I bought a DVD movie of the newest installment in the Star Trek line this week. Yes, I guess I  have to admit it but I am a little bit of a trekker, trekkie or whatever they call us today. I was 11 years old in 1966 and my dad and I used to tune into the original series every Thursday night at 8:30 pm for the first season, first run of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. (Of course, in the original space/time continuum Spock wasn’t making out with Uhura.)

I will offer a slight review of the new movie here. It was OK, not great, but none of the movies have been terrific, with the exception of Khan. This one  was quite humorous slightly reminiscent of “The Trouble with Tribbles.” I understand exactly why they did what they did with this new one in the space/time continuum; however, I still didn’t care for it. OK, that’s enough from me on that…onto the subject of this column.

I got a good surprise this week when I opened the DVD. I consider myself to be a pretty well versed user of the iPod and several of its versions. However, this week I was surprised to see that they also included a digital copy of the movie on the disc. This allows me to “burn” a legal copy of the entire movie to my 120GB iPod Classic. I had not experienced this before.

Of course, I only watch movies on my iPod when I fly. This means that I don’t need many movies on my iPod since I’ve flown only twice in the last ten years. So now I have this one ready to go.

The surprise, other than having never done this before, was how easy it actually worked. It also worked exactly as the instructions said it would; “working as described” is something that I don’t experience very often with most products today. That is unfortunate too but at least this one did work.

If you purchase a movie with a digital iPod ready copy here is all you do. Start up iTunes (yes, I don’t care for it either but it does its job), insert the DVD into your DVD player on your computer. Wait for a few seconds for a menu to popup then choose “Transfer digital copy to iTunes”. After you enter a secret code to prove that you really bought it, the install starts. I also imagine the code registers your movie which should stop anyone else from using the same code for additional copies. That is speculation on my part, but I’m pretty positive about that scenario.

Following a 5-10 minute wait the installation to iTunes will be complete. The next time you  sync your iPod you will have a crystal clear, excellent sounding copy of the movie on your iPod. You may now view it at your convenience – on your two inch wide monitor. OK, well nothings perfect!

I hope all of you have a great Thanksgiving with friends and family this week!

Tags: computer help

I am repeatedly asked by some of my readers why I don’t write about games.  Well, there are a couple of reasons why I choose not to.

First, I don’t have a lot of time for gaming.  Before kids I used to play a lot of games.  Now that my kids are grown, and on their own it seems that life has taken precedence over that excuse.  Next, I refuse to purchase the latest and greatest expensive game consoles.  Yes, you can also read into that making a living and paying bills.  The last PC game I purchased years ago was “Morrowind” which was and still is a very good game.  Finally, I have found that the large majority of free games are of poor quality – simple as that.

Now enter Josh, one of my friends and coworkers, who introduced me to “Evony” (evony.com).  This is an online game whose slogan is “Evony-Free forever” and the free part is just that, free which conquers one of my excuses.

You may have seen “Evony” advertised with scantily clad women as shown on the first page of the site.  I have to tell you that if you avoided it due to that there are no women displayed at all in the game; other than their sometimes, not so exquisite faces.  I figure that the developers use that moniker to attract the young game playing men who have the time to invest.

This very well designed game is an enjoyable way to use some of your online time.  Basically you start by building your own town in an extremely large ancient world.  Of course, in most games of this genre you have quests that you must perform to make your towns and your game lord more powerful.  These quests start with getting imaginary people to come to your town and dwell by building cottages they virtually inhabit.  You have to adjust your taxes (yes, like life) to make your towns attractive.  You must create farms, sawmills, quarries and iron mines to give your people jobs and then use the yielding food, lumber, stone and iron to build your towns.

It takes the previously mentioned building materials, in sometimes tremendous amounts, and time to build your little towns into major ones to be reckoned with.  And time it does take, from less than a minute to build your first level one cottage to slightly over an hour to build that same cottage to a level eight.  But there are plenty of other things to be working on in the intervening time.  You may also log off of the game and it continues to grow in real time.

You probably guessed it too but what other things do these ancient worlds hold in store for you?  There is the banding together as friends in alliances to thwart evil in the land.  As you play you will be scouted by other, sometimes not so friendly, players who want to take over your kingdom.  They may then attack your towns.  Sometimes you will wipe out the invading forces and other times…well, you know.

If you decide to become a member of this community look me up, Elyod (pretty original name huh?) in Upper Lorraine at http://39.evony.com.  Before you know it you can join an alliance like mine, (7Seas) and have your online friends give you tips and help you battle the evils of the age.

Tags: Double Click, internet, Ron Doyle

This week I wasn’t planning on writing about Facebook; nevertheless, a new and devious problem has popped up.

I, apparently along with millions of others, have been getting emails that appear to be from Facebook.  These emails have a subject line of, “updated account agreement” with an authentic looking verification number.   It has an attachment and basically states, “Due to Facebook policy changes, all Facebook users must submit a new, updated account agreement, regardless of their original account start date.”  It goes on to say, “Accounts that do not submit the updated account agreement by the deadline will be restricted.”

For me the offending email went to a non-Facebook email account I have.  This was my first warning to ignore the email.  Next, which I have warned you about before, you should never open attached files that you are not expecting, so don’t unzip it.  Lastly, and the most obvious warning is that the unzipped file is an executable file (marked with the .exe extension).  NEVER EVER run an exe file on your computer if you don’t know exactly what it is…NEVER.

So basically, DO NOT follow the directions to unzip and run the agreement.exe file.  I have read several different descriptions on this agreement.  The scariest one states that the executable file is a variant of the “ZeuS banking Trojan“, a very nasty program.  Once run the program installs silently in the background of your system and waits for you to type in your banking logon information.  What happens when you do logon to your bank’s site?  It steals your information and sends the login info back to the bad guys.  Then they take your money…simply and quickly.  They now have full access to your bank accounts just as if they were you.

One day last week several Tech-news sites reported that over 6 million emails like this went out before lunch.

Along with this one, another Facebook phishing scam hit that asked you to logon to your Facebook account and change your password.  When you went to the linked site from within this email you would be taken to a very realistic Facebook login page.  If you entered your current username and password it would then take over your Facebook account.  This isn’t nearly as bad as the first one I mentioned but it may still cause you a lot of problems.  In this case you would most likely never be able to regain control your FB site.  They will have changed the password and your email account that was attached to FB and you are out of the picture.

Please folks I am tired of these attacks and tired of writing about them so let’s all listen up now.

Never open an attached file in your email unless you are waiting to get something from a known person/place.  Even if from a close friend!  Email accounts can be imitated just as if your friend sent something to you.  Next, no trustworthy company will ever ask you for your login information; whether it is a bank or online social network.

PLEASE be careful!  Once a mistake like this is made it may never be properly corrected.

Tags: bad guys, botnet, doyle, evil, facebook, newspaper column, phishing, Ron Doyle, sneaky, twitter, Zeus

Last week I wrote about “Google Chrome” and mentioned a couple of its better options.  “Google Chrome” is a good browser; however, at this point on the internet timeline I like another browser better.  “Better” used here is “as in my opinion”, so you are certainly welcomed to disagree.  Due to the huge number of emails about my favorite browser I will write this week about Firefox.  From the Firefox URL of mozilla.com, you can probably figure that FF is somehow related to Mozilla.  A very quick/short history of the browser starts in the 1990s as Netscape Communicator, later becoming Mozilla which is now Firefox.  That history leaves out a lot of the details but if you are really interested just Google for “history of Firefox” and you will find more than you care to know.

Why do I like Firefox more than other browsers?  Well, I can’t really put it in words but basically, for me, it is due to the “add-ons” available for Firefox.  You can make it a slim, fast running browser as it is downloaded from the URL above.  But also you can add add-ons which give it other abilities beyond those that come with it.  Be careful.  If you add too many add-ons it has been my experience that the browser can slow down significantly, especially when opening.

Add-ons are easy to find, download, install and use.  Every time I see something on the internet about Firefox it always includes the author’s favorite add-ons for their preferred browser, so that is where I will head today.  My “have to have” add-ons for Firefox are:

KEYSCRAMBLER:  When you type on your keyboard, the signals from the keys travel along a path in the operating system before it hits your browser. Keyloggers (the bad guys) are in this path and monitor, record and then send these keystrokes to the criminals who then use your secret data.  KeyScrambler stops keyloggers by encrypting your keystrokes before they get to this path. Keyloggers can only record the encrypted keys, which are completely impossible to read at that level.

IE TAB:  Sometimes web sites/pages are written to only use Internet Explorer.  The only one I have issues with is Microsoft’s “Outlook Web Access” which allows Outlook email to be used on the internet, usually by companies.  If I open it in FF they are jumbled and disordered but if I open them using the IE Tab in FF, the Outlook Web screens are displayed properly.

GOOGLE TOOLBAR:  This is the Google Toolbar that is available for most all browsers but this version is for FF.  It really ties your browser into all of your Google related resources on the web.

TABLOC:  This add-on obviously deals with tabs in FF.  It has many features but the one that I appreciate most is being able to double-click a tab and it locks.  Once a tab is locked when you click any link on that locked page a new tab will open.  That way it is much easier to go back to the tab that you started on before clicking away from it.

These are just a few of the add-ons that I like in Firefox.  Shoot me an email this week and let me know what you like about Firefox and its abundance of add-ons.

Tags: add-on, addons, computer, Double Click, doyle, FF, Firefox, google, internet, Ron Doyle