Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Free wi-fi?

Here’s an ethical question for you. Is it OK to regularly glom onto someone’s (company or individual) wireless Internet access without them knowing it?

That’s the latest poll question at the Great Lakes Geek site.

I see no problem in using a connection once or even twice in a crunch time situation, as long as you’re not sending/grabbing huge files and hogging all their bandwidth.

I know some would argue that since it’s out there in the ether and the people were too inept to secure their access, then it’s OK. I’m not so sure of that. Someone is paying for that access and to routinely use up some of their bandwidth doesn’t seem right.

I might be more forgiving if a company’s access was used rather than a family who just doesn’t know to secure their wi-fi. But still, I think the regular use of such access is wrong. What do you think? Let the Geek know.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

OneCleveland or OneCommunity?

I know that the OneCleveland is expanding to Akron and other venues outside of the traditional “Cleveland” geography but I wish they had kept the name OneCleveland.

Can you imagine if a project was developed, spearheaded, financed and brought to fruition in say Boston or Detroit and the name was changed to exclude the home city? It just wouldn’t happen.

I think I am sensitive to how Akron, Canton and beyond might feel but this was a Cleveland project and I think it dilutes the credit and prestige that Cleveland has earned. If Akron people and orgs had developed the project and we wanted to tap into it, I would expect to refer to OneAkron. I wouldn’t expect a name change.

OneCommunity sounds bland and amorphous to me and smacks of political correctness. How can we build an identity and civic pride if we bend in the wind like this?

So far visitors to the Great Lakes Geek site have felt the same way as 90% of voters say they do not like the new name.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Tiny, free utility

I found a tiny but useful utility you may be interested in.

It’s called TinyResMeter and you can download and run it for free.


TinyResMeter is a free utility that displays useful realtime system resource information (CPU speed, usage, RAM, processes, disk space, swapfile, etc) in a customizable format.

It’s not as pretty as the meters in Norton SystemWorks or other commercial programs but it is under 100k, doesn’t modify the registry and doesn’t add any new DLLs to your system.

The next version is supposed to have net connection speed info too.

Pretty slick