This morning I got a notice from Chase Bank that my account had been accessed from a different location. Could I please go to their website and verify my identity? Considering I that I haven’t banked at Chase in at least 5 years it seemed a wee bit suspicious. My gut told me it was spam, but what did the message itself tell me?
The source code concealed as much as it revealed, but my inquiry showed me how these new fangled criminals cover their tracks.
Imagine you wake up one day and all of your data is gone. The last 5 years of digital pictures, the spreadsheet your worked on yesterday, and the diary you’ve been keeping for the last 10 years. Sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? But surely, you backup your data, don’t you?
The problem with my backup plan was that I didn’t realize how effective the plan was until it was too late. On Saturday, I woke up, went to check the news and my trusty old blue and white G3 crashed. I restarted. Instead of the normal startup screens, I got a question mark. I’m enough of a geek to know how to bring a Mac back to life if it misplaces its system folder, but this time, my bag of tricks did nothing. I determined that the hard drive failed. So how was my backup strategy?
By now, everyone knows that Mozilla’s Firefox is eating away at Internet Explorer’s market share. It’s no wonder, innovation of Internet Explorer creeps along with releases of the Windows operating system. In true open source spirit, Firefox allows for anyone with a little know-how to contribute and improve the product. Case in point is the Mozilla mycroft project, home to browser search plug-ins, which "allow you to access a search engine right from your browser without having to go to the search engine’s page first." It’s pretty handy–I use it to search Amazon, track Fedex packages, look up entries in the Wikipedia, etc. Quite often, I need to google something at Columbia University, so today I wrote a Firefox plug-in that will google those pages. I’ve submitted the plug-in to the folks at the mycroft project, but in the meantime, you can download the zip file. To install on the Mac, you’ll need to drop it in: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins On the PC, drop the files in: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ Happy searching. (Thanks to Alan Bramley, who originally developed this plug-in for the University of Virginia. I modified his work for the Columbia University plug-in.)
Unhappy with the mainstream media these days? Having trouble with the fact that the paper of record helped drive the country to war with misleading stories on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Disappointed in their coverage of the "issues" in the recent US presidential election? Choose a different source for your news. Or, should I say, let let Google choose your news for you.
If only people were as transparent as computers.
Timothy Wilson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, in his book, “Strangers to Ourselves,” introduced the idea of the adaptive unconscious. In essence, some 80% of your thinking happens automatically. Think of the adaptive unconscious as that generator in the basement that powers your actions–instead of what you consciously will. Similarly, your computer also has lots going on in the background beyond the few programs you’ve asked it to run, but unlike the adaptive non-conscious, it’s possible to learn exactly what your computer doing.
A Macintouch. reader wrote in asking how they might synch MP3 libraries–in non geek speak–have your MP3s on your home computer and want to listen to them at work. Rather than try and synch them, here’s a way to access them from home.
“…[U]se a product like Edna, in its own words, "edna allows you to access your MP3 collection from any networked computer. This software streams your MP3s via HTTP to any MP3 player that supports playing off a remote connection.”
Edna serves up Playlists that can be managed in iTunes. Sadly, Edna can’t stream protected .AAC files. Andromeda ($35) streaming jukebox software works in a similar fashion, and does handle .AAC files.
Overall, Edna provides a handy way to access most of my music collection on my home Mac when I’m elsewhere.”