TQT: iPod charging…

Since Tuesday came and went without a post (actually, this entire week came and went without a post), I figured I’d try and squeeze in a Thursday Quick Tip. Let’s just say you are lucky there are two days that begin with the letter T.

Tonight’s tip refers to charging an iPod, but this advice is equally applicable to many of your electronic devices, especially your phone. The USB port on your computer can not only be used to transfer data to your mobile device, but it can also be used to charge your mobile device.

When I’m traveling, I like to do everything I can to not have to check a bag. This inevitably leads to me cutting back on as much stuff as possible. To do that, I generally take a USB cord and simply plug my cell phone or iPod into the USB port of my computer to charge. This saves me from having to take a cord with a big bulky plug with me.

Additionally, there has been a movement in the last year or so to standardize the charging ports for cellphones and other devices to use a connector called micro-USB. The beautiful thing about that is instead of taking a cord for your cellphone, a cord for your camera, a cord for your wife’s phone, etc, you will be able to just bring one cord and charge all your devices. Convenient!

Got your own tips on how to charge various devices or how to pack lighter for a trip? Let me know in the comments!

SyncBack: Synchronize and Backup…

I’ve covered a number of posts about backing up your information (Twitter/Facebook/Gmail with Backupify and documents/spreadsheets with Dropbox), but I haven’t really touched on how to protect yourself from a catastrophic failure of your computer.

In a tweet by Eddie, a frequent commenter here, he posted another lecture on backing up your data, by Merlin Mann. A quote from that article says:

Assume that [your hard drives] are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

While in his article he talks about a schedule for backing things up, I am going to give you a tool that will help you get things backed up in a simple, quick, and scheduled fashion.

If you have important documents and want a completely automated system for backing them up for a cost of $250 (which includes setup, external hard drive, and USB thumbdrive), you can skip the rest of the article and instead contact me from the About The Digitante page.

First of all, you are going to need a place to put everything and placing all your important info on the same hard drive that it is on right now is a terrible idea. If your hard drive crashes, everything is gone, including both copies of your Barbie doll database you’ve been working so feverishly on compiling. What you need is to invest a few dollars, in an external hard drive (this Seagate can be had at less than $80).

Once you’ve hooked that up, you need to get a program called SyncBack Free (a paid version is also available, but probably unnecessary for our needs). You end up downloading a .zip file which you will have to extract. You can extract it wherever you like, but keep track of where it goes. Extracting it to your desktop is probably the best place for it.

Double click the file you extracted to start the installation. You can pretty much click your way through the Next > buttons. After you finish installing you are going need to set up a profile so answer ‘Yes’ to the dialog that pops up. Then we need to choose between the type of set up we want: Backup or synchronization.

Here are some usage cases for each of the options above:

• Backup – Used to keep a copy of a file or files elsewhere for safekeeping. These should be kept on a separate disk and should also be stored away in a safe place such as a safe deposit box.
• Synchronization – Used for organizational purposes such as making sure your music or picture files are the same in two different folders. If changes are made in one place (adding new photos on your living room computer), then changes are copied in the second location (a folder on your laptop).

We are going to choose Backup. The default settings should be fine, but you can certainly tweak them on the Advanced tab if you like. The only thing we need to add is the source and destination directories.

The source directory is going to be all the information that needs to be transferred. To backup 99.99% of the information you will need in the future, you can try backing up the directory ‘C:\Users\USERNAME’ where USERNAME is the name you use to sign on to your computer.

The destination directory is going to be a folder on your external hard drive. You can just call it Backup if you like so it will look like ‘X:\Backup’.

After this is complete you will see a plain English description of what will take place when you run the profile you just created. Mine says:

Next, you can do a test run which does not copy anything, but does generate a report telling what copied successfully and what failed to copy. This is optional if you know what is going to be copied.

Be sure to schedule the backup to run on a regular basis, say once a week or so.

The only thing left to do is run the job. It may take awhile, depending on how much information you have to copy. Be sure to review the report briefly after the job has completed running error-free.

Congratulations! You just backed up your data. Be sure to take Merlin Mann’s suggest and do complete backups on multiple hard drives and keep one at home, one at work, and one elsewhere. Additionally, keep your absolute must-have documents encrypted on a USB thumbdrive. If you have gotten this far, you are truly a pro!

Tuesday Quick Tips: Middle Click…

If you’ve ever used a mouse, you pretty quickly notice there is a left mouse button which you can use to click, double click, and hold down to drag things around. The right button brings up a little menu called the context menu that has commands that you can use to perform available actions such as copy and paste, create a new folder, and look at the properties of various items. Finally, there is a scroll wheel that allows you to, well, scroll around on web pages and documents.

What you may not realize is that the scroll wheel also has the ability to click! You may have to investigate what it does in various circumstances, but here are a couple things for you to try out:

1. When browsing the web, click the scroll wheel on a link. You will notice that link opens in a separate tab or window in the background leaving your current page available to continue using. Most of the links on my site will open in a separate tab or window, however, they open immediately, taking you away from whatever you were reading. This is especially helpful for things like Friday Night Links. Try scroll wheel clicking each link, then you can go read them after you’ve read all my commentary!
2. Open up a PDF document (try it on a Form 1040 in honor of tax season). If you scroll wheel click on the PDF, you will see a circle with some arrows pop up. If you move the mouse, it will pan around the PDF. It makes for nice fluid navigation of PDF documents.

Now that you are armed with these tips, try scroll wheel clicking in other programs. Let me know if you find any other secret middle clicking secrets in the comments!

Portable Apps…

Last week I talked about using someone else’s computer and the traces it can leave behind. Furthermore, sometimes you aren’t allowed to install programs on the computer you are using such as when you go to the library or if you are in a corporate environment.

However, there are applications out there that can be installed onto and used directly from a USB flash drive. Probably the first thing you would want on a USB flash drive would be a  web browser. By carrying a web browser, you can use a secure browser, such as Firefox, and be sure it is up-to-date and can even bring your setting along for the ride.

If you are interested a USB flash drive pre-loaded with about 30 portable apps ranging from a PDF reader to an office suite, contact me from the About The Digitante page and for $25, I’ll send one to you, all loaded up and ready to go. If you have specific requests for programs you would like to see on your USB flash drive, we can make arrangements for that as well.

In the past, you’ve heard me ramble on and on about Mozilla Firefox. As a reminder, Firefox is an excellent replacement for Internet Explorer, a much maligned browser amongst savvy internet users. Firefox is fast and stable when compared to Internet Explorer and a few days of using it will turn you into a Firefox convert.

While using Firefox at home is great, sometimes you end up at other computers with no Firefox and hence, none of your settings or information.

By installing Portable Firefox to a USB flash drive, all those settings and all that information comes with you. Installing couldn’t be easier either. Just download the files from Portable Apps, begin the install, and select your USB flash drive.

Once you’ve installed it, you can head on over to the directory in which you installed it; in my case, I headed to E:/FirefoxPortable.

Once there, I was sure to read the help file since using a portable app isn’t exactly like using a desktop app. Once I familiarized myself with the help file, I simply double clicked on the PortableFirefox.exe and launched the browser.

Its as simple as that. If you want to get a little more complex, the help file also gives you some tweaks that will allow you to import the settings from your regular Firefox as well as enable most addons, plugins (eg Flash), and helper apps (eg a PDF reader).

A final note: while using portable applications on a USB flash drive is super convenient, it can also be super hazardous. PortableApps.com has also provided a safety guide so you can protect yourself, especially if you use your drive with an unknown computer that may already be chock full of viruses. With a little caution, you can avoid bringing all those viruses to your home computer.

Aside from Portable Firefox, do you use any portable apps that you would like to see covered here? Did you even know such things as portable apps existed? Let me know in the comments!

FYIJSYK: Internet Explorer Hole…

I’ve got a brand new FYI: Just So You Know. It seems that Internet Explore (you know, the little blue ‘e’ that is used to browse the internet) has a massive security hole and the worst part is: it can’t be patched. This means that any time you browse the internet using Internet Explorer (any version), the bad guys can access all your files and even upload their own files, essentially turning your computer into a petri dish for viruses and malware.

What can you do to fix this? Well, as usual, there is the hard way and there is the easy way.

The hard way

Some people might need to use the hard way if they are at work and are only allowed to use Internet Explorer. In this case, you need to follow the instructions provided by the How-To-Geek. While it doesn’t fix the problem, it certainly makes it much safer. If you must use Internet Explorer, please follow the How-To-Geek’s steps.

The easy way

Before we get to the easy way, I want to ask – why are you still not using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome? I’ve written before about the amazing extentions available for Firefox and Chrome recently added extensions as well. Both are much faster than Internet Explorer as well.

Extensions aside, both Firefox and Chrome are also much more secure than Internet Explorer and specifically, they are not affected by the current Internet Explorer security hole.

Before you do anything else, if you are reading this in Internet Explorer, please go get Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome and protect yourself. Your computer will thank you for it. FYI, just so you know…

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?

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.

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KeePass…

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a post about Passwords. Since I wrote the post a lot of things have changed.

First, I’ll admit that even after I wrote that post, I continued for months to use my same old password that I had used for everything. I lollygagged about changing it. I didn’t know what to change the passwords to. I didn’t know how to keep track of them. I was just plain unmotivated to do something about my password situation.

I’ve developed a solid system for managing my passwords since that time and I will share my system tomorrow, but first I wanted to show you the primary tool I’ve been using: KeePass.

The basics

After you’ve downloaded and installed KeePass (which is super easy – just click through), you need to create a database to hold your passwords.

You will then be prompted to create a new database. You can save it wherever you like, but I’ll have some more pointers on a great place to put it in my later post about the system I’ve developed.

Once you’ve saved your new database, you’ll be prompted to create a Master Key. That is just a fancy phrase for master password. For this password, I would recommend choosing something that fits the following criteria:

1. Memorable – Make it something that you can memorize and be able to reproduce at any moment. If you forget the password that holds all your passwords, then you’ve just basically locked yourself out of all your accounts. Not good.
2. Not guessable – Don’t make it your street and your birthday. You really don’t want to make it that easy for someone. See my password post for tips on this.
3. Mix it up – Instead of typing your password as BrownBear71, try mixing up the capitalization or use slangy misspellings like this: bRowNbarezZz71

To judge the strength of your chosen password, KeePass has an indicator bar showing the relative strength. The first is for BrownBear71. It has a strength of 60.

Changing the password to bRowNbarezZz71 increases the strength to 78.

The next step should require you to simply press ‘ok’ since all the default options should be fine.

An example

This will be a walk through of the process of adding a password to the database and then using the password.

First, navigate to the category group that you want to use. I will be using the eMail group. Along the top of the window, you will see a little gold key. You can click that to add an entry or you may also right click in the main window and select the gold key there.

The two tabs of interest in the New Entry box are Entry and Advanced. Entry allows you to fill in the title of the site, username, URL (link to the site), and any notes you might want to keep. The password should be filled in for you automatically as a 20 character string of random letter (caps and lowercase) and numbers.

Hint: From the main screen, if you click on the ‘Tools’ menu and choose ‘Generate Password…’ you can navigate to the ‘Advanced’ tab. Here it might be wise to check the second box so you can eliminate things like the letter O and the number 0 or the number 1 and the lowercase letter l. Your passwords will still be plenty strong.

Once you’ve chosen a password, you can head over to the site, head to your profile and update your password. Just copy/paste your password in and change it.

Additionally, you might want to change the answers to your password recovery since a 20 digit random password does no good if they only need your dad’s middle name to get it reset. On the Advanced tab of the New Entry box, you can add String Fields. For me, the field name was the question asked for password reset and field value was a randomly generated password that will be used as the answer to the question.

Now you have strong passwords, password reset answers, and a secure database to hold it all.

What if I’m not at MY computer

That is a good question: What if you are out wandering around and you need access to your email?

This is going to be the second part of the system. We are going to attempt to make the database accessible anywhere and even make some contingency plans, just in case.

Does anyone use a different password manager or have a better way to store and organize passwords? Anybody have their password stolen?

CCleaner…

As a follow up to last night’s post about Revo Uninstaller Pro, I’m posting about CCleaner. In the same vein as Revo, CCleaner is a utility that will get rid of all the extra crud floating around your computer and hopefully speed it up and keep it from getting bogged down in the long run.

Before we dive too far in, I want to warn you that when you are installing CCleaner, it is going to have a Yahoo! bar for your browser checked by default. This is a way for them to get some revenue for their free product, however, installing more relatively unnecessary stuff is what we are trying to avoid. If you don’t want the Yahoo! bar, I would recommend tossing a couple of bucks their way if you find this utility useful.

Cleaner

The Cleaner feature is the first item of interest. Cleaner basically runs through your installed applications and Windows itself to clear out unwanted junk such as temporary files, cookies (method for websites to track you), “most recently used” lists.

As you can see below, on my computer, there were some huge files in my recycle bin and there were a ton of temporary files in a couple of different spots.

Registry

You can picture the registry of your computer as the directory at the entry of a large building. As people move in, move out, and switch floors, the directory gets updated. Sometimes.

In order to remove out of date information in your registry, you can run a scan and it will list items that no longer have a reason to be there. Before doing so, it will ask you to make a backup. I highly recommend this as it only takes a second and can solve any issues you have after cleaning the registry (which should be none).

More about cookies

While they sound delicious, cookies might be the dumbest, but one of the more usable items on the internet.

Essentially every site you go to deposits a cookie on your computer. This might seem a little strange, but what those little cookies do is hold information about your visit. Have you ever gone to a website and already had your screen name typed in a box? Or perhaps you are already logged into Facebook or Twitter when you arrive there. These are due to cookies on your computer.

However, not all sites are so nice about cookies. Ad sites like to put cookies on your computer so they can see where you go and what you browse and search for on the internet. Personally, I would like at least a little privacy, so I clear my cookies every week or two.

But what if I want too keep the good cookies and chuck the bad? CCleaner has a solution which can be found in the Options → Cookies menu. This menu gives you a chance to add any cookies you want to maintain so you can delete the rest of the riff-raff.

Do you have any other tools that you use to keep your computer in working order? Anybody have any experience with similar programs for a Mac?

Revo Uninstaller Pro…

I’m in an excellent position: I have a nearly new Windows 7 install on my laptop. However, before I upgraded back in early November, that wasn’t the case. I had installed program after program, mostly because I was doing a one-off thing. Over time, all those little programs got my computer messier and messier.

When I installed Windows 7, the performance boost was incredible. While part of that might have been the move from Vista to Win7, I think most of it was dumping all the extra program baggage.

I recently heard about a program called Revo Uninstaller Pro and decided to try it out. I’ve got a couple of programs on my computer that need to be eliminated, but nothing to bad. To test it out, I am going to be uninstalling Songbird 1.2 to make way for the brand-new Songbird.

Uninstalling

Generally, when you uninstall a program, little bits and pieces get left around your computer. Services that helped that program function might get left behind, certain files that were in use when the uninstall happened don’t get deleted, and the worst offender is all the entries left behind in your registry. We will take care of the registry issues later in the week.

Once you’ve installed Revo Uninstaller Pro and started it up, it will take you to the main uninstall page. Here, you need to select the program you want to uninstall, in my case, Songbird 1.2.

Revo then informs you of the steps to uninstalling: creating restore points in case something goes awry, running the programs standard uninstall, then scanning for any additional files or registry entries that were missed.

After running my scan, Revo found 17 items and 3 folders, that would have been left over to slow down my system had I relied on Songbird’s built in installer to remove it.

But wait! There’s more!

There are a couple other useful tools the Revo provides:

• Autorun Manager – A more advanced feature, the autorun manager allows you to customize what programs run when you start up your computer. An example of a relatively useless start up program on my computer is the webcam manager. I only use the webcam for the occasional Skype conversation, yet the webcam manager starts up every time and bogs down my computer. I’m not sure what it does, but if I find I need it, I can always re-enable it.
• Junk Files Cleaner – In order to speed up many of the day to day processes, your computer makes temporary copies of files from various areas of your computer and maintains logs on a variety of activities. While this can be helpful, if these temporary files get too big, they slow you down. It’s best to dump them once in a while.
• Windows Tools – This is just a gathering of programs you can find elsewhere on your computer. This way you don’t have to poke around for them.
• Browsers Cleaner – Clears all your browsing history, cookies, and other items from your browsers. Once again, you can find this info elsewhere, but here it is in one spot.
• Microsoft Office Cleaner – Clears the recent documents history for various MS Office products.
• Windows Cleaner – Clears out all kinds of history stored on your computer.
• Evidence Remover – When you delete a file, it isn’t necessarily gone. Imagine you are standing in front of a bunch of mailboxes. One of those boxes has a label with your name on it and some mail that is addressed to you. When you delete a file, it is like removing the label. The mail is still in the box and anyone who was interested could find out what was in the box that was formerly yours. Evidence Remover is like a paper shredder. No more deleted files hanging around hidden.

There is a bit more to these tools and Revo in general, but most of it is pretty advanced.

One feature that could come in handy, but I can’t test out because I don’t need it right now is the Hunter Mode. Essentially, it allows you to use  your cursor, click on something such as a window or a shortcut icon and eliminate a program that way. If you’ve ever tried to delete a desktop shortcut, you know that it tells you something of the effect, “This is a shortcut. If you want to delete the program, please go to the Add/Remove Program blah, blah, blah.” Hunter Mode saves you the trouble.

Got any stubborn programs that just keep hanging around? Find that your computer gets slowed down after a year or two of installing this and that? Try out Revo and let me know what you think. Any speed improvements?