Tech and life

Do you save passwords in your browser? Have you stored sensitive information on your PC or Mac? Want to track down what stuff you’ve saved and where? Well I’ve come across a program called Identity Finder which will help to track private information like passwords, and credit card and bank account numbers on your PC or Mac. There’s a free version with more limited capabilities which I’m trying out here. In essence, it will only scan your My Documents folder not the entire hard drive, it won’t look for bank account numbers, and won’t go through emails and attachments; you’ll have to buy a licence for the Home or Premium editions for that. The Free edition searches Firefox and IE for hidden passwords. It will also shred or secure your sensitive data by encryption. Here’s a list of comparisons between the different editions.

So I downloaded and ran the Free edition. The scan took 20 minutes to complete and identified a number of sensitive passwords stored away in some files which I had forgotten about. You can scroll down through the results window and even preview the results for certain file types like pdfs and doc files. Although I don’t use Firefox any more, my hidden passwords there were all visible to Identity Finder so I went into Firefox and removed them. It didn’t report anything for Chrome but I do store those passwords in there so I suspect it isn’t checking Chrome at all.

But it was the passwords stored around the My Documents folder which worried me most. I do use LastPass to store my passwords securely so these back up locations storing passwords on my PC should be dealt with securely just in case anyone accesses it – they’re clearly quite easily found.

Identity Finder allows you to shred the files, or more usefully encrypt them. However I was only interested in the list of sensitive files as I use and like the free Axcrypt for file encryption. I’ll use this to encrypt the sensitive files.

I recommend you give Identity Finder Free a try and see what you find on your PC or Mac. You might be surprised. If you store all your sensitive stuff within My Documents and aren’t interested in emails and bank account numbers, it may be right for you. If not, the paid editions search more deeply and have 1-year to 5 year licences with a 40% discount on the 5-year licence.

A few weeks back, I wrote of my frustrations with the recent Google Reader update, particularly the ridiculously wide spacing in list view. Many other bloggers also expressed their dissatisfaction with the update and some suggested alternative feed readers. One very popular suggestion was Feedly. I already knew about it from a post on Blogging Tips back in 2009: Feedly: Blog Reading in Style and I had tried it out then… unfortunately not thoroughly enough. I like to read post titles in list or titles view rather than as a magazine or mosaic layout – I can browse through articles more quickly this way. I didn’t look carefully enough for titles view back then and so persevered with Google Reader. But now people were saying that Feedly does have list view, so I had to look at it again. It does have list view as you can see above, and overall I’m pretty impressed.

It’s easy to get started with Feedly, just load up the extension in your browser then link to Google to import your feeds. I don’t want to do a full review of Feedly – there are plenty of posts out there doing that. Having said that, Feedly has just upgraded to version 8 today with some changes including ‘infinite’ scrolling feeds. There’s a nice summary of the changes on ReadWriteWeb. I’ll just focus on a couple of advantages and disadvantages Feedly has in comparison with Google Reader.

Feedly’s Advantages over Google Reader

1. Choose from a number of different themes. But at the moment, they’re a little dark and some of the fonts a little too small.

2. Nice layout and post title spacing.

3. Marking items as read and changing feed folders is blindingly fast in comparison with Reader. Having said that, the new version of Feedly introduced today has ‘infinite scrolling’ rather than paged views and I find it a little slower to load than before to refresh feeds. One way round that is to just show unread feeds rather than all feeds. To do that go to Change layout shown on the image at the top and select ‘Unread Only’.

4. There are a lot of preferences you can set up to customise Feedly and there are many nice touches which you only discover when working with it. For example, you can mark new posts as read just by clicking on the ‘Unread posts’ shown on the image above – if you can see it (discussed in the Disadvantages).

Feedly’s Disadvantages Compared with Google Reader

1. Can’t filter out posts on the basis of keywords in the post title. Using Google Reader Filter this can be done in Google Reader. Keyword filtering would be a nice addition in Feedly and would have let me filter out all the Black Friday and Cyber Monday posts suffocating my feeds last weekend.

2. Here’s an annoying little thing about Feedly. If you haven’t refreshed the list in a while and you mark the list as read, when you refresh the list all the posts you hadn’t seen will also be marked as read. Google Reader doesn’t do this. You have to remember to Refresh before you mark as read, using the buttons on the right side as shown in the image above.

3. It’s not easy to see the number of Unread posts in your categories because the font size is way to small; and the theme colour can make it pretty much invisible – see above image.

I’m going to contact Feedly on these points and see if they’re considering anything. Having said that, for me the advantages of Feedly outweigh the disadvantages and so I’ll be staying with it. If you use Google Reader and haven’t tried Feedly, I strongly recommend you have a look at it.

I live in the country about 3 km from the nearest telephone exchange so I don’t expect great broadband speeds – the best I get is about 5 to 6Mbps during the day when the load on the network at my ISP and the local load is lower. It drops down to 1 to 2Mbps in the evening when everyone is trying to download or stream media further up the line. So I always try to do my downloading during the day when broadband speeds are better. But there’s another important factor involved in download speed and that’s the server supplying the file or files you’re downloading. I came across this problem recently when trying to download a podcast. I had to give up even though broadband speeds were fine at around 5.8Mbps at the time according to Speedtest.net:

As you can see, despite good broadband download speed, the mp3 file was downloading at crawling pace when I took the screenshot but it slowed further and eventually hung after this. I contacted the webmaster and he confirmed intermittent server side problems. If files are hosted on a busy server, this may slow down access speed. He arranged an alternative mirror location for the file on a different server and that solved the problem.

Server location can also be a factor in download speed. Generally, servers closer to you will give faster download speeds. The Ubuntu Software Center is a good example of how downloading should be arranged, allowing you to pick servers close to you. After that it runs a series of ping tests to find the best mirror for your location so you download from the fastest server.

As you probably know, Google Reader was updated earlier this week. The old internal sharing options were removed and sharing with Google+ brought in. The interface was also rejigged. Here are my thoughts on both.

Change to sharing options

I can understand bringing in sharing to Google+ but to remove the old internal sharing and following options within Google Reader is a shame. I see where they’re going with the tighter integration with Google+ but removal of choice bodes poorly for the future. I just think it would be in their best interests to allow us more choice rather than dictate how they want things to be done with ‘automatic upgrades’. We actually don’t all want to use Google+ or to be forced down the road of using it. Thankfully, you can still enable sharing to other networks. Go to the Gear at the top right, click Reader Settings and click the Send To tab. Select the networks you want and you’ll now have a Send To option at the bottom of each entry with the networks you’ve chosen. There is also a Chrome plugin called ReaderSharer to restore the old sharing options and improve the feed spacing.

New interface

It’s hard to fathom how they got the new user interface so badly wrong. We’re all led to believe Google employs the best minds but the redesigned interface just beggars belief. Google, this is supposed to be an interface to, well, read stuff. So why put in so much white space in List View that I spend more time scrolling than reading? And the colours are so drab – all shades of grey. I just don’t get it and I’m not alone. I know they’re trying to impose some kind of interface consistency with their other apps. We’ll all experience a similar interface in GMail soon after what Google call an ‘automatic upgrade’ but really, I preferred things as they were. Thankfully browser plugins have already been released to remove some of the white space and display more feeds on the screen. Without a Chrome plugin to help, I’m getting just 17 feeds displayed in List View. Install New Google Reader Rectifier and I get 23 feeds, while FixStyleSheet for GoogleReader crams in 32 feeds. But why should I have to install Chrome plugins to get Reader to work the way it used to? Each extension takes up valuable memory. Why aren’t there preferences within Reader to tweak display settings?

It may well be that Google eventually responds to the widespread condemnation and reinstates internal sharing and something resembling the old interface, but I just can’t understand how a company supposedly with a lot of bright people can just get things so badly wrong in terms of user choice and design. If they don’t innovate well, or listen to users’ opinion, and impose badly designed stuff with cut-back choices, it surely doesn’t bode well for their future, or the users for that matter. Developers take note. We need a good Google Reader alternative to show how it should be done.

Any thoughts? As always I’d love to hear what you think.

I seem to get more than my fair share of ‘junk’ phone calls usually wanting me to invest in stocks and shares but this week I got my first scam ‘tech’ phone call. Thankfully I’d heard about it already on some tech podcast, but I think I would have seen through it anyway and hung up before it went too far. Here’s what happened and why my alarm bells were ringing pretty much straight away and hopefully this heads-up will alert you if you haven’t experienced this type of call yet.

The phone rang in the evening. My phone has caller ID so it displays the incoming caller’s number; in this case, the number was ‘unavailable’. So the caller was hiding their ID – always a bad start for them. I picked up the phone and there was a 2 second delay where I could hear that the caller was in a call centre. She spoke with an Indian accent so probably an Indian call centre. I probably should have hung up at that point but she asked to speak to my wife calling her by her real name saying that my wife was a registered Microsoft user and she was calling from a tech support centre. The game was definitely up at this point as I’m the registered Microsoft user at home. When I challenged her on this, she just said she wanted to speak to whoever was the registered user. I guess she was working from a sales database of names and numbers freely available in India or she’d got hold of our local phone directory. I let her go on for a little while to see where it would go. She said she wanted to do a security check on my PC and asked me to click on the Start button…

And that was enough for me. I politely said I was a fairly experienced Windows user and I didn’t have any PC problems and hung up. Doubtless she then went on her way and phoned the next number on her list. I wondered if she was paid on a commission only basis with payment only on calls with a ‘result’ for them. But I guess it doesn’t take many results for this to be a worthwhile business proposition for the scammers.

Anyway, I knew from what I’d heard already that if I followed her instructions she would have taken me to Windows Event Viewer and shown me folders of (usually unimportant) errors which Windows logs while it proceeds on its merry way. It’s a great scam as many people are alarmed by these errors even though their PC is running fine and they follow the scammer’s instructions for their removal with both a financial cost and with security implications as they let the scammer gain remote access to their PC. There’s a good write up here on the Guardian website. Apparently, this scam has been doing the rounds since 2008. I mentioned it to my wife later and thankfully, she said she wouldn’t have fallen for it either. When she mentioned it at work the next day, two of her colleagues had also received scam calls like that and neither had been conned.

Some of you may be reading this after it’s already happened and are searching for information about it.  If it’s happened to you, warn your family and friends. The scammers may be working from a local phone book so you may all get these calls in the same period. And don’t think that because you use Linux or a Mac you won’t get the call. Despite what they say, they only have a list of names and numbers and don’t know if you have a Windows PC. Best advice is to politely hang up or if you have the time, waste their time so they won’t be scamming someone else when you’re on the line.

Have you come across this phone scam or anything like it? How did you deal with the caller? Drop a comment below.

So you’ve uploaded all your photos to a social network and they’ve been tagged. Your profile picture is on Facebook, Twitter and now Google+ and your picture avatar follows you everywhere online from forums to blog comments. That’s okay isn’t it? There’s nothing to worry about, everyone else is doing it so it must be fine… I’d rather this than a cartoon or clip art for my avatar.

And it may well be okay, but there have been recent developments which may just start the alarm bells ringing. But first, can I take you back to a time before Facebook and social networking. In the early days online it was fine to have a cool username and cartoon avatar as part of your online persona. I came across this post on identity management in cyberspace (written in 2002 – pre-social networking) which brought that home nicely. It wasn’t necessary to bring your real personal identity online in those days. In fact there are even a bunch of terms used to describe your online persona: handle, alias, nickname, moniker, alter ego. But with the rise and rise of Facebook, Twitter  and now Google+, they want real names, with profile pictures encouraging real identity aggregated between online services. It seems now it’s time to be real online – real names and real tagged photos to identify us. But as I’ve said before on several occasions, we’re still breaking new ground with online social networking. We’re only about 5 years into this fledgling phenomenon. It’s not been done before and it remains to be seen whether being so open with our real names and photos will have a scary downside in say 10 to 15 years time when so much information has been released by us and gathered by… who knows who? So I’ve always been a little reluctant to put too much personal information out there. But not so for my business – online directories with real names and business details is surely okay. But hear me out, particularly on online photos of yourself.

Facial recognition

It’s not very hard to imagine that in the next few years our mobile devices will feature facial recognition technology – software to put names to faces in photos. Trial facial recognition software, PittPatt,  developed at Carnegie Mellon University can take a photo of a stranger and, using information from the cloud (Facebook, etc), can track down their real identity in minutes. It’s only a short hop from there to search and dig out other information like address, email and mobile phone numbers linked to the photo and identity and we surely have the scary possibility of some stranger snapping you with their mobile phone and fairly quickly getting hold of a lot of useful personal information about you.

Pseudonymity

But then I could be totally wrong, and judging by the millions  of people quite happy to put so much information online, I probably am. But at least spare a thought for those of us who continue to operate under pseudonyms and don’t want to put up photos of ourselves. It’s not because we want to hide behind a front and dish out stuff without fear of recrimination. There may just be a good reason now for trying to preserve our anonymity.

Have you every googled your name and been surprised at how much detail comes up? Even though some of it is out of date and quite misleading, it’s all virtually impossible to remove once it’s out there. But people are making judgements of you based on what they find. You could also try googling your phone number + city/town and see if that brings up other aspects of your identity for all to see.

You don’t have to go the real name route online. After a lot of pressure, Google has finally backtracked on the real name requirement for Google+ and soon you will be able to sign up under a pseudonym. So perhaps it’s time to think again about online photos and online identity before it’s too late. Or am I just being way too paranoid? Drop a comment below.

Delicious

Most of you will probably know that Delicious relaunched under its new owners back in September promising an improved bookmarking service. First thing I noticed after the launch was that there wasn’t much buzz or enthusiasm in the tech blogosphere so that didn’t bode too well. In fact there was a lot more buzz when the sale was announced with people rushing to export all their links.  Anyway, if you’re a regular Delicious user, you’ll know that the service has been an utter disaster since its relaunch and is only now slowly starting to take shape – however it’s still lagging well behind the service I used to know, which wasn’t that great anyway and had stagnated for years. I have to say I’m surprised they launched when they did. They could at least have a taken a leaf from Twitter’s book running the old and new services side by side and giving users a choice until the problems were ironed out. Or just waited until it was right.

At the moment, it’s not possible to bulk rename tags, but doubtless that will come in time.  The old Delicious used to list all tags alphabetically on your ‘my links’ page which I liked. But now we have a truncated list of your most popular tags instead – not good. You can still get an alphabetical listing but it takes a couple of clicks so I’ve resorted to adding the link with all tags sorted alphabetically to my bookmark bar for quick access.

(Update – December 2011: It’s now possible to get an alphabetical listing of tags on the Links page. Thanks Delicious.)

Diigo

In the light of the lack of development of Delicious over the years, I’ve actually been using Diigo as my main bookmarking site for over a year now with Delicious just a backup of those links. It’s possible to save your links on Diigo to Delicious and although this didn’t work for a while after the Delicious relaunch, I note that it is back working again now.

One thing that bugs me in Diigo that I’ve noticed recently is that it’s been set up to display a maximum of 5000 tags. Although it will store more than 5000 tags, when you list your tags sorted alphabetically, it will only list the first 5000. In addition and probably linked to this, annoyingly, the Diigo browser extension won’t auto-complete tags which have names beyond the 5000th in your tag list. So if you want to use a tag say ‘zoho’ that you’ve used in the past, type in ‘zo’ and it won’t autocomplete. Okay, you might say 5000 tags is a bit much but if you use multi word tags, you’ll soon get up there.

(Update – December 2011: This flaw has now been fixed! Thanks Diigo.)

So that’s a quick look at some problems in Diigo and Delicious – if anyone’s interested. Judging by social networks, blogs and podcasts, probably not.

Do you use bookmarking sites any more? Or just search for the information you’re looking for? Drop a comment below.

I listened to a podcast recently which got me thinking about free versus paid software and online services. I’ve blogged about free software and alternatives to commercial programs before but Tracy Holt made a great point on The Techie Geek Podcast 90. Tracy and Russ were discussing freeing up space in web email accounts rather than paying for unlimited storage. Tracy ran through his lengthy routine for archiving emails then admitted he would have been better off paying $50/year for unlimited email storage which he does now:

‘My time is probably worth more than all the time I spent trying to free up space’

He’s right and that applies to software as well as online services, particularly if you run a small office/home office (SOHO). If buying software or online services or upgrading from free to premium versions is going to save you time in the long run, that precious time saved is also going to make you more productive and you should earn more in the same time available. So far this has definitely applied to me in my day job as a freelance copy editor. For example, I’ve invested a small amount in two commercial macros for MS Word which both save me a lot of time in the long run.

MegaReplacer is a batch search and replace macro for Word. You add a bunch of words you want to search for in a file and their replacements, for example, commonly misspelled words and when you run the macro it  goes through the file prompting at each occurrence whether you want to replace it. It’s essential for an editor. Without the macro, you just can’t do that quickly and you’ll most certainly miss some words anyway.

ReferenceChecker is a macro for Word to spot inconsistencies between reference citations in text and the reference list. It’s not important to understand exactly what the macro is doing unless you’re a copy editor, but believe me, it’s a lot quicker than going through the text manually and checking each citation against the reference list, and vice versa.

So particularly if you run a small office/home office, consider investing in commercial software or add-ons and weigh up the differences between premium and free versions of software and services and see if the increased productivity they’ll bring will save you money in the long run.

Have you invested in commercial software or add-ons, or paid for online services to increase productivity? Let us know below.

I know for most of you reading this, the 1970s is before your time. Well it was pretty much before personal tech time as well! This was the era of the LP and single (vinyl records), the cassette tape, the ill-fated 8-track, VCRs  and as far as personal tech is concerned, that was about it. No CDs then (they came in the 1980s), just radios and radio/cassette players. In fact, the words 1970s and tech don’t really seem to go together. But one thing that 1970s tech had was durability. It was built to last longer than today’s tech. Which prompted me to write this post. When I looked around at my old tech stuff still running, I found these two items:

Coincidentally, I bought both in virtually the same week in 1978. The digital clock still sits on my bedside table and shows no signs of dying after 33 years, just like my Seiko Quartz watch which I still wear. And both still keep pretty good time. Yes I know, most of you guys now use your smartphone for telling the time but I like to be able to glance over in bed and see the time without lifting my head!

And delving further back into the 1970s:

My slide rule for maths calculations. I originally had a better longer version which we all had to buy in secondary school for our final Maths exams in 1971. Yes, believe it or not that was the era just before personal calculators so as well as learning maths we had to learn how to use these contraptions to multiply and divide! Calculators came soon after I left school and I still remember ‘the calculator room’ in my chemistry lab in college in around 1974. A bench with 7 or 8 mains powered desktop calculators around 6”x6” in size. I later bought the Casio Scientific fx-31  shown above around 1978. The display is VFD (vacuum fluorescent display, I think), and much better than the later LCD displays as you could see it clearly in low light. Again my Casio calculator still works – when I put batteries in it, but nowadays I prefer my much more recent solar powered desktop calculator most of the time.

Do you still use any old tech? Will it still be running in 30 years time? Drop a comment below.

Search is synonymous with Google. For most of us, when we search, we google and we don’t give a second thought to trying or using any other search engine. Why would we? Google is just fine isn’t it? I’ve been online since about 1998. In those days, I used to read (paper) computer magazines to get the low down on all the best tech products and services to use. I seem to remember them recommending Alta Vista for search when I started, then I think around 1999-2000, Google became the recommended search engine and I switched to that and honestly I haven’t used any other search engine since then.

Why not just use Google?

Frankly, since the introduction of Google+, I’m a little worried that Google is heading to take over almost everything we do online, and collect masses amounts of data on us in the process. Apart from that, I believe Google needs competition to keep it on its toes and the competition needs to be encouraged especially if it’s providing a good service. So I thought it was time to look around and see if anyone else comes close to Google in search. Spurred on by very encouraging recent articles on DuckDuckGo by Rich Menga at PCMech, and Scott Nesbitt at Make Tech Easier, I decided to shun Google search for a couple of weeks and use only DuckDuckGo just to see if it was a viable long term search alternative for me.

So how does DuckDuckGo shape up?

Well DuckDuckGo is actually very good. I like the cleaner, uncluttered interface and better privacy. Definitions when presented are pulled from Wikipedia and shown in a red box at the top and the search results overall are fine for me and I’m sure for most people. Specialist searches are a little different though and actually very good. Here’s my experience:

I’m actually a freelance editor and often have to research published medical reference details. Authors tend to get the detail wrong here or miss out stuff so it’s left to the editor to sort out/check publication details like page numbers, volume number, year of publication. Very often I would just paste the article title into Google and it would come up with the full reference details usually on the first page of results – PubMed is a great source for these details. But when I tried this procedure in DuckDuckGo, I couldn’t get the details I wanted in the results – because in a general search, DuckDuckGo doesn’t go to PubMed. But then I discovered what they call !Bangs, or specialized site searches. There are a whole bunch of these specialized searches as listed here, including PubMed and to launch this, you just type!pubmed along with your article title and it usually pulls up the result. Not strictly true as it actually launches the link and opens PubMed with the result in the DuckDuckGo window. Which brings me to my next point.

Customizable

Settings are great in DuckDuckGo and it’s very customisable. You can elect to have results open in a new window, which is what I prefer. But in the case of bangs discussed above, they open in the same window. A click on the back arrow is needed to get back to DuckDuckGo. So I sent feedback to DuckDuckGo about this last weekend – and got a reply that same weekend – something you wouldn’t get from Google I might add – you can’t actually contact them! They responded:

…there is a strong case that a bang command is an external page by definition and should open in a new window. I’ve added it as a defect in our bug tracking software so I should get to it sometime soon!

Very impressed. Another minor change I made was to turn off highlighted (and clickable) results when you move over them. I often like to copy text straight from the results page and you can’t do this with highlighted results – once you click on the text it follows the link. To turn this off, go to Settings, Color Settings, and turn Highlight from Green (default) to off. Incidentally, once you have DuckDuckGo set up the way you want it, you can save the URL parameters so it will always load that way. I have DuckDuckGo loading in a tab when I start Google Chrome and I’ve added those URL parameters. You can add your own customized parameters in Chrome. Go to Wrench, Options and add it to your start up tabs.

Do you use a Google alternative for search? Bing, Blekko? Have you tried anything else? Or are you happy to stick with Google for the long haul? Drop a comment below.

Incidentally, if you are interested in reading about other Google alternatives, not just in search, here’s a great article on Techie Buzz.