Opendns-Web Blocker

I'm definitely overworking, two posts in one day but I do have to thank my co-worker (code name: Mr. Search and Destroy) for all these wonderful free services for all of us to use.

If you are a parents with children under 18 yrs old, read this blog and implement immediately! Does your kid have a computer with Internet access? What a silly question, everybody have a computer and without an Internet connection what use is it. Agree, so every kids who are on a computer have Internet access and probably viewing porn sites or other adult related sites. Agree? Not my kid, righhht, if your kid have a computer in their room, you’re in for a big surprise. I have my computer in the living room so I can monitor what they view. Anyway, let just say all our kids are perfect but want to protect our children from accidently going to these horrible sites, so what can you do that is FREE? There is an Internet service called OpenDNS at http://www.opendns.com/ and it is better than paid software that does the same thing, in my opinion. Basically, Opendns will block websites that you don’t want your children go to and it is updated by Opendns. You say, I can do this on my Windows 7, sure you can and I have tried it too but it is pretty painful to type in website after website or you can just say “block all”, which defeat the purpose of having a computer, right?

Go to the Opendns website and read their feature, you’ll be surprised. By the way, if you set this up on your router your kid Itouch or Ipad will be protected by Opendns if using your router WIFI. If any question please let me know, so I can ask my co-worker who introduce this to me. Happy surfing.

Some of the feature of Opendns:
§ Web Content Filtering: Cloud-based, award-winning Web content filtering from OpenDNS with more than 50 categories of content. No appliance necessary. Effective against proxies, P2P, Web 2.0, adult and more.
§ PhishTank Anti-Phishing: Industry-leading anti-phishing powered by PhishTank, the most authoritative source of phishing data on the Internet. Protects your network, organization and its employees from fraudulent phishing scams.
§ Malware Site Protection / Botnet Protection: DNS layer security protects the most vulnerable level of your network against the latest threats, including viruses, worms and zero-day vulnerabilities.
§ Whitelist / Blacklist: Lets you decide where your users can navigate on your customized Internet. Whitelist-only functionality available.

LastPass Password

How many passwords do I need to remember just to use the Internet? I need one for my bank, my forum, blog site, Facebook, Amazon, and on and on. You say you got it beat, just have one userid and password for everything. What a great idea but there is one tiny problem, if somebody somehow got your password, you are in big trouble or a Korean would say in deep kimchee. So how do you solve this cumbersome problem…Answer, get Lastpass and it is FREE.

My co-worker introduced me to Lastpass but I didn’t take him seriously because I’m thinking how can I trust some company with my password that offer this service for free, so I did some digging and found out it is very secured and everything is encrypted so even the Lastpass people won’t know your password. Of course nothing is never but it would take tremendous amount of time to break the encryption, so I wouldn’t worry unless you are hiding something that everybody want. Anyway, if you don’t want to take my word for it listen to a security guru who actually did an in-depth review of Lastpass at http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm episode #256.

Now that I have convinced you to use Lastpass, let me introduce you to another Internet service you definitely need, if you are a traveler or have multiple computers you need xmarks. Xmark site is at http://www.xmarks.com/ and its feature is to keep your Internet explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari bookmark in the Internet cloud so that wherever you are or whichever computer you’re on, you’ll have access to your bookmarked websites. Xmark was procured by Lastpass not too long ago and it makes a perfect marriage for people who use the Internet for their daily work or pleasure.

Try it out and let me know what you think. I been using it for couple of weeks and loving it, or as the British would say “lovely darling”.

Folder Size

Have you ever had your hard drive get so full that you had to either delete some files or move it to an external drive? I'm sure almost everybody who uses a computer probably encountered this problem and how do we go about cleaning our drive, most likely go folder by folder to see what was in it, which was very time comsuming if you had lots of folders. I don't understand why Microsoft did not include folder size display for the Explore. Anyway, to solve this problem I came upon a freeware utlity program that does exactly what I needed called "Folder Size".

Product excerp from http://www.mindgems.com/products/Folder-Size/Folder-Size.html

Folder Size FREEWARE will analyze your hard drives and display the file and folder sizes so that you can easily check the distribution of your disk space. The application will display the sizes of the folders and files and also the percentage of the total disk size that they occupy. The neat report can be sorted in order to identify the largest folders and the largest files. You can easily figure out which files or folders have filled up your dive space as Folder Size will also scan the sizes of all the subfolders. The application can scan your entire hard drive in minutes due to its optimized scan algorithms. The progressive scan will let you continue the scan from the point of interruption.
Besides scanning an entire hard drive Folder Size can also scan a single folder in order to save time.

COZI - Online Day Planner

If you have lots of friends and family member that likes to keep in contact with each other, you need to check out COZI. It is an online tool for calandar, scheduling, journal, and etc. This is what COZI has to say: Finally, a resolution that actually makes life easier, not harder. Use Cozi to manage your busy family life with a shared online calendar, shopping lists, to do lists, a family journal, and more. Cozi is free and accessible from any computer and any mobile phone.

Win7CODEC

One day I got this video file but could not play on my Windows media player, so I tried on my VLC player and no luck. I use a year old VLC version because it works better but lack all the current codec. I didn't want to upgrade my VLC, so I went on a search for codec that will support Windows media player for my Windows 7 and I found it.

Check out http://shark007.net/win7codecs.html and read all about it. Now, all video files plays on my Windows media player.