CHRISdotTODD

The Internet is flooded with websites, more bad than good. Just the shear number of sites, even if they were all good, makes it difficult to find those sites that are relevant to you right now. With that in mind, I thought I would share some websites that I recently found, that I believe fall into the "good" category. The Best Article Every Day Day-to-day the articles on this site do not typically go together, which is the power of this site. It exposes you to new things all the time. Take for example the article from October 16 , 2008 -- it's about 28 different free file storage websites. The article on the 15th of October has 78 ways small businesses can save money. Quite diverse, both offer value. NirSoft NirSoft has countless software utilities from password tools, to network tools, to browser tools. Definately a site for geeks. How to Clean Stuff Maybe your microwave smells like burnt popcorn. How to Clean Stuff has a way to clean up that smell. Maybe your son came

As you may recall I wrote in September about the latest company to drop DRM, Walmart. I think we all agree that dropping DRM is a good thing, but in Walmart's case, as with Microsoft and Yahoo before them, they were also planning to turn-off their DRM servers, punishing those who bought the DRM'd music through their online store. Again like Microsoft and Yahoo before them, Walmart had a change of heart and has decided to leave their DRM servers running, at least for now. So this is a good thing. At least for Microsoft, Yahoo, and Walmart they have owned up to their mistake and they are not penalizing their customers, who supported them during their DRM mistake, any further. For those companies that are still pushing and supporting DRM, heres a short comic of the greater problem they are causing. They're putting their own customers between a rock and a hard place. I ask, "Why would you do this to people who have interest in your products?"

What would it be like if your life was like Facebook or another social network? You might find acquaintances from long ago showing up at your door. This first video helps you see what that might be like. The first video is from some blokes in England, Idots of Ants -- they are Benjamin Wilson, James Wrighton, Elliott Tiney and Andrew Spiers. This is just one of many videos available on YouTube by the Idiots. If you have a tech job, many others likely do not understand what you do. Of course you spend most of the day playing computer games. And when your non-technical colleagues have technical problems, they are all the same problem, caused by the same thing, requiring the same fix. In this case, it's because the website is down. I hope you enjoyed these video shorts as much as I did.

I found a great, free site that will take my mp3 music and create ringtones. With audiko.net you can search for existing ringtones, upload your own mp3 or enter a URL of an mp3 or YouTube video. The ringtones should work with most phones including the iPhone. When you upload a file, it takes only a few minutes to process, and then you can select the music segment that you want converted to a ringtone. The one problem with the entire process is that you cannot play your uploaded file, so you need to determine on your computer or mp3 player the time mark to start and stop the clip. Audiko.net is able to process files so quickly because they only use the first 75 seconds of a clip, which should be fine in most cases. If you opt to use a YouTube file, the process takes a bit longer, but still works. Of course with YouTube, the audio is not likely to be as good as what you can get from an mp3 file. When the ringtone is ready to download, you can get it in mp3 format, m4r, (the iPhone forma

Updated 17-Oct-08. Some good news on the Wells Fargo security front. Though the ignoring of extra password characters is still true, you have to exceed 14 characters before you see this behavior. A 14 character password is sufficiently long enough where this should not be a significant issue. The reason behind the case insensitive username and password is so the same system can support phone interaction as well. Though this lowers the security level, it is compensated for by limiting failed logins to 3 attempts. After the 3rd failure, the user must contact the bank before they can try again. In listening to Security Now , a TWiT Network netcast, staring Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte has reported over several episodes in September that the Wells Fargo online login is not as secure as it should be. This report came from users of Secuirty Now. The first report was that the password would still work if it had extra charcters at the end of it. It was not determined to whether the length w

In an effort to tell the stories of Obama and McCain and their positions of Net Neutrality, Popular Mechanics put together a great article describing the various issues involved in the Net Neutrality debate. Though too late in the game for Obama and McCain to devote time to sitting down and discussing with Popular Mechanics, they did get enough information to know the general positions -- Obama wants enough regulation by government to provide an open Internet while McCain does not want government involvement. Popular Mechanics summarized it as "John McCain is against Net neutrality and Barack Obama is for it." The Popular Mechanics article does a good job describing the role of the ISP and the so called "last mile". We're reminded about the ethical issues around conflict in interest the ISPs have. For example, the ISP can provide a slower or throttled bandwidth, which would impact VoIP (Internet telephone) from 3rd parties while making sure their own VoIP solu

Here's just one way to improve the performance of Firefox, through enabling pipelining. Pipelining is having the browser send a subsequent request before receiving a response from the prior request (standard behavior). Pipelining also provides the facility to include multiple requests within a single packet. Mozilla reports the highest potential performance gains for those web pages that have a higher latency rate. Here's how to configure Firefox: Enter about:config in the URL bar Click the warning button Enter "pip" in the Filter -- this should reduce the list of options to four items Click on the Value field for the following two entries and change from False to True network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining Click on the Value field of network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set the value to 8 Start enjoying a faster Firefox If you set the maximum requests for pipelining too high, you could actually see or just perceive a slower response time, so if y