Happy Turkey Day

As with so many holidays we celebrate, Thanksgiving has drifted from what it originally was, a celebration acknowledging the prosperous beginnings of our countries early settlers to eating turkeys and watching football while cruising through the newspaper to decide what stores have the best ‘supposed’ deals on Christmas presents.

The first Thanksgiving was about the Pilgrims devotion to God and how their blessings and prosperity were a gift from God, even their sorrows. These were people that left England because they were not allowed to worship God in the way they saw fit because of laws enforced by King James the First.

I’ve not been a very religious person over the years, I often say that going to catholic school and attending mass daily I’ve earned the right to opt out but as of late I’ve started to see my spiritual side coming back out so with that while you and yours sit down to a feast this Thanksgiving day, remember what it’s all about, not if the Cowboys are going to win or if someone is discounting an iPad at 3am but a celebration of what we have and being thankful for it.

Can’t wait till next Easter when I get to rant a little about how Christ died on the cross and for that we look for eggs filled with chocolate delivered by a rabbit while wearing a bonnet!

Happy Turkey Day

Veterans Day

To all that serve, now and in the past, a well deserved tribute and nothing but respect on this Veterans Day.

Account Hacking

In the last 2 weeks 5 of my friends have had one of their accounts hacked and all sorts of stuff have happened, the latest was today. So let me offer some Geek Wisdom in the form of a couple of very easy things that you can do to protect yourself online.

1- Do not use the same password on every site on the web, face it if you do, 1 hacker figures out just a little simple information about you, asks to reset your password and suddenly you’re compromised. Use a different password everywhere!

2- Use STRONG passwords; want to use a strong password and a different one on each site? A password that you can actually remember? Do this: Take a name that you will remember, substitute symbols for letters like @ for A and $ for S, next add a phone number like your first phone number you ever had, then add a DASH and the 1st three letters of that site something like M@ry8005551212-Fac each site is semi-unique. It’s strong but if someone figures out your pattern you’re done.

3- Get a password generator, my old fav was KeyPass, it sits on your machine and creates some strong passwords then locks them away into a database, it’s based on the principal of a Secret Master Key that you know but the issue is that if you damage the database you’re cooked!

4- My new Fav is Super Gen Pass at http://supergenpass.com/ this is not a database, it’s a simple script that you download to your Bookmarks then when you go to a site that needs a password it creates a special password just for that site based on the site name and your master key, encrypts it and makes it very strong!

To use all you do is enter your secret master key which can be something that only you know and can easily remember, click on the link you saved for SuperGenPass in your bookmarks and it automatically populates the password on the site with a super strong password.

Finally don’t use PUBLIC COMPUTERS for email or personal business and be aware of the guy at Starbucks that’s sitting on his computer next to you while you use the public WiFi, he’s likely stealing your packets, if you can sit next to him so you can see HIS screen, if they get uncomfortable, they’re probably stealing your information.

Boxee Box

In my continued quest to re-purpose and save the few $$$’s that I have, I took out an old PC that was collecting dust and by today’s standards is pretty much useless and setup a Boxee Box (www.boxee.tv).

In all took about 30 minutes to setup, which included the reformatting of the hard drive to a Linux system, pointed it to my share drive and it found all my movies, then went out and found the IMDB data for each movie and added box cover artwork!

Such a cool piece of software, very streamlined in it’s Ubuntu environment and best of all, FEEDS!!! All my favorite feeds from Netflix to Revision 3 are all available.

Technology ROCKS!

Western Digital Spyware Update

Tech support at Western Digital has responded and stated that they only use Geobytes as part of the registration process of HD Live Plus to confirm what country the device is in, and the registration is optional.

Since I registered my unit online, this point is moot, but it would have been nice to have a disclaimer at start up or for the unit to try a couple of times and then give up, unlike what this unit does which is continue to try over and over to register with Geobytes.

Hopefully this will be removed in teh next version.

Re: Firewall taking hits from WDTV Live

12 hours ago – last edited 12 hours ago

I’ve got an answer for you guys. Geobytes.com is being used to check the country you’re in for the device registration process. This registration is optional – if you don’t register, the country information is not used for anything. Sorry it took so long to figure this out.

1st and only SB1070 Comment

So let’s understand this… if you drive from California to Arizona or from southern Arizona to Tucson you have to stop at a mandatory Border Patrol Checkpoint, be asked what your nationality is and prove citizenship and this is OK.

It’s not OK however for Arizona to have a law that let’s local police do the same, and this was decided by a Federal judge?

We are doomed as a nation!