Foreverpurple

Recently someone asked me: How can I clean a virus from my thumb drive and how can I protect it in the future?

You don’t need any special tools to do either of these things. You need a good antivirus program, some virus/spyware removal tools, a little time, patience and common sense.

If you have a good antivirus software on your computer and it is up to date, it will detect viruses and spyware on your thumb drive when you plug it in. If nothing is detected but you are still suspicious, manually run a scan on that drive just as you would on your C drive.

Three good applications for detecting, preventing and removing viruses, spyware and trojans are: Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad Aware and Malware Bytes. All are free or have free versions. Download, install and then one by one use them to scan your system and include your thumb drive. Alternately you can scan just the thumb drive. This may take some time depending on how much data you have. Spybot Search and Destroy will run in the background and constantly monitor your system if you configure it to do so on install. It will give you a pop up to confirm or deny changes to your system registry and files. Set it to ‘remember’ your answer for common applications.

Now some common sense advice!

Be careful where you download FROM. Not only from porn sites, warez, torrent and crack sites but free games or screensavers are often the culprit, this is typically what I see in households with children. They download free stuff not knowing they are infecting the computer. One easy way to prevent this is to create a restricted user account on your computer. Restricted accounts will not have permission to install software. Instruct your kids to log on with this account and password protect your administrator or power user account!

Be careful where you stick it! Your thumb drive that is. Be selective about putting your thumb drive in other people’s computers. Much like an STD you never know when you will pick up a nasty virus.

If you have a usb external hard drive that you often use to clean systems or share from, you can write protect the drive. I’m not sure if this will work with thumb drives.

Beware of buying thumb drives on eBay! Thumb drives coming out of China are NOTORIOUS for being loaded with viruses and/or spyware.

While this question was specifically about thumb drives, it is also applicable for external USB hard drives.

U.S. Army Bans USB drives

Do you ever send racy texts via your work phone? Are those texts the property of your employer like your emails are? A court ruling this year says no and affirmed fourth amendment protections apply to messages held by a service provider. Your messages should safe from arbitrary searches at least but is this you want to find out first hand? It’s easy to forget that the phone is the company phone when most people use it for nearly everything.

Oh yeah… new Blackberry Storm hits tomorrow! Too bad it’s only available on Verizon because it’s so sexy cool that my little fingers are itching to hold it and pet it. Almost worth leaving Cingular. But then again it’s the first generation of touch devices for Blackberry so I think it won’t hurt at all to wait for the second generation version.

Someone at work is always mimicking this phone ring and I didn’t know what it was. Then in talking about it his cube neighbor said it would be a fun ringtone and asked if I could find it. I found an MP3 of it and now you can have this for your phone too. Of course unless you are over the age of 30 you probably will have no idea who Flint is or what the red phone was. I am 35 and didn’t have a clue.

Flint Red Phone Ringtone

Every so often I post a list of interesting stuff I find in magazines. This time it’s from Laptop magazine. They listed the 50 best web apps of 2008. I pulled the ones I found interesting and here they are:

www.atmokeep.com - A site to help you manage all those online profiles.
www.fluther.com - Got questions? The collective knowledge of these users is sure to have an answer. Lots of this type of thing out there but this one is getting the nod from the magazine.
www.fixya.com - Technical Support, Instructions & Repair Service
www.howcast.com - Kinda like a Wiki How or E-How but ALL video
www.hulu.com - Free tv shows like The Office, The Simpsons, Family Guy - Good stuff!
www.ileonardo.com - Social network for Research
www.jajah.com - Supposed to be even better than Skype
www.joggle.com - Compiles all your personal media out on the web and aggregates it in one place for social sharing
www.knol.google.com/k - Wiki with real authors
www.linkedin.com - Social network for adults with jobs
www.netvibes.com - a personalized page that is supposed to be better than iGoogle
www.oovoo.com - Free video chat and conferencing. Supports 6 way video conferences!!
www.posterous.com - Don’t want to be hassled with setting up a blog? Blog by email, including setting up your blog. Sure they all look the same but you don’t care about that if you are interested in something so simple to begin with.
www.slacker.com - Touted as better than Pandora and a BB app is coming soon
www.spreednews.com - Your news delivered in a ticker style blurb
www.sugarsync.com - Online data storage with syncing and web availability
www.trulia.com - Find a home easier than ever before
www.ustream.tv - Live feeds, no pretaped content
www.vyew.com - Free anytime collaboration and conferencing
www.wakerupper.com - web’s easiest telephone reminder tool

www.laptopmag.com

I just submitted another eHow article and this one is on Getting the most out of Gmail. So run right over and give it a read :)

Brett at www.softduit.com wrote the following blog entry about the new Dragon Speaking Naturally software. Check out the video and the article below to learn more about how you can Type at 150 WPM for $99!

I just watched a great video by Owen the writer for www.u-g-h.com . Owen is a great blogger from the Isle of Man who keeps a couple great tech blogs and even builds plug-ins and widgets in his spare time from what I understand. I’ve known Owen for over two years now through the blogosphere.

I just finished watching the video Owen created after he agreed to try out Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred. What is really amazing here is that he created this video just a few minutes after he installed the Dragon Naturally Speaking on his machine.

Many people remember the days when it would take hours if not days or a week or more to train a voice recognition software program. Owen was able to install the software and use it to very good effect as you can see from the video above which has been embedded from YouTube.

Now he’s just getting used to the software and one of the things that you will notice is that his speaking style is a little slow and starts and stops a bit in between each sentence. He doesn’t have 2 talk that slow nor does he have to start and stop after each sentence. He could just keep talking in one continuous fluid verbal conversation with his computer. Dragon NaturallySpeaking even has the ability to automatically insert punctuation as you talk. The auto punctuation feature is not perfect, but it is a lot better than you might expect.

Owen is actually using the manual punctuation function where he specifically says each item of punctuation that he wants inserted into his sentences and paragraphs.

Regardless, as you watch Owen’s video and many other videos out there on Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, you can see just how fast it is and just how useful it can be for anyone that wants to be able to type on their computer and create text by using their voice and speaking to their computer. It’s a very liberating experience and as I write this right now I am using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, and I am pacing around my kitchen about 20 feet from my computer using a wireless headset microphone. I walk by my computer every few steps and glance at the screen to see if my computer is capturing the text correctly, but I probably don’t even need to do that because it is so very accurate.

That said, it is very important for new users to do a fairly good grammar check on the documents that they create with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. When you first get started, Dragon NaturallySpeaking does learn what you’re trying to say and it improves over time. So you will need to edit a little bit more when you first start, and it’s a good habit to pick up as you go forward because your speaking style is going to be much different than your normal writing style would be if you were typing with your fingers. It’s a different area of the brain and you will get a different result in your written documents when you use Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

This article is approximately 540 words long(pre-edit), and I wrote it in about three minutes. It also took me about two minutes to edit because I was going back and forth into another room to help my kids with their homework. Still, that’s approximately 108 words per minute including editing time!

My name is Brett Bumeter and I’ve been writing about Dragon NaturallySpeaking for almost 2 years now. I think this is a great product, however I also recognize that people really have to see this product in action in order to envision how I can truly help them in their work and in their lives. So I am working to bring many more videos of Dragon NaturallySpeaking to you since you can help figure out if this great tool that costs about $99 could help you type in 150 words a minute. I think it can, and I definitely think it’s worth it. You decide and you let me know what you think. :-)

Best regards,
Brett
www.softduit.com

This is a very, very critical security update for windows. If you don’t have automatic update turned on be sure to visit this link for details and links to update your system ASAP!

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical

So I have received two Grouply viruses invites through my ReUseIt Groups and the first one I just deleted. It annoys me to see them in my inbox. It makes me feel slimey and tainted. The one that came in yesterday had an option at the bottom to block my email from ever receiving Grouply invites. I clicked the link but somehow I am not comfortable giving them confirmation of my email address, especially considering all the shifty shit they pull. I guess for now I will just continue to report the invites to the group owner, delete them and take scalding hot showers.

Being the computer geek that I am, I often get asked by people where to host their web site. They want to know who has the best price, who has the best features and which one is the easiest interface to use. There are so many web hosting providers out there today it’s hard to know where to begin sorting them out. You really need to do a side by side comparisons of what the providers offer and what they are charging for those services. Before comparing providers you need to establish what your needs are. Do you need Linux Hosting? Windows? Do you want to be a reseller?Do you need to host multiple domains? How many emails do you need? How many databases do you need? Do you need Ecommerce options? Do you need a lot of storage space? Do you anticipate having a lot of traffic (bandwidth)?

Is your head spinning yet??? You haven’t even started comparing yet! So establish your needs first and then we can move on to choosing a web hosting.

Ready?

Okay I’m not going to make you work any harder than you already have! Now that you know what you need for your website I am going to send you to one site to make your decision easier. Web Hosting Rating has done all the leg work…er mouse work? for you. They offer side by side comparisons of current web hosting providers and they list winners of 2008 awards in various categories such as Best Budget Hosting, Best Blog Hosting, Best PHP Hosting. If you have a specific need you can find the best provider easily on this list. Otherwise browse their extensive list of web hosting providers and find the best fit for your site and your wallet. Take a look at the Top 10 or browse the directory. View all the awards and the ratings.

Web hosting rating also has helpful articles. How do you create multiple FTP accounts? Check out the article and it will all become perfectly clear! Or at least clearer ;)

Let’s face it, the faster you find a host the faster you can get your site up and running. Letting someone else aggregate the best providers out there is a smart use of your time. Don’t get sucked into spending endless hours surfing in search of a web hosting provider.