Blocking Websites or IP addresses

Their can be many reasons to block websites from your computer such as you want to keep kids from going onto malicious sites or you just want to stop yourself going onto sites, for me I blocked a bunch of shopping websites so I don’t spend any money such as ebuyer.com, play.com and amazon.co.uk.

To block the websites I used something called the host file you will find this in “%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\” for XP machines for other machines you might need to look for it.

To open the file you can double click on it and open it in notepad you will get examples in it showing you how to use it but some people don’t always understand it.

Once inside it you can type in at the bottom of the page “127.0.0.1 example.com” the 127.0.0.1 is your local machine which you are on right now and example.com is the site that you want to block from your machine, so try it out and you will find that the list slowly gets bigger and bigger.

My on the move tool kit

All I need is a USB flash drive 1gb+ now I go through a lot of USB flash drives as you have to keep up with the new technologies inside them now my current favourite is the U3 this is a brilliant invention its like having your own little start menu running from your flash drive.

From this I can fun Opera, Firefox, Putty and trillian so I can keep up with my emails on Opera or surf the net using Opera or Firefox, or if I need to talk to someone fast I can boot up trillian and log into AIM.

Inside the menu you have a Download option allowing you to download new programs from software.u3.com for example you can download a new version of Skype, the best thing of all if your using the download option in the menu it will download it then install it in one go.

Now if you haven’t got a U3 flash drive their are many other options out their one of my personal favourites are portable apps these have a much smaller ammount of programs as it isn’t on a bigger scale of U3 but it is well worth it you can have open office, firefox, putty, Gaim and a couple more just check out portableapps.com

I want to use my computer as a telephone: Post II

So my fist product I started looking at was a modem so I could run my phone like through my PC, if you remember the good old days when we was using a dial up connection that is what I’m looking for you can get them pretty cheap now so I just searched modem in amazon.co.uk and found one for around a fiver (Trust MD-1100 56K modem) link is at the bottom of the page with my other products.

So now I’ve brought my modem I need a cable to plug into the modem so unless you have one stashed away in your attic theirs a link next to the modem.

Now my favorite product and most expensive, I want something so I can walk around my house on the phone so it got me thinking about mobile cell phones, they have wireless headphones for sale all around the place using blue tooth so I looked for a wireless blue tooth headset for my PC, so I found a Belkin Bluetooth Headset for about £30.

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.

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!