Author Archive | Steve Bass

Seven Tools for Making Firefox Jump Through Hoops

Posted by Steve Bass on July 21, 2009 at 11:31 pm

Steve Bass's TechBiteClear the decks, I’m now an avid Firefox user. It took me a long time to give up my treasured Maxthon, an Internet Explorer shell that I truly loved. When Maxthon was first released, it had features years before they were added to IE8–tabs, multi-threading, groups, add-ons — things the kids at Microsoft should have copied eons ago, but didn’t.

When I first contemplated switching, my Firefox fanatic friends insisted it could do everything Maxthon did, only better. Firefox has a multitude of free add-ons, cool extras to whittle down your browser feature wish list. The add-ons let me modify Firefox to almost replicate Maxthon. (No matter what anyone says, Maxthon outshines Firefox in managing favorites, and saving sites and favorites in groups is wonderfully effortless.) The added bennie is that Firefox offers better security than Internet Explorer.

If you’re an Internet Explorer user, I encourage you to look at Firefox. It’s free; the transition for most people isn’t a big deal (see Switching is Easy); and you don’t have to give up IE to play around with it. (But I bet you will…)

Here are a few of the cooler Firefox add-ons I’m using. Give them a whirl and let me know what you think.

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The Steve Bass Guide to the iPod Touch

Posted by Steve Bass on July 13, 2009 at 10:52 am

Steve Bass's TechBiteYou would think a PC guy could escape Apple’s clutches. I’ve been successful until now, but I recently bought an Apple iPod Touch. Here’s the weird part: I love it.

If you own an iPod Touch, you’re wondering why it took me so long. For the rest of you: This is one fun device, and a terrifically useful one with the right applications. Watch a video to see what the gizmo does. (Warning: The presenter is a hurt-your-eyes perky Apple evangelist.)

Actually, I had no choice. My wife, Judy, heard about iBird ($30), a must-have birding program available for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. The app does away with the hassle of carrying birding field guides; iBird shows images and illustrations of birds, plays their songs, supplies behavior and range details, and more. (Even if you’re not a birder, watch a video of iBird in action–it’s amazing.)

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Canon’s G10: An SLR in Your Pocket

Posted by Steve Bass on July 2, 2009 at 3:09 pm

Steve Bass's TechBiteThe stars were in alignment: I needed a small digital camera to stash in my backpack while Judy and I drove 4,000 miles in Utah, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho; meanwhile, the Canon PR rep was on the horn and asking if I’d try their PowerShot G10, a pocket-size camera. I could have played hard to get (PR people love that), but I’m easy.

I took the G10 along for the three weeks Judy and I spent traveling. I took over 500 shots, and dozens of videos, and was pleased with the results. I was happy with lots of the features and I’d almost like to own the G10. (A few problems; more in a second.)

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How’s Your Hard Drive Doing?

Posted by Steve Bass on June 4, 2009 at 8:40 am

Steve Bass's TechBiteHard drives are about as dependable as a teenager promising to come home by midnight. The more you know about your drive–the brand-specific idiosyncrasies and the diagnostic sounds that drives produce–the better prepared you are for the inevitable crash.

* Hard Drive Inspector is a handy tool to monitor your drives for spin rate, seek time, and almost 20 other potential problem spots. The program also supplies specs–including drive model, firmware version, and serial number, all perfect when calling for warranty support.

The drive’s temperature is displayed in the system tray; if the drive gets too toasty (I have mine set for 120 degrees Fahrenheit), you can get an e-mail alert, or better, automatically put the computer in Standby mode. You can view a summary health report that’s enough for most of us; the S.M.A.R.T. report has the details. Hard Drive Inspector costs $30, but you can download a 15-day trial version to give you a feel for the tool; the trial is fully functional, though limited to one drive. Nonetheless, it’ll tell you everything you’ll need to know about your drive.

Note: At press time (an antiquated phrase if I ever heard one), the Hard Drive Inspector’s site is temporarily down. You can read about the product by looking at a Google cache.

* It’s not as comprehensive as Hard Drive Inspector, but if you’d prefer a freebie (of course you would!), download CrystalDiskInfo. The tool will show you the number of hours logged on your hard drive and give you its health status. If you see caution or bad, cancel all your appointments and replace the drive, like, immediately, even if you don’t hear any weird sounds from the drive.

* If you listen to your hard drive, all you should hear is a soothing, comforting hum. Yet drives often make weird sounds–thuds, screeches, knocking, or whining — and determining if a sound means trouble can be, well, troubling.

DataCent, a data-recovery company, has an extraordinarily helpful site that plays the actual sounds of flaky hard drives: stuck spindles, bad or unstable heads, bad bearings, and bad media, to name a few. You can listen to your specific drive brand, too. Even better, the data recovery company lists typical drive failures by manufacturer. Listen to a Seagate drive with bad heads making a clicking and knocking sound.

[This post is excerpted from Steve’s TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up–it’s delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it’s free.]

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Why I Dumped Windows System Restore for ERUNT

Posted by Steve Bass on May 26, 2009 at 1:05 pm

Steve Bass's TechBiteI gave up on Windows System Restore. Yep, I turned the feature off and replaced it with a freebie I like better.

System Restore is a recovery tool built into Windows that backs up and restores the Registry. System Restore takes a snapshot of your computer — called a restore point — once a day, as well as before you perform certain tasks, such as installing a new program. If all goes well, you can use a restore point later on to bring your PC back to the state it was in when the snapshot was taken. But remember, we’re talking about computers.

Sometimes System Restore doesn’t work. You click a restore point and Windows has a hearty, gleeful laugh. The problem is that each restore point is linked to previous points; if one is corrupt or missing, you’re out of luck: System Restore won’t work. (Learn more about the ins and outs of System Restore in Bert Kinney’s smart and thorough FAQ.)

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WinPatrol: A Must-Have Free Tool

Posted by Steve Bass on May 6, 2009 at 7:20 pm

Steve Bass's TechBiteWinPatrol is a free tool you just must have on your Windows PC: It gives you a way to stop unwanted programs from loading (and tells you which apps are safe), watches out for spyware and keyloggers, keeps your System tray uncluttered, and when you boot, can get you to the desktop quickly.

At its core, WinPatrol raises a flag when something suspicious happens within critical parts of your system. For instance, you’ll get an alert when anything is added to any of the Registry’s Startup locations and you’ll have the option of blocking it or disabling it later. WinPatrol watches almost 20 functions, including when a browser plug-in is added, a file type association is changed, a scheduled task is created, your HOST file is touched, or a new ActiveX component is installed.

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Five Web Services You've Got to Try

Posted by Steve Bass on April 29, 2009 at 9:35 am

Steve Bass's TechBiteJunk and clutter: It’s the blaring banner ads and annoying boxes that slide across the screen that are ruining the Web. I avoid it all with a smart ad blocker–Ad Muncher, a miraculous tool.

But there’s still a problem.

Web pages aren’t designed for reading, and that’s one of my pleasures: Reading product and movie reviews, for instance, or devouring John McPhee’s lengthy pieces in The New Yorker, or James Fallows (read his old, but still valuable What Was I Thinking? in The Atlantic).

Up until now, I’d click the Print button if the site offered one. Then I discovered Readability, a site that reformats any page of text to conform to your reading style. Set up Readability by choosing a style, font size, and margin width, and then drag the Readability bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar. The next time you’re on a Web page you want to read, click the Readability link and the transformation happens immediately. (You can get a better idea by watching the video.)

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Enough Already: Stop Malware, Spyware, and Trojans

Posted by Steve Bass on April 23, 2009 at 3:51 pm

Steve Bass's TechBiteThey’re out to get you: Sleaze balls writing devious, sneaky programs that load you system with junk. I’ll show you a few quick ways to protect yourself from Windows Trojans that want your credit card number, malware that slows your system, and spyware that tracks your keystrokes.

Over the years I’ve played with at least 3 million security programs–Norton, McAfee (the program that AOL uses), Kaspersky, Spyware Doctor, Vipre, Avast, AVG, and Trend, to name just a few. They all give adequate protection. (I know, I didn’t mention your favorite. Get over it.) While all these tools do the job, there are differences: For instance, I think Spyware Doctor reports too many false positives and AVG, a former favorite, gets bigger with each iteration.

If you’re comfortable with your existing protection program, and confident it’s protecting you, (read: you haven’t been infected recently), stick with it.

However, I often get e-mails asking if it’s a good idea to switch products.

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Posterous: A Cool Web Repository

Posted by Steve Bass on April 16, 2009 at 8:55 am

Steve Bass's TechBiteI get e-mails with PowerPoint and other types of files attached. Some are entertaining, but it takes more skill than I have to embed them in my newsletter in such a way that everyone can see them. (Scores of you wrote and said that you couldn’t play the YouTube videos I tried embedding months ago.)

But I’ve just discovered Posterous, a handy site for displaying practically any type of file: PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, Flash games, images, MP3s, documents, and videos in a variety of formats. The beauty of Posterous is that PowerPoint files display as they would if you had a PowerPoint viewer and image collections are automatically available as slide shows.

So far, here’s what I’ve posted to Posterous:

* Two PowerPoint presentations, one with images of unusual aircraft and the other showing a trip on Bolivia’s “Road of Death.”
* Two videos–Darwin Awards Reject numbers one and two.
* A PDF of the Monthly Computer Chronicle newsletter.
* A stack of images that show why our car insurance rates are so high.

I really like Posterous because it’s a free service with no signup to worry about. And there’s no muss or fuss: I just send them an e-mail and attach the file I want you to view. There are other features, such as making a blog private and password protecting it. Read the FAQ for more info.

[This post is excerpted from Steve’s TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up–it’s delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it’s free.]

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Ten Super-Duper Free Tools

Posted by Steve Bass on April 9, 2009 at 9:40 am

Steve Bass's TechBiteI’ve been bingeing on free tools for the last week. Here are a bunch of the best I found.

Greased Lightning Finds

I want you to download and try the Everything search tool. It installs in a minute, and indexes your drive in another minute — and the speed of its finds will blow you away. No, really, this is the fastest thing I’ve ever seen.

My friend Darryl said, “Everything’s search engine only searches file names and folders — it doesn’t index file contents like Windows Desktop Search does. Instead, it indexes the entire hard drive by using the hard disk’s existing USN Change Journal. The result is a tiny program that uses very little resources, is deadly simple to use, and is astonishingly fast. You can find any file virtually instantly.” The question is why Microsoft didn’t use the USN functionality in the Search function built into XP and Vista. (Don’t you love these rhetorical questions for Microsoft?)

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