Down she goes. The weekend, I mean.
One more weekend is in the books. Thanks to illness last week, the time away from work was extended. Much of Thursday was spent resting at home. The lady friend stopped by for lunch, a movie, and an episode of South Park (the one that explains why I have to restrain laughter at passing motorcyclists). We went to an art show (mutual friend's project on display) then dinner at Olive Garden on Friday night; the food was good, but gave her some bad heartburn afterward. Founders Day was Saturday in Terre Haute, so I went up that way for the early part of the day. Naked Dave made it to town, barely, so we got to hang out for a little bit yesterday. Aside from that, a normal weekend. And bin Laden was killed.
My Asus Transformer also arrived at the end of last week. Finding a store with stock to ship was nearly impossible, more stores had iPad 2's in stock than these slates, but I was able to get an order in early on launch day. The keyboard dock on the other hand is even harder to find. Many stores don't even have it listed and those that do don't have any idea how long it will take to ship. So, for the near future, my Transformer is just a slate. And that's not too bad. Neither Honeycomb nor the Transformer have been perfect, but it is showing promise. More on that in a later post.
The AT&T bandwidth cap at home technically starts today, although there hasn't been any news about it recently. I still haven't heard much about a monitoring utility, a requirement before we can get penalized for exceeding the 250GB limit, however I will still do what I can to keep a close eye on usage. I've been fairly liberal with Netflix and Hulu streaming, which may need to get cut down by quite a bit. Additionally, I'll want to stagger Steam downloads (the recently acquired Portal 2 was over 10GB by itself) if I need to get something on multiple machines. Alternatively, using WiFi hotspots for the portable laptops. I don't have a cap on my iPad, so I can use that for lower quality video streaming. I've been getting into the habit of downloading Android updates on my phone over 3G, so that won't change much. The real problem will be anything with an 'i' in front of it. iDevices don't allow you to download updates or apps larger than 20MB over 3G. Aside from taking them to an AT&T hotspot in town for each update, I could download them to my desktop and sync the updated apps. That would make one download per app rather than per app, per device, but it still has problems. One is it's a pain in the ass. Another larger problem is that I can't easily pick and choose updates. Not every app is installed on any of my devices for one reason or another, and these needless updates may require more data than I'm saving. I'll play around with it and see what can be done. Update: Confirmed that we are not yet subject to capped internet.
In bigger annoying news, Sony managed a catastrophic fuck up of their own last week and the week prior. They had an intrusion at their Playstation Network (PSN) data center in San Diego two weeks ago prompting them to shut down the service. Almost a week later, they announced the scale of the situation. Thanks to poor security and practices, hackers got, well, basically everything Sony ever stored about every single PSN user. This includes the usual trophies such as name and email address, along with far more sensitive information like billing address, birthdate, security question/answer, and passwords, all in plaintext. Were that not enough, credit card info (number and expiration date) might have also made it out although Sony claims that at least that information was encrypted (no mention of how well) and that there is no proof that it was. Since then, some members of the internet security community have claimed to catch wind of PSN information, including credit card details, for sale. It could be fake, but the threat is, unfortunately, quite real. With password reuse as widespread as it is, many users have more than just PSN to worry about now. If you had a PSN account and used a common password, change it ASAP. And monitor your credit cards for fraudulent activity.
My Asus Transformer also arrived at the end of last week. Finding a store with stock to ship was nearly impossible, more stores had iPad 2's in stock than these slates, but I was able to get an order in early on launch day. The keyboard dock on the other hand is even harder to find. Many stores don't even have it listed and those that do don't have any idea how long it will take to ship. So, for the near future, my Transformer is just a slate. And that's not too bad. Neither Honeycomb nor the Transformer have been perfect, but it is showing promise. More on that in a later post.
The AT&T bandwidth cap at home technically starts today, although there hasn't been any news about it recently. I still haven't heard much about a monitoring utility, a requirement before we can get penalized for exceeding the 250GB limit, however I will still do what I can to keep a close eye on usage. I've been fairly liberal with Netflix and Hulu streaming, which may need to get cut down by quite a bit. Additionally, I'll want to stagger Steam downloads (the recently acquired Portal 2 was over 10GB by itself) if I need to get something on multiple machines. Alternatively, using WiFi hotspots for the portable laptops. I don't have a cap on my iPad, so I can use that for lower quality video streaming. I've been getting into the habit of downloading Android updates on my phone over 3G, so that won't change much. The real problem will be anything with an 'i' in front of it. iDevices don't allow you to download updates or apps larger than 20MB over 3G. Aside from taking them to an AT&T hotspot in town for each update, I could download them to my desktop and sync the updated apps. That would make one download per app rather than per app, per device, but it still has problems. One is it's a pain in the ass. Another larger problem is that I can't easily pick and choose updates. Not every app is installed on any of my devices for one reason or another, and these needless updates may require more data than I'm saving. I'll play around with it and see what can be done. Update: Confirmed that we are not yet subject to capped internet.
In bigger annoying news, Sony managed a catastrophic fuck up of their own last week and the week prior. They had an intrusion at their Playstation Network (PSN) data center in San Diego two weeks ago prompting them to shut down the service. Almost a week later, they announced the scale of the situation. Thanks to poor security and practices, hackers got, well, basically everything Sony ever stored about every single PSN user. This includes the usual trophies such as name and email address, along with far more sensitive information like billing address, birthdate, security question/answer, and passwords, all in plaintext. Were that not enough, credit card info (number and expiration date) might have also made it out although Sony claims that at least that information was encrypted (no mention of how well) and that there is no proof that it was. Since then, some members of the internet security community have claimed to catch wind of PSN information, including credit card details, for sale. It could be fake, but the threat is, unfortunately, quite real. With password reuse as widespread as it is, many users have more than just PSN to worry about now. If you had a PSN account and used a common password, change it ASAP. And monitor your credit cards for fraudulent activity.