Many of my friends and family now have teens that are on the net. Most of them either don’t know themselves how their teen can protect their identity or ways to keep safe while online, or their teen doesn’t want to listen to mom or dad.

I came across this book that is labeled as The book for teens that every parent should read! it’s called Own Your Space: Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online (linked to amazon but maybe cheaper other places)

From the link:

You have been immersed in the technology since preschool. You download music, Google your homework, and constantly IM your friends. You check your email before dinner, tweak your MySpace page, and bypass that hardcopy diary for your own 31337 space in the blogosphere. While you’re doing that, you also need to protect yourself. This book is about keeping safe—protecting your data, your identity, and yourself without giving up all the great stuff the Net puts at your fingertips.

Learn how to

• Kill viruses, worms, Trojans, and spyware
• Give Spam the curb and smash web bugs
• Understand just how public your “private” blogs are
• Keep wireless freeloaders off your network
• Safeguard your parents’ credit card and financial data
• Understand what tools you need and how to tweak them

This could also be a good gift for your teen..

For those of you interested in technology, security and a bit of hacking check out Outerz0ne, a conference held in Atlanta, GA in February. I’ve meet many of the people from Outerz0ne from both ATL2600 and when I attended PhreakNic in Tenn last Oct. where I also had a great time. Everyone can expect to learn something, meet other techies like yourself and have a drink or 12 durring and after hours. These Cons always make for a memorable time.

A couple days ago I wrote about Pandora and how it could help you find different music. Well I’ve got another music site for you, Musicovery.Using their control panel, you can choose type of music, years of the music and even the mood of the music. What I really like about this site is it shows you all the music upfront, you can then skip along or just follow the path to the next song. Check it out, it may not use software to match your type of music but it sure lets you choose what you want. We’ll see if licensing stops some of this, like on Pandora, you can only skip so many songs an hour.

Tonight I sent a trackback to another site and noticed a couple things..

1. Because I added tags to the top of my post, the trackback now shows those before it shows the comments. Tags should not be shown. I love the plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior and will have to go in and get rid of the top tags.

2. I didn’t listen to my own advice that I gave long ago on Things i’m learning about blogging.

1. TrackBack works, but will add the entire paragraph the link is in to the comments of the linked blog. So use paragraphs! I’ve had a couple trackback comments sent to other blogs that just run on and on… and only one line about the blog entry I was linking to. I don’t think I would want someone entire blog entry added to my comments.

Now off to make the changes.

Mashable talks about the new del.icio.us widget that was released today. I use del.icio.us, not as much as I should, but probably will not use the widget. There are so many of these type of plugins/widgets to choose from, from feedburner to BlogPatrol to get stats for your blog, but a widget to see how many people have bookmarked your site on del.icio.us is a bit silly. I can see bloggers that have hundreds to thousands of readers maybe using it, but who wants to add it to their site and have it say saved by 4 other people? Maybe that would cause others to save it..?

Speaking of plugins, I’ve added a couple more tonight and will add them to my list tomorrow.. maybe from the airport (flying to Illinois for Christmas)

With Christmas just days away, I was looking up product reviews on a couple gifts that I was thinking about getting family members. I came across ExpoTV, where users create their own reviews but they are all video. If someone watches your video, you are then rewarded with $.01. I watched a couple and thought even more than just a review i’d like to see a more in depth demo and on some products a demo of the setup instructions (I always loose mine and would watch one before reading it’s docs online).

For Music while surfing, Pandora has been my choice for the last couple weeks. What makes Pandora interesting is, as the user, you add a band that you like. Pandora’s software then finds songs that are like the group or song that you like. This is for people that like to find new music, if you only want to hear the songs you know, Pandora isn’t for you. But for those that will listen to new music, this is your type of radio station. The hardest part for me was thinking of the first bands to add.

Have you ever downloaded a file, double clicked it and heard your computer running but nothing happened? Sometime it’s nothing, something didn’t work, the file was corrupt….  But sometimes it’s a virus or could be.

Like everyone should, I have virus protection on my computer, it auto updates once a week, but this week I had the above scare. I rescaned the file with my virus software and it said it was ok, but do we trust each piece of software 100%.. NO.  So along comes Virus Total. If you have a file you need tested, use the browse button at the top of the page, find the file and send it to them. Within minutes the screen will start testing the vile with a number of different virus scanners.

Oh, the file I had clicked.. no virus

In the last few days I found out that my site could not send trackbacks or pingbacks because of this post (that should have added a comment on my site). I think i’ve found the problem..

After alot of checking and making 500 new post, I think the problem was my permalinks. At first I thought that mod_rewrite wasn’t working correctly (sorry hosting company) but I found that you need to set your .htaccess file to 666, choose your setting , it then saves it and then you can change it back to 644. Maybe Scott can try this and let me know if it works for him.

I’ve been doing some work with video and adding it to websites. What I needed to do was take a dvd (not a bought one, a home movie). Take that DVD, and rip the files off of it. Then split it into many parts, take those parts and convert them into flash video. It’s then ready to add to my gallery site.

Software used:

DVD ripping: AOA DVD Ripper After trying a couple different packages, I found that AOA works great and will let me convert it to mpeg as it’s ripping.

Splitting the File: Ultra Video Splitter Again I tried a couple packages and while they all worked, some of them made files that when later I tried to convert them, didn’t like the file format. Ultra Video Splitter worked great. One thing I wish it did that others did, is let me choose like 10 different times to clip instead of doing one at a time. (but the file format is cleaner thatn the other I used.
Convert to Flash: Allok Video to FLV Converter Does a great job and will allow you to convert many at one time.

Those are the main programs I use for the video work.. One other I should mention because a user sent me all their files in MP4, so to convert them to Mpeg2 so I could then convert to Flv I used 4U MP4 Converter.

If you’ve come across something that works better or an all in one product, let me know, add a comment

Since this blog is about things i’ve come across and learned, daily. I have to post about a WordPress plugin I found last night while redoing the site.

My friend Scott Janz has his own blog and on the page he has many plugins running on the right side. Sometimes adding and configuring the plugins can be a pain, like adding his poll or webcam. To make this job much easier SideBar Widgets was created. You need to have a theme that is built to take the widgets plugin but many devs are changing their themes to work with them. After installing the main plugin, you can then find others to add. The great thing about this is that to add a widget you just upload it, activate it and then it’s drag and drop to add it to your site and to choose where it goes.