PCWize Vol 3, Issue 50 - Where'd my surfboard go? December 12, 1999 ______________________________________________________________________ I haven't done much web surfing over the last week as most of my time has been devoted to getting the new web site, distribution lists, and HTML version of this e-zine up and running. My biggest hurdle with getting the HTML version off of the ground is trying to discover the least invasive means of getting those of you who want it, subscribed to that list, and unsubscribing you from the TEXT list. See a sneak preview of the HTML version of the PCWize e-zine. Let me know what you think. ------ I've decided to change the issue numbers to a slightly better system of volume and issue designators. It works like this: The volume number is the year relative to PCWize's inception, so "Vol 3" indicates the third year, and because PCWize is a weekly publication and there are 52 weeks in a year, "Issue 50" means the 50th week of that year. Not that this will really impact you in any way, but it will help me keep track of what is going on. ------ If you don't normally read the Security Issues section, please at least take a quick look at this week's column. ------ I'm looking for a hard-core gamer who has a secret desire to write about their latest conquests. If you think you have what it takes to get your name in print, please e-mail me stating your desire to do so along with a two or three paragraph sample of your writing at: Please note that I am looking for someone who plays a diverse selection of games from many different genres. Please note part deux, I don't get paid for this e-zine, so neither will you! . You will however, get your own e-mail address of ooooh, ahhhh, ohhhh... :-) ------ Check out the next installment of Leif's Laptop Quest! ______________________________________________________________________ TOC 1. Voting Booth and Other PCWize Stuff 2. Software Review 3. Cool Sites 4. Tips, Tricks, Do's and Don't Do's 5. That's the news! 6. Security Issues, Hoaxes, Viruses and Other Urban Legends 7. PCWize Contests and winner announcement If the columns in the below articles appear misaligned, it's because you are using a non-fixed width font. If you would like to see them nice and straight, change your e-mail font to Courier New. ______________________________________________________________________ ** A word from our sponsors ** ------ * LiveWire! Broadcast - Easily locate and play Live Radio and TV stations on the Internet * MediaGrab! - Find and download MP3s and 18 other types of multimedia files. * WebGrab! - Great web tool for viewing and downloading webpage elements. * UsenetGrab! - Integrated Usenet News browser and more. EastBay Technologies - http://www.eastbaytech.com ------ Want to see your advertisement here? Send mail to with the text 'Advertiser' in the SUBJECT line for more information. ______________________________________________________________________ 1. Voting Booth and Other PCWize Stuff ------ Click here to vote for PCWize as one of the best newsletters in the "E-zines Top Ten Poll"! It's just a click, no need to fill anything out. ------ Come visit the PCWize forum and live chat. You may discuss anything computer related and it's a good place to get help with any computer questions you may have. ______________________________________________________________________ 2. Software Review ------ Name: Boot Log Analyser (sic) v1.23 by Vision 4 Ltd Genre: Utility Platform: PC Win95/98 Type/Cost: Freeware Size: 233KB Homepage: Download: As we all know, the longer you have your machine, and the more software you load, the slower it gets during boot-up. Oftentimes, you have little to no idea what exactly is causing the bottleneck, so you just live with it. This little gem will analyze your bootlog.txt and report back the times that each .DLL (Dynamic Link Library) takes to load, and if there were any failures on loading them. This is a single file with no install routines and it provides a very detailed analysis of what is going on behind the scenes. Once you know which .DLLs are giving you the most trouble, you can then decide if the software that uses that .DLL is really necessary. ______________________________________________________________________ 3. Cool Sites ------ AT&T Research Labs Next-Generation Text-To-Speech project I've always been fascinated with computer "speech", and have longed for the day in which I can speak to my machine and have Majel Barrett respond (for those of you who aren't trekkies, Majel Barrett does the voice for the Enterprise computer systems.) This web site isn't going to make that happen, but it does allow you to input English text, and an audio file with either a male or female voice will be created for you. It does do a pretty good job, but some tweaking is necessary to get the cadence correct. For example, to get "Welcome to PCWize" to sound just right, I had to enter it as: "Welcome! To P C Wise" ______________________________________________________________________ 4. Tips, Tricks, Do's and Don't Do's ------ For those of you who build web pages and who use Opera, here is a trick I discovered to make your life much easier when creating screenshots for inclusion in your web pages. If you don't have Opera, then read on, I'll teach you another way too. The biggest problem with creating screenshots is that generally most people are running at a screen resolution much higher than the resolution they want the screenshot to appear at. This forces you to "resample" the image in your image editor when you resize down to the correct resolution. This introduces loss, and many times the image looks distorted. Granted, you could change your desktop settings to match the resolution of your screenshot needs, but that takes time, and you always end up having to fix a bunch of improperly sized windows when you return to your normal screen resolution. I'll explain two quick solutions, one for people with Opera, and another for those without. For those with Opera: Opera tells you the size of the browsing window at the top of the currently selected window. This is extremely useful for providing a reference size to scale the window of the program/screen that you want to take a snapshot of. For example, if you want to create a screenshot of your favorite text editor so you can show the rest of the world just how cool it looks, do the following: 1. Open Opera and create a new window. 2. Resize the new window to say, 640x480. 3. Open your super cool text editor. 4. Resize the super cool text editor window so that it overlays the 640x480 window in Opera. 5. Press ALT-PrtSc to capture only the currently selected window contents. 6. Open your favorite image editing program, paste the image, and crop if necessary. 7. Now you have a perfectly sized image that isn't distorted because you had to resize down from a different resolution. For those without Opera, you can try this: 1. Open your favorite image editor. 2. Make sure the canvas size is set for the size you need, or resize down after doing the below steps. 3. Fill the background color with white or a color that will contrast with whatever background color you have set for your desktop. 4. Save the image as a .BMP in the C:\Windows directory and call it 640x480 (if that is the size you are wanting to create.) 5. Make different size templates if you want, and save them too. Now, to use your snapshot template, open your desktop properties and change the wallpaper to the 640x480 template, make sure it is set to center, then click 'OK'. Open the super cool text editor and resize its window to overlay the template. Press CTRL-PrtSc to take a snapshot of the currently selected window, open your favorite image editing software, paste the image, crop if necessary, and save. ______________________________________________________________________ 5. That's the news! ------ Privacy issues on-line is rearing its ugly head again. This time its AOL doing the ugliness. If you use AOL, you might want to check on your one year opt-out agreement. If not, and it expires, AOL will provide your browsing habits and account information (demographics) to interested parties. Read on! If the URL has wrapped, you may need to cut and paste it into your browser. ______________________________________________________________________ 6. Security Issues, Hoaxes, Viruses and Other Urban Legends ------ Before we begin, let me define these for you: Security Issues: These are issues affecting your privacy and security while on the Internet. Most security risks that will be mentioned here are ones concerning holes in software which leak information or will allow people to gain access to private information. Viruses/Trojans/Worms: These will be *real* warnings about new viruses. If I'm warning you of a virus, then you can take it to the bank that I've fully checked its validity first. Hoaxes: The most memorable in all of your minds is most likely the Good Times Virus hoax. These are warnings about some new fangled virus that will wreck your life. The difference between this and other virus warnings is that they aren't for real. Their entire purpose is to scare people and bog down mail servers with all the forwarding going on. The reason I'll be telling you about them is so that you'll be in the know and won't forward them to everyone in your address book. Urban Legends: These are stories that will be computer related, but aren't necessarily virus related. A warning/story moves out of the hoaxes category when it keeps making a comeback. An example of an urban legend would be the one about the FCC allowing phone companies to charge for local access to the ISP in which the cost would be passed onto us as users. ------ Rather than cover the latest viruses and worms that have appeared over the last few weeks, I'm going to deviate a little here and provide you with some general rules to protecting yourself. As we get closer to the new millennium it seems that virus/worm writers are scrambling to make the worst possible baddies to wreck your life. I guess they feel that they need to bring in the new year with a bang, and because it also happens to start a whole new millennium, that it has to be a big bang. I'm really expecting to see a huge explosion in the pure numbers of new viruses and variants for this new year. I guess I'll never understand these losers. Many of them are very talented programmers, and why they choose to hurt rather than help is beyond me. If their viruses were benign and its entire purpose in life is to see how far it can spread before being discovered, then maybe I wouldn't have to write this column. At any rate I digress. Let's go over some ground rules to help yourself as well as others. These rules apply pretty much anytime, but if you don't agree with them, then at least do me one favor. Follow them until sometime in mid January. By then, most of the viruses created just for the new millennium will be detectable by virus scanning software. 1. Don't open any attached files, unless you just have to, and even then, make sure you have the latest virus scanner updates. Now, don't feel that you are safe just because you have the latest updates. New viruses and variants are coming out much faster than the virus scanning software people can keep up with. You can never be sure that a new virus isn't being spread around that came out after the last update. For those of you who didn't see PCWize issue 29, I mentioned that Microsoft has teamed up with vendors from many different virus scanning packages to extend their trial period to 90 days. If you haven't already got a virus scanning package, then go here: 2. Don't send Word documents to people. I would say that over 90% of documents that need to be sent by attachment, can be sent as either plaintext or rich text format. If you have formatted text such as centered, bold, underlined etc. then .RTF format will suit you just fine, and they can't carry macro viruses. 3. Funny programs etc. are fine, but executables are perfect hiding places for viruses. I don't accept executable files (meaning my e-mail software dumps them), so you might as well not even send them to me. If a minute or two of laughs are worth all the data on your hard drive, then by all means, open away. My personal view is that I'll be the last man standing in my circle of friends. 4. Even be wary of images that are sent to you. I've heard of a couple of instances where a file was named something like uglypic.jpg.exe. What this accomplishes is that because by default Windows hides the extensions of files it knows (such as .EXE) you'll see just the filename uglypic.jpg. This is further compounded by the fact that the EXE may have an embedded icon to make it look as though it is actually an image and not an executable. The way you can check is to right click on the image in question, select properties, and look at the entire filename. If it ends in just .jpg, .gif, or .bmp, then you can be reasonably sure that it is just an image. 5. Make a few backups of your data. You don't have to back up your entire hard drive(s), just the stuff you can't replace without a lot of work. I have all my applications on CD or disk, so I can reinstall those if necessary, but my data (such as the PCWize subscriber list, documents, images I've created etc.) are getting backed up. 6. I've tried pretty hard to stay out of the Y2K craze and hypothesizing as to what disasters may befall us. My personal opinion is that yes, we might have a few problems, but I don't foresee any major disasters in developed countries. However, I still plan on having my emergency kit just in case. Just some basic necessities to tide my family over. Stuff like: - Bottled water - Canned food goods - Flashlights / propane lanterns (from camping stuff) - A full propane tank for my grill in case electricity goes out - A kerosene heater - Battery operated radio with extra batteries - Blankets - Changes of clothing (warm jackets and clothing) - Extra fuel for my vehicle - A fully charged cell phone - A fully charged laptop battery (hey, gotta have my priorities straight!) - Toys and books for my daughter - A couple of hundred dollars in cash - and a buddy/friend/neighbor to check up on each other In any event, I plan on drinking a few beers with good friends and celebrating the new year with my family. My main point this week, is that I believe there are going to be a very large number of new viruses appearing throughout the month of December. Please take some extra precautions. Other than that, have a great New Year. ______________________________________________________________________ 7. PCWize Contests and Winner Announcement ------ This weeks contest sponsor is Eastbay Technologies and they have generously offered four of their products to be used as prizes in our random drawing contests. Eastbay Technologies offers a wide variety of software to meet many different user's needs. Take a look at some of what they have to offer: * LiveWire! Broadcast - Easily locate and play Live Radio and TV stations on the Internet * MediaGrab! - Find and download MP3s and 18 other types of multimedia files. * WebGrab! - Great web tool for viewing and downloading webpage elements. * UsenetGrab! - Integrated Usenet News browser and more. EastBay Technologies - http://www.eastbaytech.com ------ Each week PCWize holds a random drawing contest and gives away free stuff (usually software) to its subscribers. We will continue to do this as long as there are advertisers who are willing to provide the prizes. If you are such an individual/company, then please contact me at editor@pcwize.com so that we can work a deal. ------ The winner of this weeks random drawing contest is: Lee Erickson ______________________________________________________________________ Well, that's it for this issue! Have a good week and I'll see you in seven days. Leif Gregory Copyright © 1997-99 by Leif Gregory. All rights reserved. You may share this copy of the PCWize newsletter with others as long as it is reprinted in it's entirety to include the copyright notice and subscription directions. If you've received this edition of the PCWize newsletter from a friend or colleague and wish to start receiving your own copy, then click the below link and send the generated e-mail message. I have made every attempt to ensure that all information contained in this newsletter is accurate to the best of my ability. Due to the myriad of possible configurations in the PC platform, information and software discussed here may not always work with your particular configuration. That being said, Leif Gregory and the PCWize newsletter can not be held liable for any damages you may incur either directly or indirectly from the use of anything contained in this newsletter. PCWize does not endorse any of the products or services provided by advertisers in this newsletter. As with anything in life, please check the credibility of the advertiser as well as to use common sense. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. PCWize Editor PCWize Homepage Unsubscribe Back-Edition Titles