the new computer

The new computer is wonderful. It’s not so much Vista (which I have no complaints about), but having 2 gbs of RAM is glorious, as is the new 20″ LCD widescreen monitor. I finished off the the look with a new wireless keyboard and mouse. All my equipment (0ther than my white iPod) is black and silver and I must say, it’s nice. I may be a geek, but I’m still a girl and a matching computer and accessories is nice.

The problem I anticipated from the very beginning turned out to be the one thing that caused some grief: transferring my music in iTunes to to the new computer. I first looked at the instructions from Apple, but they were 11 pages long and reading them over convinced me to not go there. I then evaluated Music Rescue, which looked good in the description, but turned out to not work.

I wound up with a terrific product called iPodCopy, which I highly recommend. It simply copies the contents of the iPod to the new computer, quickly and accurately.  The next time I synched up my iPod, it copied the contents of iTunes back onto the iPod. Quick, easy, and an intuitive interface. A big thumbs up!

I keep hearing people dissing Vista, but so far I’m pretty impressed. It’s working great for me: it’s fast, looks nice, and all of my software except for Scrabble is working fine on Vista.

I am a bit sad about Scrabble … I hope I can find a Vista version of my favorite game soon.

webshots

Being a visual person, I like having pretty wallpaper to look at on my computer. But I also get really tired of looking at the same pictures every day.

A couple of years ago, I discovered Webshots. You can put your own photos up for all to see. They also have a section of professional photographs that you can use for free as wallpaper or screensavers. Some of the professional photographs were “premium” and you had to pay to get those. But most were free and as a result, I had many beautiful photos to use as wallpaper.

With the new widescreen monitor, though, my regular-sized photos no longer work. Webshots does offer wide screen images, but it required upgrading to the premium offering, at $2.99 a month.

I have upgraded and have downloaded many beautiful photographs. Their tool runs in the background and lets you configure it any way you want. I’ve got mine set to give me a new background every four hours.

There’s a huge selection: nature, travel, pets, wild animals, flowers and gardens, space, and more.

If you like nice wallpaper, give Webshots a try.

new toys

Last week my old and dependable 19″ CRT started showing everything white as yellow. I can’t complain, as I only paid $50 for it in 2001, when my company was downsizing and the monitor had to be at least four years old at that time.

I read on the net that if you whack the CRT hard on the side, it might clear up for a bit, and indeed that did work for most of last week. But on Friday afternoon, it went yellow and stayed yellow, as if someone had put a yellow gel on the screen (or as if someone had peed all over the screen).

So, I dipped into savings a bit and splurged for a Viewsonic 20″ widescreen LCD monitor and installed it this weekend. I have to say that I really, really love it. The image is beautiful and the widescreen is wonderful. I can open all kinds of windows and see everything at once. This puppy runs at 1680×1050. Very nice.

I was so excited about the new LCD monitor that I took a long, hard look at my ageing PC: an old, but sturdy PIII that my brother had scavenged for me from his office, where he is an IT manager and had been told to get rid of all the PIIIs. My Dad and my niece also have nice PIIIs. It only has 256 mb of RAM, and can only go up to 512 MB.  As an impatient multi-tasker, I often ran into issues waiting for programs to open.

I took a gander at the Dell Outlet store and found a very nice machine with 2 GB of RAM, Intel Dual Core, a nice NVIDIA graphics card, and a hunky hard drive. It should arrive next week.  I got a great price on it and free shipping due to a special they were running. Couldn’t be happier. I have a screaming PC and a hot monitor for less than $1000, and I’m really, really happy in a geeky kind of way.

a nifty little tool

Thanks to one of my favorite tech writing e-mail lists, TECHWR-L, I discovered a very nice tool, for Windows only, called Launchy.

Launchy runs in the background and can be easily launched with a simple keystroke combination. Once open, Launchy provides a text entry field that lets you type in the application, file, or folder you want to open.  After a few uses, Launchy knows what you want with just a few letters typed in. For example, I only need to type “ex” to open Internet Explorer.

Why Launchy? Well, I do have an older and slower system, and in my impatience, often wind up trying to click the same desktop icon more than once, thus slowing down my slower system even more. But I really do think Launchy is faster than clicking on a icon on my desktop.

Another very nice aspect of Launchy is that is an Open Source app and open source is something the Homescribe likes very much. And being completely free, the price is excellent.

sssnnnaaappp!

WordPress has introduced a wonderful new feature called Snap. With snap, when you move your cursor over a  link, you get a nice preview of the web site. Here … try it now … look at the wordpress site now.

Quite clever.

how many passwords can you remember?

I don’t know about you, but there is a limit to the number of password and user ids that I can remember. Just the passwords and user ids for work are bad enough, but there are all my personal credentials.

Luckily, I discovered a product called RoboForm. RoboForm remembers my user ids and passwords and will fill in forms for me when it’s time to log in. It will even create robust passwords for me. It works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Alas, no Opera support as yet. There is also a version that allows you to load your password file on a portable external drive and use it on another computer, such as your work computer. Very handy, that.

 You can use RoboForm free of charge (up to 10 passwords) or can pay $29.95 for unlimited use with unlimited upgrades.

 The Homescribe highly recommends RoboForm.

mozying along

I have approximately 40 gbs of music in iTunes, both my CDs that I’ve burned in as well as music purchased from iTunes. Before iTunes,  I never invested in any kind of backup solution, other than burning CDs of My Documents every few weeks.

Of course, with that much music, burning CDs is not such a practical idea.

On Christmas Eve, I discovered a company called Mozy that offers online backups. For just $4.95 a month, I can have unlimited backups. It is taking a while to do the backup, as Mozy runs in the background and for most ISPs, including mine, the upload bandwidth isn’t that great. I’m about half done now, though, and am quite pleased with how Mozy is working.

Another solution is Carbonite, which offers similar services at pretty much the same cost. But Mozy has a richer set of features and better encryption. I’m glad I took the plunge.

If you don’t have a lot to back up, Mozy will give you 2 gbs of backup completely free.

For more information, visit www.mozy.com.

multi-factor authentication

Yes, that’s what I’m writing about lately. Multi-factor authentication for people’s online banking accounts. If your bank hasn’t added this yet, you might want to ask them about it. But first, you can ask the HomeScribe.

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that a user name and password don’t provide a lot of security when it comes to protecting really important personal information, like your financial records. Therefore, a government agency called the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (does that sound boring or what) has decreed that banks must use this multi-factor authentication for customers to access their accounts.

 This is a very good thing.

In the solution I’m writing about, bank customers will choose a picture and a phrase to identify themselves. They will also choose answers to several challenge questions. They will also answer if they are signing on from a private (your own personal home computer) or a public computer (any other computer, including the one you think only you use from your office, for example.)  In addition to your user name and password, you’ll also verify the little picture and phrase. This picture ensures that you are indeed logging on to your bank’s genuine site and not some site a phisher has created to get your private information.  And, if anyone is logging in from any computer other than your private home computer, they’ll have to answer one or more of those challenge questions. And, each time you sign in to your bank, you’ll be presented with information about your recent logins.

 No, of course it isn’t perfect. But it’s pretty close to that. It’s a pretty good first-line defense to identity theft and it will help protect your personal information.

 And, if you aren’t doing this already, be sure you’re running a good spyware checker to make sure that you’re not running software that’s capturing your keystrokes, for example, to harvest your login information for various sites. The HomeScribe recommends a free product called Ad-Aware, which can be downloaded at www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/ .