Watch out for SPAM and PHISH(ing)

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I have written before about spam and phishing attacks, but I thought it would be a good idea to re-visit this topic since there seems to be a concerted effort by senders out there to blast our collective Inboxes with not only hideous amounts of spam (which is bad enough), but also with a whole new class of phishing emails.  I get tons of them “from” Amazon (that’s where the phrase Spamazon came from!), Newegg, Bank Of America, PayPal, and eBay just to name a few.  Basically, they are likely to send one of these phishing emails from pretty much any online e-commerce type of store that they think the can trick someone with.  That’s why you have to be careful and check these messages out thoroughly!  Because the ones I have been getting lately have been really, really well done.  They have been pretty hard to tell from the real thing.

The idea here is that the phisher will send you something from … let’s use Amazon, saying that your order went through successfully and your credit card was charged X amount of dollars.  Well, you look at that and right away know you didn’t order anything recently (or maybe you did, but the amount charged shows different from what you just ordered) and it makes you think that someone maybe got into your credit card account or your Amazon account maybe.  You feel that rush of excitement and fear as your mind starts doing the mental tally of how much money you are losing for every second that ticks off.  So you immediately click the link in the email so you can log into your account at Amazon and see just what the heck is going on.  Only, that link you just clicked isn’t taking you to Amazon, the phisher sends you to his own web page that looks like Amazon and is counting on that excited fear feeling to get you to rush into action without thinking.  Once you are on the version of Amazon that the phisher sends you to, you try to log in.  You might get an error or the phisher might go ahead and re-direct you to the real Amazon now, it doesn’t really matter because he has what he wants.  He now actually does have your username and password that he just snagged from you attempting to log in at the fake site.  Plus, if you use the same password for a bunch of different sites, he now has your password and probably username for those as well!!!

In a case like I described above, be sure to take a deep breath and act calmly.  Even if you are sure that the email really is from Amazon, open up your web browser and go to Amazon directly and then log in there to check your account, where you can be sure that it really is the correct site.  When you get these suspect emails, check them out closely because as good as I have seen them, there is always something that isn’t exactly right.  For example, when I get a legitimate email from Amazon it will start with a greeting that includes my name.  In the fake but really good one, one thing that stood out was the greeting was to my email address and not my name.  Another was that there was a total dollar amount for the order, but no itemized list.  The real ones from Amazon always have an itemized list.  So, keep an eye out and use your head and you’ll be just fine.  Be safe!!

Beware Website Repair Wizards

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We have all seen them, the commercials for fixit web sites that declare all you have to do is visit their site and they will magically fix your computer or make it run faster or any of a number promises.  Well, I don’t want to sound like the Grinch on Christmas, but these sites just don’t live up to all of the hype that they promise.  When you go to one of these sites, you are going to have to have some type of software to download, you just cannot do all that much solely through the web browser.  So, just how much can these guys cram into a small, probably activex plugin?  My guess is not near as much as some of the better known and trusted applications like Symantec’s Norton Utilities, System Mechanic , and Fix-It Utilities to name a few.

I am sure that there are some of these web based tune up sites/companies that are legit and are trying to help people, but I would be careful because I have seen a few that look pretty shady and for all we know, instead of scanning for and removing spyware and such, they could be installing more!  The real bottom line here is that even if these sites are trying to do right by you, there is a limit on what can be done by software, especially software delivered over the web and made generic enough to work on a wide range of platforms.  It’s like the old joke about a mechanic in a can for your car, there just isn’t one, just like there is no magic bullet for your PC.  You just cannot beat a trusted technician, who is well trained and experienced, and has your best interests in mind.  Someone there looking at the screen, analyzing what they find and making good decisions on what to do to make it better versus a script that boils down to a bunch of If/Then questions and loops.

I just wanted to make sure that people think before they use these sites, and don’t go blindly forth, sucked in by slick commercials and ending up with computers that are worse off than when you started.  There may be some good sites out there, and if/as I find them I will post them on the site so everyone will know.  Good luck!

VMware and avast! Internet Security Network Problem

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Just in case I am not the only one to run into this, I thought I would post the answer to a problem that vexed me for a while.  I run avast! Internet Security for my software host based firewall and anti-virus on my Windows boxes.  On some of those I also have VMware Workstation installed.  I noticed that when all of the protection settings or “shields” as they are called were turned on, my virtual machines couldn’t talk to anything else on the network when in bridged mode.  If I went to NAT mode or turned the avast! shields off, it would work, but neither of these solutions was satisfactory to me.  So, I kept on digging, even checked in with tech support to no avail.  Finally I found it, something so simple and trivial I wanted to scream, but my family is asleep right now so I didn’t.  In avast! Internet Security, there is an option to tell the firewall to allow Internet Sharing.  I guess multiple computers communicating in a shared manner like that looks bad if you didn’t plan it that way.  Well, when your virtual machines are running, it looks just like Internet Sharing, at least it does to avast! anyway.  Simply open up the main window, go to the firewall section and hit the “Expert Settings” button.  On the dialog that pops up there is a check box about in the middle (maybe a little lower) of the page to enable Internet Sharing.  Turn that on and your virtual machines will be talking like teenage girls with unlimited text plans.  Hope that helps someone out there, enjoy!

Drop Down Date Picker For Excel

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I was working on a spreadsheet where I had a range of cells I wanted a drop down date picker/calendar for.  Now, I could have just added a bazillion calendar controls (one to each cell) but I knew that was cheesy and that there had to be a better way.  Well now, I found an awesome tutorial on adding just the thing and I had to share.  One control and a little bit of VBA code and you are all set working like a pro.  Check it out, the info at the end of this link rocks!  Enjoy!!

http://www.rondebruin.nl/calendar.htm

Keeping Up With Business Cards

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If any of you are like me and deal with/meet lots of vendors and salespeople, keeping up with the mountain of business cards can be a job in and of itself.  Whether you keep them in some kind of binder or Rolodex, or maybe just piled in a shoebox, they can be a real pain to sort through when you want someone’s number.  Plus, heaven forbid you want all of their information in your PDA or PC because then you have to type it all in by hand and that’s no fun either.  Instead of paying $300 or more for a business card scanner, I found a nifty little app for my iPhone that takes advantage of the camera to take a picture of the card and then OCR all of the info, even categorizing it properly as well.  So email addresses get put into email address fields, and phone numbers in phone number slots and so on.  You get a chance to verify that it recognized everything correctly, and it even compares it to the section of the scanned card it got the info from, very easy.  Once that is done, the contact gets shoved right into your contact list, easy as pie, it’s great!  Now I am sure Blackberry and other platforms have similar apps, this post is partly to rave about the concept of doing this on your smart phone/PDA, but also for iPhone users out there to give a nod to the application “WorldCard Mobile”, because it works really well.  It’s currently priced at $5.99 in the app store and worth every penny and more, really.  So check it out if you have a need for something like this.  If you already have an iPhone, $5.99 is cheap compared to that business card scanner!  Read more about it here …

*Note: This is not a paid endorsement, I am posting this because I like the app and felt it would be beneficial to share.

Linux, your iPhone and your pictures

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I suppose this might work for an iPod touch as well, but the ones I have and have seen don’t have cameras.  OK, on to the tip!  Recently I wanted to get all of my pictures copied off of my iPhone and onto my computer running Linux, specifically Debian 5.0.  Normally with something like a USB thumb drive this is easy, once you plug it in, even if it doesn’t auto mount itself you can at least look in your messages file to see the actual device path in order to mount it manually.  However, what I noticed with my iPhone (3GS version 3.1.2) is that not only did it not auto mount, my messages file didn’t list any information about a device path for me to mount it manually.

From here naturally I turned to Google, but everything I came across talked about installing iFuse and some kind of ipod-convenience package or said it couldn’t be done, or my favorite that you had to have a jail-broken phone in order to do it.  Now, I didn’t want to install a bunch of packages I wasn’t familiar with just for this, and I darn sure didn’t want to jail-break my phone either.  If for no other reason than because I was convinced that if I could do it in Windows (connect to my iPhone and copy my pics off), there had to be a way to do it in Linux too, without having to alter the device.  I am hard headed that way, but in this case it worked.

Now this might be obvious and simple to everyone else, and if so I am sorry to bore you, but it wasn’t something I was familiar with.  I did have an inspiration though, something so simple I just knew it wouldn’t work but I decided to try it out anyway.  I fired up gthumb which was conveniently installed already, and is a tool for doing just what I wanted to do, importing pictures from a digital camera among other things.  I then plugged in my iPhone and gthumb picked it up immediately and started pulling up a list of all my pics on the phone.  From there I could import, rotate, delete originals and more, easy as pie.  It worked perfect, and was very simple, just like it should be.

In the end, I found that I didn’t have to install any software hacks or jail-break my phone, just use the right tool for the job.  Ain’t Linux grand?