My choice for email out of all the email choices out there, from ISP email to domain email accounts. I choose my gmail address to be my primary choice for an email account. Today over at makeuseof.com there is an interesting artical about my  gmail address for example lets use the email address scottymead@gmail.com which is my address, and lets say my mom emails me but she puts a period in the email address, so for example scotty.mead@gmail.com it still comes into my gmail account, or one day I was talking to a bunch of people and we exchanged email address and talking about email providers and I said something like ‘I love google mail, so someone who was attending this little get together decides to email me but put my email address as scottymead@googlemail.com it will still go to my gmail address. more examples that email can get sent is s.c.o.t.t.y.m.e.a.d@gmail.com. You get the idea.

Have you ever signed up for a service that sends you email on a daily basis like newsletters, ect? Well say you are over at cnn.com and you want to sign up to their daily newsletter that is received, well when you sign up you have to give them your email address, well you can give an email like this. scottymead+cnn@gmail.com Pretty neat I think, now your asking… WHY would I want to do this?

1. One email for every purpose

Instead of using different email addresses for various purposes (work, school, friends, etc.) you can use different variations of your Gmail and filter incoming mails by ’sent to’ address. For instance, all incoming mail sent to ‘Name.Surname@gmail.com’ can be put to folder ‘work’, messages sent to ‘NameSurname@gmail.com’ can be put to ‘friends’, ‘N.ameSurname@gmail.com’ can be used for newsletters, and so on.

2. Track/Block spammers

When signing up for some website, say thatwebsite.com, you can add thatwebsite to your Gmail user ID (eg. scottymead+thatwebsite@gmail.com). This way you can block your subscription whenever you want and even identify those websites that distribute your email address to spammers.
If you have any neat tips like this I would love to hear them leave a comment or email me at scott@scottsgnome.com or s.c.otty.mea.d@gmail.com and be sure you visit me at ScottsGnome.Com where you can also see me LIVE on camera.

Apple tracks iPhone and Leopard users

A discovery buried deep within the code of some iPhone applications may be cause for concern for those who like to know who’s seeing their data.

Windows XP SP3 moves closer to completion

Beta testers have received access to a release candidate of Windows XP Service Pack 3, but general consumers still have a long wait until they’ll see SP3 available for download.

TinyURL Outage Illustrates the Service’s Risks

The link shortening and redirection service TinyURL went down apparently for hours last night, rendering countless links broken across the web. Complaints have been particularly loud on Twitter, where long links are automatically turned to TinyURLs and complaining is easy to do, but the service is widely used in emails and web pages as well.

Top 15 Leopard Hints

It’s been almost a month since Leopard was officially released, and in that month we’ve had some time to play with the OS and get to know it. Here are the Top 15 Leopard Hints we’ve come across this past month.
The Internet Ends in 2010 – Unless you give AT&T what they want (Karl/DSLreports)

The Internet Ends in 2010 – Unless you give AT&T what they want  —  More warnings of a looming bandwidth apocalypse, this time from USAToday, who insists that the Internet “will start to seem pokey as early as 2010, as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers.

Be sure to visit Scott over at ScottsGnome.Com

Alright lets make this todays blog post and keep it the only post today from ScottsGnome.Com. I am going to ask and I really hope to get feedback from this post, here is the question. What is it that you would like to see on or blogged about at ScottsGnome.Com time to go back to how I wanted my site ran which is Visitor driven content. So I am asking the one simple question. What is it that your interested in, I dont know about you but I like reading tech related news. I would like to know.

What this comes down to is I recently over the weekend posted a blog post about the 14 year old girl that killed her self over a fake profile on myspace. That falls into the cyber crime category which blew up my website. So leave a comment or simply email me at scott@scottsgnome.com

If you are reading this and did not come directly to my page to get here, check out my website at ScottsGnome.Com

Thanks,
Scott

Alot of people have asked me what is wrong? why was today a bad day? Well first of all I really hate my job, I hate it ALOT. Today started off okay till I got back from lunch at that time I felt that I was set up, okay I work on the banking side of GMAC Morgages now so I am no longer in the regular Q for regular phone calls, but everyday at 10 oclock is calibration, thats where all 3 centers are listening to whatever call comes in next and scores it. So right when I get back from lunch everyone must of been on a call so our floor manager comes out of her office and said, who can we put on the phone? I was just taking off my coat and putting it on my chair when I was told to get on the phones, so it was at the last second and was not even logged into my computer yet, and here I was being calibrated. I was so pissed, so I took the call, and I had to get an answer from 2 supervisors, it was envolving an outgoing wire transfer, well the customer just had a basic question like “what is a ABA number” he was filling out an outgoing wire form that needs to be faxed back to us. So since I know I was being scored, I got the customers acct number, id’ed him and gave him the information he wanted, I read the notes while I had the customer on hold, well anyways about 11:30 I get my feedback regarding the call, a friggin 73%, and I got deducted for not telling the customer how much the outgoing wire cost, and if it was domestic or international wire transfer, and I did not get a good day time contact number, I was WHOA okay first of all, the customer called 30 minutes prior, in the notes was ‘Reason for call: Needs outgoing wire transfer form to send outgoing domestic wire transfer‘ and ‘Fees: 20.00 outgoing domestic wire transfer’ and that previous agent also got a good contact number for the customer. I was basicly called a lier, the call was about 6 minutes long and the lady that gave me my score said in that time im sure you did not bring up the notes and see that, so I brought up the acct and showed her right in the notes from the previous agent it was all told to the customer, so that pissed me off. Anyways next topic my supervisor said I was talking ’shit’ behind her back, she said “if your going to talk shit about me say it to my face, I have busted my ass to help you and Jeniece out” oh I was so livid, I said no such thing, but she said 6 people said Jeniece and I was, oh I was so friggin pissed, I sit with a bunch of people 3 people in my pod and the pod across from me 3 ladys sit over there, and across the small hallway Jeniece and 2 other girls. They all told my supervisor whoever said has no clue what they are talking about because nothing even came up like that. Then that does not end my crappy day. Right before the end of the day, next weeks schedule was put out, our hours got CUT again oh will this day never end. when I first started I was getting 37 – 40 hours, then we got cut down to 35, then 32, then 30 and was told no lower then 30, okay we figured out our budget for 30, oh now next week 27 hours. I need to find a new job, I am not going to put up with this crap anymore.

Be sure to visit me at ScottsGnome.Com

• Dell to buy remote-services management company

The PC maker continues to expand its software business with the planned purchase of Everdream.

• Dawn of the Computer Era [ Pics ]

Do you have any nostalgia about the days when computers were big and slow? Now the size, appearance and speed of first computers seem to be lame but it was not always the case!

• Twitter reactions to Apple’s OS update

Lest you think I’m the only one having problems:
JesseStay: the 10.4.11 update killed my Mac too. Windley (he’s the former CTO for the state of Utah): “the 10.4.11 update killed my Mac too. ” Hey, Phil, can’t you pick a different line than Jesse? Heheh.
ordinal: Killed my Powerbook too. I had to erase & install.

• Instant Messenger Virus

http://live.pirillo.com – Michael Downing emailed me to say that a friend of his had gotten a virus through Windows Live Messenger. He is wondering if Windows Defender can remove it, and is it for stopping viruses… or just spyware?
Steve Jobs May Get a Raise After ten years of drawing only one dollar a year in salary, Steve Jobs may get a raise. According to Apple’s most recent 10-K filing, the board is considering offering additional compensation to the Apple CEO.

• Windows Vista SP1 Hands-On Details

babyshiori writes “Users of Microsoft Windows Vista can rejoice in the fact that Microsoft just released a preview of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate! The build is the lead-up to the actual service pack, which will be made available to even more testers at a later date. ‘In our early tests with the beta, we saw some small improvements in boot time on an HP Compaq 8710p Core 2 Duo notebook. Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds. Microsoft is also touting improvements in “the speed of copying and extracting files,” so we tested a few of those scenarios. We noted a slight increase in the time required to copy 562 JPEG images totaling 1.9GB from an SD Card to the hard drive of the aforementioned HP Compaq notebook.

Be sure to visit me over at ScottsGnome.Com

Over on CNN.Com there is a story titled Fake online ‘friend’ led to girl’s suicide. The 13 year old girl was on myspace when this fake online ‘friend’ started saying mean and hurtfull things which led the girl to her death. Here is the story directly from CNN, Just another reason i do not like MySpace.

DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Missouri (AP) — Megan Meier thought she had made a new friend in cyberspace when a cute teenage boy named Josh contacted her on MySpace and began exchanging messages with her.

Megan, a 13-year-old who suffered from depression and attention deficit disorder, corresponded with Josh for more than a month before he abruptly ended their friendship, telling her he had heard she was cruel.

The next day Megan committed suicide. Her family learned later that Josh never actually existed; he was created by members of a neighborhood family that included a former friend of Megan’s.

Now Megan’s parents hope the people who made the fraudulent profile on the social networking web site will be prosecuted, and they are seeking legal changes to safeguard children on the Internet.

The girl’s mother, Tina Meier, said she doesn’t think anyone involved intended for her daughter to kill herself.

“But when adults are involved and continue to screw with a 13-year-old, with or without mental problems, it is absolutely vile,” she told the Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis, which first reported on the case.

Tina Meier said law enforcement officials told her the case did not fit into any law. But sheriff’s officials have not closed the case and pledged to consider new evidence if it emerges.

Megan Meier hanged herself in her bedroom on October 16, 2006, and died the next day. She was described as a “bubbly, goofy” girl who loved spending time with her friends, watching movies and fishing with her dad.

Megan had been on medication, but had been upbeat before her death, her mother said, after striking up a relationship on MySpace with Josh Evans about six weeks before her death.

Josh told her he was born in Florida and had recently moved to the nearby community of O’Fallon. He said he was homeschooled, and didn’t yet have a phone number in the area to give her. Watch Megan’s parents say she swooned when she received an affectionate note from ‘Josh’ »

Megan’s parents said she received a message from him on October 15 of last year, essentially saying he didn’t want to be her friend anymore, that he had heard she wasn’t nice to her friends.

The next day, as Megan’s mother headed out the door to take another daughter to the orthodontist, she knew Megan was upset about Internet messages. She asked Megan to log off. Users on MySpace must be at least 14, though Megan was not when she opened her account. A MySpace spokeswoman did not return calls seeking comment.

Someone using Josh’s account was sending cruel messages. Then, Megan called her mother, saying electronic bulletins were being posted about her, saying things like, “Megan Meier is a slut. Megan Meier is fat.”

Megan’s mother, who monitored her daughter’s online communications, returned home and said she was shocked at the vulgar language her own daughter was sending. She told her daughter how upset she was about it.

Megan ran upstairs, and her father, Ron, tried to tell her everything would be fine. About 20 minutes later, she was found in her bedroom. She died the next day.

Her father said he found a message the next day from Josh, which he said law enforcement authorities have not been able to retrieve. It told the girl she was a bad person and the world would be better without her, he has said.

Another parent, who learned of the MySpace account from her own daughter who had access to the Josh profile, told Megan’s parents about the hoax in a counselor’s office about six weeks after Megan died. That’s when they learned Josh was imaginary, they said.

The woman who created the fake profile has not been charged with a crime. She allegedly told the St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department she created Josh’s profile because she wanted to gain Megan’s confidence to know what Megan was saying about her own child online.

The mother from down the street told police that she, her daughter and another person all typed and monitored the communication between the fictitious boy and Megan.

A person who answered the door at the family’s house told an Associated Press reporter on Friday afternoon that they had been advised not to comment.

Megan’s parents had been storing a foosball table for the family that created the MySpace character. Six weeks after Megan’s death, they learned the other family had created the profile and responded by destroying the foosball table, dumping it on the neighbors’ driveway and encouraging them to move away.

Megan’s parents are now separated and plan to divorce.

Be sure to visit Scott on ScottsGnome.Com

• Leopard 10.5.1 is now available

Leopard bugs got you down? Apple just pushed out its first update for the new OS, 10.5.1. It looks like it cures a whole laundry list of niggles with Leopard, including that nasty “potential data loss” issue with partitions in Finder. We heard about most of these fixes last week when the first build was seeded to developers, but there’s a rundown of what actually made it after the break. Highlights include a fix to Time Machine drive limitations, a bunch of improvements to Finder’s Shared Sidebar, and good old fashioned spanking of Mail.app’s issues. Let us know if Apple didn’t fix what ails you and we’ll be sure to have our people talk to Steve’s people

• Safari 3.0.4 Beta for Windows

Alongside the Mac OS X 10.4.11 updates today, Apple also released a new beta of Safari for Windows as detailed in this tech note. The latest Safari beta for Windows incorporates a number of stability, performance and security improveme…

• Email Is For Old People?

A few years ago, we pointed to a report in Asia, where kids were saying that email was for old people, and they were more focused on things like text messaging. This may have just been foreshadowing a larger trend, highlight by an article in Slate about how, just as older generations have embraced emails, kids have moved on to many different forms of communication from instant messaging to text messaging to private messaging through social networks to broadcast messaging through Twitter and Facebook news feeds. And, while it worries the reporter a bit, he’s come to accept it and realize that kids are simply figuring out the best, most efficient way to communicate different messages — where email as a one-size-fits-all communication system is a bit clunky. That’s not to say that email is going away any time soon — but that it’s not nearly as important a communication tool as many “older” people seem to assume it is.

Be sure to visit me online, only at one place ScottsGnome.Com

Over at on10.net they did again for the 3rd day in a row out of all the feeds I read from day to do and websites I get my content from, they are in my book AWESOME and posting quality content.

There was an interesting feed on on10.net today talking about Windows Live Calendar, just one of the many new features Windows Live has come out with in the past week or so. Windows Live Calendar is AWESOME and is far better then Google Calendar. You may have read my recent posts on Windows Live Messenger which is what I strickly went to for my IM service.

Windows Live Calendar is just great and just another reason I am glad I choose Windows Live Messenger. The beta offers features like multiple color-coded calendars, shared calendars, email and text message alerts for appointments, and the ability to subscribe to a calendar’s contents via RSS.

You can also share your Calendar with clients in a read-only mode and optional read/write permissions. You can import your calendar to Outlook 2007 and one of the coolest things that you can do with Windows Live Calendar is it can be automatically sync to to Windows Calendar on Vista.

Be sure to visit me online at ScottsGnome.Com

Comcast hit with class-action lawsuit over traffic blocking
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071114-comcast-hit-with-class-action-lawsuit-over-traffic-blocking.html

Less than two weeks after a complaint was filed with the FCC, Comcast now faces a class-action lawsuit over its practice of blocking BitTorrent and other P2P traffic.
Online property theft once again leads to real-world legal action
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071114-online-property-theft-once-again-leads-to-real-world-legal-action.html

Some residents of Habbo Hotel, a UK-based social networking site crossed with a virtual world, have had their virtual stuff stolen—enough to get (real) law enforcement involved. One teenager has already been arrested and five others questioned.
Microsoft Expands Vista SP1 Beta
http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Expands_Vista_SP1_Beta/1195078473

Microsoft has released yet another build of its first planned service pack for Windows Vista on Wednesday, opening up the patch to a broader base of testers.
High-quality YouTube videos coming soon
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9817732-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen says high-bitrate streaming coming within three months.
Twitter Blogoscoped
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-11-14.html#n41

What are you doing right now (other than reading this post, I guess…)?
Ever Wonder Why Your Internet Went Down? // Pic
http://digg.com/design/Ever_Wonder_Why_Your_Internet_Went_Down_Pic

If this is real I would have to be paid alot of money to be working for I.T. there.
iPhone Keyboard Leads to Typso
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/184716694/article.pl

jfruhlinger writes “One of the selling points of the iPhone was its revolutionary touch-screen full keyboard. But a study has shown that text messages sent from iPhones contain significantly more typso than messages from phones with other kinds of keyboards — and aren’t entered any faster.”
Microsoft Patches Critical XP Hole
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/topheadlines/~3/184742441/MICROSOFT_SECURITY

In a security update, Microsoft issues two fixes assigned its most urgent “critical” rating, including one that patches Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The patched vulnerability would have let hackers use IE7 to exploit personal computers.

Besure to visit me over at ScottsGnome.Com

I get my tech information from various tech feeds on the internet, I am very impressed with the site on10.net that the same site I found my very cool Yahoo Instant Messengar web Widget I put on my contact page.

Have you ever wanted to just have your Digital camera upload your photos stored on your SD card in your digital camera automaticly? Well now you can by a company called Eye-Fi. Eye-Fi is a wireless card that communicates with your wireless internet router by going into the management one time and setting up all your wifi preferences and everytime your camera is on within your wifi signal the images will be automaticly uploaded, this card works with any wifi network as long as your not on a wifi network with a splash screen asking you to log in like for example at Starbucks.

The card works with many services such as myriad of services, including Kodak, Walmart, Snapfish, Photobucket, Facebook, Webshots, Phanfare, Shutterfly, flickr, TypePad, Vox, Sharpcast, and many more.

This 2GB Wireless Eye-Fi card is deffently on my list of Top 5 gifts I want for Christmas.

Besure to visit me over at ScottsGnome.Com