I’ve been using Skype at work for a while to talk long distance with our company’s programmer in the UK and it seems to work pretty good so far. Today I came across this article on LA Times website that announces that Skype now does video too, and better than it’s competitors…

Video Phone Calling is Starting to Look Better

I don’t run Skype all the time, but if you want to add me to your Skype buddy list I’m “probasix” there, just as I am on Yahoo, AIM, and MSN.

Terry

Finally, Opera has released my favorite Web browser as a free app! They even removed the banner ads now that they’ve got backing from the big guys (like Google and eBay). I’ve been using (and paying for) Opera since about version 5. Something to keep in mind is that it’s so simple to use that you never realize the power you’re sitting on until you go through one of the tutorials or check out the keyboard shortcuts or the mouse gestures. I still tend to use a combination of keyboard and mouse, but as most of my friends know I never learned to love my mouse, so I tend to like the keyboarding shortcuts more. However, there are times when I’m just browsing, reading news, looking at pictures, etc., and it’s nice to just sit back and without touching the keyboard or even moving the mouse more than an inch on your mousepad you can open new windows, close the ones you’re done with, go back in history, move forward, even go to a ‘Next’ link without having to move the mouse all the way to the bottom of the page.

One of my favorite things has been the F12 key:

With a quick click you can turn off sound, GIF animation, Java, disable javascript or your plugins, enable or disable your cookies, popups, or change the identity of your browser when you come across those rebel sites that only allow IE users. The funny thing is that this has always been a great browser, one of the first to offer true tab browsing and the first one I know of to have a built-in ability to block pop-ups.

Firefox is also an excellent browser and I’ve been using it equally, especially at work, because it was free and because of it’s simplicity and compatibility with plug-ins I use in the office (by the way, they just released 1.07 about three days ago and if you’re a loyal user you should upgrade soon). I won’t abandon Firefox, but Opera is still my favorite, particularly now that it’s FREE…

From W2Knews™:

Free Opera. Great Move, And No Ads.

This week, Opera Software announced the release of version 8.5 of its web browser, available on Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s Mac OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, and Sun Solaris. The latest version is downloadable at no cost and without banner ads. Their revenues are generated via third parties such as Google and eBay and have grown more than the money they make from ads, so they now believe they can gain wider adoption by making their browser freely available for users. In fact, they want to beat Firefox which is the No. 2 player with 8.3% (Redmond’s share being 86.3%). Here is the download:
http://www.w2knews.com/050926ED-Opera

Back in April I blogged about Part 1 of a two-part article on “30 must-have PC skills” by Anthony Dhanendran of Computeractive. Not so suprisingly I forgot about it and never blogged or mentioned the link to Part 2. Well, anyway, below are links to both articles at the vnu network and I highly recommend checking them out. If you’re new to PCs or you’re still a novice you need to read these articles because they outline the things you should know. Print them out if it helps, circle the things you don’t understand and ask someone or look it up somewhere. If you have an assistant that always there to answer your every question or do your job for you then maybe you could skip them. And maybe your assistant will call in sick one day. These are survival skills if you own a PC, or you’re going to own one, and you want to be able to do things for yourself.

30 must-have PC skills – Part 1
30 must-have PC skills – Part 2

Not really related to technology or SciFi, except on the subject of cell phones, I thought this was worth mentioning for my family and friends. In response to the recent bombings in London a Cambridge-based paramedic, Bob Brotchie, and Falklands war hero Simon Weston in association with Vodafone’s annual Life Savers Awards have launched a campaign suggesting that cell phone users program emergency contact information into their phone under the acronym ICE (or ICE1, ICE2, ICE3, etc., for multiple numbers). This way, if you are not conscious, emergency response teams or rescue services can quickly and readily contact relatives or friends that would need to know about your emergency. I think it’s a great idea. Without a system like this emergency workers are faced with paging through your address book guessing at which contacts should be called.

Article at the East Anglian Ambulance NHS Trust website.

Thanks to my friend Anson for forwarding this information to me.

PCWorld.com – Beware of Fake Microsoft Security Alerts

Watch out! This email is not only a fake bulletin, it links to supposed patches that are actually Trojan viruses. The good part is that so many people have already tried to download the patch that the server has exceeded it’s allowed bandwidth (you couldn’t download it if you wanted to). The bad part is that these are becoming more common — fake bulletins from Microsoft and fake notices from your bank that either try to trick you into downloading harmful software or get you to give up your financial information to identity thieves.

When you get messages like this in your email you should be suspicious unless you specifically subscribed to such bulletins. Even then, you should check the links before clicking on anything — move your mouse over the page and watch which addresses display in the status bar of your browser. If the message looks like it’s from Microsoft but the links go to something like http://k23iLeID30dkrl3.com be really careful. Clicking on the link can install the virus on your PC without any further action from you. The trojan mentioned in the article above isn’t even recognized by your antivirus program yet because it’s so new.

Just because you have the newest version of a popular antivirus program doesn’t mean you’re safe to click on whatever you see. Always use caution. You wouldn’t drive down the street with your eyes closed just because you’re wearing a seatbelt and have airbags…

Having a PC at home went from being a “geek” thing back in the days of DOS (what’s DOS?) to being a “cool” thing in the days of Windows 95 and 98. Now in the days of XP it is even easier to use than ever and almost everyone has at least one PC in their home. But recently the tide has shifted and it’s not as easy as everyone was thinking. At one time you only had to worry about saving your Quicken file to a floppy disk and having a decent Antivirus program. Now you’re lucky if you haven’t recently had to learn how to format your harddrive and re-install all your programs, not to mention all the MP3s you lost in the process because you didn’t know where to find them or how to save them.

I can’t teach you everything in a blog, but I’m pointing you to this article that might be useful to some of you out there: 30 must-have PC skills – Part 1 – vnunet.com The article is very brief, but it gives you an idea of the basics that you should know if you’re daring enough to own a PC these days. Read through it and make notes of which things you can’t do or things that you forget to do. If you don’t understand one of the things on this list you should do a little reading elsewhere and figure it out — for your own safety. Not being knowledgable of these basic things can be dangerous to the health of your PC. At a minimum you should know how to copy and move files, create CDs, update Windows, protect your PC with Antivirus, Antispyware, and firewall programs and know how to keep them and all your other software up to date (i.e., not getting an update for your browser, IE or not, means that you could be vulnerable to the latest nastiest Malware on the Net). Windows is not the only thing that has vulnerabilities.

Wake up, the Matrix has you. Now follow the white rabbit…

Bill Gates’ Open Letter to Hobbyists

Every once in the while I come across some ancient document that I feel compelled to share with my friends. Here’s a letter from Bill Gates, General Partner of “Micro-Soft,” in which he pleads for computer hobbyists to stop stealing his software and support the cause to “deluge the hobby market with good software.”

Enjoy!

I’ve been following the Talkback forum on the new Firefox release and it seems that the users who are having problems with the new release are those that were using test versions (aka nightly builds) and then installed the new version without first removing the unstable software.

After using the new version for a week I have not experienced any problems. I’m not sure if it’s necessary but I uninstalled 1.0 before installing the new 1.0.1 version. You don’t need to worry about your preferences or your bookmarks, all those things are stored in a separate directory and will not be touched by the upgrade. Version 1.0.1 will use all the same customisations you had prior to the upgrade with the only exception of extensions, if you’ve installed any (extensions are small add-ons to the browser that give it extra functionality, sort of like many of the pop-up blockers or the Yahoo toolbar for Internet Explorer).

So, go to www.getfirefox.com, click on Free Download and save the file to your hard drive. You could just install it over the top of your old version but I recommend going to Add/Remove Programs and uninstalling the old version first (this should only take a minute or two). Once you install the new Firefox you’re ready to surf the web with all your same preferences, stored passwords, bookmarks, etc. If you have any trouble drop me a line (email terry at this domain) and I’ll help you work it out.

Update (3/15/2005): I successfully installed Firefox 1.0.1 over the top of 1.0 just after posting this blog. I’ve been using it daily for just over a week and have not experienced any glitches or problems.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0.1 Released – MozillaZine Talkback

Good news and not-so-good news. I was about to encourage everyone to upgrade to the latest Firefox, released just yesterday, but after reading the talkback on MozillaZine I’m going to caution everyone to wait a week or two. I’ve read posts about a couple of bugs (one occurs when entering an URL into the address bar and pressing [Enter] rather than clicking the [Go] button, the other has to do with memory consumption, i.e. possible memory leak). It’s possible these are specific to the users running the program or having to do with the way they installed it. 17 million people have downloaded Firefox 1.0 so it won’t be long before many of them upgrade. We’ll find out soon enough if it’s advisable to upgrade.

If you decide to upgrade it’s best to uninstall 1.0 before installing 1.0.1. Your preferences and bookmarks will still be left in tact in your user directory and will still be available after you install the new version (I tested this with no obvious problems). Technically you could install the new version over the top of the old version but this is not recommended. Let me know how it goes if you decide to do this.

See the announcements or get the new version (if you’re ready) at Mozilla.org.

Terry

Frustrated? Me too. A few years ago I was on a crusade to convince all my friends to get PCs. The Web was the coolest thing since Atari. Viruses were rare, you could only get one by downloading an infected program and running it on your computer, and all you needed was a cheap antivirus program to keep you safe.

Now there is malware (malicious software), spyware (software that spies on you), adware (software that annoys you with advertisements), worms (software that leaks through security holes in your Operating System or other programs), and browser hijackers (software that takes over your Web browser and either takes you to sites you never wanted to see or blocks you from going to favorite sites). The bad part is that, in most cases, these work very differently from viruses, which means your trusty $50 antivirus program can’t detect or protect you from these things. It’s like taking antibiotics for a cold — it just doesn’t work that way. So now we have anti-spyware programs, like Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware SE, Spyware Eliminator, Spyware Blaster, Hijack This, etc. (Important note: watch out for Spyware Nuker, it’s not what you think — see below)

So what do you use? Spybot S&D and Ad-Aware seem to be the most popular for finding and removing common spyware infections. Spyware Eliminator claims to be able to remove the about:blank (aka CoolWebSearch) spyware, which happens to be nearly impossible to remove with any other tool. Spyware Blaster (review here) claims to block or prevent most spyware from getting into your PC in the first place. HijackThis is more a utility for advanced PC users: it digs deep into the system, reports everything it sees including legitimate programs, and lets you remove whatever you want. Generally users copy the results and upload them to a news forum for analysis by users that supposedly “know” what the best course of action will be. Be careful with this one and be careful of the advice you get. I’ve noticed that there are many opinions for each type of infection reported.

It should go without saying that you should back up your My Documents, Favorites, Outlook folders, etc., before doing anything advanced (such as HijackThis). Also, the first thing you might want to do if you have Microsoft Windows ME or XP is to try a previous restore point that dates back prior to the infection. Keep in mind that this can remove settings that other recently installed software has put in place, but it might be easier to re-install a game than to remove a spyware infection.

Now if all that isn’t enough to confuse and frustrate a novice… stay away from Spyware Nuker. This program claims to remove spyware but at the same time installs it’s own. Go figure. If you want it, it’s at nuker.com, but I don’t even recommend going to their site. See this article at Symantec or this article at Camtech2000 for more details.

Prevention? Of course, there is always abstinence — unplug the cord to your modem and never connect to the Web again. Not. Always, always, always, be up-to-date with your patches and service packs. Why does no one get this?

Check out About.com’s article The Best AntiSpyware Tools of 2005 for some recommendations, news about Microsoft’s own anti-spyware program and links to more resources. AdwareReport also has some good information. Also, don’t get so caught up with the whole spyware thing that you forget to update your antivirus program. If you’re going to surf, wear your armor and try not to sink.

Terry