Tech and life

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.

Yesterday I received email notification of a blog comment which I should check was spam and approve or trash. It looked like spam – a couple of words and a shortened URL. But was the link important or interesting? I was a little wary and knew that this could be a security risk, i.e. don’t click a link if you’re not sure where it’s leading or you don’t know the sender. If you come across a shortened URL on Twitter, you can hover your mouse over it and the full URL will often appear – but not always. So what can you do to check out a shortened URL before you click?

Unshorten the link

Paste the link into unfwd4.me or unshorten.com to see the full URL. You may then be able to decide if the link is reputable and worth following. Still unsure? Try the link scanners mentioned below.

Scan the link

Copy the shortened URL into LinkScanner Online or Online Link Scan. They’ll scan the site and alert you if there may be a problem following the link. Or if you have time and want to try multiple antivirus engines, try the scanner at URLVoid.

After you click the link

After you’ve decided to click, browser plugins like McAfee SiteAdvisor and WOT (Web of Trust) provide another tool you can use to alert you of known dubious or untrusted  sites. I use McAfee and have found it to be fine. There are free and paid versions. The download link to the free limited version (SiteAdvisor) is currently at the bottom of their Downloads page. Web of Trust is also highly regarded in this fight against ‘clickjacking’ and avoiding malicious sites.

You don’t have to scan documents to your PC then save them into Evernote organizer in two stages, you can set up your printer/scanner to scan directly into Evernote. I’ve already posted about scanning directly to Evernote with an Epson Perfection 4180 scanner.

I recently got a Canon MP series multifunction printer with built in scanner (MP280) and had no trouble setting it up to scan directly to Evernote. Here’s what you do.

When you installed your Canon printer drivers and utilities on the CD which came with the printer, you would have installed MP Navigator, the application which, among other things, allows you to scan directly to an application, in our case Evernote. Switch on your printer and place a test sheet on the scanner tray. On your PC desktop click Start, All Programs and navigate to Canon Utilities and click on that and open the MP Navigator folder.

For me it was actually called MP Navigator EX 4.0 but you may have a different version. Then double click the executable file in that folder (again for me it was MP Navigator EX 4.0 as shown above) and that should open Canon MP Navigator. If you intend to scan stuff frequently to Evernote, you could copy a program shortcut to your desktop. To do this, drag that executable to your desktop while pressing the Ctrl key (this makes a copy rather than moving it).  Once MP Navigator is open, click on One-click at the top right and you should see the options below.

Click on Custom and that should open a box like below. If it starts to scan now, just click Cancel.

This is the part where we select Evernote as the program we want to open the scan with. So under the section Application Settings, click Set as shown above, then navigate to your Evernote folder (for me it was C:\Program Files\Evernote\Evernote but it may be different for you. You’re looking for the Evernote executable file as shown below:

Select that file and click Open. Evernote will now appear as the application in the Open with: box on the previous screenshot. Click Apply in the bottom left corner to save Evernote in that box, then click the green Scan button in the bottom right corner and if all goes well the test page should be scanned and Evernote will open to show it.

By the way, now this is set up, in future when you click Custom, everything will happen automatically so make sure you have your page loaded ready for scanning.

A few months ago, I posted on the top recommended Google Chrome extensions which I compiled from recommendations across the blogosphere. I thought I’d now list the extensions I find most useful, i.e. the ones I’ve installed that I use pretty much on a daily basis.

Several of my top extensions are also in the earlier post – LastPass, Clip to Evernote, and Shareaholic so I won’t say any more on them. Here’s the rest.

Diigo

I’ve been bookmarking sites with the Diigo extension for quite a while now. Diigo lets you import all your bookmarks from Delicious at the start and then you can set it up to send copies of subsequent bookmarks back to Delicious so you have all your bookmarks on two independent sites. This is the extension I use the most… by a long way. I wrote a post on bookmarking versus searching some time ago which you might like to read.

SiteAdvisor

SiteAdvisor will give you a safety rating for the site you have just loaded in your browser.

SEO Site Tools

SEO Site Tools gives the page rank at a glance and some SEO info on the site your browsing. There’s more info on it here.

Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus works away in the background to remove ads and pop-ups from websites as you browse.

iReader

Fed up with all the clutter on sites? Then install the iReader extension for distraction-free reading. The iReader icon appears at the right end of your browser address bar – click it to remove all the clutter and leave a page that’s a joy to read. The options let you disable images too if that’s what you want. You can also print the page without all the clutter. And if you’ve installed a pdf utility like doPDF, you can even print the decluttered page to a pdf. After installation, doPDF appears in your Print menu so you now have the option to print to a pdf format file. Here’s a post about using iReader.

Google Quick Scroll

The Google Quick Scroll extension helps you find what you’re looking for on a webpage faster, particularly on long webpages. I’ve written about it before here.

Google Reader Filter

If you spend a lot of time in Google Reader, then Google Reader Filter is a must. It cuts out entries you don’t want to know about and highlights ones you do. Again I’ve written about it before here and it now works in Chrome.

Facebook Disconnect

Facebook Disconnect prevents Facebook from tracking you when you visit a site which uses Facebook Connect.

Google Calendar – weekend coloration

Weekend coloration adds a different colour for Saturdays and Sundays. Not very distinctive on the new look Google Calendar though.

Unburner

If you click through to posts from Google Reader, you’ll see a lot of feedburner ‘junk’ appended at the end of the URL. Unburner removes all the unnecessary stuff so you get a clean URL for bookmarking. I’ve blogged about it here.

Well that’s my roundup of my useful Google Chrome extensions. I’d love to hear about any others that you find awesome. Drop a comment below.

A few weeks ago, there was a flurry of posts about the Chrome extension Super Google Reader which lets you read RSS feeds in full form in Google Reader. Some blogs only give truncated feeds and you have to visit their website for the full post so I thought I’d give it a try. Once I had reopened Reader, I had access to full RSS feeds using the Readable tab which Super Google Reader had added at the top of the posts as shown below.

But I noticed that Google Reader had slowed down considerably after I enabled that extension. Refresh, Mark All as Read and changing folders were all unacceptably slow so I ran through my slow Reader checklist which I’ve already posted just to ensure that the Google servers weren’t at fault. They weren’t. When I disabled Super Google Reader, speed was back to normal.

So if you’re experiencing Google Reader to be slow and you’re using Super Google Reader, try  disabling the extension and see if that helps.