On Computers

Corel has come out with a new Office suite on a flash drive, a memory stick that plugs into the USB slot on a Windows computer.

Corel calls it “Home Office” and they’re marketing it for the small netbook computers that have proved so popular. These have no disk drive, so they can’t install programs that come on disk. Though netbooks are their target customer, Home Office can be installed on any Windows computer and offers most of the tools that users get with Microsoft Office.

The price for Corel’s office on a stick is $70, compared to $400-$500 for Microsoft Office. In all fairness, you get more features and programs with Microsoft Office, but many people don’t use or need them all.

Another advantage of Corel’s office on a stick is that it uses very few system resources. The whole suite takes up only 100 megabytes, compared with Microsoft Office that requires 1.5 gigabytes, 15 times as much. Home Office comes with a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation program, but does not have a database.

Corel’s office has the look and feel of Microsoft Office 2007 and can read and write documents that are compatible with the latest versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There’s a free trial version at Corel.com.

Though Corel’s office comes on a stick, that doesn’t mean it is one of those portable applications that run off the stick itself without affecting the host computer. If you want one of these, there is a free suite of programs at PortableApps.com. They include a portable version of the free “Open Office,” developed by Sun Microsystems. Portable Apps has been around for a few years but they’re constantly updating the free stuff they offer. Memory sticks, also called flash drives, have become so cheap that the smallest ones you can buy these days will hold everything they have.

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More than 250 million people use Yahoo.com for their email. Finally grasping the size of that, Yahoo is adding 12 applications that can be used without leaving the email window.

Best of breed among the new apps within email:

• PayPal.com, which lets you make secure money transfers.
• Edit photos and share photo collages with Picnik.com.
• ZumoDrive.com lets you email files as large as 100MB for free. (That’s a really big file!)
• Family Journal: build your family tree and connect with relatives.

• Movies: share movie trailers, show times and reviews.
• OtherInBox, which finds bulk emails, such as newsletters, and puts them in folders where you can get to them later.

These applications are just starting to come online in Yahoo mail. Go to yahoo.twi.bz/gb to get them. If you don’t have a Yahoo! email account, you can get one for free at Yahoo.com and have your email forwarded there. (This brings up something that many people we talk to don’t know: You can have any emails forwarded to some other email service. Bob for example, stopped using America Online a couple years ago and has emails from there forwarded to Gmail.com.)

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• Click2try.com  provides a catalog of more than 40 Open Source applications that visitors can try for free, right from their browser without downloading any software. Nice tutorials too.
• Cellswapper.com: Get out of your cell phone contract by selling it to someone else, who avoids the typical activation fees and gets a free phone.
• Kidzui.com: a free browser for kids that protects them automatically. Parents don’t have to know what safeguards to turn on.
• thetunedepot.com: a $25 a month service that lets musicians sell their music online from their own websites and keep 100 percent of the royalties, something you can’t do at MySpace or Facebook. The Tune Depot Marketplace will also promote their tunes.

Filed under: free stuff, kids, music, phones | No Comments »

Some of us appear in several places on the web. For example, we have a web site, a MySpace page, a Facebook page, photo albums on Picasa and SmugMug, a Twitter page and some reviews at Amazon. It’s common to see one location and not others. A service called “UnHub” puts everything in one place.

First you sign up for a free account at unhub.com. Then choose your site. Your new UnHub address will take people to your selected starting point. In our case that’s OnComp.com, the web site for our columns. But you may like your MySpace page best, or a personal website. The top of the screen for whichever site you choose will have an UnHub bar, which shows links to the other sites. When you give out your UnHub address, friends and associates will see all your locations. Our UnHub address is: unhub.com/oncomp.

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Bob’s favorite technology book series is the “Evil Genius” group from McGraw Hill’s Tab division. There are more than a dozen of these and the Evil Genius tag that appears in all their names is for marketing – just as the “(fill-in-the-blank) for Dummies” series isn’t really for dummies.

No evil genius is required to use or enjoy these books, which are filled with projects for people who like to tinker and experiment at home or school. Sample titles are “Science Fair Projects for the Evil Genius;” “Programming Video Games for the Evil Genius;” “Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius,” etc. The projects are similar to what you might find in “Popular Science” magazine. They tell you the cost for each project and warn of any risks. The books run around $20-$25 each and you can find them at MHProfessional.com.

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The easy to use Jitterbug cell phone has an updated version that includes  a speakerphone button, can use Bluetooth and offers an “ask a nurse” extra.

The “ask a nurse” feature is an acknowledgement that this phone is popular with older users. It costs an extra $4 a month and lets you talk to a nurse about any symptoms of illness you may be experiencing and get advice on whether you should call a doctor or go to a hospital. Regular service without the nurse is $15 a month, though you can find cheaper deals at cellphones.about.com.

The Jitterbug has large backlit keys that are easy to read and simple controls for on/off and phone list scrolling. If the user has trouble with the numbers, they can simply press “O” and get a live operator; these are on duty 24 hours, every day. Normal phone calls can be made by dialing or simply speaking the name of someone whose number has been pre-loaded. Unlike phones that appeal to young users, the $147 no-contract Jitterbug has no camera and is intended simply to make phone calls and send text messages. What a radical idea.

On the other hand, if you want a jazzy phone, Casio has just come out with the Exilim Mobile for $330 with a two-year service contract. A typical service contract runs $60 for 900 minutes a month.

This phone has been a big seller in Japan. In the U.S., we could only find it at Verizon dealers.

The name of the phone caught our attention immediately because Exilim is the brand name for their line of ultra-slim digital cameras. And in fact that’s what you’re getting: an Exilim camera merged with a cell phone. This provides high resolution photos at 5.1 megapixels and the phone is also “water resistant,” as they say. In practice this means this usually means it still works if it falls into water and you don’t let it sit there.

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TabTab.com is a free toolbar for Internet Explorer or Firefox that adds popular tabs to the top of your browser window. If you choose “sports,” for example, you can add a sports tab, choosing from a dozen popular web sites that feature sports news and results. The tabs are still there at the top of your browser screen when you next turn it on. There is a substantial list of preset tabs to choose from and you can add more.

This is one way of doing it. It’s a good way because it lets you have lots of choices that appear permanently on your browser’s home page and can be reached with just a click. Here are some other ways:

You can often add tabs to browsers simply by dragging the title of a particular web site onto the toolbar at the top of the screen.

Typing control-t also adds a new tab to the toolbar of any browser. Internet Explorer loses those new tabs, however, as soon as you exit. Firefox asks you if you want to keep the tabs for your next session. Other browsers have other approaches. It’s worth mentioning again that you can have as many web browsers as you want on your computer and they do not interfere with each other.

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You’ll find some real “tweets” in “The Twitter Book,” by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein; $20 from oreilly.com.

For instance, Shaquille O’Neal, the famous professional basketball player, has over 1.2 million followers of his “tweets” and gives away free game tickets at his site: twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ. Here’s an example: “People n phoenix have 5 min to touch me I have 2 laker tickets n my hand I’m on a corner at a bus stop.” (At seven feet, one inch, he should be fairly easy to spot.) Since Twitter only allows 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation, users tend to omit full spelling, common articles and conjunctions, and pay little attention to capitals.

Go to search.twitter.com to read tweets. You have to register to send tweets, but not to read them. Twitter allows you to communicate with the world in short bursts. News of remarkable events and people are often transmitted within seconds. The safe landing of a jet liner in the Hudson River close to New York was tweeted within seconds. Though the box you type into says “what are you doing now,” people use Twitter for all kinds of things, including business.

Some of the top tips from “The Twitter Book” include:

• Use Twi.bz to shorten a long website address. It lets visitors see where they’re going, by using the original name in the new address. For example, we shortened a link to a column item at our web site, from “oncomp.com/2009/06/music-maestro-if-you-please,” to: oncomp.twi.bz/a. Twitter will shorten your link for you if you don’t, but twi.bz lets you include the real website name.
• Tweetdeck.com. You may be following 3000 people but you really only have time for three; Tweetdeck lets you look at the key ones first. (Use the “group” feature to set it up.)
• Tweetbrain.com. Use this to ask questions of the whole Twitter community. Somewhere, somebody has an answer for anything. New York Times columnist David Pogue recently tweeted for a hiccup cure and got dozens of replies in seconds.   

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A study by the United States Secret Service, which apparently took some time off from protecting the President, found that 32% of all electronic crimes are committed by insiders.  

This goes along with regular crime, which Bob did some articles on years ago and found that criminals committing serious crimes, especially murder, nearly always knew their victims. Looking at the kind of crimes the Secret Service was talking about, it also makes sense that the perpetrators would be familiar with an organization’s computer system and how to circumvent its protection. They could be current employees or recently dismissed employees.  

This fits with the computer viruses that shut down large systems, sometimes very large systems. The virus is almost always acquired by an employee doing something foolish or simply unthinking, such as clicking on a button that says sometime seemingly harmless like “click here to verify your account.” If you don’t know the source of the information, don’t click. Which leads us right into our next topic: dangerous searches. 

Dangerous Search Terms 

A recent report by McAfee, one of the leading makers of anti-virus software, found that the most dangerous search term to use on the web is “screensavers.”  

Now who would have thought that an innocuous term like screensavers would bring up bad things, like viruses, key loggers and plain old-fashioned scams? But it makes all kinds of sense. Because first of all, screensavers, or “screen savers,” no matter how you spell it, are nearly always free. And everybody loves free stuff, so when you get to the web site and it says “click here for your free screen saver,” well, you have to click or you’re not going to get your freebie.  

The instant you click, it triggers a download of some something, and you have no idea what that something is. It could be a key logger, which will record every keystroke you make from that second forward, including the passwords you are going to type in at some time in the not too distant future, or it could be software that allows your system to be controlled from another location. Not good. 

There’s no point in being completely paranoid about this, though it’s true that even paranoids can have enemies, but a little caution is advisable. McAfee’s research found that nearly 60 percent of the web sites that came up for the search term “screensavers,” were in fact sites set up to transmit bad software, often referred to collectively as “malware,” straight into your computer. The second and third worst results came from searches for “lyrics,” which connected to potentially bad sites 26 percent of the time, and “free,” which found dangerous sites 21 percent of the time. Other dangerous search terms were “iPhone” and “games.” 

Now there’s no need to go nuts and hide in the digital closet; most sites are trustworthy. Most people also know which sites they trust.  After all, your local newspaper or news magazine is not out to cheat you. You can also use protective software. We both use a free program from AVG that posts a warning on screen if the site you are about to go to looks risky. You can get that at grisoft.com. They also sell more comprehensive protection programs. 

If you’re searching for free programs to download – which we often do, it’s best to go to sites like download.com or tucows.com, which test programs before posting them. Sites for leading computer magazines also test programs before listing them for download.

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Microsoft’s new “Bing” search engine is designed to give Google a run for the money. From our first look, it may very well do that. It’s free and you can use it at bing.com.

Swiss Alps

Here’s how it works: You click on a link, such as “shopping” or “news” to target a narrower search. Provide a subject and it comes up with lots of results, usually with pictures. We clicked its video link and searched for our new favorite TV show, “The Mentalist.” It came back with a dozen video clips. If you let your mouse pointer hover over the right edge of a result, you get a brief summary of what’s on any site you just selected..

The Bing search engine has a pleasing interface. Like its predecessor, Live.com, its opening screen features a new photo each day. But unlike Live, when you hover over the photo, a number of spots provide links to related information. For example, a picture of Polychrome Pass in Alaska’s Denali National Park had links to other rainbow-colored mountains. Since the featured range was in Alaska, one of the links invited you to “meet the world’s champion dog sled driver.” You can also have the Bing tool bar added to Microsoft’s “Windows Explorer” browser.

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