Earlier today, I was reminded by our eldest, Emily, of the text-to-speech function (She wanted to use my computer to play with her new discovery). She’d learned how to do this on a Mac, so I handed her my PC and said “have fun. Click around, experiment. If something breaks, we’ll fix it later”.

I expect that she’s found the way to do it on Windows 7 by now.

For the rest of us, here’s the scoop:
Mac OS X:Highlight some text on the screen, right click, and choose Speech ->Start Speaking.
Or, you can turn on Voiceover by pressing [tippy title="command-F5 "]Command is the key with the cloverleaf-shaped symbol on it, next to the spacebar, also known as the Apple key[tippy]. Then your Mac will speak text to you whenever you want it to. There is a tutorial which you can run when you start voiceover. It will walk you through all the voiceover commands you can use.

The Universal Access preference pane (in System Preferences ->Universal Access ->Seeing) has various options you can set for Voiceover.

In Windows XP and Vista, similar controls are in the Speech Control Panel, under the Text-to-Speech tab. You start Text-to-Speech by opening Narrator, which lives in the Start Menu->Programs, under Accessories.

These are both relatively bare-bones readers. There are more feature-rich products available as well.
Next time? Voice recognition.

Here’s how it works – Every time you bid on an item, the price goes up (usually by 5 cents) and the auction is extended by anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds. This, in itself, isn’t too bad. At some point, someone doesn’t react quickly enough, so the last bidder wins, right?

Here’s the catch – it costs 60 or 70 cents to bid – every time you bid. So a $1000 laptop that finally sells for $200 has cost 4000 bids ($200 / 5 cents) times 60 cents per bid = $2400. Now, the winner doesn’t pay the whole 2400. He just pays for his bids. He’s probably clicked through, at a guess, 500 bids, so he’s paying $200 winning price, plus $300 for the bids (500 at 60 cents each). He got a good deal, but here’s the rub – everyone else bidding on the item has also paid 60 cents per bid – probably hundreds of bids each on average – and they got nothing for their bid money – zilch.

So unlike eBay and similar auction sites, where there are winners, but no actual losers (aside from the occasional scam or shoddy merchandise), Swoopo.com, Quibid.com and the like depend on many losers to make up for the one winner.

Beware.

I’m currently watching this auction on Quibid -
http://www.quibids.com/auction.php?id=15854

We’ll do the math later. It’s currently at about $35 – about $420 in bid fees.

2009/ 12/02 13:51 – Now at $105. So it’s still going strong, and they’ve already collected $1260 in bid fees. Most of the bidders at $35 appear to have dropped out.

2009/ 12/02 15:03 – Now 159 – they’ve collected 1900+ in bid fees, over and above what they’ll charge the ‘winner’. Not bad for a $1699 laptop.

2009/ 12/02 16:18 – Auction ended. The MacBook Pro went for $216.50. Quibid took in $2598 in bid fees, plus the $216.50 price, for a total of $2816, for a laptop that retails for $1699. Great deal for the winner, as long as he didn’t bit more than 1480 times. Not so great deal for everyone else who bid on the laptop, and thus spent $2382 for the privilege of clicking “bid now” many times.

As happens often these days, I received an official-looking email today.

Phishing email

This one is a helpful warning – or at least appears to be

Subject: Watch for errors on Social Security statement

Then it helpfully offers to let me check my Social Security statement for errors.

Due to possible identity theft, your annual Social Security statement may contain errors.

Use the link below to review your annual Social Security statement:

And of course, the link (I’ve inserted typos (xyz), so it won’t actually go anywhere):
Review your annual Social Security statement

So, how do I know it’s fake? There are a few things to watch for.

1. This one isn’t even part of the email itself – it’s just fact.
Your bank, the social security administration, the IRS, Ebay, PayPal ; all of these are likely to appear in a phishing email. None of them will ever send an email to clients asking for account details, or asking you to “verify your security”, or anything along those lines.

2. The “To” address isn’t mine. It sometimes might read “undisclosed-recipients’”.

3. Often, you’ll see spelling or grammatical errors. While everyone is perfectly capable of sending emails with errors, they are usually less common in business communications. This particular ‘phishing’ email is anomalous – it does not contain spelling errors, serious grammatical flubs, or oddly phrased or stilted language that can often indicate a message composed by a non-English speaker.

4. The link in the email doesn’t actually go to a Social Security Administration server. You don’t have to visit the link to tell – just hover the mouse pointer over the link (point to it, but don’t click). Usually, you’ll see a box pop up that shows you where the link will go:

This is where the link actually goes. If you read closely, you'll see it's going to a server in Belgium. The SSA, I'd like to think, doesn't host its websites overseas.

Technical bits: If you look at that web site, you can tell where it goes by looking at the part between “http://” and the next slash – “/”. This is the “server” or “host” name. That’s the name of the computer that the web site lives on.

Here is the hostname:
statements.ssa.gov.reedasg.be

“statements.ssa.gov, if it were the entire hostname, would probably be legitimate (but see point #1 above – SSA doesn’t send these0.

But, it’s followed by more: reedasg.be. This is the “domain” in which the machine lives. It’s kind of like the city/statye/country in a street address.

statements.ssa.gov.reedasg.be translates like this. Let’s look at it backwards, starting with the “.be”.

In “be” (belgium), look for “reedasg” (a “second level” domain – similar to a state in a physical address). Once you get there, look for a 3rd-level domain (think “county” or “parish”) called .gov, then look for the city called “ssa”, then find the house called “statements”. So in essence, you have some dinky little machine somewhere masquerading as the social security severs (statements.ssa.gov).

Protect yourself
Again, the best thing you can do to protect yourself is to know that the IRS, SSA, banks, etc, never send these emails. Delete them. If you need to visit your bank or an official web site, type in the www.whatever.com address in the addressbar in your browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, etc) yourself.

For further reading, see these articles and pages:
SS spoofed in scam(SC Magazine US)

Protect yourself from phishing (IRS)

Washington Mutual phishing scam (about.com)

If you open up someone’s contact card in AddressBook, click on the “work” or “home” label next to the address. Then choose “Map this Address” in the menu that pops up.

That’s it! It will open up Google Maps with the address pinpointed.

If you use Outlook on a PC, you can pull up a map (msn.com) using these steps (courtesy of Microsoft’s support site):

To display a map for a selected contact’s address:
Click Contacts on either the Outlook Bar or in the folder list.
Click the contact whose address you want to locate.
On the File menu, point to Open, and then click Selected Items.
Under the Address button, click the arrow, and then click the type of address you want to find on a map, for example, Business, Home, or Other.
On the Actions menu, click Display Map of Address.