When I examine the bill closer recently, I find lots of fluff and taxes in the bill. Of the $15.01 bill, $7.28 is the cost of the “measured” service (I do not pay any additional toll charges) and $7.73 is the cost of taxes and all the other fluff, including

• federal subscriber line charge,
• rate surcharge,
• state regulatory fee,
• federal universal service fee,
• CA high cost fund surcharge-A,
• CA high cost fund-B,
• CA advanced service fund,
• California teleconnectFund surcharge,
• CA relay service and communications devices fund,
• local government fee,
• 9-1-1 emergency system,
• federal fees and tax, and
• local fees and tax.

That’s right, 51.5% of my payment went towards paying taxes and junk fees; only 48.5% is the actual payment for the service. Except for the 9-1-1 fee of $0.04, I consider the rest junk fees. Something is wrong here.

I have identified my land line replacement and I am now testing out the service. The replacement is essentially a VOIP (voice-over-IP/internet) service. Once I am happy with it, I would port my existing number over and rid myself of these junk fees!

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• November 5, 2009 — Refinance Still In Progress (0)
• September 29, 2009 — Refinance Started (1)

The following is a review of the process in moving this website (www.indextown.com) together with another of my domain away from 1&1′s webhost.

1. 1&1 : Unlocked the domain from the 1&1 domains control panel (select the domain and click on Transfers -> Lock/Unlock).
2. 1&1 : Take note of the Authorization Code (select the domain and click on “Info”).
3. 1&1 : Made sure the email address under Contact -> Show Contact Details is reachable by test sending an email to this address. As long as this email address is reachable, there is NO need to disable private registration on 1&1 if you don’t want to. Note: some other registrars’ whois protection does not forward emails to the listed contact; in which case the only option is to disable the whois protection.
4. Arvixe : Signed up for the Personal Class hosting at Arvixe.com and specified that I am transferring a domain over. Provide the transfer authorization code obtained in Step 2 to Arvixe.
5. Arvixe : An authorization for transfer email will be initiated by Arvixe (eNom, Inc). This is sent to the contact information listed in Step 3, so a reachable email address in Step 3 is essential. Approved the transfer by following the instructions in the email.
6. 1&1 and Arvixe : I installed the latest version of WordPress and created an empty MySQL database on Arvixe. I then exported the WordPress MySQL database from 1&1 and imported into Arvixe. I then transferred the site-specific files (images, theme files etc) over.
7. 1&1 (this step is optional) : I changed the DNS away from 1&1 (e.g. ns57.1and1.com) and pointed it to those provided by Arvixe (e.g. ns1.bee.arvixe.com) (select the domain and click on DNS -> Edit DNS Settings). What this does is that while 1&1 still has my domain name, any request to the website would now go to the new Arvixe servers). It takes about 24 hours for this change to be propagated throughout the internet.
8. Five days later, the domain name was transferred successfully.
9. 1&1 : Finally, go to cancel.1and1.com to cancel the 1and1 hosting. If you don’t do this, 1and1 will continue charging you, and if your credit card doesn’t go through, they will send your account to collection.

Keywords: review of domain transfer, 1&1, 1and1, Arvixe.

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• July 24, 2009 — 1and1 web hosting hiking fees by 40% (5)
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• April 15, 2008 — Site upgraded to WordPress 2.5 (0)

We are pleased to unveil the new 1&1 Home Package with more web space and unlimited traffic coming in September 2009. As a result, starting September 2009 your Home package will cost $6.99 per month*.

By listening to our customers, we’ve made this important change to allow us to offer the worry-free hosting environment that your site needs. Regardless of the amount of traffic your site generates you won’t have unexpected charges at the end of the month beyond your monthly fees. And with more web space, you can take your site even further.

As of September 1, 2009 you will be able to enjoy unlimited traffic and more web space. The new price for the Home package will be applied at the start of your package’s next billing cycle after September 1, 2009.

If you have any questions regarding the changes to the Home package, our support representatives will be happy to assist you.

I don’t need the additional bandwidth nor the storage space. Besides, the prices of hosting services are going DOWN, instead of UP. So I sent them a request politely to let me stay on my old plan, hoping they would listen to me and assist me in this matter. Here’s their reply:

Unfortunately, this is applicable to all Home packages that we had. There is no option to stay to the old $4.99 per month.

Looks like I am off shopping for a new web hosting service!

Keywords: 1&1 webhoster, 1and1.com web hosting, increasing fees, raising fees, monthly fees, problems, issues.

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This time round, I wanted to save some time and decided to try a disk cloning program. Although I have heard of programs such as Norton Ghost that helps you clone a hard disk, I have never used one. I need to find a program that can do this job. My main criteria was that it had to be “cheap” (aka free) since I am not willing to shell out money for a program that I perhaps will use only once in every two to three years.

I went to Snapfiles and look up their freeware program. I decided to try Xxclone. It was a very small download (1.2MB) but to my pleasant surprise, it worked very well.

Here are the steps I took to upgrade the hard disk drive in case anyone is interested:

1. Connect the new hard disk drive to my computer through an external USB 2.0 drive enclosure.
2. Partition and format the drive using the Disk Management tool in Windows XP under Administrative Tools > Computer Management (in Control Panel). If this is the first time the drive is being formatted, I suggest NOT using “Quick Format” to check and make sure that there are no bad sectors.
3. After the drive is formatted, assign a drive letter to it.
4. Install and run Xxclone.
5. Select the source disk and the target disk.
6. Use the “Backup the entire volume by copying all the files form scratch.” (/backup1) option. This is the only option if you are using the free version.
7. Click “Start” and then go have a coffee or something while Xxclone does its job.
8. After the cloning is completed, use the “Cool Tools” to make the new disk bootable (“Make Bootable”). Also duplicate the volume ID if you like.
9. Power down the computer, swap out the old drive with the new drive.
10. Power up the computer, and … viola, the new disk boots correctly with the same Windows environment.

For me it was a painless experience, and all this for a price of $0. I couldn’t help but write this post to recommend it.

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Recently, with my growing camcorder video collection, I thought about using their paid service, called MozyHome, that offers unlimited backup at a price of $4.95 a month. It sounds like a reasonable deal — pay $54.45 a year (one month free with one year subscription) and get off-site backup protection for my files.

One concern I have though is whether “unlimited backup” is really unlimited. As we all know, sometimes “unlimited” does not really mean that the space is unlimited; rather the company chooses to impose some unpublished limitations. For example, some web hosting plans have been known to advertised with “unlimited” space but once a certain limit is reached, the hosting would terminate the service to the customer.

I posed this question to Mozy, and here’s their reply (which came in no more than 10 minutes!):

Unlimited really means Unlimited! We’re constantly adding more space to our database so we’ll be able to keep up with whatever you throw at it.

In other words, don’t worry about it, just back it up.

I am still mauling this over. If you have any experience with using the MozyHome paid service, it will be great to hear it!

And if you are interested in the free backup service, refer to my earlier post HERE. You can get an additional 256 MB from the referral link.

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The following information is from OpenDNS:

Why should I use OpenDNS?

Why is OpenDNS safer than what I’m using now for DNS?

OpenDNS intercepts phishing attempts. OpenDNS customers will be warned if they attempt to visit a phishing site.

Why is OpenDNS faster than other DNS services?

Two things make OpenDNS faster than similar services. First, OpenDNS runs a really big, smart cache, so every OpenDNS user benefits from the activities of the broader OpenDNS user base. Second, OpenDNS runs a high-performance network which is geographically distributed (see network map) and serviced by several redundant connections. OpenDNS responds to your query from the nearest location. That means we’re very fast (and extremely reliable, to boot).

Why is OpenDNS smarter?

We fix typos in the URLs you enter whenever we can. For example, if you’re using OpenDNS craigslist.og will lead directly to craigslist.org.

If we’re not sure what to do with an error, we provide search results for you to choose from.

Does using OpenDNS cost me money?

No. OpenDNS is free to use.

How do I start using OpenDNS?

Change your DNS settings to the OpenDNS servers:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

More details are in the Getting Started section, with step-by-step instructions for different routers, operating systems, and networks.

Reminder: there is no software to install, no cost, and you can switch any time.

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The stock quote download plug-in is distributed free from the Microsoft website. You can use the following search keywords “excel stock quote download” from the Microsoft website main page to locate the files. For Excel 2002/2003, here is the link to the file.

Here is how the stock quote toolbar looks like in Excel after you install the plug-in:

To insert the latest price of a fund, for example VTSMX, enter the following into a cell:

=MSNStockQuote(“VTSMX”,”Last Price”,”US”)

You can also reference the name of a fund using another cell. For example if cell A1 contains VTSMX, the following will also give the latest price of the fund:

=MSNStockQuote(A1,”Last Price”,”US”)

You can have multiple instances of the above code to download the prices of as many stocks or funds as needed. Once you have modified the spreadsheet with the MSNStockQuote commands, you will be able to view your latest portfolio asset allocation with the click of a button.

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There are currently a few wireless encryption standards used: 64-bit WEP, 128-bit WEP, WPA and WPA-2. WPA and WPA-2 are the newer standards and might not be available on the device if it was bought 2 or more years ago.

I used to think that 128-bit WEP is very secure; afterall there are 2^128 combinations, which is roughly equals to 3.4 x 10^38 combinations (that’s 34 followed by 37 zeros behind). To put this number into perspective, if we can test a combination in one nanosecond (one second divided into a billion intervals), it will take 1.08 x 10^22 years to run through all the combinations.

Recently, I found that I was badly mistaken. A 128-bit WEP can be cracked in a matter of a few hours; and the 64-bit (40-bit) version can be cracked in a matter of a few minutes. You can read about this in Tom’s Networking HERE.

The solution is to move to the more advance WPA or WPA-2 encryption scheme.

Note: Cracking WEP means that the hacker will have a “physical” connection to your network; it does not mean he/she will have access to your files. That access is usually controlled by the operating system’s file sharing mechanisms.

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While searching around for a hosting service, I came across one interesting web application named “singapore“. I was intrigued by the name and decided to look further. What I found was singapore is “an open source, multilingual, template-driven image gallery web application … quite a mouthful! It is written in PHP and is licensed under the GNU General Public License.”

As for why the name :

I am not sure if LKY is amused by this.

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One free backup program which offers strong encryption is Cobian Backup. The program is quite easy to use and if you encounter problems, the author has a support forum and is quite responsive to questions. Click on the thumbnail to see a screenshot from the program.

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Recently, I signed up with the service from Mozy.com which gives you 2GB of free online storage. This space can be used to backup and store your computer files. Mozy claims that the storage is secure and encrypted but I can never completely trust this. So, what I did was to use an AES encryption program to encrypt my files before uploading them to Mozy. So far it has worked quite well.

If you should decide to sign up, you can use the referral code 4NG3X3 or this link to get an additional 256MB, for a total of 2.25GB. (Disclosure: I will also get 256MB.)

EDIT 2006-08-01: A free computer backup program with strong encryption is Cobian Backup.

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