Tech Bytes

Tech Bytes 5: Open Source

2007-12-20T05:56:41Z

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- Show Transcript - Welcome to Tech Bytes Episode 5: Open Source. I'm Kevin, and this episode of Tech Bytes is ready for consumption. If you follow any technology today, you've more than likely heard the word Open Source a few times. In fact, if you listen to any of my shows, you've definitely heard me mention it many times. I discovered the concept of Open Source software about three years ago, and it has definitely been a great learning experience for me. I also realized that I'd been using open source software for some time. I have found that open source is a difficult concept, especially if you've never done any programming. However, I'm going to attempt to boil it down to something easier to understand, and also talk a bit about the pros and cons. ]]> When a programmer writes a program, they are producing what is called source code. This is a human-readable format of the program that can be understood by anyone who knows the programming language. There are many programming languages; some you may have heard of include C++, Perl, BASIC, and Java. These languages share many similarities, one being that they are intended to be usable by humans (specifically programmers). Now, you may have noticed that if you try to open a program like Microsoft Word in a text editor that there is nothing human-readable about that program. This is because the source code has been run through a compiler. A compiler takes a programming language and turns it into an executable file. It may also obfuscate the code so that it cannot easily be decompiled back into the source code. The code that goes into a compiler is source code, and the code that comes out is object code. Object code cannot be modified. Whenever Microsoft wants to make changes to Word, they make the changes in the source code and then recompile the program. What this means is that if a programmer wants to build on another programmer's work, they need the source code. The idea of open source software is to always make the source code of programs available so that other people can modify, build on, and hopefully improve the original program. For instance, if Microsoft Word was open source, another programmer could take the source code and modify it so that you can save a file as a PDF. Or, maybe someone wants to write a program for designing web pages, but they don't want to write a spell checker. If Word was open source, they could take the spell checker built into Word and put it in their new application. These are very simple examples, but they illustrate how open source allows one innovation to be shared amongst the whole programming community. Maybe the person programming the web design software takes the spell checking software and improves on it. Then, Microsoft could take those improvements and easily apply them to Word. Now, of course, none of this is possible because all of Microsoft's software is not open source. Open source software is not just unobfuscated source code. Open source also means that the source code is accompanied by a license that permits modification and distribution of the code. Just like any other written creations, under US law a computer program is given a copyright as soon as it is produced. So, unless permission is given to take that source code and use it in another program, doing so is against the law. One of the more popular open source software licenses is the GNU General Public License, or GPL. The open source operating system Linux is released under the GPL. The GPL and other open source software licenses are designed to easily allow software programmers to release the source code of their programs without any confusion as to how the code can be used by other people. These "one size fits all" licenses are provided so that a programmer does not have to be a lawyer to write open source code. I've already mentioned the main advantage of open source software: it fosters a community of collaboration on software. This enables programmers to work together and build off of prior work to produce improved software. There is no need to invent the wheel if someone else has already done it. It is very analogous to the experimental scientific community. If you look through any science journal, you can see papers that detail experiments and their outcomes. This enables another scientist to take that experiment, try to reproduce the results, and potentially come up with a new conclusion. By working together in communities, both the programming world and the scientific world benefit. The open source environment is also very beneficial to newcomers. Someone trying to learn programming can look at the source code of a program and see how it ticks. This is not possible in closed source software. Revenue difficulties are normally sited as the main disadvantage of open source software. If Microsoft Windows was open source, they would not be able to easily charge you for every copy because someone could modify the source code and release their own version. The revenue model is very different with open source software. Instead of charging for units, a developer may instead charge for support or installation. Other software developers will release an open source version of a program that is very similar to a "professional" closed source program that they develop. The open source program is used to stimulate interest in the professional version. Mozilla makes a lot of money from the Firefox browser from Google and other search engines whenever people use those search engines in the browser. Admittedly, these revenue models are not as straight forward as the standard "buy 1 unit for x dollars," but one could argue that the benefits to the community of open source software outweigh these difficulties. Another common contention between open and closed source software arises on the issue of security. On the closed source side, people argue that closed source software is more secure because attackers cannot see the code and use this information to hack the program. This is referred to as security by obscurity, and the number of security patches you get from Microsoft each month illustrate the fact that this is not a foolproof security method. On the open source side, the argument is that because the source code is available, the entire software community acts as a security audit for the program, and can even suggest fixes to security flaws. While this is a great concept, historically it has been shown that the pool of people willing to trudge through source code looking for security flaws is pretty small. I would say that the jury is still out on this issue, but open source has the advantage that if motivation was found for programmers to audit programs, they would definitely be more secure than their closed source counterparts. One thing I will add is that I will never use a closed source privacy program such as data encryption software. This is because there is no way for me to know for sure that the programmer did not provide a "back door" into my private data, whereas this would be very evident in an open source program. Well, that's my primer on Open Source software. I hope I have educated some of you without making any glaring mistakes, and perhaps recruited some new proponents of open source. If you are looking for more information, Wikipedia is chock full of great stuff on open source software. As always, if I talked too fast or you can't stand the sound of my voice, you can find a full transcript of this show at www.techbyteshow.com. If you want to hear more talk about technology, you should subscribe to our sister show Tech Talk with 5 to 9 Computer Services which you can find at http://www.techtalkshow.com. To request a topic to be covered in a future Tech Bytes show, send an e-mail to requests@techbyteshow.com. I'm Kevin, and I'll be back next week with another serving of Tech Bytes.

Tech Bytes 4: More Firefox Tips

2007-12-12T00:47:38Z

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- Show Transcript - Welcome to Tech Bytes Episode 4: More Firefox Tips. I'm Kevin, and this episode of Tech Bytes is ready for consumption. On the first episode of Tech Bytes I provided some tips and tricks on how to improve your productivity with Firefox, and I promised more. Well here it is. As a side note, this episode is meant to stand on its own. I definitely recommend listening to the first Tech Bytes show, but you don't need to have listened to it prior to consuming this Tech Byte. On this episode, I am going to discuss Firefox extensions, search engine customization, and smart keywords. ]]> Smart Keywords Instructions I hope you can use these new Firefox tips. Firefox has its issues (mostly with stability), but I keep coming back to it because it is so customizable, and I cannot do without many of my extensions. Here's hoping that Firefox 3 will resolve these stability issues, it will probably be completed early next year. If you want to hear more talk about technology, you should subscribe to our sister show Tech Talk with 5 to 9 Computer Services which you can find at http://www.techtalkshow.com. To request a topic to be covered in a future Tech Bytes show, send an e-mail to requests@techbyteshow.com. I'm Kevin, and I'll be back next week with another serving of Tech Bytes.

Tech Bytes 3: Cookies

2007-12-05T06:24:03Z

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- Show Transcript - Welcome to Tech Bytes Episode 3: Cookies. I'm Kevin, and this episode of Tech Bytes is ready for consumption. Today we're going to learn about cookies. Not the ones with chocolate chips or raisins in them, but the cookies that your web browser receives from web servers. These kinds of cookies are much less delicious, but (in my opinion) much more important. I have found that there is a lot of confusion when it comes to browser cookies and I'm hoping that I can clear the air a bit. Without cookies the web would be a much more boring place, and no one wants that. We will begin by discussing why cookies are used in web browsers, and then discuss the ways in which cookies are used for good and evil and finally how to protect yourself from the potentially "bad" cookies. ]]> What Are Cookies? When the World Wide Web was first created, the only purpose of browsers was to view data on web servers. Once the data started going the other direction (users logging in, customers buying products online, etc.), there needed to be a way to maintain knowledge of a person as they browsed to different pages on a web server. There are a few ways to do this, one of them being the use of cookies. When you visit a web server (example: google.com) that wants to set a cookie on your browser it sends a message to the browser to set a cookie. If you have cookies enabled on your browser, it accepts and stores the cookie. The cookie contains a name, a value, and may contain an expiration date. From this point forward, every time you visit a page on that web server your browser will return all the information stored in cookies that the web server has set. If no expiration date is set, the cookie is destroyed as soon as you close the web browser. By setting an expiration date, the web server enables the cookie to persist between browser sessions. You may notice this persistent behavior on sites like Amazon.com that welcome you back to their site by name. Also, when you log into a site and check a box that says "remember my login information" or something similar, the web server will set an expiration date on cookie it passes to your browser. As you can probably see by now, cookies are very useful. Cookie Misconceptions Regardless of the usefulness of cookies, for some reason they have been vilified. The main reason for this is probably something called a third party cookie which I'll talk about in a bit, but first I want to cover some common cookie misconceptions. One misconception is that cookies can contain viruses. A cookie is not a program, it is just a set of plain text values your browser stores. Your browser stores the name of the web server that gave it the cookie, the name of the cookie, the value, and potentially an expiration date. There is no way for a cookie to contain code that is executed on your computer, so there is no way for a cookie to contain a virus, spyware, or any other sort of malicious software. Another misconception is that someone can look at your cookies and see your passwords, logins, and credit card numbers. Normally, no personal information is stored in cookies. There is nothing preventing a misguided web programmer from storing information you provide to the web server in a cookie in your browser, but this is not a common practice. What most web servers will do is store a randomly generated number in your cookie. When it generates this random number it sets it as the value of a cookie in your browser and then also sets it as a value in a database. Then, when you visit the web site again it takes your randomly generated value and checks to see if it has a match in the database. If there's a match it uses this information to remember that you like a black background, and that your name is John Smith and welcomes you back to the web site. One other misconception is that any web server can access any of your cookies. As a matter of fact, your browser will only send cookies that originated from the web server you are visiting. For example, yahoo.com has no way to see what cookies google.com has set on your browser. This is good because even though yahoo.com would probably only get some random value, if they took that value and set it as their own cookie and visited google.com, they could then pretend to be you. So, even though cookies have received a bit of a bad rap you can see that they are actually pretty benign. 3rd Party Cookies There is one type of cookie that could be considered evil, and that is the 3rd party, or tracking, cookie. In order to understand 3rd party cookies you have to know how most advertising works on websites. Advertisers will normally pay a website for ads in two ways: the number of people the ad is displayed to, and the number of people who click on an advertisement. In order to keep track of these numbers the advertiser will setup a web server for hosting their advertisements. The website being paid to display the advertisement then creates a link on his page to the advertiser's web server. In this way the advertiser can change the ad as needed and keep track of clicks and views. When you visit a website like cnet.com to read reviews, you have a first party relationship with cnet. However, you also have a third party relationship with all their advertisers. Your web browser is told by cnet.com to visit their advertiser's web page to download advertisements to display on the page. When your browser makes the request for the images, the advertiser's web server can take this opportunity to set a cookie in your browser. This is called a 3rd party cookie because it didn't come from the website you meant to visit, in this case cnet.com. This may seem benign on the surface, but what happens when you then go to amazon.com and it turns out that amazon.com is using the same advertising company as cnet.com? If this happens, then when your browser goes to get an advertisement from the advertiser's server your browser provides the cookie data back to the advertiser. If the advertiser is keeping a database, they now know that you go to cnet.com and amazon.com and they use this information to determine what advertisements to show you. If you expand this out you can see how a big advertising company like DoubleClick, Google, or Microsoft can start tracking your browsing habits. Historically, DoubleClick has been one of the worst offenders of this behavior. Now, if you don't mind getting advertisements tailored to your browsing habits, and you aren't bothered by an advertising company knowing what sites you visit, this isn't really a big deal. However, many people, myself included, would rather not be tracked by advertisers. Blocking 3rd Party Cookies So, how do you avoid or minimize this tracking? You disable third party cookies in your web browser. If you're using Internet Explorer, you can disable third part cookies through the built-in user interface. Just go to Tools on the menu bar, and select Internet Options. On the Internet options dialog, select the Privacy tab, and click on the button labeled "Advanced." Check the box that is labeled "Override automatic cookie handling" and then underneath this option select the radio button next to "Block" under the Third-party Cookies header. Also, check the box that says "Always allow session cookies." Starting with Firefox version 2, Mozilla removed the ability to block 3rd party cookies from the default configuration menu. They stated that they did this because there were ways to get around the setting. The problem is that a little security is better than none. I would equate it to using a theft deterrent device on your car, it's not going to stop a determined thief, but if they see that device they may move on to the next car that has no such device. Anyway, you can still turn off 3rd party cookies in Firefox, you just have to know how (and I'm going to tell you). In the location bar of Firefox, type about:config. This will open a hidden interface in the browser. Scroll down to the entry labeled "network.cookie.cookieBehavior", or you can type this into the Filter field to reduce the options below. Once you see the entry, double-click on it and change the number from a 0 to a 1 and then click "OK." That's it, you will now block 3rd party cookies in Firefox. If you use another browser, you can do a Google search for the name of your browser and "3rd party cookies," and you should find instructions for blocking them. Well, that's all I have on cookies. I hope I cleared any confusion you may have had regarding this funnily named web browser feature. If you are still wary of cookies, just turn them off. You may, however, find that the web doesn't work near as well without them. As always, you can find a full transcript of this show at www.techbyteshow.com. If you want to hear more talk about technology, you should subscribe to our sister show Tech Talk with 5 to 9 Computer Services which you can find at http://www.techtalkshow.com. To request a topic to be covered in a future Tech Bytes show, send an e-mail to requests@techbyteshow.com. I'm Kevin, and I'll be back next week with another serving of Tech Bytes.

Tech Bytes 2: Upgrading Your Computer

2007-11-28T03:23:34Z

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- Show Transcript - Welcome to Tech Bytes Episode 2: Upgrading Your Computer. I'm Kevin, and this tech byte is ready for consumption. I normally recommend that your replace your computer every 3 to 5 years, but many times you can increase the life of your computer by upgrading a few components at a lower cost than replacing the whole shebang. When I put a computer together I usually try to choose components that allow for an easy upgrade path. However, if you buy a computer from a big company like Dell or HP your upgrade options may be more limited. Regardless of your situation, I'm going to cover the basics so that you can at least make an educated decision on how you should proceed in order to improve your computing performance. Even if you have a computer geek that helps you make these decisions, it can help if you know what he or she is talking about. ]]> Components to Upgrade When it comes to upgrading a computer you will most likely be upgrading one of three things: the Processor, Memory, or the Video Card. The processor, or CPU, is the "brain" of the computer. It's what does most of the hard work. Certain tasks are very processor intensive. Encoding a video for a DVD, scanning for viruses, defragmenting a hard drive, and searching for files and folders are examples of processor intensive tasks. Memory or RAM is used to store data that the CPU is currently working on or may need to work on in the near future. RAM is much faster to access than the Hard Drive and when your computer needs to use more memory than is physically available it uses something called virtual memory, this is space on your hard drive specifically set aside by the operating system. This is also referred to as swap space. Too many programs open at the same time, poorly written programs that have memory leaks, and other factors can all lead to a program trying to run from virtual memory. This causes the program and the computer to run very slowly, and if it happens often you need more RAM. Certain programs are very memory intensive. Adobe Photoshop, for instance, keeps full copies of images in RAM as you make changes so that you can undo them if needed. If you use programs like this frequently you may need more RAM than is required for other, more simple, computer usage. The video card is specialized computer component. It is essentially a small computer in its own right. A video card has a dedicated CPU and RAM built into it. The purpose of a video card is to draw the video on the monitor, a very processor and memory intensive task. Back in the day, all of this was handled by the CPU and RAM in the computer, but the advent of 3D computer gaming and 3D drafting necessitated offloading these intensive processes onto a separate device. This is a good thing because unless you do a lot of video processing you don't need a high-end graphics card. Choosing What To Upgrade Now that you know the function of the three things we will most likely be upgrading, how do you choose which to do first? Should you upgrade all? Well, the answer is: it depends on how you use your computer. What you want to do is identify the bottlenecks in your system. Upgrading your processor won't do much good if you don't have enough memory. If your computer has been running sluggish, think about what you were doing when it slowed down. Were you doing one of the processor intensive tasks listed above? One of the things you can do when your computer gets sluggish is to open the Task Manager in Windows. You can open the Task Manager by either pressing ctrl-alt-del, or right clicking on the task bar and choosing Task Manager. Click on the performance tab and look at your CPU Usage and Page File (PF) Usage. If your CPU usage is spiking at or near 100%, then your processor is your bottleneck. If your PF Usage is larger than your physical memory, then you are using virtual memory and you could probably use more RAM. One thing to be aware of is that a program locking up will likely peg your CPU usage at 100%, so if the CPU usage is real high click on the Applications tab and under status check to see if any programs are Not Responding. If so, select the applications and choose End Task and then see if that improves the CPU performance. If the program continually crashes you have a problem that upgrading your computer will probably not fix. Lastly, if a game you want to play looks horrible on your computer and great on your friends, or if you can't turn on Aero Glass in Windows Vista, or if your CAD software is running really slow you would probably benefit from a new video card. Research Your Current Configuration Once you have identified your bottlenecks and have decided on what components you want to upgrade, you need to find out if you can upgrade your components, and what types you need to buy. This is where building your own computer, or having a boutique shop build one for you comes in handy. If you held onto it, you will have your motherboard manual. If you don't have your motherboard manual, or if you bought a computer from a company like Dell or HP, you need to find out who the manufacturer is and what model you have. There are a few things to try. You can try and see if the make and model is listed while the computer is booting. You could also open the case and see if you see a model number printed on the motherboard. Lastly, you can do a search on the internet based on the model of your computer. This may result in multiple options, however, as companies may switch components in a computer while keeping the model number the same. Once you know what your motherboard is and get a hold of the manual, you can see what your upgrade options are. For the processor, you want to find out the socket type of the motherboard and what the fastest processor it can handle is. If you already have the fastest processor your motherboard can handle, or if your computer is more than 3 or so years old you are probably out of luck when it comes to upgrading the processor and you will most likely have to replace the motherboard as well. For the memory, you want to see how many memory slots there are, what the speed of the memory bus is, and you will probably have to open the case to see what the current configuration is and if you can add memory or if you need to replace what's already in there. For the video card, you need to find out what type of slot is on the motherboard. The two options are AGP or PCI-Express. You can also look at pictures of other motherboards and compare them to yours in order to figure this one out. Buying the Components Once you know what you need, it's time to go shopping. I buy all of my computer parts from Newegg because they normally have very good prices, and their customer service is superb. Once you price your parts out, you may also want to price out replacing the whole motherboard with a new processor and memory and compare the two prices. You may find that for a slight difference in price you can put together a much faster computer. Sometimes it's even cheaper. When it comes to replacing components, replacing the memory or video card is pretty simple. Replacing the processor, though, can be a bit more difficult. It helps if you can find someone you know who has put together their own computer before. If not, then some Google searches on things like "how to replace an AMD processor" will turn up some good information. Choosing a video card can be a tricky process. You want to get the best bang for your buck, and that's not always easy. A computer gaming friend would come in handy, but if you can't find one, read the reviews on some hardware sites like http://www.tomshardware.com and http://www.anandtech.com. At the time of this recording, if I was asked to choose a video card that is the best bang for your buck for playing the latest and greatest video games I would tell you to buy the Nvidia 8800GT. If you're not looking to play the latest games and want to save some money, you can't go wrong with the Nvidia 8600GT, just make sure the version you buy is using DDR3 RAM. More Options One other often overlooked upgrade is the hard drive. If you think about it, all your programs are loaded from the hard drive into RAM and the faster your hard drive is the faster these programs will open. Also, files will open and save faster. The latest in greatest in Hard Drive technology is Serial ATA (SATA) and it transfers data at 3Gbs. As long as your motherboard supports it, I would definitely recommend upgrading to a SATA hard drive assuming you don't already have one. If you're looking for the best performance, you can also go with a drive that spins faster as this will decrease seek times, or the time it takes for the hard drive to find the data it's looking for. Most consumer hard drives spin at 7200RPM, but Western Digital sells a hard drive that spins at 10000RPM called the Raptor. You pay for this speed increase, though. If you have a laptop, you most likely have a 5400 RPM drive, and I would definitely recommend upgrading that to a 7200RPM hard drive. Don't Forget the Power Lastly, if you upgrade your computers components, you may need to upgrade your power supply. Many computers, especially the ones you buy from big retailers, have very small power supplies and are barely powerful enough to support the components they come with. If your computer needs more power than the power supply can deliver you will usually have a lot of problems with the computer locking up, especially during intensive processes. Eventually the power supply may even fail. You can use the power supply calculator at http://www.extreme.outervision.com/powercalc.jsp to help you choose the right size power supply. Well, that's all I have for now about upgrading your computer. I know I covered a lot of material, so if you want to refer back to anything I talked about you can find a full transcript of this show at http://www.techbyteshow.com. If you want to hear more talk about technology, you should subscribe to our sister show Tech Talk with 5 to 9 Computer Services which you can find at http://www.techtalkshow.com. To request a topic to be covered in a future Tech Bytes show, send an e-mail to (listen to the show for the email address). I'm Kevin, and I'll be back next week with another serving of Tech Bytes.

Tech Bytes 1: Firefox Tips & Tricks

2007-11-20T12:54:17Z

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- Show Transcript - Welcome to Tech Bytes Episode 1: Firefox Tips and Tricks. I'm Kevin, and this is the first of many tech bytes to come. Tech Bytes are little morsels of technology tips and tricks delivered in 15 minutes or less. This week we are going to discuss how you can get the most out of your web browser. Now, since you are listening to a show called Tech Bytes I'm going to assume that you use Firefox. If you don't use Firefox, I still recommend listening because you may hear about a neat feature that will cause you to switch over to Firefox. I always recommend Firefox because it has historically been more secure than Internet Explorer, is the most feature rich open source browser I have come across, and the power of Firefox is almost limitless due to the functionality of extensions. However, we aren't here to discuss why you should use Firefox, we are going to empower you to use Firefox to its full potential. The tips I'm going to cover today include keyboard shortcuts, mouse shortcuts, and what to do when Firefox locks up on you. ]]> Keyboard Shortcuts First, lets go over keyboard shortcuts. I'm a touch-typist, and I find that keyboard shortcuts can really come in handy for saving time. I don't have to take a hand off the keyboard, move the mouse, click, and then put my hand back on the keyboard to start typing again. The first shortcut is for opening a new tab, and it is ctrl-t. Just hold down the ctrl key and press t. This will open a new tab with the cursor in the address bar ready for you to type in a website to visit. The second shortcut is also for tabs, but this is a very useful function that has saved my bacon more than once. If you accidentally close a tab you didn't want to close, you can open it back up with the keyboard shortcut ctrl-shift-t. Firefox even remembers where on the page you were. It's like you never even closed the tab. This trick even works with my bank website if I'm quick enough re-opening the tab. The third keyboard shortcut I'm going to cover is probably the one I use most often after ctrl-t and that is ctrl-f. Use this to search for text contained in the website you're currently looking at. Pressing ctrl-f will open a find box in the lower left side of the browser window. Just start typing what you want to find. The fourth shortcut is to put the cursor up in the search box. Just press ctrl-k and your cursor will jump up into search box. If the search engine selected is not the one you want, just use the up and down arrows while holding down the ctrl key to change between engines like google, amazon and eBay. Similarly, if you would like to navigate away from the current page by typing in a new website address, just press ctrl-l and your cursor will jump up to the location bar and select the current page's address. You can just start typing in a website like www.aztechsupport.net and press enter. These are the keyboard shortcuts I most commonly use, but if you're looking for more you can go to http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/keyboard for the full list. Mouse Shortcuts If you find yourself using Firefox with a mouse in hand, you may find the following mouse shortcuts useful as well. If you want to open a link in a new tab instead of the current window, and you have a mouse with a scroll wheel or a center button, use that center button or wheel to click on the link. By default, this will open the link in a new tab. I find this very useful when I am reading headlines on a news site. I can open the stories of interest in new tabs and then go through the tabs reading the stories. Another mouse shortcut for opening new tabs is to double-click the empty area to the the right of an open tab. Now, this will only work if that empty space is there, so if you only have one tab open, or so many tabs that they fill the screen, this trick won't work. If you still want to use this trick when only one tab is open, go into the options menu under tools and under tabs check the box that says "Always show the tab bar." This is how I have Firefox setup for myself. Forced Restart Finally, the last tip I want to cover today is what to do if Firefox becomes sluggish or locks up your computer. Unfortunately, I have found that if I leave Firefox open for extended periods of time (Like a few days or longer) it will start to slow down my computer. When this happens I do a forced restart of Firefox. The advantage of this is that when I restart Firefox I can choose the restore option and have all my tabs and windows still open, yet it's no longer slowing down my computer. In order to do a forced restart of Firefox in windows, open the task manager. Two ways to do this is to either press ctrl-alt-del, or right click on the task bar and choose Task Manager. Select the Processes tab and find firefox.exe under the Image Name. Select firefox.exe and press the End Process button. Choose yes on the pop-up notification. Wait about a minute, and then re-launch Firefox. When Firefox launches it should ask you if you want to "Restore Session" or "Start New Session." Choose to Restore the Session. Well, that's it for Episode 1 of Tech Bytes. I hope these tips help you to better use Firefox. While putting this show together, I made a much longer list of tips and tricks I wanted to cover for Firefox, so expect more Firefox tips in the future. If you want to hear more talk about technology, you should subscribe to our sister show Tech Talk with 5 to 9 Computer Services which you can find at http://www.techtalkshow.com. For show notes or to subscribe to Tech Bytes, visit http://www.techbyteshow.com/ that's t-e-c-h-b-y-t-e-show.com. If you would like to request a topic to be covered in a future Tech Bytes show, send an e-mail to (listen to the show for the email address). I'm Kevin, and I'll be back next week with another serving of Tech Bytes.