The Simple TechBlog

Run Linux Apps in Windows

Christopher Sisk — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:38:01 +0000

If you have any Linux applications that you just can’t live without, like Amarok, but keep a Windows family PC in the house, andLinux might just be what you were looking for.

andLinux is a full virtual installation of Ubuntu Linux and comes with a handy system tray icon for access to several default KDE apps like Konqueror (web browser / file manager) and Synaptic (to install more Linux apps.)

Lifehacker already has a full article on installing and setting up andLinux so I’ll just point you to their fine article.

[Found via: Lifehacker]

We Love Our Sponsors

Christopher Sisk — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 09:00:23 +0000

Here at the TechBlog, we love our generous sponsors. They help pay hosting and costs associated with running a blog.

The Simple TechBlog articles are brought to you by:

RadioAid.com - Streaming radio from some of the best independent and unsigned musicians out there.
ArtistServer.com - Music hosting and tools to help musicians promote and distribute their music.
Tubatomic Studios - A multi-disciplined creative firm that focuses on enhancing interactive environments on the internet.

Check them out… and, if you don’t mind, tell them we sent you.

BitTorrent Quick Start

Christopher Sisk — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 05:43:42 +0000

What Is It?

BitTorrent is a fast, distributed file sharing peer-to-peer system. BitTorrent is not a file sharing program, rather its a protocol used by numerous programs (clients) to download from and share files with other BitTorrent users. BitTorrent works by breaking up files into a large number of very small pieces. These pieces can be shared quickly with other users and allow users who are still in the process of downloading a file, to share the pieces they do have.

How Do I Use It?

BitTorrent files (.torrent) contain the information that links you to other users sharing the same target file… so all you really need is a program (client) to handle BitTorrent files. I recommend the following for each operating system:

utorrent (Windows)
Azureas (Linux / Mac / Windows)

Once you install your client, you need to search for some good torrents. I recommend the following:

Each of these sites will feature a search box. Type some search terms in and scan through the results. Most torrent files names are plain English and give some information about the torrent. What you really need to look for is the number of Seeders and Peers.

Seeders are people who have completed the download and are sharing a full copy of the file. Peers are people, like you, who are in the process of downloading the file and are sharing a partial copy. The more Seeders there are, the faster, generally speaking, your download will be. It is also possible, though rare, to have a large group of Peers who, collectively, have a complete copy of the file.

So now that you’ve searched for a file you want, and found a torrent with a lot of Seeders, download the file. Your browser will probably ask you what to do with a “.torrent” file. Tell it to open the file using the new BitTorrent client you’ve just installed. Your BitTorrent client will start and (possibly) ask you where to save the target file (or files) and… Presto!

Many clients allow you to set default download locations and many other bandwidth specific details in the program’s options. (In utorrent: Options - Preferences )

One of the beautiful aspects of the BitTorrent system is the ability to share complete directories (folders) with a single torrent file. A user may share a folder that contains a large archive of podcasts. Say you were only interested in the last two months worth of podcast episodes… Both the programs I have recommended allow you to choose only the files you want and disregard the rest.

What’s In A Baby’s Name?

Christopher Sisk — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 02:16:30 +0000

Searching for a unique baby name? Curious just how popular your name really is?

The Baby Name Wizard site recently launched their Name Voyager, a javascript application that shows the popularity of a name from the 1800s to 2006. My name, Christopher, was on it’s way to #2 when I was born in 1979 (my parent’s were so on the cutting edge).

The Name Voyager and its creator were recently featured on NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook. You can also check out the Social Security’s “Popular Baby Names” section for more on the historical popularity of names or TechBlog reader, Guy Davis’ excellent Google Maps mashup, Baby Name Map, that shows US popular names along with other countries.

How trendy were your parents?

Get Your Money Back When Prices Drop

Christopher Sisk — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 01:48:00 +0000

I just recently mentioned PriceAmbush, a site that helps you find the lowest price while shopping online. But what happens when you buy something online and the price drops two days later? We’ve all been there. Well, new web service PriceProtectr.com is here to help.

From the site:

There are lots of stores out there that offer price protection policies — when the price drops on an item you’ve purchased, they’ll refund you the difference. But there’s a catch… it’s up to you to watch prices. Price Protectr makes it simple to keep track of your purchases and get your money back. It’s free. It’s easy. It’s free and easy money. How often do you get that offer?

The service currently boasts 46 online retailers including Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, Costco, Future Shop, Sears and Staples.

By taking the hassle out of searching for price drops, PriceProtectr makes it much easier to focus on what really matters… like that new shiny 16BG iPod Touch.

Shopping - PriceAmbush has you covered

Christopher Sisk — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 01:19:06 +0000

PriceAmbush.com is a new web service that lets you find products at the price you want. The service is very simple and very straight forward. You search for a product, set the price target you want and PriceAmbush emails you when that target is found.

What services do you use for a better shopping experience?

Quick Security Tip: PayPal Security Key

Christopher Sisk — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 22:52:30 +0000

PayPal, teaming up with VeriSign, has recently released a new hardware SecurID device to help increase the security available to their users. The PayPal Security Key is a small dongle-like device that generates an algorithmic 6-digit password token every 30 seconds. Once activated, independently for each account, the current token must be entered when logging into your PayPal or eBay account. This means even if someone gets a hold of your username and password, they still won’t be able to log in to your account without the 6-digit token.

Since the security key is activated independently for each account, the same device could eventually be used for other VeriSign-owned companies and websites as well.

Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson interviewed Director of Account Protections at PayPal, Michael Vergara in episode 103 of their weekly podcast, Security Now for an in depth look at how the security key works to keep your account safe.

If you use your PayPal or eBay account regularly or are concerned with the security of either of those services, the Security Key is highly recommended. The PayPal Security Key is available for an introductory price of $5.

Free Software Showcase - Picasa

Christopher Sisk — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 05:57:40 +0000

Picasa is a free, digital photo editing and media organization program from Google that helps you do almost everything with your digital photos. Picasa helps you organize your photos into albums, add effects and fix basic photo problems like ‘red-eye’ with just a few clicks and print, email or upload your final collection to the web to share your photos with friends and family.

Picasa also makes it easy to edit and enhance your digital photos with simple and intuitive controls. Picasa includes 12 visual effects as well as many basic fixes.

Picasa’s Basic Fixes are buttons that make it fast and easy to crop, remove red eye, fix the contrast and color, and enhance your digital pictures.

One of my favorite features in Picasa is the screensaver album. Once Picasa is installed, go into your desktop properties and select Picasa as your screensaver. Whenever your screensaver kicks on, Picasa will play a slideshow of the contents of the screensaver album. If you keep lots of family photos on your computer, your idle monitor can become a digital photo frame.

Its easy to share your photos with Picasa too. If you have a CD burner (and who doesn’t anymore), Picasa can burn Gift CDs and DVDs that instantly play photo slideshows on grandma’s computer. Picasa has plenty of print options for your home printer as well as uploading your photos to order professional prints.

Picasa supports jpg, bmp, gif, png, psd and tif images as well as RAW data files, including cameras from Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Minolta and Pentax. Picasa will also recognize and organize your avi, mpg, wmv, asf and mov video formats.

Picasa is a free download from Google.

Free Software Showcase - 7-Zip

Christopher Sisk — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 02:13:07 +0000

7-Zip is a lightning fast, open source file archiver with a high compression ratio.

While Windows XP has Zip Compression built into it, 7-Zip supports many more compression formats including, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ and more. 7-Zip integrates with the Windows Shell, so extracting a Zip file is just a right-click away.

7-Zip is an open source, free download for Windows. There is also a pz7ip project at sourceforge for Posix/Linux systems.

A Really Useful Blog

Christopher Sisk — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 03:47:25 +0000

Learning keyboard shortcuts is one of the easiest things you can to speed things up. Left hand keyboard shortcuts like Copy (Ctrl+C), Paste (Ctrl+V), and Undo (Ctrl+Z) have become second nature to me. In fact, unless I’m typing something, my left pinky finger basically lives on the Control key.

A really useful blog I’ve discovered recently is Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Day and it delivers exactly what you’d expect. Everything from software specific shortcuts like Ctrl+Shift+F to “Select Font” in Microsoft Office applications to Ctrl+A, another second nature shortcut to select all the text in a document, page or text area.

As you might have guessed, the shortcuts on this blog are entirely Windows shortcuts and though some classic shortcuts will work on a Mac (using the Command key instead of Control) some won’t. You have been warned.

Sunday Security Tip - Shields UP!!

Christopher Sisk — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 05:41:06 +0000

Shields UP!! is a free security tool provided by Gibson Research Corporation (GRC.com) that tests your computer for a large variety of vulnerabilities like windows messenger spam, browser headers and open ports. Shields UP!! was created by Steve Gibson (the co-host of Security Now! and creator of SpinRite, an amazing Hard Drive maintenance and repair tool) to poke and prod at your computer much like a real hacker or malicious code might, tell you where it was able to get in and how to fix it.

GRC also offers many other free tools and software (available here) to test, track and fix your computer’s security. I highly recommend Steve’s tools and software as well as listening to Security Now! every Thurs. on the TWiT Netcast Network.

Snacksby - Social Recipes

Christopher Sisk — Sun, 27 May 2007 21:21:26 +0000

Snacksby.com is a new take on the old recipe for, well, recipe sites. Snacksby brings together the openness of social networks with the practicality of user-generated recipes. But Snacksby also goes one step further. The site lets you to input all the items in your pantry and receive a custom-tailored list of delicious goodies to make with them.

Snacksby is a different, easier kind of recipe site. You tell us what you’ve got in your fridge or in your pantry and wham!, we let you know what your options are.

Recipes and ingredients are categorized with snacksonomies, which are tags like lowfat or vegetarian that help you find what you might like better and faster. Are you missing something? Snacksby can tell you what to do if you don’t have buttermilk or if you’d like a vegan substitute for eggs.

You can also create lists of favorite recipes and get RSS feeds of those lists. If you find a recipe you don’t have all the fixin’s for, Snacksby will take your Pantry list into account and give you a shopping list.

Snacksby is free to register and use.

Quick Tip - Read-Only Email

Christopher Sisk — Fri, 18 May 2007 04:32:50 +0000

Posting your email address online, publicly, is usually not a good idea. Unfortuately, there are times when you just have to do it. One way to avoid the onslaught of spam is to use Read-Only email services. These are web services that allow you to create throw-away email address. You then visit their site to check the email address for incoming email. Two services we like are:

DodgeIt.com - DodgeIt is a great service. Just put any email name in front of “@dodgeit.com” and you’ve got an instant, read-only email address. For instance, simppletechblog@dodgeit.com. Then go to dodgeit.com and enter your email name into the field to check for any emails sent to that account.

PookMail.com - Pookmail works exactly the same as dodgeit. Think of an email name, put iit n front of “@pookmail.com” and check for mail in that account at the PookMail.com website.

These services can be great for registering at unknown websites, forums, blogs, or any untrusted place you need to post an email address.

Get Free International Calls With Yak4Ever

Christopher Sisk — Mon, 14 May 2007 02:20:49 +0000

In February, AllFreeCalls, a web service that allowed people to call overseas for free by exploiting a regulatory loophole, was shut down due to legal litigation. Today its back from the dead as Yak4Ever.

Like their previous incarnation, AllFreeCalls, all users have to do is call an access number in the U.S. and then forward on to an International number for free. The main difference now is, at registration, you’re asked to enter up to 10 phone numbers and assign each a numeric code (1-10). You then dial the access number and enter the code number you want to dial.

This change lowers the overall usability now, but the service can still be very useful for people who call the same international number regularly.

[AllFreeCalls Back From DeadPool, Free Calls Are Here Again - Via: TechCrunch]

Quick Tip - Beat Telemarketers At Their Own Game

Christopher Sisk — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:00:55 +0000

No matter how hard you try, it seems like telemarketers always get your number and a list of times you’d like to relax. Amateur Radio Operator, Andy Carlton, shows us how to beat those pesky telemarketing auto-dialer computers at their own game.

By using the FCC approved, industry standard, disconnected number tone sequence (those three tones you hear when you get a bad number) at the beginning of your voice mail or answering machine message, you can trick the auto-dialer computers into thinking they’ve got a bad number and putting you on THEIR “do not call” list. Andy even provides you with a download of the three tones.

Get the full scoop and the download here.

Of course, if you don’t want to change your message, you can always use the Anti-Telemarketing “Counterscript”.