School of Phish: Why Facebook Connect is a bad lesson.

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phishing

Image credit: phishing by Richzendy

For years, I’ve been counseling people to be careful about falling for phishing attempts while on the Internet (or, really in any social situation). Phishing is when some nefarious character masquerades as a trusted entity and attempts to extract information from you. For example, you might get redirected to a website that looks exactly like a site you want to login to, but when you do, you’re really passing that information to the criminal, as the site is a fake.1 But it doesn’t have to be on the Internet. For example, you get a phone call from your bank saying there is a problem with your account and they need to verify you are their customer (but it isn’t really the bank calling… and please don’t trust the caller ID!). Continue reading →

Have to see it to believe it – Soap Nuts!

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Coming off of Canadian Environment Week (June 5-11th) and World Environment Day (June 5th) I thought I would share one of our latest environmental discoveries.

I often find myself a bit under-whelmed with some of ‘natural’ or environmentally friendly solutions I read about or test out. I suppose this makes sense, as some chemical cocktail designed for a specific cleaning purpose will probably beat something which just kind of works in that regard. If these solutions do work, they often require more work and elbow-grease. Both of these trade-offs are worth it, though, in many cases to lessen our environmental impact. Continue reading →

Farewell Gizmo5, No Thanks Google Voice, Hello Callcentric!

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Ok, this is a bit of a rant, but might also help out some stranded Gizmo5 clients.

A couple weeks back, I received an e-mail that Gizmo5 services were being shut-down, and that I would have to transition my account to Google Voice, or get a refund on any remaining credit. I was expecting this to happen eventually after Gizmo5 was bought-out by Google, but was a bit surprised at the quick time-frame once announced (about a month). Continue reading →

Can an iPad replace your laptop? Revisit for iPad 2

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Photo: IMG_0712 by Jon Mountjoy.

In a previous article, I asked this question and listed some of the benefits of a tablet, yet also expressed some concerns (though I felt the answer would be yes for myself, as well as for many people). With the introduction of the iPad 2 (or iPad2) and all sorts of other improvements since then, I decided to do a ‘revisit’ article.

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Abortion: Above anyone’s pay grade?

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In what might seem an odd topic for this blog, I decided to start a post to debate the topic of abortion. I’ve recently posted in response to abortion related articles at CNN and other places. Since these places aren’t a great place for such a debate to take place (their ‘forum’ software is horrible for that kind of thing), I challenged people to come here. Continue reading →

Gas mileage conversion chart: Canada & USA

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I have yet to get used to thinking in Liters/100km for gas mileage here in Canada. Miles per Gallon (MPG) is simply engrained in my head. Part of the problem is just the difference in units of liters and gallons. But, there is also the issue of one measuring distance on 1 gallon, while the other is measuring the quantity of fuel over a distance. To top it off, they run inverse of each other. (ex: a car that gets MORE MPG is better, but a car that uses LESS liters/100km is better.) Anyway, it threw my brain for a loop while I was car shopping several months back, so I looked around the Internet for a conversion calculator or chart. I could only find one for UK gallons (which I didn’t catch for a while, which REALLY confused me for a bit). Calculators weren’t very convenient while car shopping, so I decided to make a nice chart to take along. Continue reading →

Inexpensive stereo headset solution for PS3

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A friend of mine has been using a Plantronics .Audio 770 headset with his Playstation3 and has been quite pleased with it. I was not only unable to find one locally, but the cost on what I did find was more than I wanted to spend. My friend and I schemed a bit and came up with the following solution (cost ~$29):

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Great OSX Services addition: WordService by Devon Technologies

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Just a quick post to point out an update to Devon Technologies’ WordService. WordService has just been updated to version 2.8 if you are already using it. Download at:

http://www.devon-technologies.com/download/index.html

If you are not already using this, I really recommend that you check it out. Continue reading →

Economics: Vegas Style!

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The article, “Trading program sparked May ‘flash crash’” today (Oct 1, 2010) by Ben Rooney at CNNMoney.com confirms what I have feared for quite some time: there may be a good deal of ‘intelligence’ involved in the stock market, but very little wisdom.

The article outlines how a computer program was monitoring a certain type of stock, which reached a threshold, inducing the computer to start selling this stock. It was of a type and quantity, that the market reacted to the change, causing the computer to further react. This affected other stocks, and eventually caused the avalanche on May 6, where the Dow took the biggest drop on record in a single day (nearly 1000 points, or about $1 trillion). Continue reading →

Can an iPad replace your laptop?

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Photo: IMG_0712 by Jon Mountjoy.

That is a question I have been considering, not too long after the announcement of Apple’s new iPad product-line. Initially, I had been in the camp hoping the new tablet would be some kind of OSX device. While I would still love to see such a device, it is also apparent that one would sacrifice battery life even if it were considerably slower than my current laptop. Slower I could deal with, less battery life I can not. iPhone OS was clearly the way to go for a device of this size/weight.
Continue reading →