Clark's Weblog

How To Check G-mail With Your News Aggregator

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 13:35:23 GMT

Did you know that your G-mail account comes with an Atom feed of your messages? This means that you could check you Gmail messages with you RSS aggregator (as long as it supports Atom feeds). See Google's help page for details of how to do it.

US-CERT Cyber Security Tip ST05-002 -- Keeping Children Safe Online

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 12:59:25 GMT

Keeping Children Safe Online:

"When a child is using your computer, normal safeguards and security practices may not be sufficient. Children present additional challenges because of their natural characteristics: innocence, curiosity, desire for independence, and fear of punishment. You need to consider these characteristics when determining how to protect your data and the child."

Into The iPod and Back Again

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 21:42:25 GMT

My wife's iPod (aka my old 15 GB 3G iPod) had a hard drive failure shortly after the one year warranty expired. I bought a new hard drive, thinking it would be a cinch to replace. Wrong. Getting into an iPod is rather hard. Some Googling turned up a method using guitar picks and it worked! Installing the new 15 GB hard drive was easy. The only problem now is that our music collection has grown beyond 15 GB (99 cents at a time)!

How To Read RSS Headlines On Your PalmOS Device

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 18:55:25 GMT

I just upgraded to a Treo 600 from my Tungsten C. The always-on internet is handy, and I wanted to be able to read certain of my RSS feeds on the handheld during down time at work so I'd have that much less to read when I'm NOT at work because, like checking e-mail, scanning rss headlines is something that MUST be done before the day's end.

I'm an OS X user and I use the excellent NewNewWire as my RSS reader. After looking at several option, I chose Hand/RSS for PalmOS for $14.95. I chose it because I'm familiar with the company (which used to make Newton software). After installing it I must say I'm impressed with the app all around.

Hand/RSS comes with some channels installed, but I wanted to move my subscriptions from NetNewsWire over. Hand/RSS can import rss subscriptions that are in an OPML file. Although NetNewsWire 2 offers syncing via dotMac, it doesn't use an opml file to do it (it uses a 'SyncSubscriptions.plist.gz' file), so I had to export my NetNewsWire subscriptions as an opml file. The easiest way to import the opml file into Hand/RSS is to make it a memo. That method failed for me, probably because I'm not using the default PalmOS memo application (I'm using MarkSpace Memo Pad). Instead, I uploaded the opml file to my web server, from where Hand/RSS could fetch it via http.

It's a kind of labor intensive way to import the subscriptions, but my rss subscriptions list is mature and doesn't change too much anymore so it's not something that I have to do often.

Four Steps To A More Secure Wireless Network

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 14:01:58 GMT

CNN.com - Out of the box and into the ether - Oct 19, 2004:

"1. Change the SSID. That's the name that identifies a network. The default settings that come out of the box are well known. Use the name of your favorite song or something else you will remember. Don't use Social Security or phone numbers or any identifiable number. Also, if possible, use non-printable characters (for example, smiley faces or vowels with umlauts) in your SSID. Some equipment used to detect SSIDs does not recognize these characters.
2. Enable MAC address filtering. This lets you specify precisely which computers may connect to your network.
3. Disable SSID broadcast. The most common network scanner won't see your network if you disable broadcasting.
4. Enable encryption. There are two types of encryption technology for wireless networks: WEP and WPA. WEP is flawed, but it is much better than nothing. If your equipment is WPA compatible, make sure your password is at least 40 characters long and includes upper and lowercase letters, special characters (!,* and & for example) and numbers."