was n te mddle of wrtng a blog post on my laptop wen my keyboard’s buttons started fallng off. You migt be able to guess te letters tat ‘m now mssng, and t’s really ard to type lke ts. ope to get t fxed ASAP, ten wll blog more. Computers, ug .
A week ago (sadly, my most recent blog post) I blogged about a school district monitoring their students by remotely turning on the webcams of their school-issued laptops. This story has really ballooned. On one site I have been following a thread about it and many links have been posted. Here are a few- click the titles for the full articles:
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…AP reports the FBI is investigating the school district’s webcam program, and district spokesman Doug Young suggests without claiming that Harriton High School student Blake J. Robbins’ webcam was activated only because the laptop had been reported stolen — in accordance with an established policy. The boy was charged with an undisclosed infraction based on an image the school picked up from his webcam. District superintendent Christopher W. McGinley, in an orotund statement, defends the program while canceling it. And just to make clear that we’re still in high school, Master Robbins appears to have gotten in trouble when he was photographed eating Mike and Ikes…
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…Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Jan DuBois issued a consent order that prevents Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa., from “remotely activating any and all web cams embedded in lap top [sic] computers issued to students … or from remotely taking screenshots of such computers.”
Lower Merion spokesman Doug Young said today that the district would fully cooperate with the court order…
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…The truly amazing part of this story is what’s coming out from comments from the students themselves. Some of the interesting points:
- Possession of a monitored Macbook was required for classes
- Possession of an unmonitored personal computer was forbidden and would be confiscated
- Disabling the camera was impossible
- Jailbreaking a school laptop in order to secure it or monitor it against intrusion was an offense which merited expulsion
When I spoke at MIT about the wealth of electronic evidence I came across regarding Chinese gymnasts, I used the phrase “compulsory transparency”. I never thought I would be using the phrase to describe America, especially so soon, but that appears to be exactly the case…
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The company selling the software used by a Pennsylvania school district to allegedly spy on its students blasted what it called laptop theft-recovery “vigilantism” today.
Absolute Software said it dissuades users of theft-recovery software from acting on their own. “We discourage any customer from taking theft recovery into their own hands,” said Stephen Midgley, the company’s head of marketing, in an interview Monday. “That’s best left in the hands of professionals.”…
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There is now a Wikipedia page about the ongoing investigation of this lawsuit, though the blogs and articles (full of even more links for your perusal by the way) are more interesting IMHO.
Next up, something about my own unexciting life. Hopefully. 🙂
Besides being a song from a show I was in once, this is a question we ask ourselves over and over again as the government or some other entity does some eyebrow-raising stunt. It seems a lot of such stunts have occurred in the recent decades, and this one isn’t going to make you feel better. The question here is, what should a school be allowed to do to keep tabs on their students or the school property they use, in this case laptop computers? A lawsuit has been brought against a school district for remotely activating webcams when the computer is off-site. This came to light when a school had the gall to discipline a student for something that happened at his home using webcam footage as evidence. Now I can fully understand monitoring computer use when the computers are at the school. After all, at school students should be engaged in schoolwork. But at home? It isn’t mentioned just what the student did at home, but even if it had something to do with the computer, should the school really be allowed to turn on the webcam? What if the student left his or her computer open in the bedroom while undressing for the night or to shower? I really hope this school goes down for this, but not with some big financial settlement as it would be the taxpayers of course who wind up paying. What a stupid decision, in my humble opinion of course. Here is the article:
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BoingBoing: School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home
Courtesy of absolutevista.com, I now have a new computer. This page will eventually tell about my experiences thus far, but for now enjoy the pictures. Click on each thumbnail for a larger picture. Be careful- some are quite large and will take time to show on a slow connection. Please excuse the quality as I am not a professional photographer by any means. Except for the desktop screenshots, all pictures were taken with my Kodak 4-megapixel Easyshare and edited with Corel Paint Shop Pro X2. The thumnail pics were done with IrfanView. Oh, if you see only one picture per line then resize your browser window. It should be friendly to 1024×768 resolution or higher. They should be two across.
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The box for the computer. Sorry for the shipping labels- they are pretty much permanent.
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Some of the accessories and the setup instruction sheet. The power brick in the left picture is easily recognizable, but the others probably aren’t. They are an HDTV antenna (back), another antenna (FM I believe), a remote controller to use the included remote (pictured later) with another device like a TV, and a pair of headphones.
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The closed computer (left) and the computer opened up, at least the keyboard (right). Note that not only is the computer large enough to have a keypad on the right, it has room for a place to put the remote on the left! Just above the keyboard is a control panel that is lit up. These are touch-sensitive buttons- not just a cool display. There are closeups of this below.
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The closeups are pretty much shown from left to right as they appear. The left picture starts with the power button, the only “real” button that actually goes down when you press it unlike the others. Next to the power buttons are three buttons that will load up HP’s Quickplay software with two buttons that will go right to the DVD/Blu-ray player or the external input (antenna or s-video). Those buttons are repeated in the right picture, and beside them are the standard controls you would see on a standard multimedia keyboard. Just to the right of that (not pictured) is a button that will dim the entire panel for “theater mode.”
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On these two pictures you see slider controls that will adjust the volume or treble/bass. Pretty neat on the surface, but I found it really doesn’t work that well in practice. I found it much easier to tap the [-]/[+] buttons directly than to use the slider. Pressing the treble/bass button will switch between the two. An on-screen display pops up when you press either of these controls. To the far left is of course the mute button. Not shown to the left of that is a button that will turn off the wireless networking, both WLAN and bluetooth. The control on the far right opens the CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive. The light you see below the treble/bass slider is the num-lock light. The caps lock has a similar light.
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The picture on the right is a closeup of the fingerprint reader in the dead center of the control panel above the keyboard. The icons on either side are the theater mode (left) and wireless toggle (right) mentioned earlier. With UAC on Vista I have found this to be an incredible resource, saving me from having to type in the admin password every time I want to install something, run certain programs, or even delete unwanted icons from my desktop (whose idea was it to protect the desktop?!?). I have yet to check if the fingerprint reader can be used at the BIOS level, but I hope it can for security reasons. The picture on the right is a closeup of the included remote sitting in its bay to the left of the keyboard. The switch to the right of it releases the remote.
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Here are the ports on the left side of the computer. From left to right are two USB ports, the LAN port for wired networking, HP expansion port to connect to a docking bay or port replicator, VGA out, HDMI out, E-SATA port, 1394 (FireWire) port, digital memory card reader, and ExpressCard port.
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Quite a bit less on the right since that is where the optical drive is. There are two more USB ports in addition to the drive. The picture on the right is of the ports on the front of the computer. As you can see, we have the IR remote sensor, microphone input, and two headphone inputs.
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These two pictures are from the back of the machine. There are air vents on either side. In addition to that are the IR emitter port (remember the accessory above?), audio input, s-video input, antenna input, and audio output ports for 7.1 sound. I am a little confused at this because to this day I have not figured out how to get Quickplay (the only way to play Blu-ray, which can use 7.1 audio) to use anything but the left/right channel! I can play DVDs through another player and get 5.1 sound, but as I said only HP’s Quickplay will play Blu-ray.
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The left picture shows the stickers at the bottom corner. As you can see it comes with the Core2 Extreme (X9000), Vista (x64), and NVidia (8800M GTS). The right picture is a bad photo of the webcam just over the screen. An LED lights up when it’s on so there should be no surprises. I hope this is hard-wired so a hacker can’t turn the camera on without the LED lighting up. Um- excuse me while I find some electrical tape to cover it. I think it’s by my tinfoil hat… 😛 If you look closely, you will also see a microphone to the right of the webcam. The computer has two built-in microphones just above the screen on either side of the webcam.
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The Blu-ray drive, with and without a disc. Since I have already seen the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I chose to rent a Blu-ray movie instead to test this out.
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HP’s Quickplay software in action in select mode and full-screen mode.
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Two more pictures from Enchanted. Notice how in the picture on the left the menu works a little differently from DVD movies. I am not sure if this is just Enchanted or other Blu-ray titles as well. Clearly you can do more with Blu-ray. Even some of the included games are a bit more involved than your standard DVD fare.
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In another attempt to show you just how large this computer is I have set a desktop keyboard on top of the HPX. As you can see, this computer is just as wide. There’s a little story with the keyboard comparison- one of the posts on Absolute Vista after their contest ended linked to a site that did a photo comparison with an HP tablet PC. Not knowing how a tablet PC compared with a regular laptop I wrote John back that it would have been a better comparison for me if they used a desktop keyboard instead, since they have a size most people know, or can at least understand just by looking in front of them. So I figured, why not? So here it is. Anyway, the picture on the right is the software I received as a bonus to the computer. Dead center on the bottom is Norton IS 2008. Though I hear Norton software has improved from its bloated, crippleware infamity, I still do not trust it. Notice in the screenshots below that Avast! and Comodo have replaced the previously Norton IS 2007 trial. I had thought Office 2007 was to come with this computer, but I guess I got Norton instead. Fortunately I already had a license from Microsoft’s ultimate steal promotion (Office 2007 Ultimate for $70!) last year. It pays to take continuing education classes sometimes…
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Two boring screenshots, with some lame site showing on the right. Okay, I am kidding. It is only thanks to their contest that I have this computer and am writing this right now, so it’s only right to give free advertisement for their site. 🙂 The desktop background is from a site where I found a lot of breathtaking pictures. Just underneath the taskbar is the name of the photographer, Rob Laddish. I forgot to bookmark his site, but I am sure a search on google or whatever engine you use will yield good results.
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Well, now that the eye candy is out of the way, how about some of my thoughts and stories? Well, after a few emails back and forth with John from AbsoluteVista, I received the two packages via FedEx. When John gave me the tracking number he forgot to tell me who was delivering it, so on my third try (tried USPS and UPS first) I found FedEx was going to deliver it, and so I headed home from work in anticipation and, nothing. I looked it up again and yep, it was on the truck to be delivered. I waited a bit, and a little after 5PM the van pulled up, and I was at the door before the delivery guy could ring the doorbell. I signed for it and I was ready to go. From the picture above, you can probably guess that the computer was not packaged inside another box to hide the contents from view, but it didn’t matter as it arrived safe and sound. I examined the computer box and saw that it had been opened before- probably John checked it out to make sure it worked. This was a potential concern if I wanted to sell it, and I did think about that considering the value of this thing. However, the want to keep this won out and here we are. I opened it up and realized that this thing was enormous for a laptop. Good thing I didn’t go out and buy a laptob bag for this- I think I will need an art bag (holds sketch pads) to transport this around!
Next up was the software box. Everything that was in this box is pictured above. Again, from the list on their website I was able to see that I received everything, with Norton 2008 apparently substituted for Microsoft Office, as the only Office on this computer was a 60-day trial. As I also said, it was no big deal since I already had Office 2007 Ultimate. Right away I installed Paint Shop Pro since I use this a lot. As soon as I do my week at camp this summer, I will be checking out Video Studio as well. The rest I saved for later.
I hooked up the computer, turned it on, and went through the initial setup. Vista had me create an account and finally I was looking at the Vista desktop for the first time. Incredible- what a difference. 1920×1200 resolution. Until now I had only used up to 1152×864. But- only the one account, and an administrator account at that? I thought Vista made people create a user account without administrator privileges? Well, in the interest of security I went ahead and did that, and now I am operating from a standard user account. One of the things it kept reminding me to do (other than registering) was to make a fingerprint profile to make logging in easier. I actually decided to skip this for awhile and just login by password. This lasted less than a week before I finally got tired of UAC asking me for the administrator password and registered two fingers to my administrator account. What a pain! It took untold amounts of swiping to even get it to tell me it got the finger, but I had to do it four times (turned into 30+!) to get to know the finger. Then more times than not, it would tell me that the fingerprints were no good and I had to start over?!? Well, it finally took and I decided (much later) to register two other fingers to my standard account, so now whenever I have to reboot or I just turn on my computer, the account I log into depends on what finger I choose to use to sign in. I still use the passwords from time to time so I don’t forget them though.
Well, time to install some of my own stuff. I quickly found out it was best to do this from the administrator account. UAC may come up with the “are you sure?” prompts, but at least I didn’t have to swipe my finger or enter a password. One of the first things I decided to install was a real mouse- I really hate touchpads. I will only use them if I have to. I uninstalled Norton 2007 right off. “Are you sure? You may lose your trial period…” Only a few times in my life have I ever been more sure. Next up, Avast, make a retore point, Comodo, and how about updating some drivers? I would start with the video drivers. I find on NVidia’s site that I would have to get them from HP or risk losing function of the media controls. Fine- I go to HP’s site and it wants the model number. Of course, HPX wasn’t good enough, it wanted “Pavilion xxx.” Naturally this was at the bottom, in the back. Always the most inconvenient of places. Carefully lifing it up and contorting myself so I could read it, I memorized it, entered it in, and voila! The drivers. Downloaded, went to install video drivers right away. Being video drivers the screen went blank at some point. You-know-whose law being what it is, the drivers fail at this point. I wait and wait, and nothing but a blank screen, so I can’t even find out what went wrong. Sigh. I reboot, restore, then find it lost my fingerprint information. Oh joy! Registration again. You know how that went, just like before. Comodo would have to be reinstalled too. The video drivers were in my download folder and were now gone thanks to Vista’s restore feature- yeah, restore the folder to its original empty configuration… No matter as I wouldn’t be trying those again. Hopefully future updates will go through the HP/Windows update features.
It is fortunate I have been using someone else’s computer for so long. It has kind of weaned me off of some programs so I really didn’t have much to install. There are a couple more things I want to install that were on my old computer, and I eventually will, but for now I am satisfied. Anyway, next up was to try the new media features, particularly blu-ray. Having seen the Pirates movies before, I decided to go rent a movie- Enchanted as you know from above. Excellent movie as I found out. And this computer does an excellent job playing them- not a single problem with the movie. Well, an annoyance. Quickplay apparently doesn’t save the position of the movie if you stop in the middle. When I wanted to continue, I had to go through everything again (blu-ray ad- why? I already have blu-ray and this is a blu-ray title!; previews- this is where the menu button/option comes in handy; FBI threats) before finally being able to find my place again. Moving on, I decided to try the media center. I went through the setup, hooked up the HD antenna that came with the computer, and found I only received a few channels on it. No sign of the multiple channels of one station my brother gets on his HDTV either, like PBS-1, PBS-2, etc. I guess I need a real antenna. I haven’t yet tried the satellite over s-video, but I will. And I will start doing some recording too.
How is it for games you might ask? Well, I can’t answer that as of yet- I have been a little busy getting acquainted with these things to give my freebies a try. When I get back from camp I will give Gears of War and Viva Piñata a go. I expect some nice speed and nice detail. I have tried MAME though. Definitely an improvement on frame rates. Some of the unplayables like California Speed, Gradius 4, and others have become more enjoyable if not full speed. California Speed gets about 65-75% in game, but San Francisco Rush only gets about 50%. For those who are not MAME-geeks, Seattle/Vegas games like these two require hardware not currently sold in the consumer market to get full speed, though some who have overclocked Core 2 CPUs to 4GHZ and beyond have gotten pretty close. Emulation requires a lot of power. Dreamcast emulation should be nice when I get around to it.
Video I have just started to get up and running again. A few of the apps I’m used to no longer work, like ProjectX, but others like avi.net and mediacoder seem to be working. So far the encoding speed has improved by 50-100%, but I expect when I find more 64-bit and more multi-threaded applications I will see this go up immensely. There will be more on this as I figure out what applications are best on this hardware/OS.
Now for a couple of disappointments. First off, the 5.1 sound in Quickplay- is this only allowed over HDMI? Why even bother with the analog 7.1 output then. At least other apps don’t have this restriction. I am still trying to figure out how to play blu-ray in Media Player Classic- it claims to be a blu-ray player, but it looks like certain codecs need to be installed by programs like PowerDVD, and I know pack-in versions of this and WinDVD don’t allow more than stereo sound. That’s only for the pay versions. I may have to invest in one. Another dislike is no SPDIF (digital audio) out. Apparently digital out is over HDMI only as far as I can figure. I know there are converters out ther, but they are expensive. There is also no s-video output, so I can’t use my analog TV as a second monitor for games or video (typical uses of mine). Again, there are converters available, like VGA to s-video, but they can be expensive or low-quality. The placement of the keys and touchpad have been problematic as I am not used to them. I had to find a tweak to disable the caps lock key after hitting it accidentally over and over again. As for the touchpad, there is a button to disable it. I kept gliding my thumbs over it when typing. I am more comfortable with a real mouse anyway. I have had issues with Vista x64 and applications I am used to using, but I guess it’s not much different from moving to XP from 98. Eventually I will get sorted out on this. The last thing is where do I find a laptop bag for this beast?? It won’t even come close to fitting in a regular bag! Okay, that one was kind of lame.
Where do I go from here? Well, a lot more testing is needed for sure, like with regular PC games and real 64-bit multithreaded video applications. More media center use as well. I have only had this for a few weeks after all. However, I will be away for a week so I won’t be updating this during that time. I suppose you can consider it finished- for now.
Oh, I almost forgot. Click here to read the story I wrote for the contest.
If you look at the top of this page, you will notice a new link at the top. Just click on this link and you will see some pictures of my new computer. This page will be expanded soon, with descriptions of the pictures and more, but for now just click for some pics! A 1024×768 resolution with your browser maximized will give you the best results. Here is a preview- click now for more! Oh, and before someone (you know who you are!) says anything about my writing a new page when the first one remains unfinished (for nearly four months… 😮 ) feel free to click on the other page link as well and you will find it finally finished! 😛
No, I am not posting about Annie, but rather when FedEx gets over here tomorrow with my new computer. My old one died last year, hard drive failed again making think there is something wrong with the controller as it ended its life in the same way as the one it replaced. Second hard drive worked all the way through. Fortunately I was able to get a final backup of critical data before it stopped working altogether. I have been using someone else’s computer ever since, but it will be good to have my own again. Which reminds me, I will need a wireless router now so I can use the computer anywhere, after all what good is a laptop if I can’t surf the net from the bathroom? 😀 Time to join the new millennium, eh? I’ll probably pick one up on ebay.
Well, second day of second grade. Different school, different class, different experience. I actually got to do some teaching today, though only in math. They seemed to be a few sections behind the other school interestingly enough. Basic multiplication facts. That can kill the joy of math for many… They did get to draw at least rather than just writing numbers. They would draw arrays, like a 4 by 6 array for the problem 4×6=24. Aside from math I went over answers, did some reading aloud about how a movie is made interjecting my own thoughts as well as getting theirs on the process, and, well, that’s about it for the teaching I guess. The rest was more or less babysitting and trying to learn their particular routines. And no specials for this class today by the way. Aside from recess and lunch I was with them constantly, though like the class yesterday they had computer lab time where someone else was at least in charge even if I didn’t get to put my feet up in the lounge.
The lounge- what a tiny room to be crammed so full of teachers. There was just enough room for three long tables pretty close together with just enough room to walk around them. It wouldn’t ordinarily be so bad as teachers tend to go out for lunch, but today they had a cookout with grilled steaks and chicken, and baked potatoes. I’m not sure who all was invited to the cookout, but I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know about it. So instead of going out, they all got their food and came into the lounge crowding around the tables. I felt sort of like this:
It didn’t help much that half the table space was taken up by three large cakes (someone’s birthday- don’t know what the other two were for) as well as a couple of miscellaneous snacks of which I did partake. 🙂
Well, aside from a 5th grade band concert in the afternoon, it was pretty much a normal day I would say. Good group of kids though a bit talkative and some would move about without permission. And now a long three or four (hoping just three) day weekend. Two districts are off on Tuesday so I may be out of work that day as well as Monday…
By the way, 100th post for me!
Well, it has been awhile since my last post, so I will have to pick up the pace. I had some insane idea that I would be able to post from my friend’s house when I was in Ohio for the last few days. Of course the opportunity to ask really never presented itself. If I was making more money I could have had a laptop with me, but as a poor substitute (no pun intended…) I am still trying to afford a new desktop to replace my old 1.1GHz one that stopped working last year. Yes, I use another’s computer to do my blogging and other stuff.
Well, Ohio was entertaining, at least when we could decide on something to do. On Thursday I was able to get some use out of my new phone with the camera feature. I have yet to see if any of the pictures actually look any good full scale. Once I transfer them to the computer I will show a couple of them. Anyway, we were at the Toledo Zoo even though it was an overcast, somewhat rainy day (especially in the late afternoon- we got soaked!). We were one of maybe a dozen families there enjoying the day. Many attractions were closed but for some reason it still cost me the same $10 it would cost to enter on a bustling summer day. Not all were closed, so we still saw a large number of animals. Again, pictures will follow. At night we watched some Office episodes and split up to go to bed.
The following day was the day of indecision. We went to Defiance (yes, as in The Prizewinner from…) for the day and besides eating and playing some Highway 66 mini-bowling we did some shopping of all things. The bowling was definitely different than the full-scale version, but I was just as bad at it. If nothing else, the shopping was good social time. Speaking of social time, once we got back their friends started arriving shortly after (they were invited- they weren’t those sort of friends…) and we played a couple of games while the kids watched TV. Finally, after bearing our souls in one of the social games I left for home (about an hour and a half after I wanted to, yes the game was fun) and didn’t get home until after 1AM.
At least the traffic was good, even through the city, until I encountered a bottleneck where the expressway was bottled to just one lane. I have no idea what was going on- there were many trucks lined up on the other side of the highway but the side I was on was recently finished road work and so looked excellent. Were they doing a late night inspection to see if the job was done right? Anyway, that only lasted for a couple of miles so after that there were no problems. I quickly got some things unpacked then I got ready for bed, so again, no post.
Today I was busy for much of the day so I am only now finally getting to the blog. Well, time to end this post so hopefully you will get in some happy reading!