Microsoft two-factor authentication

This week Microsoft added the ability for users to secure their Microsoft account with two-factor authentication.  This should help prevent unauthorized access to your account.  I think that it is great that Microsoft is enabling this extra security, as people can have their credit cards associated with their account.

I enabled two-factor authentication on my account, and by default your verification code will be sent to your phone.  You can also use a phone based authenticator to generate codes.  Microsoft has released an application that you can use on Windows Phone based phones, or you can use Google Authenticator on Android, iOS and Blackberry.

There are some things that you should be aware of before enabling this for your accounts:

1. If you use Google Authenticator, since Microsoft doesn't add a prefix to the account name in the key uri, adding your Microsoft account to the app, will replace any existing account with that name.  Make sure that you rename, in the app, any account that is named with the email address that you use to log in, before adding the Microsoft account.
2. The Xbox doesn't have the UI to allow entry of the second-factor verification code, so you will need to create an application specific password for these devices that don't accept these validation codes.

SqueezePlug

We have been using various SqueezeBox radios for several years now.  These allow us to listen to our local library of music, and streaming radio throughout our house.  We have had a NAS installed in our house for years (initially a Windows Home Server, now a ReadyNAS) and these were great to run the Logitech Media Server software, as we didn't need to leave any of our PCs up and running.

Recently, we have been transitioning to cloud services for storage, from the NAS.  We use CrashPlan for backing up our Macs and PCs.  Since we have been transitioning to Chromebooks, I have copied all of our files to Google Drive.  All of our movie content exists on the NAS, but since we have been using Vudu and Netflix for watching movies, we haven't played this content.  Since we haven't been really using the NAS for anything other serving content for the Squeezeboxes, this seems like a waste.  The electricity needed for a NAS with five 2TB drives, is overkill just to serve our music.

The +Raspberry Pi  is a great solution for this.  It is a small ARM based computer that uses 3.5 watts of power.  The SqueezePlug distribution has every thing needed for a media server, including the Logitech Media Server software, and this distribution supports the Raspberry Pi.

Fitbit One

I have been using a +Fitbit for a while now. In the past few years, using a Fitbit has encouraged me to move more during the day.  I have had two of the original Fitbits, and one Fitbit Ultra.  I just got a Fitbit One and I was looking forward to the wireless syncing.

Sync we have switch to using Chomebooks as our main computers, it has been pain to sync my previous Fitbits.  I would either have to leave a PC or Mac running all of the time, or turn it on often if I wanted my activity data synced.  Uploading my data daily is useful when you are trying to compare your activity against your friends. What I ended up doing was turn on a computer when the Fitbit needed to charge.  This would sync about a weeks worth of data at once.  I was looking forward to the Fitbit One solving this problem, by adding the ability to sync through my cell phone, which I always have with me and is always on.

Unfortunately, wireless syncing doesn't work with my phone, so I still need to turn on a computer at home to sync.

One other downside of the Fitbit One is that they changed the single USB dongle that charged and did the wireless syncing with the Fitbit into two.  Now if I want to sync and charge my Fitbit, I need to use two of my USB ports.

I am still pretty happy with the Fitbit One, and am looking forward to being able to sync through my cell phone.

Switched to Blogger

I moved my blogs to +Blogger from Wordpress.com.  Blogger has essentially the same functionality as WordPress.com but has better integration with +Google+.  Blogger also allows you to use a custom domain for free, while WordPress.com charges for this.

The conversion from WordPress went pretty well.  I was able to use the online conversion tool for one of of my blogs.  But since the tool only supports converting files up to 1MB, I needed to run the tool locally.  I also encountered a few other problems:

1. WordPress.com supports special syntax that gets converted at display time, which creates the html for embedding content.  WordPress makes it easy to embed +YouTube and +Google Drive content, with out having to include the html.  When these posts are imported into Blogger, the inline content isn't shown.
2. Blogger only supports 20 labels per post, while WordPress.com doesn't have a limit for tags.  I needed to remove these extra tags before exporting the blog from WordPress.

This is the 4th migration that I have done with my blogs, so I am sure that some links won't work in previous posts. My blogs were originally run on a self-hosted LifeType blog, then I migrated to a self-hosted to WordPress.org blog, and then I migrated it to a WordPress.com blog.

New Xbox 360 Dashboard

I have played with the updated Xbox 360 dashboard for a few weeks, and really am enjoying several of the new features.  The new additions that I like are better support for using an Xbox Live account on multiple Xboxes and improved support for  new video content sources.

Multi-Xbox support

We have two Xboxes in our house.  The second Xbox is upstairs, and has been used mainly as a Windows Media Extender and as a way to watch Netflix and Hulu content.  We haven't used it to play games because it was too much of a pain to either recover our Gamertags or copy the profile and saved games to a USB thumb stick.

With the new Dashboard update, Microsoft added two features that help with users with multiple Xboxes.

Roaming Profile

Microsoft renamed "recovering" profiles to "downloading" profiles.  With this you can "download" a profile on multiple consoles, with specifying the live.com password.  This allows you to use the same Xbox Live account on multiple consoles (though not at the same time.)  With this functionality, I am able to play a game on the upstairs Xbox while my wife or kids are watching something else on the downstairs TV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRrJ7pVInqI

Reducing power consumption of electronics

One of our network switches stopped working.  While looking for replacements, I decided to look for a switch that would be more energy-efficient than the existing one.  I was very interested in D-Link's Green line of products. I bought the DSG-1024D 24-port network switch.  I figured that I would be able to replace several switches with a single energy-efficient switch.

The D-Link Green series has several ways that it saves power:

• It powers down port where it detects an idle link status.


• The switch can detect the cable length of Gigabit Ethernet run, and will use less power for shorter runs.

Before I replaced the switch, I measured the combined energy usages of the switches and did the same after replacing the old ones with the new switch.  By just replacing the two older switches, with the single new switch I saw some power savings.  Since I have other switches that are always on, I decided to replace those as well.

Once I replaced these switches, I saw a savings of 8 watts.
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Travel accessories

My wife and I traveled to Chicago this past weekend.  There were two accessories that made the trip easier.

AmazonBasics Universal Travel Case

The AmazonBasics Travel Case allowed us to keep our assorted cables and accessories in a compact form.  For this trip, we used it to store:

• 2 cell phone chargers


• USB cable & power adapter for our kindles


• USB cable for phone


• ethernet cable


• charger for Motorola Xoom


• USB thumb drive


• extra sdcard


• Charger for Samsung Series 5 Chromebook

All of these items fit in a 10" x 6" case.  One good thing about this is that having these items contained in one case made it easy to find each of these items.  Also, my backback wasn't loaded with a rats nest of wires.

I did put this case inside my checked bag, as I was sure that such a densely packed container of wires might have looked suspicious to the TSA agent watching the X-ray images.

ZuniConnect Travel IV

The ZuniConnect is a great travel router.  It lets you connect to a wired or wireless network, and share that with multiple computers.  It will share the network connection either via Ethernet or a 802.11g/n network. One our trip, my wife and I used  the ZuniConnect to share the the hotel wired network connection with our two phones, our laptop, and our tablet.

There are some other nice features of the ZuniConnect:

• Two USB ports to charge portable devices


• The ZuniConnect can be used for a wireless network bridge to connect devices that only have an Ethernet port to connect to a wireless network.