Dot Journal - Hints and Tips

Four More Free Things to Improve your PC

Patrick — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 17:03:00 -0500

Written By: Patrick Grote
Date: August 1, 2003 (Previously Published)
Section: Hints and Tips

Last time we looked at things you can do to improve your PC. We're back with four more things!

SPAM EVERYWHERE

It is extremely hard to avoid spam these days. Every time you check for e-mail there's a deluge of offers to make money fast, spy on someone or visit the latest porno site. Spam not only frustrates us, but also makes the chore of keeping our e-mail boxes clean harder.

There are two ways of dealing with spam. For those of you who are new to the Internet you have the opportunity to save yourself from a ton of time. Whatever you do never use your primary e-mail address for the following:

Five Free Things to Improve your PC

Patrick — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 17:01:25 -0500

Written By: Patrick Grote
Date: July 30, 2003 (Previously Published)
Section: Hints and Tips

Isn't it odd that the internet used to be all about information and access and now it's about revenue generation and advertising placements? Look no further than here for a free guide to improving your PC.

DEFRAG FOR HEALTH

In the new era of 20 gigabyte and larger drives, defragmenting becomes extremely important. Your PC writes information to the hard drives in the zaniest ways you can imagine. Instead of keeping things together and in order, it will look for any free space, start writing and if it runs out of space it will write the next fragment of data onto another space and so on. This leads to delays in loading your software and even data corruption if the fragmentation becomes too extensive.

What is an Intranet? Definition and more.

Patrick — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 16:58:41 -0500

Written By: Pawan Bangar
Date: July 24, 2003 (Previously Published)
Section: Hints and Tips

What exactly is an intranet? It's one of those terms that's more thrown around than understood, and has become more of a buzzword than a commonly understood idea. Simply put, an intranet is a private network with Internet technology used as the underlying architecture.

An intranet is built using the Internet's TCP/IP protocols for communications. TCP/IP protocols can be run on many hardware platforms and cabling schemes. The underlying hardware is not what makes an intranet-it's the software protocols that matter. Intranets can co-exist with other local area networking technology. In many companies, existing "legacy systems" including mainframes, Novell networks, minicomputers, and various databases, are being integrated into an intranet.

Three Things that will Protect your PC

Patrick — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 16:57:21 -0500

Written By: Joe McHenry
Date: July 20, 2003 (Previously Published)
Section: Hints and Tips

Hackers, spyware and viruses all combine to make it essential that you have a firewall, a spyware detector and an anti-virus program - all up to date and operating on your system.

1. Safety First - Get Yourself a Firewall Now

If you don't have a firewall installed and operating on your computer then you are risking an attack by a cracker.

Without a firewall your computer is like an open door. Private and confidential information may become available to hackers with basic computer skills.

Replacing Tabbrowser Extensions in Firefox

Patrick — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 16:55:46 -0500

1) It's buggy. Being a work in constant progress, TBE always seems to have bugs that affect performance and functionality.
2) It slows Firefox down. Horrible performance can be expected once TBE gets its claws into your browser.
3) It's too much functionality. This leads to confusing and overlapping issues.

So what's an excited Firefox user going to do if TBE has finally pushed you too far? REPLACE IT.

But before you cry, "Where oh where will I get the functionality," finish reading the article.

There are four features I really needed:

Blocking Skweezer.net from accessing your site

Patrick — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 16:16:38 -0500

If you go to their site and type in a URL you'll notice that they will server your site sans anything related to advertising at all. Now, I am not a heavy hitter looking to make millions of dollars, but I do run AdSense. They even strip that out.

This really pissed me off.

I looked in my logs and saw that the IP address that was poking me was:

Search results for: 216.115.239.17

OrgName: Financial Fitness Internet DBA West Coast Internet
OrgID: WCST
Address: 300 S Harbor Blvd #804
City: Anaheim
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 92805
Country: US

NetRange: 216.115.224.0 - 216.115.255.255
CIDR: 216.115.224.0/19
NetName: WCI-BLK-1
NetHandle: NET-216-115-224-0-1
Parent: NET-216-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS.FEA.NET
NameServer: NS2.FEA.NET
Comment: ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate: 1998-11-30
Updated: 2000-01-18

TechHandle: PQ21-ARIN
TechName: Quaranto, Paul
TechPhone: +1-949-487-3300
TechEmail: sysop@fea.net

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2004-12-28 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

We're changing a few things ...

Patrick — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 16:13:32 -0500

Dot Journal will start a normal publication schedule starting June 22, 2006. We'll have the same reviews, interviews, information, articles and fun that we had before.

The delay is due to time. Dot Journal has always stood for quality, but quality takes time. We now have that time, so we're ready to go.

The first thing on the list is to change the site. Right now we're running Movable Type, but we'll be swinging over to Drupal. The actual change won't take that long, but we'll need to pop some redirects into the site to make sure all the backlinks don't break.