Month: November 2012

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Norton turns my computer into a snail

We’ve used Norton Online Family for well over a year in order to give our children’s accounts time and website restrictions. During that time, our five-year-old Vista computer became unbearably slow, and it’s been difficult to identify the culprit, since the I/O slowness is attributed to svchost.

My experience with other Norton consumer products has been poor, and so I guessed that by uninstalling their Online Family software, it might improve performance. Since uninstalling it, the computer feels at least twice as fast — for login and logout, for network file copies, etc.

I liked Norton Online Family’s functionality, but I couldn’t bear it’s performance hit to the user experience. Now I’m in the market for another solution. Do you have any recommendations?

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Arstechnica: Use your phone as a document scanner

Arstechnica has an article about using a smartphone as a document scanner “in a pinch”. It’s fun to see the possibilities that technology opens up.

Seven years ago, I wanted to scan some journals for archival purposes. Using a traditional flatbed scanner would have taken far too long, and wouldn’t have worked well since the pages were bound. So I mounted my Olympus C-8080 digital camera on a tripod, added crude lighting from lamps, and quickly photographed the pages. It may not be perfect, but it’s better than nothing.

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Content-centric networking with CCNx

This was an interesting topic to read about: Content-centric networking with CCNx:

Content-centric networking (CCN) is a novel approach to networking that abstracts away the specifics of the connection, and focuses on disseminating the content efficiently.

CCNx is the brainchild of PARC’s Van Jacobson, and if anyone is qualified to rethink core Internet protocols, Jacobson is.