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My MobileMe Experience

Oh My, MobileMe

You’ve probably already heard of the disastrous launch of Apple’s MobileMe service. Apple has taken a lot of heat for this and heads have rolled over at Apple HQ for it. There are still some remaining issues to be fixed but for the most part Apple has gotten MobileMe working. I’m currently using a free MobileMe trial to evaluate it to see if it will meet my needs. The biggest of my needs is getting all of my emails from several accounts on my iPhone as quickly as possible.

Push Email

If you use a standard POP or IMAP email account, you are limited to a 15 minute check frequency in the iPhone Mail application. In addition to that limitation, if you set up multiple accounts, it will drain your battery all the quicker. My solution was to set up just one account on the phone and have all the email accounts I want to get mail from forwarded to that one. MobileMe is the perfect choice because it offers push email. Instead of that 15+ minute wait for new mail notification, push means you get near instant notification of a new message. In my experience, near instant means about 10 seconds or less.

When MobileMe launched, it was simply unreliable. Some of my messages would arrive instantly, others would never notify me without opening the Mail app. Besides a couple of bad days this month, things have worked far more reliably lately although I still manually check the mail if I haven’t gotten any notifications in a while. Once I had my MobileMe account set up on the iPhone, I still had to get all my email accounts forwarding to my username@me.com email address.

VersaForward to Forward Email

I use Email Forwarding by VersaForward Service to get all my mail to my me.com address. You can set up all of your email accounts to forward to the email address you check on your iPhone. This is a service with a fee paid monthly or every 6 months. To get a discount, use the promotional code TECHDC when signing up for a free trial. That will give you 50% off the first 3 months. Alternatively, you can run home desktop versions of VersaForward either with the entry-level VersaForward Personal or the more powerful VersaForward Professional.

Once you’ve got your email forwarding set up, you can get all of your email messages on your iPhone in a timely and reliable fashion.

Other MobileMe Features

MobileMe does cost $99/year although it offers more than just an email address. Push contacts and calendar updates help keep your iPhone, Desktop, and laptop all up to date with your latest changes. The MobileMe Gallery is a very elegant photo sharing system which creates a website with your photos to share with others as you want to.

Besides mail, my favorite MobileMe feature is iDisk. You can basically consider this a hard drive that you have access to on your computer but the data is stored on the internet. It is the simplicity of iDisk on your computer that makes this so useful. It appears like an external hard drive would. Drag files to it like normal. You can log in to me.com to access the files on the iDisk so it is a great place to keep important files that you might need remote access to. You have a total of 20GB of storage on MobileMe. You can allocate this between email and data storage. The iDisk can work with Macs and Windows as well.

Give Me a Chance

MobileMe got off to a slow start but now that it is finally working, you can see the advantages that it offers. For me, the push email is the #1 selling point. As long as it continues to work, I expect to become a paying customer. The free trial lasts 60 days so you can try it yourself to see how you like it.

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VNC and DynDNS for Remote Desktop Support

Connecting Remotely with VNC

One of my favorite software tools to use at Tech DC is VNC. If I have a client in Maryland, D.C. or elsewhere in the world when I am in Virginia, I can use VNC to take control of their computer in order to remotely diagnose problems or provide user training.

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It was originally developed by AT&T Labs in Cambridge, England. It is open source and free. There are many “flavors” of VNC that use the VNC protocol. My favorite for Windows is UltraVNC because it has the added feature of allowing file transfers between the two machines. VNC exists for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

VNC has two parts. There is the VNC Server which serves up the image. And there is the VNC Viewer which views and controls the server computer.

DynDNS.org

One limitation is that VNC requires a static IP. This is where DynDNS.org helps. Most home internet connections have a dynamic IP address, meaning that the IP address changes occasionally. DynDNS.org creates an address such as “yourname.dyndns.org” that is always mapped to your latest IP address, so it is as if you have a static home IP address.

UltraVNC’s Single Click

It takes extra time to setup, but Single Click is a great tool that can be built at UltraVNC. It is a small executable file that someone can click on in order for you to take over their computer. This makes it simple for the person you are connecting to. It also has the added benefit of not needing to configure their router to forward port 5900 to their computer. Single Click is only available for Windows computers.

All Free

VNC is free and DynDNS has a free service that is all you need. You can purchase other remote connection tools that are sometimes easier to set up such as GoToMyPC.  But if you can configure them, VNC and DynDNS should provide everything you need to connect to remote computers.

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Erasing Your Hard Drive with Apple’s Disk Utility

If you attach a hard drive to a Mac OS X computer, you can erase it using the built-in Disk Utility.

The cheapest way to attach an external drive is with an adapter such as this one for IDE hard drives from Newegg for about $18.

Once connected on a Mac OS X computer, click Go – Utilites – Disk Utility. From there, click on the disk you want to erase, click the Erase tab at the top, then click Security Options. This will give you the following options:

Zeroing out the data will erase it. For added security, choose the 7-Pass or 35-Pass options to overwrite the data in multiple passes. Like Darik’s Boot and Nuke utility, this will ensure that the data can not be recovered even if someone is using special forensic recovery software.

Once you choose the option you want, click Erase. That’s it.

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Truly Erasing Your Hard Drive

Deleting is not Erasing

Most people delete their important computer files before they throw away their computer or donate it to charity. The problem is that file deletion does not overwrite files. Deletion just removes the operating system’s link to that data. Until the files are overwritten, they can still be recovered. This could give someone your valuable bank and credit card information from your web browser cache. It could give someone enough information to commit identity fraud.

While you could physically destroy the hard drive, there are software tools that will securely erase the hard drive so that there is no chance of reconstructing the original data. Software tools are even accepted by the US Government for most deletions of sensitive data.

Darik’s Book and Nuke

My favorite tool is Darik’s Book and Nuke disk. This is a free tool that boots your computer into Linux and then overwrites your drive in multiple passes. Depending on the level of erasure you choose and the speed and size of your hard drive, the deletion can take minutes to a couple of days.

You need to follow instructions to create the CD or DVD yourself from the iso file you download. Then you need to make sure the computer will boot from the CD drive, which could include going into the starting setup (BIOS) to make sure that the CD is first in the boot order. Then just put in the CD and follow the easy instructions.

Once you have Darik’s Book and Nuke disk, you can truly erase your hard drive and keep your information secure.

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Buy Dell, buy Mac, or build your own?

It is often claimed that Mac computers are simply far more expensive than their PC counterparts. Some also say you might as well buy Dell now because they are so cheap? So what is the truth? Should you buy from a big PC seller like Dell? Should you go with the stylish Mac? Or should you just buy parts and build your own computer by hand?

I am using Dell as the example of the big PC maker. Plenty of other choices exist such as HP, Acer, and Gateway that are all similarly priced. The Mac is only made by Apple. For build-your-own computers, I will be using prices based on parts from newegg.com which almost always has the lowest priced computer parts. I will target 2 different system concepts. The first will be a home desktop where you can either go with a tower that is powerful or an all-on-one solution that is easier to hookup and more stylish. The second system will be a notebook.

Tower Desktops
The most common home/office desktop computer is a tower. I designed towers from Dell and NewEgg that consisted of Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz CPUs, 4GBs of RAM, 1TB hard drives with 32MB of cache, and with video cards that were very powerful such as the GeForce 9800 GTX+ for the build-your-own computer and an ATI Radeon HD3870 for the Dell. That makes these systems almost identical as far as specifications and performance.

The resultant price for the Dell was $1674. The build-your-own was $1361. The build-your-own price assumes you already have a copy of Windows XP which allows you to buy the much cheaper Vista Home Premium Upgrade version. If you need to buy Vista Home Premium full version, that adds $128 more to the price which yields a final total of $1489. The build-your-own saves $185 and you can save even more if you already have your OS or have a copy that allows an upgrade Vista version.

Now what about the Mac? Unfortunately, Apple makes absolutely no tower in this category. This is a big complaint about Macs since this is the most common choice for home desktops. Your first Mac alternative is the very expensive Mac Pro which is overkill for almost anyone since it has server components. These higher quality server parts are also very pricey. The pricing for a Mac Pro starts at $2299 which pretty much rules it out for most sane people. Then you are left with the under powered, over priced mac mini or the iMac. The mac mini is cute and good enough for most users but the price just isn’t worth it unless you specifically need a super tiny desktop.

All-in-One Desktops
It is this design that Apple pushes as what people should want in a desktop. It is certainly simpler for most people to hook up and a more stylish and elegant solution. However, if something breaks you almost always need to get a specialist to open up this harder-to-work-with case. These tend to be more expensive as well since they include an LCD monitor and some laptop components since they are so thin.

The Dell XPS One starts at $1299. The Apple iMac starts at $1199. The iMac has a slightly faster processor but you need to add 1GB of RAM to the iMac to bring it up to the RAM of the Dell. Getting the RAM from crucial is going to add about $30 after tax and shipping which brings the comparable iMac price up to $1229. The iMac also has a better video card with dedicated memory whereas the Dell uses up some of the 2GB system RAM for video. The end result is the iMac is hardware superior in several ways so if you want to run Vista or Mac OS X on it, the iMac is clearly the way to go.

Notebooks
Apple has had huge success with their notebooks mainly because they are very sturdy yet stylish. They also include a built-in camera which has become very popular these days for video conferencing. I will compare Apple’s most popular Macbook to the Dell XPS M1330. Again, you need to get some extra RAM from crucial for the Mac bringing it’s total up to 2GB for an extra $30. It can support up to 4GB but Mac OS X simply doesn’t need that for 99% of users out there. Vista on the other hand needs all the RAM it can get. The Dell comes with 4GB probably for that very reason. The price points are then $1149 for the Dell vs $1129 for the Macbook. The Dell has one other big hardware advantage of a 320GB hard drive. The Macbook only includes a 120GB. Moving the Macbook up to 250GB adds $150. So as far as a direct hardware comparison the Dell is the better value. Despite this, Macbook sales are growing at a much greater rate than any PC notebooks because they are so well designed and have the often preferred Mac OS X.

New Macs Soon
One point that is almost always left out in comparisons is that companies like Dell are constantly adjusting their prices. Apple only changes their prices when they release a new version of a model which they typically only do every 6-8 months. The result of this disappointing practice is that Apple hardware only tends to be a good value when a new model comes out. New Macbooks are expected out next month and new iMacs and Mac Pros are also due out soon. I have often found myself having to wait many months to buy a Mac just to wait for the better hardware value. It is this and the lack of a true Mac desktop tower that are my biggest complaints about the Mac lineup.

Operating Systems
I have barely mentioned the differences between Vista and Mac OS X but they are typically the biggest reason someone goes with a Mac over a PC, despite any price advantage a PC may or may not have. Vista is sluggish and needs 3+ GB of RAM. Besides that, I don’t think it as quite as awful as many people claim. The Mac has always been the more elegant OS and that is what really keeps Mac sales growing at twice the rate of PCs. The fact that Macs can run Windows but PCs can’t run Mac OS X also make the Macs more attractive.

Conclusion
If you want a powerful yet good value home desktop tower, building it on your own is much cheaper than Dell.  This is the best choice for gamers as well.  There is really no Mac alternative for the tower. If you want an all-in-one desktop solution, the iMac is the clear choice. If you want a notebook, Dell has an edge on hardware but I’ve never needed 320GB in a laptop before. The MacBook’s design, sturdiness, and OS tends to put it as the best selection and it is the one I recommend. Next month’s new Mac portable lineup should strengthen their hand even further.