Site has moved to: My Mypage Account

Site has moved to: My Mypage Account at IUSB. This is in hopes of having a working site hosted by Wordpress with a MySQL database running on my home machine. Site may move to an even more permanent resident once I am satisfied with the settings and register for a dynamic DNS for my server at home.

Expect posts that would ordinarily be posted for this site to be there till further notice.

Not Everything You Accidentlly Delete is Lost.

Have you ever deleted something and emptied your Recycle Bin and become overwhelmed by the sense of "Ohhh nooooo, I just didn't do that" and realized you deleted something fairly precious to you. Well if you're one of those people or know someone who has then offer them this miraculous piece of software.

It's called PC Inspector File Recovery, provided by CONVAR – Die Datenretter™, and it's capable of scanning your hard drives for files that had once thought to have been deleted. It's totally free as is all their other products and they leave it to you to donate to them. This can be a life saver to just about anyone. If you're a system admin and accidently delete your file allocation tables for those databases you can recover them. You delete those last remaining digital photos of your important ones then there's a chance you can recover those too.

Just keep in mind the sooner you use the program the less likely those files get written over and the greater the chance you'll have of recovering them. There are other file recovery tools but this one beats them out because it's free and it's an all around nice application.

Spurl.net - Keeping Bookmarks Mobile.

How many computer users use more than 1 computer? Quite a few I'd imagine and so you'll run into an issue when it comes to bookmarks. Unless you maintain your bookmarks on a media that you carry around with you, which is how I use to. You'll probably have to remember your most useful ones but with the help of Spurl.net you can take them with you wherever you go. All you have to do is login and you'll get a sidebar frame which will contain all those bookmarks you've been missing.

Anywhere you can access the web you'll have access to your bookmarks. The cost for this is that Spurl.net will collect information dealing with peopls browsing habits but does maintain Spurl.net users privacy. It really is a handy free service and is better than keeping your bookmarks on a floppy or some other media that is fairly easy to carry around.

An alternative to this is to maintain a website that has your links on it but the downside to this is that updating those bookmarks can be troublesome due to the nature of editing .html. A php website with a database or a wiki style page could be useful for maitaining your bookmarks without letting another party have direct access to them. But this isn't as straightforward and require a lot of computer knowledge and possible maintenance to maintain.

Why Not Internet Explorer?

How many of you enjoy having 4 internet explorer's open when browsing the web? I have a feeling that there's a good portion of people who don't know what tabs are in an internet explorer and that Microsoft's Internet Explorer or IE doesn't have them. Unfortunatly Mircosoft doesn't believe in tabs. Tabs are wonderful once you get use to them. You'll get them if you're using Mozilla, Firefox, or Opera.

In Mozilla and Firefox just press: ctrl + t for a new tab. This will create an empty location you can type or paste a hyperlink into and have the browser display it. This is all done in the same window and saves on taskbar space and your visual area on your monitor. You can navigate the tabs either by clicking on them with your mouse or usually pressing: shift + tab and to navigate backwards ctrl + shift + tab.

Once learned you'll probably stop using IE and switch to a broswer with tabs enabled. There are many other features to explore in the above mentioned internet explorers but as of yet none that are as useful as tabs.

Another Step in Protecting Youself Online.

I recently posted an article about protecting yourself online using a firewall. Well in the spirit of securing your pc I'll give you a few more good tips to help you cope with the ever expanding and malicious Internet.

Having a firewall is a good way to protect yourself in terms of being attacked by people from the web but sometimes you are your own worste enemy, or those other individuals who use your computer at home. All it takes is one mouse click and your computer could be infected with a malicious piece of software that will take over your computer and make your life on the web a nightmare.

Malware will disable your pc or personal computer and make you vulnerable. Your passwords to important sites could be recorded/read and sent to a website that will let everyone know your personal information. You pc may no longer work because important files that are needed to boot your pc are deleted and security crackers can log onto your machine and install or copy software that was bought and paid for by the owner of the compromised pc.

You can take steps to protect you from these horrors by purchasing or download antivirus software or AVG software. For those who can afford it Norton and McAfee have some very decent software to remove viruses and prevent viruses from infecting your computer in the first place. Both feature real-time protection which means that the programs stays loaded in the background and scans files before you access them for malware. Another free antivirus application is called AntiVir, which is just like Norton and McAfee but doesn't have all the bells and whisles like Adware/Spyware detection.

In addition to installing antivirus applications you'll want to install Adware/Spyware detecting and removal software like Ad-Aware and Spybot - Search and Destroy. Both are free and have the same features except Spybot includes a Immunization feature to prevent known Spyware from infecting your personal computer.

The key to all this software is to keep it up-to-date and to scan your computer regularly for any malware. Make sure you have the latest security patches for your operating system by using the update program for you system. And don't open files from other individuals unless they are trusted and you know they are expecting that file from them. Taking these precautions will only help in protecting your computer. There is no 100% solution to protecting yourself from malware but this is taking your closer to the next best thing.

Winamp, the Groovy Llama

There are a lot of different applications availiable on the web that let you listen to music. Windows comes with it's own called Windows Media Player but it doesn't always do the job. You can also download ITunes which has a few neat tools to manage you media library and play video files. Another not so well known but tends to get packaged with HP and Compaq's Personal Computers is Musicmatch Jukebox.

These are all capable of playing music files such as: .wav, .mp3/4, and .ogg but my single favorite freeware application is called Winamp by Nullsoft, part of Time Warner. It's been around since 1997 and has grown a lot since. It has a lot of features that keep me hooked on it like: it's variety of skins, it's ability to play any video's in a sizable window, and has plugins for ripping CDs to mp3s and for music visualizations. Winamps visualization plugin is called: Advanced Visualization Studio or AVS and allows for customizable designs and effects that can be saved as a "preset". The music visualizations are wonderful and winamp now has the ability to make your desktop wallpaper a visualizations. While this is very taxing on your system it looks amazing will impress your friends who like that kind of thing.

Winamp is my choice out of all the windows media players. It's skin's can be minimized to create very small skins that take up a very small percentage of your monitor. It's dockable toolbars let you customize it's look and can support Internet radio and Internet television.

Keeping Those DVDs Around for a While.

Need to backup a DVD but you don't have a dual-layer DVD burner? There's a program called DVD Shrink, who's latest version is 3.2.0.15 and it's a great utility for ripping and then burning DVDs. You have to have a DVD burner in order to burn a DVD but you can still rip them using a standard DVD-rom drive. The program will convert both dual and single layer DVDs to a directory with a similar structure of those found on DVDs. The DVD on your local hard drive can be played with software such as Cyberlink's PowerDVD and Cliprex's free DVD Player Pro.

The program is fairly simple to use and has a few useful features like Re-authoring DVDs so you can make your own DVD and can be set up to only copy certain media streams and subtitles.