I was pretty impressed when I checked my email, and found this email scam from Kuwait. Unlike some of the other scams that I have received, instead of helping some corrupt official embezzle money out of the country, the premise here is that I will help give $25 Million away to charity. I mean, who doesn’t want to give someone else’s money away to charity?

Of course, to compensate me for my time time and effort, I would get to keep a measly 20% of the $25 million. Hardly seems worth the effort.

Seriously, from my understanding, Kuwait isn’t a poor country, but this reminds me of something I was thinking recently. With the internet everywhere, and the $100 laptop Project, not to mention other initiatives to put technology in the hands of under developed countries, will we start seeing many more of these types of email scams? I’ll be curious to see what happens.

Without further ado, here is the email:

************

Warning, the following is a scam email, reply to addresses have been removed to protect the gullible. If you receive an email like this, don’t reply to it.

************

Greetings,

My name is Mrs. Aisha Qadir, widow to late Mr. Ahmed Qadir, former owner of Petroleum and Gas Company, here in Kuwait, I am 68years old, Suffering from long time cancer of the breast, From all indications my condition is really Deteriorating, and it’s quite obvious that I won’t live more than 3 months according to my doctors, this is because the cancer stage has gotten to a very bad stage, I don’t want your pity, but i need your trust.

My late husband died early last year from heart attack, and during theperiod of our marriage we Couldn’t produce any child, my late husband was very wealthy, and after his death, I inherited all his business and wealth, The doctor has advised me that I will not live for more than 3 months, so I have now decided to spread all my wealth, to contribute mainly to the development of charity in Africa, America, Asia and Europe, am sorry if you are embarrassed by my mail, i found your e-mail address in the web directory, and i have decided to contact you, but if for any reason you find this mail offensive, you can ignore it and please accept my apology.

Before my late husband died he was a major oil tycoon, in Kuwait anddeposited the sum of 25million dollars (Twenty Five million dollars) in a company in Europe some years ago, thats all i have left now, I need you to collect this funds and distribute it yourself to charity, so that when i die my soul can rest in peace, the funds will be entirely in hands and management, i hope God gives you the wisdom to touch very many lives, that is my main concern.

20% of this money will be for your time and effort, while 80% goes to charity.

God bless you.

Mrs. Aisha Qadir.

Posted in Distractions, Scams 4 Comments »

Ever have one of those programs that just won’t uninstall cleanly? I especially hate it when a program leaves a bunch of services that still manage to start, and lock files in their directory.

I ran across a nifty command to help remove at least the service portion of those programs, so that you can then remove the files in those folders. In a command prompt just type:

“SC delete %servicename%”

The tricky part to this is that the service name isn’t necessarily what appears in the services applet.

If you open the service that you want to delete, the top of the general tab has “Service name:” on top. That is the service name that you should use.

If we were removing the “Google Updater Service” in the picture below. We would use the name “gusvc”. Click on the picture for the full sized version.

Posted in Command Prompt, Windows 3 Comments »

If you’re in the habit of downloading large files, like ISO images, and you happen to be a Windows User, you may want to take a look at WinWGet.

Use your Bandwidth later

Personally, when I’m surfing the web, writing posts, or playing some First Person Shooter, I want all the bandwidth I can muster. So I try to schedule my downloads for when I’m sleeping. This is why I first decided to look at WinWGet.

Don’t use up all of your Bandwidth

Another reason that I like WinWGet is that you can limit the rate at which you are downloading. This is pretty handy if you are downloading a large file from a web site, and you want to still be able to use your Internet connection.

Or, if you are downloading a large file from a big web site, and you don’t want to use up all of your company’s Internet connection.

Resume Broken Downloads

One other benefit to downloading large files with WinWGet is that if the download stops for some reason, and the server supports it, you don’t have to start from scratch. If you ever try to download a 5G file from a flaky server, you’ll thank me for this tip.

What is WinWGet

WGet is a powerful command line utility in Unix / Linux, which among other things, allows you to download files from the Internet in the command prompt or console window. Luckily, for the Windows users, WinWGet is a very powerful GUI utility and WGet port for Windows.

Download and Install

If you go to the Cybershade.us homepage for WinWGet, you can find the download page.

I don’t usually advise it, but in this case, I would get the .20 beta version, which is a single download you can get here. I haven’t had any problems with this beta, and it is a heck of a lot easier to do it this way.

After saving the installer to disk, and then running it, the install is pretty straightforward. Click on Next 7 times (feel free to change any defaults to whatever your heard desires), and then install and finally “finish”.

After installation, you’re ready to start creating your first download jobs.

Posted in Internet, Open Source, Utilities, Wget, Windows No Comments »

If you are like me, pretty things are nice to look at, but I quickly get tired of visual effects if they don’t do anything for the operation of the computer. That is about how I felt about Aero Glass. It’s nice to look at, but I’m sure it eats up valuable system resources.

If you aren’t like me, and somehow Aero Glass was turned off on your computer, then you’ll want to scroll down some, so you can see how to turn it on.

Your first step, wether you want to turn it on or off, is to get to “Windows Color and Appearance”.

Getting to Windows Color and Appearance Settings

Right Click on a blank space on the desktop, and choose personalize:

The personalization Menu should now appear. Choose “Windows Color and Appearance”

Turning Aero Glass off / Disabling Aero Glass

If you already have Aero on, then you will see the window pictured below (click on it for a larger version). If you have Aero glass turned off, then scroll down to the “Turning Aero Glass Off / Enabling Aero Glass”

Click on “Open classic appearance properties for more color options”

You should see the window pictured below:

Basically, choosing anything besides “Windows Aero” in the color scheme section will turn off Aero Glass. Windows Vista basic looks pretty close, just without the transparencies.

Clicking apply will let you see the change without closing the window. When you are happy with the appearance, click on “OK”.

Turning Aero Glass Off / Enabling Aero Glass

If you followed the instructions above, in Getting to “Windows Color and Appearance Settings”, then you should see the screen below.

All you have to do is click on “Windows Aero”, and then click on Apply. If you are happy with the way things look, then click on “OK”. That’s all there is to it.

Posted in Aero Glass, How To, Vista, Windows 1 Comment »

Well, we knew it was coming. Funny though, I thought it would be released in the morning, rather than in the evening. So get your databases backed up, and check your plug in compatibility, because WordPress 2.3 is here!

In the announcement, some of the features listed are:

- Native Tagging support

- Update Notification – This will tell you when a new version is available, and when one of your plug-ins have a update available.

- Canonical URLs – This sounds like it is really going to be great, re-directs broken or truncated URLs to the correct URL anyway. I’m curious to see this one in action.

- Pending Review feature – so multi-blog authors can put something up for review by an editor, rather than saving it as a draft.

- Better WYSIWYG functionality – I’ll have to see this one for myself. I’ve never liked the way the GUI editor works.

There are even more features that I didn’t mention. Read the announcement for yourself.

I’m not going to jump on board and upgrade tonight, but hopefully it will be this week.

Posted in Updates, WordPress 6 Comments »