The Pinged Hobbit

Anyone reading this probably uses the web to shop for items and do research just like me. One of the most annoying things of using the web in this way is that when it comes to clicking the print button, what you think is one page of A4 from looking at the screen actually turns out to be 4 or 5 when printed out and usually it is covered with ads which obscure or detract from what you are really interested in. In this age of environmental awareness where everyone is being encouraged to look for ways to save the planet, the amount of wasted paper this generates needs to be reduced. This is not only an environmental saving it is also a monetary saving as well (definitely a good thing with the rising cost of living!)

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Yesterday I talked about a method used by some companies to trick people into downloading and installing some software on to their computer that was less than good. Lets face it, there are a lot of people out there looking to download something on to people’s computers that is less than good. Some are relatively harmless but annoying like the MBS Payment and Windows Antivirus 2008, but others are rather malicious pieces of code. I like a lot of other people probably get asked to look at computers quite often that are running some malicious code on start up. This never used to be a problem Things that ran at startup used to be easy to locate, it was enough to open up msconfig and scroll down the list of processes running and disable the one you want. Of course things evolve, after a while the people creating these programs found ways to start their programs with out showing them on this list. They created registry keys that were hard to find.

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Most people have probably seen pictures of people running a PC with multiple monitors. Giving them lots of desktop real estate. There are plenty of studies out there that point out the productivity benefits of this type of working. Seeing two sets of information at once can be really helpful, work in Dreamweaver on one screen and have your web page previewed in Firefox on another (yes I know Dreamweaver has a preview but nothing beats running it in a true web browser). The next step up from that is some one like me, I run two computers some of the time at home. I have my nice quick Windows box and then I have my flash iMac for fun. It can be quite useful at times to have multiple machines to use the processing power from as I am a constantly multi-tasking. With my two computers running I can use one to do do the processing for my day job while the other is still free to use for web surfing, blog posting, emailing and any other past time I might have. Continue reading »

I’m fairly nerd like myself, so I can usually find my way through most technology based problems I have all on my own, heck like most nerds I’m the one people call when they cant get things to work because they don’t understand them. Be that computers, DVD players, alarm systems,etc. Continue reading »