Keeping your kids safe online is now easier than ever!

Last year we mentioned Microsoft’s Steady State and how it’s simple imaging and rollback capabilities made it easy to protect your computer from your children, “Guest” users and elderly people. Today we will be highlighting another easy to use program that makes it easy to protect your computer and its users when on the internet.

K9 Web Protection from Blue Coat makes it easy to filter and restrict what websites can be viewed on the internet. It’s great for keep kids from stumbling on to naughty sites, for keeping web novices off of mal-ware filled site and for keeping employees from shopping, gambling, and from visiting Facebook or Myspace when they should be working. More features are explained below.

To get K9 Web Protection, go to the K9 website via the link at the bottom of the page, click the Download K9 Today For Free button on the left of the page. After getting a free license, you will be emailed the link to the program download. Once the program is downloaded, install it. You will be asked for the license key and to setup an administrator password. Remember this password because it is needed to update/uninstall the program, as well as changing its filter settings. After the installation you will have to restart your computer so the K9Filter can be activated.

After your computer is restarted you can start setting the web filter by clicking on the Blue Coat K9 Web Protection Admin button in the start menu. This will take you to the admin login page which will ask you for your admin password which you set up during the installation. Once logged in you can set up filters, manage time restriction, enforcing Safesearch on search engines, blocked keywords and more!

The first settings panel lets you chose which types of sites to block. You can block common things like porn, malware, drug and nudity. You can also block stuff like email, blogs, software downloads and shopping sites and even advertising! .

 

The Time Restrictions panel lets you set when you want users to have internet access. You can chose from unrestricted access; Nightguard, which lets you set when the internet turns off at night and comes back on in the morning; and custom which lets you pick what hours to to allow and deny internet access.

 

The Web Site Exceptions panel lets you chose which sites to allow or block by URL in addition to the filters setup in the Filters panel.

 

The Blocking Effects panel lets you set what happens when a blocked site is reached. If you Show Admin Options, you will have the option to temporarily or permanently allow a site after supplying your admin password. If you enable the time out option, when you can choose to deny web access for so many minutes if so many blocked pages are accesses with so many minutes.

 

The URL Keywords panel lets you create a list of key words to block in addition to the main filtering  rules in the first panel.

 

The Advanced panel has the option to force Safe Search on search engines that support it like Google, AOL, Live, and Yahoo!. There is also the option to filter HTTPS traffic.

 

Whether for home, school, business, or library, K9 Web Protection is a great choice for free, advanced web filtering.

 

Bootstrapping: Sinclair ZX80

The Sinclair ZX80 was introduced in 1980 and only cost £100. It was available preassembled or as a kit for a discounted price.  The ZX80 had had a tape storage device, 1 KB of RAM and 4 KB of ROM that held the Sinclair BASIC programming language, and the operating system. Commands were entered into the computer in the same fashion as a scientific calculator, each key had a different function and could be changed by a shift key, of by the context in which it was being used.

The computer’s display shown over an RF connection on a normal television. The display generator used a mixture of of hardware and software to generate a signal. Because of the very minimal configuration of the ZX80, it could only show an image on the display when it wasn’t processing data. Running a program or even typing would cause the display to black out until the processor became idle.

Now You Can Fix Most Computer Problems With Just One Click!

According to Cnet, for the past few weeks, Microsoft has been adding “Fix It” buttons to some of the help documents in the Knowledge Base. The purpose of the Fix It button is to automatically do the steps that are described in the Knowledge Base help article. This is great because if there is a problem that has to be fixed by tinkering in the registry or deleting system files, you no longer have to worry about accidently doing something wrong and messing up your computer. Just click Fix It and the problem is gone! 

Currently the Fix It button is only on a couple hundred of the Knowledge Base’s thousands of articles. Microsoft is working fervently to have automated fixes; as this is up from just four Fix It buttons when the program started in December. The fixes available now include common problems like enabling the DVD library in Vista’s Media Center, speeding up Outlook downloads , and even download errors in Street & Trips 2008 .

When possible, Microsoft is even going to add a Fix It button into the error reporting tools in future versions of Windows. This is a great improvement from the old “Send error report to Microsoft“ option. The Windows 7 Action Center already includes the framework to offer automatic fixes when a user encounters a problem. In the future, Microsoft aims to have products that are able to spot problems before they happen, or offer ways to take action before problems happen.

It seems that with each day, reports of the new features of Windows 7 are restoring the publics confidence in Microsoft that was lost with Vista. If you have any ideas or improvements that you would like to see implemented in Windows 7, then email us at caseytech@GMX.com, with “Windows 7” as the subject. You can also get instant gratification by leaving a comment.

Find Deep File Paths in Windows Vista

I recent had the fun opportunity of fixing a computer that couldn’t open files because the file’s path was to deep. For the many people who have not had this problem, some Windows programs can only handle file paths that are 255 characters or less. This means that some programs won’t able to open the following file “C:\Documents and Settings\Casey Tech\Audio-Music Files\Music\Archived Flac Files\Intelligent Dance Music\The Future Sound Of London\The Far Out Son of Lung and The Ramblings of a Mad Man\Disc One\03 - Smoking Japanese Babe (Live In South America -Argentina).flac” because there are 262 characters in the file path. The only way to file this problem is to find all of your files with a long file path, and then rename them so that there are 250 files or less

Unfortunately, I have yet to find a free program that can search for long file paths (However, long file name programs are rampant), but I was able to discover a simple way to find them using the command line and a text file. First, open a command prompt by clicking on the Windows Orb and then typing “cmd”and pressing enter. Next, input the following command and press enter.

dir c:\ /s /b > files.txt

 
 
Once the command is complete (it may take several minutes if you have a lot of files.), navigate to C:\User\(Your Name)\ if you use Vista or C:\Documents and Settings\(Your Name)\ if you use XP. Open the file called “Files.txt”.

Now for the boring part, scroll down until you spot a long file path and count the characters. My screen is 1280x800 and was 180 characters wide. I would recommend renaming any files with a file path longer than 240 characters. If your screen is under 240 characters wide, then you can easily just scroll down and until you spot a file path that runs off of your screen. If your screen is wider than 240 characters, then you may want to resize the window so it is narrower. Also, if you have a long list of files, you may want to use the page up and down keys on your keyboard to speed up the process.

Once you file a long file path, you can use Windows Explorer to rename the file, or move it to a different directory. When I found the long file path mentioned at the beginning of this article, I moved and renamed it to ”C:\Home\Casey Tech\Music\Flac\IDM\FSOL\The Far Out Son of Lung and The Ramblings of a Mad Man\01-03- Smoking Japanese Babe (Live In Argentina).flac” Now the file path is only 147 characters long and will no longer be a problem for any programs.

If you have any tricks for dealing with files in Windows, then email us at CaseyTech@GMX.com and put “Dealing With Files” in the subject line, or tell the world by leaving a comment.

Ubuntu Sets It's Sights On The Mainstream Desktop Market

The New York Times has a very interesting article on Mark Shuttleworth who is the founder or Ubuntu. The article gives brief but through background information on Mr. Shuttleworth and Ubuntu, as well has his plains for the future of Ubuntu and how he thinks he could become a real competitor for Microsoft. You can read the New York Times article here and you can download Ubuntu, the free Linux desktop, from here.

Better Dual Boot and Easier Fullscreen

Our previous article on How To Dual Boot Better has been updated with more information on how to mount hibernated drives. Also, the article on Better Fullscreen in Firefox has also been updated with information from Sajb. 

If you ever have information that could improve our articles, email us at CaseyTech@GMX.com , please have “Update” as your subject, and include the title of the article that needs updating, and the new information.