CCleaner for Mac

I have been using my Apple Macbook Pro 17 a lot lately, and I always have a funny feeling when I do. I have spent most of the last 40 years being concerned, to varying levels, about security on computers. So it comes as no surprise that I have developed my Security Baseline for PCs. But in Apple's world where they tell me they are immune to viruses and rogue programs, I just can't help feel that one day that will all change. So I guess I won't rest easy until I eventually see (as I believe I will) an equivalent Apple version of all of the program functions provided by my Security Baseline for all of you PC users.

So I was happy to see that there is a version of CCleaner for Macs, and I downloaded it, installed it, and ran it as quickly as I could. Now CCleaner is not really a security program per se, but it cleans out a lot of the junk that accumulates on our systems, and I believe this is a good thing and a part of an overall security system.

So all of you Mac users, visit this site, http://www.piriform.com/mac/ccleaner, and get yourself a very lean, neat system cleaner and give it a try. Run the Analyze step first to see just what it will delete from your system, and then run the Clean portion of your program. Run it weekly and it'll take a minute or less each time and go a long way to keeping your system clean.

What Is the Ultrabook?

"Since May there has been a nearly constant, subcellular buzz on the Internet about something called an Intel Ultrabook. But what, exactly, are we looking at here?

First, let’s understand how Intel “releases” notebooks. Intel makes chips. That, in general, is all they do and all they ever want to do. However, the company often releases reference designs or plans for future products. These reference designs have included embedded systems for machinery (using Intel chips), point-of-sale systems for stores (using Intel chips) and low-power “in-vehicle infotainment systems” (using Intel chips.)

In short, Intel builds something, gives manufacturers the plans (and guidelines), and then sells them a few million chips that will go inside the hardware. That’s why most laptops are, inside, essentially the same: they’re based on a reference design passed along from chipmaker to manufacturer like holy writ."

Read the rest of this NYT article here

Samsung tablet is the best one whose name doesn’t start with ‘i’

I am not sure I have seen, to this point in time, anyone claim a tablet was as good as or better than the iPad.

This is worth checking out if you are considering buying a tablet.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Okay, I am a bit biased. Just a bit. I was around for this and was just as excited as everyone else about the thought of having computer power inside our homes. And we did. As quickly as IBM made these machines available to employees, we had one in our new home. And ours came with TWO floppy diskette drives! Imagine being able to copy files from one drive to another! :-) Of course this was quite an expensive option, but I thought it worthwhile at the time.

My memory being what it is today, I am probably wrong, but I think we paid around $1,100. for our first PC.

How IBM's 5150 PC shaped the computer industry

It's about time is all I have to say!

Bruce Schneier’s Telepathic Takeover of the TSA

Giving Microsoft Word a Tune-Up

I don't use MS Word that often anymore, but I followed the links in this Q&A from the New York Times and it appears to contain some good tips. If you ave noticed a slowdown in Word, these tips probably apply somewhat to any version.

Giving Microsoft Word a Tune-Up

Remote support

I had a very successful remote support call yesterday with a VT customer.

Being out of state is not too big a handicap. If we are in different places, I can still connect to your machine, if you can connect to the internet, and do a system cleaning and tune up. An advantage to you, the customer, is that these calls are also a one-on-one tutorial. We connect machine to machine via our high speed internet connections all the while both of us are on our phones talking, discussing, tutoring.

If you need help, consider this approach.

I know that many of you have the issue of an older laptop that seems to lack the zip it once had. The easiest fix for many of you has been to add RAM (memory) since most older machines came with 1GB or less, and that just doesn't cut it anymore. But there are other things you can do too. If you are the DIY type, you may enjoy this article and even be moved to try one or two of the suggestions in it. This comes to us from PCWorld.

Laptop Refresh: Six Ways to Revitalize an Older Notebook

Rogue Gallery

This serves as a reminder of a good place to check if you think you may be the victim of a rogue program. There are lots of them out there. This link to the Lavasoft Rogue Gallery will show you the latest half dozen or so.

Lavasoft's Rogue Gallery

E-mail hacked?

I have seen many wacky e-mails lately coming from friends. These e-mails, while they may contain sob stories from a "relative" who needs money, also come with no message at all, just a link to some wacky web site. Even Google e-mail's spam filter does not pick up on these! (And, IMHO, Google's spam filter is a good one.)

Here is the contents of an e-mail from a trusted friend (although this came through as a clickable link, I have removed the link in case one of you might accidentally click on it:

http://zukunftsmann.de/images/asern.html

The subject of the e-mail was "free trial", and you can see why some people might be drawn into a note with that subject. So, since it was an e-mail from a trueted friend, I opened it up. When I saw the line (as shown above) that was the ONLY content of the note, I knew, or suspected, that my friend's e-mail had been hacked.

Have you seen any of these? As I said in my opening, I have seen a lot of these lately. Moral of the story, never click on any suspect link in an e-mail, such as the link shown above, even if the e-mail is from a friend. But that is just the beginning of what should be your concern. Has this friend's e-mail been hacked? I'm not sure, but I would proceed and take the steps one would take when one suspects his/her e-mail has been hacked. I would always recommend changing the account password to a robust password, and, as noted in the referenced Kim Komando article below, I would go into the account settings and change the alternate e-mail address, if there is one. 

Yikes! Email was hacked!

Microsoft ad. Funny, or NOT?

I enjoyed this funny Microsoft ad. I hope you to too.

Browser Wars: Chrome vs IE9 vs Firefox

I see these comparisons quite frequently. I don't really know to whom these performance data mean anything. They mean little to me. I am a Firefox user and don't really have anything against IE. In fact, I have IE9 and it is quite impressive. I left IE because Firefox was less likely to be attacked by hackers. There was a time, and maybe it's still here, when the IE installation numbers were so much greater than Firefox, and now Chrome, that the hackers didn't bother us Firefox users. Why trouble a handful of people when you can get so many more while attacking IE users, was the logic of the day.

So I am not sure there is any longer a greater danger using IE, and Microsoft has put so much effort into improving security in IE that I suspect it is just as safe as Firefox in that regard.

Chrome? I just don't like it. I am a big Google faan, but their refusal to make Chrome so unique that they can't even provide a left hand side of the screen Bookmarks list, the way every other browser does, was enough to help me quickly forget Chrome. So admittedly that is my bias and I am unlikely to become a Chrome lover.

The article provides lots of technical data, and perhaps some of you will learn something and maybe make a decision based on what you learn. As for me, I will stick with Firefox for now.

From Pcmag.com, Browser Wars: Chrome vs IE9 vs Firefox

Kudos to Coffee Cup Software

As a rule I do not like to pay for software, but there are exceptions to the rule. Coffee Cup Software is a company that makes and sells a plethora of software products, all of which are very reasonably priced.

For several years I struggled with a few of the web sites that I have designed and built on my own using a Microsoft product called Frontpage. Frontpage was replaced by newer products from Microsoft, one of which I tried but did not like. I abandoned it and stuck with Frontpage even though it is no longer supported, and has not been for several years now. My web hosting company, Icdsoft, forced me to eliminate all of the Frontpage extensions (nice, exclusive to Frontpage features) because of the fact that Frontpage support had been dropped and they could no longer afford to support the few slow-to-change web site developers like me who insisted on hanging on. This was a painful experience, but I have managed to make it through the transition, removing the Frontpage bells & whistles from my web sites. There were some I had to replace and this is where Coffee Cup Software came in.

Several of my web sites, most notably Boothbay Region for Rent by Owner or BRFRBO, used fill in the blank forms to enable potential renters to inquire of a cottage owner about their rental property. I had been looking to enable CAPTCHA in these forms, but Frontpage did not support CAPTCHA. Now we all know what CAPTCHA is, even though we may not realize it, because CAPTCHA is nowadays used by most web sites to prevent spam. CAPTCHA bills itself with this description, "CAPTCHA: Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically". That doesn't tell one what CAPTCHA really is, but just take a quick look at their web site and you will immediately recognize what it is!


In my search for a way to implement CAPTCHA on my web sites, I stumbled upon Coffee Cup Software. They offered a very inexpensive product called Web Form Builder. I decided to try it and the rest is history. I love it. I am not a sophisticated web site developer. My sites are all quite basic, but Coffee Cup's Web Form Builder has added a touch of class to my sites. You see, with CAPTCHA I have been able to eliminate spam completely. Coffee Cup's CAPTCHA is a simple implementation requiring users to enter just 5 cahracters that, in this case, are very easy to discern. Take a look at one example from BRFRBO of what I am talking about here:

BRFRBO CAPTCHA form example

If you picture the form, located at the bottom of the above page, without the CAPTCHA image, you can perhaps see that it was easy to spam the cottage owner since there was no way to force a human to enter the data, and believe me, before Coffee Cup with its easy-to-implement CAPTCHA feature, the owners got plenty of spam.

So many kudos, thanks, and a tip of the hat to Coffee Cup Software! Check them out, not just for Web Form Builder but also for all of their software products.

MVPS HOSTS file for July available now

The MVPS HOSTS file for July is available now. Do yourself a BIG favor now and download it and install it. This one action can help keep you from becoming infected with one of those ROGUE programs that are so widespread these days and about which I write so often. You can download the new HOSTS file here:

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Remember to update and run a Spybot scan before you do the install.

Also, if you have not run the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool yet this month, this might be a good idea to do that. Remember to run a FULL scan.  (START/RUN/MRT).

For those of you who may be new to this HOSTS file thing, I once wrote up instructions on how to download and install the MVPS HOSTS file. There were 5 blog posts that cover the subject, the and first is at:

http://pcdocsblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/hosts-file-post-1.html

If you go to the first post you'll find the other 4. I think I wrote them up on 5 consecutive days.

Also, for those of you who are not familiar with the HOSTS file, please note that I consider it a very essential part of a good baseline security package I hope most of my readers have implemented by now. To review my recommended baseline security package, consisting of all FREE programs, check this out:

http://pcdocsblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/security-baseline-revisited.html

Airbnb Raises $112 Million for Vacation Rental Business

This is a very interesting new business and web site. I heard about it recently and immediately added my Maine rental cabin to their site. It is a new option for those who own rental properties. It is of particular interest to me because this summer rental season has not been the best for traditional second home owners who expect commitments from prospective renters in terms of weeks, not days. This summer has brought with it a dearth of those traditional renters, and more and more I am getting inquiries for 3 or 4 day weekend types of rentals.

It also opens up a whole new market. Listers can offer traditional B&B type listings for a room or two in their own homes, whereas heretofore they never considered that, or there was no way to advertise such offerings at no or low cost.

Airbnb offers no cost listing services on their web site, so I was immediately interested.

My traditional web site for renters

The Airbnb web site

Finally, my listing on Airbnb

Even if you have never thought of renting out a room in your home for a night or your second home for a few days, take a look at this possibility. We all can use a few extra dollars these days!

Slow week

What a hot one it is! I am taking a few days off from blogging. I hope everyone is managing, in one way or another, to keep cool.

Malwarebytes Notches 100 Million Downloads, Toots Its Own Horn

I am very happy to see this news. Good for Malwarebytes. These companies that provide us so much good and free at that, deserve our attention and praise. As you know by now, Malwarebytes is one of my highly recommended (free) programs for the detection and removal of malware.  See this June 2011 post of mine for a review of my recommended security baseline, Security Baseline revisited.

I must say, however, that these days whenever I am called to clean up a malware situation, my number one tool to identify and remove malware is the Superantispyware Portable tool.

  Malwarebytes Notches 100 Million Downloads, Toots Its Own Horn

There are lots of pluses to Google’s new social networking site

I got myself a Google+ account a few days ago. As with most things Google comes out with, I tread lightly until I am sure I know what I am doing. I have no real experience yet, and I am not interested in yet another "time sink", as Hiawatha Bray, the author and Boston Globe Staff Writer says below. I have 8 invitations. If you'd like one, please write me.

"I thought Google was supposed to make our lives simpler. Instead, the giant Internet search service has come up with Google+, an impressive new social network that is rapidly becoming another time sink in my too-busy life.

It was easy to ignore Google’s earlier social network efforts. The Orkut service did fine in Brazil and India, but nowhere else. Last year’s Google Buzz began by violating the e-mail privacy of its users and went downhill from there.

But Google+, which launched on a trial basis a couple of weeks ago, has the makings of a first-rate social platform. Google is expanding the service slowly, mostly by invitations from those of us who have already gotten in, so it may take you awhile to score a ticket."

There are lots of pluses to Google’s new social networking site

25 Ways To Ditch Your Cable Bill

I view this as a timely aticle, the title anyway. Cable rates sure are getting to be outrageous. Anyway, maybe we all can find at least one tip (out of 25) that will help a little bit.

25 Ways To Ditch Your Cable Bill

Windows XP is a Dead OS Walking

I got scared when I saw the title of this Maximum PC article, but no, nothing has changed. Windows XP will still be supported by Microsoft through April 8, 2014, as we all have known all along. I don't know about the rest of you, but my Windows XP hardware, that is the machines I use to run Windows XP, is getting old and tired. It is entirely possible that I personally may abandon it sooner than the final date. If you or I are lucky enough to keep it going until 2014, it's not like our machines will stop working. It's just that Microsoft will no longer provide updates after that date. Ho-hum.

By the way, I will agree with anyone that Windows 7 is as good as or better than Windows XP. Who knows, however, what the name of the replacement will be in 2014?

Windows XP is a Dead OS Walking (For Reals This Time)