I pre-ordered mine!

The Raspberry Pi  is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. The design is based around aBroadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and 128 or 256 Megabytes of RAM. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage. This board is intended to run Linux kernel based operating systems.

The foundation plans to release two versions; Model A & Model B. Model A will have 128 Megabytes (MB) RAM memory, one USB port and no Ethernet controller,  while model B will contain 256MB RAM memory, two USB ports and a 10/100 Ethernet controller.

Though the Model A doesn’t have an RJ45 Ethernet port, it can connect to a network by using a user supplied USB Ethernet or Wi-Fi adapter. As typical of modern computers, generic USB keyboards and mice are compatible with the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi use Linux-kernel based operating systems. Debian GNU/Linux, Iceweasel, Calligra Suite and Python are planned to be bundled with the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi does not come with a real-time clock, so an OS must use a network time server, or ask the user for time information at boot time to get access to time and date info for file time and date stamping. However a real time clock (such as the DS1307) with battery backup can be easily added via the I2C interface.

On February 19, 2012 the Raspberry Pi Foundation released its first proof of concept SD Card image that can be loaded onto an SD Card to produce a preliminary operating system. The image is based upon Debian 6.0 (Squeeze), with the LXDE desktop and the Midori browser, plus various programming tools. The image can also run on QEMU allowing the Raspberry Pi to be emulated on various other platforms. The Raspberry Pi Foundation plans to release a version of Fedora later.

This one will probably not affect you unless you buy online. The email looks like it comes from the NACHA and informs you that an elctronic payment has been rejected. Well if you buy and or sell online the odds are good this may happen, but if we hold the mouse over the “hot link” we see it does not lead to the NACHA site.

The NACHA is a legitimate organization and in fact has warnings regarding this scam.

Analysis: Once again it is evident that one should not click on “hot links” in email unless they are sure of where it came from and where it is going. Always check with the issuing company / organization when in doubt or Google the message or details. In this case if we Google NACHA email we get a long list of info regarding the scam.

The final destination here leads to an executable file that installs a virus on your computer.

Beware – Be Informed – Be Safe

Hope This Helps

I decided to take some action and start posting email scams. I get lots of them and want to alert my readers of the plethora of scams out there.

The reason I get so many is I have many websites I mantain out there and therefore Internet exposure. I list many of my items forsale on Ebay, Craig’s List, Backpage and more.  I sell using Pay Pal. All these open you up for all or some of these scams.

I will list a screen shot of the email and note the “problems”. I will try and list any names or email address so you can be aware of the scamers. I will then give a brief synopsis of the scam. This first one ticked me off enough to start this project.

Analysis: I received an email from the name shown in screen shot. He offered additional $90 extra for me to ship (did not know where). I felt great since I would ship anywhere if you pay for it. After sending a Pay Pal invoice to Andy that the package was ready, I received this email as shown.

Once they received my Pay Pal email address (different then the selling email address) they could put together this very official looking email. The problem is Pay Pal does not hold money waiting for shipping verification. If you check your Pay Pal account you will see the staus as Pending, but this is awaiting payment from the buyer. 

Normally the buyer pays, you ship and if your buyer does not receive the product he then files a complaint with Pay Pal (this is why you use Pay Pal). I have filed and have been re-imbursed monies when the product failed to arrive, usually within 15 to 45 days.

One way to check the authenticity of the email, is to hold your mouse over any links. At the bottom of the page you should see the actual email. If it is different then the subject sender or extremely long, chance are it is a scam. Call or email the actual vendor and check with them. This email was forawrded to spoof@paypal.com.

Beware – Be Informed – Be Safe

Hope This Helps

We are a firm believer in reading to learn. My clients will ask me how to do this or that and I always remind them that the internet and Google search is your friend. You need to get out there and read up on your interests or follow up on your questions.

With that in mind, I stumbled upon this today and thought I would post it here. It is a page of 50 guides on how to do things. From Android to Ubuntu. Guides on Google Gmail (which we highly recommend), buying laptops and Microsoft office 2010 tips and tricks. A great guide on using Windows 7 is also available, in fact the complete list is:

1. Set Up Your Blog With WordPress: The Ultimate Guide

2. Best of the Web, Delivered: The Reddit Manual

3. An Android Guide : These Are The Droids You’re Looking For

4. Virtual Currency: The MakeUseOf BitCoin Manual

5. Computer In Your Computer: How To Use VirtualBox

6. New Life: Bring Old PC To Life With Ubuntu [PDF]

7. Operation Cleanup: Complete Malware Removal Guide

8. Watch The Web: AWESOME Media Center Guide 2011

9. Bam! Your Guide To Cool Online Comic Books

10. Go Google: Free Email and More On Your Domain

11. 50 Cool Uses for Live CDs

12. The Laptop Buying Guide 2011

13. Lockdown: Secure Your Files with TrueCrypt

14. Learn to Speak “Internet”: Your Guide To xHTML

15. Picture Perfect: Set Up Your Own Photoblog

16. Open Book: Managing Your eBooks With Calibre

17. Microsoft Office 2010: Ultimate Tips & Tricks

18. Stuff Happens: The Backup & Restore Guide

19. Hard Drive Of The Future: 101 Guide To Solid State Drives

20. Windows on Speed: Ultimate PC Acceleration Manual

21. HackerProof: Your Guide To PC Security

22. The Five-Star Guide For Your iPad

23. How The Internet Works

24. You Like This: The Facebook Marketing Guide

25. Your PC, Inside And Out [Part 2]

26. The Awesome Automation Guide for Mac Users

27. Your PC, Inside and Out [Part 1]

28. The First Unofficial Guide To Dropbox

29. The (Very) Unofficial Facebook Privacy Guide

30. The Office Worker’s 101 Guide to a USB Thumb Drive

31. Step-By-Step Guide To Using GarageBand

32. The Ultimate Windows 7 Guide

33. The Complete Beginners Guide To Joomla

34. The Ultimate Guide To Gmail

35. The Essential Guide To Digital Photography

36. How To Create Professional Reports & Docs on Word

37. The MakeUseOf Guide To Internet Searching

38. The MakeUseOf Online Shopping Guide

39. How To Build a Gaming PC

40. The Internet Music Guide For The Audiophile

41. The MakeUseOf Guide to File Sharing Networks

42. The MakeUseOf Windows Mobile Guide

43. How To Build A Great Media Center PC

44. The Easy Guide To Computer Networks

45. The Ubuntu Karmic Koala Bible

46. An Easy Guide to Build Your Own WordPress Site

47. The Underground Guide To The iPhone

48. The Internet Guide to the Movie Addict

49. The Complete Guide To Twitter

50. An Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop

51. The FREE A-Z Torrent Guide

52. The Idiot’s Ultimate Guide to Build Your Own PC

53. Newbie’s Getting Started Guide to Linux

54. MakeUseOf’s Smart Productivity Guide

55. The BIG Book Of iTunes for FREE

56. The FREE Mac Manual

     

Now we have not read all these guides and therefore cannot recommend or condone them all, but most are simple information PDF files that will give you the basic info you need. We also have downloaded and highly recommend he Ultimate Windows 7 Guide for those of you who need help learning your way around Windows 7.

So why not go here and check out some of these great guides and start expanding your Internet / Computing knowledge .. today!

Just got this in one of my email accounts:

Evidently this has been around before but is now back. The “scam” here is to get you to open the attached ZIP file. when this surfaced earlier the NACHA (a legitimate company) posted this response:

Random individuals and/or companies may have received a falsified e-mail with the subject title “Rejected ACH Transaction.”  This e-mail appears to be from NACHA – The Electronic Payments Association telling them that there is a problem with an ACH transaction they have originated.  The e-mail includes a link which redirects the individual to a fake web page which appears like the NACHA website and contains a link which is almost certainly executable virus with malware.

If you are like me and use PayPal and shop online, this would cause some concern that one of your payments got cancelled. Again, be safe.

DO NOT open any attachments you do not know who they are from.

If you are in doubt, go to the source. So if you receive something about your credit card, go to their site or better yet, your account. In thi scase we checked the NACHA website (noted at bottom of email) and look at their first post on the page:

Google joins Internet biggies Twitter (T.Co) , Overstock (O.co) and Amazon (A.Co, Z.Co and K.Co) today in taking over the G.Co domain name, buying the TLD in order to build the official URL shortcut for Google products like GMail, Documents and Photos. While representatives from the .Co registry wouldn’t comment on the specific pricing of the deal, .Co-founder Juan Diego Calle recently told Reuters that in general single letter domains costs more than $1.5 million.

Google says it will use the domain in order to create a shortcut for all its products and services using the format g.co/[XYZproduct/service] and that the domain will be live sometime later in the afternoon today. ”You can visit a G.CO shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service,” said Google VP of consumer marketing Gary Briggs in a release.

Run out of Colombia (and with the support of the Colombian government), the .Co domain is hard core targeting itself towards tech companies big and small. Also announced today is the 500 Startups‘ .Co rebranding; the incubator will be moving from 500Startups.com to 500.co this fall. While not as mainstream, the 500 Startups move is probably just as monumental as the Google news, as it give the domain street cred and solidifies that idea that the “Co” in .Co means companies.

Emphasizing this point, 500 Startups co-founder Dave McClure said that he recommends the .Co domain to all his now 150 startups, ” “With .Co, startups can launch businesses and brands on a short, cool, credible domain name — without having to shell out a million bucks to do it.” “CO is quickly becoming the hot new geek TLD in Silicon Valley,” he said.

The .Co domain registry is two days away from the first anniversary of its public launch and most recently hit 1 million registered domains after ten months of existence. Its marketing and advertising push has been aimed at tech companies who have thus far had to settle for a lame mainstream .com domains — i.e. no vowels, weird spelling, etc — or have had to shell out tons of VC cash for the domains that they want. The new enough .Co offers a viable alternative.

“We want to be inspiring people with big dreams and big ideas to do it on a .Co.,” .Co  Director Lori Anne Wardi told me about the registry’s aspirations on the phone earlier, “We want to be a platform for the world’s next great businesses.”

 
Alexia Tsotsis

Awhile back I had written an article comparing the differences in these three devices. Unfortunately I lost those when redoing this site so I am writing a new explanation.

You can find the technical explanations of Laptops, Notebooks and Netbooks by clicking on these terms. This will bring up a pop-up Wiki link with their definitions. I, however, will attempt to show and explain some examples in a little more lay persons term.

Although many definitions lump Notebook and Laptop as the same, the primary difference would be screen and unit size. Years back, IBM came out with their Thinkpad which was in fact a notebook. The screens on these are typically 12″ to 14″ (all screens are measured diagonally) and the size of the device was around that of a spiral “notebook”. Now that size has gone by the wayside for the “bigger is better” screen sizes of 15″ to 17″, true notebooks are hard to find. Of course as screens and units got bigger, their weight also got heavier. The industry saw a need for a lighter more convenient device and the netbook was conceived.

The pictures below are comparison photos I took of both my laptop (on the left 15″ screen) and my netbook.

The unit on the left is a Dell Laptop with 15″ screen and the unit on the right is a MSI netbook with 10.1″ screen. That is a 12″ white ruler on the netbook. Now besides the obvious screen and weight differences, there are some performance differences. A laptop will come with a much faster processor, i.e. computer chip, then the netbook.

This iPhone cable has three extra USB ports built right in

07:45 AM, Wednesday, 13 July 2011

The smaller laptops get, the fewer ports they have room for.

It’s a common problem, especially on the smaller Apple laptops, which only have two.
That’s what makes this iPhone cable with a built-in USB hub so smart.

Want three extra USB ports? Just use this cable to charge and sync your iPhone.
You can then plug three other devices right into it, saving space and making up for the scarcity of ports on your laptop. It’s clever and elegant; it’s almost surprising Apple didn’t do this themselves.

DITS via Technabob

My favorite video streaming services only hope is to convince major media companies to let it rent movies—but I fear it’s already too late.
By Lance Ulanoff

Well that was a short, fast ride. Netflix, a service that continues to expand at an astounding rate and has arguably changed the way we watch movies at home seems primed for a big fall off the top of the home video delivery heap.

Netflix certainly changed movie night in my home. Less than a decade ago, we all got in the car and visited Blockbuster or a local video store and fought over which DVD(s) to rent. Today, the fighting’s still there, but everything else has changed. We don’t leave our house to find movies. First, we stopped going out because Netflix would deliver multiple DVDs directly to our home as fast as we could consume them. Now, however, we’ve cut down our monthly Netflix bill and have just one DVD in our possession at any given time. We rarely watch whatever’s on that disc, though. Instead, we turn on the Blu-ray player, select Netflix, and then find something on which we can all agree (hence the fighting).

Netflix, by the way, seems quite ready to do as we did and leave the red-enveloped DVDs behind. Sign out of your account and visit the Netflix homepage. It’s devoted to promoting Netflix streaming service. You wouldn’t even know it still ships millions of DVDs all over the U.S. (and some to other parts of the world). This makes sense. It’s hard to buy a device without built-in Netflix streaming capability. Of course, Netflix is not alone on these devices. My Blu-ray player and Sony TVs also offer a variety of other video-streaming options, including Amazon, Qriocity, and Hulu. Netflix streaming pickings, though, are still not super for the latest movies.

So what’s the problem? Netflix customers like me are migrating from the labor- and cost-intensive disc shipping services to the largely all digital streaming option. Netflix’s costs must be tumbling and with lots and lots of new $8-a-month, streaming-only subscribers, there should be nothing but blue skies ahead for Netflix. If only that were true.

As this story on CNNMoney explains and even Netflix’s own CEO Reed Hastings has revealed, Netflix will have to shell out millions and millions of dollars (if not billions) just to keep the content it currently offers in its Watch Instantly library. During June’s D9   conference in California, Hastings readily admitted that it was going to cost money to deliver the kind of streaming experience customers demand: “Part of our goal is to make subscribers happy and part is to make our content partners really happy and part of that is writing really big checks,” he said.

CNN reports that many of the contracts Netflix signed with the studios had a user cap. As Netflix blows by those caps, the contracts implode and Netflix loses access to the content. Paying a lot more money is one way to get the movie and TV shows back, but the new deals Netflix signs will be far more expensive than those the partners drafted three or four years ago.

Not that Netflix even has the best library. When I first started using Netflix’s Watch Now services, there were virtually no new films, just titles that had come out last year or a few years ago. There were lots B movies, older films, and crummy TV series that no one wanted to watch when they were new. When Netflix signed with Starz, the service finally gained access to movies that had been in theaters months or just weeks before. That relationship has since imploded   , mostly over the fees Starz and its parent Sony wanted and what Netflix was willing—or able—to pay. Hasting’s has explained that “[You] can’t have all the new stuff and have the $8-a-month price we have.”

For me, the result has been that I now look to Apple TV or Amazon for most of my streaming needs. They at least have a selection almost comparable to what I might find if I allowed Netflix to send me more DVDs or visited one of the remaining video stores. Granted, I pay $5 per movie, but that’s still far less expensive than taking the whole family to a movie theater (at $9-to-$12 a head).

And this is where it gets real sticky for Netflix. Hastings said at D9 that, even though the DVD business will eventually go away, Netflix’s streaming business is, for now, still “complimentary.” That could change fast. Netflix is obviously working to counter the shrinking, but probably more lucrative, shipping business by expanding globally into places like Canada   and Latin America   . Over time, the world will walk away from physical media. Broadband access (wired or wireless) will reach every part of the U.S. and further and further around the globe, and consumers will get their HD video content exclusively from the Web.

Netflix should be well-positioned to take advantage of this trend, but it’s clear to me that that’s not the case right now. As CNNMoney notes, Netflix does not have the cash or, possibly, even the buying power of competitors like Google, Amazon, and Apple. What’s more, switching from one service to another is inconsequential. I can switch back and forth in my home right now, searching for the best movies on the service of my choice. With Netflix making almost no headway in accessing first-run films for instant streaming, and no hurdles to stop consumers like me from switching, Netflix’s future looks very dire indeed.