Some of our customers have been complaining about AVG’s update warnings recently.  Sure enough, we’ve also noticed that AVG doesn’t always manage to successfully update its virus definitions every day.  This can be pretty annoying.  The good news is that as AVG always eventually gets the job done, and it’s probably not too dangerous to be a day or two behind on virus definitions.

Still, we’ve come up with a quick guide to make AVG a little less annoying.  Follow these steps to disable the AVG warnings.  This way, you won’t be notified every time AVG can’t do an update.  Caution - use this power tip at your own risk and always pay attention to AVG’s status - you want to take action immediately if AVG does find a virus.

How to disable AVG auto-notifications:

1. Double click on the AVG icon on your desktop or your system tray.
2. Tools -> Advanced Settings

3. Uncheck “Display tray notifications about update.”

Alternatively, you can just disable the main box - “Display system tray notifications.”  But this is a bit dangerous as you could miss important notifications from the Resident Shield.

The biggest environmental impact your PC makes is power.  Every hour your PC is on is more energy burned.  So the number one trick for reducting environmental impact is TURN IT OFF.  If you can turn off your PC at night, you’re already reducing the power consumption by half.

Aside from turning off your PC, it’s a great idea to use Windows and OS X built in power management tools.  For OS X, just go to System Preferences and select Power Management, there you can control how long until the hard drive powers down, the screen goes blank, or the machine goes to sleep.  For Windows, go to the control panel to find similar options.

Some Windows users ask about Standby versus Hibernate.  Techinically Hibernate is a deeper form of sleep, which takes longer to go into and get out of, but saves more power.

A few people have asked about screen savers.  Remember that screen savers do not save energy.  They also are not needed by today’s modern LCD screens.  They’re now officially just for fun.  You can use your power management tools to put your screen to sleep/off, which is best for the environment and your screen.

Finally, don’t forget to buy EnergyStar rated products - this applies to computers, monitors, and most any peripherals.  If you have any thoughts or questions about green computing, feel free to chime in below in the comments.

These guys really scour the Dell.com website carefully.  You can reap the benefit.  Just go to www.gotapex.com when you want some Dell products, and take a look at their listings.  They almost always have a deal on a Dell laptop and a desktop.  They give nice, careful instructions on exactly how to benefit from the discount.

One note: don’t be afraid if they recommend buying a computer from the Small Business section.  Any individual counts as a small business - you are definitely entitled to a Dell Vostro computer.  And speaking of Vostro computers, the Vostro is one of our favorite desktop and laptop models.  If you’d like help configuring one for your business or home, just contact us!

Name: JirboBreak

Price: Free

Type: Game

This is an awesome, free, fun game with unique controls.  Sure, it’s basically BrickBreaker, but this is way more interactive and pretty than anything i’ve seen on other phones.  And this is just the beginning.

Other notable games: Cro-Mag, Cube Runner, MonkeyBall.

Name: Yelp

Price: Free

Type: Information

We love Yelp, and this little App is one of the best ways to access it.  Take advantage of localization - the iPhone’s ability to let applications know where you are.  Yelp will find you restaurants, movies, or any other type of business in whatever area you happen to be in (or search other areas to plan trips, etc.)  I used it to find pizza in Lake Tahoe, burritos in San Francisco, and restaurants in NY.  You can even sort by price or distance, read reviews, or even post your own.

Name: Movies.app

Price: Free

Type: Information

Movies.app makes finding movie times and information as easy as possible.   Just put in your zip code and you can find movies by name or theater.  You can see an impressive amount of information about a movie including length, rating, and full video trailers.  Best of all, movie times are loaded quickly and easily - no more waiting around for web pages to load.  Amazingly useful on the go, possibly even ideal at home.

Name: Pandora Dadio

Price: Free

Type: Media

This is brilliant.  Panorda is one of our favorite websites at the office.  You put in the name of an artist you like, and it creates a custom “radio station” for you.  The station will stream full quality audio to your browser, and mix it in with other similar artists.  It’s got semantic feedback as well - you can give songs the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”, and it will adjust the station accordingly.

Now it’s here for the iPhone.  Wow.  You can stream any music you want, free, straight to your iPhone.  It works perfectly over WiFi.  We haven’t tried it on 3G or EDGE, but it reportedly does work.  This turns your 4, 8, or 16 gigabyte iPhone into an unlimited source of new music.

Also see: Apple iTunes Remote Control.  Use the iPhone as a WiFi remote control for your iTunes library or Apple TV - very cool!

Note: We are still waiting for an application that will allow you to stream your own music collection to your iPhone, preferable without using iTunes.  We’ll let you know if/when it happens.

The Future

This is the tip of the iceberg.  Opening up the iPhone to custom applications is really going to make this device into a landmark in the history of computing.  We’re looking for applications in the future that will let us stream our music, sync our calendar/contacts, access computers remotely, edit documents, play social games, give us turn-by-turn GPS, and more.  Thanks Apple - this one is a true winner.

This is just a quick update for Mac users of Mozy.  Version 1.0 is finally out.  If you’ve been using Mozy, you’ve been using a “beta” (test) version, which was all that was available until now.  We highly recommend the upgrade, which is not yet automatic.  The upgrade will give you more control over upload speeds, and more reliable performance overall.  You can upgrade yourself by following these instructions:

1. Go to www.mozy.com
2. Log in with your email and password
3. Click “download mozy” in the corner
4. Click “download for Mac”
5. Download the file, which is a Universal DMG image.
6. Open the DMG file, and double-click on the installer.
7. Run the installer with all the default options.
8. When the installer is done, unmount it and delete it.

That’s it - you are upgraded to Mozy 1.0.  If you are a PC Mozy user, you have nothing to worry about, you’ve been getting automatic updates all along.

If you don’t have Mozy yet, and you want 2 gigabytes of free backup or $5 for unlimited backup, go to www.mozy.com today and sign up for your copy.

For those of you who are making the switch, especially with Apple’s new Back to School promotion (read: great deals on new Macs for students,) Walt Mossberg (tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal,) has written a really nice article on making the switch to Mac.  He covers some basic but important (and sometimes hard to intuit) aspects of using OS X.  He answers common questions (like “How do I right-click?”) and advanced subjects like keyboard subjects.

Walt’s article is an excellent, short read - you can check it out here.

Some General Tips for Switching from Windows To Mac - Walt Mossberg

Bill, you’ve been a part of it all. You’ve made magic happen, you’ve pissed us all off from time to time, you’ve got your hands into just about every tech industry there is. You’ve created great success stories and miserable failures. You are publicly pitted against your old friend Steve Jobs, but really you two are one in the same.

A few of our favorite Bill Gates memories:

MS-DOS. DOS is nearly forgotten now, having been overshadowed by the GUI and by the leaner, meaner Linux. But for all of you who still use the command line in Windows, for all of you who remember optimizing your autoexec.bat and config.DTs files to squeze out 16k of extra RAM, we raise our glasses and thank you for MS-DOS (even if you did practice some shady business techniques with licensing and PC-DOS.)

Pie in the Face.  As Bill began to emerge as a world figure, he went through one of my personal favotie rights of passage.  For those of you not familiar with it, there is a great history of various groups throwing pies at people of importance, trying to remind us all not to take life too seriously.  A man named Noël Godin got Bill in 1998 in Brussels, and got away with it.  He left this comment “The attack against Bill Gates is symbolic, it’s against hierarchical power itself.”.  Here’s a video:

The XBOX.  Bill’s vision to lead the company into the world of video games was another suprising and successful decision.  I was impressed by the XBOX because of it’s relatively adult-oriented (no, not that kind of adult-oriented) style - the XBOX really doesn’t look like it’s made for kids.  Sure enough, Microsoft got itself right into the mix selling record numbers of video games to the now grown-up video game generation.  By the way, Bill never intended this but the XBOX can be made into an amazing media center.

Internet Explorer.  Once again, Bill drives Microsoft straight into new territory.  At the time of its release, Internet Explorer was a baby next to the goliath Netscape.  Bill had a vision to integrate the web browser right into the operating system, something that not even Apple does today.  This caused a huge barrage of anti-monopoly lawsuits, something MS got pretty used to, and which MS won eventually.  On a personal note, we at Computer Courage much prefer Mozilla Firefox, but we want to recognize Bill and MS the accomplishments of IE.  Internet Explorer brought the internet to the masses, introduced CSS, integrated with video in the pre-flash days (thanks to RealMedia), and made Favorites easy.

Windows Genuine Advantage. Ugh.  By far and away the most annoying thing to ever come out of your camp.  Of course, we all complain about the privacy invasion, the inconvenience, the outages, and the false positives, but most of the complaints probably come from pirates.  The real problem is that the pirates ended up beating the system, leaving only the honest users to suffer.  MS should take cue from their rivals in Cupertino on this one and ditch the copyright protection - trust your users and keep making a good product.

Windows Vista. Yuck.  I’ve already covered this one.

Bill’s Foundation. Bill’s not done yet, he’s off to run his unbelievably altruistic charity, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which will probably do greater good to humankind than any politician, ever.  Thanks for the memories, thanks in advance for wiping the planted of TB, thanks for Windows XP, thanks for all viruses, spyware, driver conflicts, and Windows reinstalls.  Oh yeah, and thanks for the careers.

First off, lets review the types of threats that are out there.  We’re going to work on the basic terms - cookie, tracking cookie, trojan, spyware, and virues.

A cookie is a simple text file that is stored on your computer by a website.  In theory, only the website that left the cookie can read it again.  This allows websites to store some information about their visitors such as your name, your preferences, or shopping cart contents.  Cookies cannot become “viruses” and cannot hurt your computer.  Crafty engineers, however, have discovered ways to create networks of websites that can read the same cookies.  This allows them to track your internet usage across a wide network of sites - hence the name “tracking cookie.”  We first heard of this technology in the late nineties when an ad company, DoubleClick (now owned by Google) started the trend.  Tracking cookies are a bit of an invasion of privacy, but only information you provide to the sites, along with your general browsing patterns, can be revealed.  We appreciate the removal of these cookies by antispyware programs, but the cookies are certainly not a “serious threat.”

Next in line is trojans, aka trojan horses.  Trojans are real, boanfide malicious programs that are sitting on your computer waiting to be run.  A trojan is often disguised as another program (a filesharing program, even an antispyware program.)  When run, these trojans will infect your computer with mailicious code, which can do just about anything depending on the craftiness of the programmer.  Trojans typically will either destroy the operating system and/or files, use your computer to send out spam, or display ads (often pornographic) on your screen.

Spyware refers to a program on your computer that is designed to spy on you.  Technically this includes cookies, trojans, and full blown viruses, as long as the goal is to gain information and/or make money off of your computer, rather than to attack it.  Spyware is commonly passed through trojans in email or attached to packages on filesharing networks.  While spyware technically isn’t out to get you, it has the side-effects of slowing your computer down, slowing your network down, and opening up your computer to other attacks, including mailicous viruses.

A virus, by definition, is a piece of malicious code that replicates itself.  You’ll also hear the term “worm” thrown around, which is much like a virus but often without the malicious aspect (worms are still very dangerous to networks, even if they are only trying to replicate themselves aimlessly.)  A virus is typically considered “worse” than spyware, because it is designed with the specific intention of harming your data or your computer.  We’ve seen viruses prevent Windows from booting, prevent Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook from loading, and attempt to steal private or corporate data.  Worse, rumors have circulated describing viruses which demand a credit card number while threatening to delete all your data by a certain deadline (we’ve never seen this.)

Now that you know what types of threats are out there, it’s time to get yourself protected with free antivirus.  Look out for another article coming soon with information about what to do if you think you have a virus.  And remember that you can contact us anytime if you want professional, paid help with your computer systems, security, or websites.  510-525-2226.

The problem: E-mail was never designed to handle sending large attachments.  Most servers have limits on how large a file you can send.  While those limits have been increasing (Google is up to 10 Megabyte attachments,) it’s still not enough.  Even if your large file is within the allowed attachment limit, it’s still a pain to send files over a few megabytes by email - it often locks up Outlook or your web browser while the file is transferred.

The answer: A slew of companies have come to the rescue in the last few years to handle this.  They provide applications and websites that let you upload the file to a server, and then send a small, attachment-free email to your recipient informing them that the file is available to download.  We’ve tried a few of these, and recently have been impressed by DropSend.

DropSend is free.  It is Mac and PC compatible.  It lets you keep a file history for easy re-sending.   It has a desktop upload tool for really big files.  It just works.

Give DropSend a chance by visiting their website.

For instance: Carrie Fischer.

Carrie Fischer was in Star Wars with Harrison Ford.
Harrison Ford was in The Fugitive with Tommy Lee Jones.
Tommy Lee Jones was in Batman Forever with Val Kilmer.
Val Kilmer was in Heat with Robert Dinero.
Robert Dinero was in Sleepers with KEVIN BACON.

Well the game has been translated into a much more larger field - wikipedia.  In “Six Degrees of Wikipedia” the player is challenged to find a link between any two entries with less than 6 wikipedia links.  Of course the game is played by a computer, notably Stephen Dolan’s webserver.  What’s amazing is that it is hard to find two articles separated by more than FOUR entries.

I tried “Corn” and “Korn”.  Easy, only 3 clicks needed (Corn -> Austia -> Rock Music -> Korn)

Next I tried “Steve Jobs” and “Tomatoes”.  Even easier, only 2 clicks.  (Steve Jobs -> Fruitarianism -> Tomatoes).  Fruitarianism!?

I can’t stump it, can you? You can play Six Degrees of Wikipedia here.