Christmas gifts for men

December 10th, 2009 | By Antonie Geerts

Since the fat man in red is arriving pretty shortly I decided to put on a little wish list of gifts most guys can appreciate. Just so that you don’t have to ask your boyfriend , husband , brother , friend etc directly you can pick some of these..

The low budget ones:

Gillette Mach 3 – Even if your boy is an electronic shaver user this would be most likely because he never had a proper blade one. For about 10 euro’s you have a great little set and often with Christmas there are special offers going on.  PS Go for the Original Mach3 – Fusion ones are crap.

A funny t-shirt- Get something in relation to drinks, coolness, or sex and you will have a winner they are cheap enough and can be bought in any shop that has loud music on. Funny Boxers are a winner as well.

The mid budget ones

So you got a bit more cash to spend… Good then why not buy..

A External Hard drive: If he is a bit of a tech head , or he downloads / watches a lot of movies then this might be a great little gift. For about 70 buck you can give him a great 1 Terabyte ( 1024GB ) sized drive.

Very cool laptop speakers: Who doesn’t love music ? Well this set of speakers will really rock any laptop and they are pretty cheap as well!

Now the high budget section.

As you can tell the high budget for me is not thousands but maybe 100 to 200 euro because that’s what 90% of the Christmas loving people might spend in this recession..

XBOX Arcade: Yes forget about Play Station , WII, DS’s just buy the Xbox arcade.. Not only is it the cheapest one of the bunch it also is great for online movies, facebook , digg and other popular websites and it has some of the GREATEST games available. Don’t think too much about it. Just get it

Apple IPOD Touch 3g: Ok it is not a IPhone but it will give you almost all the same features (except for calling people). You can pick it up around 150 euros and will make a great little gift.

Generation 2010 : A new business perspective

October 21st, 2009 | By Antonie Geerts

If I would ask you the question describe a businessman in 5 words? The chance that you come up with terms like: Suit, sleek, smooth, direct, greedy, grey , boring. Is very well likely even when you are in business yourself you tend to have this kind of stereo type in your mind and most likely you will have met 1 or 2 of these types of business people. But more then often the average business person is not the boring suit wearing stereotype we all can in vision. The new generation of business men and women will be a bit looser, more social and funny. You will have to admit, you rather do business with a fun person than with a grey person when it comes to new and innovative ideas. The internet with its social media networking for example is where businesses try to “connect” to their consumers and the only way to connect is by relating with them. Hence lets get rid of this picture:

And with that picture would also come the businesscard….

Now let’s get rid of it Let’s get ready for the business view of the future.

And lets not forget to spice up the businesscards like mine :

What happened to VoIP?

October 19th, 2009 | By Antonie Geerts

When I first got introduced to Voice over IP it arrived in the form of an Asterisk PBX system back in the summer of 2005. Ploughing through the config files and trying to get my first BRI ISDN card to work was the difficult part but once you’re done with that the “real” fun could start. As I was getting in to it more and more really seeing a future in to the system made me invest in myself by getting the Digium Certificed Asterisk Certificated (DCAP) which I received in the beginning of 2008. So almost 2 years later where is Asterisk and its VoIP system now?

My company’s mailbox received sporadic mails in asking me for support on their Asterisk build or Trixbox system but the “boom” on VoIP has still not arrived to my disappointment. Would it be that this great technology could not cope with the pressure of mobile network companies and negative advertising from leading PBX brand systems like Alcatel and Cisco?

The best way to answer questions like this is by finding out how popular it was during the years. I am using Google Insights Search to find out this information and this is what happened.

Ah this explains already a bit more what happend to me. Since I learned about Asterisk in 2005 it was when VoIP was HOT. The tipping point was building up and keywords like: VoIP and Future where widely coined. Sadly enough this hype was kind short lived since in January 2006 the search for VoIP declined rapidly. So does this mean VoIP does not have a future anymore.

Lets try to figure this out as well by find out relations of VoIP by using Google Sets and Insight search.

http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=VoIP&q2=Asterisk&q3=&q4=&q5=&btn=Small+Set+%2815+items+or+fewer%29

Google sets provided me with the following keywords: voip,asterisk,linux,pbx,sip,software,telephony,ser,opensource,ip,skype,phone,voice

So lets do some insight search with a couple of these

By compairing the various Opensource PBX systems and also the widely used VoIP Application called Skype we notice that although the Trixbox,FreePBX,Asterisk systems are not really widely used the SER system is.

So a conflict , on the one side we see a rapid decline in VoIP and Asterisk and on the other side we see a big rise in SER and Skype. So what are we doing wrong ?

Go out on grafton street and asking anyone about Asterisk or VoIP…The chance that they know what you are talking about is very slim ! So that is the problem with our graphs and results. We need to related the information to not what it really is but to what it really means. So lets do this “check” again but now with understandable terms.

So it looks like internet calling is really on its way out… But not completely because how many people have a land line these days ? Often the younger generation will just have there mobile and no landline phone at all. So

Well a little light at the end of the VoIP tunnel since we have a rising volume of Internet mobile calling and VoIP Mobile and GSM searches… And Skype ofcourse with its steady stream, but to be honest I would put my eggs in the basket that will offer free phone calls which will be most likely a google system that offers free mobile wifi on its android system and it will make its money by advertising on the mobiles once in a while and finding out the so called hotspots in mobile phone numbers. By the way the “hotspots in mobile phone numbers” is another artical all together !

A very good way to get rid of spyware & adware Video tutorial

October 7th, 2009 | By Antonie Geerts

I added this video to show you how its done !

(original blog text)

Hearing more and more complaints about how spyware is ruining pc’s and how the only solution is formatting your drives I decided to write down a simple 5 step config for getting rid of most of them (With these steps I got rid of the Brittiania Search / Feed Yard Virus for example)

So first up download the following 2 programs

1. GMER (http://www.gmer.net/#files)
2. MalwareBytes (http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam-download.php)
3. Install GMER and start scanning , after the scan remove all items that are marked RED (see this vid for an example )
4. Install Malwarebytes and do a Quick Scan
5. After the quick scan is finished delete the selected “problems” and reboot your pc.

You should now be adware free !

Let's Go Lite! Facebook Lite to be precise

October 6th, 2009 | By Antonie Geerts

When the first social networking websites came out they were heavy loaded, full of images, colors and cool widgets. Remember those days that you would open a MySpace page and the annoying glitters, flashy imagines and the Britney spears mp3’s would start kicking off.  The internet and pc’s were quick enough for most of the western world and your pc would only crash after maybe 4 or 5 pages open. Now some things we have changed, technology is getting faster however it also is smaller and with the introduction of the IPod touch, the Iphone and now another tsunami comes in at form of Google Wave the internet had to make a Lite Change !.

A Lite Facebook is the same as your Face Book but then smaller, quicker and less flashy. This type of “lite” site is perfect for your IPhone, notebook or a cloud computing system. So you can expect in 2010 not just facebook lite (which is here http://lite.facebook.com/ )

But also gmail-lite , myspace-lite , twitter-lite and ofcourse YouTube lite !

How did you learn that stuff you do !

October 4th, 2009 | By Antonie Geerts

Recently i got asked the question, how did you get where you are at now? To be honest , it didn’t take me long to think about the answer. You might find the answer in the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell but I will give you the summery and a little bit more.

It started when I was 9 years old, as a smaller then average boy living in a small village called Rilland in the province of Zeeland in The Netherlands I spend my days doing mostly geeky stuff. From taking bugs home instead of playing football or playing with my microscope, if you can imagine a 9 year old geek then most likely you will find something very similar to how i looked at that age.

Now a new addition came to the house in the form of a MSX Computer. It was the year 1992 and the MSX was already 10 years old which resulted in a few problems… one of them was that the games were not made anymore ! My solution was that of roaming around the monthly flee markets in “De Zeeland hallen” in a town called Goes.

There I bought the old games and MSX magazines which were my first real study books that i found interesting. My games were made of the examples I found in the MSX magazines which often consisted of 10 or more pages of BASIC code.

Now the lethal combination of geekness , a old MSX with no games and no money to buy any newer computer and 15 years and voila you have the making of an IT Consultant.

Hence if I can give anyone an advice on how to get up and running in an IT Business, IT Services or Anything in live it is to just do it. You want to learn Linux, go ahead download debian , ubuntu ,centos and install it.. You want to do penetration testing install OpenVas and start following the security and hacker scenes . You want to learn how to build a pbx system go download asterisk and get your self a softphone installed… Everything you want to learn is available for you, just be aware that you might need to spend 15 years on it in order to fully understand it for about 1 min.. And then the information is old and you will have to study some more again.