The Webmaster will provide links to files or sites of potential interest to SPAUG members, which are suggested by other members. Just connect to the web and click on the hyperlinks. If that does not work, copy the links into your browser URL address field and press enter.
If any of you members have suggestions, they would be more than welcome - . Share your favorite sites with other SPAUG members.
There is reported to be a much better, more powerful, and perhaps more reliable disk management and imaging program called BootIt NG from Terabyte Unlimited. It is Partition Magic and Ghost rolled into one, with a great boot manager included. It's cheaper too. Too be fair, its interface is geeky, but we're all that kind of guys and gals ☺.
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
The week of February 6-12, 2005 is National Consumer Protection Week (NCPW). The subject of this year's NCPW is “Identity Theft: When Fact Becomes Fiction.” Consumer groups and government agencies nationwide are marking the event by making a wealth of free information available to consumers. Some of the highlights include:
Space.com's choices for the Best Space Images of 2004. A fast connection would be good…
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
Still thinking about an external server to back up your computers? Matt Lake at ComputerUser.com reviews a personal server he says anyone can use, the Mirra M-80 Personal Server ($399 MSRP). You can share files between systems with it, too. By going through Mirra's Web site portal, you can open a secure connection to your Mirra server and retrieve files you need via the Internet. It works a bit like the file access feature in GoToMyPC, except that you're dealing with files on a backup server–and you don't have to pay a monthly fee for the service. You can also give Web access to your folders to other people, on a case-by-case basis.
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
Filling out taxes? Do it for free at one of the IRS's Free File Alliance Companies. Free File is online tax preparation and electronic filing through a partnership agreement between the IRS and the Free File Alliance, LLC. In other words, you can e-file… free.
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
Sometimes malware locks files so they cannot be deleted. This is a command line utility to close and delete a file which is locked by another process. It doesn't work with modules. Usage: FORCEDEL.EXE [/S] filename
/S — Soft delete. Like the "del" command
filename — File name you want to delete
www.codeguru.com/Cpp/W-P/files/fileio/article.php/c1287/
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
Here are some sites to visit when checking up on urban legends—
www.breakthechain.org/
www.truthorfiction.com/search.htm
urbanlegends.about.com
www.snopes.com
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
This article, How to Avoid Your Email Address Being Harvested by Spambots, will teach you several tricks to use to disguise your email address from at least 85% of the spammers. There are, however, at least two techniques which appear not only to currently be 100% successful at protecting email addresses, but are likely to remain so for some time. The first technique (which SPAUG uses to hide your email addresses) uses Javascript to obscure the address; the second hides the email address in an image. Harvesters are unlikely to begin interpreting Javascript any time soon and even less likely to do the OCR required to pull an email address from an image. There is a form that you can use to convert your email address to JavaScript.
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
Barry Thompson's Software that I use is a list of handy security and utility programs, mostly free or very inexpensive, with links to their source.
Zaine Ridling says, "Consider my own suggestions for great software, The Great Software List.
If you don't have the club CD, and have a fast connection, these are very useful sources of utility programs.
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
Occasionally one runs into some exceptional software. In this case it is a free program called, Audacity. This software provides an amazing variety of capabilities for music processing:
• Record live audio.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
• Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
• Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
Versions for both Mac and PC are available. Audacity is free software, developed by a group of volunteers and distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). "Free software is not just free of cost (like "free beer"). It is free as in freedom (like "free speech"). Free software gives you the freedom to use a program, study how it works, improve it, and share it with others. For more information, visit the Free Software Foundation. "Programs like Audacity are also called open source software, because their source code is available for anyone to study or use. There are thousands of other free and open source programs, including the Mozilla web browser, the OpenOffice.org office suite, and entire Linux-based operating systems."
More information on the open-source software sponsor organization, SourceForge. Many additional programs are available for download at sourceforge distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). I hope others find this software as fascinating as I have.
Submitted by Roger Summit