After close to 3 years with my Treo 600 I finally updated to the new Treo 700p.

I’m quite impressed with the critter. Beautiful screen, lots of memory, excellent keyboard and a decent browser.

Unfortunately, it got some software issues which make the Bluetooth marginal and the app switching speed is bad. Hopefully we’ll see an update soon.

Since I’m carrying a bigger laptop around these days with enough room to have a dev environment and real desktop replacement work environment I decided that I needed some way to secure my confidential data. I found this link (Encrypt /home and swap over RAID with dm-crypt) and used a subset of it to encrypt my /home directory, at a minimum. It just seems like “The Right Thing(tm)” to do where you might have sensitive data that could be stolen.

I was able to bypass some of the step since I’m not using a RAID array. Here is the gist of what I did:

Create the logical volume called “sec”
lvcreate -L 16G -n sec vg0

Fill it with random noise
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/vg0/sec bs=1M

Do the crypt setup, setup the encryption, create the /dev/mapper/device
cryptsetup -y -c twofish-cbc-essiv:sha256 create sec /dev/vg0/sec

Make a filesystem on the encrypted device.
mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 /dev/mapper/sec

Edit the startup script to taste.
vi /etc/init.d/encrypted_home.sh

Run the script and mount the volume
/etc/init.d/encrypted_home.sh

I also linked in the /etc/init.d/encrypted_home.sh script into /etc/rc3.d and /etc/rc5.d so my machine prompts me for my crypt password on boot, which FC5 handles quite nicely.

I recently picked a Dell Precision M50 laptop. It’s a nice machine, P4M 2.2GHz, 1GB RAM, 60GB 5400RPM drive and Nvidia 64MB Quadro 500 GoGL card driving a 1600×1200 display. It’s quite a contrast with my Sony Z505 Vaio, but I’ve been thinking of a paradigm shift in laptops anyways. I now carry my Treo which allows me to SMS, IM, Email all on the go without having to open up my ultra-portable laptop. Since the Treo means I only need my laptop for real computing (Hotel room, customer site demo, presentation or technical work) why not have a desktop replacement with plenty of guts?

I have built it up with a 2915 802.11a/b/g Mini-PCI card for wireless to complement the internal Ethernet and have added an extra battery to replace the floppy (floppy is dead, really). I ended up loading the machine with the required Windows XP + SP2 + Office 2k3 (our standard load) and then put on Red Hat Fedora Core 5. I hadn’t run FC in years and thought it was about time to come around and see where it stood. I’ve been very impressed and think that I’ll be leaving this as a FC machine for the duration.

More info to come as I carry it more.

My partners and I often find ourselves using our laptops at customer sites and always seem to end up having 2+ laptops and 1 Ethernet port available. I decided to start looking for a USB or battery powered hub or switch. I’ve found a couple of options:

3 port 10baseT USB powered Ethernet Hub

4 port 10/100baseT USB powered Ethernet Switch

I’ve bitten the bullet and ordered both a USB Bluetooth Dongle and a Bluetrek G2 headset. The headset is on sale until tomorrow for only $48.00 with $20.00 in rebates bringing the final cost down to $28+$3.95 S&H. I couldn’t pass it up for that price. Hopefully the dongle and headset will be here by the end of the week and I’ll be using it with Skype shortly after! It should also be a nice headset for my Treo 650 when it arrives and just a decent headset to have laying around for loaner, etc.

mytreo.net has Treo 650’s for $369 with a free shirt, hat and a compact DVD player. Pretty good deal compared to the $599 from Sprint. I’m still using my 600 and will probably hold off until sometime in December to pick my 650 up, maybe as a Christmas present for myself!