The new Digg, it sucks right?

I knew it, I thought I was alone, turns out my gut feelings on the new Digg are right on the money. They changed the UI and underpinnings last week, and while Digg was a daily (sometimes hourly) visit for me previously, these changes did something I couldn’t pin my finger on precisely. Something I didn’t like, anyways.

Turns out everybody hates it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/30/reddit-digg-rivalry-heats_n_699225.html

Reddit looks pretty good now, glad they spammed Digg as much as they did, I might not have given them a second chance.

Make phone calls right through Gmail

Gmail is integrating Google Voice, bringing free calls to the U.S. and Canada and cheap international calls to Gmail.

I made just THREE calls on my cellphone last month … well, three calls that counted as minutes on my voice plan. Thanks Google Voice and Android! You’re saving me tons of money.

Full System Encryption – Just Do It!

There’s a problem here folks. Laptops and PCs are getting stolen or lost, and all the files on them are free for the taking.

That’s right. Forget about your Windows password. Anybody who has their hands on your hard drives can yank out all your files.

Docs? Theirs.

Spreadsheets. Theirs.

Financials? Theirs.

Pictures of you in Maui in that bikini? Theirs.

So what can you do? Well thankfully its really, really ridiculously easy to encrypt your entire hard drive so nobody (even the NSA or a team of crack meganerds with supercomputers couldn’t break this encryption.)

First off, what is encryption? Right now your data is stored on your hard drives in a way that’s fully standard to pretty much every computer out there. If you pull out a drive from one PC and stick it in another, that PC can read the files like you can read plain English.

Encryption scrambles every single bit, byte, character and word using a complicated math formula that can only be undone with your password. If you want to know the juicy details I’ll be happy to post up the info here too.

At Technica Systems, we use TrueCrypt on all our system. TrueCrypt is hands down the best file and drive encryption software out there, and its free! Why free? Because some people like to make great things for free. That’s all there is to it.

There are two main ways to use TrueCrypt, one is to create an encrypted container that you load after Windows starts. This is useful if you really just want to encrypt a specific pile of files, like your spreadsheets. But why stop there?

The other way to use TrueCrypt is to have it imbed itself on your hard drive so it loads before Windows even starts up. When you fire up your PC, TrueCrypt starts first. You type in your password, then it lets Windows start up. There’s nothing else for you to do. Everything else about your computing experience is completely normal and unobtrusive.

If somebody steals your laptop or PC, your files are safe.

(This is the abridged version of how TrueCrypt works. If you want to learn more just ask here, or get in touch with us. Technica Systems are experts at finding easy, smart, inexpensive ways to use IT intelligently.)

Odd pairing: Intel buys McAfee

My clients know what I think about McAfee and Symantec and the other “big” names in anti-virus PC security: junk

It seemed odd to me yesterday when I read that Intel is buying McAfee for about $7.7 billion.

Mind. Blown. Turns out I’m not the only one who thought that.

The notoriously harsh commenters on Slashdot sum it all up in this post.

- Will they kill it?  Pretty please? Just give all their victims - I mean customers - their money back and just kill it off already. McAfee has no right even existing.

- Reply:  And deprive millions of corporate IT drones of their false sense of security?!?!? Are you insane, man???

- On the other hand, this makes sense:  If you want to drive demand for new processors, sell bloatware.  

Scored 5 “Insightful” by the other readers: Holy Cow. That junk is worth $7bn?

- I think we're all thinking that. I'm so amazed at this. Someone paid 7 billion for the right to sell people magic beans.

My favourite security app is Microsoft Security Essentials, for every good reason under the sun.

- I imagine intel has watched the home AV market get gobbled up by MS Security Essentials and may want to join in the free for home use game. I'd love to see a shakeup in the AV industry as its pretty terrible right now. I'm sick of seeing machines with horrible infections because the trial of the AV has expired. End users cannot be trusted to maintain subscriptions for something they barely understand. I also imagine intel is so deeply in bed with MS that AV is now their problem as well. McAfee's enterprise products sell for whatever reason. I imagine those will continue to be expensive.
- McAfee doesn't have anything I can think of that would get me to pay up over the MS AV. This seems like a horrible deal to me. I even sold my Intel stock because I'm irritated they are pissing away 7+ billion of my money on an AV product I won't even use. This is the problem when companies hoard too much cash. They go out and make stupid purchases because they can.
- McAfee is finally in the hands of someone qualified to figure out how to completely uninstall it.

Smartphone wishlist: Faster camera access

I wish my Nexus One camera, which behaves the exact same way as every other smartphone camera out there, wouldn’t need the camera app fired up for me to take a pic.  I wish I could just press a dedicated shutter button anywhere, anytime, and it would take a pic.  As long as the phone is unlocked that is, wouldn’t help for it to take pics in my pocket.

Say I’m reading an email, or picking a song, and a butterfly lands on my knee.  Now I have to switch to the camera app, wait a sec for it to load, and hit the shutter.  Too slow.

I’d rather just point the camera at the butterfly, hit a shutter button, and blammo the pic is taken.

ArtsyFartsy

Easy workaround for banned Blackberries in SA, UAE etc

Saudi Arabia and UAE are blocking Blackberry emails because the encryption is too tight for those governments to snoop in on messages.  Whatever their reason, I see a really easy solution for circumventing this.

Get a Gmail account, or even better your own domain-branded Google Apps account, and install the Gmail app on your Blackberry.  You’ll get notifications and pushed emails just like before.

You can easily setup any Gmail account to pull messages from other email systems using POP3 or IMAP, so nothing gets left behind.

In other words:

Emails delivered through the Blackberry’s email system:  Blocked

Emails delivered through the Google Gmail system:  Not blocked.

Coming back to WordPress

Running a blog through Google Sites is slightly more painful than I’d hoped.  I’m coming back to WordPress.

Blog Move

That’s it, I’m centralizing everything.  The blog is moving away from WordPress and over to my Google Sites page.

http://www.thinktechnica.com/blog

Its a great week for apps in Android-land

LogMeIn Ignition for my Android phone?  Check.

Dropbox too?  Check.

LogMeIn is a tool many IT professionals use to gain remote access to a desktop over the internet, and today they announced the Ignition app in the Android market.  Free of course, like most decent Android apps.

Dropbox is another invaluable tool, its a little piece of software that automatically syncs local files up to a web-based folder.  Run the same app on another PC, and that sync now happens three ways, on and on.  Of course, having access to all my files from my phone is awesome.

Merge Microsoft Office and Google Apps seamlessly with OffiSync

Most of my clients are now switched over to Google Apps, and they love it — except for one little issue that comes up over and over:  Despite Google Docs being really rich, fast, fantastic and robust, they insist on sticking with Microsoft Word and Excel.  Eventually they’ll come around, but in the meantime I wanted to showcase a really fantastic way to use both.

OffiSync is a plugin for Microsoft Office that lets you do what its name suggests, sync Office and Docs.  Rather than go through the hoopla and hype, I’ll show you some screenshots so you can see with your own eyes.

How OffiSync looks in Microsoft Word:

OffiSync adds a new tab to Word, Excel and PowerPoint and gives you a panel of tools and options.

When saving a doc (or choosing the Share option) you can pick a partner and tweak their capabilities (read only or edit).

The user doesn’t even have to be from your contact book or have a Google account, although they’ll need to set one up to do anything with the link they’ll receive.

When you hit Save, it sends it up to your Google Docs account in the folder you specified.

If you share it with somebody, it also automatically creates the email with the link and instructions.

The Dashboard lets you dig more into the Collaborators and lets you dig around for more files to open.

Opening Google Docs shows the file like you’d expect.

One caveat, Word’s internal document markup language is tightly controlled, but Google usually does a bang up job of converting it to Google Docs format.  Note that they for-pay version of OffiSync automatically uploads in the Google Docs native format and all the formatting is properly preserved.  This free version has minor limitations, and as you can see below the formatting mistakes are easy to fix.

Before (above) and After (below)

What’s really great about Google Docs is collaboration.  Now that I’ve reformatted it in Google Docs, my PC running Word sees these changes in real time and offers to sync things up automatically.  Nice!

Of course, you can easily open any existing docs and spreadsheets and presentations you have in Google Docs.

Brought to you by the scientists at Technica Systems