Computer Tips -Tech Info

Author: Avery

  • Protecting your computer hardware from Lightning

    I think it was last night on the local news, they led with a story about a local family that, during a recent thunderstorm heard/saw a very close lightning hit. They had some nice film footage of a tree that had its bark completely blown away and a nice rip down the side of the tree. (My guess is the lightning hit flash heated ( vaporized) the sap or water inside the tree and the pressure of that is what blew bark around. I don’t know though.) The report talked about how North Carolina is high on the list of states with regards to lightning strikes (more…)

  • Windows Vista?

    OK, I’m just seeing the news that Microsoft has announced the name for the next version of Windows which has gone under the working name of Longhorn. It’s going to be Windows Vista That may take some getting used to. I guess it’s better than Windows View? There are some funny posibilities though… (more…)

  • Virus Hoaxes are almost as bad as real viruses

    I suspect you’ve probably got a fair share of these, I know I pull my hair out everytime I see someone forward one to their closest 400 friends and include me. Virus warnings. Viruses, are something that I deal with cleaning up quite a bit and I guess people try to help, but most of the time circulated virus warnings through email are hoaxes. I have seen one in particular crop up every now and then that directs the user to find and delete a file on the drive which is actually a harmless file distributed with Windows.

    But how to tell the wheat from the chaff so to speak?
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  • Google as a tool for crackers

    Google is a search tool which I use literally every day. Sometimes it’s multiple times per day. Sometimes I can’t imagine how I would function without being able to do a quick google search. There are some features that I don’t often use and in some ways have promised myself to use more in an attempt to hone in on just that piece of information I’m looking for, but those features can also be turned against a site owner. (more…)

  • More details on php exploit from last week

    Ok. I have a bit of time that I can sit down and get a little more detailed on what specifically happened late last week that shut the site down for a couple days.
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  • Sending Virus or Spam Abuse reports

    It occured to me that I may not have brought things to a neat conclusion on the post earlier about tracking email header data. I did make reference to sending an abuse report. Here’s an attempt to clear up a few things that might still be fuzzy.
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  • Google Moon

    For some time now, I’ve used Google Maps fairly extensively. I love the ability to drag the street maps around and the inclusion of Satellite imagery has been absolutely fantastic and at the same time a bit scary. Of course there’s the ability to do local searches on the map with pushpins of a sort tagging the search hits. Very nice. I’ve even seen gps overlays and ways to pull gps coordinates from a map. Anyway…
    Today I saw a news post somewhere that there was a new twist Google Moon Since July 20th was the anniversary (more…)

  • Modern Computer Viruses are almost NEVER from whom they claim to be from

    This is one that I’ve probably talked about before, but it’s worth rehashing because of a call I had this afternoon. A customer had been receiving phone calls and email messages from folks asking that he stop sending them a virus. Essentially all of the viruses were claiming to be from his email address and he was very concerned that his system had been compromised.

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  • Busy Evening

    I’ve got all traces of the old cms system off of the server now. (Well there might be a README here or there, but all php scripts from the old CMS are now gone.) At this point I can disclose a bit about the sudden move.
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