Debunk it!

Tech help 5

Information at our fingertips, what a luxury we have at our disposal. Unfortunately, as we all well know, there are those who seek to take advantage of us on the internet. Just this week, two of the three email addresses in our household have been the target of a  phishing attack that our separate email providers did not detect as spam. This email sought to convince us that it was a receipt for an online purchase.

• Yes - we do often purchase goods online and the amount was not unreasonable enough to cause a panic.
• No - neither of us had made a purchase for that amount. 
• Yes - there was an attachment which would have contained a virus, trojan or malware of some sort had it been opened. 

Be alert, be aware is our motto.

This help session points to some useful sites that assist in raising our digital awareness and a couple of sites useful for debunking those tips, often too good to be true, that manage to arrive via email.

Mentioned below:
Stay Smart Online
Internet basics
Scam Watch
Snopes
Urban Legends

Travel tools and apps

Planning a trip can be the most stressful part of your journey but with so many tools available how does one choose? One of my favourite tools is Tripit and that is just one of dozens in this presentation prepared for patrons of Noosa Library Service.

Have a look at this range of apps and sites designed to enhance your travel planning, then choose some to enable easy management of your data and photos while travelling. My newest piece of hardware gets a mention too. Check out some ideas for creating your own travel ebooks and view some suggestions for preserving your memories upon returning home.




Here's a short video to guide you in making your own etravel guide

Related post: Making Readlists Use a Readlist to compile all those pages you want to take with you.


Follow Travel apps and tips to keep up to date with the latest offerings.

Can you find it again?

I'll send you that link!

Have you ever been talking to someone who promised to send you a great link but now they can't find it? My guess is they didn't know how to use bookmarks effectively and probably did not know where to look for their web history.

Bookmarks and Favourites

These terms are interchangeable when used in reference to a web browser. 

Below are a series of screenshots showing you how to add to, edit and use your bookmarks in Internet Explorer, Chrome for desktop and tablets and Safari for iDevices.

If you prefer to use an online bookmarking service I recommend Diigo, but do investigate Delicious and Google bookmarks. Online services like these allow you to add tags, so that the search function finds and groups by the tags you have used. Their biggest advantage is that they can be viewed on any platform and are independent of learning the quirks of a particular browser's peculiarities. When one upgrades to a new computer or mobile device those bookmarks are all still there, not lost in the collapse of old hardware.

I have used Diigo for long term storage and tagging of bookmarks for several years and Chrome provides quick access to the sites I need daily.