Software: Remote Potato (Free Access to Your Media Over the Internet)

Remote Potato is a free program that runs on a Windows computer (supports: XP, Vista and Windows 7) that gives you access to your media (e.g. music, pictures, video, etc.) over the Internet.  The program also has remote support for Windows Media Center.

All you need for remote access of your content is an Internet connection and a web browser.  There is even a mobile application for viewing your

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Understanding the Facebook “Find out who views your profile” scam

OpenDNS Blog reports: "Every few weeks there’s a new scam that makes the rounds on Facebook. This week it’s the “Find out who visits your profile,” scam, which we’ve all seen before. The reason it piques my interest this time is the sheer volume of people falling victim. That coupled with the fact that the victims include some of my more tech-savvy Facebook friends made me want to understand

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Software: Handbrake (Free Video Transcoder)

HandBrake is an open-source, multi-platform (e.g. MacOS X, Linux and Windows), video transcoder.  If you never heard of a transcoder, it converts digital media from one format (such as .VOB, .TS and M2TS files) into another format (MPEG-4, H.264, MP3, Vorbis, and mroe)



For more information on the program, check out its web site.
For more information on the video formats this program supports,

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Windows 7: Delete Recent Items from the Jump Lists

People are worried about privacy these days, and sometimes features that are designed for convenience store too much information about us.  If you want to get rid of the recent items displayed in the taskbar jump lists, follow the instructions below:
Right-click the Start button.
Select Properties.
Click the Start Menu tab.
Uncheck the item "Store and display recently opened items in the Start

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Microsoft Security Tools

Microsoft has created a page where they post all their security tools, both free and commercial.  The age and usefulness of some of these tools will vary depending on your environment (e.g. a home vs. an enterprise network). Although, what I really find handy about this page is that all the tools are grouped together in one place.

Below is a brief list of some of the tools that are available for

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Web Site: Building a museum of museums on the web

Imagine being able to see artwork in the greatest museums around the world without leaving your chair. Driven by his passion for art, Amit Sood tells the story of how he developed Art Project to let people do just that.

Links

Google's Art Project

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Microsoft Safety Scanner (Free)

Sometimes you need a second opinion when it comes to the subject of malware (e.g.: virus, worms, spyware, etc.). Although, first and foremost you should be running a real-time malware scanner with up-to-date signatures to protect your home or small business computers.

On those occasions where you think something maybe wrong, then you should use an alternate tool to make sure that your current

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Windows 7: The Power of FSUTIL Command

FSUTIL is a powerful command-line utility that can provide very technical information about your computer's drives, or if utilized incorrectly can cause damage to the file system.
Note: To use this utility, it requires administrative permission on the local system.Below are a few examples of different operations that the command can perform.

Queries volume information
E.g.: fsutil fsinfo

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Windows 7: Advanced Format Disks Update

This topic is a more advanced then I generally discuss in this blog, but I am hoping it might be able to help some people whom might be using this technology.

Microsoft has release an update to improve Advanced Format Disks compatibility in the latest versions of Windows 7 (SP1) and Server 2008 R2 (SP1). The Advanced Format Disk is utilized when the physical media has been formatted with 4,096

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NSA's Best Practices for Keeping Your Home Network Secure

As you might have heard cyber-criminals are getting more sophisticated all the time.  To help protect people from becoming victims of these criminals, the NSA has published a PDF called "Best Practices for Keeping Your Home Network Secure".  The document offers some tips on how to secure your computer (Windows and Mac OS X) and your home network.

If you want a book that offers more in-depth 

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Find the precise location of just about any Wi-Fi router

Here is a slightly disturbing fact about wireless networks. Did you know Google uses its Android mobile operating system to collect Wi-Fi routers GPS location and store them in a public database? You can put in a router's MAC address (e.g. 08:00:69:02:01:FC) and see its precise location on Google Maps using this site (http://samy.pl/androidmap/).
Note: MAC address definition (from Wikipedia):

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