Tech Tips & Resources

Google added new features to their search page overnight and the new options give you a lot more control over the results you get from a search.

When you do a search on Google today (go ahead, I’ll wait…), your results will look very similar to before. However, the little tagline descriptions under each link has been expanded just a bit to give you more information about that site.

But that’s not the big change.

On your search page, take a look up towards the top and you’ll see this…

Click that “Show options…” link. Pretty cool, huh?!? Down the left-hand side of your search results you get all sorts of options for narrowing your search! You can now find just videos related to your search. Or just results from the past week. You can see your results on a time line…or on the cool new Wonder Wheel. These options really help you drill down to the results you really want much more quickly than just scrolling through the millions of links in your search results.

Now…go try a few searches. Experiment with the options and see just how much nicer Google has made things for all of us.

Laptop batteries are a constant source of complaints. They won’t take a charge. They run down too quickly. Whatever. But if you have an Apple laptop, there are a couple of things you can do to help maintain good battery performance.

First of all, Apple recommends that you recalibrate the battery every couple of months. This is an easy process.

Fully charge the battery and then disconnect the laptop from the power adapter.

Keep the computer awake and running until it shuts off. Wait five hours.

Recharge the battery as normal.

Those steps recalibrate the battery. At that point, if the battery will not hold a charge, you need a new battery.

Another option for improving your battery is to install the latest MacBook Battery Updater. Go to the SystemConfiguration folder inside the Library folder which is inside the System folder. Look for a file named BatteryUpdater.bundle. Select the file and then Get Info for the file. If you don’t have at least Version 1.2 or 1.3, go to the Apple web site, download, and install the Battery Update.

Just like with the recalibration, if your battery continues to fail after installing the updater, you need a new battery. But often one of these processes will solve your problem.

Finally, if you have OS X 10.5, you can check the health of your battery by going to System Profiler and selecting Power in the left-hand column. Now look for Health Information in the larger portion of the window. If “Condition” says anything other than “good”, it is time to replace your battery.

Just in case you don’t know, David Pogue write the technology column for the New York Times. He also publishes online articles and videos, writes books on technology, and does appearances on NPR and MSNBC. And I’ve had the pleasure of hearing him speak in person, attending workshops led by him, and even chatting with him for a bit.

And today he speaks for me. And perhaps for you, as well. If you’ve ever been annoyed by blinking ads and stupid spam, take a quick leap over and read his latest post on his NYTimes blog. You might find yourself nodding and smiling in agreement.

Yep, I’m on Facebook. And so are many of you. And a bunch of us are all friends with each other. It is fun. It can sometimes be a bit addictive. And I’ve talked with old friends from high school and college that I had not heard from in more than 30 years! All good.

Facebook is also one of the most targeted sites for phishing scams. Latest statistics for the month of March show that Facebook was the seventh most phished site on the web. At that time, 104 phishing sites were identified as targeting Facebook. Thats an average of three different phishing campaigns per day.

And it is no surprise. Facebook is a prime target. It continues to be the third most popular web site for users in the United States, having topped the 200 million user mark just this month. Of those users, more than 100 million log on each day. With that much traffic, a good scam can catch a lot of people.

The most recent identified phishing attack was just yesterday. That attack encouraged users to enter their Facebook login information on a screen that looked real - but wasn’t. It doesn’t seem any attempt was made to gain financial advantage directly from this, but it was an attempt to steal login names and passwords so the user could co-opt profiles which they can then use to get your friends to download malicious software.

Facebook is very good at catching and stopping the bulk of these attacks before they become widespread. But it never hurts for you to exercise caution.

So how can you use Facebook and still be safe? When you go to log in, add the “s” to your http. So enter “https://www.facebook.com” into your browser when you want to reach the login page. You’ll notice your browser changes and shows a green name strip with “Facebook, Inc (US)” in the bar. If you wanted, you could click on that green bar and get additional information about the site. But just by using that address to reach the login screen, you are doing all you can to guarantee that you are reaching the secure login screen for Facebook.

What makes that little green bar pop up there? Something called “extended validation” (”ev certs” for short). This is a technology that companies can purchase to help inform their users. Buying into the program is somewhat costly and requires a background check that can take several weeks. At this time, it is the most secure option for banks and other large web sites to help their customers feel peace of mind.

And all it takes from you is just that extra “s”.

After our series on Google For Educators, many of you have become avid Gmail users. However, when you click on a link in a web page to send an e-mail, your computer still opens Apple Mail or Entourage or whatever old mail program you were using.

You can change that. You can tell your computer that you want it to default to Gmail when you want to send an e-mail.

To make the change, go here…and follow their instructions. Trust me, it is easy. One copy and paste and a couple of clicks and you’re all set.

Over the last week I’ve gotten tons of questions about the Conficker computer virus. Concern really escalated after the story on 60 Minutes this past Sunday. So what do you need to know to be safe?

At the latest report, the Conficker C virus was estimated to be on about 12 million computers worldwide. It is also believed that most of those infections are not on home computers but rather larger servers throughout the internet. The Conficker C is the third version of the Conficker worm and is quite creative in how it works.

But most folks won’t want details about all that. You just want to know if you are infected and, if so, how do you get uninfected.

To begin with, Conficker only works on machines running Microsoft Windows. So Macs and Linux based machines have no worries.

Next, security experts have known about the Conficker virus since last November. As a result, Microsoft has had a security patch available on their web site. If you go to their Conficker page, you will find all the information you need for diagnosing and removing the virus.

Meanwhile, security experts are working to disable the virus on all machines before tomorrow. April 1st is a concern because it is known that the worm sitting on those 12 millioni computers is programmed to ask for instructions tomorrow. A correct instruction from the creator could cause all 12 million machines to engage in denial of service attacks or other damaging behaviors.

It is also entirely possible that nothing will happen on April 1st.

There are plenty of places on the internet where you can go and find more information about how the Conficker C worm works. But for now, if you have a Windows based machine, you can just visit the page above and get all the information you need to rest easy.

Mozilla will be pushing out an update to Firefox today. This update will patch a critical flaw in the browser. Attack code has already been written and released on the internet to exploit the flaw, so the update is important for Firefox users. This flaw effects all users of Firefox including Mac OS X and Linux.

David Pogue, technology columnist for the New York Times, recently conducted an interview with Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. The transcript of that interview is here. If you think your backups are safe on that DVD, you’ll be surprised what Spicer has to say about saving those family photos.

Academic Earth is a new site on the internet that you don’t want to miss. It is the Hulu of academic videos. Sure, you can find plenty of university lectures on YouTube, but Academic Earth brings them all together in one spot without the clutter you find on the typical YouTube page.

The site is attractive, easy to navigate, and open! That means you can download the videos and view them any time, any where. And it is all free!

Don’t miss this incredible site.

The blogs and Twitter are buzzing this morning as Flickr has passed a very impressive mark. There are now more than 100,000,000 photos on Flickr with a Creative Commons license. If you are not familiar with CC, it is an agreement by the photographer that you are free to use the photos without worry of any copyright infringement.

Why is this important? Well, we can all remember the times when we had to scour through old magazines to find and cut out photos we needed for a lesson or a bulletin board. It wasn’t easy to find what you wanted. It was very time consuming. And sometimes impossible unless you knew someone with hundreds of back copies of National Geographic, Life Magazine, Time and Newsweek, etc.

But now, on average, more than 2.5 million photos are added to Flickr each day. With such an abundance of graphic material at our fingertips that can be so easily searched and downloaded, will it change how we gather curriculum materials for our classes? Will it change how we teach?