TinyUrl links - the real destination

Most people that have used the internet for a while know about the TinyUrl service. For those that are not familiar with it, here's a quick primer.

If you find a website that you want to tell your friends about, all you have to do is copy and paste the URL (the website address) into an email. Simple, right? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. What if the address looks something like this:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?ovi=1&mqma
p.x=300&mqmap.y=75&mapdata=%252bKZmeiIh6N%252bI
gpXRP3bylMaN0O4z8OOUkZWYe7NRH6ldDN96YFTIUmSH3Q6
OzE5XVqcuc5zb%252fY5wy1MZwTnT2pu%252bNMjOjsHjvN
lygTRMzqazPStrN%252f1YzA0oWEWLwkHdhVHeG9sG6cMrf
XNJKHY6fML4o6Nb0SeQm75ET9jAjKelrmqBCNta%252bsKC
9n8jslz%252fo188N4g3BvAJYuzx8J8r%252f1fPFWkPYg%
252bT9Su5KoQ9YpNSj%252bmo0h0aEK%252bofj3f6vCP

You really don't want to paste something that long into an email. This is where the TinyURL service comes in. Just go to www.tinyurl.com and paste that ridiculously long address into the form on the front page, and they will automatically create a nice SHORT address that you can use instead of the long one. You will get something like this:

http://tinyurl.com/6

So now, whenever you see a link like that, you know it is really just a shortened link that goes to some other website.

But what about security? I mean, you don't really want to be blindly clicking on links and not knowing exactly where you are being taken, right? That is the subject of today's tip.

The TinyURL website has a special feature that you should enable: the Preview Feature. You will see a link on the left side of the TinyURL website called Preview Feature. Just click on that, and then click on "Click here to enable previews". That is all you have to do - the site puts a cookie on your computer so it knows your preference.

Now, whenever you click on a TinyURL link, it will first take you to a page that tells you the ACTUAL website address to which you are being taken. Then, you can continue on to the site, knowing that you will be safe.

This week's video - forget being smarter than a 5th Grader; are smarter than a chimpanzee?

Email forwards

Okay...I have received an email from 3 different people in the last week, asking me if the virus they were being warned about was real. I am going to cover this in detail here, because there is an element of truth to it that makes it dangerous. The best scams/hoaxes usually have a little bit of truth in them.

First, here is the text of the email:

I received this from a friend that is in the loop on computer virus issues. Thought I would Forward.
I checked with Norton Anti-Virus, and they are gearing up for this virus!
I checked snopes.com, and it is for real!!
Get this E-mail message sent around to your contacts ASAP.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CONTACTS!
You should be alert during the next few days. Do not open any message with an attachment entitled 'POSTCARD,' regardless of who sent it to you. It is a virus which opens A POSTCARD IMAGE, which 'burns' the whole hard disc C of your computer. This virus will be received from someone who has your e-mail address in his/her contact list. This is the reason why you need to send this e-mail to all your contacts. It is better to receive this message 25 times than to receive the virus and open it.
If you receive a mail called' POSTCARD,' even though sent to you by a friend, do not open it.! Shut down your computer immediately.
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. This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information is kept.
COPY THIS E-MAIL, AND SEND IT TO YOUR FRIENDS. REMEMBER: IF YOU SEND IT TO THEM, YOU WILL BENEFIT ALL OF US.

There are a few elements that jump out here as a red flag. Primarily, it violates email Rule #1: the encouragement to send this to all your friends. Rule #1 says that if an email encourages you to send it to everyone you know, do not forward it. Delete it.

For the other elements, I will take them line by line:

"I received this from a friend that is in the loop on computer virus issues. Thought I would Forward."
Yes, the ambigious reference to the "expert" friend. Your friend was such an expert, he decided to forward an email on to you about a computer virus. Remember Rule #1.

" I checked with Norton Anti-Virus, and they are gearing up for this virus!"
Here's some news: Norton does not "gear up" for a virus. Norton has a specific procedure in which they identify a virus, discover its characteristics, create a solution based on those characteristics, and post information about it on their website. "Gearing up" is not part of the process.

"I checked snopes.com, and it is for real!!"
It is pretty common for most hoaxes now to include this line, because snopes is where a lot of people check to see if an email forward is legitimate. So why include it in the email? Because that way people will be less likely to question it - after all, it's been verified, right?

"Get this E-mail message sent around to your contacts ASAP."
Remember Rule #1.

"PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CONTACTS!"
Again, Rule #1. The fact that it is written in ALL CAPS means it is even less likely to be legitimate.

"You should be alert during the next few days."
There are currently over 200,000 viruses in circulation. My opinion is that you should be alert every day. Even better, follow certain email practices that make it almost impossible for your computer to get a virus. More on this in a minute.

"Do not open any message with an attachment entitled 'POSTCARD,' regardless of who sent it to you."
How about this plan: don't open any attachments, regardless of who sent it to you. The only exception is if you KNOW what the attachment is ahead of time. So if you get an email from your best friend, and the email says, "Hey, check out this cute puppy!" you DON'T open it, because you don't know ahead of time what it is. If your friend's computer has a virus, the virus could have sent that email just to get you to open it. The point is, it doesn't matter if the attachment is called Postcard or any other name - don't open attachments.

"It is a virus which opens A POSTCARD IMAGE, which 'burns' the whole hard disc C of your computer."
That's interesting...I wonder how, after the whole hard drive is destroyed, the virus then uses that computer to send itself to all of the email contacts?

"It is better to receive this message 25 times than to receive the virus and open it."
That is where I disagree. I think I would rather get the virus.

"If you receive a mail called' POSTCARD,' even though sent to you by a friend, do not open it.! Shut down your computer immediately."
Hey, there's some good technical advice on how to handle a virus: just shut down your computer. Guess what - it will still be there when you turn your computer on again.

"This is the worst virus announced by CNN. "
Not true. CNN did not announce it.

It has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever.
Not true. Microsoft does not "classify" viruses.

This virus was discovered by McAfee yesterday
Not true. Notice how the term "yesterday" is used and no date is given - "yesterday" could be any day.

This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information is kept.
Wow, with that kind of technical language, this warning must have really come from someone that knows about these things - some kind of Special Expert! Didn't I read a few lines earlier that the virus "burns" the whole C drive? Why would it then have to destroy just a certain sector?

COPY THIS E-MAIL, AND SEND IT TO YOUR FRIENDS. REMEMBER: IF YOU SEND IT TO THEM, YOU WILL BENEFIT ALL OF US.
Here we go back to Rule #1 again.

Are there viruses in circulation? Of course. Should you be careful? Obviously. You should have a good antivirus program (not Norton or McAfee) that is up to date. You should not click on any links in emails, and you should not open attachments.

And if an email tells you to forward it to everyone you know, you should delete it.

Self-destructing email

Have you ever sent an email, and then regretted sending it? Maybe it had some harsh words, or maybe you made a business commitment that you really didn't want to make. In any case, we have all typed things that we wish we could somehow magically make disappear, even after we have hit that "Send" button.

Now it's possible. However, you can't use your "regular" email program such as Outlook to send this "special" email. You have to go to this website: www.WillSelfDestruct.com and send your email from there. You can choose the time period for the email to destroy itself:
- a single viewing, and it will destroy itself after a certain amount of time (measured in seconds)
- multiple viewings (you can designate how many times it can be viewed before destruction)
- multiple days (it will destroy itself after a set number of days)

The service is free - try it yourself and see how it works before sending an email to someone else. The service and website are also for sale - so if you have $17,000 you can own it.

This week's video is for all the men out there - tired of candles that are all scented based on female preferences? Now for men we have...Mandles.

What is the Standby option?

I recently received an email question from Lynn, a friend in Maine (incidentally, Lynn and her husband Bill are owners of Old Comfortable, a great place to stay when you are vacationing in Vacationland).

Lynn writes: "When you click on start, turn off computer, you get a screen that asks you three things. I have either hit restart or shut off and never paid any attention to the other option, standby. If I use standby for overnight, does it save on electricity? Will the overnight programs (backup, virus update, etc) still run in Standby mode? When should you use this standby option if ever? I just turn my monitor screen off and don't worry about turning anything else off."

The idea with Standby mode is that the computer is effectively powered down, but it saves your current session in memory (assuming enough memory is available). So, if you have a Word document open, and 3 different websites open, and you're in the middle of creating an email, all of that should come right back on the screen when the computer comes back out of Standby mode.

However, using Standby for overnight is generally not an option that I would recommend (depending on how your computer is configured). All of the computers in our house do their "housekeeping" overnight: antivirus is updated, antispyware is updated, and all data is backed up to a single external drive. If the computer is in Standby mode, those things will not happen. Of course, if you have your computer do that stuff during the day, then it doesn't matter.

Since the computer is basically shut down while in Standby mode, it does save a little on electricity. However, the biggest electricity hog is the monitor (especially if you are using one of the old CRT monitors). You can always shut down the monitor and it has no effect at all on the functions of the computer.

I do still recommend that you restart your computer once a day. This clears the memory and gives it a "fresh start" so that it will perform at its best. The easiest way is to do the restart when you are done using it at night. When you come back to it in the morning, it will be ready for a new day of work.

This week's video was made by some guys in Finland with a whole lot of time on their hands. They set up a supermarket with a domino-like trail of pallets, boxes, etc. and then video the trail of falling items throughout the store. Interesting to watch, but it seems like a whole lot of work for not enough reward. And then they have that whole mess to clean up.

Those silly Floridians

This was from an Associated Press article about Super Tuesday:

"In Florida, election officials across the state fielded hundreds of phone calls from confused voters asking where they could vote Tuesday, apparently unaware that Florida's presidential primary was last week."

I guess this explains Ron Paul's low numbers here in the Sunshine State.

Naming those vacation photos

You just got back from the vacation of a lifetime (or any event during which you took a lot of photos). You just transferred about 300 new pictures from your camera to your computer, and now you are looking at your "My Pictures" folder with hundreds of pictures in it, and they are all named something like this:

P1010035.jpg
P1010036.jpg
P1010037.jpg
P1010038.jpg
and so on...

Obviously those file names don't mean anything to you; they are just the sequence of file names given them by the camera when the picture was taken. Of course, you could right-click on each one of them individually and rename them, but that would take a very long time. You might want to do that eventually, but there is a quicker way to solve the immediate problem.

First, click to select all of the photos in the same group at one time. In other words, you can hold down the CTRL key, and click once on each of the "Christmas Vacation" photos until they are all selected. Then, do a right-click on one of them and choose "Rename". Name it "2007 Christmas Vacation".

No, the computer won't give all of those selected pictures the same name. What you will end up with is a list that looks something like this:

2007 Christmas Vacation001
2007 Christmas Vacation002
2007 Christmas Vacation003
2007 Christmas Vacation004
2007 Christmas Vacation005
and so on.

It's still not the most ideal way to name your pictures, but it is better than before. And now you can put all of those photos in their own folder and rename them specifically at your leisure.

This week's video deals with Google - their first rule as a company has always been "don't be evil", but have they crossed the line?

Government always knows best!

Did you know that you are too stupid to know what to do with your money? That's right. And because you don't know how to properly spend the money that you have earned, it's the federal government's God-given right to step in and spend your money for you.

No, I'm not talking about all of the earmarks and pork-barrel spending that goes on in Congress every day. I am referring to having your personal wages garnished - money forcibly taken from you, right out of your paycheck - in order to force you to buy health insurance.

Think I'm joking?