Free WIFI is pretty sweet but your sensitive data is left bare naked to prying eyes. Those that are connected to the same network can easily intercept incoming/outgoing packets and decipher the data you send and receive from your computer – meaning, those important business emails or your credit card information is at risk of being stolen.

Luckily, there’s a way to combat this. Get a virtual private network (VPN).

I don’t want to get too deep into how VPN’s work but you should at least know the main premise:

1) Data to/from your computer is packaged with an outer layer of data (this is called tunnelling for those who are interested).

2) The internet connection you are connected to transports this packaged data to your VPN and vice versa. Because your sensitive data is packaged within this outer layer, it is secure from deciphering.

3) The internet connection you are using (the public WIFI) acts like a conduit to transport this package, whereas your VPN acts as a hub – allowing you to browse the internet through the VPN.

If you’re still not with me, this simple analogy will help demystify it. And just for kicks, I’ll use a Paint-app to illustrate what I mean.

Well…that didn’t work out very well. And now my fingers are all cramped up – I’m using the mousepad.

Anyways, the analogy is that the data is your car. And you’re speeding down the road, which is the public WIFI connection. The destination is the city, which is your VPN (the hub – get it?! ahh hahaha). While in the city you can have all your vice and sins – which effectively describes what you do on the internet. Then, after you collect your fun and bring it back to your car you drive back home, which is your laptop – something I forgot to add to my illustration (I’m really bad at this). The difference is that the car has to make trips back and forth to carry back the fun to your home so you can do what you wan with it.

Okay…I think I’m just going to give up on this analogy. You can read an actual comprehensible analogy here: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/vpn1.htm

What is nice about using a VPN is that your internet experience becomes that of the country where the VPN is hosted. This is a big plus if you frequently find yourself unable to access US-only content, such as Pandora, Hulu, ABC news etc..With a VPN, the website sees your connection as originating from the US.

The VPN I’m using now is from 12vpn. I did a bit of research on other providers before settling down with them. Many people on the web find their service and connection speed to be fantastic. You also get access to not one VPN server but 20+ servers spread across the world. In case, you know, you want to view Germany-only content. The price is very fair as well.

If you often connect to public WIFI, then you should definitely get an account with 12vpn.

Related Posts

• The Dumb Will Get Dumber, and the Smart Will Get Smarter

In cPanel’s new upgrade, the default option for email routing is set to ‘Automatically Detect Configuration’, which is “recommended.”

It is not recommended to use this setting if you’re using Google Apps for email. It should instead be ‘Remote Mail Exchanger.’

When using the default option, the web server will at times (mistakenly) take responsibility to act as the main mail exchanger. This means your incoming emails will fall through the gap and into the internet abyss, which is where all the fun sites like MySpace and Xanga are hanging out.

You don’t want your email there.

Related Posts

• HOWTO: Change language on Android
• HOWTO: Configure Microsoft Exchange and Outlook Web Access for Thunderbird
• HOWTO: Fix upload errors for Wordpress on sites hosted on Nearlyfreespeech

The question to the community was, “Do people really prefer $99.99 over $100?”

The answer is: It depends, but generally yes.

Here are some of the more notable comments:

Yes, they do prefer the $X.99. The effect is stronger among those who have lower income and education levels.

Result of a quick Google search.

- DrivebyGroper

I managed a luxury brand furniture store and found that $9,950 worked better than $10,000. I found that in lowering the price by $50, the client would often refer to the piece in the future as $9000 compared to them confusing the $10,000 price tag at a higher rate ($12k or so) in their memory.

- barcelonaKIZ

Yes, it works. It even works on people who know how it works.

It the same as using numbers to make things APPEAR smaller – using percentages instead of large numbers, using different scales, etc…

Some stores also use different price endings as "code". Some will use x.95 to indicate it is on sale while x.99 is regular price and x.98 is on liquidation, etc…

- Glossy_Paper

You’re communicating certain things with certain prices. Generally, the communication is: $XX – you’re selling a premium product, and therefore you’re not picky about the minor details of money. Use this pricing on higher end products, and especially one where service is emphasized. Don’t do $XX.00, this kills some of the illusion.

$XX.99 – You’re selling a low-end, budget product, where you’re trying to squeeze every last penny out of it. Use this for the highly price sensitive-consumer.

$XX.95 or $XX.90 – You’re offering a value product, generally in the mid-range.

People tend to look at, when considering price (roughly in order though market segment and other factors apply), the first number, the number of numbers, the last number.

- zhidzhid

Related Posts

• Auti: A toy designed to help autistic children
• A quote on price and value
• My Workterm at Microsoft and What I have Discovered About It’s Culture

While this mode is turned on, you won’t be able to upload files to your blog through WordPress, which is rather annoying when inserting an image. You also won’t be able to make changes to your theme or plugin files.

The reason is because the mode disallows PHP scripts from editing a file or folder that does not have the same group as it does. It also requires that the script doing any kind of writing be part of the group “web.”

I ran a quick Google search on the problem and found a solution that works. Here are the instructions (from the author’s blog):

1)

Download Putty.

2)

Download and install the FTP client FileZilla. You won’t actually be using it to do much, but it makes it much easier to see what Putty’s doing.

It doesn’t absolutely have to be FileZilla – if you’ve got another FTP client installed, and it can do SFTP and can show you a file’s permissions, owner, and group, then that’s fine.

3)

Open Putty. There’ll be a box that says “Host Name (or IP address).” Into that box, paste “ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net”. This is NearlyFreeSpeech’s SSH Hostname.

4)

Hit the “Open” button. The first time you do this, you will see a very scary-looking dialog box, saying something like “The server’s host key is not cached in the registry. Indescribably horrible things will happen to you if you click ‘Yes’ down there. My brother died that way.” It’s probably fine, hit “Yes.”

5)

A terrifying terminal window will appear, black as a moonless night. It will say “login as:” Type in your username. This is the same as your FTP username, and can be found on your “Site Information” page.

6)

It’ll ask you for your password. Type that in.

7)

Open FileZilla and log into your account using SFTP. You do that exactly the same way you log in using normal FTP, except that you put “ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net” in the “Host” box instead of “ftp.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net,” and select “SFTP” instead of “FTP” in the “Servertype” box.

The first time you do this, there should be a dialog box asking if you’re sure you want to go through with this and talking about bad guys coming to get you, but you can just ignore it. They’re probably very small bad guys.

When you’re logged in, navigate to the directory WordPress is installed in and look at your file permissions and owner/group columns. Go into a few subdirectories and check them out, too.

In all likelihood, your owner/group column says “me me” all the way down. (If you have an .htaccess file in there, it may possibly say “web me” or “web web.” Don’t worry about it.) Ideally, your file permissions are all set to 664, and your directory permissions are set to 775. If not, we’ll change them in a minute.

7a)

Oh, and if you don’t have an .htaccess file in the main WordPress directory, create an empty one now.

Putty starts out in your “htdocs” directory, aka your “public” directory. If you installed WordPress directly in this directory, skip to the next step.

If not, we need to change directories, using the brilliantly namedbash command “cd”. Figure out the pathname for your directory, and type in:

cd path

For example, if your WordPress installation’s in /htdocs/wordpress or /htdocs/personal/wordpress,

cd wordpress
cd personal/wordpress

9)

Okay, so you’re in your WordPress directory. Type in

ls -al

A long list of all the files in the directory will appear. The entries should look something like this:

drwxrwxr-x 8 me me 2048 Jul 3 11:06 wp-admin
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me 32776 Jul 3 10:54 wp-app.php
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me 129 Jul 3 10:54 wp-atom.php
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me 1026 Jul 3 10:54 wp-blog-header.php

Yeah, it looks pretty much like what you’re seeing in FileZilla. The incomprehensible string of characters at the beginning of each line represents the file’s permissions, and the “me me” after it means that the file’s user and group are both “me.”

10)

This is the part where we actually change something. We will be changing every single file and subdirectory in your WordPress installation at once. If you’re going to chicken out, do so now.

We’re first going to change everything in the directory’s group to “web”. The command to do that is

chgrp -R web *

Type that in and hit enter. There’ll probably be a short pause before the command line reappears again.

Once it has, go into FileZilla, move to another directory, then move back. Your owner/group column should now say “me web” all the way down (except possibly for the .htaccess file, which might say “web web”). Now move into a couple of subdirectories and check them out. We did it!

11)

We probbbably did it. Just to double-check, go back to Putty, and type in

find . -group me

This will search for any files in the directory that are still part of group “me”. If you installed WordPress via Subversion, there may still be some in a directory called .svn. You can ignore those – as long as there aren’t any others, you’re safe.

12)

Now we’re going to make sure your file and directory permissions are all correct. They should be fine already – a fresh WordPress install has the correct permissions automatically – but if you or anyone else has been fiddling around with the installation trying to fix things, you may have changed some to 777 or something, which is not good. So just to be paranoid, we’re going to reset them to the default.

First, we want to change all your files’ permissions to 664 – that is, group-writable. To do that, type

find . -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

Now, we’ll change all the directories’ permissions to 775 (group-writable all-executable, because directories need to be executable if you ever think you’ll want to, you know, open them):

find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

Annnd go check around in FileZilla to make sure everything looks right.

13)

Now go test whatever didn’t work before in your WordPress installation. Hopefully it works now!

14)

Remember that whenever you upload a new file via FTP, its group will always be “me” by default. This means that next time you upgrade or install a plugin that needs to be able to write to files, you’re going to need to go back into Putty and change everything to group “web.” Again, the command to do that is:

chgrp -R web *

Thanks for the instructions, Snarp!

Related Posts

• HOWTO: Add fixed position side tab buttons to your website
• HOWTO: Configure Microsoft Exchange and Outlook Web Access for Thunderbird
• HOWTO: Change language on Android

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Related Posts

• Navigating Singapore with gothere.sg
• Singapore is a FINE country

Related Posts

• No Related Post

It works by sending positive feedback by way of cuddly actions to the child when it is handled gently (ie. whispers, petting) and becoming unresponsive when it is mis-treated, such as when hit or yelled at.

You can read more about it here: http://www.springwise.com/education/toy-designed-autistic-children-learn-play/

Or, see a video of how it works below:

Related Posts

• Do people really prefer $99.99 over $100? [reddit]

I’ve been doing a lot of research on each ecommerce solution and there seems to be plenty of comparisons between each cart. These comparisons tend to focus on the features of each cart, which does vary but are more or less the same after installing certain modules that fill the gap.

Sure, a web store must have functionalities that suit your specific needs but these can be easily extended through third-party modules, which are available for free from the community or purchased at a reasonable price. If not available anywhere, you can always hire a team of developers to create it.

What I’ve found to be a more useful metric for comparison is the resource use, stability, back-end interface and the scalability of the cart since these cannot easily be changed and make up the back-bone for the store experience and management.

From all of my research, I’ve found very little comparing the two types of shopping cart setups: a dedicated shopping cart and CMS with a shopping cart module installed.

The current setup for my online store is Drupal + Ubercart which falls under the CMS + cart module category. It’s a setup that is often recommended by web developers. And I can see why. Drupal is an extremely powerful CMS that can be extended to do anything, and it’s easy to develop for. Likewise, the shopping cart module, Ubercart, can also be extended easily. Seeing all the good things said about the ecommerce setup, I used it for Postertext.

Big mistake.

Ubercart feels like an extension of something else, which it absolutely is. The back-end interface pales in comparison to dedicated shopping carts like CS-Cart. Scalability is great on both platforms but you get more ecommerce-related opportunities with a dedicated solution. Also, I know I just made my point on functionalities, but they are made so much more usable with more sub-feature sets than what you would find in a cart module. In other words, Ubercart is a toy compared to a full-fledged ecommerce solution like CS-Cart.

Here are the opinions I’ve developed after my research:

Magento

+ stable even with 1,000+ products

+ many features

+ beautiful back-end

- resource hog

- extremely expensive, and pricing structure doesn’t make sense

- hard to develop for

Prestashop

+ huge community

+ light-weight

+ easy to design for

- ugly back-end

- most modules cost money

Shopify

+ very easy to manage because it’s a hosted solution

+ beautiful templates to choose from

- monthly and % fees

Drupal + Ubercart

+ powerful CMS

+ easy to extend

+ huge community

- module is flaky

- functionalities lacks attention to detail

- ugly back-end

Joomla + Virtuemart

+ tested and true, many stores use this setup

- built on very old programming

CS-Cart

+ medium-sized community

+ popularity is up-trending

+ beautiful back-end

+ cheap one-time payment

+ solid and growing roadmap (that they actually follow)

+ has common ecommerce functionalities in the core

- hard to create unique design

- built-in CMS lacks customization

- many developers have not worked with the cart before

A notable mention is Lemonstand. It’s a beautiful cart, inside and out but is too new for a serious business. This is a cart that I will definitely keep an eye out for.

Related Posts

• No Related Post

But last month, I came across someone mentioning WebeTalk on an online community which I’ve already forgotten the name of.

It’s a simple but elegantly designed website with a web-based IRC client in the middle with the banner text,

“We are a group of web entrepreneurs who like to talk with each other about new ideas, internet topics, and various other things. Come join us today!”

It’s mostly quiet when I’m logged in, but I also happen to be on the other side of the world, assuming that most of the chat members are from North America. But having just logged in at 1:20PM (UTC/GMT +8 hours) there seems to be some short bursts of activity.

Not sure if you want to join this small WebeTalk community? You can find interesting stats on the channel here: http://webetalk.com/stats.php like my favorite, Longest Monologue.

See you there!

Related Posts

• Build what you want with all the tools you need with hackerspaces
• Speed Networking for Entrepreneurs at CBET – March 4, 4:30pm – 6:30pm