Category Archives: Technology

If you have a card with a high credit limit like a gold or platinum card definitely avoid using it for online payments. There are also privacy issues related to using a regular credit card since your location can be traced using the transaction details/personal information associated with the card number.

I suggest buying a prepaid credit card instead. They can be purchased in amounts from $100 to $500. Using the card limits your maximum exposure to the credit balance you have on the card. Plus there is no risk of exposing any personal data.

Here in Vancouver, both Citizen Bank and Vancity Credit Union offer an anonymous prepaid VISA credit card. Technically it’s actually a VISA gift card. Unlike store gift cards, it can be used anywhere that VISA cards are accepted. I have used the card online for a couple of different transactions without any problems. I also returned an item I bought to a store easily. I phoned VISA to check out their customer service with regard to the refund. It was excellent and the agent promptly confirmed the refund amount had been credited to the card.

There’s more. You can access the balance remaining and view transactions on-line. You can also associate a shipping address if you are purchasing physical goods online at sites like Amazon.com.

If you’re thinking of buying a store gift card for someone on your shopping list, the VISA gift card is a lot more flexible since you can use it at so many more stores. It’s also a good option for people who have trouble getting credit cards. Since it’s prepaid there is no credit check required to obtain the card.

There is a $2 overhead charge to purchase the card. The balance on the card expires in one calendar year and it can’t be refilled.

Overall using a prepaid VISA gift card makes a lot of sense to provide anonymity and reduce your risk when shopping online.

Each part of a domain name can be up to 255 characters long. Upper and lower case is not important – .google.com is the same as google.COm or gOOgle.coM.

You can have a free blog up and running in literally a couple of minutes. For free Check out WordPress.org, Blogger.com, Tumblr.com for starters. But there’s a catch. Your site’s name will be: johngdavidson.blogger.com or johngdavidson.wordpress.com.

To want to take advantage of the free hosting plus look professional – which means having your site come up with the name johngdavidson.com while still running on the free server.

In this post, you’ll learn just how to do it. Let’s get started by learning a little about the internet.

What an IP address is;
How to register a domain name;
How to register for a free DNS server and
How to register for a free hosting account

First what’s an IP address? Similarly to how each cell phone needs a unique phone number, each web server needs a unique address called an IP address. The IP address looks like 192.168,15.32. It’s a series of 4 numbers separated by dots. Each of the numbers can be between 0 and 255.

People are terrible at remembering long strings of digits, so the internet engineers decided to allow customers to register a unique name for their server instead of a sequence of numbers. “ibm.com” and “joesgolf.com” are examples. This service is provided by domain name registrars.

There also needs to be a service to map the unique domain names to the IP address of the server (and vice versa). This service is called a DNS server. A DNS server takes a domain name and spits out the IP address of the website’s server or given the IP address of the server it spits out the name associated with it.

And finally we need a physical server to actually host and serve the web content for the site (web server).

Most hosting companies make it convenient for you by providing all three services. They are domain name registrars. They have their own name-servers to map the names to numeric addresses and they also provide hosting for your web content. GoDaddy, DreamHost and Host Gator are all examples of hosting companies that will gladly do this for you. But once you understand what’s happening, you can get more flexibility by separating the functionality.

Setting up a free website:

First you need to thinK up a good name for your site and register the name with a domain name registrar. There are hundreds of registrars. They allow you to choose a unique domain name for your site. Finding a name that isn’t already taken is getting more and more difficult.

I usually register my domain names with GoDaddy. Mainly because I’m already familiar with ordering and setting up domain names with them. They’ve never let me down.

During the registration process you can specify the name server that will provide the DNS lookup for the name you register. If you don’t specify a name server. GoDaddy will use their own nameserver to point your domain name to a parking page that displays GoDaddy ads.

How much does all this cost? I’ve registered “.info” domains on sale at GoDaddy for a couple of dollars. “.com” domains are usually about $10. Be careful of registrars that allow you to register the first year cheaply, but then charge you a lot each subsequent year to renew.

On to the next step setting up DNS hosting – during the name registration process you usually to specify the address of the DNS server for your website. I use a free DNS account with Sitelutions. Again I’m familiar with the interface to their site and they’ve always worked for me.

Content Hosting this is where the text, images for your site are held. Blogger, Google for Domains are a couple of examples of sites that host content for free.

This site costs only $10/year to run – the cost of renewing the domain name each year).

Website Hosting

I host all my client’s sites using a Linode Virtual Private Server (VPS).

http://www.linode.com

Mail Server – Google Mail For domains

I use Google’s free mail servers to host my clients email. Email is accessed using the web.

Domain Name Registration

GoDaddy is my domain name registrar of choice mainly because they’ve never let me down. For a while I needed to use NetNation to register .ca domains. But last year GoDaddy got the right to issue .ca domains as well. So that makes it a one-stop shop for all my domain names.

http://godaddy.com

DNS Server – DNS) Management

I often have to alter domain name records, domain redirects and MX records for clients. Instead of running my own DNS server I use the free DNS service at Sitelutions. Sitelutions give me all the flexibility of my own DNS server while providing much better resiliency. I can specify uo to 6 sitelution nameservers which are spread out geographically in case part of the internet goes down.

http://sitelutions.com

Numeric IP and Network Speed Check

http://whatismyip.com

http://ip-address.domaintools.com

http://speedtest.net

The Open System Interconnect (OSI) model for computer networking protocols divides network architecture into 7 layers; Physical, Data-Link, Network. Transport, Session. Presentation and Application. TCP/IP. the most popular networking protocol covers the bottom 4 layers. Within the TCP protocol. there are many other sub-protocols defined. The one I’m writing about is Address Resolution Protocol (ARP).

The term ARP is used in different ways which can lead to confusion. ARP is the protocol used to obtain a computer’s data-link address given it’s network address. It’s also the name of the tool used to manipulate the ARP tables on machines

In order to communicate, each layer of the network architecture needs to have it’s own unique address. The data-link address or Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to each network adapter or network interface cards (NICs) by the manufacturer It’s an OSI layer 2 address. It looks like a string of 6 bytes. It’s commonly written as 8 hexadecimal couplets sepated by colons such as AA:BB:CC:DD:EE The IP address is an OSI layer 4 address. It’s 4 bytes long and is commonly written in the form of 4 digits between 0 and 255 separated by colons such as 192. 0.0.1.

Each computer on a sub-net need to keep track of both the MAC and IP addresses of all the other machines on the same sub-net. And also be able to translate the low level MAC address into the higher level IP address.The translation table between ARP and IP addresses for the sub-net is kept in a special file called the ARP table on each machine.

ARP is also the name of a tool that lets you do things like broadcast your ARP address, clear the ARP table, add entries, delete entries and view the ARP table on your local machine. ARP is a command line utility. The most common parameter is -a. It shows the IP address, MAC address and whether the IP address is static or dynamic for each of the adapters..

arp -a ; show me the ARP table on this machine

You delete entries with the -d parameter.

arp -d 102.168.1.1

To view the other options use the /? switch

arp /?

When you’re starting out and making pennies a word, writing quickly is the only way to keep the wolves from the door. My weakness is research. I can spend hours looking up quotes, finding interesting background info and fact checking with Google..

Unfortunately Google is a two-edged sword. Sometimes bringing up just the info I need. But more and more often I end up wading through endless pages of crap. So I decided to invest a little time learning to become a Google search ninja. It doesn’t take that long and I’ve written a short hub to teach you what I’ve learned.

Open up Google.com in a separate tab in your browser and you are greeted with the empty search box. I thought you could only enter keywords in the search box, but can enter both keywords and operators into the search box. There are only 4 operators you really need to know; ‘+’, ‘-’. ‘.’, ‘date:’ and site:’ .

The + operator is the include operator. This means the keyword must be present to be included in the search result.

The – operator is the exclude operator. This means the keyword must not be present in thesearch results.

The . operator lests you combine keywords into phrases. Use this operator to search for phrases.

The date: operator is one of the most useful. It allows you to limit the sites to just the pages that were created between a range of dates.

The site: opeator is used to limit the search to a particular web-site. All the results listed will be from that particular site.

link:web-site name will show you all the sites that are linked to your hub-page for example.

related:web-site will show you all the sites that Google considers related to your web page.

You want your music, movies and programs now with a minimum of fuss. This article will get the music and movies streaming onto your screen. You promise not to use this knowledge to download anything copyrighted. Read on.

Let’s begin with the grand-daddies of file sharing – Napster, Limewire and Emule. With all these applications you connect with one other person (computer) and download an entire file. Sweet and simple. But here’s the problem, If it’s a popular file, probably there are thousands of other people all trying to download the same file at the same time. The more popular a file is, the slower your download becomes!

A smart guy named Bram Cohen designed a new protocol to overcome the problem of everybody trying to download the same file at the same time called Bit-torrent. With Bit-torrent the more popular a file is the faster it downloads. Eureka! Bit-torrent is usually shortened to just torrent,

There are two kinds of people in torrent land; seeders and leachers, First each file is divided into 1024 pieces. Just like a puzzle with 1024 pieces. The seeders are the people that have the entire file, all 1024 pieces, The leachers are the people who still haven’t downloaded the entire file; they might have 0 pieces or 1023 pieces, Bram realized that even though the leachers don’t have the entire file they might have a piece that another leacher still needs. That person doesn’t have to wait for the seeder to give that piece, he can download it from another leacher instead. Each person (computer) is both downloading and uploading the files. That’s why you’ll also hear it called peer-to-peer file-sharing, Because you are downloaded from many computers instead of only one, you get your file faster. Yay!

But wait! How do you find out which files are available in torrent land and who the seeders are? Just visit any popular torrent site on the internet. Do a search. And download a small .torrent which contains the address of the people (computers) who are the seeders for the file you need.

Enough of the background. On to the recipe.

First things first. You need a Bit-torrent client. For Windows users, I recommend utorrent. OS X users try transmission. Both applications are free,

Second you need a torrent website. Check out thepiratebay.com, mininova.com, sumotorrents.com and btjunkie.com. Next search for an (uncopyrighted… ) album you want. Try to find one with a high number of seeders (these are people who are uploading the album) and a low number of leechers (these are other people who are downloading the album). If you can find one with a good ratio (seeders/leechers) then it will download much faster. Once you’ve found the album you want, click download file.

“Whoa! How did that file download in 2 seconds?” Well you have just downloaded the .torrent file itself (remember it only has the address of the seeders for the file). Now open utorrent or transmission. Drag the .torrent file you just downloaded into it. And start your download.

Enjoy!

Remember to keep the torrent client running so now you can seed the file to other people.

Buying a cell phone can be overwhelming. It’s easy to get lost in the wide choice of features and end up with less phone or more phone than you need. So here’s a quick primer.

If you’ve never had a cell phone, it’s tempting to just sign up for a 2 or 3 year plan especially with Telus and Rogers reps dangling a flashy free phone in your face. Do not sign up for any long term contracts! You don’t know what kind of usage you’re going to need. You don’t want to be locked into paying $30 or $40 for 2 or 3 years on a plan that is way more than you need or end up paying extra charges each month because you have committed to less airtime than you need. If you’re like me some months you might need a lot of air-time like around Christmas and other months you use very little. A pay as you go plan makes a lot more sense at least until you can gauge how much airtime you’ll need.

In Canada, 7-11 has an excellent pay as you go plan with a few reasonably priced handsets carefully chosen to meet the needs of 90% of the users out there.

When I got my phone last July, 7-11 even offered a free phone when you bought $100 of air-time or $75 credit on any of their cell phones. The free phone was a basic, no frills GSM handset. The GSM is important. GSM phones have a chip inside that holds all your personal info like phone numbers. Upgrading a GSM phone is easy – transfer the chip to any other GSM phone and all your personal info is transferred.

The other important thing is that the $100 in airtime credit is valid for up to a year. With the other Canadian carriers you buy a $10, $20 or $30 cards that are only valid for 1 month. If it’s your first phone then you have no idea how many minutes of air time you/lll need. It’s a pain having to keep running out to the store to buy new cards and getting cut off in mid-sentence because your airtime has run out.

Now keep track of how much you use the phone for a few months (or until your airtime credit runs out which was almost a year for me). You’ll gain the info you need to make a rational decision about whether a long-term contract makes sense for you. If you decide to switch to a long-term contract and new flashy phone just transfer the GSM chip to the new phone.

Basically avoid getting locked into a long-term contract until you have an idea of your needs. Check out the handset and plans at 7-11 Speakout. They are suppose to be having another free phone deal coming Nov 16. I’m planning to get a couple for people on my Christmas shopping list.

P.S.

I opted for the more advanced Nokia 5200 cell phone instead of the basic handset because it has a built-in MP3 player. The phone also has blue-tooth which makes it a snap to transfer music and video files back and forth between my computer. Two things that disappointed me are the crappy builtin camera. I was looking forward to using this on hiking, skiing and biking trips but it turned out to be grainy and low resolution. The phone also accepts micro SD memory cards. I imagined myself having an ultra-cheap 8 gigabyte ipod Unfortunately it only accepts memory chips of up to 2 GB.