Lifehacker.com’s Banish telemarketers from your phone is a post that everyone needs to read. If you want to stop telemarketers from calling any of your phone numbers use the National Do Not Call Registry. Here’s some more information from donotcall.gov:

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE NATIONAL DO NOT CALL REGISTRY

The National Do Not Call Registry gives you a choice about whether to receive telemarketing calls at home. Most telemarketers should not call your number once it has been on the registry for 31 days. If they do, you can file a complaint at this Website. You can register your home or mobile phone for free.

Your registration will not expire. Telephone numbers placed on the National Do Not Call Registry will remain on it permanently due to the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007, which became law in February 2008. Read more about it at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/04/dncfyi.shtm.

McAfee Avert Labs is claiming that 27% of all PCs their products have scanned since last Friday are infected with a Trojan malware named Downloader-UA.h. This Trojan was found disguised as media files on more than half a million computers. Believed to have been planted on file sharing sites like Limewire and eDonkey, users are tricked when trying to play a media file they downloaded.

As explained in the Yahoo news article Fake MP3 Trojan Detected On 27% Of PCs: (more…)

Computer keyboards can be dirtier than a toilet: study is an article from news.yahoo.com that caught my attention, and will defnitely make me clean my keyboard and mouse more often!

“A study by British consumer magazine “Which? Computing” asked a microbiologist to examine 33 keyboards in a typical London office, a toilet seat and a toilet door handle, for bugs generally found in unhygienic places.

Four keyboards were judged potential health hazards and the microbiologist recommended the removal of one keyboard as it had 150 times the pass limit of bacteria — five times filthier than the swabbed toilet seat.”

More from the article: (more…)

Ubuntu 8.04 has several cool features that were not previously available in past versions. The coolest is when you load the Ubuntu CD on a PC running Windows you have the option to perform a Wubi installation. The Wubi install installs like a Windows application (and it is removed as a Windows app too – i.e. from the Control Panel > Add / Remove programs) but configures your PC to dual boot Ubuntu and your Windows version. It does not modify partitions, the MBR, or any part of your hard disk. It simply creates a new folder named Ubuntu on the drive you choose to install to.

When I first tried the Wubi install I attempted to load it to the same partition Windows boots from. The installation failed, so I then installed it to my data partition and was successful. After a reboot I was prompted to choose which OS to boot. I selected Ubuntu and was amazed as my Lenovo T60p booted successfully. The only problem Ubuntu had with my hardware was that the wireless indicator L.E.D. did not light up, but wireless was working fine.

I was then able to download and install packages / updates, modify my theme and appearance, and configure Ubuntu as you would expect. I could even access my Windows files because the data partition was mounted as /host and the boot partition could be mounted as a removable drive. The end result is the screenshot of my dsktop in this post. (more…)

Lifehacker.com post Free Fax: Drop.io Adds Free, Simple Faxing points out a totally free internet fax service:

“Drop.io now sends and receives faxes for free. To send a fax, just upload a document to Drop.io, enter the fax number, and click Fax. To receive a fax, Drop.io generates a cover sheet you email to the sender; as long as they use your cover page on the fax, it will end up in your Drop.io account as a PDF. Like most of Drop.io, faxing services are free and require no registration to use.”

Technorati Tags: fax, internet, free, pdf

Lifehacker.com’s post Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters reports:

“Commercial video converter software’s aplenty, but there are several solid free utilities that can convert your video files on every operating system, or if you’ve just got a web browser and a quick clip. Put DVDs on your iPod, YouTube videos on DVD, or convert any video file with today’s top 10 free video rippers, encoders and converters.”

Here’s the list of all ten of the utilities. Read the entire article at the link above for more details on each one. (more…)

Whenever family and friends come to me and say my PC is running slow the first thing I do is install and run the free utility CCleaner for them. The features page on ccleaner.com explain why:

Program Summary:

CCleaner is a freeware PC optimization tool.
It combines a system cleaner that removes unused and temporary files from your system and also a fully featured registry cleaner!
CCleaner allows Windows to run faster, more efficiently and gives you more hard disk space.
The best part is that it’s Small, Fast and Free!

Cleans the following Windows components: (more…)

Just Watch Its Sum Laff!! Get Leavin Comments!!

If you have a Nintendo Wii then you know all about creating Mii characters to play in the games like Wii Sports, Wii Play, and even other titles like Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.

Miieditor.com is a website that lets you create or edit a Mii and save it to a .jpg. So you could create your own avatar for other applications, for example. With some additional software and a bluetooth connection to a computer, you can even transfer the Mii you made on-line to your WiiRemote.

Try it for yourself here.

(more…)

My name is Rich Brambley and I am a Senior Infrastructure Consultant with Optimus Solutions (recently acquired by Softchoice). I live and work in Atlanta, GA. I am a father of 2 sons, Zachary and Cooper, and I am second in charge to my wonderful wife Marilee.

This blog is my personal site. For my professional expertise check out my virtualization blog at http://vmetc.com, but on this site you will find anything and everything about my family, my friends, my sports teams, and a lot of personal opinions about desktop technologies, games, music, video and anything else that catches my attention.

Like most professionals in the IT industry, we can’t visit friends or family without eventually being asked to look at a slow PC, to help configure an email client, or recommend a gadget like a camera or mp3 player. So, since I’m doing that all the time anyways I figured I’d start a blog and maybe even get some collaboration from anyone who can help. Fell free to comment and ask questions!

I can be reached at rbrambley[@]gmail[.]com.

Oh, and there is no deep meaning to why this blog is called “treesum”. It’s an abbreviation for the apartments we were living in when I first used DynDns.com to set up my own “go to my pc” solution. Yeah, I am such a geek, I know.