I’ve been a long time fan of Ian “Gizmo” Richards and in days past we’ve had quite a natter about tech items. Sadly his newsletter no longer runs but he does still maintain the most excellent Gizmo’s Freeware reviews site under the old TechSupportAlert newsletter URL.

Sadly I don’t get as much time as I’d like to contribute there but a recent discovery of mine is his Security Advice Wizard.

It’s a very simple, 4 page, multiple choice info gathering wizard.

Nothing complicated and I guarantee that once you’ve read the T&C’s it’ll take you less than a minute to complete (and if you include those then make it less than 2 minutes).

At the end of it you get appropriate and focused advice on what you should do and how you should protect your Windows based computer..

I say you all should go through it … now.

I’ve taken to recently unfollowing a bunch of folks on Twitter.

Not because I don’t want to see their tweets but because I’m seeing them twice and sometimes three times.

You see, I use lists – probably not as extensively as some do but then TweetDeck does recommend you restrict the maximum number of open columns. So in an effort to improve the flow of my twitter world I’ve taken to trying to be more organised.

Some lists I’ve created myself:

ChurchIT – this one covers far more than just IT. The basic criteria is do you go to a church (I don’t care what denomination or faith) and are you involved in IT, Tech, Media, AV, or similar in some way. If so, and I’ve seen your name then you are likely on this list. Currently it has 197 members and 17 followers.

CCNA – this one loosely covers anyone that tweets about the Cisco Certified Network Associate certification. It’s work related so I feel duty bound but it only has 19 members and one follower.

Welsh Rugby – I think this one is fairly self explanatory but it is a list of folks that play or have played rugby for or in Wales. A passion of mine and has 32 members but no followers.

I also have a couple of private lists that include folks I know IRL (in real life) and the folks I’ve interacted with on the 31DBBB project. I’m open to bribes for making my 31DBBB one public though. Equally I have a few lists I follow that I didn’t create.

The trouble with my recent actions is that it could cause some folks to unfollow me – and I accept this as it is too much effort to tell them individually that I’m following them via a list so please don’t drop me. Instead I’ll accept that my sphere of influence will likely decrease.

That’s no bad thing – after all it’s not about me.

Anyway, to utilise lists requires that you have a twitter app that allows you to easily view them.

My software of choice is TweetDeck because for me and the way I use Twitter it just works – and there’s an iPhone app for it as well.

• Do you use lists – if so tell me a list or lists you follow?
• What software do you use to manage your lists?
• How do you find your lists?
• Would you find a lists 101 helpful?
• Are you on any lists?
• Do you have a twitter plan of action?

It would appear that a certain Irish ISP (no names, no pack drill) has taken to blocking content they deem as unsuitable. This follows on from another Irish ISP that has adopted the “three strikes and out” rule on file sharing.

They aren’t just blocking the unsuitable content but entire sites.

The worrying thing is the lack of choice offered and no prior warnings – just blocked unceremoniously. Additionally there is no burden of proof required – so malicious reports could easily see someone barred from the internet. When you consider that most schools in the UK expect children to have access to the web at home for school purposes – then we once again enter into the realm of a two tier society. The have and have nots.

But, I don’t want to get into the politics of these decisions here, but show how (in the case of the site blocking) it can be overcome with some simple changes. Equally, making these changes could improve your surf speeds even if you don’t get blocked.

The approach is to utilise a third party DNS service such as OpenDNS or Google.

If you’re not a fan of either or find they aren’t perhaps as good as your current ISP then try using namebench – which is a simple utility that has code for Windows, Macs and *nix. In their own words they state that namebench “hunts down the fastest DNS servers available for your computer to use“.

So why is this a 201?

Mostly because it’s a step above an intro lesson to DNS (covered here) as you’ll need to know how to access yoru router and change it’s settings – that I won’t cover here, but OpenDNS cover a ‘how to‘ for most major manufacturers.

And another way around this is to utilise one of the methods discussed here recently.

• Should ISP’s play judge & jury?
• What about other un-regulated setups such as the IWF?
• Ignoring for now, the dangers to minors are you for or against ineternet censorship by organisations?

Today’s post is a guest post from Kevin Weatherby. Kevin is a cowboy by trade and a pastor by calling and has some fantastic stories and insights and a wonderful ability to link stories from ‘the ranch‘ to real life spiritual applications.

Here’s one that caught my eye recently and Kevin kindly agreed to re-write it to better suit my tech blog. Thanks Kevin.

My friend Stuart asked me to pass along a few high tech cowboy tips and pointers post. I am always willing to help people out where and when I can. Today’s lesson will be on computer repair. There is a right way and a wrong way to get things done….I’ll leave you to decide which one this might be.

When you live 30 miles from the nearest anywhere, you learn to use a variety of things in a variety of situations. Cowboys can figure out how to fix items, or at least patch them, with the simplest things he has laying around.

I had lightning strike the house about 5 years ago and ruined my computer. I know I should have had a surge protector, but it was outside running the air compressor, the drill, two heat lamps, a fountain pump, a weedeater, a radio, a kick-butt chair massager, a battery charger, two ceiling fans, a burned up coffee maker, a curlin’ iron, and a cell phone charger.

Well, this computer wasn’t working, so I didn’t figure I would break it by trying to fix it. It was already fried. I opened it up to see if anything was wrong. The whole durn thing looked like a rainbow bright rat’s nest with all the colorful wires and green boards. I didn’t know the first thing about what any of that stuff did or where to begin. The whole thing looked broken to me. I couldn’t even find the cards from the Solitaire Game that I played so much. But I did find one of the mines from minesweeper. It looked remarkably like a mouse turd.

I figured I would just start where the cord went in the back. I had to take out about fourteen screws the size of a pencil lead just to get into the little box where the cord goes. I didn’t have a screwdriver that small so I just took a hacksaw and opened it like everyone else does. That is how ya’ll would do it, right?

Anyway, the first thing I saw in this little box was a fuse. It was not a big fuse, but it didn’t take an electrical jeanius to see that the durned thing was blown. I had never seen a fuse like this in my whole life. I didn’t know where I was going to find a “little weird computer fuse” store. So I did the next best thing. I made one out of baling wire.

All a fuse does is make electricity go from one side of it to another. Wire will do that. I went out to the horse pens and got some wire that was tied up there. I didn’t use the good stuff, I used the real rusty batch. It didn’t have to be pretty. It just had to run a little electricity. I taped that little piece of baling wire on the outside of that fuse and secured it with a little piece of duct tape. It’s very hard to get a piece of duct tape that small. I was afraid at one point I was going to have to get some bubble gum to make the wire stay put.

In the end though, the toughest part was getting the blasted thing back together, not fixing it. I had hacksawed all the little screws off and I couldn’t figure out how to get the cover back on. If I hadn’t seen that cover come off there with my own two eyes, I would have bet you a good dog that the cover was off something else.

I plugged the computer in and hit the magic button. The thing fired right up and I used it for about three more years.

Now that baling wire was not ever intended to be used to fix a computer. It might have worked out alright, but that definitely was not the tool for the job. I learned two things from that close encounter with the computer kind.

The first is to not be afraid to dive into something you don’t know anything about. You might surprise yourself with what you can do.

The second is that if you have to use a hacksaw to get into something, you should probably stay out of it. Let someone that knows what they are doing get the job done right the first time–without duct tape and rusted wire from a horse pen.

Let’s face it – we’re probably all addicted to social networking.

Whether you can walk away from it for a week or more or have to use it to tell us every minor part of your day from what you had for breakfast (and where) to what colour socks you’ve got on – then in some way, the very fact you are reading here is likely proof you use social media and possibly are addicted to it..

Well according to CSOonline “dozens of IT security professionals have pinpointed seven typical security mistakes people make” and they are:

• Over-sharing company activities.
• Mixing personal with professional .
• Engaging in Tweet (or Facebook/LinkedIn/Myspace) rage
• Believing he/she who dies with the most connections wins
• Password sloth
• Trigger finger (clicking everything, especially on Facebook)
• Endangering yourself and others

Please click through on the above link to see the detail.

Are you guilty of any of these?

Do you feel any of these are an over-simplification?

Here’s a freebie for you.

But it’s not me but Pandora Corp. that are giving something away.

Starting June 26th at 00:01 Pacific Standard Time (time conversion) which is equivalent to GMT / UTC 07:01 and finishing at midnight (PST) Wednesday, June 30th  they are giving away its signature computer monitoring software, PC Pandora 6.0, absolutely free!

Me, I’m against monitoring without first having discussion but if you’ve already reached that stage or you have another need for it, then I say grab it while you can.

Here’s how to get it:

Vist PC Pandora and use the code FREESUMMER2010. As I say – the giveaway will last until midnight on the 30th or until 50,000 units have been given away.

I’d barely got my new series of “Internet Safety Sunday” up and running when I was approached by Brightfilter to see if I was willing to review their software.

Of course I said yes and made it abundantly clear that to do it justice I would need an unrestricted version and that it would be totally unbiased without fear of favour. The only pre-deal I agreed to is that I’d let the company see this review first so that they could “respond to it as necessary” – you can see their response at the end in red.

So…

Who are Brightfilter?

They are a Bath (UK) based company that is fairly new (since 2004) to the world of filtering but appear to have made quite an impact already. They provide internet security solutions that “protect children online both at school and at home”.

From information found on their website they only “provide solutions” that meet standards or guidelines published by groups such as: CIPA; IIA; ISPA and IWF. They are also now a McAfee Premier partner.

What do they offer?

The easy answer is to say see the web but in short they offer:

• Family surfing protection and
• Educational surfing protection

Though these two broad sweep categories are far from the complete picture. The first is via a windows application and the second is typically via an appliance such as the McAfee Web Gateway unit.

Here’s an interesting find.

Yesterday I blogged about how to hide your IP address and today I caught up with one of the many blogs (EFF in this case) I follow who posted about “encrypting the web”.

In short, it’s a plugin for Firefox released by the Tor Project and EFF that encrypts all your search requests and attempts to encrypt all standard web browsing. Read all about it here.

It’s still in beta but it’s a start.

I say grab it now.

N.B. it doesn’t hide your IP or stop search engines from logging but it does stop ‘in the open‘ intercepts.