Tools of the trade

It's been a while since I've served up some original writing. The wheels of denouement have been turning in the background, but at this time (for many reasons) the stony glare of the internal censor rests heavily upon me. So I'll do what writers do, and keep writing steadily (and privately) until the censor backs the hell off.

Printer woes

A writer without a printer is like a message without an ear to hear it.

Fortunately for the tragically printer-compromised amongst us (*cough me cough*) there's the promise of a brighter future (pun intended) here: 

How not to spend your Sunday

That was fun!

I’ve just spent the last 18 hours of my life learning more about malware removal than I ever wanted to know.

No, I’m not clueless.  We have a pretty good anti-virus set up, and I know what sort of pages and files to avoid, and yet this nasty – and difficult to remove - operator still managed to find a way in.

Alarmingly, it took a total of seven different processes/programs, several of which were lengthy and needed to be repeated in sequence a number of times, to finally flush out the offenders.  This consumed a large portion of what would otherwise have been productive writing time.

Take home messages for writers:

·       Keep your anti-nasties software and operating systems updated.

·       Back up your work to a remote location ** Make sure you do this even if you ignore everything else in this post **.

·       Get a good spyware tool to use alongside your regular virus checker.  Increasingly malware is using innocuous looking cookies as its way in.

·       Take action when your browser first starts running slowly (in hindsight, I should’ve investigated more carefully a couple of days ago when I noticed how clunky it was getting).

·       Remain calm and use the task manager to close the browser when an “attack” begins.  This can reduce the scale of file corruption.

·       Always have several punchy antivirus programs at your disposal.  Sometimes one just ain’t enough.

Fortunately, everyone else on the planet hates malware just as much I do, so there were some good how-to guides and free software available.  The only other things I needed were moral fortitude and a violet crumble.

It has been a warning to be more vigilant.  This time it was just an annoyance, but it has reminded me how close the threat of loss of data always lurks.

Freedom

I’ve just downloaded a nifty bit of software.  If it’s good enough for Nora Ephron, then it’s good enough for me.  It’s called Freedom and it allows you to take a self-enforced break from the internet.  You simply enter the number of minutes you want to work, undistracted by the endless lure of cyberspace, then it locks you out until that amount of time has passed.

The deal is, you can’t just have the computer open and idling, you actually have to be working for your Freedom minutes to tick past.  So the minutes don't tick by unless you're writing. Pretty neat, huh?

So, while I’m talking about things that are neat, there is a similar program called Anti-Social, which still allows you to access the internet except for social networking sites.  Oh how I want this.  BUT it’s only available for Macs at this stage.  I emailed the software developer who, being a real, live person, took the time to email me back! (Thanks, Fred.  Most appreciated).  Sadly, it’s a much more complex process for Windows than for Macs, so it will be a while coming.  If ever.

Sigh.  First and only time in my life I’ve wished for a Mac.  In the meantime I’m going cold turkey on the internet – well as much as I can – until the new semester starts and then I’ll be back online thrashing the WWW in a big way. 



Apple keyboard by Håkan Dahlström @ flickr