Author: Rick

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Fake Shipping Alert

Be careful of fake emails pretending to be from your bank or shopping sites. Many are phishing scams trying to get your personal information. To avoid those scams, it’s best to go directly to the site instead of clicking to the site from an email.

Other fake emails are trying to infect your computer with a virus. This fake email with a shipping alert has been making the rounds lately:

Subject: Shipping Notification

Message Body:

Shipping Notification Thank you for shopping with us. We look forward to serving you again.

The following is your receipt. Please retain a copy for your records.
Qty  Item no  Description  Price  S&H  Tax  Return
Code
1 FC864-2038B Msg Drma7303 White 650.99 6.95 3.37 ____

Merchandise total 650.99
Shipping and handling 6.95
Tax on mdse 6.75% 3.37
Invoice total 706.31

Welcome to the convenience of shopping JCPenney Catalog

Doing a web search, we confirmed that this was malicious from Cisco Security:

Cisco Security Intelligence Operations has detected significant activity related to spam e-mail messages that claim to contain a shipping notification attachment for the recipient.  The text in the e-mail message instructs the recipient to open the attached file to view the notification.  However, the .zip attachment contains a malicious .exe file that, when executed, attempts to infect the targeted system with malicious code.

E-mail messages that are related to this threat (RuleID2979) may contain the following files:

Shipping Notification.zip
Shipping Notification.exe

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Dropbox Automator Service for Saving Selected Text

Always looking for new uses for Dropbox, I came across a couple of sites showing the same tip: 1) It’s All Tech’s How to automatically copy your Mac OS X clipboard to Dropbox and 2) Tip #1 in this MacOSXTutorials12 video.

What it Does

Essentially this is a way for Max OS X users to select text somewhere and then quickly append it to a text file in Dropbox. That might be a faster way, for example, to make note of things you find while web browsing. Or you might use it to add part of a PDF file to Dropbox without the extra clicks needed to create a new text document.

My Additions

I liked the tip but wanted to make a few improvements. I wanted to:

  1. Make the script work. The cat command needs two “>” in order to append instead of overwrite a file.
  2. Add date and time information to the text selection that I was appending.
  3. List the text selections in reverse chronological order, meaning that the most recent is at the top.

How to Make It

This is the Automator Service script that I used:

echo —“$(date)”— > ~/Text-Clips-temp.txt
cat >> ~/Text-Clips-temp.txt
cat ~/Dropbox/Text-Clips.txt >> ~/Text-Clips-temp.txt
mv ~/Text-Clips-temp.txt ~/Dropbox/Text-Clips.txt

Only Works in Some Applications

Unfortunately not all apps can use Automator Services. Only apps written in Cocoa, as Apple does with most of its apps, will work. This means that Safari, Mail, Preview, Calendar, and Address Book will work. Most other apps including Chrome and Firefox will not.

Side Notes

That this isn’t using the Mac OS X clipboard, as the tips I found stated. We’re selecting text and then using a service on it. The text is never copied or cut so it’s not in the clipboard.

Even though this tip is described as for Dropbox, there is nothing Dropbox specific except that the location of the text file happens to be in the Dropbox folder. Dropbox makes the service useful since you can have access to the text file from other locations. But this tip will work on any text file.

If you’re new to Dropbox, please use our Dropbox referral to set it up. It will give you an additional 250MB and give the same to us. Now Dropbox referrals will allow you to get up to 10GB for free, a great deal for your backup and sharing files needs.

What do you think?

If you have any suggestions to improve this Automator Service or to better use Dropbox, let me know.

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Canon S95 versus S90

King of Pocket Cameras, Improved

Canon just replaced their PowerShot S90 with the S95, so I did the same. The Canon S90 was my favorite camera ever so I wanted to see what Canon could do to improve it.

The S95 retains everything that made the S90 great.

  • a relatively large 1/1.7″ CCD sensor capturing 10 megapixels (same sensor as Canon G10 and G11)
  • excellent built quality
  • lots of manual controls that can be assigned to ring on front of camera

What’s improved?

  • body finish is more grippy
  • wheel on back has stop clicks (many people didn’t like the freely spinning wheel on the S90)
  • added 720p movie mode (only 24 fps though) with stereo recording
  • High Dynamic Range scene option
  • better image stabilization
  • can be used with a neck strap (holes at both sides of the camera)
  • just a little bit thinner (see photo). Some will complain about the camera being too small and losing the little thumb grip, but I prefer a camera to be as pocketable as possible.

Conclusion

There are loads of  pocket cameras to chose from that will take good shots in brightly lit situations. It’s in the poorly lit situations that the larger sensor of the S90/S95 really helps. It’s not about the number of megapixels, but about how good the image sensor is at collecting light. The image sensor on the S90/S95 combined with image stabilization makes the camera worth the money for me. By adding a plethora of manual controls, Canon has made a camera that many professional photographers will be comfortable using when they don’t want to carry their big DSLR.

Currently costing $399 at Amazon, the S95 is not a cheap camera. It isn’t a necessary purchase if you already own the S90. But the Canon S95 is the current best camera that can fit in a pocket and it’s a worthy successor to the S90.

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OpenDNS and other DNS options

OpenDNS

David Pogue explains DNS and why OpenDNS is a great service in this video.

OpenDNS is generally fast, has extra features like anti-phishing, shortcuts, and parental controls, and is run by non-evil people (perhaps unlike your ISP).

Other Options

But you should also check to see what DNS provider gives your particular location the fastest DNS response as we explained in the post Make your Internet faster by changing DNS.

We explained that you can use namebench to test a variety of DNS providers. I recommend running namebench multiple times since results will vary between tests. For me, Verizon’s DNS service actually provided the fastest and most consistent DNS speeds so I’m sticking with them for now for the quickest web browsing experience.

Profit Model

One way to see who is running the DNS on a particular network is to type in a long web address that doesn’t exist. Most DNS providers “hijack” the 404 Not Found response and give you something like the response below from Verizon. It’s annoying that this is a standard practice now, but your ISP and other DNS providers get extra income from search engines for directing people there.

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MS Word editing on iPad

I recently needed to do some basic editing of Word documents from the iPad. Looking at the app store, I found Pages ($9.99) by Apple, Documents To Go Premium – Office Suite ($14.99), and QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad ($14.99) to be the most popular applications for this. I’ll refer to thees as just Pages, Documents To Go, and QuickOffice.

After using these apps, I found file transfers and Word compatibility to be the two major issues.

1) How to Move Files

The Apple iPad is not a traditional computer. It does not have a file system that is designed to be universally accessed. Therefore applications need to be creative.

I wanted to be able to edit and save documents kept on Dropbox, the popular cloud file storage service. This factor ruled out Pages. When used in conjunction with an application like GoodReader or Air Sharing, Pages can import files from Dropbox. The problem comes when you want to save those files you edited in Pages back to Dropbox. It’s a mess. Sure, you can save the Pages file locally as a Word file, sync with iTunes, bring the file to your desktop, then load it into Dropbox. But what kind of workflow is that?

Both Documents To Go and QuickOffice will import and save directly to Dropbox and other services.

There are other ways to move documents to and from your computer. Documents To Go has a program that you can install on Windows or Mac. I prefer Quickoffice‘s solution though. Quickoffice lists an IP address, e.g. 192.168.1.3:4242, which you can type into the web browser of any computer on your local network. From there, you can download and upload files. It’s slick.

2) Compatibility with Word

In general, I found Pages to be the strongest stand alone word processor, both in terms of editing and Word compatibility. Unfortunately, the lack of a good file transfer workflow disqualified it for me.

Both Quickoffice and Documents To Go handled most documents well enough to be useful. Neither did well with multiple columns. Quickoffice appeared to more consistently show page breaks. Documents To Go was slightly better at drawing tables on the examples we gave it.

There were a lot of quirks but both apps worked. And if you made some changes to the document, it wouldn’t screw up the existing formatting. So even if not everything looked right on the iPad, it looked correct when loaded back into Word.

Other Considerations

In favor of Documents To Go:

  • Documents To Go is a universal app, meaning that it will work on iPhone and iPad so you don’t have to buy separate apps.
  • Only Documents To Go can edit PowerPoint files. The editing mode is unusual in that it only occurs in what looks like an outline view. Still, that’s better than QuickOffice which can only view PowerPoint files. Also, only Documents To Go will show you notes saved in PowerPoint.
  • Documents To Go launches with the last document open that you were using. This can be a timesaver.

In favor of Quickoffice:

  • Quickoffice has a more intuitive user interface. For example, in Documents To Go you tap a file in Dropbox once to download it. You tap it again to open it. In Quickoffice, that’s just one tap. Another oddity in Documents To Go is that it creates a “Documents To Go” folder in Dropbox, even though it can use any folders. You can delete the folder but Documents To Go will add it back.
  • The Quickoffice has a simpler layout and prettier icons.
  • Quickoffice autosaves documents.

Both apps can edit Excel files. They are also compatible with a bluetooth wireless keyboard.

Conclusion

The saying goes that the iPad is a great media consumption device, but not the ideal media creation tool. I agree, at least for now. If you need to do serious word processing, photo manipulation, etc, you’re better off with a traditional computer due to it’s full fledged operating system (with printing and file management) and more capable applications. I suspect that in a year we’ll have vastly more capable iOS for iPad. Perhaps there will even be Office apps from Microsoft.

I can’t proclaim a winner between Documents To Go and Quickoffice. They are both regularly updated with new features. If you plan on editing MS Office files a lot, you might want both. I’m going to continue switching between the two since I can’t decide which is better.  If you have any opinions on these apps or others to write documents on the iPad, let me know.