Over the past month I’ve been playing around with various tech, so I thought I’d share what I have learned (aside form NEVER try to install Windows 7 on a USB drive)

Team Viewer

Microsoft Windows 7 has what appears to be a nifty built-in utility for remote access and assistance into remote PCs. Its called Microsoft Remote Assistance. However, typically for M$, it don’t work and there ain’t much on microsoft.com about it as they have removed it.

I struggled with it for a couple of days using its “Easy Connect” option (which wasn’t…easy). I never got it to work and their diagnostic tool they mention in their help file, Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool, no longer exists on with web site – again, probably ’cause it don’t work.

Desktop gadget in Windows 7 are another wonderful tool. But again, because of issue with them, M$ decided to remove them rather than fix the problems. But that’s another story

After giving up with a M$ solution, I found a bevy of freeware available on the inter-tubes that does this same function. TeamViewer turns out to be the highest rated software out there. Alas, I never got to try it out. I originally wanted to install it on my  mother-in-laws PC so that I could remote in when there were problems and fix them rather than hop on a bus or moped over there – or make them wait until I could get there. But they were a bit concerned about security and having that option open on the internet for someone to possibly hack in to.

IP WebCam, tinyCam Monitor and UPNP

Android has two pretty nifty apps in their Google Play Store for setting up Web Cameras using Android phones and view them over the internet. IP WebCam is a cool freeware app that turns your Android phone into a Web Cam that can be viewed using tinyCam Monitor over Wifi. So if you want to watch you baby, dog or SI (significant other) when out of the room, that’s a quick, free, easy setup. If you want to monitor the same over the internet, you need to set up Port Forwarding on your wireless router.

I won’t get into what Port Forwarding is. If you don’t know, here is a good Wiki page on it: Port Forwarding

Usually you have just one router to access the internet and its yours. So accessing its web-base configuration page to configure Port Forwarding is easy to do.

However, if you are like me (sigh), your ISP gave you their locked router that is not wireless and only supports 4 devices. So I had to plug in my own wireless router, putting me behind two NATs and firewalls – mine and theirs. This made it seemly impossible to configure Port Forwarding on both routers out to the internet…or so I thought.

While digging around for alternatives to Windows Remote Assistance, I stumbled upon UPNP Port Mapping (Universal Plug ‘n Play). This is a relatively new protocol for routers that using IPv6 to tunnel into routers and set up Port Forwarding programmatically.

The program I found and used is called PortMapper 1.9.5. Its a very simple Java JAR file application with no bells or whistles, but works very well.

You plug your PC into the outermost router and map ports to your internal router. Then plug your PC into your internal router and map those same ports to your static ip address assigned Android running IP WebCam. Then you just configure tinyCam Monitor to use your external IP address and that mapped port. Those requests get forwarding through both your routers and to you Android Web Cam and you’re in business!

I’ve skipped some details on how to do this because this is more about the UPNP allowing the mapping of ports on routers that you don’t have web-based configuration access to otherwise.

Perhaps I’ll expound on exactly how to set this all up in a future posting.

Seti@Home with 2 Display Adapters

I’ve been getting obsessive with looking for aliens again. With my 4 core, 8 thread Intel I7 processor in my new/old PC, I’ve been burning up radio signal processing for Seti@Home

I’ve read that AMD (formally ATI) and NIVIDA graphics adapters are super fast for processing data from SETI, so I thought I’d buy a cheap Radeon HD 6450 card and give it a try. At the same time, Seti came out with a new version of their software that allows you to use Intel’s built-in HD graphics processors. Wow!, I thought, I can use both display adapters in my PC at the same time!

Turns out I can, but its a bit tricky.

Seti doesn’t see the Intel graphics adapter unless there is a monitor plugged into it. Luckly, that’s not the case for the ATI card. The only drawback is that I can’t monitor the ATI card’s temperature or processor usage without a monitor plugged into it! Strange but true.

WiFi Inspector

This is filed under Useful Android Apps.

So you’ve got WiFi set up at home and its secure…or at least you believe it is. Want to make sure? There’s an app for that.

It’s called WiFi Inspector and its free on Google Play Store. Just run it and it shows all the devices on your network (including your router and wired devices). If they have a name, like a Windows PC, it shows that. It also shows their IP addresses, MAC addresses and vendor. You can go around to all your internet connected devices and match them up. As you do that, you update the names for them in WiFi Inspector and check them off as “Known”.

Later, when you check your network again, it remembers those known devices and doesn’t warn you about them again – even if they change IP addresses (when using DHCP)

Just a handy little app for peace of mind.

Useful windows gadgets

While I’m talking about useful apps, and as I mentioned above, I’ve found a could nice Windows 7 gadgets (despite M$ having shut down gadgets support for Windows 7 due to ‘security issues’ – that they decided not to bother to fix).

These all come from AddGadgets.com

All CPU Meter – This shows all your processor cores and threads usage and temperatures, as memory and pagefile usage and other useful information. I use it on my SET@HOME system to make sure things don’t get too hot.

GPU Meter – This does for Graphics Adapters what ALL CPU Meters does for CPUs. The only drawback is that it only works for NVIDIA and ATI adapters and only one adapter per window/gadget.

Drives Meter – This one shows your HD usage, free space, reads/writes, stats, etc. I find it particularly useful on my laptop which has a SSD and no drive lights. It lets me know that my PC is still working with the HD when nothing seems to otherwise be happening.

There are other gadgets on their site that are equally as interesting, but I’ve not used them…yet.

Translations on this Blog

Astute regulars to this site may have noticed the addition of two national flags on each web page: Britain and China. This is for English and Chinese translations, respectively.

I found a plug-in for WordPress that allows near-instant online translations of my pages using the Google Translate API.

Other languages are available. I may add more in the future.

That’s about it for now.

Cheers!