Number 280 - September 2006

UPDATE
Get Organized    In the first article Glenn Richards shows beginners how to get things organized to make their computer work their way. RSS? What's That?    Beginners won't know, maybe, but most of you have heard of it. Lord knows Past Prez Ray has talked about it plenty of times. Okay, One more time, Phil Shapiro tries his hand at explaining this esoteric area of computing. Is Overwriting Files To Clear Your Hard Drive Necessary?    The author's title query refers to the practice of overwriting files with 1's and 0's so they cannot be retrieved by an unauthorized person. The principal use of this technique was to really delete sensitive files, like bank statements, personal info, etc., from your hard drive when you want to sell or otherwise dispose of it. Overwriting would prevent the new owner or anyone else from reading thoe data in those files. Improvements in hard drives have changed requirements some. Read the article and learn. If you haven't already got it on a previous library disk. See librarian Tom Stepanek for a copy of BCWipe. Short Life CD's?    I thought CD's were forever--didn't you? Well, apparently they're not. Read the article and become an informed user.	Resizing Those Photos    Like most people I send pictures and diagrams to others attached to an e-mail message. We all do. But if those images are at the full resolution that your photo software is capable of they will never go through. They will be far too large to be handled by the e-mail system. Find out in this article how to downsize them for transmittal with your e-mails. How Safe is Your ID?    Most of us are already following some of the advice given in this article. Some of it may seem like overkill to some of you. You will have to judge how paranoid you want to be. But as the author suggests Identity Theft is much more inconvenience to you than property theft. It may take years to unravel and may require going so far as to change your name in some circumstances. Printing Better Pictures    With the great advances in digital photography in the last couple of years, every body has the potential to take great pictures. the quality depends on the number of pixels captured and size matters if you want to share them over the Internet as discussed above. Read this article and learn something about the characteristics of the pictures you capture as they are handles by your computer screen and output by your printer    Internet Forensics    This is a review of a book written to show how to look for useful info buried in websites and to track people and techniques used to phish for information. Maybe you'll buy it!
Number 280 - September 2006