RECOMMENDED: PAYTRUST

Monday, June 14, 2010

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2010/06/14/the-rewards-of-routine-maintenance/

The Rewards of Routine Maintenance

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I used to make fun of my cousin, Nick, for this. Nick has tens of thousands of dollars in the bank, yet he’s always getting late fees for things like the electric bill. “What the heck?” I asked him once. “How can this be possible?” He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I get the bills in the mail, put them on the table, and then I forget about them. They get buried under other mail. It’s only three or four months later that I find them again.” This used to baffle me, but now I understand.

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May I make an unusual suggestion? (It’s unusual for me. Not that I’m making a suggestion. I am after all a “know it all” and never leave a suggestion unexpressed. — “That’s supposed to be a joke, son.” Yosemite Sam — I try ONLY to suggest things that are free. This ain’t free.)

PAYRUST

It costs about 15$/month. For this, they will receive your bills by USMAIL or over the net and put it in your “inbox”. It can automatically “action” your bills; paying them in full or in part. And, it emails you weekly summaries, reminders, and such. You pay them on their site and they send the checks or e-payments.

All very organized.

I recommend it highly. Especially if you’re disorganized, travel a lot, or have psych issues with bills in the mail.

It’s a great service.

At the end of the year, they will send you a CD of your stuff for 20$. It’s all very useful.

And, I recommend it. Highly.

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RECOMMENDED: OpenDNS

Saturday, June 12, 2010

http://www.opendns.com/

Rock-Solid Security

   * Web Content Filtering

   Cloud-based, award-winning Web content filtering from OpenDNS with more than 50 categories of content. No appliance necessary. Effective against proxies, P2P, Web 2.0, adult and more.

   * PhishTank Anti-Phishing

   Industry-leading anti-phishing powered by PhishTank, the most authoritative source of phishing data on the Internet. Protects your network, organization and its employees from fraudulent phishing scams.

   * Malware Site Protection / Botnet Protection

   DNS layer security protects the most vulnerable level of your network against the latest threats, including viruses, worms and zero-day vulnerabilities.

   * Whitelist / Blacklist

   Lets you decide where your users can navigate on your customized Internet. Whitelist-only functionality available.

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TECHNOLOGY: Printers with e-mail addresses

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2010/06/hp-introduces-printers-with-e-mail-addresses-cloud-access.ars

HP introduces printers with e-mail addresses, cloud access
By Casey Johnston

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Hewlett-Packard has announced a new line of printers designed to work directly with smartphones and cloud services without the need for a computer intermediary. The printers are designed to take print jobs that are e-mailed to them or uploaded to a cloud service they can access. HP hopes the increased accessibility will encourage the use of printouts, as files can increasingly be carried on a single pocket device.

The new range of printers have Web access, either wired or wireless, removing the need for a print server or connection to a computer. They have touchscreens and e-mail addresses, and can print documents that are e-mailed to them from any source, as well as items from Web services like Google Docs. Users can schedule print jobs on the printers and set up regular print runs of their documents, like weekly menus or itineraries.

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(1) SPAM! Can you think of junk mail faxes? How long do you think it will take for “Dr (Mrs.) Faith Zenwakolo, a dying woman who has decided to donate what I have to charity through any thoughtful and selfless someone” to guess what the email address is? Or whatever the complicated “security structure” that’s put in place to “protect” it. Wanna bet you’ll get HP advertisements?

(2) I want to print a sensitive document to my HP printer. Email? Unless it’s encrypted — in transit and at each place of residence — and the User controls the keys, and there’s no backdoors.

(3) And is there storage on the printer? How does it get erased?

Seems like a lot of questions!

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RANTING: Opened sold as new

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Went to WalMart to get a smaller table and cheap printer.

Had some “excitement” with the old lady, but that’s another story.

Got the printer home! It was only 40$. (Yeah, I know they screw you on the ink.)

And, the printer doesn’t work.

It’s been used and repackaged.

I knew it when I opened the box. The plastic around it was not like a factory seal.

The contents aren’t right. Stuff is missing. And the cartridges are either gone or in the machine.

I’m pissed that this is another example of a return sold as new. I didn’t think WalMart did that. I know Officemax, Staples, and Office Depot do.

And it had a very complicated anti-theft device around it. So that means the Store has to have done it!

Back it goes today.

Very disappointing WalMart. I thought you were above that. At least Best Buy has an open box sale area and you know it’s not brand spanking new.

Argh!

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SOFTWARE: Trying Safari5 (It’s free!)

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

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Apple today released Safari 5, the latest version of the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser. This release features the new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction, a 30-percent performance increase over Safari 4, and the ability to choose Google, Yahoo!, or Bing as the search service powering Safari’s search field. Available for both Mac and Windows, Safari 5 includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies that allow web developers to create rich, dynamic websites.

*** end quote ***

Downloaded and am trying it now. No science; just feel. Seems snappy. Have the Fox and Chrome. Who needs three browsers?

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SERVICE: Surprise GMAIL CONTACTS has quotas? Who knew!

Monday, June 7, 2010

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Over contacts quota

Because problems can occur when you have an extremely large number of contacts in your Google Account (note that this number includes the people you’re following on Google Buzz), we’ve implemented some quota restrictions. If you take an action that would put you beyond this limit, we’ll show you an error message.

One common reason for having a large number of contacts is having many duplicate entries. We recommend using the merge tools in your Contact Manager to consolidate your duplicates and make room for new additions.

You can also back up your existing contacts by exporting to a CSV file.

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Argh!

Another reason “cloud computing” won’t work. Surprises!

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TECHNOLOGY: Forgery or just a riddle?

Sunday, June 6, 2010

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3892674,00.html

Israeli art detectives crack forgery riddle
Sotheby’s discovers Israel Museum owns exact same painting about to go on auction in Amsterdam
Associated Press
Published: 05.26.10, 14:26 / Israel Culture

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Then Elon checked the fabric. The recently discovered painting was painted on cotton. The museum’s was done on linen, a more expensive material far more likely to have been used by a wealthy painter in Europe than by someone working in a poor city like Jerusalem.

The museum’s painting was the real thing, Elon concluded. The new arrival was the fake.

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Hot stuff! Literally.

You have to admire “technology’s” ability to gather “evidence”.

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HARDWARE: APPLE TIME CAPSULE died. Some backup!

Thursday, June 3, 2010

APPLE TIME CAPSULE died. Some backup!

According to the Apple website, it’s out of warranty.

I’ll take it into the Apple store and see what they say.

Argh!

I’d have expected it to outlive the MacBookAir that I bought at the same time.

Did I say “Argh!”?

I see a “NOTRECOMMENDED” coming up.

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TECHNOLOGY: When IT systems fail silently?

Friday, May 28, 2010

201005281516.jpg

Rofl?

Maybe they need an IT consultant?

May 28th, 2010 @ 1515 EDST

Argh!

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TECHNOLOGY: Diskless Booting; why not cdrom booting?

Monday, May 24, 2010

http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/05/08/0455244/Diskless-Booting-For-the-Modern-Age

Diskless Booting For the Modern Age on Saturday May 08, @05:08AM
Posted by timothy on Saturday May 08, @05:08AM
from the who-needs-moving-parts dept.

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An anonymous reader writes “Ever wonder what happened to PXE? Intel’s popular standard for diskless booting hasn’t been updated since 1999, and has missed out on such revolutions as wireless Ethernet, cloud computing, and iSCSI. An open source project called Etherboot has been trying to drag PXE into the 21st century. One of their programmers explains how to set up diskless booting for your cloud, using copy-on-write to save space.”

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Having had to “clean” more than one machine — freinds, family, workmates, fellow alums, complete strangers (I love helping) — I have really never ever understood why we don’t boot from a CDROM.

Persistent virus infections, hiding in boot records, would be impossible.

Given that a reboot for desktops are relatively rare and for notebooks are infrequent, we could have true “change control”.

Never understood that?

Can you help me out and explain it?

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