Archive for July, 2009

Google and Microsoft are two of the more visible companies that are pushing the cloud computing frontier.  There are several advantages to computing in the cloud; your files are available from whatever computer you’re on as long as you have a network connection, you don’t have to worry about backups, etc.  There is a downside to the cloud though.

Basically cloud computing is using applications for productivity that live on the internet, not on the computer you’re working on.  Google Docs and Microsoft’s soon to be released internet based version of it’s flagship product Office are modern examples of cloud computing, but really any webmail (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc) could loosely be referred to as a cloud application.

My biggest concerns has always been privacy.  Your email, financial information, business contacts, etc are all saved on a third party companies servers.  There is always the possibility that there could be a security breach from the inside, or someone uses the password reset feature (these are sometimes very insecure) and gains access to your information.  What if the service is interrupted or you can’t log in or something goes missing, who can you call to fix it?

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If you share documents often, then you will likely know the word “Redaction.”   Colloquially, redaction is blacking out  sensitive information on a document.  Adobe Acrobat Pro has a redaction tool built in, found under the “Advanced” tab, which makes it easy to select and highlight the data you want to hide; however,   there is a well known and compromising glitch.  Even if the data is blacked out via redaction, if the document is merely saved, the hidden data could be revealed by copying and pasting said data into a new document. Not so bueno!

If redaction is a daily part of your work regimen, then you are probably utilizing a tool like Redax to properly redact data.  However, if you only utilize this function on occasion,  then know that you must first save the document as a TIFF – turning the document into an image ensures the  blacked out data cannot be retrieved.  Next, save the TIFF version  as a PDF. Your blacked out content will finally be embedded in the PDF.

For more information, here is an informative, albeit verbose article:

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Sharing folders for your iphone

If you did not hear, apple released the MobileMe iDisk App, of course you will need a mobile me account. OSX users really should have one, let me list the benefits:

- get an new email address ( you choose what it is ) belonging to the .me domain
- can set up galleries through iphoto and upload your pictures to it for anyone to see.
- get a website that you can manipulate with iWeb.
- get 20 GB of space to share between your website/pictures/email or whatever else you want
- get access to a backup application tht will backup whatever files you want to the iDisk ( after it is set up)
If you have an iPhone you can track it if it is ever lost

And the best part? Its all in sync and push enabled (Email , contacts, calendar)

When you have MobileMe installed on OSX or Windows, goto your settings/control panel and make sure you are logged in and iDisk is set up. You should see it under devices in finder or under my computer in Windows.
So either use Itunes to search for the MobileMe IDisk app or use your iPhone/iTouch device to install the device (app store).
Its a great tool to keep your files accessible to you wherever you go.

Spyware, malware, adware…whatever you call it, it’s time to get rid of it. Is your system running slowly, are you getting pop-up windows?  Is there software that “looks” like an antivirus program asking you to pay, warning that you are infected but won’t do anything until you cough up the dough and you don’t remember even installing it?  You might have spyware on your computer.

Loosely defined, spyware is any software on your computer that is monitoring you (internet usage, web habits, or even possibly stealing passwords), adware is any software that tries to display ads on your computer either when you’re browsing websites that don’t have pop-ups windows or sometimes when you’re not even on the internet.  Malware is both spyware and adware, plus any number of programs that pretend to be antivirus, antispyware or other types of utilities but actually don’t do anything except ask you for money.

There are some really great free tools out there to remove spyware.  If these don’t get rid of your infection we’d recommend either calling a professional or just backing up your data and reinstalling your entire operating system and all programs.

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In some business environments people end up using the same bookmarks (resources for work, search tools, favorite vendors, etc) but have to maintain their own bookmarks manually.  This is fine but it’s really a waste of time and energy if you have to send an email around letting people know who a new vendor is and to make sure to remember to update their bookmarks accordingly.  Here’s a great workaround that let’s this happen automatically.

If you use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer this walkthrough is useful too.  Firefox doesn’t have a way to share bookmarks automatically, however you can use this trick plus PlainOldFavorites (that we talked about here) to get your bookmarks sync’d in Firefox as well.

Getting the share setup

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Taking the time to make a few distinctions in your Outlook Contacts has its advantages, in particular for applying bulk actions.

I sync my Blackberry phone to Outlook here at NYC Tech Guys. I use my phone for both personal and business calls, but my NYCTG email address I only use for business communication. When I sync my Blackberry to Outlook it mixes all of my personal contacts with my business contacts; I want to distinguish between the contacts, so this “how to” will show you the way to do the same for yourself.

Adding categories to your entries is worth the labor, simply because you will then have the flexibility of sorting. You can add multiple categories to a single entry, too, which solves what to do with those multifaceted people in your life.

The easiest way I found to quickly add a category to a contact is as follows: continue

Usually , barring a hardware problem (especially if its just software that is mounted) an application or .dmg can be locked and impossible to eject if it has open files. In OSX it can be very simple. OSX mounts things under /Volumes/mountname . If you open up terminal in OSX, and list out the Volumes (type ls /Volumes/) you can see the name of whatever is mounted. The next command is lsof ( list open files) , run that on the offending mount and find out what file is preventing you from ejecting the offending application (lsof /Volumes/mountname).

Its easy to do and gets you closer to unix command line mastery.

Do you switch back and forth between Internet Explorer and Firefox and miss the bookmarks of the one when you’re in the other?  Then check out the Firefox extension PlainOldFavorites for a quick fix to this and get your bookmarks in sync.

What PlainOldBookmarks does is creates an extra option in your menu bar called “Favorites” right next to your “Bookmarks” in Firefox.  This is a list of all the favorites in Internet Explorer that you can now access, sort, add to and delete from right through Firefox.

Grab it for free from:

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These hack are for advanced users, they can really mess up your system. Please make backups of your registry before you do anything else. Caveat utilitor!

First thing is first, fire up your registry editor. Goto start –> run –> type in “regedit32″ and press enter

1st hack-

Changing the speed of menu speed
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\

MenuShowDelay. Thedefault valueis 400. Set it to 0

2nd hack-

This one places the windows kernel in ram ( the heart of the OS, do this only if you have over 1 gig of ram)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\MemoryManagement\DisablePagingExecutive set this to 1 to disable paging and have the kernel run in RAM

3rd hack-

Prefetch Parameters

This places system files into cache for faster loading ( do this is you have more than 1 gig of memory)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\MemorManagement\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher Set this to 0 to disable prefetching, 1 to prefetch application launch files, 2 to prefetch boot files, and 3 to prefetch as many files as possible.

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Life hacker has a great troubleshooting tutorial dealing with how to figure out what’s wrong with your internet connection when you can’t get to a website. Print it out and file it somewhere safe, you won’t be able to get to the website when you need to follow the steps. From lifehacker: how to troubleshoot a flaky internet connection