Fox Page: October 2005

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Thursday, October 27, 2005

Great Programs that are Free!

On tonight's Tech Check we mentioned 5 great freeware programs that are well with your time.

Here's where to get them: (Just click on the links, and it will take you to the site)

Open Office - A great alternative to Microsoft Office that won't cost you a dime.

Audacity - A very good program for recording and editing sounds. Powerful and simple.

Sebran Learning Games - Great learning games for the pre-schooler and up. From matching pictures, learning the alphabet to math, this program has fun little games to teach your child.

Artrage - A painting program that is powerful enough to turn out some decent works of art, and simple enough for children - it includes crayons, pens, pencils, and more.

Aqua Dock - Give your pc a snazzy program launch bar similar to a Mac. (this is a direct download link)

OTHER PROGRAMS NOT MENTIONED ON THE SHOW, BUT STILL JUST AS FREE !

Google Earth - This is a fascinating satelite map of the world. In some areas you are able to zoom in really close. Yes, you could even try finding the area you live in. Broadband internet is a must for this program. As well, it can be a resource hog while running it, but it's worth the try.

Abi Word - Recommended by our friend Tollie, Abiword is a small and efficient Word Processor that is very similar to Microsoft Word.

Trillian - is a fully featured, stand-alone, skinnable chat client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC. It provides capabilities not possible with original network clients, while supporting standard features such as audio chat, file transfers, group chats, chat rooms, buddy icons, multiple simultaneous connections to the same network, server-side contact importing, typing notification, direct connection (AIM), proxy support, encrypted messaging (AIM/ICQ), SMS support, and privacy settings.

ALSO.....

If you know of any great freeware programs, email us at: techcheck{at}chaseandsam.com

posted by Chase Thompson @ 5:34 PM 0 comments

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Tips on avoiding spam.

Basic rules to avoid and minimize spam (from an external source)

Techniques to stop spam fall into two categories: Filtering out spam and minimising the exposure of your email addresses

Do NOT, ever, click on the REMOVE link SPAMmers add to thier emails to you. This also will verify your email address as VALID and your address will be added to the list and sold to more SPAMmers.

Some spam emailers use computer programs to guess at email addresses. So use unusual email addresses containing numbers and letters.

If you want to enable users of your website to contact you online, provide a form. But make sure the "send to" email address is not contained in the page HTML, but in the form processing script.

If the spam has gotten to be too much, change email addresses! Simply let all of your friends and contacts know, and then make the switch (send them notice from your old email address and your new one) We recommend Gmail, a free mail program from Google with great features, and a pretty decent built in spam filter. You can get gmail by using your mobile phone number (very odd, I know....) or you can send us an email and we'll send you a free gmail invite. Mail us at: help chaseandsam.com (replace the with the @ symbol, of course.

Spammers use special programs that extract email addresses from Web sites and Usenet postings. To avoid ending on a spammer's mailing list when you post to a Web forum or a newsgroup, you can obscure your email address by inserting something obvious into it. If my email address is alex@yahoo.com, I modify it to read alex@yah[delete_this]oo.com
Never reply to spam messages, even when they entice you to reply to "remove" you from their mailing lists. Often the instructions are either bogus, or a way to collect more addresses. Replying confirms to the spammers that your e-mail address is active, and you may receive even more junk mail

More to come later.

posted by Chase Thompson @ 7:32 PM 0 comments

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