It was back in January of 2008 when Google first released their very own web browser by the name of Chrome, since that time it had only ever been available to people running windows as their operating system. Unfortunately for those of us who run either Mac or Linux as our main operating systems we weren’t able to get in on the action of this new browser. Ever since the launch however Google had said that there were plans for a Mac and Linux based version of the browser which has now arrived.

I downloaded it late last night and thought I would have a quick browse around with it. I almost always use Safari on the Mac which I consider to be a very fast web browser and on par with Firefox, but upon opening up Chrome and using it for a little while you do notice the speed in which web pages load. Speed is always something that we are looking for in a web browser because we all want the fastest load times possible and Chrome certainly doesn’t disappoint here.

As far as appearance goes, if you have used the Windows version of Chrome at all you will notice that it is all very similar but with a more…Mac’ish feel to it, the colour scheme has been adapted to better fit within the OS X environment. Although Google have equipped Chrome with a host of different themes that can be added to it as well to change up the look. It does offer the now expected feature of tabbed browsing, however it does so in a different manner to what we are all used to. As mac users if you remember back to when the beta version of Safari 4 was released the behaviour of the tabs was to sit above the address bar? Well this is the same way that tabs are implemented in Chrome – I really like this way of setting out the tabs as it maximises your viewing area which can be especially valuable if you are on a laptop and it is something that I wish had been kept in Safari.

The other neat thing that you will notice is that you lose the search bar that we have come to expect, it is no longer a separate box to type your search into. Google Chrome integrates the address bar and search box all into one and they call it the Omnibox. Therefore if you know the URL go ahead and type it in, but if your not sure use the same box and do a Google (or other specified search engine) search.

One of the other things that has become standard in all modern browsers is the ability to browse the web in ‘private’ mode, Chrome also has this functionality which they call Incognito. Essentially meaning that there will be no cookies or web history saved from sites you visit while ‘incognito’ this is a very good feature if you are using a public computer and would like to further increase your safety while doing internet banking or shopping. I do however like the rather humorous explanation that Google gives about the Incognito function.

All in all this is a very capable browser and I like it a lot! I’m glad it is finally available on the Mac and Linux platforms for all to utilise. Google Chrome is available for download here: http://www.google.com/chrome

And further information about the browser is available here: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features_mac.html

To start off with here I will explain a little about what a DNS is and will later describe a service to help increase your security on the web and speed up your browsing experience.

DNS stands for Domain Name System, and what does this mean? Well the main purpose of a domain name service is to turn domain names (the address or URL of a website) into something meaningful to humans. Essentially the internet is a massive number of computers which all connect to one another and every computer that has access to the internet has a number the usual format is something like 111.222.3.44. The way you access websites is by telling your computer to go and get information off another computer using a given number. Due to the fact that the internet would be largely unusable to us if we had to remember these numbers each time we wanted to visit a site, we have domain names. each domain name is an easy way of presenting the string of numbers the computers use to talk to each other.

Normally when you type in an internet address you’re computer speaks with your internet service provider who then gets the page your looking for. However services such as OpenDNS allow you to direct your internet traffic through their data centres rather than through that of your own internet service provider. This is achieved by either re-directing at each of the computers on your network or you can tell your router to control this allowing easy set up for all computers on your network.

If for nothing else the benefit of using a service like this enables a good speed boost to your web browsing experience. On some of my tests I noticed that sites were loading around 2 seconds quicker than they previously were through my ISP’s service.

I feel that all households should make use of a service like this in large for the security features that they offer. If you have children it may be of interest to know that you have the ability to specifically blacklist websites that you want to restrict access to. This is often more effective than the built in parental controls on the computer itself becuase it is being controlled by a third party service externally, therefore it is not possible for them to work around this. There are presets provided by OpenDNS which allow you to quickly and very easily filter your web access the presets include:

• None: no restriction to your browsing, you may select this if you’re not using the service for security
• Minimal: protects you against phishing websites and attacks
• Low: protects you against limited adult material & phishing attacks
• Moderate: protects against all adult material & illegal material & previously mentioned items
• High: restricts all adult material, illegal activity, social networking, video sharing, general time wasters plus previously mentioned items.

If you run a business you may find the high level of protection suitable to protect you and your employees from accessing unwanted websites and material. To further add to the offering, if you are so inclined down the big-brother kind of path you can enable stats. This logs all websites that are visited and makes them available for you to view, this can of course be turned on or off.

One of my favourite uses of this service is mainly because I’m lazy, and this is the shortcuts feature. Once you have set this up within the dashboard on your OpenDNS login you simply add a website to the list and give it a shortcut. For example I have it set so that when I type ‘fb’ into my address bar, it will automatically direct me to facebook.com. Pretty handy if you can remember your shortcuts. There is always bookmarks in your browser of course. To add to this is the auto correct feature, this means that if I type facebook.cmo by mistake it recognises this and redirects me to facebook.com instead of giving me a 404 page not found error.

One of the last things that I will mention here for personal users is the ability for the service to redirect when you come accross a site that either no longer exists or you have entered incorrectly and isn’t able to be auto corrected. What happens is that if I am to try and go to fabebook.com, this is obviously spelt wrong but instead of my browser giving me the very annoying 404 page not found error, OpenDNS spits up a page which politely says why you weren’t taken to the page and gives you a list of alternatives or you can do what looks to be a google search.

These are some of the reasons why I feel that this is a service that all homes should be using, and the best part is that for the basic account which gives you all of the things I have mentioned here it is all free! No theres no catches all free. If you’re a business and want some of the more advanced features that this kind of service can provide you do pay a fee. So even if for nothing else but a bit of a speed boost to your browsing head over to OpenDNS.com

Since the arrival of Twitter, the use of URL shorteners has grown incredibly. Just so everyone is aware of what I’m talking about I will explain a little about them here. Due to the fact that twitter restricts all of their tweets to 140 characters or less, it is imperative to get your message into that tweet in as few characters as possible. Therefore when you want to post a link to something you’ve stumbled on around the web, often the link on it’s own gobbles up the 140 characters. This is where the URL shortener  such at bit.ly or tinyurl.com steps in, by creating a shorter version of the link that directs you to the actual site.

This is so convenient and has spread so quickly on the net I think that a lot of people may not be aware of the issues that this technology could cause. Why do I say this? Well with a shortened URL you never know exactly where it is going to take you. In a way it masks the destination that you would end up at. For example if I want to create a short url for this blog’s homepage, the actual URL is www.lukeandmelissah.com but a URL shortener would make it http://bit.ly/xOUfy or something similar. My reason for concern is that if the actual destination that you navigate to has malicious code or something similar on it, you could very easily and possibly without even knowing end up with an infection on your computer!

Take for example the amount of spam email you get, often the links included in the spam appear legitimate, but if you were to click on them or expose what the actual URL is you would see that it isn’t exactly what it claims to be. For this reason I think we all need to be cautious when clicking on these shortened links, in the same way we are cautious about clicking on links in emails. Don’t click on things from unknown sources!!!

I think that the concept of Apple’s Mobile Me is just genius, allowing you to automatically sync all of your emails, contacts, calendar and numerous other settings and preferences with very little work from yourself. However as I already have my email address set up – everyone knows it – I’m not really keen on changing that, nor am I very keen on spending the $120 a year for this subscription when I can get by with my own solutions to the problem for free. In this post I’m going to look at a few things that I have done to create my own ‘kind-of’ mobile me solution.

Email

First and easiest is syncing your email. To do this you’re email provider needs to support what is called IMAP, generally they will tell you to set up your email programs with POP3. The difference here is that POP3 is a system which downloads what is on your email server and stores a copy on your local system – this is excellent if you only use one computer. But throw in your mobile phone and your laptop on top of your desktop computer and you will be getting the same email showing as unread multiple times, and if you delete it on one computer it will still be on the other devices same with your sent emails – frustrating!!.

The beauty of using IMAP based email is that every-time your computer or mobile phone is told to check your mail it will only show you what is currently on the email systems server, so think of it this way: somebody sends you an email > it goes to your email providers central computer > your computer or phone checks to see if there is any mail > it pulls down a copy of this and shows you your mail > all the time keeping a message on the emails providers computers. If you make a change such as delete or move it to another folder the action is mimicked on the email systems server. Therefore the next time one of your other devices checks for new mail it will see exactly what is on the email server and refresh all of your devices.

Setting up an IMAP email is hard to document because every internet/email service provider is set up a different way therefore there isn’t one set way to do this, generally speaking by navigating through your suppliers support pages and by using google to search you will generally be able to find a way to set this up. If your primary email is done through a service like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc this makes it easier because by nature these are already an IMAP way of managing your email just navigate to their websites and they will give you details on how to set this up for your email program.

Files

Mobile Me provides a service called iDisk, which is like your own portion of disk space on Apples servers. This means it appears as a local disk on your computers however it can be accessed by any computer you give access to or via the web. The nice thing about this is that if you work between multiple computers you know just what it is like to go out one day and have forgotten to copy the file across. My solution to this was to use a service called Dropbox. I have blogged about this previously so won’t go into too much depth, but for free with this service you get 2GB worth of space which I find is adequate for files and some pictures. You can pay for a larger disk space if you want to. This service provides the same function that I mentioned earlier about providing an online central place to store files, but the beauty of dropbox is that whatever you put in your dropbox folder on one computer is automatically synced up to the dropbox server and back down to any other computer that you have installed dropbox on!

Calendar

Another great feature of Mobile Me is the ability to synchronize your calendars across different machines and you’re iPhones, Mobile Me does a really great job of this by pushing any changes made up to their servers and back down to your other devices to be updated. There is one great way to achieve this for free and this is with Google Calendar.

Once you have a google account you have full access to this feature for free, the process is fairly simple however I won’t discuss it here for the fact that it is so in-depth, however if this interests you check out the links posted below to find out how to set this up. Below are the links to platforms and programs it is available with:

• Click here for links to set up Calendar
• Works with Mozilla Sunbird
• Apple iCal & iPhone
• Microsoft Outlook
• Windows Mobile
• Blackberry

Contacts

Google really provides so many great services at no charge and due to the nature of how your contacts with Google are managed – that is in the ‘cloud’, it allows them to offer this free synchronizing services for contacts as well. So like with the Calendar when you add or update a contact on your computer or phone, it will update this on every device enabled to do so. Again the explanation of how to do this is to in depth for me to cover here but if you would like to enable this as well check out the link here > Google Sync Services

There is one thing that continues to irritate me, especially given the day and age we live in and the technology we all have available to us, it’s the fact that so many businesses maintain ignorant to the benefits of having a presence on the web.

I come accross it all the time, a big portion of where I do my information search before making a purchase decision is on the Internet. Because of this I find it really frustrating when businesses either have absolutely no presence on the web or they have a very poor website with so little information they needn’t have bothered.

I really feel that as the younger generations such as Gen Y and the up and coming Gen Z’s become more and more prominent in the market place if businesses want to keep attracting these kind of people they will have to get their act together. I understand that to have a fully fledged website is sometimes very expensive if you don’t have the knowledge of how to build one yourself, but what about all of these great free alternatives?!? Twitter, Facebook or any free kind of blogging software, or very inexpensive solutions like Squarespace which allow you to easily build very pro looking pages with very little hassle!

It just dumbfounds me that these business owners or managers are willing to let opportunities just go past and miss out on making that extra all important dollar just because they couldn’t be bothered to spend a little time in building a place for themselves on the internet.

The password that we key into our email, instant messenger’s, bank websites and online accounts are often the only thing protecting our (for the most part) very personal and private data whether it is as simple as our address, or as potentially dangerous as our credit cards, tax file numbers and so on. So it is very important that we make this line of defence as hard for a hacker to crack as possible.

In this post I will have a look at a few simple things that you can do to really strengthen your passwords. A lot of the hints and tips that are put out there involve you creating passwords that are so hard to remember you just don’t worry about creating stronger passwords anymore. Now the first thing that I will state and it is pretty common knowledge, that your password shouldn’t ever be a dictionary word! In fact don’t even let it be a string of letters – these passwords that contain only letters are very easy to break.

My next tip here is something very simple but incredibly effective, something that I have put into all of my passwords and I find it an easy way to remember a rather ‘complex’ password. My thought here is to take something that you can easily remember, it may even be your current (dictionary word) password. For the purpose of this exercise lets use the word password as our password.

You can make this incredibly weak password infinitely more secure by simply replacing certain characters with symbols on your keyboard that look the same as the letters in the current word. These symbols may be as simple as ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) < > ?.

After substituting some of the letters with these symbols we may have a password that looks like this: p@s$word

Now because we have broken up the dictionary word (yes I know it still contains a dictionary word but will look at this next) by putting in symbols it would take a significantly bigger effort for the hacker to break this, while remaining easy for you to remember because it still looks and nearly reads the same as the actual word.

Now lets make this a little more secure! Don’t forget about the numbers on your keyboard either, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 are also good to be substituted or put into a password to make it harder to break. After substituting again we might have a password that looks like this: p@5$w0rd. Notice I replaced the first s with 5 and the o with a zero. To read and remember it is almost the same as the original but for someone to try and guess or use hacking software it is almost impossible.

Do yourself a favour and change your passwords to include some of these tips today! This will significantly improve your peace of mind while using the net and protect all of that important data that is out there.

I think that the invention of  wireless broadband dongles is one of the greatest things to come to broadband internet access in the last few years, mainly because it allows you to get online anywhere you have 3G mobile phone coverage and on top of this it allows people who only have one computer in the home the freedom of doing away with landlines and DSL at home.

I do however have a bit of an issue with the phone companies over these devices. While the plans for them are fine if this is your only method of access to the internet, I think it is a terrible ripoff if you allready have your home broadband and possibly your mobile phone with that carrier as well. If you are anything like us we already have the highest broadband plan our service provider allows which costs us over $100 a month, and we also both have our phones with the same carrier thats almost another $100 a month there as well. I feel that it is pointless paying another $50 dollars a month over two years or having an even more expensive pre-paid arrangement just to allow you to access the web anywhere you go.

What I would like to see mobile carriers do is bundle their products, what would be so wrong with us paying a little extra each month say $10-$20 to have a dongle that is linked to our home broadband account. Allowing us to utilise the data allowance we have  at home, anywhere in the country. Rather than having another whole contract for a separate device giving us an extra 1-5 gig’s of data,  which we allready get (and often don’t use) in our home broadband anyway.

I understand that there are probably extra costs associated with providing broadband via 3G but I think that it makes good sense, not only that but it would give the company who adopts it a good marketing and competitive advantage over the competitors in the industry.

Do you have any thoughts on this topic? If so please feel free to leave a comment below!

RSS Feeds have been around for quite some time now, but believe it or not I have only just figured out what they are all about. I must admit I never really researched into them too much, and I got the idea that it’s a way for you to view updates from certain websites.

For those of you, like me who are unsure of what RSS is all about here’s a rough idea. Modern web browsers all support RSS, and if the website is set up to provide RSS you will notice a little symbol showing this, for Safari it is in the left hand side of the address bar. If you click on this link it will open up a fairly bland looking page with all of that websites posts.

Ok so this isn’t too exciting and well if that was it’s only purpose it wouldn’t really be very significant and this is as far as I had thought to look into RSS until now. Now I haven’t had the chance to look into this on Windows because I live in a Mac filled house, but I gather it would be a similar situation for PC’s. Essentially the great thing about RSS is that it enables you to gather blog post updates and website posts all in one place – your email client or an RSS Reader.

I just love the idea of being able to open up you mail program and as your email downloads, so does all of the new posts on your favourite blogs and websites. Essentially this means that all you have to do is set up you RSS Reader to catch your site of interest and viola you will no longer need to bookmark/remember/google all of your favourite websites and spend all that time navigating around the web just to catch up on all your internet news for the day. After all isn’t computing all about making our lives easier?

Want to get your RSS feeds underway? Check out these tools:

NetNewsWire – For Mac

FeedDemon – For Windows

For mac you can also use Mail or on Windows you can use Outlook 2007. Otherwise I would try Googling RSS Reader to find one that suits you best.

It is kind of funny how Twitter works, its a great medium for communicating with friends any where in the world as well as finding new friends and it was because of Twitter that I thought I would do this follow up post to my previous one. In fact its because of Twitter that I found out about this:

Cali Lewis from Geekbrief.tv posted a tweet the other day to inform everybody about a series of blog posts she is going to do called the 12 Days of Twitter. Click on that link to take you there. I am interested to see what she posts as I have been using Twitter for some time now but I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m overly proficient in using it, Cali however is. So I thought it would be a good opportunity for all you non-believers/don’t understanders to check out her tips and see if we can learn a little more about it! Sometimes I feel a little out of the twitter loop with all the @ replies and DM’s etc so it will prove useful.

I have been a twitter user for some time now and must admit, it took me a while to understand what it was all about. I think that I have it all under control now and use it fluently. There have been stats around showing that some mad percentage of new Twitter users default and never use the service again.

My thoughts on this are that Facebook is easy to determine what you are to do, sign up find people you know, add them as friends participate in the interactive games etc. Facebook is all about interacting with people that you already know and have made some form of relationship with at another point in time.

This is where Twitter differs, it isn’t completely obvious at first what your supposed to do. It isn’t as easy to find people, and I feel that this is kind-of the point. Now yes it is a great medium for following people that you already know and keeping in touch and communicating but Twitter to me is all about finding new friends, as well as it rapidly becoming almost like a news service. Because of it’s instantaneous nature you can get news from anywhere in the world as it is happening. I also feel that to really make the most of this service you need to have access to it on the go say on your mobile phone because of it’s live and up to the second nature if you don’t then by the time you sit down at your computer of the evening then of course it’s not going to make any sense.

I read a blog post by a guy of the name Dave Moyer you can read it here: http://davemoyer.org/2009/05/23/dont-spout-nothingness-nobody-cares/ and I have to say I think that it’s a pretty accurate summary of the whole situation!

So I guess what I’m saying is, to everybody out there who has signed up for Twitter and then said to me ‘I don’t get it, it’s so lame’, well do you want a service like this, are you willing to participate in the online community that is Twitter and are you willing to give it some time to learn? If not then don’t whine at us about how you don’t get it.