wanderingstar.net

Here’s a link that some of you with voracious reading habits and blogs might find interesting.

reader2.com

I’m getting pretty good at cleaning spyware off of WindowsXP systems. Not that I have to do it very often, thankfully, but it’s always a pain when it happens because the stock Windows tools available — regedit and task manager mostly — require a lot of manual work to effectively clean house.

I used to just look in the task manager process list for process images I didn’t like (or recognize), note the image name, then search for that image in regedit, find CLSIDs and possibly the name of the spyware (e.g. Hotbar), then search for those in regedit as well, judiciously cleaning all references out of the registry which amounted to startup items and browser helper objects (BHOs) usually. Then reboot, find the files in explorer and delete them since they can’t be deleted when in use. On the command line, netstat was also occasionally useful to catch a program connecting to a remote server on the internet. The whole thing takes awhile, and it’s a pain in the brain.

I finally bought a USB memory stick recently, so the first thing I did was to load several freeware utilities I discovered in my travels. Most of these are the very excellent sysinternals.com tools. In addition to the regmon and filemon tools that I played with several years ago to see what was going on to the registry and filesystem in real-time, they’ve expanded their collection to include many other useful utilities. Autoruns shows startup items from all those deep, dark places they hide in the registry and more, and it completely runs circles around msconfig. ProcessExplorer beats task manager into a bloody pulp. It has many useful features for spyware hunting — hover over a process for its location on disk, right click a process for a ‘Google…’ option, and the properties on a process offers a treasure trove of information on what’s going on. One last useful sysinternals utility that’s a big step up from netstat is TCPView. ‘Nuff said.

One last utility that helped me recently is something called ToolBarCop. This is pretty useful for seeing — and disabling or deleting — BHOs and other browser integrated items that get loaded at IE startup. The user interface isn’t the best, but it sure beats hunting endlessly through the registry. Prior to using this I was able to work around some problems by unchecking Enable Third Party Browser Extensions, so that’s always an option too. Also, as a general rule I would also recommend unchecking the Install On Demand options.

If you know what you’re doing, I’ve found that these tools make pretty quick work out of cleaning up after spyware, not to mention OEM crapware that slows down new computers just as much as spyware.

Of course, the best cure is prevention. Use Firefox if possible, and keep it up to date. If you’re using a browser with advanced css support (Mozilla/Firefox-based, Safari, Opera, [IE7?] etc), download this custom css file and put it in your profile as userContent.css to filter most ads effectively. (Methods vary for non-Mozilla browsers.) I also recommend privoxy for ad and spyware filtering — especially if you *have* to use Internet Explorer — but it may break some financial sites so be sure you know how to flip your browser’s proxy settings back and forth to disable and re-enable it if you can’t log into your bank website.

In addition to those steps, anti-virus scanning is NOT OPTIONAL if you’re on Windows. Download and install AVG Antivirus: Free Edition. Or, although I have no experience with it, ClamWin may also be a good freeware anti-virus program for Windows. Mac users with friends on Windows may want to consider using ClamXav to avoid passing along Windows virii by e-mail even if you’re not vulnerable yourself.

Especially if you do online shopping or banking on your computer, do yourself a favor and protect yourself from identity thieves. ALL the software mentioned in this post is 100% FREE, so there’s no excuse not to practice safe surfing, people. Remember, it’s a jungle out there.

I paid almost $30 today for 11 gallons of mid-grade gas. Had I used high grade (which I normally do), I definitely would have broken $30. To quote someone whose 15 minutes have long since passed, ‘Stop the insanity!’.

Seriously, can somebody explain to me why gas prices have raged out of control just this past year? Is it the war? Is it the economy? Or (as I strongly suspect) is Bush just lining his oil-buddy’s pockets?

At least now that Americans are being hurt where we care the most — the wallet (certainly not the environment) — maybe we’ll start to see some more rapid advancements in alternative fuel sources. A recent development in low-energy hydrogen production is promising. It would also be nice to see biodiesel take off and ween us from dependency on foreign fuels, as well as spur growth in our declining farm industry.

Until then, travel is becoming more and more dear.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find those new BK Chicken commercials disturbing? At first I thought they hired Gwar for the commercials, but I guess this is the next step after the subservient chicken web marketing ploy.

You have to wonder exactly what market they’re aiming for.

I found a recipe on the internet the other day for something this person was calling Crockpot Dal. [Ed. Surely Crackpot Dal by the time I'm finished with it...] I’ve been meaning to try my hand at some Indian cooking for awhile, and this looked suitably easy enough, so I decided to give it a go.

Went to the store, bought some more spices for my collection — turmeric, cumin seeds, chili powder — and I picked up a rice cooker at Targét. They had a nice 2d+2 rice cooker for only ten dollars more, but I went with the 1d rice cooker. Honestly, I don’t expect that much from a rice cooker!

Anyway, I put all the ingredients into the crockpot as called for, and it’s simmering now. It smells pretty good all spiced up, but I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out how the dal turns out.

Incidentally, for any Mac people out there, I just started using a program called MacGourmet to organize my recipes on my computer. It seems pretty useful, somewhat like iTunes for your recipes (which it claims to be) although it could use some polishing. I think I’m going to go ahead and register it; the shopping list feature alone will make my life a lot easier. I might even post more cooking experiments now…