Make the thing with the buttons go good
Archive for September, 2010
Own Your Space – Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online
14 years
Microsoft has published a free eBook about keeping yourself and your stuff safe online. It’s aimed primarily at teenagers but has excellent information for anyone who is interested in protecting themselves, their identity and their computers while online.
It is written in very easy to understand English and covers topics like spam, malware, your online identity, browser security, social networking and much more. I’ve had a look through it and can highly recommend it for anyone who uses the internet.
Download the whole book or individual chapters from Microsoft’s Website here.
(It’s probably easier to stick with the pdf format as you are more likely to have a reader for it than xps format)
Own Your Space–Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online
Free Legal Movies Online
14 years
Here’s a quick link from Christian Personal Finance blog that I found very interesting:
http://christianpf.com/where-to-find-free-and-legal-tv-and-movies-online/
While there are many shady sites where you can download illegal content, it’s good to know that there are some people who are keeping up with technology and consumer demand and making this sort of thing available legally. Follow the link and enjoy.
Don’t blame me if you have no bandwidth left at the end of the month.
Wireless Networking
14 years
Here’s a collection of useful information about wireless networks and networking.
Set it up
One of the best guides I’ve seen for setting up and configuring a wireless network is from Lifehacker. Check out their coverage on the subject here: Set up a home wireless network
Map it out
It’s often very useful information to know how strong your wireless network is in various locations around your house. These applications allow you to upload a floor plan of your house (you can make a basic one in paint or any other graphics program if you need to) and then map out the wireless signal in around the house.
Ekahau Heatmapper is a free application if you fill in your name, email address and answer a few questions.
Passmark’s WirelessMon costs US$24.00 for the personal edition and US$49 for the professional edition but there is a 30 day trail for each version. The heat map function is only available in the professional version but it provides several other wireless features as well.
Get the most out of it
Check Microsoft’s 10 Tips for Improving your wireless network – some very practical and useful tips that I often pass on to people.
And a few extra tips (some are repeated) from Lifehacker – Strengthen your home wireless network signal
Boost the signal with some homemade parabolic amplifier for your antennas
If all else fails there are Wireless Extenders and extra routers or access points. Most of these you can buy for less than $100 from your local computer shop. Ask for a Wireless Network Extender or Range Boosters. Here’s an example of what to look for.
These improvements are especially good if you create a heatmap with the tools mentioned in the ‘Map it out’ section before you start and compare with another heatmap created after you’ve made the changes. You can then visually see the difference that these changes are make.
Secure it
Unless you’re happy to hang a sign on your network that says “Anyone welcome – steal whatever you can” then it makes sense to put some basic security measures in place. Especially as with wireless networks, it is not required for someone to have physical access to get onto your network if it isn’t secure.
10 Tips for Wireless Home security
PC World’s guide on How to Secure your wireless network
Practically Networks page on Securing your wireless network
Keep secure while in public
This is only loosely related but sooner or later if you have a laptop, you’ll probably take it on the road and want to connect it to a public Wifi hotspot. This is a good guide to Keep you Windows computer secure on public wireless networks.
If you know any other great wireless tips or pages, feel free to add them to the comments section below.
2 usefull bookmarklets for reading online
14 years
I’ve found 2 very useful tools for reading online recently. Instapaper and Readability.
Both work as bookmarklets – which are like bookmarks but instead of taking you to another page, they change the current page you are on in some way.
Instapaper is a very simple ‘read later’ tool. If you’re like me and follow links from things you are reading you can end up with 40 tabs open and not enough time to read them all. Or you’ll be in the middle of reading an article and something else comes up to demand your immediate attention. Instapaper lets you create a place to store all those links and read them later. You need an account but all they need is a username. Adding an email address and password are optional and generally unnecessary unless you’re afraid someone might guess your username and read the stuff you’ve saved for reading later. It’s a great tool for making the internet work on your schedule. Find great articles when you’ve got time and read them when you’ve got time.
Readability changes the view of the website you are on so it removes all the clutter around the article you are reading. It removes ad, most images etc and can change the font of the page to something more readable. It is incredibly easy to use and is a God-send on some of the over-crowded websites I visit.
Used together you can get total control over what, how and when you read things on the internet. You can store things for later and read them in a clean, easy to read format.
Try them out and let me know how you got on.