Anwyay, I had a need to take a screenshot of an app I use and had no idea how to do this. As ever in these situations, Google was my friend.

I discovered that for HTC Android based phones you need to:

“hold the power button & then click on your home button”.

A short camera noise will alert you to the success of this and the image itself is on your film roll.

That’s it.

HTC Screen Grab is a post from: Church Techy

I’ve just had a metaphorical kick up the backside.

Some of you may know – most probably don’t – that I’ve harboured a desire to gather techs be they hardware or software fans or even both. Whether they be sound or video or AV, or IT or media or film or ….! Basically there is no limit and minimal restriction – if you are a tech or know a tech then please read on or get the tech to read on.

I don’t want to gather them to build a community.

I don’t want to boost my reputation.

I want to build a worldwide database of techs and their abilities.

I want that database to be restrictive in only two ways.

1. You must be a christian walking the walk.
2. And you must be a tech head who’s willing to serve.

With that out of the way you’ll be wanting the why – well let me outline the vision a little bit:

A desire to serve the smaller Church, charity, non-profit, small business and others whom don’t have access to dedicated and / or regular support – be that via volunteer or paid basis. To see this be a vehicle to serve the Church and community so that God’s love may be seen by our actions. To see this be a vehicle that will draw together those from different backgrounds; denominations; race; creed; upbringing; etc. To see this work so that the local Church may better fulfill its own destiny.

I have let this vision slip but I have never stopped believing in it.

I want us to be an army of techs able, willing and ready to meet the tech needs of our local churches – wherever that may be.

But I’m not asking you to do this for nothing – though that is of course your right and your blessing to do so – in fact all this was born out of my desire to see the local churches to me be better served by local techs. I personally know 3 or 4 local techs with varying skillsets and if I thought harder could probably think of and find a few more. I wanted my home town to have the best tech served set of churches in the world. I wanted us, on meagre budgets to help our local and smaller churches be able to walk alongside (not compete) with the bigger churches.

I don’t want an us & them situation.

I want us all to pull together.

I want us all to use our talents and abilities to help further God’s kingdom. After all, as a tech not serving in a large church I often wonder whether I’m in the right place or not. I wonder why others get to play with new ideas & kit and I struggle to keep 6 to 10yr old PCs going with no budget and wonder why I’m placed where I am.

I want techs to have a purpose.

I want techs to know they are valued – even if that value has a monetary gain for them.

If you want to read the full vision then have look here.

So what say you?

Do you want to use your talents and abilities for more than just your day job?

If you do work for the church then consider:

• the potential to earn more
• or to serve others less fortunate

If the answer is yes then all I need at this stage is for you to contact me and give me some very basic information:

• Name & Contact details
• Location – doesn’t have to be precise, just an area, county & country at this stage
• The capabilities you’d be willing to serve others with – whether free or paid

If you aren’t happy to divulge this info yet then please do get in touch so we can begin to build a relationship.

Without God and your willingness then this won’t happen.

So one final thing …

Please pass this along to any techs you know

Tech Call to Arms is a post from: Church Techy

A time saver – for the end user if not for the creator.

They originated in car manufacturing back in 1994, but in the last few years they’ve become much more available – from the giant building size codes visible from space via company’s such as Blue Marble to QR codes on your business cards. The key thing about them is the amount of data the code can hold is more than a simple one visible line.

They are being used in education – in sales – in marketing – in … well you get the idea. If you can think of somewhere then it’s likely a QR code could be used.

And therein also lies a problem.

As we become more and more used to them and in some cases even dependent on them then so the bad guys will use them.

Consider how easily we accept QR codes as benign and just scan them in.

(The following taken from the Optimal Security blog)

•  Malicious URLs are at all time highs – from Q2 2011 to Q4 2011 they are up an additional 89%
• QR scanning growth is exploding – the Mobile Barcode Trend Report provides interesting statics:
  o Active users of QR codes is up 525%
  o Average number of scans per code is up 39%
• Mobile Marketer reports QR code scanning is up 4,549%
•  It’s easy for anyone to create a QR code with any kind of content
•  Mobile devices such as iPhones and Androids out of the box are poorly equipped to deal with filtering QR codes and their underlying URLs
•   Malicious QR codes are already in use and are making money for the bad guys. It is a certainty that the use of malicious QR codes will expand.

When you consider the explosive use of QR codes then have we, the techs, kept up with educating the end users of possible dangers?

Are all of us techs aware that we can equip our smart devices with 3rd party scanning tools that we would natively install on our desltops?

Or how about getting the tech industry to only release apps that pre-emptively pre-scan and advise us of what the URL(s) we are about to visit are? As it happens, Google Goggles does this and is one of a very few that do.

QR Codes – good, bad or ugly?

QR Codes is a post from: Church Techy

In fact long before it got commercialised.

However one of the things it was never easy to do with PGP was encrypt what I’ll call ad-hoc communications and web based email. So trying to encrypt IM conversations or facebook messages or … well you take your pick of what … was just a nightmare that required complicated hoop jumping measures or specific client software.

Now encipher.it have come out with a simple, effective and strong method for doing all of the above and more.

Simply visit the site, bookmark the link they point you at (a bit of javascript) and when you need to encrypt your webmail simply create your email as normal but prior to sending click the javascript link, enter your chosen encryption key which can be as simple or as complicated as you like and your text become garbage to all intents and purposes.

So an email that says:

This is a test

becomes:

 This message is encrypted. Visit https://encipher.it to learn how to deal with it.

EnCt2a24aebb4948433aa3bdae40c2dbccc2ad02f3c7fa24aebb4948433aa3bdae40cbE6vPop02QB
S7uL3kk5hgkVFeK0UnVYQronPlg6z10g=IwEmS

The only other thing you need to organise is getting the encryption key to the person at the other end.

And as for security, well all the processing is done locally in your browser.

Sorted.

Encrypted Webmail is a post from: Church Techy

I admit, I’d never heard of them and initially I wasn’t impressed by what I saw. I blame that on tiredness though as I had been very busy around the time Joe first contacted me. Having taken another look here’s what I think.

In short, BigMarker is a free web conferencing community.

Their blurb goes on to say:

Through our platform, you can reconnect with your family in Rio; manage your employees in Madagascar; organize your non-profit’s resources to Ottawa; teach a virtual class from Tulsa to students all over Thailand; foster a support group for cancer survivors from France to the Falkland Islands. With unlimited access to live events, there are endless opportunities for you, your community, organization, business, classroom, and social network to grow.

But with a little lateral thinking one can see how a church might use this.

• How about live streaming of a church service?
• Can’t make that house (home) group session then why not dial in to one?
• Hosting a conference and a speaker can’t physically make it?
• Chat with a missionary you sponsor?
• What about staying in contact with your youth that have gone to University or on a gap year?

… and so on.

Given time I’m sure you or I could think of several more options that could be added to the list.

The supplied tools all add benefits to the service – items such as document sharing, whiteboards; share parts of your screen and so on. I hear you say so why not just use Skype or MSN or a similar video conferencing system? The answer is three fold.

1. First they provide private as well as public meeting areas
2. Second their conferencing system is multi-point in that you are not limited to “one to one” video chats
3. and, third, the best bit is it’s all free.

There is a caveat or two though … I was unable to test this or see behind the scenes due to their demo not working and I couldn’t think of a way to test it by signing myself up to an account. Secondly you have to have flash so whilst it will work on a laptop or desktop anybody with an iPhone or iPad that wants to join in is out of luck.

Still, for free, you can’t complain and this can only be a good addition to the ministry toolbox.

Big Marker is a post from: Church Techy

Safe in our use and safe from intruders accessing our data or utilising our bandwidth to do untold things. Restricting physical access is now old hat, we need to be aware that anyone sat in a car outside our house, our church or our business could be leeching off of our wifi.

So what to do?

First off, you need to ensure that your equipment is reasonably new. At least new enough to be running the latest standards even if not the fastest speeds.

Secondly you must, let me say that again, must use encryption and here you need to go as new as you can. Whatever you do (unless it is the only option) don’t choose WEP – as this has long since been shown to be weak and vulnerable to any semi-determined leecher. If you do have to use WEP then my suggestion is twofold – either replace the hardware or change the password weekly.

Third; don’t bother disabling SSID broadcasting. It makes no difference. Those who promote this as a part of wifi security either don’t understand wifi or are being wilfully ignorant or are promoting security by obscurity. I’ve discussed not disabling SSID before and in response to other blog posts and the usual pat answer I get goes something like: “well every step helps”.

Well shutting your front door helps, but it won’t stop a burglar checking to see if it’s open. In short, for your wifi card to be able to talk to your wifi router, then the router HAS (let me repeat that … has) to send the SSID. In fact the router will broadcast your SSID in 1 of 5 ways and your “disabling its broadcast” merely turns off one way. Even my maths tells me that’s still 4 ways to discover your SSID. Sure, when I turn on wifi search on my smartphone it won’t show your SSID but give me a few seconds more (and I’m the good guy here) and I will know what it is.

That’s it, simple steps really.

1. Newest or reasonably new hardware with up to date firmware.
2. Use the strongest encryption possible.

Now, go do it and protect that network of yours.

Protect That WiFi is a post from: Church Techy

Of them all, this is the one that generates the heaviest traffic – don’t get me wrong. The traffic isn’t huge but I’m one of those folks that like the sites I visit to respond quickly. So not surprisingly I want this site to respond as fast and get frustrated when it doesn’t.

But is that lack of speed down to my end or my route to the site? Or some other reason such as a particular element of a page that is slow loading. Well I’ve recently found a site that will test your site (or any other) and report back on both aspects

Simply go to www.webpagetest.org and enter the URL of the page you want to test.  Then, if you wish, pick where you want to run the test from.  There are a few other options as well but these are the basic ones and all you need. After that sit back and await your results.

• Do you know of a better one than this that’s also free?

Website Speed Testing 101 is a post from: Church Techy

Well that resulted in my doing a search and I came up with this interesting find.

Doodle.ly

I guess you could call it the Twitter of drawing

Simply draw what you want then paste the resultant URL into twitter and tweet away.

It’s a little limited at present but I hear new options will be available after the 5,000th doodle.

The Drawn Twitter is a post from: Church Techy