Basic Tech Tips

Since I am a programmer and I spend all day dealing with computers, I can at least share a few things that work for me.

News Reader

If you like to keep up with your favorite blogs you need to use a news reader. News readers function similar to email; when a new entry is posted on a blog the reader will find it and show that blog as having unread entries. Almost all blogs have a reader feed of some type, usually RSS or Atom. You can use desktop based readers like Feed Demon or web based readers like Google Reader or NewsGator Online. I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird for both email and news but I’ll probably start trying out web based versions soon.

Browser

For security reasons I strongly recommend using one of the latest browsers: FireFox, Opera, or IE 7 (if you must). I use FireFox over Opera because of the extensions. I love the tabbed browsing and the fact that text resizing just works; simply hit “Ctrl” and “+” to enlarge the text on any page. The find feature in FireFox is much friendlier too. I have no trust left in IE. Version 7 is a nice browser but the fact that Microsoft left the world out to dry with version 6 until FireFox forced their hand was irresponsible beyond belief.

Calendar

Airset has worked amazingly well for me. The key features are groups and desktop sync. I have a group calendar for the family, church, work, extended family, as well as my personal one. This is great for keeping everything straight and organized but still in one place. The desktop sync is important to me because I use a Palm, but not very often. So the ability to change things online or on the palm and then sync it up has really enabled me to finally use a calendar effectively.

Personal Firewall

I’ve tested a ton of personal or desktop firewalls. In fact at one point it was my job to see what firewalls were capable of stopping a “firewall jumping” product we were creating. Anyway I’ve been using Comodo and highly recommend it; it works well and it’s free (even for commercial use). It’s a bit annoying until it’s trained but after that it works great. One of it’s best features is for those that travel. Whenever you connect to a new network it asks what level of visibility you need to have on that network. This is handy because hotel and airport networks are among the most dangerous and all you’re trying to do is surf the web or grab some email; not find all the computers, printers, servers, or whatever.