Twin Pines Technologies

I will be participating in a panel discussion regarding online marketing. This is a Business After-hours session run by Wayland Area revitalization (www.waylandarea.org) and will take place at the Wayland Library at 6:30 PM Monday, July 12th.

I will be giving an overview of websites and the basics of different types of online marketing. The other panelists will expand on Social Media marketing. Other panelist include representatives from Smitty’s Pop and Hops, Dogwood trading, Dogwood Floral, and 129 Main St. this should be a lively discussion covering ways to use facebook and other social media for local marketing.

Wayland Area Revitalization will also unveil their new website, designed by a student at Wayland-Cohocton High School.

We will be closed for an extended weekend break for the 4th of July. We will be closed Friday, July 2nd through Monday, July 5th. Normal hours will resume Tuesday July 6th.

I will be checking voice mail periodically throughout the weekend, so if you have a critical outage and require emergency service, please leave a voice mail and we will get back to you.

Frontier internet service is down nationwide. I have called in to support and was told there is no ETA yet for the repair.

I just came across an interesting read about the now infamous bad capacitor problems that plagued Dell, HP, and other manufacturers through 2005. Here’s the link. What is interesting is how hard Dell worked to hide the problem from customers and in some cases actually used the motherboard failures to try to upsell higher end hardware to customers.

I see several older desktops a month that are affected by these bad capacitors. Most of them are either Dell or eMachines. However, I have seen other brands have the same problem. I believe the difference is in how fast each individual brand was to replace faulty motherboards vs trying to hide the problem. Additionally, Dell replaced faulty boards with new boards that had the same faulty capacitors.

Are you running Internet Explorer 8? If you have Windows Updates turned on, chances are yes.  Well, I have a fun treat for you. Web Slices!

IE8 has the capability to add “Web Slices” to its interface. When you install a Web Slice, it creates a link on your favorites bar that you can click on and see specific updates from a website without going there. Facebook is a perfect example. Here’s a sample image showing what the webslice can do:

Picture of the facebook webslice

Where can you get webslices? Some websites will have the green webslice logo on them (similar idea to the RSS feed logo, but green instead), however, the easiest place is http://www.ieaddons.com/en/webslices/

I recently came across a Microsoft Lab project that looks very interesting. Photosynth allows you to stitch together photos for a panorama or a 3D image then share it on the web.

To see some really cool action, select the link to view Photosynths on Bing maps, then click to zoom in. It is really amazing how the two interfaces were merged together.

Yes, there is a new form of threat out in the wild. Tab Napping! Sounds sinister…and it is.

Basically, there is a new class of malware that targets users that use multiple tabs. It monitors your browser tabs for activity and will hijack whichever one that you are not using. The hijack will try to replace the real site with a fake version. Usually, this happes with bank websites and the average user just suspects that the bank automatically logged them out for inactivity.

There are some steps you can take to protect yourself:

Reference Link here.

In association with Ship and Shop and Embroidered FX, we will be having a “parking lot” sale on Thursday June 10th and Friday June 11th. We will have several refurbished computers, and a table full of clearance items on sale. Other items that will be sold by our neighboring businesses include Princess House items, clearance ink and toner, and more.