Archive for July, 2009

Google and Microsoft are two of the more visible companies that are pushing the cloud computing frontier.  There are several advantages to computing in the cloud; your files are available from whatever computer you’re on as long as you have a network connection, you don’t have to worry about backups, etc.  There is a downside to the cloud though.

Basically cloud computing is using applications for productivity that live on the internet, not on the computer you’re working on.  Google Docs and Microsoft’s soon to be released internet based version of it’s flagship product Office are modern examples of cloud computing, but really any webmail (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc) could loosely be referred to as a cloud application.

My biggest concerns has always been privacy.  Your email, financial information, business contacts, etc are all saved on a third party companies servers.  There is always the possibility that there could be a security breach from the inside, or someone uses the password reset feature (these are sometimes very insecure) and gains access to your information.  What if the service is interrupted or you can’t log in or something goes missing, who can you call to fix it?

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Sharing folders for your iphone

If you did not hear, apple released the MobileMe iDisk App, of course you will need a mobile me account. OSX users really should have one, let me list the benefits:

- get an new email address ( you choose what it is ) belonging to the .me domain
- can set up galleries through iphoto and upload your pictures to it for anyone to see.
- get a website that you can manipulate with iWeb.
- get 20 GB of space to share between your website/pictures/email or whatever else you want
- get access to a backup application tht will backup whatever files you want to the iDisk ( after it is set up)
If you have an iPhone you can track it if it is ever lost

And the best part? Its all in sync and push enabled (Email , contacts, calendar)

When you have MobileMe installed on OSX or Windows, goto your settings/control panel and make sure you are logged in and iDisk is set up. You should see it under devices in finder or under my computer in Windows.
So either use Itunes to search for the MobileMe IDisk app or use your iPhone/iTouch device to install the device (app store).
Its a great tool to keep your files accessible to you wherever you go.

Spyware, malware, adware…whatever you call it, it’s time to get rid of it. Is your system running slowly, are you getting pop-up windows?  Is there software that “looks” like an antivirus program asking you to pay, warning that you are infected but won’t do anything until you cough up the dough and you don’t remember even installing it?  You might have spyware on your computer.

Loosely defined, spyware is any software on your computer that is monitoring you (internet usage, web habits, or even possibly stealing passwords), adware is any software that tries to display ads on your computer either when you’re browsing websites that don’t have pop-ups windows or sometimes when you’re not even on the internet.  Malware is both spyware and adware, plus any number of programs that pretend to be antivirus, antispyware or other types of utilities but actually don’t do anything except ask you for money.

There are some really great free tools out there to remove spyware.  If these don’t get rid of your infection we’d recommend either calling a professional or just backing up your data and reinstalling your entire operating system and all programs.

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In some business environments people end up using the same bookmarks (resources for work, search tools, favorite vendors, etc) but have to maintain their own bookmarks manually.  This is fine but it’s really a waste of time and energy if you have to send an email around letting people know who a new vendor is and to make sure to remember to update their bookmarks accordingly.  Here’s a great workaround that let’s this happen automatically.

If you use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer this walkthrough is useful too.  Firefox doesn’t have a way to share bookmarks automatically, however you can use this trick plus PlainOldFavorites (that we talked about here) to get your bookmarks sync’d in Firefox as well.

Getting the share setup

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Usually , barring a hardware problem (especially if its just software that is mounted) an application or .dmg can be locked and impossible to eject if it has open files. In OSX it can be very simple. OSX mounts things under /Volumes/mountname . If you open up terminal in OSX, and list out the Volumes (type ls /Volumes/) you can see the name of whatever is mounted. The next command is lsof ( list open files) , run that on the offending mount and find out what file is preventing you from ejecting the offending application (lsof /Volumes/mountname).

Its easy to do and gets you closer to unix command line mastery.

Do you switch back and forth between Internet Explorer and Firefox and miss the bookmarks of the one when you’re in the other?  Then check out the Firefox extension PlainOldFavorites for a quick fix to this and get your bookmarks in sync.

What PlainOldBookmarks does is creates an extra option in your menu bar called “Favorites” right next to your “Bookmarks” in Firefox.  This is a list of all the favorites in Internet Explorer that you can now access, sort, add to and delete from right through Firefox.

Grab it for free from:

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These hack are for advanced users, they can really mess up your system. Please make backups of your registry before you do anything else. Caveat utilitor!

First thing is first, fire up your registry editor. Goto start –> run –> type in “regedit32″ and press enter

1st hack-

Changing the speed of menu speed
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\

MenuShowDelay. Thedefault valueis 400. Set it to 0

2nd hack-

This one places the windows kernel in ram ( the heart of the OS, do this only if you have over 1 gig of ram)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\MemoryManagement\DisablePagingExecutive set this to 1 to disable paging and have the kernel run in RAM

3rd hack-

Prefetch Parameters

This places system files into cache for faster loading ( do this is you have more than 1 gig of memory)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\MemorManagement\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher Set this to 0 to disable prefetching, 1 to prefetch application launch files, 2 to prefetch boot files, and 3 to prefetch as many files as possible.

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Life hacker has a great troubleshooting tutorial dealing with how to figure out what’s wrong with your internet connection when you can’t get to a website. Print it out and file it somewhere safe, you won’t be able to get to the website when you need to follow the steps. From lifehacker: how to troubleshoot a flaky internet connection

Its almost a dirty word, most people secretly want something better, but are stuck with windows applications due to policy at the work place or ignorance of anything else. What am I talking about? Microsoft Office.  Boy is that one entrenched, Microsoft makes quite a lot of money on their versions of office. They would rather you pirate windows than office.  

Picture from this link (full story here)

So, what are our alternatives?

OpenOffice  This is a great suite , with the exception of email it contains all you need to replace office, some would say its even better (and faster) than office. It will handle word files, spread sheets , presentations. One of the best features? It can print to PDF natively ( get with the program Microsoft) 

It can be used on Windows, OSX and Linux Download

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Not sure what a RAM slot is?  Unclear what a USB port looks like? Sonic840 on deviantart.com put together an incredible collection of images of everything from RAM slots to CPU sockets to power supply cables.

I’ve already printed out a copy and stuck it on my wall over my workbench, I might have to order a full sized print from the creator.

Click here for a full sized version.

http://sonic840.deviantart.com/art/Computer-hardware-poster-1-7-111402099

found via gizmodo