It’s true.  I made my mom cry.

But before you start thinking what a terrible son I must be, let me tell you what happened.

My brother and his family live in South Carolina.  This summer they came down to our area for a brief visit.  When they went back home, they left their 9 year old daughter, Eva, here to spend a couple of weeks with my parents. I don’t know who was more excited about this extended vacation, my niece Eva or her grandma and grandpa.

Since my mom and dad are both retired, they have the time available to make their own schedule, so with Eva here for a couple of weeks they definitely made the most of it.  My other brother lives locally and they have a couple of kids in the same age range as Eva, so Grandma and Grandpa and the 3 grandchildren had a blast for those 2 weeks.  They went to the park, the beach, the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, the Glazer Children’s Museum, and more – they all had a great time.

And of course, lots of pictures were taken.  My dad has this compact digital camera that he takes just about everywhere, so every time the group of them did something fun he was snapping pictures.  I don’t know how many total, but probably close to 100 over the 2 weeks.

Shortly after that, my mom was looking at the pictures on the camera and saw a few that didn’t turn out right, so she deleted them.  Suddenly, somehow, all of the pictures disappeared.  She and my dad kept looking all around in the camera’s menu, but no pictures.  To say they were disappointed doesn’t really do it.  My mom was especially sad, because those pictures represented a really special time with their grandkids, and she was the one who apparently “deleted” them.

In my computer business, I have had a few times when my clients have accidentally deleted pictures from their camera’s memory card.  I have a few methods (using various specialized software) to retrieve those photos, and have had a pretty good success rate.  So I took the camera card home and worked my magic on it.

It didn’t work.  Here is the email I sent mom and dad:

We talked about this later.  She didn’t show it much, because my mom is a very positive person.  But she was really feeling awful that those pictures were lost forever.

A day or so later, I was thinking about the whole situation, and it occurred to me that there was one thing I hadn’t tried (a different program to use for data recovery).  I plugged in the memory card, ran the software, and…

There were all of the pictures!  I couldn’t believe it.  I double checked and opened several of them in Photoshop to be sure, and it was true…the pictures were recovered.

One other thing that I haven’t mentioned so far in the story is that I have been planning a new business venture for a little while – video production.  I am able to take some pictures and put them into a video format, add some music and some text, and turn out a product that people will really treasure.

So that’s what I did.  I put together a 3-4 minute video, made up of all of the “lost” photos.  I think it turned out pretty well.

The next day, I called my mom and dad to make sure they were home and said I was coming over to show them something.  They had no idea what I was up to.  I brought the video over on a DVD so they could watch it on their big screen.

Surprised? Excited? Elated?  All understatements.  Like I said, I made my mom cry.

Clearly one of my happiest moments as a son.  It’s something that none of us will ever forget.  To top it off, the day I delivered it was my parents’ wedding anniversary.

I love the timing of this – what a great way to launch a new service!  Still pictures are fine, but when you add cool graphics and music and make them into a video, they really take on a whole new meaning.  It turns those pictures into something your family will treasure forever.  What a great birthday or anniversary gift, or a heartwarming way to remember a loved one who has passed, or to show off a new baby.  The possibilities are endless.

Would you like to make someone cry with happiness? Check out the possibilities at my new site – SmilingVideos.com.  (On that site you can also see the video that I talked about above.)

I think you’ll like it!

Thanks to my friend Eileen this week for alerting me to a fantastic add-on for viewing content on the web: Readability.

If you get your news from the internet, you know that it comes with a price.  Not a monetary price necessarily, but an “annoyance” price.  All you want to do is read a particular news story, and the whole page is cluttered up with text ads, display ads, Flash ads (many with images that are bouncing or moving around, and some even with sound), links to other stories, and all kinds of JUNK that is of no interest when you just want to read the story.

(In defense of the news sites, I know they have to make money somehow.  We pay nothing to view the content on the site, and without all that other stuff to help pay for the site, there would be no news to read.  That doesn’t mean I have to like it though.)

Enter Readability (www.readability.com).  When you are on a web page like I described above and you just want to read the article, all you have to do is click the Readability icon.  The page magically transforms, and you will see a wonderfully clean space with the text of the article you want to read.  When you are finished, just click the Back button to return to the previous cluttered page.

Here’s an example.  This is what a current MSN news page “normally” looks like (the items in red are unrelated to the article on the page):

When Readability has converted it, it looks like this:

Readability is built as an add-on for Firefox, Safari and Chrome.  You can also use it with Internet Explorer, as a Favorites button.  There are full instructions on the site – when you go to the home page, just click “Get the Free Add-on” and follow the directions.  You might also want to watch the brief video to get an overview of what it does.

Have you tried Readability?  Let us know what you think in the comments below.

This past week was interesting.  Several hundred people got my new guide to computer security, and one of my friends emailed me asking about what appeared to be a scam email that he received.  I confirmed to him that it was indeed a scam, and thought it would be good to mention it here.

The interesting thing about this scam is that it doesn’t actually cost you any money.

To understand how this works, you need to know about a particular type of auction website: penny auctions.  The one we are talking about today is BidCactus.com, but there are lots of them.

With a penny auction site, there are lots of great electronics, appliances, gift cards and other things available for auction – all items that are in high demand.  You can see the items available right on the front page, along with the current bid and the time left in the auction.

Whenever a new bid is received, the price for the items goes up by a penny (hence the name “penny auctions”).  Also, at every new bid, there is a little more time added to the auction.  So you might see something ending in 1 minute, and you place your bid.  The price goes up by 1 penny, and you are now the high bidder, but now there are 3 minutes left.  As long as no one else bids in that 3 minute period, you get the item (and the final bid price is always ridiculously low).

Here’s the catch: you have to buy your “bids” ahead of time.  The site will give you 10 free bids when you create the account, but beyond that you would need to buy a bid package.

As you can see in the image on the left, you can get 100 bids for $75.  You can probably do that math in your head – that means each bid costs 75 cents.  You can buy bids in packages of 30, 50, 75, 100 or maybe even more.  But the cost for each bid boils down to 75 cents.  Remember that, because it is important to know in order to figure out how this works (and why it’s not a good deal for anyone except the people running the website).

So let’s look at an example that I saw happen.  The item being auctioned was an iPad – retail value $729.00.  As I watched, the bidding was at $12 or so.  The clock would tick down, and then someone else would bid and another minute or so got added.  This happened over and over.

Finally, the last bid was for $33.31, and the clock ticked down and that buyer “won” the iPad for $33.31.  Wow, right?  Getting a $700 iPad for $33.31, what an amazing deal!  Not really.  Do the math:

If the iPad’s final bid was $33.31, that means that there were a total of 3,331 bids placed on it.  Every one of those bids had to be purchased through the site.  Remember the cost per bid?  75 cents.  That means the website took in $2498.25 in bid sales, plus the final price of $33.31 for a total income of $2531.56.  And for that, they need to ship the winner a $729 item.  Net profit on this single auction: $1802.56.   I don’t know about you, but I would be happy to trade a $700 item for $2500.

And that was just one item.  This site sells multiple items at the same time, and it goes 24 hours a day.  Frankly, it’s a pretty clever (although slimy) business model.  The key is to get people “hooked” – once they have some bids invested in an item, it’s very difficult to let that item go.  After all, the next bid could be the winner!

From the website’s standpoint, they just want to keep bringing in new members in high volume.  In fact, they will pay people to promote their site and bring them new members.  If I were an affiliate for this site (I’m not, by the way), I could put an ad on MY website.  Anyone that clicked on that ad, signed up, got there free 10 bids, and made at least one bid, would mean I would get an $18 commission.

That means there are a bunch of affiliates out there trying to come up with ways to get people to sign up, so they can earn their easy $18 commissions.

That brings us to the email that my friend Dan received.  He was advertising a mattress on Craigslist, and he got this email:

Hi,

I noticed your ad and was thinking if you would like to trade. I’m a collector and have been seeking for your item for a long time, I got to have it! Well, I currently run a site where I sell popular electronics for amazingly cheap. It’s very enjoyable and tons of customers get hooked on it! Anyways, why don’t you go look at the main page and see if you like anything. You can have whatever you like. However, I do have 1 easy favor. Can you validate you’re real and not a scammer? All you have to do is sign up for free and bid on the item you want for trading, it only costs 1 penny. If you can’t even do that for me then goodbye. I’ll not get tricked again!

To prove that I’m real, let me hook you up with a promo code – “great10″. This will give you 10 free bids so you can actually use it. Anyways, let me know after you bid 1 penny on it so I can get in touch with you! TTYL!

http://calmstuff .org

Even though the link text SAID “calmstuff.org” the link was actually to this page.  You guessed it – it goes to the BidCactus site.  The address is specific to the guy that sent the email, so that his commissions can be tracked.  He probably sends out dozens or hundreds of emails like this every day (or he could have software that sends them out for him, thousands at a time).

So there it is, the scam that doesn’t even cost you anything.  The real “victim” in this scam is the website, since they are paying an $18 commission to get a new member that was tricked to come to their site.  Even so, with such a high profit margin, they will still make money because even if someone is tricked to get to the site, a certain percentage will be intrigued and stay for a while, and probably spend some money on more bids.

What are your thoughts on a site such as this one?  Do you think there is a way to “game” it and actually get a bargain?  I would love to hear your comments below.

It’s a simple fact:  some websites are secure, and some are not.  There’s no problem with that in itself; some sites do not need to be secure.  This blog post is not “secure”, but that’s fine because I am not asking you to enter any critical information.

But what if a website is selling something, and asking you to enter your credit card information?  Before you input any information like that (credit card number, bank account number, social security number, etc.) you need to make sure that your data will be safe.

There is a quick and easy way to do that.

First, on this blog post, look up at the top of the page at the address bar:

See how the address for this site starts out with “http” – that means it is just a regular website, not one that you would want to enter your credit card into.

Now, if you click on my link above that goes to my Remote Support service and click the Buy Now button, you will be taken to a site that does ask for a credit card:

Notice the difference?  This one starts with “https” – that extra “s” stands for secure.  When you are making this purchase, you can either sign into your Paypal account, or just pay with a regular credit card if you don’t have a Paypal account.  Either way, the information that you enter will be secure.

This just means that the data you enter won’t be “eavesdropped” into a third party computer while the transaction is taking place.  Of course, the fact that a site is secure does not by itself mean that there are absolutely zero risks.  But paying with a credit card is the safest way to purchase anything online, because you are protected against loss or fraud through your credit card company, or the merchant (or both).

YouTube has a huge variety of videos.  Some funny, some bizarre, and some are actually educational and entertaining.  Sometimes you might even want to watch a particular video more than once.  One option is to just save that video page as a Bookmark (in Firefox) or a Favorite (in Internet Explorer).  However, this doesn’t always work – you might go back to that page a week or a month later and find that the video has been removed from YouTube.  There’s a better way.

What you need to do is actually download the video and save it as a file on your computer.  Of course, if you look around on the video page, you won’t see any instructions about how to do this.  Fortunately, you are a reader of this blog so you will know the secret!

Here’s how you do it:

Let’s say you have viewed the video of Paul Potts’ first television appearance, in which he stunned the audience with his incredible operatic voice.  If you have not seen the video, here it is (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelJrP3P7tA):

So you want to save that video to your computer, as a file that you can play any time without having to go to the YouTube website.  First, you go up to the address bar and copy the URL (highlight the address, then right click and choose Copy):

Next, you go to a website called Save YouTube (http://saveyoutube.com).  There you will see a place to “Paste” the URL of that video:

Paste the address in that field, and hit Download.  The first time you do it, you might get a warning – if so, just select “Run”.  No software is being installed on your computer.

You will see a list of download links – these represent different file formats for the video.  You can experiment with the various file types, but usually MP4 should work fine on most computers.  Choose where you want to save the file, and it will be on your computer in a very short period of time.

For a larger variety of filetypes and better video quality, you can download and install the free program “YouTube Downloader” at the YouTube Downloader site.  This is also handy if you are on a slow internet connection, but want to view a video – you can let the video download and when it is all done, you can watch it without having the problems of buffering starts and stops.

Recently I have seen a warning being circulated, mostly on Facebook and through email.  It reads like this:

There’s a site called Spokeo.com that’s a new online USA phone book w/personal information: everything from pics you’ve posted on Facebook or web, your approx credit score, home value, income, age, even credit card #’s. Remove yourself by searching your name, find your page, copy the URL and then go to the bottom of the page and click on the Privacy link to remove yourself. Copy & re-post so your Facebook friends are aware.

A lot of people would read that and panic.  “Oh no!  What do I do, now that there is a site that has all of my private information!?”

Okay, remain calm.  Let’s look at this rationally.

When I first read the above warning, I went to the website (www.spokeo.com) and searched on my own name.

First of all, without knowing the city I live in, the results would have been too many to be useful – there are hundreds of people with my same name in every state.

So I entered my name and the city where I live.  Here is the information that I was able to “learn” about myself:

- Street address – correct.  Of course, that is readily available from the phone book (that no one uses any more)

- Male – correct.  It’s doesn’t exactly take a super computer to analyze a name and decide if it belongs to a male or female.

- Age: late 40s – correct.  Bad news for people that like to lie about their age.

- Phone number – incorrect.  The phone number they listed I have not had for a few years.

- Married – correct.  This summer will be 27 years.

- House value of $191k – questionable.  Who really knows the actual value of a house in the current real estate market.  But anyone with your address can get an estimated value from probably a dozen different websites.  The site was wrong about the number of bedrooms in our house (listed 3, we have 4).

- Property street view – incorrect.  Again, anyone with an address can go to Google maps and get a satellite view, street view or map view of your house.  But Spokeo hasn’t quite gotten the hang of that yet, at least not with me.  The house and street they displayed are nowhere near me.

- Number of people in household – incorrect.

- How long at this address – incorrect.

Frankly, all of that information is pretty boring.  Everything listed is information that is publicly available from multiple other areas.

What about all the “juicy” stuff?  Information that’s listed under my name, such as:

• income
• photos
• videos
• home purchase price

For that stuff, you need to click on the “See the Full Profile” button – at which point you are taken to a screen where you are invited to pay $35 for a yearly subscription.  And even with the paid subscription, they are careful to say that the full report “may” include these details – you won’t know until you hand over some money.

Spokeo does nothing more than aggregate information that is already available for anyone to see; they just put it into one place to make it easier.  Then they want to make some money by selling more of the same public information.  Rather clever business model, if you ask me – get information for free, then sell it.

You can click on “Privacy” at the bottom of the page and have your information taken off the Spokeo site.  But that’s pretty pointless – it’s all still available on all the other sites, where Spokeo grabbed it in the first place.

It wouldn’t surprise me if all the Spokeo “warnings” in circulation were actually originated by their own marketing people – look at all the free publicity and website traffic they are getting from it.

Snopes.com ran some trials with Spokeo, and they found that:

• The information returned to paying customers through Spokeo searches is not very detailed and is often inaccurate.
• Our repeated attempts to request the blocking of a particular record through Spokeo’s privacy page have found the procedure to be highly questionable: no attempt is made to verify that the person requesting the blocking of a record is the person identified by that record, our efforts have never resulted in a successfully blocked record, and Spokeo’s customer service group did not respond to any of our inquiries.
• Attempts to initiate record blocking are frequently met with error messages claiming that the provided e-mail address is invalid or that “in order to prevent abuse, we must limit the frequency of privacy requests.”

Do you have any experience with Spokeo?  Let us know in the comments section below.

I’ve been using Paypal for years.  It’s almost universally accepted as a way to pay for online purchases, and you can accept credit cards using your Paypal account, even if the payer doesn’t have an account.  To pay for that convenience, Paypal’s fees are higher than a typical merchant account.

Now Paypal may have some competition.  There is a new online pay service called PayBox (check it out here).

I signed up with PayBox about a week ago to check it out (accounts are free).  At first I was concerned because in order to have an account, you have to receive their email newsletter.  I figured I would be overwhelmed with junk emails, but that has not happened – I’ve only received a couple of emails from them.

Right now, PayBox has what they call an “Early Bird” offer.  Members that get in now receive a startup bonus of $50 in their account.  They will also add to your account when you give them feedback and suggestions.

Is PayBox the next Paypal killer?  Who knows.  You can never predict what will happen with new online services.  However, it costs nothing to join and you get $50 in your account right away.  I figure it’s worth a try to see what happens.  Let me know your experience in the comments.

Take a look at PayBox here.

Now that the internet has become a big part of our day to day lives, privacy is a concern that a lot of people have.  This even comes down to doing a simple Google search.  Did you know that when you submit a search term to Google, some of the information you send is saved?  It’s true.

We don’t like to think of Google as being “sneaky” and compiling our data; after all, their motto is “Don’t be evil”.  But they do save data.  This includes the date and time of your search, the search term, and your computer’s internet IP address.  All of the Google searches you have done are stored in a computer database in California.

If that bothers you, you might want to know that there is a different way to search Google – anonymously.  It’s through a free service called Scroogle (www.scroogle.org).  Note that it is dot org, not dot com.

Scroogle is a not-for-profit service that is funded entirely by donations.  Here’s how it works:

1. When you go to the Scroogle home page, you will see a link that says “Scroogle scraper”.  This term comes from the fact that it is “scraping” Google’s search results.  Click that link to go to the search page.

2. Next you will see a simple form where you can enter your search phrase.  You can also choose how many results you want to see at a time (20, 50 or 100).

3. When you submit your search, Scroogle goes to Google on your behalf and gets the results.  So Google doesn’t see your IP address, they don’t set a cookie on your computer, they never have a record of your search.

Scroogle doesn’t use cookies, they don’t save any search terms, and all of their logs are deleted within 48 hours.  And one more added bonus: no Google ads in your search results.

One of the best ways to gain insight into your own life is to keep a journal (they used to be called diaries, but that sounds pretty old-fashioned now).  It can be interesting – and even a bit amusing – to look back and see what you wrote about your day to day life a year ago, or 5 or 10 years ago.

For some people, this task is avoided just due to procrastination.  The obvious way to do a journal is on the computer, but then you have to remember to do it each day and sometimes you might be distracted by something else and neglect your journal.  And what program do you use?  Any word processor will work, but it won’t automatically sort your entries by date.

Now there is a website that makes all of these super easy.  The site is call Oh Life – check it out at www.OhLife.com.

After you have created your free account, OhLife will send you an email at the end of each day.  All you have to do is reply to that email with whatever you want to put in your journal, and that email message becomes your journal entry for that day.  You don’t have to try to remember to do it, just watch for that email.

You can access all of your entries at the website, and it is completely private so no one else can see what you write.  If you’ve been thinking about starting a journal, give it a try.

I have always enjoyed listening to police and fire/rescue calls on a scanner.   Having obtained my amateur radio license when I was 16, pulling signals out of the air has fascinated me for a long time.  However, a lot of police departments are using new technology (including “trunking”) which makes it difficult.  You have to keep up with the latest equipment, or you won’t hear anything.

As usual, a website has been created that solves this problem.  Check out www.RadioReference.com.

This site offers the ability to listen to police, fire, ambulance and other public service radio communication throughout the US.  It does not offer every service in every city.  When you go to the site, click on “Live Audio” and go to Live Audio Home to choose your state and your local area.  Here in my area I usually listen to the Clearwater Police.

The site has other features too, for people who are really into scanners and monitoring the public airwaves – there’s a forum to communicate with other users, a classified section for buying and selling equipment, and more.