Last summer my email & eBay accounts were hacked. I don’t know who hacked into it, how they did it, or why they were inquiring into purchasing industrial water tanks on eBay. I had used the same 2 passwords for all of my online accounts for more than 10 years – one for personal stuff, one for work stuff. Let me just say – that is a bad idea, when someone gets one of your passwords they have all of them (or, in my case half of them).

When I was finally able to get back into my account I immediately changed all of my passwords on every online account I have. And, I changed them all to something different than every other one.

I know what you’re thinking – perhaps the water tanks were for a giant hot tub. You may be right, I’ve thought of that too, but that’s not what is important here. The question you should be asking is, “How do you remember a different password for every site?”

Creating a Password

Following the tips that I found at another tech-blog Lifehacker, I was able to create a password that is different from each other, but I can remember based on the site that I’m using it for.

I’d suggest reading Lifehacker’s full article, but here are the two basic tips:

1. Don’t use the same password for everything.
2. Remember hundreds of passwords by using 1 rule-set.
3. Use a base password and add onto it.

I used all of these tips to create my new password – obviously I had learned the danger of having one password for all of my sites. An example of using these rules can look like this:

Say your old password is “password” or “1234″ (always the worst passwords), first let’s improve it by putting the letters together with some numbers (or the other way around). You could use the digits in your phone number, your childhood address, your dad’s belt size, whatever. In our case we end up with:

password1234

You could improve it from here and scramble it creating something like this:

p1a2s3s4word

You’re still using your favorite number and your old password and you can remember it pretty easily. But, this would still leave you with using the same password on every site. The simple way to fix this is by somehow incorporating the name for the site into your password. You can add just the first letter, or the last few letters or whatever you choose (I had thought about using the first word on the page, but that can change far too easily).

So, if our imaginary password was going to be used at eBay, it could turn into any one of the following:

p1a2s3s4worde
ep1a2s3s4word
p1a2s3s4wordbay
ayp1a2s3s4word
ebp1a2s3s4worday

You could even scramble the word with the password and get the easy-to-remember monstrosity of:

p1a2s3s4weobrady

Variables

Some sites, like our email system, require you to also scramble in capital letters (which I just learned can also be called majuscules) while others may enforce adding special characters:

!@#$%^&*?><:”;’[],.+=_-♠♣♥™↑‡

All you need to do is make a rule for what you’re going to do when that’s the case and turn it into something like:

P1a2s3s4wordE!

Now, the only thing you need to remember is which site requires which… though you could use the special characters for all of your sites as well.

Password Managers

No, I will not suggest that you hire someone just to remember your passwords for you. These are programs that will keep them secure (behind a password of its own). Some of them can even auto-type the username and password in when you tell them to. Next week I’ll talk about one of those programs and I’ll show how useful (and secure) they can be.

As I posted previously (1, 2) Gmail can be a powerful tool for doing everything involved with managing your email. One huge thing that I’ve not addressed is setting up your email to pull in messages from other email accounts – including your work accounts. Today we’ll walk through how to do that.

First, make sure you’ve read/watched the previous posts regarding Gmail:

• The Advantages of Gmail
• Getting Started with Gmail

After you’ve gotten trough the basics of gettings started with it, let’s get you going on importing your other accounts. Because, despite the advantages that Gmail has, your workplace/ministry/school will not probably forward all of your mail to your Gmail account from now on – and the reality is that they will expect you to be reading those emails as well.

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This past week I got an email from a staff friend that contained a forward warning about a “new” computer virus. While it is a real virus and really can do significant damage to your system and stored information, there was a bit of panic-inducing misinformation:

>>This is the worst virus announced by CNN. It has been
>> classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever.
> This virus was discovered by McAfee yesterday, and there is
>> no repair yet for this kind of virus…

While this virus is not “the worst” or “most destructive” virus, all viruses can be a pain in the neck and it is important to have an antivirus in place to guart your computer and your information against these destructive little programs that (sometimes) really are able to erase whole hard drives.

For antivirus options you can go a number of different ways, from proprietary (and costly) programs like McAfee and Norton to free (and effective) ones such as Avast! or AVG.

I have installed Avast! on all of my machines and on a number of ones for family and friends and have had and heard nothing but good things from it.

To install the free Avast!4 Home Edition all you have to do is download it and register it for free every 18 months. You it will be updated as often as new virus defenitions come out and you won’t have to worry about viruses any longer.

Also, it seems that Avast! has an inexpensive Mac version (less than $40) for 3 years of virus protection and coverage.

I am not sure whether or not I would suggest getting rid of a proprietary antivirus software, but I have never had any virus get to any machine that I’ve put Avast! on (keep in mind, I probably browse websites and download programs more often than most users).

Beyond reccomending an specific antivirus, I must stress this, make sure you have some sort of antivirus software! You never know when you’re going visit a reputable site that has been hacked, like CNN.com was just this spring.

If you’d like to check out other free antivirus software options (AVG, Nod32, Avira and Kapersky antivirus programs) I’d suggest the list on this post at LifeHacker.com.

I already shared a few weeks ago a short list of shortcuts that are useful in getting the most out of Windows. Before I share more, let me list some of the reasons I am a proponent of keyboard shortcuts:

1. It’s quicker.

That’s all.

Quite simply, you can work quicker as you learn and remember more and more keyboard shortcuts and as you work to make them a part of how you work. Think about this, how long would it take you to minimize every window you had open right now? I have 7 windows open right now, for me to go and hit the “minimize” bar on the top of each window would take about 6 seconds total, for me to hit the Windows key and the letter D together (Win+D) takes about 1/2 a second – tops. (I know that Macs have a Mouse Shortcut for this, which works very well indeed.)

Most people already know some keyboard shortcuts and they don’t even realize it, for example Ctrl+C for Copy, Ctrl+V for Paste, Ctrl+X for Cut, Ctrl+P for Print and Ctrl+S for Save. I’ve even mentioned F1 for the Help menu a couple of times.

Take a few minutes and peruse your menus in the programs that you have open. For example, under the File menu you’ll find options that look like the image to the left. Here you can see that Ctrl+T opens a new tab while Ctrl+W closes a tab.

One shortcut that is common to just about every Windows program is Alt+F4 which closes the program down. It works the same as hitting the button at the top right of the window.

Also, to switch programs you can hold down Alt and hit Tab (Alt+Tab) to file through the windows you have open rather than clicking the items on your taskbar. Ctrl+Tab works within a single program – say to switch between documents you have open in Word or tabs in Firefox.

I’ve found a number of lists of shortcuts that I want to list here. Check some of them out and take advantage as you gain more of your time to work (and a better control over your computer use).

• Common Windows Shortcuts
• Mac OS X Shortcuts
• 230+ Keyboard Shortcuts for Top Web Services
• Gmail Shortcuts – there is an option in Gmail to turn these on and off.
• Microsoft Word Shortcuts
• Microsoft Excel Shortcuts
• Microsoft Powerpoint Shortcuts

Links via [Lifehacker & Mashable]

WHY? Going to one website for many updates is better than going to many websites with no updates.

Ever since I began talking about opening this site for tools, tips, and tutorials for technology, I began getting requests to explain something called RSS. I decided I’ll take a few days to go over this because it’s just that good! Before you freak out and stop reading, all I ask is you hang with me a moment. I’m going to take us through this nice and easy and I think you will at least know why RSS can be a very useful thing for you.

Let’s get the irrelevant stuff out of the way first. RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. All that means is that there are agreed-upon rules for people to allow their online content to be rebroadcast somewhere else. Just like when you watch an old rerun of The Brady Bunch, Frasier, or What’s Happening? what you are watching is the syndication of it. Like I said, this stuff really is irrelevant for us.

Today it’s my goal to get you motivated to the idea of taking advantage of RSS. Later in the week we’ll get into some more tips of how to use it better.

The Problem

Let’s say you have several websites you like to check for new articles or content on a regular basis (like CNN.com, 170spoons.com, Facebook, and your best friend’s blog). The traditional way to find out what’s new is to either remember all of the web addresses and go there, or go through your bookmarks clicking on each. When you get to the sites, you may not be able to tell what’s new, what you’ve already read, or if there is anything new at all. It could turn into a colossal waste of time!

If only there were some way to have these updates delivered to us when those websites have an update…

eMail is to People as RSS is to Websites

I’ve seen many, many attempts to explain what RSS is and I’ve tried different analogies in the past and I think this is the one that makes the most sense. When you get an email, you are basically getting an update from a person. When you get a RSS update, you get an update from a website. To read eMail you need an eMail reader (like Outlook, gMail, Yahoo Mail, etc). To read RSS, you need a RSS reader.

What RSS is Solving

When you set up a RSS reader and tell it which websites to check for updates, you then have one place to go for all of your website updates. You don’t have to go all over the web to find anything new. Just go to one place and it’ll tell you if there is anything new or not in all of the sites you’re monitoring. In fact, using a RSS reader allows you to monitor even more sites if you like since you’ll only know when something is new.

Later this week we’ll go over how to use RSS to your advantage. Today I just wanted to help you understand a bit about what RSS is.

RSS in Plain English

I admit that I may not have done the best job in explaining RSS. So let me show you a short video that was made about a year ago called RSS in Plain English.

If you use RSS to receive notifications of new website content, leave a comment as to why you do it this way instead of the traditional way.

I need to begin by noting something that I wasn’t aware of when I wrote last week’s Beginning with Firefox post; the Preferences window (called Options in the Windows’ version of FF) is not in the Tools menu, but the Edit menu in non-Windows’ versions. That is where we’ll spend a lot of our time this week.

Before we do that let’s look at the (I believe) universal Tools menu.

Web Search – This simply puts your cursor in the (customizable) search box at the top right of the screen. While we’re looking at it click on the small arrow to the left of the search box now, you’ll see the standard search engines that come pre-installed with Firefox – you can ad more which is something that we’ll cover in the future.

Downloads – Here is the window that pops up when you download a file. It’s a way to keep track of them and even monitor where you’re downloading them to on your machine.

Add-ons – This is one of the beautiful features of Firefox (and really just about any open source program). Add-ons are mini-programs that you can install into your Firefox that can make it capable of performing tasks that in can’t “out of the box”. The Firefox installation that I’m using right now has 25 add-ons running that do everything from notify me when I have a new message in my inbox to blocking ads to spell-checking things that I put in text-boxes online… and more.

If you bring up the box it will have a few options that will allow you to change the Theme (just the look of your FF browser window), and add on items that will allow you to play Flash videos (think YouTube), or other media (think CNN or games). If you click the “Get Extensions” or “Get Themes” it will take you to the page on Firefox where these are available.

Java Console, Error Console, Page Info – Probably not something you want or need to dive into if you’re not designing a website.

Clear Private Data – This will enable you to clear your cookies, browser history, and other data that your browser keeps about your habits. It does it relatively thoroughly, be careful that you don’t delete passwords that you want to keep saved!

Now on to the options…

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Last week we talked about Firefox and why (I believe) it is the best general web browser available and got it downloaded and installed for you (hopefully). Today we will talk through some of the menus in the menu bar.

If you have everything installed and nothing else going on, your screen should look something like the image above with normal web browser menu names displayed. Let’s walk through them and I will explain some of the items that might require it.

File
New Tab – Like we talked about last week, one of the advantages of Firefox is its tabbed browsing capabilities. Where you would have opened a new window before now you should open a new tab. You can do that by going to File -> New Tab or hitting Ctrl+T.

Open Location – All this does is take your cursor to the location bar at the top of the page where you type in the webpage you want to go to.

Close Tab – It closes one tab at a time, rather than closing down the whole of the Firefox browser.

Import – This is for importing bookmarks that you might have from another browser or saved as a document.

Edit
About the same as the Edit menu in just about every program.
Note: In non-Windows versions of Firefox this also contains the Options menu which is covered in the next post in the Beginning with Firefox series.

Find in This Page… – When you have a lot of text in the page you are viewing and you want to find something specific.

Find Again – Looks for the next instance of the search you just executed.

View
This is the first one with real power to change your ongoing browsing experience.

Toolbars – Toolbars are the “bars” at the top of your browser that add functionality to it. The menus that we’re looking at now are a toolbar, below that is the navigation toolbar and your bookmarks toolbar. In this sub-menu you can turn on or off toolbars that you have installed and you can customize them as well. If you click customize you’ll see a window that looks something like the image to the left.

Here you’ll be able to add buttons to your toolbars that are available in the menus or you can rearrange items. For now all I’d suggest you do is click the “Use Small Icons” box (unless you have bad vision). My favorite “hack” using this box is that you are able to drag the Location Box and the Search Box up onto the Menu Bar and give yourself that much more screenspace by disabling the Navigation Toolbar (I’ll write about this later.)

Sidebar – Like your toolbars, but here you can look at all of your bookmarks or browse the pages you’ve recently visited; and it’s on the side.

Status Bar – This is the bar at the bottom of your screen which gives you relatively vital information such as the location of the link that your mouse is over. Plug-ins that we’ll add to Firefox in the future will also display info here. Keep it checked.

Text Size – If you have bad vision, this will be your aid on pages that have small text. The newest version of Firefox that should be out by May 1 will actually enable you to enlarge the whole page to view it better!

Everything else in the View bar should probably be left alone if you don’t already know what it is. The only other thing that might be useful is the Fullscreen option which hides all the toolbars except for your tabs and makes the most use of your screen size.

History This one is pretty self explanatory, you can look through your browsing history here too.

Bookmarks Everything here is pretty self explanatory as well (if you ignore the thing about Add-ons which we’ll talk about in a later post), there are just a few things that I want to note.

Bookmark All Tabs… – You know how to bookmark one page a time, this will allow you to bookmark everything that you have open right now. Say you have been researching a school and have a bunch of tabs open about Podunk State University click this and save them all as links in a folder in your bookmarks.

Subscribe to This Page – We talked about Feeds/RSS a little bit last time. This is the simplest way to subscribe to a page (remember to look for the RSS Feed Icon – read more about it in the Wikipedia article on RSS), if you click on it now it will allow you to bookmark the future updates for CruTech. (If you decide to do this choose the options of LiveBookmarks and place it in your Bookmarks Toolbar.)

Bookmarks Toolbar – This is the toolbar at the top of your browser that should contain bookmarks that you use virtually every day or feeds that you want to keep up with. Right now you probably just have the “Getting Started” and “Latest Headlines”.

Tools – Let’s hold of on this one, there is as much there as this whole post. Next week.

Help – This is your best friend on any new program. Whenever you’re trying to figure out how to do something in a program that you’re not familiar with use this menu (or just hit F1) to bring up the help box… it’s very helpful.

For Internet Explorer Users – If this is you, check this one out, it’s a few articles in the Help box that may help you adjust to the changes that Firefox will bring.

That is all for this week. Take some time and explore some pages in the Help box to learn more about FF. Next time we’ll explore the Tools menu and the Options box.

As we start to explore ways that technology can be something that actually makes our lives in ministry easier, it makes sense to start with the “elemental things” – the basics.

Whenever I am asked to take a look at someone’s computer there are a few things that I take the time to advise them on – anti-virus programs, memory usage, storage space maintenence (cleaning and backing up) and getting the most for the least out of quality free programs. The top three free (open source) programs in the world are Linux (an operating system – think Windows or OSX), Apatche (an internet protocol – don’t think about it) and Mozilla Firefox (a web browser – see, you know what that is).

While Linux and Apatche are probably not something that we’ll ever cover on this blog, Firefox will be a staple of its content. Firefox is (arguably) the best web browser available and we’re going to take some time today to talk about why that is and we’ll get into the basics of getting it for your own machine.

Firefox is based on the now defunct Netscape browser, it has been developed by an active community of programmers who have developed it into a the most expandable and powerful web browser available. It’s currently on the verge of releasing the newest version of the program – Firefox 3.0.

I would like to run down a list of things that have convinced me that Firefox is the current best choice to use when browsing the internet, many of these reasons can be found on the Firefox site itself as well.

Tabbed Browsing – This was actually the feature that first “tempted” me away from Internet Explorer. In the old days web browsers has one window and if you wanted to look at another site you had to open a whole new window. Starting with Netscape and continuing on now in virtually every browser they introduced tabs which allows you to have multiple windows open at a time all organized in the same place. It has literally changed the way I surf the web, I can be reading an article and click on a link in it and not have to worry about hitting the back button when I am done to go back to what I was reading.

Embedded Search Bar – I’m sure many of you have installed toolbars that have searchbars in them so you can search easily from any page. Well, this has the feature too, but it’s part of the basic program and you can add just about any search to it from the big guys like Google and Yahoo to a search engine that searches every Campus Crusade for Christ page. Now, again, IE had added this aspect, but Firefox has always done it better in that it will even allow you to create (or “roll”) your own search engine for any page you’d like.

Web Feeds (RSS)/Live Bookmarks – So, one of your supporters has a blog and you like to read it on a regular basis but it gets annoying when you have to go to it every day and the updates are rarer than you’d like. Now think about today’s weather, and the news, and your students’ blogs, and your brother’s online photo album… it becomes a lot of sites to visit every day. Feeds are a way of looking quickly and knowing who and what has updated and whether or not you need to go and look at the new content. Firefox allows you to bookmark feeds and it will update them as the site is updated. All you need to do is browse through your bookmarks to know if your nephew has been potty trained yet (or may be your students as well). We’ll talk about Web Feeds more later when we talk about GReader.

Pop-Up Blocker – It blocks pop-ups unless you say otherwise. It’s pretty easy.

Phishing Protection – Some emails you get from “eBay” are not safe because they’re not really from eBay and they’re not really linking you to their site; same with your bank, Amazon, etc. (And the emails about “free V14Gra”) Hackers do a really good job at making the site they link to look A LOT like the real site and when you log in to the fake site, they now have your username and password… and perhaps your credit card and address and everything else. Firefox knows what to look for in these sites to warn  you that they are not real, it can protect you from identity theft.

Open Source Means Secure – Who are the best people to protect against hackers? Hackers. The same reason that major computer companies host “hacking competitions” every year to hire new IT employees is why Open Source programs are safer than proprietary ones – the people making it know where to look for security holes and they know how to fix them.

Spyware Protection – When a program tries to run or install, it asks you. If you say no, the program doesn’t download and your computer stays safe. It will ask every time. Simple enough.

Add-Ons – Here is the other advantage of the Open Source movement. Anyone can make it better. The same people that are building the browser for everyone to use also know that there are some uses that a lot of people want but not nearly everybody. The fact that the source code is open makes it possible for people to create Add-Ons that add functionality to the browser – blocking advertisements, notify you when you get email, change your keypad shortcuts, correct your misspellings, help you to share files, etc.

Web Standards Compliance – This will mean very little for people who do not work with internet technology much. It means that when a website is coded according to internationally accepted standards of web design that it will look exactly the way it is supposed to. The reason that some sites work in one browser and not another is IE’s historical ignoring of these standards.

Getting Firefox

Firefox is available for just about every Operating System on the market. From Windows 95 to Vista, OSX and any Linux build out there. There are even versions that you can install on a USB thumb drive and take your bookmarks and preferences with you!

Point your current antequated browser to www.GetFirefox.com and click the link that looks like this (it will recognize your Operating System – it probably will not say “for Linux i686″).

Next, save the file onto your computer wherever you usually save your install files (we’ll talk about keeping your desktop clean later) and follow the instructions on the page that just loaded – it will load instructions that are specific to your system.

Once you get it installed start it up (I would suggest saying “yes” to making it your default browser), import your bookmarks, etc. and read through some of the guides and tutorials that will come up on the first page that loads. (If the first page that comes up doesn’t say “Getting Started with Firefox” the head to that page here.)

Now you’re on your way to a new Internet experience! Next time we’ll talk about getting the most out of your Firefox install.  

Tags: firefox, internet, web browsers, tabbed browsing, search engines, web feeds, rss, bookmarks, phishing, pop-ups, open source, spyware, web standards