Friday Night Links (1/29/2010)…

When I’m working during the week, I must not eat enough because it seems like every link I come up with for Friday Night Links is a food link. It’s alright because I’ve created a bit of a storyline out of this weeks links.

• Single Serve Pie (http://thedig.in/af) – Who doesn’t like a good pie all to themselves? Unfortunately, I a pie by yourself every night is probably going to be a bad idea. But what if you could have a single serving pie? Then it wouldn’t be so bad. However, it would still be pie, so watch yourself.
• Do You Eat It? (http://thedig.in/ag) – Alright, what if, say, hypothetically speaking, “my friend” drops the above pie on the ground. How am I supposed to know if the pie is still go to eat? We’ll how about I just use the chart below and determine. By the way, if I end up at “Your call”, I’m eating it.



• Pressure Cooker (http://thedig.in/ah) – So at this point, you are so into your pie that you are even willing to eat it when the chart SPECIFICALLY says DON’T EAT IT. You have fallen that far. To take a step in the right direction, you buy a pressure cooker because it will preserve the nutrition in your food. You cook everything in there: stew, veggies, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pasta, ice cream, you name it.
• Weight-loss Graphing (http://thedig.in/ai) – Now that you are on the right path, you need to track your progress and stay motivated. Traineo is there for you. You can input your daily weigh-ins and have either family or the Traineo community keep tabs on you and you weight-loss goals. Pretty cool. And it’s scientific:
  http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6523045&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1traineo in under 2 mins from traineo on Vimeo.

Find Your Username…

The KnowEm does one thing: check the availability of usernames. Let’s find out why this is useful.

First though, we need to figure out what username you should select. You want something that is going to be memorable, pertains to you, and is likely not already taken. How about some examples?

• Memorable – If you decide your username is going to be zakzorbindow182394, it probably isn’t going to be taken by anyone. It also is going to be next to impossible to remember for your friends and acquaintances who may want to look your username on what a given social network. For my username, I choose ‘thedigitante’. It is memorable because I own the site called The Digitante.
• Pertains to you – Once again, zakzorbindow192394 is very unique, but it also doesn’t pertain to you. The simplest thing to do is attempt to get your name or name and birthdate. For formal things, I use my full name, including middle initial. I am somewhat on the fence about other things pertaining to you: if you like baseball, should you choose ‘baseballguy1090’? It’s kind of up to you.
• Available – Sorry Bob. ‘Bob’ is already taken at every site ever in the history of the world. Might want to get a little more creative than that.

Once you have settled on a decent username, you can then head to the KnowEm website. Once there, you just type your desired username in the box and hit the big, orange ‘Check it’ button.

Once you submit the username, it will search a number of categories including blogging (WordPress), community (Facebook), and music (Pandora), just to name a few. All in all, they claim to have over 350 sites available to check.

If you don’t feel like registering all these domain names yourself, you can pay KnowEm $99 to register 150 of the names for you. For the average person, this is probably major overkill.

Any other uses?

Yes, actually. I’ve been using the same username on my personal accounts for years. I decided to go through and see where that username was taken. As it turned out, there was a site on there that I had not been to in an eternity and I even went back to the site and checked it out. They’ve made a number of improvements since I was last there in 2000.

Additionally, each site has a little pop up description that tells you what the site does. KnowEm could also be a good resource to find sites, other than your usual, that are interesting.

Ever used KnowEm or a similar site? Got any other tips for picking a username? Feel free to let me know in the comments.

MalwareBytes Anti-Malware…

As you can tell, I’ve been on an anti-virus and anti-malware kick recently. This is mostly due to the fact that I’ve seen a flare up in the amount of people having issues with it.

As a result, I’m going to share another tool that I’ve used to clean up computers: MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (aka MBAM). It is a simple program that will help your computer get back on the road to recovery.

Install it

First of all, click here to download MBAM. Once you have it downloaded, install away. It should be pretty straight-forward. As you finish installing, it updates to the latest version and then leads straight to the scanning page.

As you can see, there are two modes. Quick scan searches for the most common issues and will catch most of the big stuff. This is recommended if you scan on a regular basis and haven’t been having any issues with your computer.

If you have had issues or you’ve never scanned for viruses, you may want to do the full scan to be sure everything is checked out. The full scan is going to take significantly longer than the quick scan, obviously.

After the scan is complete, you have two options:

1. If you had no malware detected, you are home free and can go on with your life.
2. If you had some malware, I would recommend looking through the list and making sure there wasn’t anything in there that you may need later such as your favorite mp3 album or a picture of your mother. Getting the wrong files like this is rare, but worth quickly checking out since getting rid of the wrong file could be a terrible thing. Typing the

I performed a full scan which took just under one hour and scannned 300,000 objects. A quick scan took just under 3 minutes and scanned around 100,000 objects, so you can see there is a significant difference. Of course the actual amount of time to perform the scan will vary based on how many objects there are to scan on your computer.

Once scanning has completed, you are prompted to remove the offending files. You can do this after you’ve checked them out as mentioned above.

Other stuff

Most of the other tabs in MBAM are easily ignored and don’t provide much additional value. One item that might help though is on the More Tools tab and it is the FileASSASSIN tool.

FileASSASSIN allows you to remove otherwise undeleteable files. Occasionally when attempting to delete a file, you will get a dialog that says something to the effect of “Windows is unable to delete the file as it is being used by a separate process.” If you are sure you want to delete it, you can use FileASSASSIN to remove it.

If you ALREADY have an infection and cannot download or run MBAM, remember that you may need to press the F8 key repeatedly before Windows start up so you can go into Safe Mode with Networking, allowing Windows to boot without loading the malware.

Any other programs you use that I should check out for preventing malware, spyware, or viruses? Had any issues using programs like this?

Tuesday Quick Tip: Chrome Site Search…

Since I’ve been posting a Biggest Loser recap over on Off Color TV (warning: since it’s off color, you might see some adult-type language and humor), Tuesdays have kind of suffered in terms of posting over here. Therefore, until Biggest Loser is over, I’ll be posting a quick tip that will hopefully show you something new that you can use in your day to day use of technology. I’d like to give a shout out to my friend Brad aka Mr. B, as he had recommended something like this but I couldn’t figure out where to fit it in, but this is a great place for it.

Before beginning the tip portion, if you don’t know what a web browser is, check out this article my friend Patric, aka Mr. Noobie, on various browsers. After you have an idea of what a browser is, come back and finish this tip.

Pretty much the top browser out there is Google Chrome. It is fast, it is minimalistic, and it has extensions. I was fiddling around the other day and discovered a cool little feature that it has. If you type in a web address and then hit the tab key, you can then type in a search term to search for on that particular site.

Unfortunately, it seems to only work on certain sites. I got it to work on Facebook.

Alternatively, you can type you search query followed by a space and then “site:http://yoursite.com” with no quotes around it, to do a similar thing. This works in any browser and from any Google search box.

If you want to try it out, open google.com, and type the following: dropbox site:http://www.thedigitante.com and you will be shown the resulting pages from my site that contain the word “dropbox.”

Got any tips you want to see in a future TQT? What is your most valuable tip you use on a daily basis?

Nasty Viruses Going Around…

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard about some nasty computer viruses that have been popping up on people’s systems. These are the normal “run some anti-virus software” type of infections; they are the “boot into safe-mode or nuke your hard drive” type.

So what can you do to prevent these types of things? What steps can you initially take to try to clean up the mess? We’ll cover that plus I’ll give you my contact info and you can let me deal with the headache of removal.

Preventative measures

There are a couple of things you can do to prevent these sort of things from happening: some are easy, commonsense, others are fairly drastic. And they are by no means comprehensive.

1. Go to sites that you trust – Everyone has heard of cnn.com, youtube.com, and facebook.com. If you haven’t been there before, please ask around to your friends or do a Google search to see what a site is. Just like you shouldn’t just go perusing around a foreign country without researching first and knowing the local terrain and cultures, neither should you visit a website without know what is in store first.
2. Avoid “free” on the ‘net – Trust me, I can show you some incredible free software such as GIMP, Mozilla Firefox, and Open Office, but putting the word “free” in a Google search should not be allowed. If you type in a search for ‘free ipod’ in Google, there is a 100% chance that you are ending up with a virus on your computer if you click all the links on the first page. If you want to find virus-free apps, start from a trusted source such as Download.com or Lifehacker. Lifehacker has a great feature called Hive Five which highlights the best programs in a number of different categories. You can also ask me for recommendations.
3. Install Linux or use a Linux LiveCD – This is a bit more involved that the first two and I’m not going to get into installing Linux on this post, but downloading an ISO file from Ubuntu and burning it to a CD is simple. Once you’ve downloaded and burned it to a CD, you can simply restart your computer with the CD in the drive and it will run Linux without changing anything about your Windows setup. Since it runs on a CD, no viruses infect the CD.

If you catch the bug

If you happen to notice strange things happening on your computer such as pop-ups saying “Your anti-virus is out-dated. Please enter credit card information blah, blah, blah” you definitely have a virus and you should definitely not enter any information. Instead, follow these instructions:

1. Shutdown your computer.
2. When the computer first turns on, start pressing the F8 key repeatedly before Windows ever starts. It should end up at a black and white screen that has an option labeled ‘Safe Mode with Networking.’
3. Select Safe Mode with Networking. It should then start up Windows. It may look funny. You can see in the screenshot that things are blurry. This is because minimal drivers are loaded. Your regular video driver is one that isn’t loaded.
   
4. Once you are in windows and connected to the internet, head over the the MalwareBytes Anti-Malware site and download the latest version. A very typical set up will ensue.
5. Update and run MalwareBytes Anti-Malware. Whatever it detects, remove it. If you want a more in depth look at MalwareBytes, I may cover it in more depth soon.
6. Restart your computer.

And what if that doesn’t work?

More drastic measures, including erasing EVERYTHING and starting from scratch, maybe in your future. In this case, you need to be sure you have all your documents and spreadsheets backed up in Dropbox and all your larger files backed up in Google Docs. Any files too large for Google Docs such as movies and Linux LiveCD images should be held on an external hard drive or a USB thumbdrive.

This has really just been a very light overview of things to watch out for. If you find your computer is slowing down and pop-ups are occurring, just remember that it isn’t a normal thing and if caught quickly may be easily remedied.

If you need help with keeping your computer running in tip-top shape, you should fill out the contact form below or use the Google Voice widget to contact me and set up a time we can meet to discuss your computer issues.

https://clients4.google.com/voice/embed/webCallButton

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Friday Night Links (1/22/2010)…

I am ready for a big weekend with the Colts playing the Jets, a birthday party, and maybe a bit of relaxing. But first things first: we need to talk about some links. From the looks of it, I am hungry!

• Bing Recipe Search (http://thedig.in/a3) – Heading to sites like RecipeZaar and Food Network is good for getting a few new recipes, but if you want to cast your net a bit wider, you can try out the new recipe search feature on Bing, the search engine by Microsoft. It provides everything you need to know right in the search engine itself once you click the recipe you like. You can find nutritional info plus it gives you a little bar indicating whether it is high in fat or calories.
• Five-Minute Sorbet (http://thedig.in/a4) – I know it’s blazing hot outside (a toasty 36F out here), but you probably could use some sorbet. Sorbet is great because it is a nice light desert that is low in fat. All you need are two large ziploc bags and some fruit juice, ice, and rock salt. Shake it around and you’ve got yourself some sorbet. Don’t forget to rinse the salt off the inner bag before you eat.
• Crowd-Source Coverage Maps (http://thedig.in/a5) – The number of cities is limited at this point, but if you live in an available one and want to help your fellow humans find a cell phone provider that give a great signal, you should grab this app and get to recording your signal strength. You can also sign up for notification when they move into your town. Go Indianapolis!
• Edibility Testing (http://thedig.in/a6) – Afraid of being stranded in the wilderness? Me too. But now you will at least know how to test out plants before you go just eating all willy-nilly. I’m not really sure about their techniques on selecting plants since one of the bits of advice is to rub a plant on your wrist for 15 minutes. Ok, sounds good. Then they tell you to wait 8 hours to see if there is a reaction. Umm, I’m starving in the wilderness! I’m not sure what I would actually do in that scenario, but I doubt I’m going to chill and drink water for 8 hours before eating.

Google Docs: Upload Anything…

If you’ve ever been to a cheap Chinese restaurant, you’ve probably used the wooden chopsticks that come in a reddish-orange sleeve. If you paid close attention to the sleeve, you would have read something pretty amazing. After learning to hold one stick with your thumb and the other like a pencil, the sleeve informs you that you can now pick up ANYTHING!

Mrs. Digitante and I regularly joke that we can change the oil in our car using the chopsticks to pick it up and drain the old oil.

While that sounds ridiculous, it doesn’t sound ridiculous to Google Docs. Recently Google changed the way Google Docs works to allow users to upload any type of file, not just documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Got some mp3s you want backed up? You got it. Want to share a program installer with others? No problem.

While chopsticks can handle anything, Google Docs does have a restriction that the file must be less than 250Mb (smaller for Google Doc files).

What about Dropbox?

The biggest advantage Google Docs new upload feature has over Dropbox is price. Dropbox is $19.99 a month (yes, per MONTH) for 100Gb. Recently, I purchased 200 Gb of space from Google for $50 for the year (yes, the entire YEAR). That means Dropbox is nearly 10x as expensive.

Do recall though that Dropbox comes with 2Gb of space for free versus Google which only offers 1Gb free. Any paid space you purchase from Google, including Picasa, Gmail, or Google Docs is available for any of the other Google services.

However, Google Docs requires that you sign into your browser (not a huge deal), but it certainly isn’t as slick as the Dropbox folder that acts just a like a normal folder on your computer and also syncs across the web.

A great feature of both services is the ability to publicly share your uploaded files.

You can send an invitation for people to view your shared file, send a link to the shared file, check out who can view and download the file, or email it as an attachment which will basically just move it over to Gmail for you. Note that Gmail has a limit of 25Mb for email attachments.

Anybody used the new Google Docs feature to upload their files? Got any tips or tricks that helped you manage your files?

Internet Backup Plan…

There is a blog that I read on a regular basis called Chicago Carless. The premise is that he writes about his life as a 39 year old who has yet to own a car or even learn how to drive. Instead he has stuck to walking, busing and subwaying his way around New York City and Chicago.

Recently, he has been going through a bit of a rehab in his digital life: he dumped his Mac OS, jailbroke his iPhone, and moved way from AT&T internet and got Clearwire instead. Apparently most of it has been clear sailing, but recently, the Clearwire portion has not been good.

The growth of telecommuting for those in the corporate world, blogging as a business, and remote working for freelancers has turned the internet connection that most of us think of as a convenience and a treat, into a commodity. Without a solid internet connection, workers end up wasting a vacation day or losing out on business opportunities.

What are the solutions? We’ll cover a couple of ways to protect yourself from missed opportunities when your internet is temporarily not available.

Free WiFi

If you live near a library, coffeeshop, or other establishment that has free WiFi, you might try to take advantage of that. This is very cost effective (depending on how much coffee you drink while hanging out). The rather large drawback is that you have venture out into the world of loud-cellphone-talking guy, grimy tables, and limited seating. Being at your home in your normal, quiet working environment is the best place to be.

On a temporary basis, you may be able to piggyback off of a neighbors internet net connection assuming you can get a signal from them and they do not have a passcode set up. If you do this, it really is a form of stealing and common courtesy might dictate that you ask your neighbor if he would mind you jumping on his connection the next time yours gets flaky. Chances are, if he doesn’t have a password in the first place, he probably isn’t going to care.

Getting mobile

I’ve posted in the past about finding internet while traveling, including using your phone as a modem. Connecting to the internet via your phone can be very effective. You already have a cellphone, so hooking it up as a modem would be trivial if you are already doing so on the road.

Unfortunately, this is also a very cumbersome process. You have to activate it when you want it by calling your cell phone carrier, otherwise you are charged each month, even if it goes unused. You also have to carry a cord around or deal with slow Bluetooth connections. Not to mention, you might not even be able to tether your phone if you have an iPhone, Palm Pre, or any number of other smartphones.

The next option is to have a USB mobile broadband modem. If you go with the traditional USB stick, you will end up typically paying $60 a month plus you have to sign a two-year contract. A simpler way to go is to get a prepaid solution: Virgin Mobile allows you to purchase a USB stick for $99. You can then load prepaid minutes on in increments from 100Mb up to 1Gb. UPDATE: Virgin Mobile also added a WiFi Hotspot router as an additional option for those with WiFi connected devices such as laptops and the iPad. They have also included a new 5gb plan for $60 if you need plenty of data. No contract required but you have to pay full price for the device ($149.99).

For basic web browsing and writing a blog post, 100Mb should be sufficient for one day of work. If you are going to be downloading large amounts of data, you may want to bump that to 250Mb.

As an added bonus, once you have this USB modem, you can then take it with you when traveling and enjoy the convenience of the internet on the road.

Extreme measures

For those who absolutely must have a connection at all times, the above solutions may not be coverage enough. As a final step to ensuring you have internet when you need it, you can simply pick two unrelated internet service providers and purchase internet from each. Each will act as a back up to the other.

The obvious drawback to this method is the cost. However, if you business relies on your being on line or things simply don’t get done or you don’t make money, then perhaps an extra internet bill is a small price to pay.

Do you have any tricks you use if your internet goes down? Do you fill your internet downtime with other activities (running, putting together puzzles, training to be a ninja)? Tell me about it below.

Rough Day…

As some of you may have noticed, my site was down today. More accurately, my site was up but not showing any of the content. Rather readers were left with completely blank pages. Turns out I accidently copied a site folder to another place by accident.

At this point, I’m clueless as to when it happened. Be sure to check in and let me know when you first noticed it. If you read on email or RSS reader, then you were unaffected. Carry on!

Site down…

I’m not sure what happened or even if this will go out to everybody, but my site is down for right now. I’m working on it and hopefully it will be back up soon.