It’s been reported by the BBC that Stephen Fry may quit Twitter.

Apparently Mr Fry was upset by a comment from a Twitter follower, I don’t know who, that complained that Fry’s Tweets were boring.

Get a life anonymous Tweeter! If you find some one a bit boring on Twitter do what everyone else does, stop following them. Don’t abuse them.

I find the Fry tweets interesting and an insight into his hectic life.

Stephen, please keep going.

UPDATE: Fry has changed his mind as is staying with Twitter, and he has made up with his follower (@brumplum) who thought he was boring.

So that’s all right then.

I am amazed that this made the news, it must be slow for ‘real news’ at the moment!

Here is screen grab of my dock, click it to get a bigger picture.

Here is what I use, from left to right:

Finder: We all have one of these.
Safari: The standard Mac browser.
Firefox: Alternative browser.
Camino: The alternative to the alternative browser.
Mailplane: Gmail made easy.
Tweetie: Twitter client.
Syrinx: Another Twitter client. I just need two OK?
Skype: VOIP free calls over the ‘net.
NetNewsWire: RSS feed, feed my addiction to news and blogs.
MarsEdit: Blogging app, easier than the WordPress interface.
Smultron: Text editor.
Address Book: My contacts.
iCal: I don’t actually use it but it tells me the date!
Preview: For looking at stuff.
Pages: Word processing and more.
Numbers: Spreadsheet.
ImageWell: Quick and easy picture manipulation.
Photoshop: Slow and complex picture manipulation.
iTunes: Music and video.
Microsoft RDC: Walk on the dark side with remote access to Windows servers.
Jiggler: Wiggles the mouse every few minutes, keeps RDC alive when it’s not in use.
System Preferences: Tinker with Mac settings.
Grab: Screen Grab.
Space: We all need personal space…
Home folder: My stuff.
Quicklinks folder: Shortcuts to stuff I use all the time.
Business Folder: Business stuff.
Applications: My apps.
Trash: For stuff I don’t need.

I had not realised how much Flash content was imbedded into web pages until I turned it off.

I installed the plugin for Safari that turns Flash off. Instead of those annoying adverts I now get a plain grey box with “FLASH” written on it. I click the box to play the Flash. Or not. Mostly not.

Look here for the ClickToFlash page. Similar plugins are available for Firefox and maybe IE.

Why should you care about this?

It costs you money. Yes really, your hard earned cash is being frittered away by Flash. Flash makes your CPU work harder, it takes more energy, so that’s electricity you are paying for. It takes up bandwidth on the web, bandwidth you indirectly pay for with your broadband subscription. If you surf on a portable using 3G WiFi from the cellular network you are directly paying for the bandwidth.

Your browsing experience will be much faster without Flash.

If we all block the Flash perhaps the perpetrators of this crime will get the message and stop putting Flash all over the web.

BAN FLASH!

Apple launched some new products yesterday.

A gorgeous looking new range of the iMac, with superb high definition screens. The MacBook laptop gets a makeover and looks really nice. The Mac Mini gets a speed boost and now they do a server version. (I have had three Mac Minis, a firm favourite of mine.)

And a mouse.
What can I say? Apple can’t make pointing devices. I have a Mighty Mouse, it sucks. I HATE it. It does not click correctly, the scroll feature keeps clogging up and jamming, the side buttons are useless, IT’S RUBBISH APPLE!

The new mouse looks like it they put a Mighty Mouse and trackpad in a box and allowed them to breed. The result looks like the worst of both devices.

It’s really easy Apple:-

Go to PC World, pick up a cheap £10 mouse.
Take to the design labs and copy it.
Make it white plastic.
Don’t do anything else to it, less is more with a mouse.

OR

Farm out your rodent production to Logitech.

I have my iPod first generation up for sale on eBay. I have had to re-list it because I got scammed on the sale. I spotted the scam just in time and informed eBay so all is well but this is what happened.

The auction was just about to close, five minutes to go or thereabouts. I received an email stating that the item had sold. Here is the email:

Hello seller,

I will like to inform you that am the winner of your item on eBay and will want you to please get back to me with your email address so as for me to be able to make payment via PayPal.

Thanks

Dora.

-dora.smith3232.32

The scam is that the seller thinks it’s sold, sends the ‘buyer’ the PayPal info. The then seller gets a spoof email from PayPal that looks like the item is paid for.

The sting comes with the seller sending off the item thinking it’s paid for when it’s not. The double sting is the possibility of following a spoof link to PayPal and revealing the users password.

It could be very easy to get caught on this if the seller did not check directly on eBay but took the spoof email as proof of the sale. As I was logged into both PayPal and eBay as the auction closed I spotted immediately that I was being scammed.

There are reports in the news that Hotmail, Gmail and other email services have been compromised. (Reported online by BBC news)

This is interesting as I was discussing passwords with some friends only a few days ago. I was amazed that one person uses ‘vvvvvvv’ as his office password; that IT department needs to check their procedures!

Password strength has always been an issue. If you have ever worked in an environment where the office system forces a password change at regular intervals and does not let you reuse previous passwords, or indeed some of the characters from previous passwords, you will know what I am talking about.

BUT, if the user falls for a phishing scam, that user can have a 64 character UPPER and lower case, numerical and symbol password but it may as well be ‘fred12345′ (Look at your keyboard for the significance of FRED) or even ‘password’ because the user is giving away the password to the bad guys.

If you get an email and it looks like it’s from your ISP, email supplier, Paypal, bank, credit card or ANYTHING secure DO NOT click on the link. Go to a saved bookmark or type the address in manually.

I checked the emails my own bank and credit card company send out and they don’t have links in them. They just ask me to login to my account.

Strong passwords are good, but education of the user is even better.