TruXter Tech News

Well I logged in today to my gmail account while on my Xubuntu partition and saw something new (to me).

It seems that Google has released  and internet based phone that we all can use locally for free.

There is a page that describes the rates. but there was also a pop up ( I did not screenshot) that says calls within the country I am in are free, but calls outside of the country have extremely low rates.

Here is a list of the rates for the google phone and the page the rates are listed on.

Now you can make phone calls from Gmail at extremely low rates — so you can share your two cents with France
(or Argentina, or Iceland, or Guam…) for $0.02. Check out some sample per-minute rates below or see the complete list.

Wooo hoo… It’s like the G1.1 for all of us lol… I wonder if they will slip in some ads in there.

Google Phone picture

The reason I mentioned Xubuntu is that I had just installed the latest version and then tested the  Ethernet driver adapter support by heading straight to gmail and I got the notice. Since I was on Linux, and all of the android phones are owned by Google, and well since Android is based on Linux , My assumption was that Google gave all of the Linux users a cool little secret treat.

But then I booted to my winseven partition and :-(

There it is, the google phone for gmail.

I remember when msn and yahoo did this years ago. As soon as they stopped, Skype took it over.

**updated**

My question is, if you have the official Gmail ap on your droid. Does this mean you can now make calls and bypass your phone billing service since you are paying for unlimited internet ?

And Google swears they monitor the ads they serve.

Picture of scam email in google

These people in the ads served by Google say they are there to back up your password.

How fricken Gullible are we these days ? is this simple of a scam working now?

Google … wake up
Scan your ads.

Email from SEOMOZ

A good friend I know (I reference tons of stuff to her website) Alicia Crowder, (my secret SEO Guru ) has a book out now called “SEO Standards for Beginners“.
If you are a web designer of new or professional status, this book is under $10 and a quick read. I assure you, there will be something in there that changes your knowledge about Search engine optimization.
Her description of the book is:

SEO Standards for Beginners is an informative book to help individuals and business owners better understand what SEO is and how to better compete in the online marketplace. Providing a general comprehension of the purpose of optimization, as well as practical methods for achieving better results online, this book will assist beginners in simplifying what is often otherwise bewildering.

I have had short encounters with her where we just sit and talk site building and SEO. Each sit in she says something that I have to study up on. Each time we have conversed she reminds me of stuff I have been neglecting to remember. Stuff I have been overlooking. This book is a must buy for anyone who needs crib notes, reminders, and new working ideas to build your website to comply to search engine needs.

She works for an SEO company. She has done so for as long as I have known her. She is great at what she does and has many large name clients ( I will not reveal or other seo companies may try and swoop em up). This book will be, for certain your best investment in web-design and site building as of yet. This book will help you in your quest to get to the front page of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and the huge string of other search engines.

It would be foolish of a professional Search Engine Optimization person to pass up on a chance to find things they have been overlooking, to find things they never knew. Or to ever assume they know it all.

Go get Seo Standards for Beginners. It will be well worth your effort. Trust it is not just for beginners, I’m certain there is something for everyone in this book. I will be ordering mine Friday.

SEO Standards for Beginners

Google said to announce soon “google me” to compete with facebook and twitter.
New social network to come.

This news posted via G1 wp ap.

Yeah that’s convenient. Actually they gave us plenty of warning. There was a highlighted text area in our account that stayed pretty static on every page. I do have to say this about adsense, ” They plan their outages and let you know at least a week in advance” .

Google AdSense

The AdSense account interface is temporarily unavailable due to system maintenance. AdSense is expected to be down from approximately 10:00 AM until 2:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time on April 10, 2010. Please note that your earnings will continue to be tracked as normal, and your ad targeting will not be affected during this downtime. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Website Status, value and worth.

Well I have been working with  the company website ( the company I work for) trying to see what it’s page rank was and how well my SEO skills are. Doing that usually consisted of me hitting about 10 websites every day and me making the adjustments to the company website I felt like I needed to make.

Well, just as you would, I got tired of all of the Google searches I had to do and bookmarks to crank through. so I found a site that some dang dude was selling a php script  that would supposedly  do all the work for me. Well the program barely did but it gave me some insight as to what labors I needed to perform on the PHP script to make it work like I needed to get the information i needed

I needed  page rank information, I needed to see how many index pages in search engines I had, I also needed to find how many websites linked to me. So I took this clump of crap I bought for like  four dollars and started asking around if I could use tools from the sites the guy originally incorporated. Sad thing is, I have not gotten the “value” part in a monetary pattern. Soooo, It will not tell you what your website is worth.. Heck I don’t really have much faith in any of those sites. If you know of one that works really well and is spot on, please tell me where it is. I will contact the site owner and see what i can get done, for him, for me , for the users.

Website Status, value and worth.

Oh there is a “whois” tool added so you can check if a domain you want is open, sorry I do not sell website domain names. I do how ever like Netfirms. They seem to have the best prices. I don’t care much for their storage though.

All over the net is the news so here is the link direct to Dell’s site with the price and all of the info you need.

Dell Selling Motorolla Droid at $119

No I make nothing from that link there. It is Dell’s site

(I love my Tmobile G1 and the same apps on it as the droid, I’m good)

Yep this also happened to me. While at work. AT WORK !!! sorry had to say it like it is supposed to be said, yelling.
Now at my job, I am not “The Tech Guy”. I am the drawings and images guy. I mean I know plenty, but they already have a “resident nerd” and well, he is pretty good at it. So by my wandering around on the internet doing things “my way” and stumbling into an ” Oh dang!” moment isn’t the best thing for my career. First warning was ” Microsoft is ready to install Explorer 8″ Yep you guessed it, I installed it . Not thinking one time that I was on Firefox the whole time.
Ok I started with the on board Symantec end point. It caught either 8 viruses , or the same virus kept trying to rescue it’s self. lol I have no idea, I was panicking and hurrying , I saw the word ” Trojan” in the pop up warning from Symantec, and freaked out. I decide I better go check Windows update site and see if I ever downloaded Internet Explorer 8, The page would not load, I run to another computer on the network and all is fine, I head back to mine, still nothing. So I headed to the first place I could think of. Bitdefender’s online malware scan. It never lets me down. Well this time it surely did. I take it up a notch and head to “Malware Bytes” and start doing a search in Google and search the term “windows update takes me to Google” and started reading all the people praying and begging for help. The ever so faithful “tech guy forums” turned up an unanswered request for help, wow that was surprising. After about 45 minutes of reading, I find nothing (well I actually found the right thing but over looked it like 10 times) and malware bytes is done scanning, It found nothing, nothing at all, I try and update it, will not let me, along with anything else I tried to scan with.
So now I break out A-squared, not the worst thing in the line up for sure, but it did not find anything either. Ok now I am feeling like I am losing my mind. Well as this is going on I am still reading threads in forums about the issue. I go back to this thread . The first link in the first and only response, well tried that. Second link I click it it takes me to Super AntiSpyware. First thought is ” Well crap, this place looks like it’s just going to make the issue worse. I figured that it really couldn’t get much worse if I scan the file first. So I wander off to the download area for the free version. All was fine until I get to the point that I actually try and download it. Another dead link.. “hmmm, the link is dead, it is blocked, it must be what I need” is exactly what I thought. Ok also another thing about that name, just kept making me think about power rangers. It really sounded like the slogan from some kid’s show “super anti-spyware free trial go team action go!!!” is what I kept saying and giggling.
I walked over to another one of the computers in the office and download the file and slip it onto an open space on the server.
Walk back to my computer and here comes the I.T. guy, just in time. I let him fumble through it like I did. He made a lot of the assumptions I did at first, I walked away to the store next to the office and get a soda while he does exactly what I did. I get back into the office and there he is, lol just like me.. Reading the forum posts for a second time. We agreed that super action malware scanner was the way to go. Well we install it while Spybot S&D or something was finishing it’s scan.
We reboot to safe mode administration by pressing F8 after the bios scan, just before the windows logo. Yes I was just sitting there hitting the F8 button repeatedly till I got the boot menu.
In administration mode we ran the quick scan. Within seconds it finds 3 Trojans and a dns changer, by the end of the scan Super AntiSpyware found two root-kits and two registry key modifications.
We rebooted after the scan and checked to see if Microsoft Windows Update worked, all was fine but still could not update any of the virus scanners. So we reboot to safe mode administrator, and do the full scan. Nothing came up.

So far not all of the issues are resolved, I will go through my “hosts” file and see if there are any changes there. Probably not but hopefully there are. I know how to change that. and I will add the link that I got the file from in the first place to the list of blocked sites. I may even email a heads up to the guys from mvp’s hosts file website (google it).
This is the help I have for you. I hope it works for you. Heck I’m going to run that goofy named program on my home pc now and see what it finds. http://www.superantispyware.com/
Hope it helps you get un-hijacked. I promise that program actually works, just the name is stupid and their web designer is cheesy.

Also that “Google” page I kept getting redirected to was not regular google. it was an affiliate page. Google English. So the freak was making money off of each search we did while we tried to resolve the issue.  Google needs to ban that account.

Well the big Selling point of Bing is that you can ask direct questions.

So i had my very first question to ask bing.

We got a file today, labeled with a .mso extension. Email opens it fine, but once out of email I have no idea hat to open it with, so i turned to bing with a question. “what is .mso” . Number one answer is “Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra”.

Didn’t like that answer at all lol. So I look deeper. Nothing identifies the use of the period/point mark showing that was not an abbreviation, but it was a file extension. Nothing for pages. So I tried a few simple ones. Sure that was fine and dandy, but why show me the simple ones but not the hard ones??

so I did the same search in google. Top answer was the same but in like the 8th  spot, there it was.

Sure it’s more difficult to locate things in Google sometimes, unless you know the tricks for locating specific details. like plus minus quote and so on.

My opinion, Bing is still being developed into a blue version of yahoo search and is not ready yet for competing with anyone other than old msn search.

The whole pop up description thing is anoying

Bing= but it’s not google!!!???….(with a sad face)