Tech Smartly

Click for bigger image

It seems like nowadays, privacy is becoming more and more a thing in the past. Google stores your search data indefinitely, although now they will anonymise searches longer that 2 years if I remember correctly. I get 10 spam emails every day, from signing up to websites and making comments. In fact, I got my very first spam email that bypassed the filter two days ago, and I’ve had my email address for more than a year. I was surprised, considering I have not seen a single spam email except when I venture into the spam vaults for a good laugh. How can you not get a laugh out your friends when you get an email like this:
Your rod and balls will become candy after taking our special formula.

So maybe this isn’t your type of humor, and instead what happens is you sit in front of your computer, contemplating on the security of email. You go on a trip, thinking about the proliferation of spam, the rise of phishing, and other techniques dependent on user intelligence. Lost passwords, stolen credit card numbers, private data available in a database for sale. All these things exist. That’s why you must protect yourself against privacy violations, and identity theft, as well as everything else out there. Now it’s not like you must mistrust everybody, but you must always be careful with what you send out. You may feel a need to run under your computer desk (your chair works OK if you can’t fit under your desk), but before you do that, you must continue reading on before you live the life of a hermit.

One of the most simple things you can do to protect yourself is to know whether or not you’re submitting info over SSL. If you wish to learn in depth about SSL, you can visit the Wikipedia article about SSL. SSL stands for secure sockets layer, created by Netscape. Nowadays, SSL is used whenever any important data has to be transmitted. Everything sent over SSL is encrypted. In fact, sending your data over SSL is the most secure it will ever be. Once it reaches it’s destination, what happens there is completely dependent on the security of the servers. So what does this mean? When you’re sending you private info, whether you’re signing up for a website, or you’re doing anything you would not rather anyone see, make sure it’s in SSL!

“But, Joe, how do I know I’m using SSL?”, I hear you say. It’s very simple. Look for an icon looking like a lock on your browser UI. Using release candidate 1 of Firefox 3, I get the lock on the bottom right corner. It’s been such a long time since using internet explorer though, but I do believe that the lock appears on the url bar. Now, as long as you have that lock, you are safe. No, not really. You are only safe against a 3rd party. Just because there is that lock there, doesn’t mean that your info can not be read by anyone. This is protection against others trying to steal what you’re sending. This does mean that the website you’re sending the info to has access to it. Even if you are using SSL, the website that you are sending it to can abuse that information, even if it is illegal to do so.

So how can you fully protect yourself against all those terrible and nasty people out there? It’s a simple answer really, and all you really need is common sense. Is a website you don’t know asking to install a plugin? Are you signing up for everything you see? Do you click on email attachments without knowing before hand there would be one? The stop right there! Think! It doesn’t take a trained eye to know when someone is trying to violate your privacy, although it does help.  When you’re dealing with the internet, and are one of the few people who wish to keep as few people as possible knowing about their info, the best thing is not anti-virus, it’s not living in a cave for the rest of your life, it’s common sense.

First off, this won’t work without Firefox. If you aren’t using it, then why are you on this site? OK, fine you have to use it at work/your grandson told you to click on the big e/Insert excuse here. I won’t hold it past you this time. If you’re curious to know what Firefox is, then click on the banner below.

Got Firefox 2 installed now? Feeling adventurous and got Firefox 3? Well, read on.

If you are unaware of the rick roll phenomenomenom ( can never remember how to spell that word), then most likely you won’t need to read the rest. Or maybe, you got rick rolled and didn’t recognize what it was. If you don’t know what it is, then this wiki page can explain it.

Now if you’ve gotten rick rolled before, and you’re wondering how to stop it, I found a very nice solution. It requires the Ad Block Plus add on. What it is, is that there is a website in which users can submit links that rick roll people, and it is added as a blocked advertisement. It’s very simple, and it only requires that you subscribe to the list. When I say subscribe, I’m talking about a two click process here, not as in giving your email or name. It’s a very nice solution, and I don’t remember a time that I have been rick rolled.

Head over to the Rick Roll Database to rid yourself of all rick rolls forever, or find some rick roll links that most people never heard of and rick roll your friends (as long as they haven’t read this blog post as well).

I’m sorry, but the kLife series will have to be delayed by a few months for two reasons.

1) My tight schedule wouldn’t allow me to give it the time it needs to be a Tech Smartly quality article! I’m currently going through a career “crisis”. (No, not in the sense that I’m anywhere close to loosing my job, but more in the sense of an overload of work!)

2) KDE4- Most of the programs I am going to review are currently going through a rewrite, or have recently gone through a rewrite, to port them to the Qt4/KDE4 platform. Therefore, if I write something, in a matter of days or weeks it could be inaccurate. Therefore I will wait for now, and over the summer, after the release of KDE4.1, I will be able to write these articles.

Thanks for understanding!

J.R.

I’ve been collecting more and more music nowadays, after realizing how much awesome game music there is at the time. There is a whole new world out there in which I didn’t know existed, the world of game music. Nowadays, if I’m ever in the mood for some new music, I don’t go see the top 100 songs. I don’t ask my friends what they like. I’m not really that interested in that anymore, except for a few exceptional bands. Now, I ask my pal Google to search for game music. I can sometimes get great results from certain searches, and I get to listen to awesome music. Sometimes I get nothing. But after much googling, I have several games from which awesome music is derived from. Here is a list of my favorite game music. Oh, and pardon my lack of music knowledge. I barely know anything about different genres, so anything that has a strong beat, a lot of synthesizers, and often little change in melody, is what I would refer to techno music.

• F-Zero GX

This game has a pretty nice soundtrack, consisting of techno music, and it’s nice to listen to in the background. My personal favorites are ZEN and F-ZERO GX/AX Arrange Version “Big Blue”.

ZEN

F-ZERO GX/AX Arrange Version “Big Blue”

• Jet Set Radio Future

One of my personal favorites, this game has a really sweet soundtrack. It’s hard to explain sounds tracks when all I can really say is that it sounds like techno, but this is different from f-Zero GX. It also has talking, and is different in style. Well, I think you’ll understand what I mean when you hear The Concept of Love and Fly Like a Butterfly.

The Concept of Love

Fly Like a Butterfly

• Sword of the New World

This is an MMORPG with a great soundtrack, consisting of techno, some heavy metal tracks, European violins, with some new age as well as some funky music. With half a gig of music, with half of it up to 5 minutes long, and 4 tracks that are 10 minutes of techno, this is a great soundtrack if you’re into any of those things. Sometimes the songs even contains a mix of two. sword of the new world Is one of my favorites, and the large amounts of songs means that I’ll almost never get bored of it. I couldn’t pick only two songs that best represent this soundtrack. Therefore, here are my favorite songs: Sol de la Centro, Espada Nigerio, Rosa Rosado, and Old Speckled Reel.

Sol de la Centro

Espada Nigerio

Rosa Rosado

Old Speckled Reel

• Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven
  

A stealth game based on feudal japan, this has some excellent music in the style of that time. If you like that type of music, I’m sure there are several songs that will tickle your ears in Tenchu’s soundtrack. My personal faves are Sadame (which means fate in English), and Echigoya’s Estate.

Sadame

Echigoya’s Estate

Now, you may be wondering where you can find the complete soundtrack of all these songs. I was wondering myself, until I found a site called Kingdom Hearts Insider, or simply khinsider. Khinsider has a large collection of songs, from many different games. It does not have every song, but name 3 games, and at least one will be on the list. That is, unless you choose incredibly rare and almost unknown games. If you’re looking for game soundtracks, you can get them free at http://downloads.khinsider.com.

During spare time, when I’m bored and trying to put off writing my next blog post, I often stumble. Sometimes I get a few gems like this insulting source code, or several other many things. One of these such gems, is a Linux distribution chooser. One of the things that I often hear people talk about when they’re trying out Linux is what distro to choose. This is actually quite a big problem for many new Linux users. Some go to Ubuntu, a good OS for Linux newbies. After all, it is considered one of the most user friendly Linux distributions and the most widely used. However, for those who choose to be a little different, or don’t like Ubuntu, there are hundreds of different distros to choose from. Perhaps you would prefer Mandriva? Or maybe OpenSuse? If you’re up for a little challenge, try Gentoo. Or try all the Ubuntu flavors like Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Gobuntu, Ubuntu studio, Fluxbuntu, UbuntuME, Mythbuntu…Ok, you know what I mean. There are just so many different distros to choose from, and it can be really hard for someone with little technical skills, or even with quite a bit of technical skills to choose the “right” distribution. Here comes Polishlinux.org with it’s Linux Distribution Chooser.

The distribution chooser requires only several simple questions. It simple and easy. Due to the simplicity however, it does not say exactly why a distribution better, or what it has over other distributions. It shows several distros that fit best the criteria, with links explaining each on in depth. However, it can be a bit hard to compare them like that. Here comes in another tool to compare them. From the same website, you can easily compare two distros, comparing them in different categories and each distro is given a rank in each category.

With these two tools, I hope it will be easier for other people to choose a distro, especially those new to Linux. If the quiz is too hard for you, there is also another one which is easier to answer, and gives help if you don’t know what it means. Made by zegenie Studies, you can find it here.

If this has helped you jump the ship and start using Linux, then good luck to you. You won’t need it though, it should be pretty easy since you will have found a newbie friendly distro.