GuruNews, Volume 8 Number 35, 9-25-08

Thu Sep 25 21:36:36 EDT 2008

Welcome to GuruNews

Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.

You can interact with the PC Guru team via our Web site, located at http://www.thepcgurus.com.  On our site you can post your computer questions, comments and rants on the forums, e-mail the PC Guru

team members and chat one on one in our nightly IRC chat beginning around 8:00 PM EDT.  You can also subscribe to our RSS feeds so you can get the latest news and forum updates from the PC Guru Web site directly on your computer.

If you're new to the Newsletter you can read back issues at Team member JP Durbin's website at http://www.jpdurbin.net.  There are links to all the old 84 Online issues as well as the new GuruNews missives.

The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region.  Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.

USS Rover's list of streaming computer shows is now available for download in Excel, Open Office and Linux ready formats from http://sheet.zoho.com/public/ussrover/shows. 

To subscribe to this newsletter just drop by www.thepcgurus.com and sign up!

Vol. 8, No. 35                 

9-25-08

1 Emergency procedure II         

2 Food or email?   

3 RIAA smackdown, 10 pounds of nuts in a 5 pound bag, Gevil, tech fight

4 Outlook diet

5 Free firewalls 

As of last week's writing, hundreds of thousands of the region's residents were without power.  Thankfully most people are back up, but several thousand remain in the dark for day 10 (I'm writing this on Tuesday) and may be getting a little annoyed.

We covered low-tech precautions to take ahead of future blackouts like batteries, LED lights, radios and corded phones.  This week, we'll go higher end and talk about ways to stay charged and online.

First up, your cell phone.  Many readers have ditched landline phones all together so having a charged mobile phone is a necessity.  You can always visit a friend with electricity to charge up you phone and other electronic items but early in an emergency you may be trapped in a powerless neighborhood by downed trees and lines.

In a case like this, there are a couple of things you can have on hand to maintain communication.  And inverter for your car and a standalone UPS for just such a purpose.

An inverter is by far the less expensive of the two options, but this assumes you have gasoline in the tank or in cans stored in a shed or garage.  This device basically plugs into the cigarette lighter and converts the power to 110 with a standard power plug or two.  Just start the engine and you can use the generated power to charge cellphones, laptops, MP3 players to keep the kids entertained, any electronic device that uses a standard power cord.

If you go this route aim for some decent strength, like 350-400 watts.  If you don't have a laptop, which will draw more power than anything else, you can go with something a little lighter duty.

The UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) option has its uses other than just charging devices, especially for keeping you online.  A couple of big stand-alone units, say 1000 VA that don't power anything, will charge a cellphone and maybe some other low power devices for a week.  Mix in a power hungry device like a laptop and you're down to a few days, but if you keep the electronics powered down as much as possible you can stretch that out.

A big one like that used exclusively for a DSL modem and a wireless router might keep you online for two or three weeks, depending on the equipment you use.  Don't worry about trying that for a cable or wireless connection because they will certainly go down in a situation like hurricane force winds.

You can also skip something that powerful for you PC, although a 350-500 VA unit with a USB connection to the computer is good to have.  When a UPS like that gets down to about 10% or so on the battery it will send a command to the PC to shutdown.  An ordinary shutdown will prevent data corruption commonly seen from a sudden loss of power.

Other than the obvious non-perishable food and water I can only recommend double-checking that everything in the house is turned off.  When the power comes back on I guarantee there will be some surges than can damage things like televisions and satellite receivers.  You might even consider flipping off most of your breakers, just leaving something unimportant like the bathroom on.

Leave the light on in the bathroom to alert you that you now have power, at least if the bulb doesn't blow from power up ;)   

Until next week.

Kevin Mefford, Editor

pcguru at microdome.net

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

Judge tells RIAA they must actually prove someone downloaded songs from user convicted of copyright violation:

http://tinyurl.com/3hyupt 

Noted video game opponent and all-around cheese log Jack Thompson permanently disbarred:

http://kotaku.com/5054772/jack-thompson-disbarred

San Francisco Chronicle asks "Is Google Evil?":

http://tinyurl.com/4cl4t3

In a rare twofer, here are competing articles describing a study of college students' reactions to pop-up dialog boxes:

http://tinyurl.com/4lx4sg

http://www.geekzone.co.nz:80/foobar/5800

Download of the Week

Outlook (not Outlook Express) stores all of its data, including emails and attachments, in a single .pst file and that file can quickly grow to gargantuan proportions--especially if you've got plenty of attachments. That can make Outlook load and run more slowly, and if your .pst file gets too big you'll be prone to crashes. What to do if you want to keep your attachments, but don't want the .pst file to get too big? Get the clever Outlook Attachment Remover. It saves your attachments to your PC, and gets them out of Outlook, so deletes them from your .pst file. It then links your email directly to the attachment, so in Outlook it appears as if the attachment still exists. You still see the attachment icon, but the file is actually on disk, not in Outlook.  When you click it; you're loading it from disk.  Get it here: 

http://www.kopf.com.br/outlook/ 

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com

Email Question of the Week

Q:  I need a firewall. Would like to get the best free one.

A:  Personally, I've used and recommended Comodo Personal Firewall Pro:http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/download_firewall.html in the past.  It has always done a stellar job for a free product, and usually gets high marks from any tests I've seen of it.  Haven't used their newest version yet, but I would say that it works with the same results as their previous versions.  I'm also going to copy in the team on this, as others may have solutions that I'm not aware of.

Hope this helps,

Daniel A. Williams
daniel at thepcgurus.com

Contact info and legal stuff

If you have tech support questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter please submit them by visiting www.thepcgurus.com and click on the "Email the Team" icon. 

Copyright 2001-2008 The PC Gurus, all rights reserved.  Publication, rebroadcast or storage is prohibited without prior consent, however you may freely forward this publication to friends as long as A) it is forwarded in its entirety and B) no fee is charged.

Information provided in this publication is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied.  Although the information provided is known to work on most systems, it may not work on ALL systems.  Make use of any information supplied at your own risk.

The PC Gurus are a group of volunteers who provide support for the PC, Mac and Linux users in the Kentuckiana region.

To unsubscribe from this newsletter visit http://thepcgurus.com/mailman/listinfo/newsletter_thepcgurus.com or send an email to microdome at seidata.com with the words "unsubscribe newsletter" (without the quotes) at the top of the body of the message.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://thepcgurus.com/pipermail/newsletter_thepcgurus.com/attachments/20080925/f5c366a4/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 32301 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://thepcgurus.com/pipermail/newsletter_thepcgurus.com/attachments/20080925/f5c366a4/attachment.jpe>