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Before I came to Australia to be with Mr JM, I’d never heard of Doctor Who. Now, after seeing three seasons of it, it’s one of my favorite shows ever.

It’s quirky, funny, thought provoking and English. Mr JM tells me the original Doctor Who, while definitely a must-see program in his early years, was very cheaply made and had non-existent production values. But these modern episodes are well made and very well written.

And that’s important to me – in my other incarnations (more…)

I asked Mr JM about his work – he does Helpdesk for an Aged Care company. He says he helps people to use their computers; they call him a Desktop Support Engineer. Specifically I wanted to know what is the best thing for people to do before they call for help.

His response? ‘If the computer is not responding, NOTHING!’

What he means is that, quite often, things are recoverable if help is called before anything changes. But mostly computer users will fiddle and try to fix things they know little about and in the process spoil the chances of getting back the document or data.

Of course, if your computer has given the much talked of BSOD, (Blue Screen of Death) there isn’t likely much you could have done.

He also thinks that not enough people (more…)

I’ve been having some fun playing around with Mind Workstation – it’s another program for using and developing holosync tracks for aiding meditation and health.

With Mind Workstation there is not only the chance to use your computer to guide your brain state (see What can a Computer Do?) using the technology of Binaural Beats and Brainwave Entrainment, but also use biofeedback to have the software respond to what is happening in your head and body. (more…)

I guess we all know the basics about computers and the range of what they are capable of. In an earlier post I mentioned Mr JM’s idea about the ‘Oh Fuck’ reaction when a person sees, for the first time, a computer do the one thing that grabs their imagination.

As a result of some very ingenious and persistent people (called programmers) we have a multitude of things that people do on their computers. Typing up letters and performing calculations using a spreadsheet (the original uses of the IBM PC that got people buying them) are still common uses, although those who learned to do it in the early days would hardly recognize the processes now.

These days we can upload and manipulate (more…)

How big a part does Internet play in your life? Or the lives of your family?

This weekend was Easter (‘duh’ for obvious) and Mr JM and I went away into the country. We had some friends to visit but mostly it was to have a break, see some new country, (something we both like) and to show me some more of my adopted land.

Australia is quite a place, although I have yet to see much more than a part of Victoria, Canberra and a section of the New South Wales South coast. The animals, landscapes and light seem very different to those to which I was accustomed.

We went to The Grampians National Park, about 250 kilometres west of Melbourne. The Grampians are a mountain range (as Australian mountains go) that jut out of surrounding plains in a jagged North-South orientation. They are probably the least ‘smoothed’ hills I’ve seen here, with jagged peaks and jutting spurs that are rather awesome, particularly close up.
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How much of what we read on the Internet should we believe? The web is a place of mystery and absurdity, knowledge and fantastic concepts, but it is also open to a high level of abuse.

Even leaving out the dangers of which we’ve all heard of being stalked and having young children misled and abused, there is the issue of just how true the information we find might be. We need to know just how reliable the facts and figures are that we find in our searches. Take a look at this…

Now this search was from a (more…)

Sesame Street knew more than they thought when they created the Cookie Monster. Cookies are truly a monster when it comes to personal privacy and computer security.

What are Cookies? They are small files that web sites create to track you. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – if you’re on (say) Amazon and you choose your items and then want to pay for them and get them delivered, Amazon uses cookies to track your choices so when you arrive at Checkout, the site knows what you want to buy.

Other cookies might keep track of your preferences for your favorite sites, so when you visit, things are as you left them.

But cookies can also tell the world out there all about your (more…)

Recently Microsoft announced the release of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. They also released Service Pack 1 for Vista.
Seems strange to be updating the old Windows while releasing fixups for the new one, but there is more.

Microsoft was also planning on dropping support for WinXP in the near future, (more…)

Failing to have a password on the Administrator account makes your computer very vulnerable. Hackers have ways to access your computer and use the Administrator account to give them permission to do all kinds of things – if there is no password.

So, you must have a password on your Administrator account. How do you do this?

The easiest way is if you are an Administrator already. Click {Start} then right-click on {My Computer} and choose {Manage}
Click the + to expand {Local Users and Groups} then click on Users. Right-click on Administrator in the right panel and choose {Set Password}
Type in a password THAT YOU WILL REMEMBER, and type it again to confirm it.

If you aren’t allowed to do this, (you will get a warning when you open the Computer Management box) make a note of the following then log off your computer.
Note: choose {Start} then {Log Off}, not {Turn Off Computer}
In the {Log Off Windows} box, click on {Log Off}

Now press {Ctrl}+{Alt}+{Delete} - twice! This should bring up a dialog allowing you to log in as Administrator.

Make a note of the name that appears (more…)

As the technology of the Internet has spread across the world, the number of targets has grown for hackers, along with the nefarious uses to which illegally gained information can be put. Police forces have entire sections now devoted to what was once almost a misdemeanor, a ‘white collar crime’ that earned a slap on the wrist.

The first step to protecting your computer is to stop people from getting access to your system. There are various levels of this. People on the Internet, using what are known as ‘Exploits’ can reach across your connection and get hold of your system. Once in, they can strip your private information, read your private files and more commonly, use your computer to pass on spam, porn and, more significantly, launch attacks on other systems.

You’ve seen movies about hackers or people doing crime using the Internet. Do you want your computer to be one of those on the path the FBI trace back to the criminal? At best it will mean a visit from Law Enforcement as they make sure you aren’t connected to the case.

Your ISP is conscious of this and (more…)

One of the major tools in the grab-bag of a hacker is what is known as Social Engineering. There are formal definitions but it is all about how people will, unless given a reason to be suspicious, be open and unsuspecting and can be led into giving away information.

In other words, hackers quite often and successfully walk into a building, posing as (say) an inspector or even a cleaner and find supposed-to-be secure information that allows them to access the company computers.

A part of this is knowing about people. There are sites that list the most common things people use for passwords. Network security can insist on a regular change of login password from users and prevent them from using the same one for a set number of times.

This seems like good security but in practice, (more…)

In Are you Safe? Part 1 I talked about whether or not our home computer is secure. Talking to Mr JM it seems even I had a false sense of security about the subject.
For example, I thought my physical computer kept my data pretty safe and my main concern was having internet sites do things to my computer. Not so…

The process of installing Windows involves setting up a user account. Most people simply walk through the install process clicking {next} on the default settings. This usually results in the creation of a named user, say ‘John’ and an Administrator account.

The problem is, while some people will provide a password for the John account, they totally ignore the Administrator account – after all, they aren’t going to be using it.

Hackers know this. Most people (more…)

Gmail has been hacked and the capcha program subverted. What is a capcha program? You’ve seen them, when you try to sign up for a site and they ask you to type in some numbers displayed as a picture or against some background pattern.

The idea of it is to make sure you’re a human.

They do this to capture ‘bots’ – programs that try to log in to sites to get access to user information and accounts. Gmail has had their spam numbers double already, so if you have a gmail account and you’ve been seeing more adult spam recently, that’s why.

But it brings up the question of how safe we are on our home PC’s. (more…)

…sometimes have to go through more than they can deal with.

Mr JM says he has had clients who personify this sort of basic commonsense.

From the Internet…This is a true story from the WordPerfect Helpline which was transcribed from a recording monitoring the customer care department. Needless to say, the Help Desk employee was fired; however, he is currently suing the WordPerfect organization for ”Termination without Cause.” This is the actual dialogue of a former WordPerfect Customer Support employee (now I know why they record these conversations)!
”Ridge Hall computer assistance; may I help you?”
”Yes, well, I’m having trouble with WordPerfect.”
”What sort of trouble?”
”Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden the words went away.”
”Went away?”
”They disappeared.”
”Hmmm. So what does your screen look like now?”
”Nothing.”
”Nothing?”
”It’s a blank; it won’t accept anything when I type.” (more…)

When Mr JM began computing, the Apple computer company was in its infancy. According to him, they made an almost fatal mistake – they locked down the architecture, sued the pants off (or threatened to) anyone who dared to try to imitate them, (in spite of the fact they ripped off the WIMP interface from Rank Xerox) and over-priced their machines to almost absurd levels.
(WIMP = Window, Icon, Menu, Pull-down)

IBM, on the other hand, introduced a much inferior computer, opened the architecture, & didn’t care if people copied them. Consequently, today, there are at least 50 Windows PC’s out there for every MAC.

There were a few other faux pas as well; inability to expand the machine you’d paid $5,000 for, holding onto a nine inch grey screen even when the standard everywhere else was a fourteen inch 256 colour VGA screen, and eventually a clunky single button mouse when even IBM was releasing a two button version.

Mr JM says also that you can tell someone who began their computer experience on a MAC by the fact they bang the mouse on the desk before they move it. (Apparently the MAC mouses had ‘sticky’ balls,  and you had to lift them & tap them on the desk to get the pointer to begin moving)

Now they have the MAC-Air. Lovely looking machine, light, thin, everything a catwalk model should be – and about as intelligent.

To quote Tech Republic, Computer Guru site… (more…)