Category Archives: Tips

30Jun 2010

PC security for the new user

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I’ve always been a believer that new computer users should get themselves a good manual or enrol on a course – just ask the resident family “computer expert” how many times they’ve had to bail out a family member who’s badly infected their PC through not knowing what they were doing – “But it said I’d won an iPod?”.

And forums, often providing a a potential solution to the c0mputer user having problems, can just makes worse. On one such forum, it is often visited by professional and amateurs alike. One of their most striking (and annoying to me) recommendations is for people to ditch commercial anti-virus products for the free equivalents and to generally make the amateur PC user feel worried that their security is at constant risk.

Lets cover that anti-virus recommendation first of all. It’s rubbish. The free equivalents are not as good as the full price equivalents – if you can afford the commercial version, buy it. The free one should be reserved for those poor enough that they can’t afford anything else.

And making them feel paranoid about security means that many talk about turning off cookies and JavaScript, expecting either to be introducing vulnerabilities to their computer. And the result? Well, one user had problems after installing the latest updates to Firefox. In their response they said…

I try very hard to follow advice on this board so far as anti-virus and stuff goes. Norton and McAfee are no-nos. I run SuperAntiSpyware, Malwarebytes, Security essentials, CrapCleaner, Spyware Blaster and Sunbelt personal firewall.

So, Norton and McAfee are “no-nos”. Great.

And, then, look at that list of software – yep, they’re running a full security program (Microsoft Security Essentials) along with an additional firewall (Sunbelt Personal Firewall) and 3 additional Antispyware products. Wow. But, hey, they’re all free.

And it took a few replies before anybody suggested that maybe, just maybe, it was this combination of clashing software that might have been causing the Firefox problems (which they promptly rejected, uninstalled Firefox, installed Opera and then complained that didn’t work either).

My recommendation – one, commercial, complete security solution (spyware, anti-virus, firewall). Don’t listen to those who say “Don’t buy Norton, your system will grind to a halt”. Yep, old message – the latest versions are much better at keeping resources low.

In fact, Norton Internet Security 2010 is the package I’d recommend. You can get a 1 PC licence for under £11 and £28 for user on 3 computers – hardly a bank  breaker.

21Jun 2010

Type better on your Android

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The problem with touch screen keyboards are that they, for one reason or another, slow to use. If you’ve never come across the concept of “swipe” keyboards, the idea is that that you don’t life your finger and simply drag your finger across the keys – it’s quicker but the software has to be smarter as a result.

There are a couple in the market, ShapeWriter being my favourite (but this is no longer available). The other is SlideIT, but I found the GUI horribly off-putting. However, Swype (which is now being bundled on some phones at launch) is now available as a free Beta to try out. It’s not in the marketplace, so you have to get it via their website.

Swype is quick, but seems to lack some of the features of ShapeWriter that I like – for example, not needing to indicate repeated letters and one key to change case. I’ll try both and report back ;)

18Jun 2010

20 Useful Browser Bookmarklets

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Updates:

Bit.ly Bookmarklet In Use

A bookmarklet is a browser shortcut that runs a small JavaScript script, adding useful and immediate functionality to whatever page you might be browsing at the time.

There are many, many to be found on the internet – the site marklets.com is a rather complete collection of around 1000 that you can use.

However, one of the most useful bookmarklet related sites is the Bookmarklet Combiner, which lets you generate your own Bookmarklet, consisting of links to others that you specify.

But, to save you the hassle of searching, here are 21 I’ve found to be the most useful. To use any of them, simply drag the name to your Bookmark list at the top of the browser.

Modify Page

1. PageZipper This appends multiple pages together to form one, continuous page. Useful on blogs, for instance, where a post may be over divided into multiple pages. [Homepage]

2. PrintWhatYouLike If you wish to print a page, this lets you modify exactly what you want – turn off background printing and images, for instance. You can even mark which part of this screen requires printing. [Homepage]

3. Readability This lets you strip everything on a website you are viewing but the content of the article itself. Again, useful for blog reading. [Homepage]

4. Remove Bloat This eliminates all occurrences of Flash, Java, music, and third-party iframes from a page. This can be particularly useful on those sites where browsing is reduced to a chore thanks to an over abundance of Flash animations!

Downloading

5. Bitlet Click on the BitLet Bookmarklet when you want to add a “download by bitlet” link near a torrent you want to download. [Homepage]

6. ClipNabber Download almost any video from any video sharing site. [Homepage]

Passwords

7. View Passwords Display all passwords on the page that are otherwise not visible – e.g. those displaying as asterisks. [Homepage]

8. BugMeNot Many sites often free access, but only after signing up to an account. BugMeNot is a service that provides shared signins to popular sites, saving you the hassle of having to sign up first. [Homepage]

9. SuperGenPass SuperGenPass uses a hash algorithm to transform a master password into unique, complex passwords for the Web sites you visit. And because it’s a bookmarklet it never stores or transmits your passwords. [Homepage]

Web Development & Design

10. Design Design is a suite of web-design and development assistive tools, encompassing utilities for grid layout, measurement and alignment. [Homepage]

11. Firebug Lite This is a cut-down version of the well-known Web Development tool, designed to work on other browsers other than Firefox. [Homepage]

12. WP Toolbar Appends the default WordPress admin menu to whatever page you’re currently on (assuming you’re on a site that’s running WordPress) and styles it with CSS, fixing it to the top right corner. [Homepage]

URL Sharing

13. Email This Email details of the current page to others. This doesn’t use your own email client, but the email is sent via its own site – simply provide your own email address. [Homepage]

14. Facebook Share Send details of the current page to your Facebook account, read to share. [Homepage]

15. GmailThis! Like Email This but uses your own Gmail account – a “Send” window appears with the site details pre-filled in. [Homepage]

Bookmark

16. TheThingsIWant Save online product pages to the TheThingsIWant website, where you can share, view and buy. [Homepage]

17. Read It Later Allows you to save the current URL to a special Read It Later account, which you can then view later. [Homepage]

Miscellaneous

18. FreezePage Stores a copy of the web page that you’re looking at on their servers, for you to access later. [Homepage]

19. Translate Use Google to translate the current page. [Homepage]

20. Bit.ly The popular URL shortening service provides a neat sidebar where you can quickly create a short URL and even share it on Twitter [Homepage]

Update 1

Removed Centricle.com links as the site no longer exists. Also removed SuperGenPass bookmarklet from page as it was causing it to break – please use the link to the homepage to use it instead.

17Jun 2010

Digsby hangs on “Connecting…”

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After my recent IM Client post, I was contacted by a member of the Digsby team suggesting I email their customer service to try and sort out my connection problems.

It was good that they contacted me directly, so thought I’d give it a try.

So, I kick off by telling them the problem…

It works on my wireless network at home but not at work – it’s an open network but has some port restrictions (although I don’t know which ones!). Both Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk work without any kind of modification. I’ve also tried Trillian and that works as well. Ok, when I try and sign in it hangs on “Connecting…” and nothing else happens.

Here’s the response…

Make sure to add both digsby.exe and digsby-app.exe in the lib folder to the allow list of any firewall or internet security software that you have.  You should also try restarting the computer.  Lastly, if you need to use a proxy server to access the Internet, click “Connection Settings” at the login screen and enter the proxy server info.  If you do not, try clicking “Connection Settings” and setting it to “No Proxy”. If it does not work, get it to fail and then send me the digsby log file located here:

He then goes on to list various ways to get the log files. Unfortunately my logs are empty because, as I said in my mail, it wasn’t failing but hanging.

I don’t have access to the firewall but I’m not running any security software. I’ve looked at the logs but they’re empty – as I said, it’s hanging on “Connecting…” and not erroring.

Ok, so by now, they must have got the hint that its hanging and not failing. I wonder what the next suggestion will be?

Get it to fail and then send me the digsby log file

<sigh> Thankfully, after a further correspondance I found out that what he ACTUALLY wanted was for to cancel Digsby after it had been hanging for a while. Not only that, but thanks to his unclear instructions earlier, I’d been looking in the wrong file for the logs before.

Anyway, now armed with the “proper” log file, I sent it on for analysis.

The response was that, well, it yielded no information of use. Their next thought was that my work network was blocking the Digsby servers. After some more unclear information I finally got to find out how they wished me to test this and it turned out… drum roll…. nope, the servers weren’t blocked.

Finally, I was sent this message…

Not sure what else to try unfortunately.  We are not getting other reports like this and can’t reproduce the issue on our end.

So, others are now experiencing it but they can’t recreate it so don’t know what to now do. My Digsby still doesn’t work and that’s that (as far as I can tell).

Remind me again Digsby, why you wanted me to contact you?

14Jun 2010

The Fruitless Search for an IM Client

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I have 2 IM clients running on my Netbook – Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk. Between them they take up over 200MB of memory.

So, I’m looking for an Instant Messaging client to run on my netbook that will run Windows Messenger and Google Talk. Optionally, Gmail notification would be good too. I don’t think that’s too big a wishlist.

In all cases I installed them on my Netbook whilst on my work’s wireless network – this is relatively open but has some port restrictions. None-the-less, both the aforementioned clients work at present.

Miranda

First up was Miranda, which got installed and, not long after, uninstalled. It doesn’t appear to support Google Talk by default – if it did, it wasn’t obvious. I tried searching the site for plugins to do this but came up empty-handed.

A search on the forum seemed to show people messing around with changing server names in config. files, which I’m hoping was not the default way to get Google Talk working. Anyway, I didn’t find anything.

Digsby

When installing you are prompted to install a “Digsby Donates” browser plugin and then, later, a Babylon toolbar (you have to decline for it not to install). At the end there are a number of advertising options to untick before completing.

Digsby uses its own account system, making it easy to use elsewhere. The interface is simple and adding accounts is easy.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work, hanging for some time when attempting to connect before failing. It works fine at home, so this must be down to port limitations at work.

Pidgin

During the Pidgin install you can select whether various URI handlers are supported – all are abbreviated terms with no explanation as to what they are. Also, you can choose a language localisation from a list which appears to be in no particular order. I eventually found EN_GB, which I assume is British English. When it comes to adding in the spell checking support, the languages are listed alphabetically and in full.

After that it was relatively straight forward and I was able to add my chat accounts easily.

Unfortunately, like Digsby, nothing was able to connect.

Trillian Astra

Installation is swift, with few options to choose. However, it does try and get you to install  the Ask toolbar and make Ask the default search provider – just be wary that you have to untick TWO boxes to prevent this. Once installed, you have to sign up as a Trillian account, which provides a single sign-in solution.

The default interface is a bit over-engineered so I swapped it to the simpler alternative. My chat account were easy to add and I can also show Twitter and Facebook. If any of your logins are attached to a mail account (e.g. Google Chat) then notifications can be made. This provides a simple interface to all your social networks, but it can be a bit cramped running it all from a small chat window.

The one problem I did have was that new mail notifications are shown on the screen only for a set amount of time. After that, there’s no icon animation, etc, to show that mail has arrived.

Trillian does has a wide range of available plugins and, once set-up and minimised, uses just 22.8 MB of memory.

Meebo

Meebo is an online IM client – simply sign up for their site and you can add all your IM details onto the site for instant access. They also provide a desktop notifier tool which will inform you of any incoming IMs and emails.

You can’t send a message without signing on the Meebo website and, more crucially for me, their mail notifier is damn annoying – the mail icon remains there until you click on it to launch your email, even if the mail has been read and gone (for example, from a phone or another PC).

I know it sounds a small issue, but its a damn annoyance that ruled out Meebo for me.

Conclusion

From the above you’d think I’d chosen Trillian. But, no, the mail notification is an issue for me. So I’m left with my original Windows Messenger and Google Talk installations.

Miranda was too difficult to set-up and Pidgin and Digsby simply wouldn’t connect through my companies security settings.

If anybody has any further suggestions then, please, let me know.

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