Tech News & Reviews

I’ve had a digital camera for around six years now. The first one I got while I was working at a computer parts surplus warehouse. Since I got the employee discount, and it was already fairly cheap, I thought I was getting a good deal. Well, it was simple enough, pretty much a child’s camera. No display screen, just a simple LCD display showing how many pictures you had left and what general settings you had selected. Most of the pictures were low resolution, especially in this day and age of 6-8-10 megapixel cameras.

The next camera we got is the one we have had for the last few years. It was a bit more expensive than our first model, but it has done a lot better for us. It’s the Polaroid PDC5080, made for the U.S. marketplace. It’s an entry-level model that ran for about $80 when we purchased it. It’s got a 2″ color LCD display so you can review your pictures and settings, and it’s resolution isn’t bad at all at 6.0. Of course, we also got the 256mb memory card at the same time. While it’s a bit clunky in the menu and interface, it does take pretty good shots. The downsides include the fact that it is digital only zoom, something I wished I had learned about before purchasing the camera.

If I want a nicer camera with a bigger display, more megapixels (although I don’t know what for, unless I plan on becoming a professional photographer), it will cost me. The one feature that I have seen on more expensive cameras from Kodak and other manufacturers is the setting wheel, or some other type selector. This is where you simply tell the camera what your setting is like, and it adjusts the various modes for you based on your selection. On the Polaroid PDC5080, there are half a dozen manual selections that must be individually adjusted in order to get the best photo possible.

The reason I’m relating all of this to you is to make one thing clear: in the world of digital cameras, you get what you pay for.

The tactics of those who are seeking to deceive and take advantage of you while you are online are changing.  It used to be the simple e-mail chain letter, much like a regular postal chain letter.  Then it was the Nigerian 411 scams, claiming that you were needed to broker millions of dollars out of Nigeria, or some other obscure country.  Perhaps you won the U.K. lottery?

Well, today the tactics are changing rapidly.  Perhaps today you got an e-mail from eBay, or PayPal, or even your local bank, saying something was wrong with your account.  How could this be?  You think better, but perhaps you should check it out, right?  You go to the site, and you see that you need to login using your username and password in order to verify your account.  The login page looks pretty much identical to the website you think you are going to, so it must be legit, right?

Wrong!  Don’t ever think that it is always ‘ok’!  You need to know two things:

(1) your bank, PayPal, eBay, etc., will NEVER ask you to ‘verify’ your login and password. 

(2)Secondly, ALWAYS check the address bar in the top of your browser.  Does the address look correct?  Is it a secure site using “https” instead of the normal “http”?  These are indicators that you need to look for, and must make yourself aware of.

These new scams are called “phishing” sites (pronounced fishing), basically because they “fish” for your information.  Surprising as it may seem, when they put out tens of thousands of e-mails, they actually manage to scam some people and steal their ID and various accounts, even if only temporarily.  It’s enough to do damage, and can happen to anyone, anywhere.  The new watchword is caveat emptor: surfer beware!

Whenever someone calls me for advice because their computer is “running slow” I always cringe.  This is because usually the culprit is a crap load of spyware running in the background, in addition to the ever-present fragmented file system on their hard drive.

It is like checking the oil on a car.  I had a friend once who bought a brand new car.  After about a year, I asked him how it was holding up.  He said it was great, and he had no problems while putting over 20K miles on the car.  I asked him when the last time he had the oil changed was, and he said “you really have to do that?  I had no idea.  Never been done!”.  Incredible, I know.

Well, people not cleaning up the spyware on their computer and running defrag is the same way.  It’s unbelievable in this age of oowey-GUI and user-friendly OS, that anyone would not be able to do these tasks on their own.  But, then again, that helps keep me in the business.

I guess I may not be joining the ranks of the TV repair man and the Maytag repair man just yet.

Does anyone else ever feel this way? The PC technology world spins on ever faster and faster, always threatening to spin out of control and lose me in the wake of it’s path forever. Ok, maybe that’s a bid dramatic, but that’s the way that I feel sometimes. I know it’s probably not quite accurate, but maybe you can feel my pain.

This week it’s a new processor on the marketplace, next week it’s the talk of yet another modification to the already intimidating M$ operating system empire. Ever hear of ‘the empire strikes back’? Yeah? Well, I wish they would quit! It’s hard enough to keep up with the hardware side of things, much less keeping up with the software updates. I mean, what was wrong with Windows 98? For all intents and purposes, it can still hold it’s own today against the ‘modern’ Windows versions, not to mention faster loading time. OK, OK, so the BSOD (blue screen of death) did become my invisible friend, just waiting to pop up at the most unopportune times (like when I had a load of stuff open and going on my desktop - all unsaved!!!).

OK, enough of my rant for today. There are just some days that I wish the world would stop for a bit, and I could catch up.