I just built a PC that I wanted to be small-ish, quiet, powerful enough to play the latest games, and reasonably priced. While one can spend many hundreds more and eek out a bit more performance, the additional gains will be minimal. This setup plays current games, including my favorite Starcraft 2, like a champ and costs under $1370 as of this writing:
Be careful of fake emails pretending to be from your bank or shopping sites. Many are phishing scams trying to get your personal information. To avoid those scams, it’s best to go directly to the site instead of clicking to the site from an email.
Other fake emails are trying to infect your computer with a virus. This fake email with a shipping alert has been making the rounds lately:
Subject: Shipping Notification
Message Body:
Shipping Notification Thank you for shopping with us. We look forward to serving you again.
The following is your receipt. Please retain a copy for your records.
Qty Item no Description Price S&H Tax Return
Code
1 FC864-2038B Msg Drma7303 White 650.99 6.95 3.37 ____
Merchandise total 650.99
Shipping and handling 6.95
Tax on mdse 6.75% 3.37
Invoice total 706.31
Welcome to the convenience of shopping JCPenney Catalog
Doing a web search, we confirmed that this was malicious from Cisco Security:
Cisco Security Intelligence Operations has detected significant activity related to spam e-mail messages that claim to contain a shipping notification attachment for the recipient. The text in the e-mail message instructs the recipient to open the attached file to view the notification. However, the .zip attachment contains a malicious .exe file that, when executed, attempts to infect the targeted system with malicious code.
E-mail messages that are related to this threat (RuleID2979) may contain the following files:
Essentially this is a way for Max OS X users to select text somewhere and then quickly append it to a text file in Dropbox. That might be a faster way, for example, to make note of things you find while web browsing. Or you might use it to add part of a PDF file to Dropbox without the extra clicks needed to create a new text document.
My Additions
I liked the tip but wanted to make a few improvements. I wanted to:
Make the script work. The cat command needs two “>” in order to append instead of overwrite a file.
Add date and time information to the text selection that I was appending.
List the text selections in reverse chronological order, meaning that the most recent is at the top.
Unfortunately not all apps can use Automator Services. Only apps written in Cocoa, as Apple does with most of its apps, will work. This means that Safari, Mail, Preview, Calendar, and Address Book will work. Most other apps including Chrome and Firefox will not.
Side Notes
That this isn’t using the Mac OS X clipboard, as the tips I found stated. We’re selecting text and then using a service on it. The text is never copied or cut so it’s not in the clipboard.
Even though this tip is described as for Dropbox, there is nothing Dropbox specific except that the location of the text file happens to be in the Dropbox folder. Dropbox makes the service useful since you can have access to the text file from other locations. But this tip will work on any text file.
If you’re new to Dropbox, please use our Dropbox referral to set it up. It will give you an additional 250MB and give the same to us. Now Dropbox referrals will allow you to get up to 10GB for free, a great deal for your backup and sharing files needs.
What do you think?
If you have any suggestions to improve this Automator Service or to better use Dropbox, let me know.
Canon just replaced their PowerShot S90 with the S95, so I did the same. The Canon S90 was my favorite camera ever so I wanted to see what Canon could do to improve it.
The S95 retains everything that made the S90 great.
a relatively large 1/1.7″ CCD sensor capturing 10 megapixels (same sensor as Canon G10 and G11)
excellent built quality
lots of manual controls that can be assigned to ring on front of camera
What’s improved?
body finish is more grippy
wheel on back has stop clicks (many people didn’t like the freely spinning wheel on the S90)
added 720p movie mode (only 24 fps though) with stereo recording
can be used with a neck strap (holes at both sides of the camera)
just a little bit thinner (see photo). Some will complain about the camera being too small and losing the little thumb grip, but I prefer a camera to be as pocketable as possible.
Conclusion
There are loads of pocket cameras to chose from that will take good shots in brightly lit situations. It’s in the poorly lit situations that the larger sensor of the S90/S95 really helps. It’s not about the number of megapixels, but about how good the image sensor is at collecting light. The image sensor on the S90/S95 combined with image stabilization makes the camera worth the money for me. By adding a plethora of manual controls, Canon has made a camera that many professional photographers will be comfortable using when they don’t want to carry their big DSLR.
Currently costing $399 at Amazon, the S95 is not a cheap camera. It isn’t a necessary purchase if you already own the S90. But the Canon S95 is the current best camera that can fit in a pocket and it’s a worthy successor to the S90.
David Pogue explains DNS and why OpenDNS is a great service in this video.
OpenDNS is generally fast, has extra features like anti-phishing, shortcuts, and parental controls, and is run by non-evil people (perhaps unlike your ISP).
Other Options
But you should also check to see what DNS provider gives your particular location the fastest DNS response as we explained in the post Make your Internet faster by changing DNS.
We explained that you can use namebench to test a variety of DNS providers. I recommend running namebench multiple times since results will vary between tests. For me, Verizon’s DNS service actually provided the fastest and most consistent DNS speeds so I’m sticking with them for now for the quickest web browsing experience.
Profit Model
One way to see who is running the DNS on a particular network is to type in a long web address that doesn’t exist. Most DNS providers “hijack” the 404 Not Found response and give you something like the response below from Verizon. It’s annoying that this is a standard practice now, but your ISP and other DNS providers get extra income from search engines for directing people there.
