It took me a few tries to successfully install the Windows 8 preview, so I thought I’d document what worked for me. Here we go:

1) Download and install VMWare Player. It’s not hard to install but the download is pretty large and the install takes a few minutes.

2) Download the ISO file for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. I used the 32-bit version (I tried without success to install the 64-bit version). This is a large download (2.5 GB). Make a note of the product key listed on that page, too–you’ll need it later.

3) Launch VMWare Player, and click on the “Create a New Virtual Machine” link to launch the create wizard.

VMWare Player main window

4) In the wizard that appears, the first screen asks how you’ll install the guest operating system. Select “I will install the operating system later.” This keeps VMWare Player from using its “Easy Install” feature. The click the Next button.

5) On the next screen, select Windows 7 as the guest operating system.

Select Guest OS

6) On the next screen, specify the name and storage location for your virtual machine.

Name the virtual machine

7) On the next screen, specify the maximum size of the virtual machine. The default should be sufficient.

Specify the maximum size of the virtual machine

8) The next screen is the last screen for the wizard, but before clicking the Finish button, we need to customize the hardware, so click on the Customize Hardware button.

Almost ready to complete the wizard.

9) First, adjust the memory upward if you have the capacity. I have 4 GB in my system and set the VM memory size to be 2 GB.

Set the memory for the virtual machine.

10) Next, select the “New CD/DVD” item in the hardware list. On the right side, in the Connection box, select “Use ISO Image File” and click the Browse button to specify the ISO file you downloaded in step 2 above. After that, you can click the Close button to return to the final wizard screen. Click the Finish button in the final wizard screen to proceed with creating the virtual machine. VMWare Player should automatically launch the new VM and connect it to the ISO file and begin the process of installing Windows 8 in the VM.

11) The Windows 8 installation is pretty straightforward, but if you need them, instructions can be found in this article on the Ars Technica web site.

12) At this point, you should be up and running with Windows 8 in a virtual machine, including internet connectivity. The only other setup thing you might want to do is install VMWare Tools in the virtual machine. VMWare Tools enhances the virtual machine by improving performance and adding additional functionality. You can get the latest version by going here on the VMWare web site and downloading the latest version (do this from within the virtual machine–that’s where it needs to be installed). Once you have the installer file downloaded, right-click on it, select Properties from the context menu, and then go to the Compatibility tab in the Properties window and set compatibility to Windows 7 and click OK to save that setting. Then right-click again on the file and select Run as Administrator to actually install it. Just accept the defaults and let the installer complete its work.

That’s all there is to it. Enjoy!

Of course, all good things must come to an end, at least as far as the wireless carriers are concerned. PdaNet has since disappeared from the Android Market (at least for Verizon customers), and stories are appearing now about carriers pressuring users of tethering apps to pay the monthly fee for the carrier services. Coincidentally, LifeHacker recently carried a story about an update to PdaNet that includes the ability to hide your tethering usage. Of course, if PdaNet no longer appears in the Android Market, you can’t get the update, right?

Well, not so fast. The PC installer for PdaNet (there are two parts–one for the PC and one for the phone) will actually update your phone with the correct version of the Android app! The beauty of this is that even if your carrier decides to delete PdaNet from your phone, you can readily reinstall it by reinstalling the corresponding PC app. No need to try to track down the .apk file and install it manually. It’s also worth noting that you don’t need to root your phone in order to use PdaNet (although you do have to enable USB debugging, which is easy to do).

The full version of PdaNet is currently priced at $15.95 and works like a charm. Updates are free for life, too, apparently. I don’t know how well it masks the tethering usage, but I guess I’ll find out eventually.

Last fall I finally replaced my crappy LG Venus cell phone with a way cool HTC Incredible phone running Android. As you would expect, it’s capable of playing pretty-much any type of music file, either with the included player or one of many third-party apps you can find. What it lacked was a straightforward way of getting music onto the phone. Verizon included a CD with some PC software and a synchronization application, but it was clunky and horrible, and it completely ignored the fact that my entire music collection (like those of millions of other people) was stored in iTunes. I needed a better solution.

A quick web search identified a couple of candidates:

• iTunes Agent–a free PC application that will sync iTunes playlists with almost any type of removeable drive (like what my Android phone looks like when you plug it in to a PC’s USB port). It worked okay, but it didn’t seem to handle playlists all that well, and album art wasn’t being copied to the phone. (This app may have improved since I tried it, in all fairness.)
• Double Twist–a free media player for Android that includes a synchronization app. I found the PC application to be difficult and non-intuitive to use, and the media player itself didn’t really offer me anything I needed above what the built-in player already did.

I ended up using iTunes Agent because it was better than nothing, at least until I upgraded to a new notebook computer. I never ended up reinstalling iTunes Agent when I installed iTunes on my new notebook.

For whatever reason, yesterday I decided to check around and see if there were any new developments in this area. What I found was a great little app called iSyncr by JRT Studio. It’s $2.99 in the Android Market, but it works like a charm and is well worth that amount of money. It installs itself in your phone’s internal storage, its SD card, or both. When you plug your phone into your PC’s USB port (there’s a Mac version, too) and mount one or both of those as external disk drives, when you explore those drives you’ll see a small PC application called iSyncr.exe. Simply double-click that application to launch it on your PC, and you’ll see the following window pop up:

You simply check/uncheck the playlists you want to sync, and hit the Sync button. The Options button will bring up the Options window:

You can see that there is also the ability to “reverse sync” music you’ve purchased through Amazon.

To make it short and sweet, iSyncr does exactly what it says it will do, and it’s easy to use. Once I’d completed the sync of my phone with iTunes, all of my music and my playlists were there, ready to go. Can’t ask for any more than that.

Well, actually, I can–how about being able to sync wirelessly? JRT Studio has an answer for that, too–the iSyncr WiFi Add-On! It’s an additional $0.99 (can you afford it?), and it includes a server app you run on your PC or Mac to listen for sync requests from your phone. You can set it to sync at regular intervals or only when told. Additionally, it will reverse-sync your phone’s photos and videos if you’d like. That covers everything as far as I’m concerned–music, photos, and videos are the three things I want to be able to transfer between my PC and my phone. And it works–no muss, no fuss. These two apps were easily the best four bucks I ever spent on software.

As I was messing with all this, I found myself wondering why Google didn’t have its own version of iTunes. Apparently, it’s on its way.

I have, at last, identified the one glaring difference between my generation of Amateur Radio experimenters and the current batch of 2 meter obsessed appliance operators.

In our day, it was our job to create emergencies. The new EmComm oriented hams are intent on “fixing” emergencies.

Although I didn’t become a ham until I was in my late thirties, I was an experimenter by the time I was ten. My parents detected the “mad scientist” gene in me at an early age, and foolishly nurtured my tendencies by giving me a chemistry set. Remember, this was back in the 60′s, when chemistry sets hadn’t yet had all the fun extracted from them by product liability lawyers. Mine had an alcohol lamp, glass test tubes, and plastic bottles of a variety of chemicals whose names I couldn’t even pronounce–the potential for both fun and disaster was thrillingly high.

I set up my “laboratory” under the stairs in the basement utility room (shared by the laundry and my dad’s workshop) and proceeded to wring as much chaos out of that set as I could. The stink bombs, and my cleaning my test tubes with bleach in the laundry sink, drove my mother nuts at times, but I never burned down the house or otherwise forced its evacuation. But I certainly had the potential, and that’s what mattered to me.

Then I graduated to electricity. We had an old model train transformer that powered many of my experiments and gadgets. My older brother showed me how to build electromagnets by winding wire around nails, and I was soon building my own telegraphs, burglar alarms, and anything else I could think of. Sparks definitely flew on occasion.

About this time one of my uncles gave me an old Knight Ocean Hopper shortwave receiver, introducing me to the wonderful world of alternating current. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the AC plug had to be plugged into the outlet in the proper orientation to avoid experiencing an unpleasant tingling sensation when I touched the metal front panel. This radio had a separate coil for each waveband, and the front panel regen controls gave you no way of knowing what frequency you were listening to. Of course, it didn’t matter anyway, as I had no idea of where to listen for different types of signals. My antenna was 20 feet of wire strung along the ceiling of the basement–hardly optimal, but I still managed to experience the occasional foreign language broadcast. Way cool when you’re twelve years old.

I knew about ham radio at that time but I didn’t know any hams, and I couldn’t afford to buy any ham equipment anyway. It was probably just as well, as geekery gave way to sports and other things as I grew older. My “mad scientist” side went into hibernation, awakened again when my wife gave me a shortwave radio for Christmas when I was in my thirties. That gift recalled the days of my youth, and I realized that I now had the knowledge and resources to become a ham. I’m not sure whether the “mad scientist” side of me has fully emerged again, but now that I have all sorts of electronics, tools, soldering irons, torches, and power supplies, all the pieces are there for once again raising the potential for emergency household evacuations. As KL7AJ put it at the end of his article,

I want to leave this hobby with eyebrows smoldering and ears ringing.

Me, too.

“Recipients of gifts with sharp edges will draw their own blood within an hour of unwrapping.”

Guess what I got for Christmas!

You’d think I’d be old enough to know better by now…

A couple of years ago I reached the breaking point with Norton, and I replaced it with the free version of AVG. AVG’s performance and footprint were definitely an improvement over Norton’s, and I wouldn’t have to pay for antivirus signatures. Of course, AVG has more “full-featured” versions that you pay for, but I was happy with just some basic virus protection. And, frankly, most of the advanced “features” in security products like AVG, Norton, or McAfee are based more on Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) than actual need or usefulness.

Even AVG had its drawbacks, though. It definitely made my PC start slower, and it nagged me every so often to either upgrade my free version or buy one of the “not free” versions. I resigned myself to these shortcomings in the name of getting something for free. That is, until I read about Microsoft Security Essentials.

One should always view a new product with a certain degree of skepticism, but Ars Technica and others gave MSE some pretty good reviews (and, unsurprisingly, other antivirus vendors poopooed it). So I gave it a whirl.

MSE is easy to install and configure, and it does what I want and only what I want. Its footprint is minimal, I don’t notice it hampering performance (even on my old PC), and its updates occur completely in the background. Once in a while it reminds me to run a scan (I don’t run scheduled scans), but other than that, its little icon sits in the system tray and it does its thing.

MSE continues to receive accolades, and I continue to be happy with it three months after I installed it. I’ve installed it on all the PCs in my household, too. I cannot understand why anyone would buy a product like Norton or McAfee these days when there are so many free alternatives available. Don’t believe the hype from these companies that “you get what you pay for.” With the free products (at least MSE, anyway) you get what you need, and you don’t get all the other worthless “features” that Norton and McAfee would like you to think you can’t live without.

I knew my iPod was capable of storing contacts and calendar items, and even syncing with Microsoft Outlook. And I figured it would be handy to have a copy of my contacts stored on my iPod. Problem is, I use a Palm T|X and Palm Desktop for handling my address book and my calendar. In fact, Outlook is nowhere to be found on my computer.

It’s not hard to get contacts onto an iPod. If you have your contacts stored as .vcf (virtual business card) files, you can simply connect your iPod to your computer as an external drive (like a thumb drive), open up its Contacts folder, and copy the .vcf files into the folder. The hard part is getting Palm Desktop to produce the .vcf files for you.

Actually, Palm Desktop is happy to export a contact as a .vcf file. You simply open Palm Desktop, select the Address Book, click on a contact to highlight it, and then select Export vCard from the File menu. It’ll then create the .vcf file with whatever name you give it, and you can merrily copy that over to the Contacts folder on your iPod.

That process is fine for a few contacts, but what if you have 200 like me? It turns out that you can select all your contacts at once in Palm Desktop and then do the Export vCard thing, but what you’ll end up with is a single .vcf file containing all your contacts, and your iPod won’t handle that (it’ll only see the first contact in the file). So the alternative is to either (a) export each contact separately, or (b) write a little program to split the .vcf file containing all your contacts into individual .vcf files.

Needless to say, I chose the latter path, and you can download the little program (vcfconvert.exe, which is the actual program itself, not an installer) I wrote if you’d like to use it. Note that it requires that you have Microsoft’s .Net 2.0 framework installed.

Here’s how to use my little utility:

1. Download vcfconvert.exe and place it in a folder by itself someplace on your computer’s hard drive.
2. Export all your contacts from Palm Desktop to a single .vcf file. Copy that .vcf file to the same folder containing vcfconvert.exe.
3. Open a command prompt, navigate to the folder containing vcfconvert.exe, and type the following command: vcfconvert mycontacts.vcf (substitute the actual name of your .vcf file for mycontacts.vcf).
4. What should happen next is that a new .vcf file should be created in that same folder for each contact in the file you exported from Palm Desktop. They’ll be named contact0.vcf, contact1.vcf, etc.
5. Copy the contact*.vcf files into your iPod’s Contacts folder (as I described above).
6. On your iPod, access your contacts and verify that they were transferred successfully. That’s it!

One thing I should mention is that vcfconvert.exe does one other thing for me. You see, most of the contacts I store in my Palm are not people, but rather organizations, web sites, etc. I use the Organization field rather than the Name field to hold the name of the organization or web site in those contacts. Unfortunately, when those contacts are exported as .vcf files, the Name field is empty, and the iPod just displays the contact as “-Unnamed-”. To fix this, vcfconvert.exe checks each contact, and if the name field is empty, it copies the organization name into the name field. If you use the name field rather than the organization field, this shouldn’t affect you.

If you give vcfconvert a whirl, leave me a comment and let me know how it worked.