Remember the handspring hand held craze?  Well, if not, then you are not missing much.  Handspring was a company started by ex Palm employees that wanted to take over Palm’s market.  Today, if you don’t have a blackberry or an iPhone, and still have a PDA, chances are that you have a Palm unless it’s old and then it could be a handspring.  Basically, handsprint tried to jump into a market that was already saturated and it didn’t work too well.

Enter Cuil into the search engine market.  Ex-Google employees unleased their website last week with over a billion pages indexed.  That’s impressive but how many of them were so outdated that when they were put together people viewd them with a mosaic browser?  But hey, I thought I would at least give them a shot.  So I put Cuil to the test.  I searched for crossdotnet and hit enter.  I got a page that links to my website.  My friend Randy over at Cross Reflections  I searched for the same thing at Google and my site came up.  So who do you think I think is Cuiler?  Google all the way. 

Besides, Google is a verb now.  Cuil pronounced cool, has been taken for decades so I don’t think they will make it in the dictionary anytime soon.  I give them a year and they will be in the background like dogpile.com and altavista.com.  Some people use them, but Google is and always will be king.

I remember when I was younger, my sister sat in this new thing called a car seat.  It hooked over the front seat which of course was a bench seat and she sat there between mom and dad in this thing that kept her strapped in.  That way if dad got in a wreck, she would not fly off mom’s lap and go through the windshield.

It was new technology and it was wonderful.  Of course nowadays car seats are made differently and they are safer and in most states are required by law.  As technology evolved, people learned how to put that technology to better use.

It’s not much different with computers.  With the advent of Wi-Fi or wireless internet connections and “hot-spots”, hackers have evolved too.  The FBI warned recently that the person sitting next to you at the airport or coffeshop may be a hacker.  They can setup phony networks near known hotspots and when you connect to their network, they can connect to your computer and get loads of information if you have saved it on your computer.  It’s so incredibly easy to steal information from someone’s computer once you get on the same network with that person.  It’s too easy!  Protect yourself.  The best way to protect yourself is to not use Wi-Fi hotspots. Of course, that is just too inconvenient for alot of people.  So the next best thing would be to not use Microsoft Windows.  Of course, that’s not likely to happen with common computer users.  So what can you do if you must use a hot spot and you use windows?

Pray?  Yes, that would help too but basically be smart.  Confirm the connection information with the propietor to be sure you are really on their network.  If you can’t do that, don’t know how or are too shy to ask then at least clear your cache and remove all saved passwords.  If you use IE7 or Firefox 2.2 or above, it should be pretty easy to figure out how to do this.  The first step is click on Tools (firefox) and then clear private data.  Then check your preferences under the edit menu option.  For IE, click on tools and then internet options.  Clear out your personal data and passwords.  But you are still not safe.

Make sure you don’t have personal files on your computer that you don’t want to be seen. If you keep an address book, notes with bank information, email addresses, etc., then don’t use a wi-fi hotspot unless you know it is safe or unless you know how to password protect your documents. But that still isn’t enough.

If you have windows you absolutely must have some sort of internet security with firewall, virus, and spyware protection.  Why? Well if you are on a hacker network, then you will be an easy target without this protection.  If you are on a legitimate network, some hacker may be also.  They don’t need their own networks, they can use the same one you are on and if they can connect to your computer, they can disable your computer in no time.

So what are you to do?  Buy a mac, protect it with the latest mac technology or download a free copy of Ubuntu, do not share anything and when the box comes up that says your password is needed to make changes to your computer, disconnect and get out of there.

Sorry to be such a downer, but I am just looking out for everyone.  Technology is great when it is used properly.  The problem is that too many people don’t use it properly or are not well versed enough to know how to protect themselves.  Also, be sure to see my post about phishing too.

When I hear the phrase home networking with windows, I have to wonder if someone means that neighbors are sharing information by shouting out the window toward the neighbor’s house and that neighbor running across the house to the opposite side and passing the information along.  You know, like a game of telephone but only with homes.  After all, that is how networking operates.  The data you are trying to access is passed from hop to hop along hubs, routers, switches and an internet backbone until it reaches your computer.

Surely the term home networking with windows doesn’t mean using Microsoft Windows?  Does it?  Well, ok, it is true that Windows has a corner on the market as far as home computing goes.  Tis truly a shame that it is so true.  But as time goes on and viruses, spyware, malware, and pop-up ads continue to inundate windows computers because of their lack of focus on security, mac and Linux will soon gather a market share.

Oh and the annoying “Vista needs your authorization…” is a horrible attempt to prevent such maladies.  Ubuntu simply makes you type in your password before anything is changed on your computer.  Why can’t Bill and the boys do that too?

So if you want a home network, get yourself a good router (Belkin not included in that list), some networking cables or wireless adapters and have at least one computer setup with Ubuntu.  It’s easy, it’s fast and it is fun. If you are a windows die hard, then try Kubuntu.  If you prefer the flashiness of Vista, try Ubuntu with Beryl

Buzzwords mean a lot to people that understand them but for others they leave us scratching our heads. A new term flying around these days is Phishing which is pronounced “Fishing” Believe me, given that my name is Phil, I appreciate the play on the PH sounding F, but Phishing is no laughing or joking matter. It’s a serious crime of deception.

If you receive an email from someone claiming that they are your bank, credit card company, email provider, etc. and want you to login to correct a problem or update a profile or whatever it may be, be wary of it. It could be a phishing site. What phishing sites do is get you to a website that looks exactly like your bank, card, email site, etc.  They ask you to login and when you do, they have your username and password and now they can go to the correct site with this logon information and steal your money, your identity, your emails, anything.

Watch out for phishing.  Turn on phishing filters in new web browsers, search Google for the site that comes in the email.  Google will tell you if it is a phishing site or not.  Just be careful.  Bad people prey on unsuspecting good people.  Don’t take the bait and be caught.  Don’t be a phish!

I recently started using Ubuntu and I love it. I started out with Xubuntu on an old laptop with 256meg of RAM and a 40gig HD. I liked it so much that I took some more memory from another laptop that had died and upgraded to 768 and the 80gig HD. It’s an old Toshiba with a celeron M processor but it runs great with Ubuntu on it.

I also put Ubuntu on an old e-machines computer with a 256 and 40 config like the laptop had. My only problem was printing. I have a Lexmark 1185 all in one and no matter how hard I tried, I could not get the scanner to scan, even with Xane or the printer to print. But I didn’t give up. I had an old box running XP so I wrote a little VB app to take advantage of the DDE aspect of Adobe’s acrobat. I am not sure why they don’t have an OCX or API, but DDE works just as well. The app is continually looking in a samba shared folder on the Ubuntu box. If it finds a PDF file, it sends it to Acrobat Reader and prints it out to the default printer. My printer is setup on the old XP box and pretty much only handles printing. I have another XP box that net prints to that printer as well. So I can now print from Windows or Linux across the network to the same printer.

So how do I get the PDF there? I simply setup a CUPS/PDF printer option that I downloaded using Synaptic Package Manager. I had to download a file from Adobe to get it to work, but the install was simple (as is always the case with Ubuntu/Linux)

If you had a similar problem and are interested in the source code or even the exe, I assure you it is clean and safe, leave a reply and I will email it to you with the email address that you registered with.