Google Toolbar Tracks Your Movements
Posted by Mitch on Feb 4, 2010
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Do you have Google Toolbar installed on your browser? I do, and I have to admit that I find it as a convenience in two ways. One, I know I can click on the Google button and it’ll pull up the Google search page. Two, I also use Google Desktop, and the icon for it sits on the toolbar, easy to find.
One thing I’ve rarely done, however, is type my search term into the little box next to the button. I almost never think about it sitting there. What’s funny is that, as I look up there now, I see the search terms I typed into the actual Google window the last time I was there waiting for me, as if I’m going to type them in again. That’s a quick way to search for something; I wonder why I have rarely used it.
Turns out there might have been a good reason not to do it, and I was just lucky. It seems that every time you put a search term into that little window and click the button, you’re sending information to Google telling them what you’re searching for. They in turn use that information to try to target ads specifically to you based on where you live and what you’ve been searching for. They store this information away, waiting for the next time you use it so they can do more calculations, trying to figure you out.
It seems this has been written about often enough, but I’ve always missed it. The last article I saw comes from Mashable, where they found that even if you disable the tracking part of the toolbar it still continues to track your movements.
Of course, you can look at that and gripe, or you can decide to gripe about the issue of Adsense reducing its payments from 75% to 72% to its publishers, of which most of us are. Man, working on getting our money coming or going; how fair is that?
Webshots
Posted by Mitch on Jan 30, 2010
One of the longest computer wallpaper image programs, and probably the most underrated today, is Webshots. I remember seeing it on computers as far back as 1998, which drove IT people crazy at the hospital because anyone could load it, but no one was supposed to.
The program initially comes with a photo package that loads automatically when you install the program. You get to decide up front if you want to use it as a screensaver, wallpaper, or both. Most people choose both, aas I did. Then, if you want more images, all you have to do is go back to the site. They allow you a small number of new photos you can download from tens of thousands, probably millions by this time, each day, from all sorts of categories. Or you can pay a small yearly fee and have unlimited downloads whenever you’re in the mood.
What most people don’t know, which surprises me, is that you can also add your own images to Webshots. That’s actually the thing I like to do the most. Any time I see cool images on the net, I download them, then add them en masse to my Webshots program on both my main computer and my laptop. All you have to do is open the program, which is sitting on your taskbar, and select Photo Manager. To the far right is a selection that says “add more photos”. Select that, and it then gives you the option of selecting a folder that’s already there, if you have some (there’s always the main folder by default), set up categories if you choose, then you hit Next and you can search your computer for your photos.
I know there are other programs that do the same thing, but I think this one is perfect, and it’s free. What you can’t do is alter images with the program, but what you can do is alter images using another program while they’re sitting in a Webshots folder and it will accept the changes. You might have to search for your folders to do that, however. What I did was moved where the Webshots folders were stored so I could have full access to them through my C drive.
One minor caveat here. Though it works well with Vista, if your computer goes into hibernation mode sometimes the program will mess up and stop working properly as a wallpaper. All you have to do then, when you come out of it, is shut down the program and restart it again. That’s a really minor inconvenience if you ask me.
Dragon 10 Software Review
Posted by Mitch on Jan 8, 2010
As y’all know, I do a lot of writing. I even wrote a real book, which is the second book listed over there to the left, Embrace The Lead.
When I wrote that book, I didn’t quite finish it by typing. I started out that way, then 9/11 hit and I got discouraged from doing anything. Then my dad got sick and I was inspired to get it finished so he could read at least some of it.
I knew that I needed some help in getting it done. So, I bought a voice recognition program, and with its assistance I was able to get the book done in record time. Voice recognition software pretty much writes down what you say; at least what it thinks you say. The first program I used, which wasn’t great, did okay for the most part, as all I then had to do was go back and edit things.
A year later I bought my first Dragon software program, which worked much better, and I loved it. I only had to use the one program, which I used often enough, until I bought my present computer. Vista, it turns out, isn’t compatible with Dragon 8. But now that I’m writing as much as I am and earning money from it, I knew I had to get the updated version at some point, and now I have it, Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.
Here’s the first thing you need to know; this sucker is huge! It’s going to take up to 1.5 GB of space on your hard drive. I guess with what it does that’s not so bad. It’s going to grow, however, but I’ll come back to that. Anyway, because it’s so big, it’s going to take awhile for it to load onto your computer. You know how you’ll often get that message about “it could take several minutes to load onto your computer”, but then the programs load really fast? This one took about 45 minutes to load; at one point I wondered whether it had frozen up.
When it’s finally ready, it doesn’t just start like some programs, so you’ll have to start the program. It will ask you a couple of questions, including whether you want to register it or not, and it also asks you if you want to activate the program. I recommend getting that out of the way so it never asks you that question again.
Next it’s time to do some testing. It will test your microphone to make sure it works with the program. It gives you a headset with a microphone that you can plug into jacks, but I wanted to use my USB headset instead, and it works just fine. It will test voice levels.
Then it’s time to get a sample of your reading and speaking patterns. I chose the very elementary first sample, as there are a bunch of them, just so I could get started. You read the entire sample, then it takes some time in processing how you read; it’s this file that’s going to get bigger and bigger as you go along, because not only will it grow as you do more testing, but every once in awhile, and it will ask you how often you want to do it, the program goes back and looks for new things you’ve produced so it can add to the file. You can read more samples or come back to it later on, and I recommend you eventually get through as many of them as you can because the more it can recognize your speech patterns, the more accurate it will be.
One last thing before you get to actually do something is it does a scan of documents in your computer to try to get a sample of not only how your words flow on paper, but adds some words that you have in documents that it might not have. For instance, my wife’s name is Robyn, obviously with a “y”, and it picks that up and knows when to use that as opposed to the bird.
Then you can finally go for it. You’ll see a little window, which you can close and just use the icon in your taskbar. Here’s the thing. You can read your words into anything. You can use it to write your blog right into the program. You can use it in Microsoft Word, email, Wordpad, etc. Anything where you usually have to type words, you can use Dragon instead. And I have to tell you, from only my first reading, it did really well. A few times when I spoke really fast it messed up, but that’s understandable since I only did the one training with it. I’m actually using it now to write this post; how neat is that?
Of course, it’s not totally as easy as that for new people. There are many commands you’ll want to learn to use it with much more efficiency so that you don’t have to keep coming to the keyboard. Things such as “capitalize that”, “scratch that (that will erase the last phrase you said), “correct that”, etc. But they’re easy things to learn and remember.
Do I recommend Dragon? Wholeheartedly! It makes the writing process easier for anyone who says they hate typing or that the words they’re thinking never seem to show up on paper the same way. I will admit that when I’m using the program I speak in phrases right now, because, oddly enough, I actually type faster on some things than I speak, and you might decide to do that yourself, or once you feel that it’s got your speech patterns down just go for it. If you do a lot of writing of any type, this bad boy is the way to go.
Mailwasher
Posted by Mitch on Dec 14, 2009
I’ve been told that if you write a review post about a product that it will drive sales of that product, especially if what you have to say is very good and very true. Let’s see how true that premise is.
Back when I was warning y’all about hidden messages in email, I mentioned Mailwasher for the first time. I even pointed you to a review I wrote about it on another site. I’m writing this review that I hope will end up being different than the previous review, since I’m not going back to look at it before I write this one. And I have this program and I’m always telling people about this product and I’ve purchased this bad boy, so now I’ve just fulfilled the FTC thing that everyone is so worried about (except me; I probably won’t write about it, though).
Mailwasher is a software program that allows you to check your email while it’s still on the server. It doesn’t care what you use as an email program, so no worries there. However, by checking email while it’s still on the server, you get to decide what you’re downloading to your computer and what you don’t want to download to your computer. You get to see the links that are hidden in email while it’s still on the server to validate whether those emails are true or not. You can add as many of your email addresses as you need to, but I’ll talk about that one because if you have email being redirected you won’t have to add those email addresses.
Let’s start with what it looks like. Here’s a screenshot of the program in use:
Actually, the way you’re looking at it here is pretty small, but you can right-click on it and open it up to see it better. And I apologize to John now for now long it’s going to take to download this one for him.
There are some other categories you can have, but these are the ones I use, and I feel they’re the most important. You can also move the categories around if you want to. That first column is probably the most important because that’s the one where you can train Mailwasher on what should be blacklisted and what should be made friendly. The status box tells you what it thinks the email coming in is. It has its own way of determining what it considers as spam or junk, and it’s pretty good.
If you look at that last column, you see where I have two separate classes, personal and second account. Though I have lots of email addresses, I have all of them directed to one of two accounts, both through my internet provider, which is Road Runner. I have two separate email addresses for that. That’s important because when you create your accounts, you need to put in your username and password so that it can check your email while it’s still out on the server.
Now, for the bottom part of the program. That’s where you’ll see what you’ve been sent. You can see as much or as little as you want to see there. I have mine set to give me 445 lines of data, which is more than some might like, and less than others might like. But that’s where you’ll see any links that might be embedded in an email, and where you’ll see some of those strange words that you know means that’s an email with images and hidden stuff that might contain viruses or malware. If a friend is sending an attachment you won’t see that, but at the top you have a column that tells you how big the email you’re getting is, and you can pretty much bet that any email more than 200K has an attachment of some type.
I’ve been using this program for about 5 years now. I’ve only had one email slip through in all that time that had a virus on it, and that wasn’t the program’s fault, but timing. Once you delete all the email you don’t want anymore, you should then download your email. However, sometimes a new email is coming through at the same time and will slip through; nothing you can do about that. I swear by this program, and I really do believe that anyone, from those of us with a bit more web savvy than others, or those with very little savvy whatsoever, should be using this bad boy. Every time I learn that someone has a virus on their computer, I think of Mailwasher and ask why they don’t have it.
Probably because they haven’t read this review. Now that you’ve read it, think about your safety and see if you believe you could use a little bit of help. Trust me, the price is worth it.
And there you go. Now, let’s see what happens. 
Firefox 3.5 Tab Issue
Posted by Mitch on Aug 3, 2009
Many of us love Firefox, right? Well, with the new version, 3.5.1, there’s this weird thing that’s been happening. I’ll be going around, looking at multiple tabs, when all of a sudden one will decide to separate itself from the browser and become its own browser.
Talk about being freaked out. The first time I didn’t know what had happened. I finally caught on that it was opening new tabs. But it’s continued doing it, and that’s irritating as sin.
You know me. I hit the search engine and went looking for my answer. And I found it. Seems the Mozilla people thought they were going to be even more creative and added something called “tab tearing” that allows tabs to become windows on their own if you click on the tab then start scrolling with your mouse. They seemed to think that was a good idea; so far, no one else has.
Thing is, they don’t have a fix on their own. So, someone else came up with a Firefox add-on, strangely named bug489729 1.3. It makes me think this might have been a problem for some people beforehand, since this is version 1.3, but no matter. You download the file, restart Firefox, then open up the add-on once the browser has restarted and click where it says disable detach tab. And that’s that.
All is bliss and peace once again; whew! So, there you go; enjoy!
Panda Experiment Is Over
Posted by Mitch on Oct 4, 2008
Well, if you’ve been checking my blog for awhile, you’ll probably remember my two conversations with the Computer Guy. The first one was when I took my computer in; the second one was the day before I went in to pick up my computer. I never talked about the day I picked it up, which then will lead into the topic of this post.
When I went to pick up my computer, for which I had an appointment, I walked in and found that the guy hadn’t quite finished with my computer, even though he wasn’t working on it when I got there either. He had never found any problems with it, but I needed it back so I could get back to work. The last thing he wanted to do was load Panda Internet Security 2008 onto my computer, saying it was the best and strongest antivirus program on the market, and the only one they recommend. So, since he was doing some other stuff, I ended up installing it while he basically watched over me; yeah, like I wouldn’t know how to load antivirus software. Of course there was a problem, mainly in the fact that it took 20 minutes for me to receive an email that he said usually took less than 15 seconds. While he was on the phone with the company, the email finally showed up, which had the username, password, and some long code I needed in order to activate the product. Of course I had to pay for it, and the computer work, but it was installed and I was good to go.
The next night, while I was loading some things back onto my computer while it was connected to the internet, my internet connection locked up on me, which I wrote about on this post, where I’d contacted Time Warner (I have Road Runner) and thought it was their issue. However, the next night the same problem occurred again, only this time I went to test the laptop and learned that the problem wasn’t with Time Warner, but with my computer. I thought maybe there was a hardware issue of some kind, and I did some tests with the Panda software, and things were still messed up. In the end, I had concluded that the problem was Firefox cookies, because I had also been having problems signing onto some websites.
Of course the problem continued, and I started paying attention to my Mailwasher error messages, which kept coming up with all these different socket errors, for which I put out a request for some possible answers. However, I never sit still when it comes to my computer, so I went onto the laptop to try to do some research, and once again came back to Panda as the possible problem. This time, I decided to uninstall Panda, and once I did, I had instant online access once again; wow!
I was irked, but decided to try to load it again, just to make sure. And, of course, I had the same problem within 30 minutes, which was shocking because at least the times beforehand had waited some hours before locking things up. I uninstalled it again, and loaded a different firewall program, but wasn’t sure which antivirus I would load. However, before I got that far, I went onto Twitter and wrote that I had uninstalled Panda because I was having major problems with it.
Turns out there’s a Panda group that monitors Twitter for any messages about Panda, and they somehow saw my message and, the next morning, I had an email direct message from them asking about my problem. I wrote and told them what the problem was, and the following day I received a phone call from someone from Panda, telling me that I needed to upgrade to the 2009 version because they had discovered a problem with the Web Proxy portion of their 2008 product that they’d fixed, and, because I had just purchased the 2008 version, I could upgrade to 2009 for free. Sounded like a great deal to me, so I did that, unloaded Zone Alarm, reloaded Panda, and things seemed to be much better.
But no, it wasn’t done with me. I still had some occasional programs that would stop working, and figured out that sometimes I could only have one program at a time open that accessed the internet; seemed that many of them were still sharing the same port (though my online poker program wasn’t one of them; I wonder why). When I shut down some of them and left only one open, I always got my internet connection back. That was irritating, but not as irritating as the next part.
I use Mailwasher, and because of that I felt I didn’t need my email scanned, because Panda adds this message to each email whether it’s incoming or outgoing; I didn’t need to be an advertiser for them, and I didn’t need to see their messages on my incoming email either. So I turned that part off, and I also decided I didn’t need it scanning my instant messaging program either, which I rarely use right now. Well, once I made those changes, these popup screens started showing up every 3 minutes, telling me I wasn’t being fully protected and asking me if I wanted to load them. I had to keep clicking on “no”, but every once in awhile if I was typing and the window came up, it would just accept my “yes” if I hit the Enter button and, of course, I’d have to go back into the program and get rid of it once again.
This was annoying so I first wrote the Panda people on Twitter about it, and they asked me to send them a copy of the popup. I did that, didn’t hear from them, and wrote again three days later. They asked for it again, I told them I’d already sent it but sent it again. Then I waited another two days. Thursday I got their response. They basically said there were two recommendations; either accept what the warnings told me and allow the program to do its job, or uninstall it. Of all things! Well, tonight (or this morning, since I started doing it around 1:30AM), I decided to uninstall the sucker, and I also left a message on their site, since it pops up asking if you’d comment on their product, and told them how much I hated their intrusive program. Now, if I could have only loaded the firewall or spyware program without the antivirus, I might have stuck with just that, but it seems that if you don’t load the antivirus then you can’t load anything; ugh.
So, I’ve now gone to AVG Free 8.0 for my antivirus, which has a spyware add-on of some kind, and I’ve also gone back to Zone Alarm, which supposedly had the same type of thing, and not loaded either toolbar; like I need more toolbars. I’ve also added Spybot’s program as further protection against spyware. I could have gone back to the CA antivirus program that Time Warner pimps for its subscribers, but it kept messing with me for some reason before I’d taken my computer to the computer guy, which was one reason why I wasn’t depressed in purchasing Panda at the time.
In the long run, I’m thinking I should have known better. I had used AVG a long time ago and loved it, and when the program expired I decided to go with the CA because of Time Warner. Now I’m back with AVG, and I’ve never had a problem with Zone Alarm, and I’m back with that. Panda is very good spyware, as years ago I used their free online scanner to find some viruses that I knew were on my computer, but for some reason couldn’t get rid of, and if I have any problems in the next 11 months I can always install it and run a quick scan, then go back to AVG if need be. For now, Panda isn’t worth the trouble, I’m sorry to say.
Since I Was On A Roll,…
Posted by Mitch on Sep 22, 2008
Okay, I wrote that last post about upgrading technology, and indicated the issue I had with Firefox 3 the first time I loaded it. I decided that, since I was turning over a new leaf, that I would go ahead and reload Firefox 3 and work my way through issues I had back in July.
And, of course, I had issues. For one, it just wouldn’t work at first, and I’m not sure why. None of the pages would load, and I was frustrated as all get out. I closed the program, waited a few beats, then opened it back up; nope, nothing yet. So I decided to reboot the computer, hoping that might help.
It seemed to do the trick, though not immediately. It still thought about it for a minute, then everything clicked into place. I still can’t say I’ve noticed any major change in speed, but everything was working. Well, not quite. For some reason, the Excite page wouldn’t load. Rather, it wouldn’t load if I tried putting in my username and password, saying I either had javascript turned off or wasn’t accepting cookies. That was an issue I’d been having before, so I went into options to check things, and noticed that the options menu looks different. Still, I found what I was looking for, which turned out to be a list of websites that were immediately blocked by Firefox, and one of those sites was Excite. I deleted that, and Excite came alive once more.
And I had two other surprises. This time, not only was my Google toolbar right where it had been with Firefox 2, but all my add-ons worked. I only had to update one of them, that being Colorful Tabs. I did add a couple, though, one being Read It Later, which I’d had at some point in the past:
I also added Download Status, which puts a bar at the bottom of your browser rather than that big window that pops up when you’re downloading something. I tested that earlier this evening and I like that, as it only shows up when you’re downloading something, otherwise your status bar is clean.
So, now I’m totally upgraded on the main computer, and things seem to be working pretty well. I still have to do the laptop, but I have time for that. I wonder who this new person is,… oh yeah, it’s me!
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