Another Ad Sense Phishing Scam

This just came in and I wanted to pass it on before it got too old. It's another phishing scam using google's ad sense as the bait. Do not click on the link in the e-mail if you get this. It's a redirected link that doesn't go to the ad-sense log in.

Quick and easy screen capture

Here's quick little tip for capturing a screen shot. Ever get an error screen that you need a copy of, or maybe you want to save that high score screen, just to prove you pwned everyone in Counter Strike. Or perhaps you'd like a print out of a screen from some program that doesn't have a print option.

First thing you need to do is capture the screen. That's easy enough. Just press (and hold) the ctrl key + the shift key + the Prt Scr key. Don't feel bad if you don't see the Prt Scr key right away, it's on the top row near the right end. So once you've pressed the three magic keys, all at the same time, your screen has been captured by microsoft and will forwarded to the FBI for further inspection. Well, probably not, but your screen shot is stored in memory just waiting to be pasted somewhere.

Now that your screen is in memory you can paste it into a graphics editor. One that is built into windows is mspaint. Rather than dig through the menus for it, just click on start and on your start menu you should have run. When you click on run it will open a dialog box and you can type mspaint in there and press enter. This will launch mspaint. One other way you can get to mspaint quickly is to press the windows key and the r key. That will also launch the run command and then you type mspaint and hit return. Once you have mspaint open, or any other graphic editing program, you just need to paste your screen shot into it. You can go to the edit menu and down to paste. I prefer to use ctrl-v to paste. The ctrl-v command works in any widows program to paste whatever you have copied, in this case it was our screen capture. You don't have to use mspaint, in fact just about any other graphics program would be better, but mspaint comes with windows. You can also use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and even Microsoft Word. Once you have your image in your graphics editing program, you can crop it, edit it, save it and/or print it.

So to sum it up. First, capture your screen by pressing ctrl+shift+PrtScr. Then open mspaint or your grpahics editing program of choice. Then paste your screen shot, press and hold the ctrl key and press the v key.

Now lets see that PrtScr key finally get a little attention.

Amazon music vs iTunes

I've always only put advertisements on here from companies I support, use and believe in. Which is one reason you won't find many ads on this site. And as you can see I have Amazon MP3's on here now.

The reason I have them here is they are better than iTunes and I hope they catch on. First off, let me say I'm not an Apple hater. I started out with an Apple ][+, which I loved. I made the switch to PC's because Apple quit making the Apple II's with the Apple ][GS and when the Macs came out, they were $5000 and a PC could be had for around $1000. I also use Macs at work to edit video for our TV news broadcast as well as any other video editing I do there. So I don't hate Apple. Now that I've cleared that up, let me tell you why I like Amazon.

All the MP3's at Amazon are DRM free. That means Amazon's MP3's don't have that nasty digital rights management, that keeps you from playing the music you've paid for, on more than 1 computer or portable music player, at a time. I really hate the fact that you have to "Deautorize" a song before you can move it to another computer or player. I have several computers, a Sony PSP and a couple of mp3 players. When I want to transfer a song, that I bought, I want to just transfer it. Not go through the hassle of "deauthorizeing" and removing it from my other computers or music players. If I get a song from Amazon, it's .89 or .99 cents and I can put it on all all my computers, and media players. They are also encoded at 256k. iTunes are not mp3s, but aac and they are encoded at only 128k. Apple has responded to the Amazon "threat" by offering some music, EMI's catalog is the only ones I see currently, in a DRM free, 256k AAC file, for $1.29. You get the same thing on all of Amazon's mp3's for $.89 or $.99

What iTunes does have over Amazon is convenience of buying. The iTunes program makes it pretty easy to buy songs. iTunes also has a bigger library of available music. If you're capable of downloading music and copying it to your portable player than I suggest checking out Amazon first, if they don't have what you're looking for, than you might want to try iTunes. For me, the choice is easy, less expensive, higher quality and DRM free, that's how I like my music.

All Your Base Belong to Kentucky

I haven't been very happy with our domain and website host, at work. The website we have runs slow at times, and every time I check the server load, it's always high. We are on a shared server so I realize this is to be expected now and then, but all the time? Our e-mail also goes down quite a bit and the web based e-mail, until recently, took a minute or more to load the first menu. This is really a problem for a company that is in the news business. As you can imagine, there is all kinds of information we get through out the day. So if we can't get the details about a story, it can affect our TV or Radio news broadcasts.

I decided to look into other hosting companies. While I was doing that, I came across an intresting site, The Modern Domainer. And while I was there I read one the craziest legal decisions I have ever seen, in regards to the internet.

Apparently, Kentucky siezed 141 domain names. How they can do this, or even believe they have the power to do so is beyond me. And a circuit court has upheld the decision. This is a case I'm going to keep an eye on. You can read the whole story here.