7 Top Firewall Programs To Consider For Your Computer’s Security

Windows built-in firewall is, in my opinion, lame compared to the free programs available to us and this article describes them well. If you don’t understand what a firewall is or why you need one or how to use yours, have a short read on this page.

Something to discuss at a coming meeting perhaps? 

For example if you are reading a page and would like to search quickly Control-k will move the cursor focus to the search box in the upper right of Firefox. In addition, while in that focus hitting F4 or Alt-up-arrow or Alt-down-arrow will change the search engine selection.

Check out the link above and see how many of the hotkeys listed are new to you.

Hope to see you at the cafe Monday!

Hotkeys

Perhaps this week we should look at options to this problem and what we can do about it. Adobe has been under attack by Apple refusing to let its iPad use Flash, perhaps this is a reasonable concern.

Hope to see you all at the cafe Monday.

-=Larry=-

I’m always looking for ways to have meetings, webinars, with everyone in a manner that would let us have folks at the cafe, at home or work, anywhere be able to join us and share. To make that work I require our method to include use of Linux and most of us require Windows, 7, XP, and a few of us need Mac support.

Yuuguu.com may make this work for us and this week, next Monday April 5, 2010, I suggest everyone visit this site,  download and install their software and create an account. Then at  5:30 we all start it, find each other through our Internet Messenger accounts, chat or (if you have free long distance) use the Yuuguu telephone conference call.

If there are support questions that member can show us their screen and we can all commiserate together or maybe find a solution.

If you need more explanation have a look at this video or Google ‘Yuuguu video’ and see more.

How To Use Yuuguu For Simple, Free Screen Sharing

One of the things Windows PCs need is to be defragmented regularly as the fragmented files will begin to slow the computer’s ability to read large files quickly. I keep watch on Gizmo’s Freeware page and noticed this software just moved to the top of their recommendations for defragging. Consider keeping this in your Tools/Utilities of your XP and up Windows boxes.

A suggestion from Larry Cotton. 

If there seems to be interest we will setup a conference call for the folks not at the cafe. Call or write us ahead of time if you are interested in this tomorrow.

-=Larry Cotton=- webmaster@epcug.net

Just as an FYI, I Googled ‘speeding up computer’ and got 117,000,000 hits.
Then I Googled ‘speeding up windows computers’ and got 114,000,000 hits.  In addition to the help that’s available on the Web people within the club like
Larry, Gary, Zener, Kelly nd Eric as well as guest speakers from local techs to Microsoft have all discussed the topic nearly endlessly.  The point I’m trying to make is that in spite of all that’s been done it’s become obvious to me that there will always be new people, new computers and new problems.

In that vein I’d like to start some sort of interactive blog or topic on our
Website or something similar that can be continually referred to and
updated.  Now, I know most of you have probably already deleted this e-mail and that even those who wrote in on the topic are probably on to bigger and better things by now so I’m not going to go too far our of my way to do this and I’m going to try to keep my expectations about how interactive it might
become realistic.  And, while I’m at it, I might mention that I know, that I
can’t come close to providing the kinds of information that’s already
available and/or even come close to providing the expertise that others in
the club can and do offer.  Instead what I can do is tell you what I do and maybe, at the same time, get some suggestions on how I can do what I do
do or don’t do better.

Anyway, watch this space.  To begin with I’m going to start off by trying
to address backing up our computers.  Everyone needs a way to back up their
current installs, files, pictures, etc.

As a little bit of an aside, as I was leaving last weeks workshop, I
happened a crossed a national radio program that had something to do
computers on either one of the local stations or on one of the two public
broadcasting stations that are available in the area.  It sounded like it
might be a weekly program and these two fellows were real geeks.  It seemed
like if anyone knows about this stuff these guys probably know it too.  I’d highly suggest you look for it.

Back to backing up our computers, quickly, there are a lot of options.
Everyone is talking (or maybe advertising) Internet backup systems.  It may
be a good option, I don’t use one and I don’t know anything about them.  One
of the fellows on this national program made the point that if you have an
average speed Internet connection, an average speed computer and one of
these new 500 Gig hard drive’s – it could take up to 129 days to back up
your computer using one of these services.  He also pointed out that with
average use you’d be adding information faster that you’d be backing it up
so you’d never have the kind of backup that they talk about.  I guess
I should say that I think that’s what he said.  I also think he went on to
say that with a faster connection, a faster computer and less info to back
up, you could cut that down to maybe 30 days.

As I said, these Interned based backup options might be a good idea but I
like the idea of having a local current back up to work with and that is
what I’m going to be trying to discuss here in the near future.  In the mean
time, let’s try to make sure your back up systems are, up, running and ready
to go? 

Questions?

More soon,

John

Sumo Paint :: Online Image Editor :: Home

We had a great time last week just doing problem solving, but the consensus after the meeting was to try to do the graphics demo we had planned weeks ago. So this week for sure we will watch ways to ‘tune up’ photos and just plain have fun with graphic editors online.

For years graphic editing had been the ‘Mac” thing, Mac’s had more memory than PC’s and tended to crash less so folks in the know used them and software programmers wrote for them and the best graphic programs were Mac. But as PC’s improved and programming advanced these same programs became available for PC’s. Coreldraw for vector images and Photoshop for bit images became the standard, but they are expensive.

Now there are some very good Open Source alternatives, Gimp for bit images and Inkscape for vectoring and there are versions (ports) for Windows PC’s, Mac’s and Linux operating systems. If you really want practise graphic editing I recommend these programs. (And I recommend the commercial programs if you have the money.)

The latest advancement is now ‘Online’ programs that do the functions of the editing programs from in our web browsers. No need to install a program on our hard drives and not even to store our images. Websites now offer both from any browser, any computer, wherever we are we can access our work and edit it. And this will be our demo this coming Monday using the site linked at the start of this post, Sumo Paint. Come join us and learn what is available.

If you want a look in advance visit their site and view the video and read about its Features and FAQ’s.

If you want to see other sites with similar features check these out:

• Photoshop.com
• Splashup.com
• Pixlr.com
• Picnik.com
• Aviary.com

Another great review of these sites is at Lifehacker.com, let me recommend it as well.

Update: I can’t believe what is available these days! Just while writing this post I rediscovered Aviary.com. I’d looked at this before and not understood it all, but on second glace today I found it to be incredibly complete. So it and its tutorial videos will be part of our show.

Note to John – remember to bring the projector, this will be a good chance to make good use of it!