Any casual reader of this blog knows I’m a wee tad of a technophile. Moderately technogeeky, if you will. A few scraps of recent techy news I’ve found interesting, odd tips, and just oddities, etc.
1.) Blow out with canned air; dishwasher; no soap; blow out with canned air again; air dry one day minimum. Easiest way to really clean a normal, wired computer keyboard. Seriously. (I don’t recommend it for wireless keyboards only because someone would forget to remove the batteries and… yeh, you get it.)
2.) Me$$y$oft may have poohed the scrooch with Office 2007. Major academic and scientific publishers have announced they will turn down ANY submissions originally written using Office 2007, even if later saved in an earlier format. “…the power to dictate standards in the documents space may be starting to shift away from the world’s largest software vendor and toward the user community.” About time.
3.) Anyone else ignore EULAs (as I routinely do)? Biggest waste of electronic or dead tree print in the world, outside the Congressional Record or Dan Rather’s Secret Journal. All software publishers really need are the copyrights they already have. EULAs are almost always simply a means of bullying the end user, nothing else.
4.) Currently, the riskiest search engine out there, according to McAfee, is… Yahoo. Top-ranked for “red” and “yellow” flagged searches resulting in sites likely to install drive-by malware, etc. Along those lines… music and tech searches now outrank pr0n searches as riskiest.
5.) Oh, Yippee and hooray! *yawn* Mac share of web presence has reached the stellar height of… 6.46%. WTG, Macrodistas! Soon, Macs could well become a meaningful presence on the web! *heh* Of course, it’s INTEL-based models accounting for the growth… (Sadly, Macultists can no longer tout their supposed hardware platform superiority as a reason for their devotion. And since OSX is just a pretty straightjacket tacked on top of BSD, they no longer have their unique software platform to tout. ;-))
6.) Did you know that it is impossible to own too many computers? No, really. And I’m in the process of attempting to prove it… *heh*
7.) “Modding” cases. Yes, it IS possible to take this one too far. (I’ll never look at a hamster wheel the same way again… )
8.) I used to wonder how I was going to effectively catalogue and store all the floppies full of data I was generating; then it was tapes; then CDRs. I wonder when I’ll start wondering how I’ll keep track of all the DVDs full of data I’ve archived? I only have so much room for boxes full of spindles of data disks… have to save room for more computers, you know.
9.) I often wonder how folks manage to infect themselves with viruses (trojans and worms, oh my!). My only experience with an “infection” was when I intentionally infected a standalone (unconnected to any network) computer with a particularly hard to remove/clean boot sector virus for experience in removing it. (Knock on wood. :-)) Oh, I know how they can do it, but I wonder how the folks who infect themselves are also able to get to the grocery store and back without breaking a leg.
10.) I want one. Having trouble locating one to use with my old Palm m500 (the device shown attached). An OBDII-CAN reader interface (and software? firmware?) for reading with a Palm device.
Sure, I could just buy a simple OBDII reader for under $50, but this would be cool.
11.) I also need some good beer making/record keeping software for when someone finally buys me this. Yeh, I’ve lowballed my wish list. THIS is the real deal. 😉
12.) Anyone have a use for some old 30-pin memory sticks? *heh* Yeh, the stacks and boxes and bins of antiquated computer parts outnumbers the stacks and boxes and shelves full of computers here at twc central.
13.) All that said, shipping me your old computers to stockpile would probably be cheaper than paying for hazardous waste disposal… But please don’t. I have enough droipped on my as it is (quite apart from what I have… pulled from dumpsters and put online after some refurbishment *LOL*).
This has been yet another off-the-wall Thursday Thirteen at twc central, noted at the Thursday Thirteen Hub and shamelessly touted at Perri Nelson’s Website, The Virtuous Republic, The Magical Rose Garden, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, stikNstein… has no mercy, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Webloggin, Leaning Straight Up, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, and High Desert Wanderer, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
So have you read about the zero-day bugs in IE and Firefox? Or about how Macs are increasingly becoming the targets of virus writers?
That’s how people get infected. 😐
My TT #7 is up at http://perrinelson.com/2007/6/7/789.aspx
Oh, yeh, Perri, you’re right. But people “get infected” (that is, infect themselves) by using browsers like IE and Firefox. And Mac users… what can I say? They cruise around like they think (and they mostly do) they are invulnerable because, like noobs, they believe the bilgewater the Mac community (irresponsibly encouraged by Apple FUD about Windoze) that they are invulnerable.
They’re not, and it’ll bite ’em in the butt. Still, as such a miniscule percentage of the “connected” world, they aren’t a particularly high visibility target, so that’s allowed them to skate… for now. Secure in their own minds.
Be it known: ALL computer users who “are infected” by malware infect themselves by practicing unsafe computing. Sure, there may be a miniscule number of folks who have taken every precaution, practice safe computing and become infected by a new piece of malware not yet known by anti-malware companies, with behaviors and signatures that are as yet unknown or that slip under a newly-updated, otherwise robust security suite, but those numbers are so vanishingly small as to be insignificant.
The first piece of email malware I recieved (but which I caught and was not infected by) lo these many years ago was sent me by a highly competent, extremely experienced and trained out the wazoo full (real Blue) IBM tech who simply relaxed his own procedures briefly and infected himself.
It can happen to ANYONE who does not make an unbreakable habit of scanning ALL downloads (and even commercial shrinkwrap software) with a known robust, newly-updated anti-malware software.
At the very least. Anti-rootkit scans, anti-spyware, etc. all also highly recommended for normal, everyday, habitual MANUAL scans of ALL downloads and software before installation, AT THE LEAST. (Regularly scheduled–as in DAILY–full scans of memory and all attached drives also highly recommended).
A nicely-hardened hardware firewall combined with a competent (NOT Windoze “firewall”), properly-configured software firewall on each and every computer on one’s network: also essential.
And then there’s simple common sense. Avoid high-risk web sites. Use a browser that is security conscious… and whose developers are extremely responsive to any notice of security lapses (one reason I appreciate Opera: not only has it had the fewest reported security holes, but to my knowledge, EACH of them has been patched within about a day. Nice.).
What most folks who use the internet refuse to learn is that yes, on the internet–though ONLY on the internet–you CAN easily catch an “STD” from “toilet seats”–*heh*