Where did I put that photo?????

Now that a majority of people are using digital cameras rather than film cameras we are seeing the cameras come out a lot more. And the cameras are not just being used more (because it is basically free to shoot photos now) but people are also taking a lot more photos. Now you can shoot and shoot and shoot and in the abundance of photos hope you get a good one of Grandma and the grandkids (or that award winning look you always thought you could do).

Well in the process of shooting so many photos you are also ending up with a problem. How to find that photo you took 9 months ago at Bob's birthday party. You have seen it I am sure.... all the photos are named something like DSC101327.jpg or some other weird name. And there is no way to find it by filename then. So now you are wading through hundreds if not thousands of those tiny thumbnails. Talk about an impossible task! Oh there is also the problem that if you just dump them all in the same folder then the computer starts having a hard time even organizing them if you sort by file date or to display all the thumbnails.

So what is the solution to this? Well the best way I have found to handle it is to get organized when you unload the photos from the camera. There are several ways to do this but over time here is what I have come up with. Under the folder I store all my photos I have created sub folders named the particular year, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and so forth. Then when I pull the photos off the camera I will put them in folders below that with the format YYYY-MM-DD subject name for the folder. So like my daughters birthday on the 13th of January went in the 2009 folder in a subfolder called 2009-1-13 Shoshannas birthday this year. The other thing I do then is to have the software I pull the photos off the camera rename the photos with the same format as the subfolder and then just add -001 on up to the photos. I still will have to look through the thumbnails... but now I know right where the proper group is and only have maybe 50 to 100 or a little more to go through and not thousands.

So give it a try the next time you unload your camera onto your computer. A lot of the software that does the transfer will make easy work of this. I use Photoshop Elements and it does a great job. The standard Windows software for transfering from camera does a good job too. If the program you use to transfer the pictures from your camera does not enable you to rename them as they come across then look for alternatives. Next post I will also tell you about a really cool utility I found for doing mass updates to file names and such.

Safe web browsing.. or protecting from malware

I have had a lot of times where people want me to help them with a totally messed up computer. You know, the computer that is atrociously slow because of pop-ups and other junk that is messing it totally up. The biggest common denominator of all of these people is they all were on Windows AND used Internet Explorer (IE). There is a bit of history in the security problems with IE. It started with Active X and has gone downhill since.

Now I am not going to bore you with all the technical details of the problems with IE. Suffice it to say they are there. If you use IE for all your web browsing you WILL have problems. Just count on it.

Now one of the good solutions is to move to using a Mac instead of Windows. Now for you Linux geeks, yes that would work too. But my position is that Linux is not ready for the average household. So put your flamethrowers away. I will not even listen (La la la la I am not listening to the Linux pontifications). The Mac has a whole ton of benefits. I very well might expound on those one of these days. But for the point of this argument, yes you will get rid of malware problems.

Of course most of you will not want to move from Windows. There is another fix however. The answer is don't use IE. There are several really good alternatives that will keep you away (for the most part) from the crushing problems of malware. I and my household have used these for years and we have almost no problems with malware. I cannot recall ever having a friend contact me to help with a dorked up machine where they use something other than IE all the time. So here are your options.

Firefox- this one has been around for a really long time. I love it and it is the one I use almost all the time. There are some awesome add ons you can get for it too. It is free and avalable from www.firefox.com for download.

Safari - this is a Windows port of the Apple Mac browser. Initially it had some problems, but it is maturing nicely. It is really fast and is very slick looking (it is from Apple after all). It is available from the Apple website.

Chrome - this one is written by people at Google. It is suppose to be the fastest, most stable, and safest of the options. It has some real holes at first, but these have been fixed for the most part. Chrome is the most spartan of the browsers. It takes a bit of getting used to.

Now here is the deal. You might find a website that will not work on anything other than IE. It does not happen to often, but there are a handful of sites this is true of. You have two options. First, just don't use the site. Send the people a message that you decided to shop elsewhere or whatever. The second is to use IE for just that site. Personally I vote for the site almost every time. And if enough people let these sites know then the programmers will stop using those program calls that only work in IE.

This brings up one final point that goes well with a rant against IE. A lot of programmers I know that write exclusively for IE say that they really don't care because IE is the majority browser and growing. Well the funny thing is that the trend is changing. The number of people using IE has started to drop significantly. There are a lot of reasons, including wonderfully that the Mac population is growing very large. The point is that as of December 2008 the percentage of people using IE has dropped to 68% and is still falling. So as more and more people use non-IE solutions then the web developers will be forced to start writing web sites that are industry standards compliant. Take that Microsoft!

Are you backed up???????

Well last time we talked about scams. Something that could cost you a lot of money if you are not careful. Today we will talk about something that if you are mindful could cost you a lot of data, backups. There are things in life that we know we need to do but often don't, or at least not as regularly as we should. Oil changes in the car, balancing our checkbooks, getting our taxes done. These are all things we procrastinate on. Another one is backing up our stuff on the computer. I am as guilty as the next guy, and I work in this all the time.

So anyway, the secret of making backups work is to make it easy. The way most people do backups is to get an external drive and copy data to it. This works, and is pretty easy to setup. But here is the thing. If you are going to do it this way then you should have two drives and then keep one at someone elses house or at work. Then swap them back and forth. You could also use a fireproof safe too. You see where this is going? You don't want to lose both your computer AND your backup in a fire. Also, you want to make sure that if one external drive fails you don't lose your backup. And you could lose an attached hard drive along with your computer if you get like a lightning strike while it is connected or something.

The biggest challenge here is most people don't want to buy two drives. Or when they get to the point that one is full then they start putting some stuff on one and some on the other instead of getting two bigger drives. Also, people will start to take stuff off the main computer thinking "well I have it on the backup drive" but might not get it on both. so now you are like looking for stuff not knowing what is where. So it works, but is a bit of a challenge. Also, if you are using a laptop, like a lot of people do now, you have the issue of needing to be at home to get to your files.

So is there a better solution? Yes there is. There are now two services that I know of that you can do backups on line. They both have a minimal cost monthly, but no limit on the amount you can back up. The initial backup takes a while to get through, but after that it just keeps updating the things you change. And if you are using a laptop you can get to your files no matter where you are at. So let's talk about each service a minute.

The first service is Mozy. I have a good friend that uses Mozy. He chose Mozy because it is the one that will work with both Windows and MacIntosh computers. A Mozyhome account is $5 a month, or if you sign up for a whole year at a time you get a month free. You can also get a free account that will backup 2 GB of data so you can give it a try. When my friend set it up he said it took about a week and a half for it to get everything the first time. He has like 50 GB of data that he backs up. He loves the service. It just runs in the background and he is always safe from data loss now.

The second service is Carbonite. Carbonite is $49 a year. So it is a bit cheaper than Mozy (annual subscription is $54 for Mozy). But you need to sign up for a full year. You cannot do a monthly thing. You can get a 15 day free trial of it though to try first. Also, Carbonite does not currently work with MacIntosh computers. They are working on a Mac version too that is suppose to be out sometime early in 2009. One big difference is that Carbonite does not do external hard drives. So if you use external drives for additional storage then you are not going to get that stuff backed up.

I will say that I like the website for Mozy better. It is better laid out and makes finding information easier. That does give me a little better feeling for the service. I am hoping to set my parents up with Mozy soon so that I won't get that call sometime in the future where they are like "hey our computer died, how do we get all the photos back of the grandkids?" I know it is coming. Everyone sooner or later loses a hard drive. It is one of those when not if things. Oh, and I am going to be setting myself and my wife up too.

OK, with all that said, here are some pointers on backups that are really important to know. First, you don't need to backup everything on your hard drive. You are going to reinstall Windows from scratch if you have a major meltdown of the computer. So that comes off a CD. Also, you need to reinstall all software from scratch. There are a lot of things that get written to the computer when you install something. To make sure everything is out there you must install. So all you really need is your data. In Windows this is typically in your "My Documents" folder. If you have multiple people that use the computer then there is a Documents and Settings folder that has all the peoples "My Documents" folders in. Make sure you use an account that has full rights to everything when you setup the backups. As long as you don't have a rogue program that puts things in a "data folder" below c:\program files\ then you should be OK (bad programmers... you ALWAYS should put data in "My Documents"). So look around sometimes to make sure you don't have any stray data somewhere.

Also, keep in mind that thumb drives will not be backed up at all. If you have data on the thumb drive then you will need to copy it to your hard drive for backup. You should have your thumb drive backed up anyway. They are way to easy to lose.

Scams and more scams!

Well one would think that in 2009 we would not have to worry about telling people about scams. There are so many emails that go out, and so many people that talk about it in the news and on radio that you would think everyone would know how to be careful. Well I have been shown how that is not true. First let me tell you a story and then I will give you some guidelines that are so important to keep in mind to help you keep from getting scammed.

OK... here is my story. I know this family that is struggling a bit right now. You know, more month than money thing. Well the mom, lets call her Susan, gets an email message that she opens and reads. It says they are looking for people to work as mystery shoppers. Now this is not totally a scam yet, but I would not have opened the email. So anyway she answered the email. The people helped "set her up" so she could get paid and all. Not bad yet. But this is where it starts getting interesting (spelled warning lights should be going off all over the place).

They said for her first assignment she was to shop Western Union because they were having complaints about foreign transfers of money (lights start flashing, big red lights). So the instructions were that they would FedEx her a cashiers check for $1500. She was to cash the check (serious warning beepers going off), keep $200 (siren starting to blare), and then wire transfer the remaining $1300 to an address in the United Arab Emirates (people running up now screaming and hollaring not to do it!!!!!).

For those that are in the know already know where this is going of course, but for those uninitiated I will finish the story. She cashes the check and does the transfer. A couple weeks later the check comes back as a fraud.

Sidenote here: Cashier's checks take like a week or two to clear and are often used for scams because of it.

So now she is out the whole $1500 and someone is $1300 richer. Interesting note is that she even felt that it might not be legitimate and so asked the cashier at the bank if the check was good. Personally I put a large fault on the bank. This is a well known scam that has been around for several years at least. One would think that they would have major amounts of training for the cashiers on this and when she asked it should have raised a lot of flags. Actually you would think that the banking industry would be doing something to fix this huge security hole. But I have worked in computers for many years and I have learned that the obvious often escapes management. At least two days later when they wanted her to do a second one she was wise enough to go to the police and talk to them about it. They informed her she had just been scammed and there was nothing they would be able to do about it.

So how do you make sure you don't fall for a scam? Well here are some points to use to evaluate anything that you come in contact with.

1. Anything with a cashier's check is an absolute no no!!!!!
2. Anytime someone sends you "money" to send back a part is an absolute no no!!!!
3. If they make an offer to you without you asking first then it is at least something to be VERY VERY suspicious about.
4. If they are asking you for personal information like social security number, login name, any sort of passwords, credit card numbers or anything else like that and they called or emailed you then DON'T GIVE THEM ANYTHING!!!!!
5. Make sure you enter the web address for all websites correctly. This is especially true for financial sites.
6. You will NEVER get an inheritance from someone in Narobi unless you were originally there and you personally knew them.
   
7. NEVER send money to anyone that contacted you first!!!!
8. No one every gets rich quickly from any sort of financial or business venture that is legitimate. The only get rich quick is the lottery and if you want to throw your money away like that then just send me the cash instead and I will invest it wisely and really truely get rich.
9. If in doubt Google! Take a key word or phrase from any message you get and Google on it and 99% of the time you will find a large number of listings showing it for the scam it is almost certainly is. Google is your best friend.
10. You can also contact your police to ask about suspicious things too.
    

Here is another story for you, this one about giving out personal information. Yesterday my wife got a call on the phone. It was automated. They said that there had been a breach in security at the credit union and they needed to check cards then reactivate them since they had deactivated them on the alert. The message then said to enter the debit card number into the phone. My wife, wisely, just hung up on them. Read point 4 above again if you are wondering why she hung up on them.

So re-read the list above. Print it out and post it next to all phones in the house. Memorize it. Teach it to your kids, escpecially the teens and college age kids. It is amazing how many of them, as tech savvy as they are, will fall for these things. Send the link to this blog to your friends and relations. And most important to remember.....

If you have any thought at all that it might be a scam it almost certainly is!

The Atomic SuperGeek resurrected!

Well it has been years since I have posted. There are a number of reasons for that, but I am not going to go into any of them. During this timeframe though my focus in computing has changed a little bit. I am now focused on computer security, mainly with directory and web security. Going forward this blog will showcase a number of things that I have learned about directory and web security. I will include code samples where appropriate.

I also have done a fair amount of VBScript also. So I will do some posts on that as well. Some of it will be whimsical and some will be more serious and productive. The biggest thing is that we are going to have fun. So get ready for new upcoming posts.