For those who havn’t seen them - mini Infrared controlled indoor helicopers are a complete blast…and amazing fun.    I got the linked one for a christmas present.

I’m seriously amazed, it had the whole family playing with it on Christmas day - and trying to control it.    We’d set up a take off and landing point in the living room, and everyone got involved trying to make the helicopter do what we wanted.

You see the remote control helicopers nowadays hover really well - but to make a real helicopter go forward, you angle the blades forward.   In these (simple) RC ones, you can’t do that, and instead use the rear propellor, and spins, to make the helicopter (very slowly) move to your destination.    Making it do what you want is therefore very tricky indeed - especially when small gusts of breeze from nearby air movement can catch  you off-guard and send the copter flying into a wall/furniture!

I’d say its been one of my favourite gadget presents ever - and even my 55 year old Dad enjoyed it a lot.   I sense a present for him on his birthday..

What presents did you get/love at Christmas?

Due to living in the country and having slightly dodgy power I’ve always had a UPS system installed at home (actually 2 currently).     Currently I have a APC Smart-UPS 1500VA, and a Eaton Powerware 9120-700.

A lot of people underestimate the value of these, and think of them as non-essential items - but for me they are invaluable when you consider I lose power for around 5-12 hours a month as a raw average.   At one point earlier this year the power lines in the field behind the house took the power company over 2 weeks to repair (luckily they got my neighbourhood power back in around 24 hours with a emergency generator).

How do I use my UPS:

• The Eaton runs my DSL router and DECT phone basestation- and runs it for around 5 hours.   This means in most circumstances I can continue to work from home for the duration of my laptop battery as most power outages don’t outlast this & the laptop.   Most useful.
• The APC runs both my main server (blogged about at the start of this year - but looks truncated now) and desktop.    This lasts for an hour and a half of use of the monitor/server, and about 10 mins if the desktop is on (desktop is a monster gaming PC).   Basically this is to allow the server to run if I’m out for the short outages, and if I’m in playing games - to allow me to shutdown cleanly on the desktop.  The server shuts down automatically when 5 minutes of power remain in the battery.

Prior to having the above 2 UPS’s I had a single 1200VA Belkin.    It died about 2 weeks after its 3 year warrenty had expired.    The Belkin died completely and it was not just a battery replacement job sadly.    As I work in IT and had experience of both APC and Eaton products, I realised buying a main-vendor full sine-wave UPS with long life and user-replacable batteries may have advantages, hence managed to source one of the above UPS’s from a 2nd hand dealer, and the other I was given as a gift from a friend (as his firm was needing more capacity than 1500 VA).   Very nice indeed - and cost me less than a new Belkin in total (I paid £80 for the Eaton)!

The UPS’s don’t just cover me from the usual full outages, they also keep my approx £2500 of PC equipment safe from surges/spikes and short brownouts.

Time running on UPS due to power-cut this month according to apcupsd statistics on my Debian server:    71 minutes and 4 seconds - with 4 power outages total (one 60 mins, 3 of 2-3 minute length).

I would reccomend “smart-ups” and sine wave models over non smart basic models, as they can accurately model their battery time remaining as they run allowing accurate battery information over the years.    Also cheap UPS’s with stepped output are from my personal experiences not as reliable as major vendors sine-wave smarter models.

With internet-additiction being common - I wonder how many other addicts will start purchasing UPS’s to enable them to not suffer in awkward loss of power situations…

Do you have a UPS  ?

I’ll actually embarressed to admit it - I’ve only recently started using a proper RSS Feedreader in Google Reader - but its already saving me hours a day.

For those not familiar, a Feedreader allows you to basically “bookmark” a dynamic site or a section of a dynamic site(such as a section on BBC news, a blog author etc).

I could completely fall on my face with this attempt and make a fool of myself - but my aim is to make some specific predictions of what will occur in 2009 which I will revisit next year.. so here goes:

1. More 0-day attacks

This year, overall for me personally 0-day’s have not overall ever really caught on inside the large organisation I work for (that is our specific countermeasures have worked). That said 0-days for which there is no patch available at time of real exploit do appear to be increasing greatly… and I can see this continuing - Only today there has been a 0-day exploit for IE for example.

2. First Mac Viruses and Spyware will start to appear

This may well be a contentious one - I know the underlying security of OS X due to it being BSD based is better than the Microsoft world. I’m also not talking about the viruses/spyware to date, which mainly relies on browser flaws. I’m talking botnets/spam engines. However the numbers as Steve Jobs puts it speak for themselves. With Apple seemingly having a 21% US market share if the linked article is to be believed, I cannot seriously see hackers and the Spyware writers will ignore this amount of “sitting” duck targets. After all, how many Mac users do you know that run AV?

3. AV vendors will continue to move away from the “signature” mentality.

With the amount of viruses being released on a daily basis, and the amount of signatures therefore that result, AV vendors will start concentrating more on behaviour analysis than the traditional signature analysis, and combine the approaches. Some AV companies are already going down this path I admit,so this is quite an easy prediction - but I think all will start to adopt sandboxing and similar techniques in order to prevent 0-day attack.

Looks like another PC magazine is potentially set to close doors to printed text and become online-only.

Background:

I have doubts about the timeframe being announced for Oyster replacement.

My personal opinion:

Beautiful - solid Alumininum manufacturing showing the industry the way to go forward.

This morning it looks like a majority of ISP’s using BT’s Wholesale Broadband Connect went offline due to a failure in one single exchange - link here to my ISP status page.

With the advent of 7Digital now providing DRM free music in 320kbit/sec mp3’s (See this article for full details) from all 4 major labels, I’m confused about the iTunes offering in AAC.

You see, I like iTunes plus music, ie the no-usage limits, no DRM music in iTunes, and prefer this to buying a CD….however its not always available.