The Novice’s Guide to the Internet and Computing pt.5

Different rules apply to different browsers and nations. I can only speak from personal experience. I use proxies for two reasons, by passing web filters, and getting around bans from forums I’ve trolled. Everything you do on the Internet leaves little clues behind that all point vaguely in your direction. Every search shows your interest or affliction, every website leaves your filthy foot prints on it’s white carpet, everywhere you go you leave a steaming lump of offal called an IP address.

“Trolling” is what fishermen do when they allow their bait to trail behind the moving boat until some gullible fish takes the bait.

Now most people have a dynamic IP and have no real reason to use a proxy except to cover their illegal activities. At least that’s the way it was 10 or so years ago before everyone got broadband. Now you still have a dynamic IP more than likely, but it’s probably only apt to change about once a month or sometimes once every three months like mine is. Now there are still very few real reasons to use a proxy for the average user, but never-the-less I’ll cover some real ones.

Chances are good that if you work at a company that requires it’s employees to use a computer to do menial tasks that require accessing a webpage and you tried to go to your favorite sites instead, you’ve encountered something similar to the Barracuda web filter. Web filters are like firewalls and in many cases are firewalls that keep you from going on MySpace and Facebook during work hours. The things these filters block are normally updated by one giant list at some cold server room with the additional list kept by your System Administrator. Now your System Administrator seems like a cool guy on the smoke breaks, but he probably won’t unban Facebook or MySpace so you can network instead of doing menial tasks. That’s where a simple web proxy comes into play.

I would advise you of my super secret web proxies, but I don’t want my enormous fanbase going and getting my proxies blocked, so just do a search for “web proxy” on google or Altavista or whatever you are using these days. Just don’t be upset when they release your IP to the Feds with all your search history exposed for the world to see. That’s right, I think. try out the new thing! IXQUICK!

IxQuick is a foreigner’s anonymous metasearch engine. It doesn’t store IP addresses even on anonymous users.

Your IP address is linked to you by your ISP and can (normally with a warrant) be used to find you!

Web proxies are well and good enough on their own, but what I really want you to know about is real proxy use. I would like to recommend portable Tor for this guide as it’s already set up, can be carried around on a thumbdrive and uses the Tor network to proxify you. Tor by itself is complicated enough for me not to want to explain it at all, but rest assured you can find plenty of info about it on their download site.

Go to WhatismyIP.com and it will inform you of your IP of course.

I am going to assume you are using my browser of choice, Firefox, for the rest of this tutorial, but just understand that you set up proxy values in Internet Explorer through “Tools”>”Internet Options”>”Connections”>”Lan Settings”.

Open up Firefox, click on “Tools”>”Options” then click on the tabs (it may be under “general” or “advanced” depending on the version) until you see “Connection Settings”. Click on the “Connection Settings” button and you should see a few settings to choose from. 1. Direct Connection to the Internet 2. Auto-Detect proxy Settings for this Network and the real winner 3. Manual Proxy Configuration.

Proxy setup in firefox

Select the third option and the options beneath will light up and become editable. In the first box labeled “HTTP Proxy:” Enter in 127.0.0.1 and port 8118 then hit “OK” Now run Portable Tor. Once portable Tor is connected and running try going to WhatismyIP.com again and see the difference. If it’s still the same than something went wrong, go back and try again. When you get tired of browsing through Tor you can go back into the settings again and change the connection back to number 1. Direct Connection to the Internet and click OK again. You will now be back to normal.

There are thousands of proxies available online some free, some pay. I won’t list any here, but a quick search on goo…er...Ixquick.com should get you the info you want right away. All you need to use the public proxies is change the 127.0.0.1 with their IP address and change the port with their port number. When you see their IP it may be listed as something like “64.15.0.0:80” well the IP is the 64.15.0.0 and the port is the 80. That’s what the “:” designates. The default proxy port is 8080 port 80 is the default HTTP port, or the one which websites are served to and through.

Now my Internet ninjas, go forth and be peaceful. try not to do anything that you need a proxy to hide behind and try not to get fired for using the Internet for personal reasons. One more good idea is not to access anything personal through a proxy, you never know who runs the proxy after all.

Be sure to check out parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of this series.

The Novice’s Guide to the Internet and Computing pt. 4

Friday night 7:30. Boredom has begun to set in because you have nothing to do since you are off of work (because you love your job so much). How will you kill the miserable 48 hours between working and working? Why, watching movies of course! The problem with that is that you have to go to a movie or a video store or you can try the crap shoot that is finding something worth watching on TV. Good thing the Internet is here to save the day once again.

Somewhere in the gray outskirts between Internet piracy and youtube lies an area where copyrighted movies and television shows are streamed 24 hours a day or on demand. That area is normally called China and God bless the Chinese for streaming videos across the world so I can watch movies that are still in theaters from the comfort of my own home.

The easiest way to watch these movies is to find a webpage that has them available for viewing. My favorite two are Watch-Movies.net and Joox.net. All you need is the proper video plugins in your browser and they will play. I have to warn you though, that flashy site MegaVideo has begun restricting their playing time making most movies unwatchable unless you subscribe to their premium service.

The next way and as of this writing the only other way I know to watch this kind of stuff is using a software download. I use Veoh, but I have used Miro in the past. Winamp also has a pretty decent selection of streaming content to watch. A quick google search for “Free Internet TV” will bring up some results for more players and sites. Just be wary of Spyware and Adware.

I started using a certain pay music download service recently and it’s sparked an enormous interest in preserving the melodies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries so called “Pre-Blues” music. It’s also allowed me to expand my music collection, with the help of certain softwares that reproduce the audio, but not all that extra data that bulks out the WMA or MP3 and effectively gives them an expiration date. Sometimes you want more than just the music of the artists that interest you. Sometimes you want video to go along with that audio.

I am a fan of the Holy Modal Rounders. Try finding them on Youtube and you will find some stuff from the rockumentry “Bound to Lose”. I’m not interested in that though as most of it is modern. I want the gritty scathing video of them performing back in the 60’s. Well I didn’t chance upon that so much as them performing with another Revival Folk band, whose name escapes me at the moment. I wanted that video though. I needed to put it in my “Holy Modal Rounders” folder, so that I can always go back and watch it as long as I keep it backed up.

I found this amazingly easy to use program called VDownloader, that works as a search engine of some of the more notable video sites like Youtube. You type in what you are looking for “Holy Modal Rounders” for example, and it returns a list of 16 year olds trying to play “Boobs-A-Lot”, you click on the video to watch it, or you can just download it to your hard drive as if it was meant to be. It allows you to que up files so you can moderate how much bandwidth it will consume.

I hope this was as informational for you as it was entertaining for me to write up. Go forth and watch movies with all the benefits of pirating them, without actually pirating them at all. Your quality may vary…GREATLY.

Be sure to check out parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series.

Coming soon: A mega XLS linking to tons of freeware across the web.

The Novice’s Guide to Computing and the Internet pt.3

Every traveler needs their essentials when traveling in a strange land and the Internet is no exception. There are all kinds of programs and all kinds of files that a “newb” might not be aware of even when the rest of the population knows them so well they can barely exist without them. These are going to be the most commonly needed applications that no one has installed for you or your browser shrugged it’s shoulders at.
Compressed files serve an incredible niche in the virtual world. Think of them as little suitcases crammed as tightly full of clothes as they can be, while 7zip is the fat lady sitting on top forcing the lid to close. Not only does compression put all those “clothes” in the case, but it actually manages to fold them in such a way as to make them take up less space, so now you have more clothing(data) taking up less space and all in one neat little package. Organize your backups, unclutter your hard drive, increase upload speeds, decrease download times. Use compression!
I mention 7zip above, but it is by no means the only compression software out there, but it is one of the best. Another good one to try if you can handle the nag screen is WinRAR which in it’s defense I still use through the context menu on my 64bit XP machine and have used it for years with no complaints.

What’s a “Context menu”? It’s the menu that pops up when you right-click on a file.

7zip can unpack 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR,  ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z files, but it can only compress in the most convenient formats of 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR. I happen to like compressing to RAR myself, so I wouldn’t mind having WinRAR on any of my boxes. WinRAR only compresses to RAR and ZIP and can unpack CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ and TAR.GZ, BZ2 and TAR.BZ2, ACE, UUE, JAR (Java Archive), ISO (ISO9660 – CD image),7Z, Z (Unix compress).

A compressed file is normally called an “archive”

Spend any reasonable amount of time on the Internet and eventually you will come across at least one of these file types, more than likely a RAR, ZIP or 7z file as they are the most common compressions with Windows. Windows XP and newer can actually handle .ZIP on it’s own.
Ok. Ok, so you just downloaded a fresh “Movie.7z” and used one of the programs listed above to extract it and you double-click on the little “movie.avi” file and super huge and bulky Windows Media Player comes plopping and plodding up on your screen 35 seconds later. It tries to load the movie, but no avail. It needs your permission to get some codec or something. ehhh….
Go and get a real media player for your machine. I use 3 different ones. KM Player, Winamp and Gom All three are highly customizable, easy to use and between KM Player and Gom you should be able to play any video that can be thrown at you, if it’s even remotely playable. Winamp is dependant on codec packs generally, but KM Player will install it’s codecs for Winamp to use if you let it. Winamp is also a pretty awesome MP3 player in it’s own right. If you combine it with something like DFX the sound is simply amazing. Maybe you like Windows Media Player 11 or 12 or10 or whatever number it is now. Try out the Combined Community Codec Pack to get your videos playing, but please for the sake of your computer at least try out Media Player Classic.

So now you can make compressed files and play video files on your computer using some of the better media players but what if you want your own DVDs to be backed up on your computer? Well that’s not a problem if you followed along with my 2nd guide.
Your going to need a DVD or CD that you want to make the image from, a DVD-ROM and that amazing little piece of software ImgBurn. Place your disk in your disk drive and open ImgBurn. This time you will want to pick “Create an Image from a Disc”, pick the disk drive as the source and then make sure the destination is where you want it to be. Hit the little icons at the bottom and blammo you have an image of your disc a little while later.
You now have the knowledge available to you to create a backup of your personal movie or music collection, bit for bit, compress them to an archive. Extract them from the archive using the context menu and burn the Image file back onto a blank disk or mount them using Daemon tools.

Please make sure to read Parts 1 and 2 of this series.

The Novice’s Guide to Computing and the Internet Part 2.

A very common issue for a novice computer user is coming across a file and having no idea what it is or how to use it. I remember the first time I saw an image file and how much of a loop it threw me for. I feel it’s important to get a good explanation of what a disc image is and exactly how it’s used and why it’s used. A Disc image is like a snapshot of the disc in it’s current state. Every blank spot, bad sector and data sector is mapped out exactly as it is on the disc the original image came from enabling you to make a perfect duplicate.

There are plenty of reasons to have image files on hand. Backups are a very common use of disc imaging, but creating a disc image is something to tackle later on. First let’s figure out some of the more common image types and learn to burn them to disc and even mount them in virtual drives.There are tons of different programs used to make images of discs, but more than likely you will see either .ISO or .BIN .CUE as they are fairly universal standards.

Let’s begin with a hypothetical situation. You have had a home video DVD sent to you through email as a disc image file. The file is called “Family_reunion.ISO” and you would like to watch it, but….What do you do with this .ISO? Well you probably want to watch this one in the DVD player out in the living room so it would make sense to burn it to an actual DVD, especially since Cousin Pete added in all the fancy menus and such to make it easier to navigate. You’re going to need a DVD burner first off and second a DVD player that will play the home made DVD, not all of them will. Third you need a decent burning software that can handle image burning. I suggest ImgBurn , it’s free, it’s simple and it get’s the job done.

Load your blank into the DVD burner on your PC, load up Imgburn, pick “write image file to disc” choose the source, which in this example is “Family_reunion.ISO” and click the thing at the bottom that looks like a CD on a piece of paper with an arrow pointing toward a CD by itself. A few minutes later you should have a complete new DVD with all the video and menus Cousin Pete put on the image to begin with.

Now let’s skip the hypothetical and get straight to the point. You have an .ISO file and don’t want to burn a disc, but want to run it anyway. Go and download Daemon tools and install it being mindful of any extra packaged toolbars and home page changes. I use Firefox so I let Daemon’s homepage stay on my copy of Internet Explorer. Once installed you should see a little lightning bolt icon in your task bar. Right click on that icon and choose “mount image” then pick the location of your image and bam. You have a DVD or CD in the drive. Open “My Computer” and double-click the new drive. It should function as a normal disk drive would. You’ll notice an increased load on your hard drive though.

Most images are handled in the same way as .ISO images are handled, but .BIN and .CUE files are a little different. .CUE is like a map to different locations on the disk, while .BIN is the disc itself. Now you will mount the .CUE files and also use them to burn images to disc.

While this tutorial won’t work for every instance it should work in at least 90%. A few more of the commonly encountered image files along with the program that created them follow in this handy list from Wikipedia:

Alcohol 120%	.mds
CloneCD	.ccd
CloneDVD	.dvd
CDRWIN	.cue
Daemon Tools	.sav
DiscJuggler	.cdi
MagicISO	.uif
Nero Burning ROM	.nrg
Power ISO	.daa

Be sure to check out part 1 of  The Novice guide to internet and computing .

The Freeware Update

LogMeIn is a secure Remote Access program that allows you to access and control a seperate computer as if you were sitting in front of it.
Hamachi is a secure VPN that is very easy to setup and takes the guess work out of network games or games across the internet.
Openoffice.org is a full Open Source replacement for Microsoft Office.
Google Docs is a freeware replacement for Microsoft Office, I have only used the spreadsheet tool and it worked well enough for what I wanted to do.
Miranda is a very lite messenger. It supports all the major Messenger services, but can be a bit limited in some ways.
NetStumbler is a great app for keeping track of Wifi access points. It can use GPS to keep track of the exact coordinates of Access point locations so they can be imported to navigational software for easy reference.
Gimp is an open source image editor that is on par with Photoshop with just as big of a learning curve, which is why I still use Photoshop.
Picasa is another program from Google that allows you to do simple editing and effects to your images and also serves as a photo organizer.
Sketchup is a 3d modeling program from Google.
Artrage Starter Edition is the free version of a painting simulator. I have heard fantastic reviews of Artrage, but never used it myself.
Sygate Personal Firewall is the best freeware firewall around. I’m not sure how much has changed since Symantec took over.

Freeware my PC can’t live without

Back around 2001 I heard about this newer and up and coming garbage that would destroy my internet bandwidth and consume my system resources. That garbage was called spyware. I went with the opinion of a friend and downloaded a free program called Adaware and it cleaned my pc of a few infections. That’s when my obsession started with spyware. I would rather have 12 variants of virii on my PC than 1 piece of spyware. Why? People who write virii do it because they enjoy the challenge and know what they are doing. People who write spyware do it because it’s their job and like a lot of people out there, they really don’t like their jobs. That’s where the problem with spyware begins. Poor coding, memory leaks and hogging your bandwidth all lead to unstable and downright poor performance from your machine.

I already covered Adaware, which is considered the king of spyware removal software. If Adaware is king, then Spybot S&D (the S&D stands for search and destroy) is the uncontested queen of spyware removal. When used in combination they will slaughter the spyware and have your PC running almost like new again.

An all in one solution, still for free, is the web based scanner that searches for all types of malware and virii and that is Trendmicro’s Housecall. Trendmicro’s Housecall will find most of the bad applications and can clean them it also notifies you of critical updates that you may be missing that could represent serious security issues.

Sometimes you need to know things your system specs or task manager just can’t tell you. I like to use a program called CPU-Z to tell me the little interesting details that you can’t just look at with your base Windows applications.

The format for documents I despise the most is .PDF. It’s actually not the format I hate it’s the standard program for opening and reading those documents, Adobe Acrobat. I found a much faster .PDF reader that’s also much smaller it’s called Foxit reader (if you download it get the .exe with out the toolbar). It is very responsive and opens about 4 times faster than Adobe does.

You may have noticed that the new version of Internet Explorer has changed quite a bit from the old version. The changes they have made have been highly influenced by Mozilla’s Firefox. I’ve been using Firefox for about 4 years now and have never looked back. It’s an open source browser that you can customize through plug-ins and themes to get just about anything you want. It has less security flaws than I.E., but doesn’t start quite as fast. I am willing to make that sacrifice though. In fact I removed all of the components of I.E. to free up more system resources and haven’t missed it at all.

Since you can’t go to Windows update with Firefox and I leave the auto update feature turned off, I couldn’t update windows for a long time. I didn’t really need too anyway, but while looking for more security features for my laptop I ran across a website called Windiz Update that acts as a backdoor to the Windows update site and allows those people who don’t use I.E. to update manually. There is no Genuine Validation check or any of the other red tape Windows Update imposes.

Email is a major part of most people’s online time. Some folks use a free service and some use the one there ISP or web servers provide. Assuming you have the option of POP mail I have a few smaller freeware options you can try. The smallest application that I’m familiar with is ReachaMail. It’s small enough to run on most USB thumbdrives and does a fine job of it as well. A more feature rich alternative would be another Mozilla product, Thunderbird. Thunderbird
has all of the features of Outlook Express, but like Firefox, has less security flaws and a slightly faster core. The transition from Outlook to Thunderbird is pretty easy since you can import your settings from Outlook over in one click.

Freeing up disk space might be the first thing people do when their system starts to get that bogged down feeling. Ccleaner is a great system cleanup utility that seems tons quicker than the Disk Cleanup feature of Windows. Another great cleaner is PC decrapifier, but use caution, this program is designed to remove the preinstalled software from PC manufacturers, specifically Dell, and may remove something you use.

Any computer you buy these days just wouldn’t be complete with out a CD burner of some sort. You can use the one that is provided for you or get a real full featured burning software like Nero or you could go another route and try out one of the great full featured freeware burner like CDburnerXP. CDburnerXP can burn data, audio and ISO compilations all with a fairly easy learning curve.

I download a lot of files and normally they are compressed in a .RAR file. I’m not sure if they invented the .RAR format, but WinRAR is still one of the best archivers available. This isn’t technically freeware, but it is shareware with a “nag screen”. I avoid the “nag screen” by right clicking on the archives I want to uncompress and choosing “Extract to [folder name goes here]” if you want to try something a little different and perhaps smaller you can try 7zip. Either way you can’t lose.

Mp3s and video are another thing most people use their PC for. You need a good reliable player. I use VLC and it works like a champ. I also have WinampWinamp you can make playlists of your MP3s, listen to internet radio and watch internet T.V. (if you install Winamp try not to install the 50 free MP3s thing that comes with it and avoid any toolbars they offer). Videos won’t play right if you don’t have the right codec for the different formats. VLC claims to be able to play any video you throw at it, but I somehow doubt this claim, but if you go and download the Defiler pack you should have no issues playing any video. Realplayer and quicktime videos may be the exception. Realplayer is bloated and generally slow, as is Quicktime, the good news is they have alternatives to both available here and here respectively.

Another good MP3 player is called Foobar and uses very little system resources.

Sometimes you will come across a .ISO file or some other variant of a disc image.
you can either use a burner like CDburnerXP to burn it to a disc or use a handy tool like Daemon Tools to mount this .ISO to a virtual drive. This will allow the .ISO to act just like a real disc is in the drive.

Ok so I said that I download a lot of files. Where do I download them from and how? Well I won’t go into all of it, but if you ever come across a torrent file you would like to download the way to do it is to use µtorrent. That symbol apparently means micro, most people just call it Utorrent. Contrary to popular belief, not all file sharing is illegal and torrent files are the common way to share files now. Here
is a site you can try µtorrent on. Try a search on Google for “legal torrents” for more, but NEVER PAY MONEY for a site that allows you to download torrents. I’ve seen plenty of sites that make you pay to download torrents and just redirect you to the illegal download sites once you pay them.

guide for tweaking XP

I’ve mentioned this before, but feel like I should mention it again the virtual NES, is a java Nintendo Emulator that works in your browser and has all of the games already there to play.

I-am-Bored.com is a great site with interesting videos, images, links to blogs and flash games.

Something Awful is a comedy website with a free to browse forum and lots of funny photoshops.

Ok enough of that stuff, stare at the four dots in the following image for 30 seconds then stare at a white wall or ceiling and blink a couple of times.

All right that’s it for now. Thanks for reading.