SENDING TEXT & PICS TO YOUR CELL

If you want to send a picture from your cell phone to your email, easy right. Just enter the email address when sending a camera shot and voila', done.

How about the other direction. Say you took this picture on a camera and want to save it as wallpaper to your cell phone.


Took me a while to Google this and I ended up calling AT&T to find the information. Evidentally this is some type of secret. Your cell phone has an email address:

yourcellphonenumber@mms.att.net -> at&t (formerly cingular)

You may need to call your provider to get the address for your cell phone.

NETMETER v1.1.2

For those of you interested in what your computer is downloading and uploading, here is a free utility that has some nice features.

It sits in the lower right hand corner of your screen, can be made transparent and allows you to click through to the windows below, essentially making it a ghost window you can see what is happening.

http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/

TASK MANAGER TINY FOOTPRINT

If you have ever opened the Task Manager and the title bar & tabs are missing, you don't have a virus; it is running in Tiny Footprint mode. Double-click the border and it will return to the normal view.

FLIP MAIL

https://www.teleflip.com/ is offering a new service called "FlipMail". It turns your normal cell phone into a BlackBerry with emails sent to you as txt messages on your cell phone.

The features make it pretty attractive at the moment:

1) It's free.
2) It only sends the emails you designate you want sent to your phone.
3) It only sends them when your email client is closed. You don't get duplicates.

COPY MESSAGE BOX TEXT TO THE CLIPBOARD

Ever get a error message and need to write it down? Particular one with an obscure error number like 0x80040e09? Sometimes you can copy the entire contents of a message box to the clipboard by pressing CTRL+C.

To test this, go to the Start menu and choose “Run...“ Then type in something that doesn't exist, such as “foobar“ and press Enter or OK. You'll get a message box dialog that says “Windows cannot find 'foobar'.“ and a lot more information that I didn't want to bother to type in manually. Press CTRL+C, the text of the message will be copied to the clipboard. If you paste it into notepad, it'll look like this:

---------------------------
foobar
---------------------------
Windows cannot find 'foobar'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the Start button, and then click Search.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

This won't work for every dialog box but it's worth a try before calling someone and saying, "I had an error." without being able to tell the person what the error was.

WINDOWS UPDATES CONTINUED

Clients,

Below is a snippet from a security show talking about compromising a network. It's a bit deep in technical jargon but the important part is two fold: 1) don't open stuff you don't know about, and 2) run MS critical updates and virus protection often.

http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-091.pdf - (zero day exploits simply mean they are hacking you from the day the bug is published/released.)

But when it comes to these client application vulnerabilities, the easiest way to really do some damage and get some data out of a company is to send the Microsoft Word zero-day to the HR department at a large company, and the lady in HR opens it, Word disappears, she’s none the wiser, now I have that computer compromised. Now that I’m on the inside of your network, I take a remote attack like the DNS zero-day to target your active directory server. And now I’ve compromised that, and I can do anything I want to your company. And this all happens within a few hours.

KISS OF (UPDATE) DEATH ...

Clients,

A number of you have been bit in the last several days with a bug in the Microsoft Automatic Updates. This service starts with the computer and talks with Microsoft to determine what patches need to be installed on your computer. Recently, this service has been crashing rendering your computer incapable of anything other than a hard reboot to recover its attention. You see a message containing information about svchost and 0x7… in a dialog and are asked to send a report to Microsoft.

If you are experiencing this behavior or just instability, the solution is simple.

1) Restart your computer.
2) Immediately open the Automatic Updates Control panel and turn it off.
3) Manually run the updates from the Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft Update menu item. This might require a ½ hour to complete before rebooting.
4) Open the Automatic Updates Control panel and turn it on.

Steps 4 is optional but the problem is fixed after running the manual update in step 3.