Disposable Email Address – What Is It Good For?

Posted on June 22, 2009 by wjimenez275

Filling out online forms these days is often times an invitation for disaster. Most of the form is okay, until you get to the part where you’re asked for your email address. Depending on the site, once you fill in that field, you’re setting yourself up for spam, even though the site says it protects your privacy.

That’s where a disposable email address comes in handy. Yahoo Mail Plus, $19.99/year, offers what it calls “AddressGuard“. “It lets you create disposable email addresses to use whenever you don’t want to give out your real Yahoo! Mail address, but when you do think you’ll probably want to receive what this source sends you—a receipt, or an invoice, or some other valid communication. Yahoo! AddressGuard directs messages sent to these addresses into your Inbox so you can see them.

You can create many alternate addresses and access them all from your Yahoo! Mail Plus account. If any of your disposable addresses starts getting spam, you can just delete that address.

If you don’t have, or don’t want to have a Yahoo! address, Anonymizer Nyms, $19.99/yr, is a tool that allows you to create and destroy alias email addresses in an instant. Anonymizer Nyms shields your real email address by allowing you to create a unique Nyms (disposable, email alias) every time you need to provide an email address or send an anonymous email. Anonymizer Nyms allows you to send email anonymously since Nyms email aliases can’t be linked to you. One click turns a Nyms alias address off to stop spam instantly.
You can use a different Nyms alias for every site you visit or correspondent you email.
All emails from your Nyms account are delivered to your real email account. You can set your Nyms addresses to auto-expire after a period of time you choose. (Taken from www.anonymizer.com)

Google mail doesn’t offer disposable addresses per se, but there is a way to set up aliases and filter the mail. There’s a great article on it here.

To sum up, a disposable email address is great when you want to sign up for something online, or when you need to give your email address to someone, and you want the ability to delete that address if it starts getting hit with a lot of spam. The email sent to the disposable address will be delivered to your regular email address but will identified as from the alias email so you’ll know which address is getting spammed. You protect your main email address and have the ability to control spam, by deleting the alias/disposable address when it starts to get hit.

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Computer injuries on rise, youths most at risk: study by AFP: Yahoo! Tech

Posted on June 9, 2009 by wjimenez275

WASHINGTON (AFP) –

Blurry vision and wrist pain are among the well-known health perils of computer use, but a study released on Tuesday shows a rise in previously overlooked injuries due to computer equipment falling over.

Researchers found a 732-percent rise in “acute computer-related injuries” from 1994 through 2006, double the 309-percent increase in household computer ownership over the period, according to a study in the July issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Young children are particularly at risk, it said.

Data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database showed that over 78,000 such injuries, including large numbers of head injuries due to toppling computer monitors, were treated in US emergency rooms in the 13-year period.

Children under five had the highest injury rate, with the most common cause being tripping or falling, according to researchers from Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Older children under 10 and seniors over age 60 also had elevated injury rates.

More than nine in 10 injuries occurred in the home, the Journal reported.

“Future research on acute computer-related injuries is needed as this ubiquitous product becomes more intertwined in our everyday lives,” Lara McKenzie of the hospital’s Center for Injury Research and Policy said in a statement.

Monitor-related injuries surged in the first years of the study, from 11.6 percent of cases in 1994 to a peak of 37.1 percent in 2003. By 2006 the figure had dropped to 25.1 percent, as heavier cathode ray tube monitors were steadily replaced with lighter and easier-to-lift liquid crystal display monitors.

via Computer injuries on rise, youths most at risk: study by AFP: Yahoo! Tech.

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Filtering Incoming EMails

Posted on May 20, 2009 by wjimenez275

Have you ever waited for an email from someone and it got lost in all of the other email in your inbox, or worse yet, while cleaning out your inbox, you accidentally deleted an email that you had wanted to save?

Of course, you can create folders in your email program and drag the emails you want to save to the folders to keep them, but what if you could setup your email program  so that when mail comes in from certain individuals, or mail comes in with a certain subject, it automatically gets filtered to an email folder and stays out of your inbox. I have a filter for some mail from marketers that I automatically send to my deleted items folder so I never have to look at it. Others, from family members, that automatically go to a “Family” folder. Some friends have their own folders where their email gets delivered to. Some folders receive newsletters that I’ve signed up for.

Every popular email program allows filtering of some sort. You can setup filters for almost anything you receive. Not only does it keep your inbox clean, it sorts and separates your email so it’s easier to find.

I’ve included a link to a pdf file that lists the email programs Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, Outlook Express and Outlook, and described how to set up the filters. You can find it here. If you are using an email program that is not listed, please let me know and I’ll find out for you how to do it.

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Evernote – Every Time to Organize Everything

Posted on May 8, 2009 by wjimenez275

Well, almost everything.

Several years ago I started using Evernote on an occasional basis to save bits of information I ran across on the web. As time went on, I found that I was using it continually. For those times when you’re surfing the web and you find websites that you’d like to go back to  but don’t want to bookmark them, or those articles that have a quote you want to copy but don’t want to open notepad or a word processor to copy it to, or, in my case, fixes for different computer ailments that I need to keep handy, Evernote is the program to use. It’s compatible with Windows and the Mac.

With Evernote, capture what you like, find it when you want.

(Taken from the Evernote site)

Things to capture:

  • Tasks and to-dos
  • Notes and research
  • Web pages
  • Whiteboards
  • Business cards
  • Scribbles
  • Snapshots
  • Wine labels
  • Even Twitter messages

And then find them all any time across all the computers and devices you use. And it’s free.

How to get stuff into Evernote

Memorable stuff is always happening, so we’ve created lots of ways for you to get that stuff into Evernote:

Create: Create new notes using desktop, web, and mobile versions of Evernote

Snap: Take a snapshot using your camera phone or webcam. We’ll even recognize the text in the image.

Clip: Clip entire webpages, screenshots, and just about anything else you can copy

Drag-and-Drop: Drag and drop content into the desktop clients for Mac and Windows

Email: Email notes directly into your account using your personalized email address

Scan: Scan receipts, recipes, tags, brochures, and anything else into Evernote

Record: Record audio wherever you are and listen to it whenever you want

Tweet: Send Twitter messages into Evernote by following @myEN

You can even install Evernote on a flash drive and take it with you. I highly recommend this program and once you start using it, you’ll find it invaluable as well.

http://www.evernote.com/

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How Can I Shorten Long Website Addresses?

Posted on April 28, 2009 by wjimenez275

On occasion, you will need to copy a website address into an email, or even worse, into Twitter. I say worse because Twitter only allows 140 characters and some website addresses that you want to share can take up most of that. As for pasting a website address into an email, depending on where you put it, it could wrap onto a second line and then when the recipient clicks on the shared link, it doesn’t pick up the entire link and they don’t get to benefit from the fantastic page you wanted to share.

When those situations arise, there are a couple of sites that will take the long address (URL) and shorten them. The one I use is called TinyURL. Just paste the website address in the top box,  click on the make tinyurl button, and then copy the resulting short url into Twitter or your email.  SnipURL is another site that does the same thing. Bit.ly is another that is really popular with Twitter and Facebook users. Definitely look at it as well.

Once you start using these programs to shorten your website addresses, you’ll find other reasons to use them besides sharing email links and Twitter.

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Google fixes severe Chrome security hole | Webware – CNET

Posted on April 23, 2009 by wjimenez275

Google released a new version of its Chrome browser Thursday to fix a high-severity security problem.

The problem affects Google’s mainstream stable version of Chrome and is fixed in the new version 1.0.154.59 (download). Google has built Chrome so it updates itself automatically with no user intervention, though the software must be restarted for the new version to run.

The security problem, reported April 8 by Roi Saltzman of the IBM Rational Application Security Research Group, allowed cross-site scripting attacks. Such methods can make a Web browser process unauthorized code such as JavaScript, enabling a variety of attacks, including impersonation or phishing.

Mark Larson, Google Chrome program manager, described the problem this way in a blog posting Thursday:

An error in handling URLs with a chromehtml: protocol could allow an attacker to run scripts of his choosing on any page or enumerate files on the local disk under certain conditions.

If a user has Google Chrome installed, visiting an attacker-controlled Web page in Internet Explorer could have caused Google Chrome to launch, open multiple tabs, and load scripts that run after navigating to a URL of the attacker’s choice. Such an attack only works if Chrome is not already running.

via Google fixes severe Chrome security hole | Webware – CNET.

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Learn a Foreign Language 10 Words at a Time

Posted on April 19, 2009 by wjimenez275

Have you ever wanted to learn a foreign language but can’t find the time to take a class or listen to CD’s? At Learn10.com you can have 10 new foreign words and their english translation sent to your email every day. Learning 10 new words a day will build your vocabulary very quickly. You can choose from: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish & Welsh.

http://www.learn10.com

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Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip

Posted on April 16, 2009 by wjimenez275

Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip

By Michael Lasky

An old urban myth claims that the microprocessors used in PCs and other consumer electronics are designed to fail within days or weeks of their warranty expiration.

For tens of thousands of people who bought Dell and HP notebooks whose motherboards fried — often a few weeks after their warranty expired — there’s nothing mythical about it.

The cause of the machines’ fried motherboards is an overheating Nvidia graphics chip. The failure rate is so huge that Nvidia had to take a $196 million charge against earnings in the second quarter of its 2008 fiscal year in anticipation of the reimbursements that would result from the faulty GPU.

What’s particularly scandalous, though, is how HP and Dell first handled the deluge of complaints from customers with notebooks that failed after their warranties expired. The companies either charged the customers (victims?) for repairs or refused service because the systems were past the warranty period.

Even worse, HP and Dell continued to sell notebooks with the same Nvidia chip long after the companies were aware of the problem. (Ultimately, Nvidia released a new version of the GPU that didn’t cause overheating.)

Unwary consumers who purchased the affected notebooks — no doubt based in part on the heady reputations of the vendors — were left in the lurch when their PCs failed, which usually occurred after 18 months or so. The purchasers had no recourse except to yell and scream at clueless tech-support reps.

When the heat from consumer complaints became as hot as the faulty Nvidia chip, HP and Dell relented and published a list of defective model numbers on their Web sites. Dell extended the standard one-year warranty to two years for the systems they identified as having the problem. HP offered a 24-month warranty extension for the specific issue.

However, instead of issuing a recall — as you would expect in such a clear case of a defective part — the vendors instead merely offered a BIOS upgrade. The “patch” for the affected notebooks made their fans run continuously in an attempt to lower the GPU-induced heat, which was cooking the motherboards onto which the chips were soldered.

This “fix” merely extended the time before the motherboards finally burned out while simultaneously devouring the machines’ battery life — sort of like putting a Band-Aid on a coronary. Of course, notebook purchasers became further inflamed by the power drain on their systems due to the constantly running fan.

via Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip.

To see if your Dell laptop could have this issue and is eligible for the extended warranty, click here

To see if your HP laptop could have this issue and is eligible for the extended warranty, click here

Filed under: Instructional, PC Maintenance, PC Tips and Tools | 2 Comments »

Changes to Apple’s iTunes prices take effect

Posted on April 8, 2009 by wjimenez275

Apple Inc., on Tuesday, began selling some of its most-downloaded songs for $1.29 apiece.

Apple said in January that it would stop selling all individual songs for 99 cents each and begin offering three tiers: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29.

Recording companies pick the prices. The main iTunes page advertised collections of 69-cent songs that included “London Calling” by The Clash and “Monkey” by George Michael.

Other songs from the same albums and artists remained at 99 cents.

Apple also did away with copy-protection technology known as digital-rights management, or DRM, allowing customers to play more songs on devices other than Apple’s own iPods.

Without DRM, the songs can be copied to any number of CDs, computers and music players, as long as those devices support the AAC encoding format Apple uses.

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Fear of viruses could be causing PC attacks: report by Reuters: Yahoo! Tech

Posted on April 8, 2009 by wjimenez275

Computer users’ growing fear of worms and viruses could be behind a recent spike in attacks on PCs via bogus security software, according to a Microsoft Corp report published on Wednesday.

As the Conficker worm and other malicious software — known as malware — have grabbed headlines, more computer users have been looking for security programs online, some of which turn out to be agents for viruses themselves.

Out of hundreds of millions of PCs monitored by the world’s largest software maker for its twice yearly Security Intelligence Report, seven of the 25 top security threats came in the form of fake security programs.

In the last six months of 2008, Microsoft said it cleared 4.4 million PCs of the most successful bogus security program, which goes under the name of Win32/Renos.

That is a 67 percent increase over the first half of 2008, said George Stathakopoulos, head of product security at Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group.

Fear of Conficker “could be a part of it,” said Stathakopoulos, explaining the sudden jump in attacks from what Microsoft calls “rogue” security software, or “scareware”.

According to the report, more security-conscious consumers are being tricked by insistent or alarming pop-up warnings into paying for protection which, unknown to them, is actually malware designed to steal personal information.

The phenomenon of “scareware” is a headache for bona fide security software makers such as Symantec Corp, McAfee Inc and Trend Micro Inc.

But these companies in turn have played a role in raising fears about malware such as Conficker, and have reaped a windfall from worried computer users buying their products.

Conficker, a program that works its way into a PC and allows it to be controlled remotely, is believed to have infected millions of PCs, but no significant disruption has yet occurred.

The report, and guidance on how to avoid viruses, is available at http://www.microsoft.com/sir.

via Fear of viruses could be causing PC attacks: report by Reuters: Yahoo! Tech.

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