We are currently working diligently on putting together what we call an “eLearning Center” solution. In just a couple of weeks, a few of us eDOT’ers are going to be in Ukraine to install our first all Microsoft Windows based computer center. The problem is that we don’t have everything working together the way we want it. But we’ll get there. The fun part will be that we will be doing our first install in Russian (I have yet to learn Russia, but at least Microsoft puts the same icons and places everything pretty much in the same place when they do different localizations).

Anyway, all this to say that we found (through eDOT’er Andrew) this great way of filtering your content and reporting on where people are going that use your Internet connection. It’s called OpenDNS.

Now many of you are probably wondering what DNS is. Well, to use this free service you don’t have to know what it is but if you do desire to know - DNS is Dynamic Name System which is when you type in “Google.com” that your computer figures out to go to the IP address 72.14.207.99 (kinda like an Internet Server’s phone number) to view that website.

While this way of doing content filtering is not 100% perfect (none of them are other than just not going online), it is effective and easy to set up. And best of all, it’s free!

So if you are a person that just doesn’t want to accidentally see some of the stuff that is in the Internet world, or don’t want to be tempted by it, maintain a computer center or small office, or have a kids in the house that you want to help protect their innocence - consider setting up OpenDNS on your computers and networks.

My Dad is a catch-n-release fisherman. He loves the sport but he is not out to hurt any of the fish. Unfortunately, there are phisherman out in the Internet world who are about hurting those online. Those of us online are the (ph)ishes. So do you think you can spot the “hooks” that are out there in cyberspace? Take this quiz to see if you can spot the “hooks” online

PS - I only got 7 out of 10

I am going to start throwing out there some new types of blogs that are very different than the ones we have posted before. Because I also do some support for my fellow missionaries and have to support my own small home network, I have decided to blog problems that I have and the fixes I have found for them. Basically, if I have to search for an answer to a problem and I have a hard time finding the answer, I figure the more people who post the fix means its easier for the next person with the same problem to find the answer. (Did that even make sense?)

Sorry to most of my regular readers as you can feel free to skip them as they will be geekie and technical. So here’s the first one:

Problem: When using Front Row or Finder on Mac OS X, whenever I “preview” an AVI file, it seems to take forever to come up i.e. really long time. I was finding this especially to be true with Front Row when watching my movies and shows. Before it would be a second or two max before the show was ready to be viewed. Then something happened to make them take minutes (like 1-5 minutes depending on the size of the file).

Equipment: MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM running Mac OS X 10.4.10 (Yes, I have a Mac - No, I am not going to go on about how Mac’s are better - It seems I can crash anything, Macs and Windows alike. Even blew up a Linux install but that took some work). Using Flip4Mac to help with the AVI files within QuickTime

Solution/Fix: Aparantly, when my Apple automatic updates happened a little bit ago, it updated QuickTime to QT 7.2 . With this update, things went screwy. Now QuickTime 7.2 update on its own isn’t bad but it makes the Flip4Mac plugin now work properly so it creates the problems in bringing up the viewers. So to fix this, you need to reinstall your Flip4Mac. I understand this might also be the case with Perian and Divx. When I did this, everything started to work lightning fast again.

Hope this helps someone out there. If it does, please leave me a comment so I’ll know. Thanks.