I want to use my computer as a telephone

I want to find out how much easier it is to use my computer as a telephone rather than using a regular telephone but what’s my aim?
Simple I want to be able to:
Record telephone conversations.
Have a answer machine.

That’s pretty much it, yer yer I know you can get this on a regular telephone for $10 from your local shop, but what I really is to be able to use a very small headset like the blue tooth ones you have for mobile phones, so go on complain to me about keeping my computer on all the time, unless I use the Wake on LAN function what’s this you might be asking well on modern motherboards in your BIOS you have something called Wake on LAN meaning if you have a modem you can plug it into your phone line if your computer is turned off and you receive a phone call it will boot up.
This is not a tried and tested method as I don’t get have a modem.

So tomorrow I will post the items I have ordered, and then I shall review the items and finally tell you (hopefully) how I’ve setup my computer phone.

Summer is Coming Closer.

How can we prepare for summer, this year in UK is supposed to beat the year of 2003 when a lot of people died because of the weather. So we should be prepared!

Keeping your house cool, this is one of my favourite methods of keeping your house cool in summer, if you own a car you might have a cover that you use for your car or something to cover your window screen you can put this over your house windows if you have very thin curtains I would not recommend doing this if you have a black cover but shiny grey or just shiny is brilliant to use.

Simple but efficient opening windows at night, now because you have covered your windows it should trap the cool air in but you need to first get this cool air in you can do this by opening your windows at night and your attic door.

Closing doors you don’t do this at night as you want cool air to circulate now closing your doors will allow you to keep cool air in each room now as the day progresses its good to move from room to room. If you have all the doors the heat you produce will be spread around the house meaning you can’t take advantage of your cool rooms.

Default Wireless names

Now this is the best part for war drivers default network names, now if you looked at wireless AP’s around your are you will more than likely find Linksys name’s now NEVER use this for your name as using this means you more than likely haven’t setup any security on your wireless router meaning you more than likely have a user name and password of admin on your router.

So what you might ask?

This is a very very dangerous thing too do it means once a war driver has access to your router he can do a number of things one of the most dangerous ones too you is called drive by pharming this means someone can have access to your router and change your DNS settings linking you too one of their servers once they have done that if you visit say your banking site they will redirect it too a fake one on their server taking all your information.

There is a lot more things people can do with it and you need to change the username and password and definitely change your router’s name instead of its default one!

Wireless War Driving.

Well all this week I’ve been dedicating my time to checking out all about war driving so I could find out how dangerous wireless could be.

The first thing I did was check out common war driving sites to find the easiest way such as already made databases which was shocking to me the amount of unsecured networks I found a database on Wigle using the Jigle desktop tool it has thousands of access points on it.

Anyone can do something similar too this which is very scary I found a couple of peoples access points on it (which where not secure) which is just advertising your AP so hackers can come and steal your information.

Now its bad enough being on the map but what can you do to stop people hacking you?

Simple use WPA encryption, WEP encryption can now be cracked in a matter of seconds so DON’T use it, or even better you could use WPA2 these encryptions are brilliant and worth wile spending money on a new AP just to get the encryption. Please check out WPA encryption.

Program Of The Week: TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt is one of the best encryption programs around in my opinion, the program is very easy to use and very secure it has many different encryption options and the best part is you can have 3 encryption types encryption on encryption on encryption its amazing at how this works, you can make it look like for example a .pdf file or a .mp3 file allowing you to hide it even further but my favourite part is, hidden volumes this will use a already made truecrypt encryption and put a hidden folder inside it so for an example say you’ve made a truecrypt volume of 15mb’s but you want a hidden one well you can make one and say you make the volume 2mb’s the original file will then show as 13m’s.

You access this hidden volume by using a different password for the original volume it really is brilliant to hide things from hackers give it a go!