Recently however, I’ve realized my compulsion to buy stems from the slick marketing process built into Steam’s interface. By default, you are presented with the home page of Steam store once you load the client. Sometimes a pop-up appears, upon start-up or after exiting a game, detailing all the latest games and promos available from Steam. Both are designed to keep you aware of what’s new, subtly pushing you to open up your wallet and make Valve (and its partner publishers) richer.

Luckily, you can change the Steam client settings and lessen temptations to buy. It’s a simple matter of clicking on the File Menu of the Steam client and selecting Settings. Once the dialog pops-up, all you have to do is set your Favorite Window to anything other than “Steam”, and unchecking Notify me (with Steam instant messages) about additions or changes to my games, new releases, and upcoming releases. Then click OK to save the new settings.

What this does is minimize the temptations to buy new games. Now when you start up Steam, you’re brought directly to your games; you don’t get to see the store until you intentionally choose to go there, saving you from the skillfully crafted “buy now” messages plastered all over Steam’s home page. The same applies to disabling Steam’s notifications, as there are now less opportunities for Valve to ply its wares on your impressionable gaming mind.

With fewer temptations to buy, you indirectly save more money, and continue maximizing the advantage that attracted you to Steam in the first place: low-priced legit copies of PC games.

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The hilarious text starts off thus:

Welcome to Surfing for Seniors: An Introduction to the Internet

If you’re not comfortable with your computer, you may need to play this tape and practice many times.

The mouse is made to fit in the palm of your hard. Rest your hand on the rounded top, and push. You will see how the pointer on your screen moves around. It works similar to the game you find in fairs, supermarkets, deparment stores, where all of the toys are inside the glass case. You have to manuever the claw to pick up the toy inside the case. Since you cannot reach your hand inside the case, you must use the tool, by manuevering the lever.

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But no one said you could snap these vistas without anyone posing in the foreground and use them as wallpapers. Better yet, if you have your own website(s), you can offer these home-made wallpapers as downloads to attract readers to your online properties.

Sometimes you come by these wallpaper opportunities thanks to pure luck. After a night of drinking at the beach, I ended up sleeping on a deck chair, with the crashing waves lulling me to sleep. A few hours later, the beautiful sunrise woke up. Luckily, my point-and-shoot was in my pocket, so I groggily pulled myself up, ambled closer to the water to compose a better picture. After snapping a photo for the ages (and my desktop), I dragged myself back to the deck chair and continued sleeping.

Of course, you have to size your landscape photos into sizes that work well with your display. Two great (and free) solutions are Picasa and resize2email.com. The former is a great photo manager, and allows you to somewhat control image resizing via its export function. If you’re looking for better control over the resizing process, you can give the latter—or any powerful photo editor like Photoshop—a try.

(image courtesy of Rey Agapito)

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1. Disable XPS Documents. Disable that new image format found in Vista. “Attackers have been having a field day exploiting image/document formats and parsers, so the fewer formats your browser supports, the better.”
2. Disable Font Download. “If you don’t tend to browse websites outside your normal language, then you really don’t need this.”
3. Disable inclusion of local file directory path when uploading files to a server. “This results in a mild privacy concern because the file path can include identifying information such as your computer’s login account name. Sending ‘c:\Users\jforristal\Pictures\blog.gif’ exposes [the] username ‘jforristal’.”
4. Disable prompting if you are prone to just clicking “yes”. “If you are prone to always selecting ‘yes’ whenever a popup box is presented to you (note: not a good habit!), you can remove the temptation by simply switching all the ‘Prompt’ options to ‘Disable.’”
5. Always prompt for username and password. “For home users and others using computers that are not in a business environment that uses Active Directory, there is no advantage to having auto-logon enabled since there is practically nothing you would want to auto-logon to out on the Internet, he said.” (Note: this doesn’t disable auto logon for your websites)
6. Disable SSL 2.0 support. “SSL2 has been long declared insecure and not suitable for use by the regulators of financial institutions”.
7. Enable TLS support. “TLS is the evolution of SSL, offering more security enhancements and extensions than SSL3. Its use is warranted, and thus this feature should be enabled.”
8. Disable searching from the URL bar. “Forristal personally doesn’t like the idea of every cut and paste error, typo, and other items entered into the URL bar to be automatically sent off to search engines as search terms. There is the possibility of an information disclosure situation happening.”
9. Disable unnecessary add-ons. “There are a lot of third-party tools that hook themselves into your browser. Each one technically is a way for an attacker to potentially hack you, and as such, you want to disable as many of them as possible.”
10. Uninstall old Java installations. “While you’re in there, it’s also a good time to browse the list and remove anything else you don’t use anymore — again, less attack surface overall”.

For details on how to do all that (some of them are only useful and work in Vista), go here.

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My family’s pretty close. To the point that I know my parents or sister will help out if something really really bad were to happen to me. We also happen to all live in the same city.

So the numbers of parents and siblings are the first items on my must-have cellphone numbers. The point of this list to make it easy for any of companions to call for help if, again, something really really bad were to happen to me. I’d rather my friends would know who to call as I lay unconscious while bleeding all over the floor. They shouldn’t even think twice about using my own phone!

Obviously, the list should also include the numbers of significant others; people would want to contact your girlfriend, wife and kids, but for obvious reasons, don’t add numbers of your loves-on-the-side.

And, thanks to high certain high-end phones allow you to add different numbers for the same contact item, I also consider numbers of the police, fire department, and hospital crucial. If you live in a metropolis with different municipalities, like I do, it makes sense to consolidate all their hotlines into one contact. For instance, create a contact named “Police”, and place all police numbers there. That way, if you happen to be in one municipality or the other, your friends will know who to call.

Am I forgetting something? What needs adding to these must-have cellphone numbers? Anything I should’ve left out?

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