Computer Tips -Tech Info

The telegraph brings us this survey which claims that 10:04 PM is the most creative time of day. To contrast that 4:33PM is the least creative time. It’s not clear HOW exactly the survey was conducted, but apparently I would be among the 25% of people that burn the midnight oil working on their ideas… What I find more interesting is that most people lose their creative ideas by failing to write them down!!! (Carry a small notebook with you, you’ll be glad to have it.)

Interestingly I’m writing this as we’re approaching 10:04PM local time!! So, what do you think – what is the most creative time of day? (Comments are Open

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How many online backup solutions ARE there now? Anyway I’ve seen another cross platform solution in JungleDisk. It’s available for Windows/Mac and Linux and uses Amazon.com’s storage as a backend. The software itself is free you just pay for the storage you make use of. (15 cents per GB using Amazon’s S3 service.)

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Adobe has released the new version 10 of Flash Player. What’s notable is that the Linux version is out at the same time as the Windows version. Thanks VERY much to Adobe for making this happen. Linux users missed out on version 8 of Flash player entirely and version 9 was about 6 months later for Linux than for Windows.

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The release candidate for version 0.94.1 of clam antivirus and they are eager for people to get out and test it. There is a new feature in this release called “malware statistics gathering” that will pass along observed malware information back to clamav.net – they hope to be posting statistics on their site. In order to enable this feature it will need to be switched on in your freshclam.conf file.

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For a while with Google’s webmaster tools they’ve reported to you which url’s they get 404 errors when spidering your site. Now with the sitemaps and webmaster tools utility they’ll show you where the link was woohoo…. I’m glad to see that I’ve been running into a few 404 errors from time to time and tracking them usually involves trying to skim through referral logs and it can get a bit messy. Here’s the official announcement.

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This is a question I see quite a bit… in fact I just saw this questoin while browsing the web. Generally it’s NOT a good idea to have more than one antivirus program. Given the low level system access that antivirus software needs to have it can interfere with correctly protecting the system from the viruses as it’s supposed to. It IS possible to have an antivirus program and other software that protects against spyware. You just need to be careful and check out the software you plan to use. I’m starting a list of good virus and spyware removal tools some of which are standalone antivirus or anti-spyware software.

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Good linux format review of the new features and the overall feel (if you can get to it this morning. The main openoffice.org site is down at the moment. New features include a plugin for pdf import, support for the new Microsoft XML docx style file formats (read only). Writer can show several pages at once in the zoomed out view (with editor notes in the margin). Calc can support 4 times the number of columns and has new collaboration features.

Sounds as though it’s a good all around improvement. The speed is about the same as the last version in the 2.x series in their comparison.

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Google Search Insights – a great tool from google that can give you detailed information on what people in different areas are searching for. Find out what the popular search terms are, where they are more popular, etc.

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The days of relying on WPA or WPA2 as your online layer of wireless security may be numbered. A new technique that makes use of NVIDIA’s newer GPU’s to do some of hte processing means that it’s possible to break “forgotten” keys about 100 times faster than was previously possible. This means a key could be broken in days or weeks instead of years. The distributed password recovery software is available here. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about WEP and WPA/WPA2 that we ought to rethink.

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I have started referring to malware more and more lately because the term virus doesn’t exactly describe the pests I see on peoples machines and the terms spyware or adware aren’t doing justice to some of these pests either. (There are many pieces of what I would consider malware that do undesired things that protest vehemently (and technically correct) that they are not spyware.) So, the last week I’ve had my hands full with a machine on the bench that had a bug in it that was like a multi-headed hydra. It’s kind of like Night of the Living dead or one of those Friday the 13th movies… every time you think you’ve got the baddies licked they keep coming back. Hang on this could be a long post….

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