TechyDad

While at the BlogHer 2010 session “Fight Spam and Hackers! Plugging Security Holes in Your Social Media Life” (audio), I Amy of Amiable Life asked a question. She said that she wants to understand security issues but that much of the reference material went over her head. She was wondering if there was any “WordPress for 5th Graders” or “How to Protect Yourself for an eight year old.”

This sparked an idea. I understand this technical stuff and pride myself on the ability to explain complex items in simple terms. So why couldn’t I take a subject like “How Does The Internet Work” and, perhaps using some crude graphics, explain how it works without delving into the details of TCP/IP, request headers and other topics that would cause peoples’ eyes to glaze over?

I still have some work to do before I can pull this off. The words will come easily, but I’ll need some graphics. And those might be trickier for me to do. So this might be a once every-other-month type of feature. My other concern is the selection of topics. How am I going to figure out which topics people want to learn about? Well, as this is an Aloha Friday, I bet you can guess how. I’m going to ask everyone out there!

My Aloha Friday question for today is: What computer/technology subjects would you like explained simply?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #53

When we moved into our house, our computer systems went upstairs. Over time, though, we found that we were using the downstairs more. This was aided by the addition of a wireless router and our laptops. When we added our Roku and CinemaTube, we hooked them up to our wireless network. This was a fine solution, but wireless is slower than direct Ethernet hookups. Unfortunately, running network cable throughout our house wasn’t an option due to the age of our house and type of walls it has. That, plus we had enough home repair bills without drilling through walls just to run cable.

Enter the LinkE. The LinkE, from Brite-View, uses Powerline Networking technology to connect your devices to your router. Put simply, the traffic flows through your router, into the LinkE bridge, through your house’s power lines, through the LinkE switch and to your device. If that sounds complicated, all you need to know is that you plug the bridge into an electrical outlet near your router, connect it to the router and then plug the switch into any other electrical outlet in the house. After connecting a device to the switch, you have Internet access.

I took the LinkE out of the box and plugged one unit in downstairs near our TV. I plugged the other unit in upstairs near our router. I was actually expecting more setup than that. I figured that I’d need to log into some administrative panel and fiddle with some settings or something. Instead, it was literally plug and play. When I hooked it up to our Roku, our Roku was able to tell that it was connected to a wired network and could use that instead of the wireless network. Before you could say “powerline networking”, Netflix movies were streaming through our power lines and onto our TV.

This was highly convenient, but it wouldn’t be much use if the speeds didn’t meet or exceed wireless network speeds. Brite-View advertises speeds up to 200Mbps, but, since my ISP doesn’t give me that much bandwidth, I didn’t expect to reach that figure. Still, I wasn’t dissappointed. The Netflix loading seemed to go faster and, when I connected it to my computer, my web page load times seemed to shrink.

Of course, I’m too much of a geek to accept “seemed to.” I want hard numbers. To quantify just how much of a boost I got, I ran six speed tests at DSLReports.com. First, I ran three using my wireless connection. This resulted in an average speed of about 1984.7 Kbps down and 988 Kbps up. Next, I ran three tests while connected via LinkE for an average of 2414.7 Kbps down and 1000 up. (I cleared my browser’s cache after each test to avoid any influence there.) The upload speeds were comparable, but the download speed improved by 22%.

Wireless Speed Test Results:

LinkE Speed Test Results:

I would definitely recommend the LinkE for connecting home theater equipment to the Internet. Nowadays, many electronics (Blu-Ray, Roku, CinemaTube, etc) come with ethernet ports. Not all come with wireless built-in. Instead of buying wireless adapters for each of these, you could hook up one LinkE and network all of our devices. The LinkE can be purchased from Brite-View. The 1 port bridge + 4 port switch model that I tested retails for $84.99.

Disclaimer: I recieved the LinkE 1 port bridge + 4 port switch model complimentary from Brite-View to test. No other compensation was given. The opinions expressed above are my own.

Computers are very important to me.  After all, I work as a webmaster so I’m around computers all day.  When I heard that NHL’s school wasn’t *really* teaching him about computers, but only letting them go online to visit some kid-oriented websites, I decided that *someone* had to teach him about computers.  After all, computers are important in today’s society.  A computer-literate child has more opportunities than a computer-illiterate one.  I quickly decided that I should have semi-regular computer lessons with NHL. Read more…

If you’ve checked out any of the (many) photos I’ve posted, you might have noticed that I watermark my photos. It’s subtle, but in the bottom right hand corner of every photo it says “www.TechyDad.com”.

Why do I do this? Well, as much as I’d like to assume that people are good, there are a lot of unscrupulous people out there that will grab photos off the Internet for their own use. By watermarking the photo, I’m decreasing its value to these people. (Yes, the watermark could be removed, but it’d take time and effort to do so. The photo thieves are more likely to just head elsewhere to grab some photos.)

In addition to the watermarking, I also rotate some photos (depending on which way they were taken) and resize them for the web. Unfortunately, when I have a lot of photos to process, this can be a time-consuming pain. Initially, my process looked like this:

1. Load one photo in Irfanview
2. Open up Irfanview’s Thumbnail mode
3. Select all images to process
4. Use Irfanview’s lossless-JPEG rotate function to auto-rotate all photos
5. Open up Irfanview’s Batch Conversion mode
6. Select all photos to process and conversion settings (e.g. new height/width)
7. Wait until Batch Conversion is done.
8. Open up Picture Shark.
9. Select All Photos
10. Select Watermark
11. Wait until watermark is applied to all photos
12. Post photos

You can see how this would make photo posting a pain, but each step was necessary. I couldn’t post sideways photos and couldn’t post full-res pictures either. There’s the download time issue as well as the aforementioned picture thieves.

That’s when I remembered about ImageMagick. ImageMagick is a freeware photo manipulation program that is often used on servers to, well, manipulate images. My server, for example, uses it to make thumbnails out of the photos I upload. The only problem is that ImageMagick doesn’t have an graphical interface. It is run by a series of command line statements. This is perfectly fine for a script running on a server, but not as good for a human user.

Since all I wanted to do was run the same commands over and over, and since I know how to program, I wrote a Photo Processor script. It would let me specify the directory that the photos were in, whether I wanted them resized/rotated/watermarked and even allowed me to select which watermark. This way, B could use the same script for TheAngelForever.com. My new photo processing process was:

1. Run Script
2. Copy/Paste name of directory with photos
3. Answer dialogs for resizing/rotating/watermarking photos.
4. Wait until script finishes
5. Post photos

Much easier, right?

When Monkey was born to Tarzan and Jane over at HisBoysCanSwim, I noticed that their photos of Monkey merely had some text at the bottom of them. This would be easily stripped out by a picture thief so I offered my Photo Processor script. And while I was working on it, I figured I’d post a version for everyone else out there.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install a copy of ImageMagick on your PC. In the configuration screen during setup (the one with all of the checkboxes), make sure that you check the box for “Install ImageMagickObject OLE Control for VBScript, Visual Basic, and WSH.” (See image below.)

Once that is done, download my Photo Processor script. When you run the script, first you’ll need to enter the directory of the photos to be processed (e.g. C:\Photos\My Trip To The Beach\). Don’t worry if they’re your originals, the altered versions will be saved in newly created subdirectories. After you enter the directory, simply answer a few Yes/No questions to set whether the photos are rotated and/or resized and sit back and wait for the script to do its job. To add a watermark, put a PNG image in the same directory as the script and name it “Watermark.png.”

If you have any questions about this script, feel free to post them in the comments below.

I began to see "Don’t Click" posts appearing in my Twhirl client from a few different users. Then came the warnings not to click the links in those tweets as that would tweet a "Don’t Click" from my own account. Being curious (and careful), I decided to figure out how this could work. First, I would like to recommend that you don’t follow my steps unless you know what you’re doing. This instance is relatively benign (annoying, but benign) the next instance could result in virus/trojan infestation.

After finding one of the "Don’t Click" links, I disabled JavaScript within Firefox. I was reasonably confident that this would prevent anything from running automatically. Next, I opened the link. Sure enough, a page opened up with a "Click Here" button. Next, I examined the source code but didn’t see anything that would automatically post the tweet. It did notice an iFrame loading Twitter.com with a premade Tweet just as thinkgeek mentioned.  I didn’t see how it would post the message to your tweet-stream, however.

At the bottom of the page was a credit for the source of the code so (keeping JavaScript disabled), I decided to follow the link.  That turned out to be a blog post written in French.  A quick trip to Babelfish later, and I was able to read the blog post.  The translation wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.  So here’s how it goes:

1. You see "Don’t Click" posted by one of your Twitter Friends.  Being the curious sort, you click on the link.
2. The page that loads contains an iFrame.  This iFrame loads up Twitter.com with another "Don’t Click" message pre-filled out.  So far, this isn’t a threat of any kind.  Websites can do this all they want, they just can’t interact with the contents of the iFrame (beyond loading up completely new contents).  The website doesn’t have access to your Twitter Username or Password.
3. The iFrame is set via CSS to be transparent.  This means that it’s there and clickable, but you don’t actually see it.
4. A "Click Here" button is shown and positioned (via CSS) right where the Twitter.com page’s submit button is.
5. You, again being the curious sort, try to click the "Click Here" button.
6. Instead of clicking "Click Here", your browser clicks on the Twitter Submit button (located on top of the Click Here button but invisible to you).
7. Twitter posts a "Don’t Click" message in your name.

It is quite clever, but it still requires two user actions.  First, you need to click on the "Don’t Click" link.  Next, you need to click on the "Click Here" button.  This whole hack wouldn’t work if Twitter.com didn’t support pre-filling out messages, but those pre-filled out messages can come in handy from time to time.  So what can Twitter do to prevent this?  To be honest, I don’t know.  They’ve said that they’re working on it, but (short of removing the "pre-filled message" functionality), this prank uses standard HTML/CSS conventions.  For now, though, the easiest way to prevent this is not to click on those links or, if you do, don’t click on the second link.

Update:  I actually did just think of something Twitter could do to stop this.  The Don’t Click pranksters can’t see what’s going on when they attempt to get their tweet sent under their victim’s name.  Twitter, however, can detect that a pre-filled out message is about to be sent and can pop-up a JavaScript prompt confirming the submission.  The pranksters won’t be able to click on the "Ok, submit this" button in a JavaScript prompt and the potential victim will (hopefully) cancel the message and leave.

I was speaking to a coworker and mentioned something I do with receipts from online purchases.  He seemed to think that it was a great idea.  It just seemed so second nature to me that I didn’t even realize that people might not know about it.  Given that this holiday season brings many online purchases, I figured that it would be a good tip to share.  (Ok, most of you have probably bought everything you’re going to buy online for the holiday season, humor me on this point, ok?  )

What you will need:

• PDFCreator – PDFCreator is a free, open-source application that can create PDF files from any file that you can print.  It fools your system into thinking that there is printer called PDFCreator.  When documents (Word files, web pages, photos, etc) are printed to this "printer", they don’t emerge on paper but are saved to a PDF file.  Since it is free, you can install it on all of your computers without paying a single penny.

The Green Tip:

Upon completing an online purchase, you’ll usually be presented with a receipt for your purchase.  Many would print this receipt out to have onhand in case they need it, but this can waste paper.  Instead, I print the receipt to PDF.  To make it easier to find, I put all of my receipts in a folder (appropriately called "Receipts") and name the PDF files in a way that I’ll remember what they were for.  e.g. "2008-12-23 – Amazon.com – Another Good Book.pdf"  Then, if I ever need to find my receipt, I simply open the cooresponding PDF file.  I haven’t yet needed to print a receipt out, but if I need to, they’ll all be there as good as new while a receipt printed at the time of sale can fade, tear, or get lost.  I don’t know offhand how many trees I’ve saved by not printing out my receipts, but every little bit counts.