Lessfeet

Are you secure on the net? May you are! Maybe you aren’t! The Internet
is always being monitored by hackers, bots and other things looking for
computers that have open ports that can be attacked.

ShieldsUP is a site from the security and harddrive expert Steve Gibson at GRC.Com.

ShieldsUp scans your computer to see if there are any vulnerable ports
on you computer to exploit. See if you computer is vulnerable.

Steve along with Leo Laporte host a security podcast call Security Now which covers many advanced security topics.

Backupify is one of the coolest services that I have seen. Backup all of your online life in one place. Enter all of your cloud accounts (Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Zoho, Google Docs, Photobucket, Wordpress sites, Basecamp, Gmail, Facebook, Friendfeed, Blogger, Hotmail and coming soon Youtube, Xmarks and Tumblr) and Backupify will backup your data on those sites to an Amazon S3 server so you know it’s safe. Backup the cloud on the cloud. How cool is that?

If your like me a digital man or woman than you really find it a hassle to breakout the paper, fire up the old printer that you never use, address an envelope and make a trip to the post office the two times a year you have to use snail-mail. That’s where Snailmailr comes in. You go to Snailmailr.com type in the return address and the recipient’s address. Type or paste in your letter and send it. No printing, no trip to the post office and no hassle. It cost more than double the price of snail-mail ($0.99) so if you send letters often I would not advise the use of this service but his is great for me!

I just told you in the two previous post about alternative software but increasingly I am turning to the Cloud (or Internet) for many of my applications. Here are just some of my favorites:

1. Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Live Mail – alternatives for your traditional ISPs email with an email program like Outlook Express.
2. Google Docs, Zoho, Microsoft Office Live – alternatives for Microsoft Office
3. Mint – alternative for Quicken
4. Quickbooks Online – alternative to Quickbooks software

Here’s a video to that tries to explain what Net Neutrality is but it is just one scenario.

To find out more learn how to help the cause go to SaveTheInternet.Com to see what action you can take. Also check put EFF.Org to see what other scary things The Man is doing.

I mentioned in the post Cloud Storage Overview that there are some services where you can store your precious files via cloud based storage (on the Internet). Here are a couple of options that will create a virtual drive on your computer as if it was an actual drive.

Dropbox is a service that gives you 2 gigabytes free with an option to pay a small amount for up to 100 gigabytes. For Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

Microsoft’s Skydrive gives you 25 gigabytes absolutely free but you need a third party program to make it a virtual drive. “Skydrive Explorer” is a free program that does this. It is really easy to setup.

Download and install Dropbox and Skydrive Explorer now.

This is an archive of the first site on the “World Wide Web”. It is instructions to use the “WWW”. Lookout folks, it has links!

On August 8th I made a post Free Personal Finance Managers. Since August 8th a lot has changed. Mint has now been purchased by Intuit (makers of Quicken and Quicken Online). So where does that leave us? For now I’m continuing to use Mint because it is the best personal finance manager. Better than Quicken Online or the Quicken software. It was a smart move for Intuit but what will happen to Mint?

One of the more stupid things I’ve heard said over the years of working in tech support is “Install this free CA Security Suite. It will remove the viruses (viri) that are slowing your Internet down.” WRONG! If you are installing an anti-virus because you are having problems, don’t! A full anti-virus not only will not help you it will most likely add to your problems.

If you think your problem might be caused by something infecting your system try these online scanners instead…

Kaspersky free online virus scanner
BitDefender Online Scanner
Eset
McAfee FreeScan
Trend Micro HouseCall

If these sites don’t work for you it may be a side-effect of a virus. In this case I would reinstall.

You Gmail users have been able to open documents attachments in Google Docs for quit some time but did you know that you can now save them in GDocs. Open your message that contains the attachment. At the bottom of the message click “Open as a Google….” then just click “Save”. Now your Word, Excel, PDF or presentation documents saved in Google Docs.