Laptops have become much cooler in recent years, but heat is still an operational problem.

Cooler notebooks last longer and too much heat can make your system crash.

Here are some simple tips:

1. Make sure the vents are not covered up, this is especially a problem when they are at the bottom of the notebook and you put the machine on cloth (like watching a video in bed).
2. Try to use notebook cooler or under layer made of glass or metal (like a metal mouse pad). If you don’t have neither use some small object like a real book to tilt the computer a bit, so air can circulate better under the machine.
3. Notebooks are like Hoovers they suck in all the dust around them. After a few months the inside of your notebook is clogged up with dust. The ventilator has to work harder and harder to cool it. That is why many notebooks get noisier over time. Open up the notebook (or let some support guy do it) and use your Hoover or some compressed air to clean out all the dirt.
4. Some notebooks with high end graphic cards can overheat nevertheless during demanding gaming sessions. A notebook cooler can only blow from below, so it might help to get an additional USB fan to add some cooling air from above.

I highly recommend doing #3 at least every six month – it really helps a lot.

Software is a complicated beast – even with a lot of testing and additional beta releases bugs will go through.

That is why I NEVER install a "full release" numbers, like Photoshop 6.0 or WordPress 2.9 – I always wait until the x.1 patch is out.

In the case of Windows you should always wait for the first service pack.

Only when the software is out to thousands or even million of users all bugs will rear their ugly heads – so let others do the painful testing of the new release and only install the patched "new" version.

Welcome to your cloud account at Google.

After years of speculation and wet dreams the Nerd world finally got to see the fabled Google Operating System (Chrome OS): a boot loader for a browser. (long video here)

A bit of an anti-climax.

Wired and all the blogs are disappointed – they wanted a razzle-dazzle new OS that would leave Windows 7 and Snow Leopard behind.

That’s not going to happen. Google is first and foremost an Internet company. They live in a “cloud” of servers and web applications. Google doesn’t do old fashioned hardware and applications.

The heralds of the digital age don’t understand that web applications and a cloud based operating system will never offer the same power as desktop computing.

Desktop computing is literally putting “Information AND PROCESSING POWER at your fingertips”. Your data and your CPU belong to you – no stinking net connection needed to “reach it”.

Once we have your data we own you … biatch!

Cloud computing is a step back to how computing was in the old days of Mainframes and Terminals. All the power and data resided in a giant computer the mainframe – and you could “peek” into it by using a dumb and feeble terminal. The terminal itself had no processing power or data storage to speak of – it was just a “window” into the mainframe.

Yesterday’s Terminals are today’s Netbooks, Smartphones and iPhones. Small underpowered devices only meant to “connect” you to small datasets or the “cloud”.

Google, Apple and many other companies want to suck you into THEIR clouds – because once they have your data they won’t give it back so easily.

Services like GMail, Flickrs, Twitter, Google Docs, Apple MobileMe, YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft OfficeLive, Adobe’s Acrobat online etc – they all want your data on their clouds.

And they know: once you have a certain amount of “your life” on their server array it’s too much hassle for you to switch.

Because downloading or deleting all those documents, images, videos and links is a time consuming process via the browser – and it is also a “Social Inconvinience”, because all your friends & colleagues have these links and have their “cloud lives” linked to yours.

And you don’t want to disconnect your friends, will you?

Cloud Computing 1.0 – IBM-style …

Microsoft might have annoyed us for years, giving us software and data formats that were less than perfect. But at least we had everything on OUR computers and hard drives.

Once you save something in a “cloud” you have only limited access to it. Internet connections are far from being so reliable like electricity and not everyone has a brutally fast internet connection at home – or on the road. And without (a fast) connection there is no access to your “cloud”.

A backup or transfer of your “cloud life” to your machine or another provider is often cumbersome or even impossible. (so much about open standards)

That is the same strategy how IBM made loads of money till the late 1980’s: the vendor lock in. IBM’s mainframes only ran IBM software – for their customers was no choice and hardly a chance to get out either.

The PC revolution offered hardware and software even mere mortals could afford and operate. Although MS-DOS, Windows nor Apple OS/X are open source, the platforms allowed users to run applications from different vendors. In the case of the Wintel Universe you could buy hardware from any vendor and the Operating System as well as your applications would run. You were not locked into just vendor …

Now we will be equally “chained” to our cloud providers. If they deny us access we are locked out of our own data, email, instant messages, tweets, Facebook profile and our whole online identity – and in the case of the Chrome OS – our own computers – we are fucked! (and you thought loosing your cell phone was bad?!)

You don’t own the cloud – the cloud owns you!

We demand simplicity instead of control over our own data …

I am afraid the great PC revolution is over and many people will welcome the switch to “dumb web 2.0 terminals”, because they are too stupid to manage their own PCs and data.

I can understand them – keeping a system clean and running is a tough job: system updates, driver updates, viruses, malware, hackers, crash recovery, regular backups and their own chaotic file organization.

It’s so much nicer to have Google (or another data centre) taking care of that. You just USE the cloud, you don’t need to keep it intact, install anything or even do a backup.

All done by some invisible hand … and in most cases even for free! How can you compare that smooth “user experience” to the hassle of fixing a broken or virus invested Windows machine?!

Care for your local data – always make backups. No matter how weird your backup medium is …

But dear consumers: beware what you are wishing for!

Just look how your cell phone company milks you for every bit of data you use via their network and devices. Do you really think that even bigger computer companies will play nice once they got you by the balls?

And one more thing: trying to get your data back from your crashed computer is one thing, getting your data back from a locked down server on another continent a totally different task …

I have high hopes for Postbox a new eMail client, which is based on Mozilla’s Thunderbird. I never understood why Thunderbird has so many obvious flaws that makes it hard to use (and adopt for any user or company – although the software itself is free).

Postbox is basically Thunderbird done right. And that’s even worth paying for it – and available for Mac & PC. The recently released first version is very good, albeit not perfect. But the Postbox team has shown it understands what users need and how to improve the workflow (check the big feature list and great interface here). Excellent!

I am looking forward to the next versions – I am not jumping ship yet. Unless either Thunderbird or Postbox or any other client really combines the feature set of Outlook (especially tasks, calendar, address book and notes) into one package I am not switching. There is a reason why in the corporate world Outlook in combination with Exchange rules supreme – it’s simply a feature set the modern Office slave needs.

If Postbox succeeds in integrating all these features (a lot of work) PLUS a working Google Services integration (GMail, calendar, address book and Reader) than they have a killer. Because GMail clients too focused just on Google and Microsofts hates opening up.

So my dear Postbox team – if you can combine both worlds you deserve all my praise and some money. Such a products is much needed …

When you live outside the US you can’t watch many web videos of commercial shows: “this content is not available in your country”

Bugger.

I can understand that copyright owners want to sell their shows to foreign markets, but often the shows arrive a year later and there is usually NO WEB option to watch the stuff. And often I want to see the original version – not a cut down and dubbed mess …

But don’t despair! With FoxyProxy and a proxy server you can watch all that great stuff – if you are willing to fiddle a bit with your browser and pay for a good proxy server to watch restricted videos from YouTube, Hulu or the BBC iPlayer …

Basically all you have to do is this:

*  find / buy a free proxy server suitable for the restricted website you want to access

* download & install FoxyProxy in Firefox

* enter the proxy servers address and your account info when you buy a commercial proxy service

* and switch FoxyProxy on or off when you need to access restricted content

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1. Data on USB sticks should ALWAYS be encrypted. Sticks get easily lost and you don’t want the finder also to get all the access codes to your online accounts  as well? Use the great OpenSource tool TrueCrypt – it’s free and works great!
2. Unless you constantly forget your keys you should attach your stick to your keychain.
3. If you have a lot of data to backup than buy a FAST USB stick, otherwise you waste a lot of time waiting to save your stuff. And a fast stick can make a LOT of difference.
4. Buy a stick that is twice as big as the data you need to save now – so you have some serious wiggle room if needed.
5. Try to use only one stick for your backup needs, lower risk of confusing yourself or forgetting that other stick somewhere.
6. Choose a stick that has a good metal ring or hole in it, so you can attach it securely to you keychain.
7. Put an unencrypted text file on the stick in case you loose it and an honest person really likes to return that thing. Include in that text file your name, address, phone number and email –and promise some reward.

I love Skype! It’s one of my most important tools for everyday business. I bought a lot of Skype credits for SMS and calling normal lines. So the newest version is important to me – like any tool I have to rely on.

And the new version blows. Big Time!

Instead of staying focused on keeping it a sharp tool in my drawer, they made it a bloated office application. Note to developers and especially the marketing guys at Skype: Bigger isn’t always better and bloating your application with even more interface gadgets, information and buttons isn’t helpful either.

I can see that the team tried to bring all the Skype functions closer together, like having you contacts on the left and all action associated with one contact on the right. But the all at once approach leads to an information overkill.

Plus I hate the new design. It tries too hard to be cool instead of being FUNCTIONAL. It looks like an overblown Web 2.0 design instead of a specialized desktop application.

The current 3.8 version may look boring, but it’s design (especially the icons) is more efficient and intuitive.

So once again KISS!

For Firefox users only:

If you are "heavy internet surfer" like me – you collect hundreds and even thousands of bookmarks.

Foxmarks won’t help you organizing your bookmarks, but it will backup and sync them for you.

A good bookmark collection is worth a lot of time, but no browser makes automatic backups for you.

Foxmarks allows you to save your bookmark collection onto their servers or your own. You obviously need a free account for the first option.

If you use several different (like in work and at home) Foxmarks can help you to sync your bookmarks on each machine – so they are on each machine the same.

This works really really really well: you can have three computers running and creating new bookmarks on each machine. Foxmarks will sync the new bookmarks from each machine to the others without any problems.

It even allows you to backup and sync password across several machines. A feature I hardly use, since I prefer to keep such important data to myself …

But otherwise Foxmarks is highly recommended.

Website: Foxmarks.com

I have tested many tools and websites that promised to stream TV perfectly. I think I finally found one that works: Livestream.

It’s cross platform, small, easy on your systems resources and delivers good quality. As usual with new contenders in the field the variety of GOOD channels is a bit weak. But I am very happy with the small number of news channel – which suit me perfectly (Al-Jazera, BBC World News, CNN and C-SPAN).

Since I download all other TV shows either via iTunes or Bittorrent I only need news (as it happens) anyway. Why wait till something I like is broadcast at a certain time – I want to control my video consumption and not follow the linear programming of a TV station.

So it’s highly recommended for news junkies.

www.livestream.com

Google gives the Blogosphere a new toys – and the techworld goes bonkers. Calm down people, it’s just a browser.

I’ll admit: it’s nice, clean and works as advertised. Sure it’s minimalism is very appealing – especially when you have propped up your Firefox browser with a gazillion plug-ins.

Dangers ahead

I am just afraid that more companies will build their browser – which mostly serves their web sites and web applications better. Google’s Chrome is supposed to run it’s services like GMail especially fast (I didn’t notice any difference). Microsoft does the same with it Windows Update Website. Opera and Firefox are truely neutral, can’t say anything about Safari, because I never use it.

I don’t want to be forced to use a different browser for different websites.

A look at the Features

Speed. Not really that faster than Firefox. I don’t notice any difference by using it.

Crash Protection. Maybe I have once a year a web page that hangs up on me. So not really needed. And I don’t need another Task Manager (like the Windows one) for web applications. It’s  a nerd feature.

Interface. Nice and clean. Well done Google.

Memory Usage. A bit less then FF again, but not much less. FF uses more memory, because it offers the plug-ins more “hooks” to work with.

Adaptibility. You hardly can change anything in the browser. So you hardly can adapt it to your style of web surfing.

Plug-ins. You can expand the bloody Chrome thing. As much as it simplicity as appealing – for daily usage I need several plug-ins to be a happy surfer. For example: Google is obviously very interested that you see all advertising it throws at you  – it’s their business. But I prefer my websites advertising free.

Bookmarking. Very easy to make bookmarks, but there are no extra tools to manage them. For example I have over 4.500 bookmarks – just dumping them in a list with no serious organizational tools like in Firefox it would be  a nightmare. I am sure Google will improve that, but for now it’s a definitive show stopper for me.

Who should use it?

If you are a casual Internet User you should stick to Internet Explorer. Such users are usually overstrained by any browser, so stick to the one you kinda know.

For more pleasure and a more customized surfing experience there is only one choice: Firefox.

Update: One more thing that’s a showstopper for me: no mouse gestures!

Firefox is currently the best browser available. I do love Opera, but FF with all it’s extensions and themes simply beats my former favorite.

Recently the first release candidate has been … uh … released and it’s a winner. I had no crashes or annoying bug while using this RC1 candidate. I won’t say it’s safe to install – but if you feel brave or simply want a faster and better browser than FF2 NOW – than go ahead an install it.

As usual RC or Beta software should only be used by developers and people who need it or want to fuck up their system. For the rest: they have to wait a few more weeks before the new version is ready – but in this case waiting is good, because several very popular extensions are not yet for FF version 3.0.

Where to get it? www.personalfirewall.comodo.com

What is it? A free excellent firewall.

Why do I want to use it? The built-in Windows firewall doesn’t deserve it’s name and is more like Swiss Cheese. Comodo is currently the BEST firewall – and it’s free. (Here is a long list of benefits – but it’s very techie)

What does it do? Protects you from intruders from the Internet and checks if any nasty programs try to "call home" from your machine.

Who should use it? Every Windows XP user who still uses the built-in firewall.

How complicated is it to use? Download and install is pretty easy – under five minutes. The software will bug you with some question while you are using it WHICH IS A GOOD thing, because you should know what certain programs are doing, so you can protect yourself. It is a bit unnerving for beginners, but once you told Comodo which programs you use on a regular basis and trust the amount of security questions is considerably reduced.

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Computer Viruses, hackers, rootkits and spyware are everywhere – they are out to get us and eat our data!

Yes? Kinda true.

I had several times ugly spyware and even viruses on my system – and I fixed many times other people’s infected machines. So why on earth would I uninstall my Anti-Virus software?! (But that firewall stays on!)

Simply because I always contracted a nasty piece of software, when I downloaded or installed something from a pirated websites or downloaded so called ‘free software’ with some hidden bonus in it.

So the problem wasn’t really the virus – it was me. I didn’t take care of my own data protection. What was needed was some strict data discipline.

Who wants to install first?

Seven simple rules for keeping my system clean

The main problem was always my own stupidity, but for three years I have complied to these simple rules and never had an accident again:

1. Keep your system and your installed applications up to date and clean. Uninstall old application and drivers if you don’t need them.
2. Don’t download and install software from so called ‘unknown sources’ or pirated crap.
3. Don’t use Internet Explorer for Internet surfing – use Firefox. Don’t install any “free” toolbars from any weird sites. Toolbars from Yahoo, Google and maybe StumbleUpon are oke.
4. Don’t use Outlook Express für eMail – use Thunderbird instead. Get your mails scanned and cleaned on the server before downloading it to your machine (by using for example GMail).
5. Don’t use any messengers like AIM, Yahoo!, ICQ or MSN. I only use Skype – and that is already a small security risk. If you need to go on any of these messenger nets use Trillian – which is bloat and advertising free.
6. Keep your network and computer’s ports pretty much closed and don’t use WiFi in unsecured locations like Starbucks etc. Simply switch your computer or your network connection OFF if you don’t need it. Most notebooks offer a simply keyboard combination to switch your WiFi on and off.
7. Make backups every day. Keep several backup sets – not just ONE extra copy of your data.

I would recommend these rules to everyone – no matter if you have an anti-virus program installed or not.

Please insert disk one …

Bloatware

But there is another reason why I don’t like to use Anti-Virus software anymore: they have all turned into bloatware.

A combination of firewall and anti-virus software makes sense – but all these “Internet Security Suites” are packed with features, protections and mechanisms I don’t want nor need. Plus they often are huge resource hogs – slowing down the system and fucking up it’s internal workings.

For example: I had to save many computer from example from Norton Security Suites, which had crashed their system and made them very unstable.

Some of these “Suites” are a pain to configure and maintain. I am a pretty nerdy person – I understand most questions and functions that are thrown at me. But I have seen many machines totally fucked up by badly answered / configured “Security Suits”.

Do you update your Anti-Virus software?

There is also the problem that many people install these suits, but never renew their update license to get new anti-virus definitions.

I know many people who have old anti-virus programs running and haven’t updated their definitions. If your protection doesn’t know a new bugger it hardly will protect you against it.

Obsolete protection gives you a false sense of security and really can fuck up your system.

See – no virus on my system!

Viruses and Anti-Virus-Software are big business

In all my years of computing I haven’t encountered that super nasty killer virus, No virus I encountered so far has deleted a SINGLE BIT OF DATA.

Most of them want to hijack your system or hide in it to use it’s power for some criminal purpose. Millions of infected machines serve in botnets for cyber attacks, sending spam mail or attack big websites.

Most spyware simply floods your machine with ads, while others try to steal credit card numbers and passwords.

So the data killing virus is ALMOST a myth – it has happened, but is VERY rare these days. (But that’s no excuse not to make your daily backup anyway.)

But data protection and security software are also a big business these days. So many companies have made millions of Euros providing “security” to business and home users alike. These companies have to keep us scared to keep us buying their product.

Final Words of Warning!

Time to get rid of your security software?

No.

If you are NOT a nerdy user or admin like me: KEEP your anti-virus software and a good firewall installed. Especially when you are downloading loads of software or spend many hours on public WiFi networks.

Especially StumbleUpon users should be aware that clicking that “Stumble” button can transfer you to a nasty site without warning.

If you have a “Security Suit” that is troubling you or you don’t know how to operate it uninstall that thing and replace it with a free and SIMPLE Anti-Virus program like AVG.

Make sure that at least your Windows Firewall is on (and allows no exceptions if you don’t need them).

You know that you hard drive will die some day and all the data on it will be lost. Maybe you loose your data by mistake, a system crash or virus? But day X is coming and you should be prepared!

This is a LONG rant – so skip this if you are not interested.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pimp my FireFox! I love this hilarious skin for my favorite browser. Make sure to also visit it’s official website www.pimpzilla.nl.

If you like watching the stars and identify formations in the sky this software Stellarium is perfect for you! It’s free, it’s open source and it’s works well. Highly recommended!

Get it here: stellarium.sourceforge.net

Yeah, USB Gadgets are gonna save the world some day – and clean your desk! Get this gadget here.