Email hoaxes

I normally have a pretty good radar for hoax email messages, including those startling 'facts' which turn out to be urban myths. Unfortunately, I got caught this week passing on a supposed speech by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, in which he exhorted all immigrants to get with the Aussie programme or ship out.
A lot of people forward these messages in good faith, but there are several good sites to check whether they are genuine or not.
Hoax-Slayer is dedicated to debunking email hoaxes, thwarting internet scammers, combating spam, and educating web users about email and internet security issues. It also includes anti-spam tips, computer and email security information, articles about true email forwards, and much more.
Another useful source for info on urban myths is www.snopes.com The myth that gets me particularly is the one about the frog that doesn't have enough sense to jump out of a pot of increasingly hot water. Or for church-goers, the common sermon illustration that says the word 'sincere' derives from a Latin phrase that means 'without wax'. 'Fraid the Oxford dictionary doesn't agree.

The Show the Desktop Icon (and how to restore it when it vanishes)

If you are like me, you often have more than one application open at once (and sometimes so many their names are barely legible in your task-bar). An irritating aspect of working like this is that you sometimes need to open a folder that is easiest accessed via your desktop but of course you cannot see it because of all your open applications.

If you haven't discovered it already, the 'Show the Desktop' icon is your best friend. One click and all open applications are tabbed down to your task-bar for easy access; when you are finished with your desktop, a second click restores everything back to being open again, in the order and location you had it open in.

The 'Show the Desktop' icon is generally located in the cluster of icons on your task-bar, next to your start button, see picture. If you don't have a small cluster of icons next to your start button, right click your task-bar, select 'toolbars' and then 'quicklaunch' and it will become visible.
To the right of your cluster of quick-launch icons there is a small double arrow (it is visible just below the word "Shortcut" in the picture above). Right clicking this will show you all the icons you can quick-launch (so called because a single click opens each instead of the usual two). You can drag and drop your three most used applications onto the task-bar and order them as you want by dragging them around. As you can see looking at mine my top three are Explorer [I am sorry, I just do not like Fire Fox], Outlook and Show the Desktop.

There is, however, a problem that can arise with one's 'Show the Desktop' icon; it can mysteriously vanish. Just when you cannot imagine how you ever coped without it it isn't there and you have to manually tab down every page again. So frustrating! There are varying theories as to why this happens but the most useful piece of information to know is how to restore it.

I have tried various options over the years when ours has vanished but it always would vanish again a few days later. A few months back I tried a very simple piece of code and it has never vanished since. This works for XP users, and is not scary I promise!

Open a notepad or other plain text document.
Copy and paste the following into it:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]Command=ToggleDesktop

Select: Save as
In the file name type: Show Desktop.scf
Ensure save as type is showing: 'plain text' or 'text documents'
Save it wherever you want it.
Then drag it from wherever it is onto the Quick-launch bar.

That's it.

(You can just memorise the keyboard command 'windows key + d' or 'windows key + m' but I think one click is more efficient than having to hit two keys - less to remember anyway!)

Panorama photos

I would love to have a camera that offers a panorama option, but they are way above my price range. However, a good option is to take a sequence of pics of a landscape (or any other subject) and stitch them together into a panorama. For this I use Serif Panorama Plus, which is simplicity itself. The software does only one thing, create panoramas, but it does it superbly well, even adjusting colours at the joining edges. The results are usually pretty seamless. I got my copy of this program free from a computer mag disk, but normally you have to pay for it. However, there are several good free programs out there:
The latest version of the free Irfanview has a panorama-creation tool, which can stitch pics horizontally or vertically. Some others:
Panorama stitching tools
Autostitch
Photopos Panorama Plus
An important tip for achieving good results is to keep your camera horizontal - if you point up or down, you will get some very curved straight lines in the panorama. Use a tripod if you can.
Incidentally, most inexpensive digital cameras have a lens roughly equivalent to a 38mm lens in film camera terms. This means they are a wide-angle lens, and therefore compress the horizontal picture. To get your pics back to a more realistic representation, you should ideally crop either the top, bottom or both, which is a semi-panorama anyway.

Password-protecting Word documents

Not many people realise you can lock Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, etc) so they can only be opened with a password. Great to protect family recipes or whatever from prying eyes. The method is much the same in both Word 2003 and Word 2007, except the buttons are located in different places. Here's the procedure:
1) Choose "save as" from the File menu.
2) Click on the "Tools" button, which I bet you have never noticed before. It's top right in the 2003 version of Word, and bottom left in the 2007 version.
3) Choose "General" options, and a dialogue box will pop up in which you enter your password. You can also have a second password for modifications, so people can access to read but not to modify the document.
Warning: Don't forget that password, because the encription is so strong even computer experts probably won't crack it.

The downside of Windows 7

Just when I think maybe life might get a bit simpler, along comes someone to spoil my day.
Further to my post on Windows 7 last week, Galen Gruman now tells me that if I want to upgrade from the XP operating system, I will have to do a complete reinstall of everything.

Unlike Vista users, (XP users) can't do an "in-place upgrade," in which the new OS overwrites the old one, preserving their installed applications, preferences, and data. Instead, they'll have to do a clean install, which means they have to back up their data, install Win 7 (either deleting or XP or installing as a separate environment), reinstall their apps, restore their data, and re-create their preferences.
For Windows XP users who avoided Vista because of its many problems, that upgrade work may seem as adding insult to injury, making it harder for them to finally adopt a new version of Windows. Through its PR agency, Microsoft confirms to InfoWorld that there will be no "in-place upgrade" option for XP users, but it declines to explain why not. "More materials on your question are in the works," the spokesman says.
But there may be good reason not to support an in-place upgrade, suggests Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst who follows Microsoft technologies. That's because viruses, registry errors, and other performance-sapping flaws in the user's Windows environment would be carried over into Windows 7; something that would not happen with a clean install.

Windows 7

When Microsoft released its new operating system Vista, it met a storm of resistance, which generally boiled down to two big problems - it required a very fast computer and scads of memory to run all the features, which for a lot of people would have meant a serious upgrade of their computer; and there were a lot of incompatibilities with existing hardware, eg printers, modems, sound and video cards, etc. While most of the incompatibilities have since been sorted out, the memory problem is still a major one. Hence, a high proportion of XP users are clinging desperately to their operating system. So much so, that Microsoft was forced to extend the length of time it would support XP. Vista still has not attracted the user base that Microsoft was expecting, and the ongoing problems forced it to hasten development of a replacement operating system, dubbed Windows 7. Development of this is well advanced, and several million people downloaded a free trial (called a "beta"), which has generally attracted good reviews. As Pat Pilcher wrote in the NZ Herald:

Having used Windows 7 Beta for the better part of two weeks, I'm pleased to report it takes Vista's strengths and manages to fix most of its annoyances. I'd even go as far as saying that Windows 7 is perhaps one of the most complete and bomb-proof betas I've ever used.

It looks like a lot of people will leapfrog Vista, and hang on to XP until they can upgrade to Windows 7 when it is finally released (and I will almost certainly be one of them, unless I have already ditched Microsoft completely and switched to Linux, which I am more tempted to do by the day).

Cyborgs soon a reality?

So you thought the Cyborgs of Star Trek were fanciful imagination. We may be closer to the reality than you realise, if this article in the NZ Herald is to be believed:

"Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, extending longevity, and creating full-immersion virtual reality (think The Matrix), "experience beaming" (Being John Malkovich), and vastly enhanced human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned."
"That's just for starters. Soon after, claims Kurzweil, "Non-biological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle. We'll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it. That will mark the singularity."
Kurzweil's point is that we don't know what happens next and, perhaps more importantly, we're not really geared up to the challenges that any of these developments present - though the "singularity" may be only 35 years from now.

And I thought I couldn't cope now!!

Internet down?

Last night, our internet connection just suddenly stopped. My first recourse was to right click on the connection icon at the right-hand side of the task bar and first check status ("offline" - huh! I know that), and then repair. It couldn't repair. Then I had a flash-back and remembered a time several years ago when the same thing used to happen fairly regularly at my workplace. When the internet there went down, we would disconnect the power from the modem, wait 10 seconds, then plug the power back in. This resets all the settings. So I dived under my desk, and did the same. Voila! Internet back in action.

Starting in safe mode

While the XP and Vista operating systems don't crash nearly as much as their predecessors, they still freeze from time to time. More commonly, a particular program refuses to work the way it should. The first line of attack is to simply restart (reboot) the computer, and most often that solves the problem (which in that case probably was to do with fragmented memory, or a conflict between two pieces of software). If that doesn't work, the next option is to reboot in "safe mode". This is a bare-bones working mode that disables all extensions, including printer drivers, internet, etc, and is a good mode in which to do trouble-shooting. Oftentimes, simply starting in safe mode and then rebooting in normal mode without doing anything else solves the problem. To reboot in safe mode, hold down the F8 key at the top of your keyboard while starting the computer. You will get some beeps, and the screen will show only black with white writing. At some point, it will stop and offer you three choices to continue. One of these is the safe mode, and you use the arrow keys at the right of your keyboard to choose this, and then press "Enter" to continue. When the computer is in safe mode, the screen operates at a lower resolution, which means all your icons will be bigger, and when you restart in normal mode, you will have the fun job of resorting all the icons.
Some people have difficulty with Firefox freezing, which may be caused by conflict between extensions and add-ons. You can also start Firefox in safe mode, which disables the extensions, and you can then turn them on one by one, to find out which is the culprit. You will find the safe mode by going to Start/Programs/Mozilla Firefox.

Anonymous surfing

A surprising amount of information about you can be gathered as you surf the Web - including the kind of computer and operating system you use, the sites you've visited recently, your location, and possibly your company. This comes about in several ways. For instance, when you are on the internet, your computer is allocated a unique numerical address called an IP address. Records of this are kept by your internet service provider, and can be accessed by people wanting the information. Some less scrupulous people sell lists of these. Another way is for the web page to plant a "cookie" in your computer, which it can then track. Most cookies are fairly benign - for instance, it tells a site whether you have visited before, and saves you having to provide a password every time you visit.
There are various ways to keep your surfing information private. One is to use what is called a proxy server, essentially an internet site that you log on to, which then disguises your computer's IP address, so it can't be traced. Another is to use programs like Tor, which is a free program that takes all of your Internet communications and sends them around a large network of "onion" routers that make it impossible for sites or people to invade your privacy. There's lots more info on this at the Tor site.

Making hard decisions

The Danish philosopher, mathematician and scientist Piet Hein reckoned that if you were faced with a difficult decision, you should toss a coin, but not necessarily be guided by the way the coin falls. His premise was that in the tossing, you would suddenly realise what you really wanted.
Or you can use the Universal Decision Maker. As it takes longer than a coin toss, you have more time to reflect, and come to the right decision, perhaps.

Look ma, no software!

One of the inherent problems of the Windows operating systems (and here Mac users can justifiably feel smug) is what is called the Registry. All software installed on the computer is controlled through the Registry, which is rather flaky and subject to things going wrong. If you are having persistent software problems, there's a strong chance the Registry is involved. When you uninstall software, often artifacts are left behind in the Registry which can't easily be removed, etc, etc. It is a no-go area for anyone except experts, because if you make the wrong changes, your whole system can crash.
So here comes the revelation: it is possible to run your computer with NO SOFTWARE installed except the operating system and whatever else Microsoft has loaded on, and do everything you would normally use a computer for. There are at least three ways you can do this.
1) Many open-source projects have been developing what they call Portable Applications. You can load them onto a memory stick/flash drive, and they will work without being installed on the computer. There's quite a list available now - here's one sample which includes such functions as web browser, email program, word processor, media player, spreadsheets.
2) Use web-based applications. These provide all the functionality of installed software, but you load nothing onto your computer. Probably the best-known is Google Docs, a package including a word processor and spreadsheet. But there are thousands of others which can perform just about every function you could wish for. The website Simple Spark has a very comprehensive list, and there are others.
3) Use a Linux disk. Many computer magazines include a disk loaded with one of the many variants of the Linux operating system. You don't actually load Linux on to your computer - simply pop the disk in the DVD drive and away you go. At the end of the session, you eject the disk and nothing is left on the computer except any documents you have saved (and which you can access again the same way at any future time). Most Linux distributions contain a big number of applications, covering all the things you would probably want to do.

Windows log on password

A friend returned from holiday and complained she could not log on to her computer after allowing someone else to use it during her absence. All was solved when we realised that Windows passwords are case sensitive, and she had not noticed the caps lock key was down.

Why I dislike Microsoft

Q: How many Microsoft technicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. They simply redefine darkness as the industry standard.
That sums up perfectly why I don't like Microsoft. They don't adhere to industry standards, and they try to enforce their own on everybody else. Here are some examples:
I worked in the prepress department of a major printing company for five years. We used to shudder when a client brought in a Word or Publisher document for printing, the reason being that Microsoft formats ALL documents (Word, Publisher, Powerpoint, etc) using the default printer driver of the computer on which they are composed. Take the document to another computer, and the composition, pagination, etc, goes to pieces. You have to try and copy drivers from one computer to the other to reconstitute the pagination, and even then it doesn't always work. (And it's impossible if you are moving from PC to Mac.)
If you create a style sheet in Word, the moment you make a slight change to a font (eg, bold, italic) etc, Word automatically creates a new style sheet. By the time you have finished formatting a whole document, you have dozens of totally unnecessary style sheets, which you dare not delete. NO-ONE ELSE's word processing or page layout software does this, for the good reason that it's not necessary and it just makes life difficult.
If you make a PowerPoint presentation containing an audio file, and you time slide transitions to the audio, the timing goes all out if you play the presentation on another computer. I don't understand the full technicalities, but it's something to do with PowerPoint using the computer system's clock speed for timing, and of course, each computer is slightly different.
Internet Explorer does not conform to the World Wide Web consortium's standards for internet browsers. So unless web pages are composed to meet their standards, they do not show properly on screen, which creates problems for designers who have to also meet the requirements of other browsers, such as Firefox and Opera (which, to be fair, are not perfect in implementation either, but are a lot closer to the internationally accepted standards).
Sun Systems came out with a very useful programming language called Java, which helps web pages perform a lot of the amazing feats you take for granted. So Microsoft hijacked the code, implemented their own version, and are now trying to enforce it on the rest of the world and kill off Sun's Java. They probably won't succeed, but it's typical of the way they operate.
So while I am forced to use a lot of Microsoft software, you can see why I find alternatives wherever possible. It's not just bloody-mindedness - it's essential to keeping sanity in my work day.

More of the best freeware

Everywhere I look at the moment, I see magazines and bloggers listing the best of this or that. I have previously listed some of the must-have's that reside on my computer, but to go with the flow, here is an additional list (again, all free).
Anti-virus - although it is not the perfect anti-virus tool, it's hard to go past AVG. If you don't have it, install it today.
Anti-spyware - the same goes for Spybot. It's essential.
Recover lost files - should the unthinkable happen, and you accidentally permanently erase an essential file, don't panic. Glary undelete will come running to the rescue, restoring files that have even vanished from the recycle bin/trash can.
Page layout - I know many Microsoft bundles include Publisher, but take my advice, DO NOT USE IT. It's a dog! Anyone who works in the real printing business will tell you it creates massive problems in their prepress departments. An alternative is Serif PagePlus, which behaves much more like the old PageMaker.
Web design - There are several good open-source tools, but the best are probably NVU and KompoZer.
Video editing - If you are fortunate enough to own a Macintosh, then iMovie is a good basic editor. The PC equivalent is MovieMaker, which comes built in with the system. If you need something a bit more sophisticated, Jahshaka is getting good reviews in the open-source world.
Calculator - the Windows calculator is pathetic. Moffsoft FreeCalc doesn't have any more maths functions, but because I keep losing my place when I'm totting up a column of figures, I love the way it gives me a sidebar read-out of the steps I have entered.
Font viewer - One of the frustrations of the PC system is that it's hard to see what fonts actually look like - mostly the names give you no clue. Fontviewer does exactly what it says, and nothing else. But it does it very simply and well.

Smash that hard drive!

If you're planning on getting rid of an old computer, the only way to make sure the data doesn't fall into the wrong hands is to remove the hard drive and smash it up with a hammer, a British consumer group has advised. Which? Computing magazine said the only way to make sure fraudsters could not steal personal details from an old computer's hard drive was to utterly destroy it, as simply deleting files or wiping the drive was not sufficient.
Which? said it had bought eight second-hand drives from internet auction site eBay and recovered 22,000 "deleted" files, including some information that could be confidential. Criminals, who it said trawled council waste sites and internet sites like eBay, would be able use specialist software to retrieve the information which could then be used to commit identity theft.
"Even if you delete your files, you'd be surprised how easy it is to recover your personal data. It sounds extreme, but the only way to be 100 per cent safe is to smash your hard drive into smithereens," said editor Sarah Kidner.

Lost product keys

I have written in a previous post about the hassle of trying to remember the dozens of passwords I use to access different websites. The answer is a little utility called PasswordFox. But what about all the different product keys for the dozens of programs I have installed on my PC? A neat utility that can save you hours of rummaging through probably long-lost packaging is Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder, a freeware open-source utility that retrieves from the bowels of your machine the product key used to install not just your copy of XP or Vista, but many other applications as well. One note: a number of anti-virus programs identify Magical Jelly Bean as a Trojan, but you can safely ignore the warning.
Another very useful program to keep a track of what’s on your computer, is Belarc Advisor, which also does other useful things like providing info on the health of your hard drive, any security leaks, and more.

Better searching in Google

You probably use Google most of the time as your main search engine (after all, most of the Western world does). But while it's an amazing engine, you can get very frustrated trying to plow through hundreds of results without finding what you want. Google has dozens of shortcuts and 'cheats' that can improve your chances of getting the right page. I won't overwhelm you with them all, but here are a few choice ones:
1) Include a phrase in double quotes, to search on the exact phrase. It's particularly important to enclose 'the' or 'and' in quotes, as otherwise Google ignores these two words.
2) If you include an asterisk (*) in the phrase, Google will search for that missing word you have forgotten.
3) Google searches don't necessarily return every page from a particular site. But you can search just a specific site by typing site:www.(sitename) and then the keywords. This often works better than a site's own internal search engine.
4) Typing the word OR will seek alternatives. Eg, Bacon OR Pork.
5)~auto looks up the word auto and synonyms.
6) printer -cartridge would exclude pages with the word cartridge from a search.
7) inurl:hobbit would find every web page that has the word hobbit in the web address (the URL). (There are 162,000 of them!)

High-risk security threats (and how to fix them)

"If you use a social network, a Web browser, a public computer, or a cell phone, beware: Your PC, your bank account, and your personal privacy are at risk," writes Andrew Brandt, of PC World. Here are 17 common threats, with fixes for each one.
"Failing to take precautions against the current wave of threats is akin to driving cross-country without a spare tire: You might get away with it, but setting off unprepared for trouble can be expensive and very inconvenient if your luck goes bad."

Power surges

While my Auckland colleagues took an anniversary day off yesterday, I came to work in Christchurch, but found myself unable to access the Auckland computer system. Turns out a power surge had put the office out of action over the weekend. Fortunately, they had recently installed a surge protector, and while that was blown to smithereens, the main computer server was protected. (Visions of a faithful servant dying to protect its master!) It goes to show how important it is for office systems to have power protection. I'm willing to bet your home computer doesn't have similar protection - few do - but at the very least, do turn off your computer if a thunderstorm is threatening. The area in which one of my Auckland colleagues lives suffered a really bad lightning strike just before Christmas, and she lost all power and telephone for more than a week, which also meant she had no water. Couldn't even flush the loo! Fortunately, she had disconnected her computer, otherwise she would have suffered a complete disaster.