The Legal Pad

Elective Pain

For some folks, it's all about the food. For some, it's all about the football games. For some, it's the sheer entertainment of being in the middle of lively conversations during dinner. For others, it's the waiting in line in the wee hours to take advantage of the Black Friday mayhem the day after Thanksgiving. I don't get that. I never got that. Sounds like elective pain to me.

One of my co-workers loves the hunt. She is the Hunter-Gatherer Queen of Black Friday. She even has an entourage that accompanies her and over the years it's become an all-out Big Event (with a capital "B" and a capital "E"). One has to get pre-approved to be part of her group. They each have their assignments -- they make a list, compare prices, they make maps, get all wound up, and head out to battle!

Getting up early to stand in line, waiting for a store to open with a bunch of people who are also on the same kind of crazed mission -- is just too much stress for me. There is nothing I need or want that will get me involved to that degree of seriousness but some people just love it! For those of you who do, I hope you have a great time and find the best bargains!

There's lots of different ways to spend Thanksgiving. I've been to dinners where I was a guest and didn't have to do a thing. Memories of some of the very best holidays I've had were Thanksgiving dinners that were very simple -- making lots of buttery popcorn, ordering take-out pizzas, and picking up movies for an all-day movie marathon was great fun. A good time was had by all! One time, I made lasagna, salad, bread sticks and cheesecake for dessert instead of turkey and all the trimmings. It's a good way to surprise guests -- and who doesn't like lasagna?

On the other hand, creating a Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, corn, pies, ice cream, etc. can be a huge undertaking. It takes lots of grocery shopping time, prep time, cooking time, and lots of effort on the part of the cook to have everything come out at the same time and taste good. When I've made a huge dinner like that, for me, it was a labor of love. But for others, they just think that's really nutty and prefer to eat out in a restaurant for dinner and not mess with all that work.

I guess when you think about it -- each and every one of us has our own elective pain about this holiday, don't we?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Part 3: On Bein' Stealthy

For those of you who were totally lost in the first two articles James wrote for us -- I'll give you a quick review. The articles are about different ways to use thumb drives. If you're not quite sure yet what a thumb drive a/k/a Flash USB port is -- here's a photo of one on the right. You can purchase them at any office supply company or a store that has a decent electronics department. They aren't expensive -- and you can get different kinds, colors, and different sizes. They're handy-dandy little items.

Learning how to use a thumb drive is not difficult. When James suggested I back up my files onto a thumb drive instead of a CD, my response was, "Okay. Good idea. What's a thumb drive?" He sighed and rolled his eyes. He showed me what a thumb drive was and gave me a quick lesson. Now I have a strange sense of power knowing I can copy important information from one computer to another -- or take the information on my thumb drive wherever I go. If you're nervous or you're not real sure you want to jump into the abyss of the thumb drive world -- trust me -- once you do it and you're successful -- you'll wonder why you took so long to learn.

In Part 3, James discusses backing up information. It's the undercover, sneaky stuff -- some ways to be stealthy!

 

One last thing about thumb drives I would like to address is a backup, and I want to emphasize the stuff most people don’t normally think of when they back up files. I have a fireproof safe in my house where I keep important documents, which is all fine and good. But if my house catches fire, then I’m still going to lose my home movies and photos, even if they were in the safe, just because they would melt. What I have done is take my home movies and important photos (wedding, babies and pictures of each room of my house) and stuck them on a thumb drive. By the way, the photos of each room are so I can show what I had should my house burn down. Along with those, I also keep a scanned copy of my important documents on the thumb drive, like birth certificates, wills and so on. Take the thumb drive out of your house, give it to a family member you trust, lock it in your car, put in your desk at work, put it in a safe deposit box, or just somewhere that won’t be destroyed by whatever destroys your home. Thumb drives are cheap, so make a few copies to cover any scenario.

I realize that making copies of these documents could be dangerous if someone dishonest gets hold of them. Depending on how sensitive the information and how far you want to take it, there are a few ways to go about protecting your data.

One is by using one of those portable applications to put your files in a password protected zip file. Then you can only open the zip file if you know the password. This keeps nosey people out, and most likely anyone who would steal your thumb drive or would go snooping around with it won't have the knowledge to do this. Google is a useful tool and passwords to zip files can be cracked. Then what you can do, as I mentioned above, is run a portable OS (operating system) on the thumb drive and keep your files in it. To step it up further, inside that OS put your files in a zip file so not only do they have to break through your computer’s security measures and passwords, but once in -- they have to find your zip file and then break into it.

Here’s a tip: Once you have made a zip file, or any other file for that matter, rename the extension. If you have a Word document, for example, called personal.doc and you rename it with an unrecognizable file extension (like personal.jwd), your computer won’t know how to open it and it won’t show up when someone searches Word documents. Even better, rename it with a file extension that has nothing to do with your file but your computer understands, like personal.jpg. When your computer tries to open personal.jpg, it’s going to try to do it with a graphics program and will result in an error along the lines of corrupt or bad file. This is elementary, but it’s one more step they have to take.

The last and best way to secure your data is to encrypt it. Download TrueCrypt, which is free and a very good tool. If you encrypt your data using it, you can feel pretty safe. Right now, if you encrypted your data using this tool and you have a good 8-character password (alpha, numerals and symbols), it would take roughly 229 years to crack. With a supercomputer it MIGHT be cracked in a few months. That’s with 8 characters; make it longer and it becomes harder to crack. Either way, anyone with the ability and time to get past your encryption scheme is hardly going to need your thumb drive to get your data.

A final note in storing your information… a SD (Secure Digital) chip like you use in your digital camera can function the same way as a thumb drive. Get a Micro SD chip - it’s smaller than a penny and usually sold with a SD chip adapter. Next time you go on a trip, put your important information (like scans of driver’s license, phone numbers to credit card companies, passport, travel information, medical information or whatever you might need) on it. Encrypt it and hide it somewhere on your person. It’s small enough that you can buy a cheap watch and hide it in the battery slot or hide it under the padding inside your shoe, for example. Then, if you get robbed, lose your luggage, get lost or whatever, you have vital information with you that only you can access.

James

Thank you to James, our Computer Guy  -- for providing some great tips and suggestions! Readers -- Let us know what you think -- your comments are always welcomed!

Part 2: Take It With You

Today's article is about "taking it with you" --  on your thumb drive. James shares more tips and suggestions by way of portable applications...

One thing I use is portable applications. Once again, there are several to choose from -- but I recommend you go to PortableApps. They have quite a few, including a suite which has the more useful/popular apps. These are applications that you can run off of your thumb drive. Even if you don’t run them off your thumb drive, you can download them to your computer and run them there. Since the idea behind thumb drives is portability,  some of these can be very useful in that capacity. For example, if you choose to put Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome on your thumb drive, then you retain your favorites wherever you go. Want to show someone a cool website you found? Just plug in your thumb drive and run your browser on whatever computer you go to. Do you want to do some online shopping for the holidays but other members of your house use the same computer? Use your portable browser and your history and cached files are on your thumb drive and not on the home computer. Want to go check out the local dating website but don’t want your spouse to know? I’m just kidding -- but you get where I’m going with this. Before I continue, let me state that an IT person with basic computer forensic know-how and the desire/need can still discover this kind of stuff, but this works for the average person.

Another thing you can do with portable applications is email. You can set up a web client on your thumb drive. If you're on the road and want to check your email without using a public computer’s web browser then you're set. Or if you want to set up an email account for that dating website that is not on your home computer, then this is what you do. (He's kidding again!)

Download GIMP and you have a portable graphics program to take with you. It’s not Photoshop, but it's free and you can do plenty of stuff like cropping or resizing photos while you're away so you can email them or post them on your web page before you get home.

Open Office is a suite of tools like Microsoft Office or Wordperfect’s Office suite, except it’s free and portable. It has programs like the others for documents, spreadsheets, presentations and so on. Not everyone has the same office suite and especially not the same version. With Open Office you can take yours and work on any computer.

I’ll stop plugging all the portable applications they have out there, but they have more, like games, security applications, mp3 players, and so on. These run off your thumb drive so you don’t need to install them on any computer you use.

James

 

Thumb Drive Tips From James -- Our Computer Guy

James is the Computer Guy in our office and he's a full-fledged geek. He says so himself. Yep, computers are his world. They're our world too, but on a much smaller scale. We've convinced him to share some of his knowledge, give us some suggestions, and pointers about thumb drives.

This will be a "three-parter" article. Today we're going to start to learn about thumb drives! You may learn something new today!

Welcome, James!

 

Thumb drives are not all that exciting. You most likely have one or more and use them to copy files between computers. If you don’t have one and are too cheap to buy one, go to your local hotel/convention center and there’s usually a booth giving them away. The main purpose of this article is to cover what you can do with a thumb drive besides copying files to take with you – although I’ll go over what files you put on it later. That being said, once you have your thumb drive, EVERYTHING I’m going to go over is free.

Let’s start with portability. You have your thumb drive to move files, but what if you could take your operating system with you? DSL (D*** Small Linux) is a complete operating system which can run off a thumb drive. There are two ways you can go from here.

One is that you boot your computer to the USB drive (your thumb drive in this case), and once booted, you have access to all your programs, files, email, etc. Any computer that can boot to a USB drive (most do nowadays) can run your operating system. The benefit is that you take what you think of as your computer – everywhere you go – home computer, office computer, laptop or an in-law’s home while you’re on vacation. From a technical standpoint, this option has its benefits. If your computer gets a virus, malware, or what not, you can boot with the thumb drive and deal with whatever problem you’re having without ever loading Windows onto your computer.

The second path, with a portable operating system, is more user-friendly. Instead of booting your computer with your thumb drive, you run it inside of Windows just like any other application. Run your thumb drive’s operating system application and you get a window with your desktop inside it that you can minimize and do everything you would expect with any other application.

Let me say that DSL, which I mentioned above, is just one route to go. There are other flavors of Linux –and some people even have Windows on theirs. I know Linux can be intimidating for someone with no experience with it, but to put it on a thumb drive is not much harder than copying the files.

Once you have it running, the same basic principals apply. Double click an icon on the desktop and it opens, click the “X” in the corner and it closes, click “File” then “Save” and it’ll do the same thing you’re used to when you perform this action in Windows.

All right – there’s a good chance you just don’t care enough to carry around a portable operating system. I’m a full-fledged geek, and I have an operating system on my thumb drive. But, with multiple laptops, an iPhone and a Blackberry, I’m pretty set on mobility as is – so I don’t use it much. If I only had a home computer and a work computer – it might be different.

James

Watch for more geeky stuff next week in Part 2