2007 August archive at forgedeuphoria.com

Archive for August, 2007

Think The Internet Is Anonymous? Think Again!

Sunday, August 26th, 2007
By Aeriff 1 year ago 1 Comment

Categories: Sponsored Posts

As the title explains, if you thought the Internet was anonymous—it’s time to think again. Every Web site you visit, every e-mail you send, every image you download – is ALL connected back to your unique IP address.

So What Is An IP Address?
An IP address is a unique address that certain electronic devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard—in simpler terms, a computer address. Any participating network device can have their own unique address. An IP address can also be thought of as the equivalent of a street address or a phone number for a computer or other network device on the Internet. Just as each street address and phone number uniquely identifies a building or telephone, an IP address can uniquely identify a specific computer or other network device on a network.

Would it bother you if I told you that anybody could find out your personal information from your IP address?

Your IP: 38.103.63.59
See those numbers? That’s your IP Address. With this special number, anyone can send an official request for your private details straight to your Internet service provider. Hackers can launch an attack against your computer. Fraudsters can track your activities and build profiles of your Internet use.

So how do you prevent all this? It’s simpler than you think. You hide your IP address, of course.

Hide My IP Address is a specially-modified browser (based on Firefox) that automatically routes all of your Internet traffic through at least two ultra-secure, ultra-fast anonymous servers using the powerful and well-known Tor network for total privacy. It’s as simple as launching the Hide My IP Address browser and start browsing the Web with a totally anonymous IP address!

This is a sponsored post.

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Fine-Tune Your Flash Drive

Saturday, August 25th, 2007
By Aeriff 1 year ago 0 Comments

Categories: Hardware and Windows

Hello there readers and welcome to another article from forgedeuphoria.com. Today I’ll explain how to coax the most out of your USB flash drive. Just a quick note before beginning: this guide has been written for Windows XP (my operating system) and therefore the names of certain options or menus might be different.

Almost every single USB flash drive comes formatted with the FAT file system by default, which allows them to be used by virtually any version of Windows that supports USB. Although Microsoft doesn’t make it either intuitive or straightforward, you can format a flash drive with the NTFS file system. This gives you the added benefit of a robust file system and a smaller allocation unit, which makes smaller files occupy less space on large flash drives (full comparison of FAT and NTFS file systems and why NTFS is better than FAT). In addition, you can take advantage of NTFS compression to create additional effective space on the flash drive or enable the Encrypting File System for added security.

Unfortunately, all good things come at a price and this statement is no different for the NTFS file system. The price you will pay for NTFS features is slower copying times (about 1.5x for USB 1.1 and 2x for USB 2.0), even without encryption or compression enabled.

To enable compression for the entire flash drive:

Open My Computer, right-click the flash drive and select ‘Properties’.
Tick the box that says ‘Compress drive to save disk space’ in the bottom box and click OK
In the ‘Confirm Attribute Changes’ dialog box, keep the default ‘Apply changes to :\, subfolder and files’ and click OK.

You can also enable or disable compression for single files and/or folders, which is the only option for encryption.
To start either procedure:

Right-click the file or folder and select ‘Properties’ and then click the ‘Advanced’ tab
You can now tick either Compression or Encryption. Make your choice, click OK and see step 3 above.

Although you can’t enable both compression and encryption on the same file or folder, you could compress one set of files or folders and encrypt a different set.

With Windows XP’s default settings, NTFS isn’t included on the Windows format tool’s list of file systems, but you can add the option by changing the default on the ‘Policy’ tab for the flash drive from ‘Optimize for quick removal’ to ‘Optimize for performance’, as illustrated here. Although you must have ‘Optimize for performance’ ticked to add the ‘NTFS format’ option, if you wish you can change back to the default after formatting. However, either policy gives the same time for copying files to the flash drive because apparently XP only enables the write cache for fixed USB drives.

If you frequently swap files on and off your flash drive(s), you should check out Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager. This freeware program requires the .NET Framework 1.1, but won’t install if you have .NET Framework 2.0 or later (weird, eh?). The solution/workaround to this problem is to temporarily uninstall the later version of .NET Framework, install version 1.1, install USB Flash Drive manager and then reinstall the later .NET Framework.

And so ends this article on Fine-tuning your flash drive. If you have any questions, comments or something was unclear, leave a comment or contact me using the contact form.

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One Year And Still Going Strong

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
By Aeriff 1 year ago 3 Comments

Categories: Site Related

So here I am, some 365 days later and still going with this blog. That’s right: It’s been 1 year since I wrote my first post. Looking back in retrospect it seems it would have been better to do the usual ‘welcome to my blog’ post, but everything conventional just seemed to be thrown out the window. Since then I’ve undergone name changes and bought a domain, celebrated a birthday, changed the theme, lost a bunch of coding work, written a rant or two, written an assortment of miscellaneous articles (with more to come!), blogged about total crap, reached 100 posts and now that all the link spam is over, I feel a few thankyous are in order for the simple reason that all of this couldn’t have been done without thanking a few people:

My first thanks goes out to Brent Pickup for allowing me to perch myself on his server. Without him there would be no forgedeuphoria.com.

The next person that I feel deserves a mention is Jeremy Erickson for purchasing me the domain (which I need to renew very very soon!)

And last but not least, I need to thank you; the readers. Without your continued support, comments and input I wouldn’t really have a reason to write this blog. While there’s a long way to go to where I’d like reader numbers to be, the support you have shown for one simple Australian guy and what he has to say on his blog has given me that warm fuzzy feeling inside which is part of the reason I post.

Also thanks to anyone who has slipped my mind and I may have left out of this list, contact me if you feel you should be on here and be in the limelight for a little.

Also keep your eyes open this month for a small competition to celebrate this milestone, so I also have a chance to properly thank all my readers.

I probably should start wrapping this up as I have work to do. Here’s to another year of somewhat meaningful blogging here at forgedeuphoria.com.

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Cheap Projector Rentals in the US

Friday, August 3rd, 2007
By Aeriff 1 year ago 0 Comments

Categories: Sponsored Posts

Looking for a projector for a special function or occasion but simply don’t have the funds or already blown the budget? Projector123 offers competitive pricing on projector rental for weddings, birthdays, corporate functions etc. and services every city in the United States. Projector 123 also offers FedEx shipping on all projector rentals, including such locations as Amarillo, Anaheim, Bakersfield, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Corpus Christi, Des Moines, El Paso, Fargo, Fresno, Las Vegas, Lincoln, Louisville, Lubbock, Memphis, Midland-Odessa, Milwaukee, Nashville, Riverside, St Louis, and Washington DC. If you’re from El Paso, why not consider their El Paso projector rental services? 24 hour technical support is always available and from a starting price of $99 plus shipping, how can you go wrong?

Speaking from experience, projectors are a great tool for presentations and trade shows etc. for visual marketing of your product, or simply just a great idea for a movie night with friends.

This is a sponsored post.