Carbonized Blog

Cerulean Studios have just made a beta version of Trillian 5 available for the public to download. I have to say that after the ugly mess that was Trillian Astra it’s a relief to see the new clean interface. Because they’ve been doing this for ten years you know that the messenger protocols they use are the latest versions and their code is stable.

They have seriously improved how they handle newfeeds such as Facebook and Twitter now giving them their own tray icons if you wish as well as their own windows. It also has a very small memory footprint and usually uses around 10MB. It’s email handling has also been improved but it still lacks Digsby’s ability to delete emails from Yahoo, Hotmail etc as I only seem able to delete emails sent to my Gmail account.

You can get more information as well as see screenshots and download the beta it’s self from http://www.trillian.im/learn/tour-trillian5.html

For years now I have used both SpywareBlaster and SpyBot to immunise my web browsers against hosts file. They also help to stop tracking cookies which are used to log what type of websites you visited.

Anyway I was updating them both today and I got to thinking, “How often do they check that the sites in their block lists are still active?” At present SpyBot is saying it has immunised me against 130712 sites and SpywareBlaster says 13138 sites. So I decided to test a random selection of 20 sites they have blocked. Out of the 20 all the domains had now expired and pointed to nothing (resulting in a oops message in the browser) or they were now a domain landing page. That’s one of these stupid pages you sometimes end up on when you mistype a web address which has a list of links loosely based upon the domain name.

I know both of these programs are free but would it be to hard for them to write a program that checks their list every so often to remove dead domains? The reason I say this is because Internet Explorers block list is stored in the registry and this can slow down your computers boot up time. Also the more sites are blocked the slower your web browser may become. SO come on programmers. Just write a program that runs through your list once a month and see if they are still active or not.

When Internet Explorer 8 came out Microsoft said they had seriously improved security and that it was now one of the safest web browsers to use. Apparently they were wrong. According to the Guardian newspaper here in the UK an exploit in Internet Explorer was used in the recent attack on Google’s systems in China.

source

So why keep using it? There are plenty of excellent alternatives these days. Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Flock and you could even use Apple’s Safari although it uses a stupid amount of memory on Windows.

Some of the software Ninite offers

Have you just installed/reinstalled Xp, Vista or Windows 7? Need to install programs but don’t want to sit there manually installing them? Then try Ninite Easy PC Setup. Ninite makes installing multiple applications simple. You just go to their site, select the applications you want to install and then click Get Installer at the bottom. It will then download a small program which you will need to run as administrator so it can install the programs. The installer then downloads the install packages for your chosen programs and silently installs them. You can even suggest other programs for them to add to their list. They promise they only install the chosen program and not any of the rubbish a lot of the program installers try to add such as toolbars.

“We install apps with default settings and say “no” to browser toolbars and other junk.”

So basically you
1 – Go to the Ninite Easy PC Setup site.
2 – Select the programs you want to install.
3 – Download their installer.
4 – Run the installr as administrator.
5 – Go do something less boring whilst their installer does all the work for you.

Just to add you will need cookies enabled to be able to download the instaler.

Fancy trying the new OS that Google is working on? Well you’re out of luck but in the meantime you can try the Chrome OS that for some bizarre reason Suse has made and released on a Google hosted site http://sites.google.com/site/chromeoslinux/ (Google has taken the site down). What’s really funny is the amount of people that have been Tweeting about how either this is Google’s new OS or the rest that are calling it a fake. It’s not a fake as it really is an OS called Chrome OS it’s just people have been fooled by the sites design and hosting in to believing it is Google’s OS.

From the site:

• GNOME 2.24 desktop environment
• Google Chrome 4.0.223 web browser
• Google Picasa 2.7 photo manager New!
• OpenOffice.org 3.0 office suite
• GIMP 2.6 image editor
• Flash Player 10.0 plugin
• and much more!

• Processor: Intel Pentium, Xeon or newer; AMD Duron, Athlon, Sempron, Opteron or newer
• RAM: min. 256 MB
• Hard disk: min. 1 GB
• Graphics card: supports most modern graphics cards

Why they would try to make people believe this was Googles forthcoming OS I don’t know.

There’s a new boy on the multi messenger scene and his name is Digsby (OK maybe her name).

Digsby is not just a cool multi messenger program but it is also a brilliant email checker for both web based email accounts and the traditional POP/IMAP accounts. And on top of that Digsby also lets you keep track of your accounts on the big four social networking sites in real time.

Go to the Digsby site
continue reading…

I recently posted how Windows 7 in Europe was going to come without a browser. Apparently now it is looking like instead of having no browsers you will be asked to select a browser when you install Windows 7 and it will then install your chosen web browser. No word yet on which browsers will be offered. Personally I think nearly everyone will select to install Internet Explorer anyways as there are still a lot of sites (such as banks) that demand you use IE.

[source]

I recently decided to try / review a new anti virus program I had heard about called Rising Antivirus. Now my first issue with this anti virus is the fact that the installer is over 60MB and the download was slow as hell. Took me around 30 minutes to download and I’m on a 20Mb connection. Once installed it takes over 200MB of hard drive space. First thing I did was run an update and it seemed to me that every component had an update and given I had only just downloaded the program this seems excessive. Next I ran a scan of the local drives. After twenty minutes I stopped it as it had only done about 5% and was saying it had over an hour left to go. Given this was my laptop with little on it this was far from acceptible.

Now we get to the main reason I swiftly uninstalled it. I downloaded the Eicar test file which is a standard file that all antivirus programs recognise as a test file so you can test if your antivirus is working or not. So I put the eicar.com file on my desktop and ran it. Rising Antivirus did absolutely nothing. I can accept it not detecting it during the download because my favourite free antivirus, AntiVir, only scans files when they are opened or read. To not detect the test file when run makes me wonder what else it doesn’t detect. I told it to scan the eicar.com file and it alerted me that it was a virus (well a test file which is what it should report it as) but not even a beep from Rising Antivirus when I run the file. In fact I had to turn Rising’s detection level up to high to get it to report it as a virus when I opened it. Even then I could see the command window in the background that eicar.com opens so I’m not even sure that if it had been a virus Rising Antivirus would of stopped it doing anything.

So my advice is avoid this anti virus like the plague. The best free anti virus, in my opinion, is AntiVir and the next best free one is Avast. I can no longer even recommend AVG as third place because all reports say as of version 8 AVG has become a resource hog that slows your computer down.

Mozilla has released a new add on for their Firefox web browser that lets you skin it. By skin it I mean an image wil appear behind the toolbars and behind the status bars with the text colour of the bars changed to match. You can read more about it, view the available skins and install the add on at www.getpersonas.com.

OK having recently installed Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and had problems with it I was determined to find what was causing the problems and how to fix it.

Before trying any of the below first try resetting IE8 to it’s defaults. Open your Control Panel (you will find it in your start menu) and then open Internet Options. Click on the Advanced tab and you will see the Reset button at the bottom.

Also it might be worth trying IE8 without add ons to see if it’s not something you have installed that is causing the problem. Just right click on the Internet Explorer shortcut (not the one in the quick start) and selct Browse Without Add-ons.

Problem:
IE8 takes around 10 – 20 seconds to start up and load first page!

Solution:
I found that this is due to the passive anti spyware method used by programs such as SpyBot S&D and SpywareBlaster (mostly SpyBot to be honest).
To fix it open SpyBot and click Immunize. Untick/deselect the hosts file entry and then click Undo at the top of the window. This should remove all immunization except the hosts file immunization. You can leave the hosts file immunization in place as this is used by the system to block bad domains and not IE8.
For SpywareBlaster I clicked Protection Status then Internet Explorer and unticked/deselected Cookie Protection. I left the Active X protection in place.

Problem:
When I open a link in a new tab the page gets stuck on loading!
Windows Explorer has started opening folders in new windows!

Solution:
After some Googling I found that both of these problems are down to a dll not being registered properly when IE8 was installed. The site I read tried to blame anti virus software for blocking it but I had mine disabled.
Anyway to fix it depends on if you are on XP or Vista as Vista requires the command prompt to be run as admin. I will first explain how to open the command prompt window for each Windows and then the instructions are the same for both.

XP: Open the start menu and click Run (or press Windows key and R). In the window that opens type cmd and press the enter key (or click OK).

Vista: Open start menu then click All Programs. Next click on Accessories. Now right click on Command Prompt and then click on Run as administrator. Click Continue in the window that pops up.

Now we have the command prompt open just type in regsvr32 actxprxy.dll and then press the Enter key on your keyboard. That should fix both problems. Now type exit and press Enter to close the command prompt window.

To be honest you might want to just ditch Internet Explorer. Given the amount of people that have had nothing but problems with IE8 it might be worth your while looking at other web browsers such as Flock, Firefox, Opera, Chrome or even Safari.