Computer Solutions in the greater brisbane area.
Author archive
Author archive
Congratulations Luke Raison!
The team at Shift Computer Solutions would like to congratulate Luke Raison on winning the 2010 Shift Computer Solutions Excellent in Information Technology award at Redbank Plains State High School. Luke has been an outstanding pupil this year, and Mathew had great pleasure in presenting him with the award at tonight’s award ceremony.
We’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate all the award winners on the acheivements, and thank the School for once again putting on a great awards evening.
The night was made very special by some stellar performances from the students. An excellent trumpet piece, several excellent band performances, and two stunning dance numbers punctuation a rewarding evening.
Why you should think twice about using WiFi
Many people take advantage of WiFi hotspots when they are on the move. Free services like the one at most McDonalds takeaways are very popular, allowing people to check their email, and update Facebook without an expensive 3G wireless plan.
The problem is, they are totally insecure, and allow anyone with a bit of skill to hack your computer and your online accounts.
Well, that’s the GOOD news.
Now, even complete morons can hack into your Facebook or other online services with the click of a mouse. As reported by Computer World, the firesheep plugin is an addon to the popular firefox browser that lets you hack other peoples accounts without more than a mouseclick.
Basically, you install Firesheep into your Firefox browser, head down to your local WiFi hotspot and connect to it, and then Firesheep will AUTOMATICALLY hack other users accounts for you.
So, if you don’t need to, you should not use these WiFi hotspots. If you do, try not to use them for things like Facebook or your internet banking. If you really must, then you should install HotSpot Shield, which will protect you and your data from the evil users of software like Firesheep.
PC World have a good writeup on Firesheep.
How to stop getting the Yellow Pages
There are plenty of us out there that think the day of the printed Yellow Pages is long gone, but each year a huge lump of dead tree is still dropped on everyone’s doorstep.
If you think the tree’s would be better off still growing, and not turned into a Yellow Pages directory, here’s what you do;
Click through to https://www.directoryselect.com.au/ds/. Whack in your postcode in the “I’d like to cancel books” section and you should be golden; That is, if they have fixed the site, which suspiciously didn’t work when I tried it.
Alternatively, you can ring 1800 008 292, or if you are adventurous, try emailing them at bookdelivery@sensis.com.au
If you’re really upset about all the wasted paper, you can join the “Let’s eliminate phone books” Facebook group.
Leave a comment and let us know how you went!
Paywave is a bad idea.
Chances are, if you haven’t already, you will soon be contacted by your bank to tell you about a wonderful new feature of their credit cards, called paywave. Basically, paywave lets you simply “wave” your card near the eftpos terminal, and your money is taken. No swiping, no pin number, no nothing.
The bank will tell you the system only works over very short distances, so there is no chance anyone will be able to steal your money. What they won’t tell you, is a similar technology, RFID, which is also supposed to only work over short distances, has been hacked to allow reading of data from kilometers away. Don’t fool yourself, organised criminals will have paywave readers as soon as lots of us have compatible cards in our wallets, and our money will not be safe.
The good news is that most banks will opt you out of the paywave system if you ask them, and send you a card that doesn’t have the paywave chip in it. I would recommend everyone opt out of this system as soon as your bank contacts you about it.
Moving iTunes to a new computer
I recently had to move my wife’s iTunes to a new computer; I had done this for myself a number of times (I’m always reformatting and messing around), but had always lost data that I had entered into apps on my iPhone. This time around, however, things went a lot more smoothly.
The first, and most important trick, is to make sure you have all your music stored in a central location that is NOT in iTunes. Even if you buy music through iTunes, you should copy the files to your central music store, so that you can access it from any computer or device at any time. We have a Windows Home Server, and so I store all our mp3′s there, and when I setup iTunes for a family member, I just drag across the music they want, and iTunes will play it or sync it with an Apple device. You should also make sure you back this up!
Because all our music isn’t on our local computers in our iTunes folder, it makes moving iTunes a lot quicker because there is so much less data to copy.
Before continuing, make sure you have updated iTunes to the latest version.
The next step is to sync your iPhone with your existing iTunes. I like to get everything up to date before I try moving anything so that the ONLY thing I’m doing is moving it, I’m not updating apps or podcasts as well. If you have the choice, keeping your old machine online during the process means if it all goes horribly wrong, you can safely start again, because it will have a current backup and all your data.
Now I locate the iTunes folder. All my home computers are running Windows 7 (and yours should be too!), and so I just open my user profile (your name on the start menu), open up the music folder, and I see my iTunes folder there. You need to take a copy of it, so a USB thumb drive or hard drive would be ideal at this point.
On your new computer, install iTunes (again, make sure you have downloaded the latest version). When I was doing the transfer for my wife, I opened iTunes and had it go through the usual questions for it’s inital setup. Once it’s up, I closed it down again, and located the iTunes folder on the new computer. (Should be in the same place). I renamed this empty new iTunes folder to iTunes-Fresh (being a fresh install), and then simply copied the iTunes folder that I had taken off the old computer into the same location.
After doing that, my wifes iPhone 4 and iPad both happily synced with iTunes without any problems, as if nothing had ever happened, and all the data in the apps on both were preserved.
The final thing you MUST do is go back to your old computer (after you have verified that all is well on the new one), and DEAUTHORISE iTunes on it. You only get to setup your iTunes account on a total of Five computers, and there is no way to remove the authorisation once the computer is gone, you can only do it via iTunes. Read more about it on Apple’s website.
Now I’ve probably missed or glossed over something important, so if you are trying to do this yourself, leave me a comment, or send me a tweet @lordphantom
The French Spellchecker problem
Many clients have reported trouble with their email spell checker turning French all of a sudden. This is because they are using Outlook Express, an old, outdated and frankly, dangerous email client that Microsoft included with Windows XP. Outlook Express, or OE as we often call it, used the dictionary system from the Microsoft Office Suite. Since Office 2007, the dictionary files used by Office are too advanced, and OE cannot use them.
The interesting result is that your email spell check turns French when this is the situation.
The best solution by far is to stop using Outlook Express and start using Microsoft Outlook. There’s a good chance you already have it installed if you are using Microsoft Office. Outlook is a much superior email client, and some of the benefits of switching are;
- Improved reliability
- Easy to backup your email
- Calendar, Tasks and Notes integrated into the client
- Easy to sync with your iPhone or other smart phone
If you prefer to stick with Outlook Express, you need to install a dictionary that it can use for English. Download and install this dictionary solution, reboot your computer and you should be back in business.
Leave a comment and let us know how you went! You can always call us on 3814 1131 and one of our technicians can fix this for you if you need us.
Why we suggest Internode ADSL
We regularly get asked about broadband internet connections, and we have for many years told all our clients the best way foward is to sign up with Internode. Because I find myself answering this question so often, I thought I would write a post about it, detailing all the reasons I use and reccomend them.
Support
Internode employ great quality people, who are well trained and keen to help when you need it. They are all based right here in Australia, which not only means you are supporting local jobs, but that you get someone who understands you and your situation. Despite having many of our clients using Internode, we only have to call them a handful of times a year, but when we do, we always get the issue resolved quickly and without a lot of hassle.
Value
It’s hard for many to see past the price tag of some large telco’s ADSL plans. This is made especially tricky when some offer a short term discount to get your business. The reality is that Internode have never been the cheapest provider of ADSL in Australia, but their plans have always represented great value, and they are certainly competitive. You know where you stand with Internode, because their plans are honest, avoiding the tricks that some ISP’s use to lure you in.
No Off Peak
Many of the best looking deals misrepresent the value they offer by dividing the quota given into peak/off peak. This means that you are forced to use a large chunk of this quota overnight. None of our clients operate 24 hours a day, and so for them, this off peak quota is wasted, and effectively, they are only getting the peak component. Internode’s quota is 24/7, so you can use it when it suits you.
Data Blocks
Internode allow you to purchase more quota almost instantly if you happen to go over. Most other ISP’s simply force you to suffer through terrible speeds, or worse, charge you massive fees when this happens. Having the option of buying extra data is a huge advantage, especially for home based businesses where sometimes kids can spend the school holidays on the computer.
Free Data
Internode also provide it’s users with a lot of content that does not count toward your quote usage. You can access most of the ABC, for example (and watch many ABC shows via iView) without using any of your quota. If you like listening to the radio, Internode rebroadcast a ton of great radio stations online, and none of them count towoard your quota.
All in all, we’ve been happy we chose internode for many many years, and even today, there isn’t an offer from another ISP that would make us switch.
Stanley Hainsworth on branding
A great video by Robert Scoble interview Stanley Hainsworth, the man behind such brands as Starbucks and Lego. If you are building your business, this video is worth a look.
How Google can hurt your business
This story is developing as I write this, so mainly this post is just a place to collect my thoughts, and broadcast them to the wider community, of which hopefully I can find some help in resolving the problem. Google thus far have not been helpful.
Today a client of ours rang to ask us to help them sort out a serious problem. When you visit their website, http://actioninspections.com.au, you get a warning that their site is probably going to harm your computer. (I’m worried now by linking to it Google might block us too, but we’ll see)
The Google Safe Browsing page for the problem said that Google had never found any malware on the site of any kind. So you can imagine how my frustration started to rise at this point; Why block a site that is perfectly safe?
The suggestion was to use the Google Webmaster Tools to check into it, but there too, I was told there was nothing wrong with the website; The aforementioned safe browsing page suggested I could use the webmaster tools to request a malware review, which would seem to be the way foward, but because Google never found any malware, there is no option to request a review!
A scan with the AVG Website Scanner reveals no malware present either.
Internet Guru @northirid (via twitter) pointed out that there was some spurious javascript being called from kollinsoy.skyefenton.com; That’s clearly the problem that tripped the warning in the first place, but we are still left with no way to have Google stand down, despite having fixed the problem.
Hours after Google began blocking access to the site, it’s tools are only now reporting that in fact there IS malware on the site (even though right now, there isn’t). Now we have access to the Google review process, but we can only guess how long it will take before someone fixes the problem;
Despite that progress, the Google system never tells you what the malware is, or where it was found. It seems pretty stupid not to give people that information, as larger sites could have thousands of pages and take days to check each one. If Google were serious about helping people, this information would be immediately provided.
Updating your ESET Anti Virus
Here’s a short video that shows you how to put the ESET username and password into the software if you already have it installed; If you need to download the software, get it from ESET Australia.
