With the increasing proliferation of Smart Phones available, you may see a feature for some phones referred to as "Tethering". What is this tethering you may ask yourself and what good is it to you? Cell phone tethering is the process of using the 3G data connection on your phone as an internet connection for your computer(s).

Why Should I Care About Tethering?
Two very good reasons, costs and convenience. For starters, the data plans on most providers are very affordable, as they generally expect the usage to be email/web browsing through your cell phone. Verizon's unlimited (often referred to as "all you can eat") 3G data plan is only an additional $10/month on top of your minutes plan. Compare this to $70/month (plus the $50 for the hardware) for a Mobile Broadband USB Modem from Sprint and you can see the savings.

The convenience is obvious, you generally always have your cell phone with you so imagine being able to whip out your laptop wherever you are and be able to get on the internet. No need to find a wifi hotspot or get on your friends wifi. You ARE your OWN internet hotspot. And with BlueTooth there are no wires. Just open your laptop and you're connected.

Many internet users are what are considered "light users". They generally just email and browse the web. If you consider yourself a light user, you should seriously consider a data plan for your phone and use it via tethering as your home internet connection. Now you've just saved whatever you're currently paying for your home internet connection.

How is This Done?
Assuming you're phone supports tethering out of the box, it should have software included on a cd to help set this up on your computer and your phone will pass the data transfer via your included cables to connect your phone to your computer or if your computer and phone support it, wirelessly via BlueTooth. Questions to ask about tethering when purchasing a cell phone are:

• Is there an additional monthly cost and how much is it?
• How much data is included in that price?
• How are the cell phone and computer connected? Physical Cable? Wirelessly with BlueTooth? Both?
• Is there an actual cap on the "unlimited data" plan?

Going Around Your Carrier's Monthly Tethering Charge
If your Carrier charges a monthly tethering fee or worse, does not offer it at all, you can purchase a third party application from June Fabrics PDA Technology Group. They have versions for iPhone, Android, BlackBery, Palm, and Windows Mobile phones. This will allow you to use your cell phones data plan to connect your laptop to the internet and will appear to the carrier to be usage on the phone. (We don't recommend sharing the fact that you're using this third party software to tether with your Carrier)

Microsoft recently did a very smart thing. They started giving away their antivirus program for free! Microsoft has an anti virus program you ask? Yes, it was called Windows Live OneCare and it was a subscription based security and performance enhancement suite which was discontinued June of 2009. The free security program is called Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) and is FREE for download here. If you don't run an anti-virus program or are tired of paying for one download and install Microsoft Security Essentials now and you won't have to worry about malware and computer viruses again.

Microsoft's decision to give this antivirus software away for free is quite simple. Keeping the Windows user experience as secure and pain free as possible is only in Microsoft's best interest and should have been done a long time ago. In fact, it should be part of the Operating System just like the OS firewall. But this is a step in the right direction.

Microsoft Security Essentials Runs Quietly In the Background
Since switching from AVG to Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) I have noticed nothing except for the "Protected" icon in the lower right hand corner.

Which is the point. Good antivirus for household users needs to be hands off, needs to update it's definitions quietly in the background, and run without hogging resources and MSE delivers on all of these points. AVG was a resource hog. Running it on a webbook, it would take the entire CPU for several minutes after booting up, to update it's definitions and whatever else it was doing. Very frustrating, but MSE does all of it's business quietly when resources are available.

Ok, But is Microsoft Security Essentials Any Good?
AV-Comparatives.org, "...an Austrian Non-Profit-Organization, which is providing independent Anti-Virus software tests free to the public", recently released a study comparing the effectiveness of various pay and free anti virus programs at removing malware from already infected/compromised computers. "Although none of the programs performed 'very well', eScan, Symantec and Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) were the only products to be good in removal of malware AND removal of leftovers." according to the results.

And there you have it. If your computer is running XP, Vista, or Windows 7, there is absolutely no excuse for not running an antivirus program for free and one that is not only hands off but highly affective.

If you need to schedule the transfer of files via FTP, save yourself a lot of headaches now for just $30. The program Second Copy from Centered Systems will give you the power to schedule FTP transfers for such things as backups and file distribution across different domains.

One of the best uses of Second Copy is for off site backups. Off site backups are essential to bringing you back from a disaster such as your web server's hard drive failing or worse, fire in your office. You should always keep your important files backed up off site. With Second Copy you can push and/or pull a folder's contents to/from any FTP location.

To backup your files with Second Copy you simply set up a Profile to specify the different parameters:

• To Start you specify if you are Pushing from your Local to an FTP destination or Pulling from an FTP source to your Local destination
  
  
• You then specify What is to be copied, either the Local source folder or the FTP source server information
  
  
• Then specify Which Files are to be copied and which to be ignored if there are specifics or if all are to be copied you can choose that option
  
  
• Then specify Where the files are to be copied, for Pushing files, the FTP destination information or for Pulling files, the Local file destination
  
  
• Now specify When these copies are to be copied which includes MANY options such as every few minutes, hours, or days, days not to run, and run at startup or shutdown
  
  
• Now you get to choose the How which includes many useful options:
  
  + Simply copy files to destination
  + Copy files and delete source upon completion
  + Compress to Zip with optional password then copy
  + Run a specified program before copying
  + and many more including Skip If Unchanged
  
  
  
  
• You can even set the options of a profile to Email You the results of each running of that Profile
  
  

The main message here is you can never have enough backups and Second Copy makes it easy, oh so easy for only $30. We have been very happy with it and have never had any bugs or errors with our backups. Do not ever doubt that backing up your files and having a recovery plan will save much pain in the future.

What is GreyListing

There is a powerful new method for combating spam and that is called GreyListing. This is how it works. When an email recipient's account is utilizing GreyListing, the first attempt by a sender's email server will get a message from the recipient's email server to the effect of, "I'm a bit busy right now, try again in a few minutes". Now, it needs to be made VERY CLEAR here that these send/responses are ONLY between the email servers. A sender would NOT receive an email back stating the above. These communications are ONLY between the recipient's email machine and the sender's email machine. So no human gets annoyed by it.

So the recipients email server says I'm busy, try again in a few, and if the sender's email server is configured properly, it will essentially say, "ok", and resend the original email after a few minutes. NOW the recipient's email server checks Three things from this follow up send to match the original email send:

• The IP address of the original sender
• The envelope sender's address
• The envelope recipient's address

If these three things match the first send attempt, the email is accepted by the recipient's email server and delivered to the intended person's inbox. ADDITIONALLY, the sender's IP address (essentially the same as their phone number in internet speak) is "WhiteListed" for a period of time, often 24 hours. This means that for the next 24 hours, the GreyListing "I'm busy, try again" message will not be sent to the email server that has been WhiteListed. Which essentially boils down to, the most delay GreyListing will cause a recipient on a daily basis for communicating with a particular individual is an extra few minutes ONCE.

Now this brings up the BIG question of, "OK fine, but why the hell should I use GreyListing?" It will ELIMINATE up to 90% of the spam you are currently receiving! How? It's simple really. Spammers make their money from blasting out an average of 200 million emails in a 24 hour period. They only need a small percentage of suckers to click on their messages to make thousands of dollars a week. BUT, if your email server replies to their "knock at the door" with "hold on a few minutes and I'll be right there", they don't bother to wait and move on. The software spammers use to blast out millions of emails, one every half second, can't afford to wait a few minutes and resend the email. They can't get enough of their junk out to make it profitable that way.

In addition to preventing the original spam from getting to you, if the original sender's email server does not try again after a few minutes, then that sender's IP address is listed as bad. This prevents any future spam from getting to you from that IP address. It's a WIN WIN WIN situation.

So if your email hosting company is not offering GreyListing , contact them and ask for it. Or contact us and we will put this powerful technology to work for you so you can stop spending your mornings deleting all of that spam.

If your TiVo is performing poorly (pixelates, stalls, is slow to respond) AND is out of warranty, you can try the following Kickstart TiVo disk commands to force the TiVo to perform several disk repair measures.

Credit for these TiVo Command steps is given to the original poster, richsadams, from TiVocommunity.com.

Here's a video showing in real time the Tivo Kickstart procedure to give you an idea of what to expect.

Tivo kickstart procedures generally leave Season Passes, Wish Lists, etc. intact, however data and recordings that used any bad sectors may be lost. Use these commands at your own risk.

1. Kickstart 57
2. Kickstart 58
3. Kickstart 52

"Kickstart 57" is TiVo’s built-in diagnostic program similar to Windows “check disk”. It triggers an MFS assert (GSOD), which marks the file system as being damaged. The repair process detects and repairs inode/data problems, and then runs mfscheck to clean up database and directory problems.

Kickstart 57 – TiVo Diagnostics:

1. Go to TiVo Central
2. Select Messages & Setup
3. Select System Reset
4. Select Restart Receiver
5. Press Thumbs Down three times
6. Press Enter
7. While the system is restarting, during the initial screen, press and hold the PAUSE button until only amber light(s) illuminate or in the case of some TiVo HD's, the red, green and amber lights.
8. Release the pause button and immediately type in the numbers 5 and 7 on the remote (you have about 10 seconds to do this step).
9. TiVo will reboot and the GSOD screen will come on saying TiVo has encountered a serious error. It will then run the disk management tool. During this time it will look for and correct configuration problems as well as isolating any bad sectors on the hard drive so they can no longer be used.

10. TiVo will automatically reboot after the diagnostic program has completed. This may take a few minutes to a few hours.

"Kickstart 58" is another of TiVo’s diagnostic programs. It runs fsfix with an additional option that causes it to make multiple passes over the inodes, re-hashing them and clearing collision bits.

Kickstart 58- TiVo Diagnostics:

1. Go to TiVo Central
2. Select Messages & Setup
3. Select System Reset
4. Select Restart Receiver
5. Press Thumbs Down three times
6. Press Enter
7. While the system is restarting, during the initial screen, press and hold the PAUSE button until only the yellow light(s) illuminates.
8. Release the pause button and immediately type in the numbers 5 and 8 on the remote (you have about 10 seconds to do this step).
9. Put the remote down and wait. The system will proceed to the diagnostic program.
10. TiVo will reboot after the diagnostic program has completed. This may take a few minutes to a few hours.

“Kickstart 52” is an "emergency reinstall" of the software. It will reinstall the existing software on the alternate root partition.

Kickstart 52 – Reinstalling TiVo Software:

1. Go to TiVo Central
2. Select Messages & Setup
3. Select System Reset
4. Select Restart Receiver
5. Press Thumbs Down three times
6. Press Enter
7. While the system is restarting, during the initial screen, press and hold the PAUSE button until only the yellow light(s) illuminates.
8. Release the pause button and immediately type in the numbers 5 and 2 on the remote (you have about 10 seconds to do this step).
9. After a time (generally a few minutes) TiVo will automatically reboot.

If you have performed these Kickstart TiVo Disk Commands and still have shoddy performance, it's likely your disk is damaged beyond repair and you will need to replace it. This is not as harrowing as it sounds and can be an opportunity to greatly increase your TiVo's capacity.