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Field Notes: Google Two-Factor Authentication

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There’s been a lot of discussion recently about GMail’s two-factor authentication thanks to the Matt Honan hack publicity. I’ve been using it awhile and figured I’d share my thoughts and experiences. I had been using it for an account that I just used for email so it wasn’t much of a hassle. But I recently added it to a second Google account and it’s been more of a hassle. It’s probably needed more on this account, since it’s used for more than just email so I’ve kept it enabled. In [...] Read the rest »

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The OSQuest Trail Log #65: October Blizzard Edition

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Things got rolling again on the Quest with upgrades all over the place, new router software, new cloud services, new problems and new frustrations. Lion's everyplace I want it to be as is iOS5. I finally joined a social network and I'me using a service based on the buzzowrd "cloud". Then as if to signal I was going down a bad path I lost power for 4 days and the internet for 5. Read the rest »

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Google’s “Hack”

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This is the non-story that just won’t go away. The big bad Google drove around stealing data by “hacking” people’s wireless network. Articles such as those at the Huffington Post contain quotes such as “one of the most massive surveillance incidents by a private corporation that has ever occurred.” Google collects a hell of a lot of data that concerns me more than this. In this case what seems to have happened is Google collected data from unsecured wireless networks as it’s street view vehicles drove around. The real lesson [...] Read the rest »

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Google DNS – Close But No Cigar

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Among Google’s recent announcements was their introduction of Google Public DNS. I’ve been using OpenDNS and have no complaints. Well, actually I recently found I had defaulted back to using my ISP’s DNS (Comcast), probably during a router firmware upgrade. When I switched to back OpenDNS I also didn’t notice a different over Comcast. I wouldn’t have noticed unless I was in the router config for another reason and happened to see it. Comcast and OpenDNS both do typo hijacking and display a search page with ads rather than an [...] Read the rest »

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Google Wants Our Photos In The Cloud

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Google currently has a deal going that offers a free Eye-Fi card when you lease 200GB of storage for them for a year. When I first saw it it seemed like a pretty good deal, and I hate to pass up a good deal. But it’s less of a deal if I don’t really need the space and won’t use the card. So that got me thinking about my options. The space is split between Gmail and Picasa. I’m not even close to my Gmail limit and I’m not currently [...] Read the rest »

Google Stealth Updater

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I’ve been setting up a new Windows 7 PC and I just installed Google Gears for Firefox. I noticed a new task under Windows Scheduler called GoogleUpdateTaskMachine. It’s set to run at every login and when the computer is idle. I have mixed emotions about this. I think it’s good to keep software up top date and for many people or PCs it may be the way to go. Yet, this is the company that recently deemed the entire web to be malware due to human error so it’s clearly [...] Read the rest »

Google Chrome

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As you probably already heard Google released their own browser last week called Google Chrome. It’s a beta release and so far only a Windows version is available, although OS X and Linux versions are in the works. It certainly received a lot of positive press. There’s been a lot of speculation about why Google released it, from the beginnings of a Web/Google OS to market research. My own theory is it’s partly to make money. While free, Google pays out a lot of money to the Mozilla foundation and [...] Read the rest »

The OS Quest Trail Log #8

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Another short update for the log. I spent some time trying to install Boot Camp on my iMac. It couldn’t resize the existing partition to make room for boot camp. I could image to another drive, then erase and image back. But I decided to try out iDefrag and explore the whole OS X doesn’t need defragging thing. My 500GB drive with about 250GB of data had 0.5% fragmentation, after being used for about 9 months. As expected (because they’re large and written to often), the Parallels VM drives were [...] Read the rest »

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Google Apps for My Domain – Part 1

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I’ve completed my move to Google Apps and now all my mail goes into my inbox there, one way or the the other. In Part 1 I’ll cover the domain setup and IMAP mail migration using the migration tool, while in part 2 I’ll cover the features that are available to all GMail users. My reasons for moving to Google Apps were: Sometimes they can be a bit creepy but I trust them as much as I trust any other ISP or mail provider. I want to provide email to [...] Read the rest »

Google Video Sales To Cease

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Google will be exiting the video sales business. Those few people who purchase videos from Google Video can’t watch them after August 15th due to the joys of DRM. As compensation Google is giving people two bucks to spend via Google checkout. On the positive side, it’s unlikely many people bought videos since the site is shutting down. Another reason to avoid DRM, as if one was needed. Read the rest »