Make the thing with the buttons go good
Tech Stuff
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
15 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.
Strong Passwords
15 years
I’ve come across an alarming number of people in my travels who have no password at all on their computers or have very easy to guess passwords.
People tell me that they don’t care if someone gets into their computer and they don’t have anything to hide or anything worth stealing but they still call me when all of their data goes missing or someone hacks their wifi connection or emails.
Think your password system is pretty secure. Read this article (How I’d hack your weak passwords) and let me know how well your password would hold up.
A case for decent passwords:
1. Your data is your data. If it isn’t well protected you could loose it forever or have it stolen and used for malicious purposes like identity theft etc. How much would your family photos on your computer be worth to someone else? How much would they be worth to get them back if you lost them?
2. Computers are always getting faster, tools are always getting more complex and hackers are always getting more ingenious. The amount of time required for a decently spec’d computer to crack password with brute force is going down by the day. And the tools for password recover, network sniffers, trojans etc are getting more ellaborate by the day.
3. If nothing else, there is hassle involved when someone else gains your password. At the very least there is the hassle to change your password and remember a new one. At worst, there is time and money spent on repairing the operating system on your computer, rebuilding your online identity and recovering your files.
How to make your passwords stronger
1. Don’t use real words, names or birthdays.
2. Use a combination of lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and symbols. The more the merrier and the longer the merrier. Many corporate organisations enforce a policy of have at least 3 of the 4 groups mentioned here and a minimum of 7 characters.
3. Try a song that you know well and use the first letter of each word as your password – “Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high” becomes sotrwuh. Then mix this up with some capital letters or numbers (don’t just capitalise the first letter add 1 to the end).
4. If you touch-type, try shifting your fingers one space to the left or right. This makes otherwise easy passwords harder to guess. password becomes [sddeptf for example.
Some suggestions for managing passwords
1. Get some software to help you remember. I recommend Keypass (http://keepass.info/) for your system passwords and LastPass (http://lastpass.com/) which specialises in Internet passwords and logins. Using these you can set strong different passwords for different systems, applications and internet sites and you only have to remember one password for your Keepass and/or Lastpass software.
2. Change your passwords regularly. I know this makes them harder to remember but it is a great security measure. If someone spends a month cracking your password but you changed it a week ago, it isn’t going to help them much.
3. Use different passwords for different systems. Some systems are more secure than others and yet people generally use the same password for everything. If someone gets your password form an insecure site on the net that you signed up to a newsletter on or something, can they then use the same password for accessing your email and bank account details?
Anti-virus
15 years
Prevention:
It’s been said that prevention is better than cure. So my first recommendation is to get an anti-virus program, use it and keep it up-to-date.
I’m not going to recommend one specific product here because they are forever getting better and worse and bigger and better and someone, somewhere will always disagree with whatever I recommend. And I can’t say I’ve used every product or done a thorough comparison.
If you don’t know where to start, some anti-virus software products are (in alphabetical order to avoid bias):
- Avast
- AVG Anti-virus and the Free Version
- Comodo Anti-virus
- Eset Anti-virus
- Kapersky Antivirus
- Microsoft Security Essentials
- Norton Anti-virus
- Sophos Anti-virus
Pick one that works for your budget, read reviews (avoid fake, sponsored reviews) and get advice from local experts. Stick with only one as installing more than one will be counter-productive. It will slow your system down, create more work for you to administer them both and keep them up-to-date, and they will probably conflict in some way with each other.
But I will recommend this. Get an anti-virus of some sort, keep it up-to-date and use it (I might have mentioned this already…).
Oh, And back up your files! I know, I know, it’s boring and tedious and there aren’t many decent backup utilities out there but believe me that you’ll be well pleased when a virus infects your documents and you have a recent backup to use once the virus is cleaned out.
And if you feel that that isn’t enough, get a firewall and a spyware/malware program as well. I use a software firewall (cause it’s free) and really enjoy the control it gives you over which applications are allowed what access to the internet and to your pc.
Cure
I recently have had a few cases where prevention wasn’t enough or wasn’t existed and I’ve had to clean out some nasty little viruses. I had a rescue cd but it was getting a big outdated and I wanted to have more than one to make sure I got everything.
I found a great roundup of anti-virus and rescue disks here:
http://www.techmixer.com/free-bootable-antivirus-rescue-cds-download-list/
These are free to download, burn and then you can use them to recover from a virus infection. I would suggest using CDRW disks if possible as the definitions and the programs themselves will change over time as viruses change. And you’ll want to update your rescue disks occasionally. The nice thing about these rescue disks is that they are usually based on a light Linux distribution and therefore will run even if your Windows installation is crippled or won’t boot.
Malware
Assuming you can at least boot into safe mode, there are some excellent apps around for clearing out and preventing spyware etc. Some of the apps mentioned above will cover this type of software as well but the following are specialists:
- Hijackthis and a log analyser like hyjackthis.de
- Spybot
- MalwareBytes