Spotting Email SPAM

A continuation of Email spam is a nice little article from Paypal Phishing Guide that has a nice explanation of what to look for in your email.

Don't worry if you don't use or know what Paypal is. The general principles are still the same an apply to any email.

What's Phishing? It's using a fake site that looks like the real thing in order to steal your information.

Making a Comment

Just a quick guide to making comments.

You see a post you'd like to comment on. You click on the link located in the bottom right hand corner called "COMMENTS". It's circled in red.



You type in your comment in the box. You can use a blogger.com/google ID or you can just leave an anonymous comment.

If you leave an anonymous comment you don't need to log in.



Enter the letters you see in the image in the Word Verification box. This is to stop scripts from posting spam comments. After clicking "Publish your Comment" the page will reload and at the top you will see:



So now your post goes into the system. They don't show up on the page until they are approved by me. I don't plan to moderate much. Mostly just to remove any personal information.

The next time I log into blogger.com I see your comment. From here it gets approved and then it appears on the site.

Picasa Guide

From lifehacker.com comes a handy article Edit your digital photos with Picasa.

Yes Picasa is one of my favorite free apps. Used on every picture that gets uploaded theBusseyFamily.ca

More Efficient Google Searches

Normally I try to avoid much linking to other sites. But here is a good article with tips on search. And that is a skill that opens up much of the infromation on the internet. For our complete beginner to newbie audience: Go read this.

From a site Zen Habits.net (a Getting things done, personal producitivity site) comes 20 Tips for More Efficient Google Searches

Some good highlights:

2 Quotes. If you want to search for an exact phrase, use quotes. ["dumb little man"] will only find that exact phrase. [dumb "little man"] will find pages that contain the word dumb and the exact phrase "little man".

4 Similar terms. Use the "~" symbol to return similar terms. [~dumb little man -dumb] will get you pages that contain "funny little man" and "stupid little man" but not "dumb little man".

Update: This can be confusing taken out of context since they've mixed item 3 with 4.

[~dumb little man] will tell google to go look up things that it thinks similar to dumb (stupid, slow, etc.) and to use those in the results as well. That mean's stupid little man would also be returned.

13 Movies. Use the "movie:" operator to search for a movie title along with either a zip code or U.S. city and state to get a list of movie theaters in the area and show times.

You can enter postal codes (no spaces) in place of zip codes. Canadian cities seem to work (e.g. movies:toronto) from google.ca

15 Unit converter. Use Google for a quick conversion, from yards to meters for example, or different currency: [12 meters in yards]

This conversion seems endless.

• For those computer types you can convert between hexidecimal, octal, binary and decimal.


• It will even convert currencies. "88 usd to cad"

Picasa Upload to Flickr

Okay I'm not a hard core graphics guy by any stretch. I think Google's Picasa does a great job of allowing me to simply edit photos. It is even smart on downloading photos from my camera. The gd software that came with the camera couldn't even do that.

Well now there is a plugin, for Picasa, called picasa2flickr that will let you upload directly to Flickr. Which as I keep harping on is where we have over 2300 of our pictures available.

So now I have the best of both worlds.

Get TheBusseyFamily blog in your Inbox

There is now a link on the upper right hand side of the page Get The Bussey Family by Email that will let you get all new posts in a single daily email each morning.

That way you can read all new posts in one email that should be delivered before 9:00 am EST each morning.

Of course you can always read the posts here at TheBusseyFamily

Google Reader II

So back in Google Reader I blathered on about how great Google Reader was.

So okay now you want to try it. First you'll need an account with Google. If you have a GMail account already you can use the same account.

Once your logged in you'll see you subscription info in the top left corner. Here's a snap shot.

When you first sign in you'll have nothing under "Add subscription".
That's the place to start to add your RSS feeds. Let's go through the steps to add TheBusseyFamily's RSS Feed.

Click on "Add subscription", in the pop up box type "thebusseyfamily" (without the quotes)



After hitting enter Google will go off and search feeds and come back with a list. You should see www.thebusseyfamily.ca at the top of the list.



Click on Subscribe. Immediately you'll see your left hand side bar update with the "TheBusseyFamily" and a number in brackets.


The number in brackets is the number of un-read messages from that RSS feed. If you click on TheBusseyFamily you'll see all of the posts from the blog on the right side of your page.

If you leave your window open for a while don't forget about that "Refresh" button. That will send Google Reader out to all of your feeds to check for updates. Very nice.
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Email SPAM

After a few recent incidents of email spam, say like RBC Financial Group Phishing Scams - MillerSmiles.co.uk found on City TV news. I thought I would highlight a few simple ways to defeat it. No matter how good your email providers spam filtering is some will eventually find you.

Good signs that an email is spam

• Offers prescription drugs at low low prices
• Promises to enhance body parts
• Offers money or prize for signing up
• Warns that an account is deleted or about to be deleted if you don't take action.

Step 1 Never reply
If you do that just lets spammers know that address they used is correct.

Step 2 Just delete
Obviously if a site or person you have never heard of sends you an offer for free stuff or cheap goods just ignore it and delete it. Or if your email account allows you to mark it as spam to help them identify spam then do that.

Step 3 Check the link
So it looks valid. Maybe you have an account with that site. But TheBusseyFamily.ca has taught you to be paranoid, or your Nanny D and your naturally paranoid.

How can you check the link? Well you just can't click it because often times the fake site is made to look like the real site. The trick is to place your mouse over the link in the email but DO NOT CLICK.

EDIT: I show a web browser/internet explorer email account here. But if your using Thunderbird/Eudora/Outlook then you should still see the same basic thing.

Here's a sample email. I have a Paypal account so maybe this is legit (Note fake Paypal emails are a dime a dozen).


But when I hold the mouse over the link and look at the BOTTOM LEFT corner of my web browser (both Internet Explorer and Firefox) I see what the real link is. In this case

So the email text says www.paypal.com, which is correct, but the actual link is to some ridiculously long address off www.aol.com. If I keep looking I see another http string in the url. That's just wrong. These should be RED FLAGS that this is spam. Then follow Step 2.

Flickr photos on your desktop

Flickr Wallpaper is a neat app that will let you set your desktop wallpaper to a picture from a flickr photo set. You can filter a users photos down to certain tags. You can run the program everytime you boot or once a month.

Looks kind'a nice. I'm checking it out.

One word of warning. It requires MS .NET 2.0. (Like Java if you know what that is) But that is 22M. Dial up users this means it will take a light year to downlaod.

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Flickr Photo Sharing

A great Flickr introduction is Newbie's Guide to Flickr from Webware.com.

What I'm going to do here is expand on the photo sharing. So here's a little guide to help you access our photos on Flickr. The rough steps are:

1. Request invite. Send me an email letting me know you want to browse the photos. No big deal. I just need 10 seconds to invite you.


2. Wait for the sign up email and click on the sign in link.


3. Now regardless of what email I sent to you, your going to need a Yahoo login. Its a quick, simple and free registration. Sorry this is needed to restrict access to the photos.
   
   If you already have a Yahoo account you can just use that login.


4. Once your in I should appear as one of your Contacts on the left hand side.
   
   
   You then can click on my name to see all of my photos


5. Once on my picture page you should see something like this.
   
   From here you have a couple of potential options underlined in red (Now we're getting into standard flickr operations)
   
   • Search photos (warning most photos have no description)
   
   
   • Click on Sets to see the sets or groups of photos (i.e. Christmas 2004 or Blah's birthday)
   
   
   • Click on tags to see all of the tags applied to my pictures. Most have some tags. More work is required. For example here are the flickr tags for the entire site
     
     The bigger the word the more pictures tagged. Click on the word to search for all pictures with that tag.
   
   

Well that's about it. Remember you can get the originals by clicking on the tiny "all sizes" button in the top left hand corner of the picture.



Download the largest sized one you can stand (download time) if you want to print them. The larger the file the better the picture quality.

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Comments are on

I have enabled posting by anyone. That way any of you less then savy internet users don't need to sign in or anything to leave a comment.

I have no idea if anyone will want to do this. I'm simply letting the experiment proceed. If no one does it or I only get spam then I'll turn it off.

Note that I still have moderation turned on. So I will review and possibly edit any posts to protect the innocent. I'm the dictator. All edits are final.

Share on Facebook

Ok, so as many of you know Mama is big into Facebook right now. While we're quietly trying to share a little family blog we also want to be some what useful and share some events.

So I've started adding a little link "Share on Facebook". This lets you add a link to facebook. Either as a post to your facebook profile OR send the link to another user to let them know about it.

If you post it to your profile your friends will see that in their what's new feed under your name.

If this is all gibberish to you then you can probably safely ignore this posting.

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Facebook

Ma-ma has discovered Facebook.

What is Facebook?

It's what they call a social networking site. I.e. if you register you create your own little profile page. Then you can make connections to all of your friends. You can see and connect with your friends friends. And so on.

They do things like ask you when you graduated high school or university. Then you can search through their active members and see if an old class mates have joined.

That's the theory anyways.

Related sites that you may have heard about
MySpace
Classmates.com (Although this one is focuses on school / university classes rather than just social networks.)

Flickr

Flickr is coming.

What is Flickr? (Pronounced Flicker, it's kewl internet speak). It's an online photo sharing site. It was bought by Yahoo! (way back) in 2005. You can login into flickr with your Yahoo ID, you don't have to create a special account.

It's soon going to be offering up a lot of our photos so read carefully.

What can it do?

• Store your photos
• Share them and post them to your blog (like this one!)
  
• Allow you to add tags (keywords) to your photos
• Add notes to little parts of the picture. I.e. to point out something.

There is a free account that limits you to

• adding 100 MB (or around 100 high resolution) pictures per month
• Only see the last 200 pictures upload
• Can only access limited sized pictures. You can't see the full sized originals.

Upgrading to the pro account removes those limitations. The Big downside for a Canadian right now is the lack of printing directly from the site. You can always download the picture and print it on your printer, or with your favourite online service (see www.harvardphoto.com for a comparison of the players). Everyone does it these days like Futureshop, Loblaws/Dominon, Walmart, and Costco.

The best thing is to head over to Flickr.com and take a look. You don't need to sign up to take a look around.

What is this RSS thingy?

If you have a customizable web page (say a My Yahoo! page) you can add theBusseyFamily.ca to it. That way when you open your web home page there is a little box that like this one that has a list of all of the recent postings.

It's an easy way to keep track of the site without visiting or typing in the address everytime your online.

You can automatically add it to your My Yahoo page by clicking the link on the right hand side under RSS Feeds.

What are labels?

Do you see the little label column to the right of the blog entries?

How about below each blog entry?






Do you know what is label is? If no keep reading.

Labels are a simple way of tagging individual entries with one or more topics. That way if you ever want to find all blog entries on a topic you just click on that label to retrieve all entries. No matter how old they are. The label is also listed below on each post.

In general all of my "Help, how does this internet thingy work posts" will be tagged with the help label so that you can easily find them.

Notable other labels are:

• BigE - is well Big E
• QOTD - Quote of the Day
• IDIM - I Did It Myself
• pic - Entry with a picture