Internet

Free Online Games

Ori­si­nal - Gor­geous Flash ani­ma­tion, per­fect for kids

Web Sudoku- Are you addic­ted to sudoku? Then you’ll love Web Sudoku, the place for a new sudoku puzzle every day.

Games.com – Lots of free Online games Like Puzz­les, Cards, Spots, Arcade and More.

1980 Games- My favo­rite – I love Pac­Man! Take a walk down the 1980’s memory lane with 1980 Games, a site dedi­ca­ted to the great 1980’s clas­sic video games.

Minic­lip Games- This is where you’ll find Runes­cape, Heli Attack, and more free Web game goodies

MSN Games- The nume­rous multi-player games that are avai­la­ble encou­rage a sense of com­mu­nity as pla­yers inte­ract in online game rooms or lob­bies, while pla­ying games using Win­dows Live Mes­sen­ger, and while on their cell pho­nes when pla­ying Win­dows Mobile ver­sions of the games.

Hallo­ween Games Online- Any­time is the right time for a spooky Hallo­ween game.

Fan­tasy Sports- Get your fan­tasy sports game on.

Teagames.com is a great place to find good, free multi-player games, as well as lots of extreme sports free web games.

Pop­Cap Games should carry a war­ning label, because these free web games are highly addictive.

AddictingGames.com should not be visi­ted if you have any work to do. You’ll find games here ran­ging from Mayhem in the Skies to Ulti­mate Field Goal Kicking.

c64s.com -  You can play all sorts of free Com­mo­dore 64 games at c64s.com, inc­lu­ding Com­mando, Bub­ble Bob­ble, and Bruce Lee.

Crazy­Mon­key Games – Flash based games, a lot to choose from

Armor Games – More Flash games.

Thanks to Tech­no­buzz for star­ting the list.  if you know of any, please add to the comments.

Child Safe Searches

In the ever expan­ding inte­gra­tion of the Inter­net and kids lives, fil­te­ring out non age appro­priate infor­ma­tion from searches is often over­loo­ked by parents.

Goo­gle did address this a while back with the Safe Search option.  This, I must admit, is not one of their bet­ter imple­men­ta­tions.  With two mouse clicks, I can turn this fea­ture off.

Enter DuckDuckGo.com.

Duck Duck Go is a new search engine with less gar­bage and bet­ter results. With less clic­king for­ward and back bet­ween results, it is for anyone who wants to get infor­ma­tion faster.

One of the first fea­tu­res I found when I visi­ted their page was the abi­lity to lock Safe Search on.  They report that once it is clic­ked it can not be remo­ved.  I can not gua­ran­tee this as true, but I did do a few things that a young kid might do and sure enough it stuck with it.

Right on the main search page you have the abi­lity to focus your search bet­ween stan­dard search, infor­ma­tion sites, and shop­ping sites.  That can really help limit the results for com­mon terms.

Some of the other fea­tu­res inc­lude: Detec­tion of cal­cu­la­tions, phone, trac­king, car #s; zip, book, pro­duct codes; street and IP addres­ses, Cate­gory pages, and Key­board shortcuts.

Will you get as many results as you do with your big search engi­nes like Goo­gle or Bing?  Most defi­ni­tely not.  But for child safe, tar­ge­ted searches this is a good search engine the whole family can use.

My own son has star­ted to use it and has been very happy with the abi­lity to search just like mommy and daddy.  We on the other hand don’t have to worry about what he will find with an inno­cent search.

Find drivers for unknown devices

Have you ever been given a com­pu­ter, or bought an old fixer upper PC that didn’t have all the discs or infor­ma­tion for the components?

I know this is frus­tra­ting since I too have had this pro­blem.  Espe­cially when it invol­ves key equip­ment (Net­work card).  There is nothing more irri­ta­ting then loo­king at your device list and seeing the yellow ques­tion mark.  Well tech­ni­cians, as with almost everything com­pu­ter rela­ted, there is a site setup to help with this.  PCIDatabase.com

So how does this work?

You will want to go to the ques­tion mark in the device mana­ger and right click on the entry (there maybe more then one on a rei­mage or a cus­tom built machine).  For those that may not be fami­liar on how to get to the device mana­ger here are some sim­ple steps.  Find the My Com­pu­ter icon on your desk­top (upper left by default).  You will want to Right click on the icon and you will get a menu like this:

After you left click on the pro­per­ties entry a new win­dow will pop up:
If you do not have the tab shown, you will want to click on the Hard­ware tab.  Once here, click on the device mana­ger and you will see a list of ins­ta­lled devi­ces.  You will scroll down for the yellow ques­tion mark.  In my exam­ple there are none, but I am sure you will find them rather quickly.

Read more…

Great Tutorials

So in my daily stum­bles today I came across this web­site: In Pic­tu­res: Online Com­pu­ter Tuto­rials.

Now this is the type of site for me.  IT Pro­fes­sio­nals could type docu­ments all day long that explain step by step how to do something in your com­mon appli­ca­tions, the pro­blem is, do peo­ple want to read them.  In my expe­rience, having typed a lot of user and tech­ni­cian docu­ments, the ans­wer is no.

Why?  Well they are dry, boring, and they take to long.

In Pic­tu­res is a great idea.  Ins­tead of typing out step by step, they uti­lize screen shots.  Not the small ones that nor­mally are attached to trai­ning docu­ments, but good sized so that you can read the information.

With topics inc­lu­ding MS Office 2003 and 2007 pro­ducts, Open Office, HTML/CSS, and Web pro­gram­ming, you will be able to find a lot of good information.

How Fast is your Internet Connection

I have com­pi­led a few links for you to use to test your broad­band speed.  I do this once or twice a week.

Try these links:

• http://www.speed.io
• http://speedtest.net - This one has a lot of nice options, inc­lu­ding tes­ting sites around the world.
• http://reviews.cnet.com/internet-speed-test/
• http://2wire.net/?p=154 — 2Wire Speed Test
• http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Although this list is not com­prehen­sive, I think these have all ser­ved me very well.

Access your passwords anywhere

I am not sure about ever­yone here, but I follow the recom­men­da­tion of not using the same pass­words on mul­ti­ple sites.  Par­ti­cu­larly the very con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion: Ban­king infor­ma­tion, Insu­rance infor­ma­tion and email.

The pro­blem with this, if I am not on my home com­pu­ter I am lost.  Often having to reset my pass­word just to get the infor­ma­tion I am loo­king for.

For a long time, I relied on Robo­form for my pass­word and iden­tity sto­rage needs.  I never had a pro­blem with this until I upgra­ded to Fire­fox 3.5.  I know some peo­ple are saying that Robo­form is not good for secon­dary com­pu­ters, but I never rea­li­zed how much I nee­ded it until the upgrade.

The add-on for Fire­fox was not com­pa­ti­ble with the new ver­sion and I was lost.  I was so used to just going to the sites and hit fill and sub­mit and bang I am there.  I know the IE ver­sion wor­ked, but I like my Firefox.

Since I am an impa­tient per­son I deci­ded to look for a new one.  I found and ins­ta­lled Kee­pass.  Which wor­ked great, except, it did not have iden­ti­ties to fill out new forms.  Also it did not have an add-on.

I know there are tons of very smart peo­ple on the inter­net, so I began searching.  But this time, I star­ted in the key source for me.  The Fire­fox add-on area.  Did I men­tion I love Fire­fox?  One that came up was Last Pass.

Since it was free, I thought I will give this a crack, as long as I can import what I already have.  Did I men­tion, I have a lot of dif­fe­rent passwords?

I go to the site and this is there list of features:

• Create strong pass­words, kno­wing you only have to remem­ber one.
• Log into your favo­rite sites with a sin­gle click
• Fill forms in a second; stop pulling out your wallet to get your cre­dit card number
• Access and manage your data from mul­ti­ple com­pu­ters seamlessly
• Secu­rely share logins and notes with friends and let others share with you

Sounds great to me.

So I sign up.  The first thing after you setup, it takes you to an area to import your current pass­words.  They even give ins­truc­tions how to export them out of current pass­word keeper.

After 5 minu­tes, I am all setup.  Some maybe thin­king, “OK, I have just uploa­ded all of my pass­words onto a web­site.  That doesn’t seem smart.”  To relieve your mind, once you login, you go to a secure con­nec­tion, so the data is encryp­ted bet­ween you and the com­pu­ter.  Not good enough?  Well accor­ding to their site, the data is encryp­ted and they do not have a key, so it is all gib­be­rish to them.

Some of the other fea­tu­res, besi­des the online sto­rage and one click logins you also get: Auto­ma­tic Form­fill, Pass­word gene­ra­tor, bac­kup to a USB key (which can be access with a client),and another side bene­fit of foi­ling key log­gers, since you don’t type the infor­ma­tion once it is in there among other fea­tu­res.  These are all the FREE fea­tu­res.  They do have a pre­mium account for $1 a month that inc­lu­des Ad Free, Black­berry synch, Yubi­Key and others.

Automating Amazon S3 Backup on Windows with CloudBerry S3 Backup

This post is cour­tesy of Nadya

Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup is a Win­dows appli­ca­tion that auto­ma­tes bac­kup and res­tore pro­ces­ses to Ama­zon S3 secure cloud sto­rage.  Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup pro­vi­des a power­ful Bac­kup and Res­tore pro­gram desig­ned to leve­rage Ama­zon S3storage to make your disas­ter reco­very plan sim­ple, relia­ble, and affor­da­ble.
Disas­ter reco­very plan­ning is often times an afterthought that comes to light when disas­ter stri­kes.
Very sel­dom do com­pa­nies fully reco­ver from loss of cri­ti­cal data which could lead to loss of business.

What is Ama­zon S3

To use Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup you should create your Ama­zon S3 account. Ama­zon S3 is unli­mi­ted secure inter­net sto­rage that leve­ra­ges Ama­zon infras­truc­ture.  Ama­zon S3 is pri­ma­rily desig­ned for soft­ware deve­lo­pers who want to take advan­tage of sca­la­ble inter­net sto­rage in their appli­ca­tions. Howe­ver, the pro­ducts like Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup unleash the power of Ama­zon S3 and make it avai­la­ble for less sophis­ti­ca­ted consumers.

There are no sign-up or mini­mum fees. You only pay for what you use. In many cases your monthly checks will be less than a dollar! The costs start at $0.15 per GB of data sto­rage a month and ONLY (!) $0.03 per GB of data trans­fer until June, 30 2009.  The data trans­fer costs will return to the nor­mal $0.1 per GB as of July, 1 2009. So hurry up to do the ini­tial backup!

Check here for more info on Ama­zon S3 pricing.

With Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup you can

• Setup your bac­kup pro­cess in a cou­ple of minutes
• Strong data encryp­tion pro­tects your data from unautho­ri­zed access
• Data com­pres­sion allows you to lower your Ama­zon S3 sto­rage and trans­fer costs
• Sche­du­ling capa­bi­li­ties auto­mate the bac­kup process
• Bac­kups are avai­la­ble for reco­very 24/7
• Intui­tive inter­face pro­vi­des easy file and fol­der selec­tion capabilities
• No pro­prie­tary sto­rage for­mat. You can access your files using other Ama­zon S3 tools.
• Con­trol band­width uti­li­za­tion to do other tasks online when bac­kup is running
• Sup­port mul­ti­ple sto­rage clouds in the future such as Mic­ro­soft Azure, Sun Cloud Sto­rage Service

This is a long list of Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup features.

• Easy ins­ta­lla­tion and configuration
• Sche­du­ling capabilities
• Data encryp­tion
• Data reten­tion schedule
• Secure online storage
• Bac­kup verification
• Aler­ting notifications
• Indi­ca­tion for successful/failed bac­kup status
• The abi­lity to res­tore to a par­ti­cu­lar date
• Bac­kup open files
• Band­width throttling
• Sup­port SSL for secure data connection
• Mini­mize to tray
• Built-in feed­back form

Conc­lu­sion

Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup is a fully func­tio­nal bac­kup pro­duct that can help com­pu­ter users ran­ging from pri­vate indi­vi­duals to small and mid size busi­ness leve­rage Ama­zon S3 secure and relia­ble Cloud sto­rage to auto­mate data bac­kup and res­tore pro­ces­ses.  If you are con­si­de­ring using Ama­zon S3 for data bac­kup pur­po­ses it is a good rea­son to start now and down­load Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup from Cloud­Berry Lab web­site at http://cloudberrydrive.com/

Thank God for Hulu

I admit I am a couch potato.  So much so, that I tend to work on the com­pu­ter while watching TV.  Have a game on the TV and watch the stats for that game or others that inte­rest me strea­ming on the lap­top.  All I can say is thank good­ness for broadband.

Now with all the TV I like to watch, some­ti­mes I miss an epi­sode (stu­pid DVR).  But never fear, Hulu is here.  With Hulu I can catch up on alot of the shows I would nor­mally not get a chance to see until repeats begin.  If you are like me, that just throws your whole sea­son chro­no­logy into disarry.

With some of my favo­rite shows: Burn Notice, Kings, Royal Pains, and many others have full epi­so­des online to catch up on.  Even some old throw­back shows I used to love as a kid: Vol­tron, Cops, Land of the Lost are repre­sen­ted.  I have even used it to find some new shows I had never heard about at all.  Even though not all of them have full epi­so­des, the clips for many of them are exactly what you are loo­king for anyways.

Since I was only using it for TV, I never truly noti­ced the movie sec­tion there.  But sure enough, not only are there trai­lers, but a few full movies.  Bill and Ted…Great cinema there.

Now with Hulu, not only can you watch them online, you can also down­load the client and watch them without ope­ning the brow­ser, but honestly, I am not a big fan of the inter­face.  But that is a good option for quickly get­ting to what you are loo­king.  You can add items to your subsc­rip­tions online so you don’t have to look for them all the time.  That’s how I get my Onion News Net­work fix.

If you have time and the band­width.  I highly recom­mend was­ting it watching shows on Hulu.

Online Backup

A few days ago, I dis­cus­sed a bac­kup tool named Cobian and I pro­mi­sed to look into online space for off­site storage.

While loo­king around a I found quite a few, but focu­sed on three.  I will go over some of my ini­tial impres­sions, and direct links to the site (so the FTC doesn’t chase me down for get­ting something for giving my opinion).

The three I will be tal­king about are iDrive.com, Mozy.com, and Humyo.com.  Now the first thing that’s impor­tant to ever­yone is, how much space do I get.  iDrive and Mozy both have 2 gigs for free, but this link (I pro­mise I get nothing) will get you a 250 MB upgrade on Mozy.  Humyo might as well be called Humon­gous giving you a whop­ping 10 GB online sto­rage.  Now this is all FREE.

Of course, if you find you are run­ning out of space, you can pay for upgra­des.  For $4.95 a month you get expand to 150 GB on iDrive, Mozy gets to be a bit more expen­sive, using the pay as you go model at $3.95 a month per 500 MB.  My opi­nion on that is if you are paying that, pay for hos­ting.  In the odd case that you will need more then 10 GB for bac­king up your most cri­ti­cal data on Humyo it will run you $6.99 a month to get 100 GB.

So besi­des space, I am sure there are pro­bably other things to con­si­der.  Let me think…

How do I get my data from my com­pu­ter to my sto­rage place.  Well all three have a client that you can ins­tall on your com­pu­ter.  Though Humyo requi­res you have a paid account to use the client.  It does, howe­ver, have a web con­sole you can drag and drop into a java upload client.

The clients are nice and small, quick easy down­loads, so I won’t get into that.  Some of the things that I noti­ced on the client.

For the Mozy client, it auto­ma­ti­cally gives you a recom­men­ded bac­kup set, inc­lu­ding Thun­der­bird data.  Since I use Thun­der­bird, that is handy to have.  It also gives you two options of data encryp­tion.  If you push have VoIP pho­nes, or band­width issues in gene­ral, you can throttle the appli­ca­tion as well as sche­dule your bac­kups for slow net­work times.

iDri­ves’ client is not as fully fea­tu­red (at least not to the naked eye).  The ini­tial bac­kup set is your docu­ments and set­tings fol­der.  With some dig­ging around you can setup band­width thrott­ling also.  But it does have a synch option (quick delete if you erase a fol­der and want it pulled out of your bac­kup) and con­ti­nuous bac­kup.  Though I am not sure how often it checks.

Since you have to have a paid account for the Humyo client, I will not review it.

Ok.  We have now bac­ked up all the data and sure enough, we have to refor­mat or our machine, boooo.  Or we just got a new com­pu­ter and we want to get our docu­ments back, yeah!

How do we get it back.  Of course for both iDrive and Mozy you can use the client and res­tore. But… I want more.  It’s free, I want it all.

For Mozy you have a two options: You can use a vir­tual drive (crea­ted when the client is ins­ta­lled) and drag and drop or pay for a DVD to be crea­ted and FedEx to deli­ver the disk.

With iDrive, you can go to the site and login.  Going into the res­tore area you can use a Java applet to down­load your files.  Or you can get a second down­load to create a vir­tual drive and go through your Win­dows Explorer.

Well Folks.  I hope that helps a bit.  Remem­ber, bac­kups are important…Before the sys­tem crashes.

Kidzui

When you think of trus­ted names in pro­ducts for kids, some of that come to the top of the list inc­lude: Bar­bie, Mat­tel, and Hot Wheels.  Now ima­gine the three of them com­bi­ning to create a safe way for kids to access the inter­net and parents to check and con­trol that access.  What you would be left with is Kid­Zui.

What is Kid­zui?  Well let me try and help with that.  Kid­zui is a brow­ser that has parents in mind.  With a cen­trally mana­ged list of web­si­tes that are allo­wed, not allo­wed, abi­lity to be noti­fied when your child adds a new friend, as well as many other cus­to­mi­za­ble secu­rity fea­tu­res, Kid­zui is all about allo­wing super­vi­sed independence.

With two ins­tall options (Fire­fox Add-in or Stan­da­lone down­load) the setup is inc­re­dibly easy.  Follo­wing the setup you will be then promp­ted to do the ini­tial regis­tra­tion of your parent account.  During this phase, you will be set­ting up your first “Zui” or child account.  You can create an account for all mem­bers of your family.  Please note, keep your pass­word and email address you set this up with away from the child so they can not login and undo wha­te­ver set­tings you choose.

Some of the paren­tal options in the brow­ser itself are: full screen (kiosk) only mode and require a pass­word to exit.  This would be a great fea­ture to keep anyone from being able to close Kid­zui and just launch IE or Firefox.

Read more…