I was taught by my parents to show kindness and help your neighbors. After my current interactions with my neighbor, I might have to re-think that idealistic concept. My car has custom license plates with the word ‘PC-Doc’ imprinted on it. Well my neighbor saw this and knocked on my door one night. They asked if I fixed computers and I told them that I was a Network Engineer but asked “what was the problem they were having?” After hearing her reply I said I would drop by since it sounded like a spyware / virus problem. I loaded Adaware, Spybot and AVG Anti-Virus onto a USB thumbdrive and went over. Once I got there the machine was infested with viruses and spyware. The file / registry key count was in the thousands. I spent an hour and cleaned the system out for them. They then asked how much they owed me for the service and I did the neighborly thing and told them not to worry about it. I also told them to do themselves a favor and purchase Symantec AntiVirus and a Linksys DSL/Cable router since their cable modem was directly attached to the workstation. Well they didn’t listen to me about the router and I have since had to pay them two more visits. They have now turned into the bane of my existence. Looking back at things now I should have charged them my regular rate of $150 an hour and they would have thought twice about asking me again for help. Since I was kind and helped them, I am now their personal computer guru (pulls hair out of head just thinking about it). Take a tip from your uncle Doc, avoid helping out friends and neighbors with computer problems unless you truly want to have the little personal time you have for yourself stripped away.
The Mac mini
Sounds like something on the McDonald’s Kids menu, but this mini belongs to Apple. I have a love hate relationship with Apple. I have owned many Macs over the years and I have sold them all on eBay. I love Apple’s OS X interface however it always comes down to issues with me. The two issues being cost of ownership and the miniscule amount of software available compared to a PC. Well it might be time for me to plunk down some money on a new Mac. Apple introduced a new headless inexpensive Mac they call the “Mac mini”. The base model is priced just below $500 the specs aren’t much to talk about, but at least you’re not out a lot for something to play around with. To find out more about Apple’s new offering, just follow the link.
Media Center 2005 & Orb
Over the weekend I built a Microsoft Media Center 2005 system. I have been a serious DirecTivo user for the past couple of years. I have hacked them made them network accessible to offload recorded shows. I have also added larger hard drives so I can record over 200hrs on one box. The DirecTivo also lets you record two channels simultaneously. The only problem I had was the lack of being able to offload recorded shows to DVD. Stand alone Tivos have been able to do this for over a year. With the recent announcement that DirecTV is going to start selling there own PVR, it looks as if the DirecTivos are close to end of life. So I decided to build my own MCE system with a terabyte of storage and give cable a try. So I have two tuners built into it, which are attached to two cable set top boxes. So now I have the same functionality as my DirecTivo with a slicker interface and a DVD burner. So far I am very happy with it and it was worth the investment. In the near future I will write an article on the construction and installation of the software. I took a lot of great pictures during the construction of the system. Also I just started using a service offered by Orb that allows me to stream live TV, recorded TV, photos and MP3s to any network device (laptop, PDA, smartphone) from my MCE system any where in the world. It was very simple to setup and the quality was pretty decent. Hardwarezone.com has an article on an announcement made at CES regarding Orb and Netgear partnering. Check back soon for more of my impressions of Microsoft’s upgrade to its Media Center and the article I am writing.
Bad Tech in Hollywood
I can’t remember the last movie that was largely based on technology that got any terminology or its proper use correct. They hire technical advisors to make sure that what they are portraying is correct. What they really need is someone to make sure the technical advisors actually know something. I just watched the first 24 minutes of 24 which will air on Sunday. Don’t worry I am not going to give anything away. If you’re a geek or at least know some terminology you will be bent over laughing within the first 10-15 minutes. It’s like someone picked up a Linksys router manual jumbled some keywords around and made a portion of the script from it. If anyone from Hollywood reads this, I’m available to be a technical advisor. At least you might get something right for a change. Don’t get me wrong, I love the show. I’d just wish they would take the time to make some things that are supposed to be intelligent actually intelligent.
Microsoft AntiSpyware (Beta) Publically Available!
Well Microsoft got this out pretty quick, considering they just acquired the Giant Software about 2 weeks ago the maker of the AntiSpyware. For details on the recent acquisition read the InformationWeek article.
You can download the beta version of MS AntiSpyware here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=321cd7a2-6a57-4c57-a8bd-dbf62eda9671&DisplayLang=en
Attacks on Microsoft WINS Service hole raise alarms
Internet security monitoring groups are warning Microsoft Windows users about new Internet attacks aimed at Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 machines running WINS (Windows Internet Naming Service).
Read Article @ Infoworld
phpBB users beware!!
Anyone running a forum server using phpBB need to take precautions immediately. There is a worm that is targeting phpBB code. The worm is called Sanity.A and it using Google to find server running phpBB by searching for ‘viewtopic.php’. Once a site is compromised it searches for several web page extensions and then defaces them. If your running a phpBB forum go this link: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=240513
For information on this story go visit the related story @ Yahoo
Give your Photo iPod the Playboy touch
Playboy is starting a service called iBod which allows you to download photos of 25 models for your Photo iPod. For more information or to download this package visit:
Microsoft fixes ‘critical’ XP firewall issue
Microsoft has quietly released an update to Windows XP to fix a potentially serious configuration problem in the firewall that ships as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).
Read Story @ InfoWorld
New IE Exploit Spoofs Web Sites
The bug, which has been confirmed on a fully patched Windows XP system with IE 6.0 and Service Pack 2, could allow a scammer to display a fake Web site with all the attributes of a genuine, secure site, including the URL and the icon indicating SSL security, according to researchers.
Read More @ eWeek