On the first weekend in September I attended BarCampLondon, a tech community get together. To attend you need to give a presentation about, well anything, but best go for something that everyone else will be interested in.

I decided to (or should that be persuaded to) get things rolling by giving my presentation in the first slot, and opted to talk about the high tech treasure hunt game of Geocaching. Below are the links I promised to publish in the presentation.

In May 2000 the United States turned off the selective availability of the global positioning system that intern allowed the system to be fully used by the public. Someone had the great idea of hiding a stash and publishing it’s coordinates online for someone else to find, and find it they did. More about the history of Geocaching is available on the geocaching.com website owned by Groundspeak.

Although there are several cache listing sites where the location of these “Caches” are listed the most popular is geocaching.com, and in the UK we have a great resource at geocacheuk.com that collates statistics from geocaching.com and allows more advanced searches.

The UK does have a body that is formed by UK Geocachers to help UK Geocachers called the Geocaching Association of Great Britain.

Another site that I recommend having a look at is trigpointinguk.com that conatins a list of all the concrete trigpoints used by ordnance sevey. Because they rely on line of sight for navigation they are normally located in a place that comes with a stunning view and are often well worth a visit.

It is becoming more common for people to ask me what they need to download to protect there machine from viruses and spyware. The following is generic advice for most Windows users trying to protect there PC for free.

First let’s protect ourselves against viruses. I will now let you in to a secret, I would like to say that I am fully protected but I don’t run antivirus software on my development and media machines for technical reasons. Despite this I do recommend that you install a virus scanner on your machine under most circumstances.

I advice you not to use Norton Antivirus that is often preinstalled on new PCs and available through Google Pack. It is not a bad virus scanner, it has had many great reviews, it may well run well on higher spec machines, but it has significantly slowed down all the machines I have run it on.

Many say you get what you pay for when it comes to virus scanners, but while acknowledging the argument I believe a free scanner will be more than adequate for generic use. The best known free virus scanner is Grisoft’s AVG. This is free for personal use, works well and does not noticeably slow the machine.

A newcomer to the free antivirus offerings is Active Virus Shield. This is interesting as it has been created by Kaspersky Labs and is begin supplied by AOL, although you do not have to be an AOL user. I am currently evaluating Active Virus Shield and not going to compare these two virus scanners, but I will note that Active Virus Shield can be used legally on some networked machines that AVG can not.

Update: Active Virus Shield is no longer available for free from AOL but has been replaced with the equivalent McAfee Security Centre.

If you don’t have a virus scanner installed and want to quickly scan your computer I suggest checking out Trend Housecall. Although not a complete solution this will allow you to do a system scan from your browser.

Next you should consider using some antispyware software as having antivirus software running will not protect you against most spyware. I don’t claim to be up to date with all offerings, but I personally use both Spybot Search & Destroy 1.4 and SpywareBlaster 3.5 to both search for spyware and protect against it invading my machine.

Finally you should consider a software firewall. Windows XP SP2 has a firewall built in, but this is very basic and I have found spyware that has bypassed it. The free offerings available are the basic Zone Alarm and the more advanced Kerio (free version activated after 30 day trial of full version). I use Kerio but the more basic Zone Alarm may be a better option if you want to keep things simple.

Update: I have also been playing with the free Comodo Personal Firewall and it is fully featured and works well.

Please remember that all this software will not completely protect you from everything and not opening unexpected emails or running untrusted software is recommended.

As unbelievable as it may sound Microsoft have released Windows Live Writer, a blog authoring tool that works not only with MSN Spaces (Microsoft’s bogging service from MSN) but with may others including Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress and more.

This is my fist post using it, and although I am not wondering how I survived without it, I am finding it intuitive and it is not annoying me. If you want to have a play then  a beta version can be downloaded from the Windows Live Writer blog.

In a previous blog posting I stated that “I will speculate that we may see an 06 code in years to come that is like an 01 or 02 but non geographic and that so called lo-call 0845 numbers (intended to be charged at local rate) will cost the same or more than the national rate numbers.

Well I got the number wrong, but 03 numbers are on the way according to an Ofcom press release.

Every week I am sent trade publications and marketing mailshots about gadgets and gizmos. Most are juts not exciting, but this portable HDD enclosure surprisingly is.

So why an I interested in an external hard drive? Because it is so much more than an external hard drive, it is a full media center. You can plug the device directly in to you TV and HiFi and play back all the files stored on the drive. The device plays back all audio and file formats that I use regularly (excluding Quick-time and Real-Audio/Video) using the front panel or the remote control. A full list of supported file formats and interfaces are listed on the oficial web site.

The reason I am interested in this device is that it will allow me to load the device up with video podcasts that have been downloaded on the unmetered broadband at the office and play them back on the TV, instead of using the rather limited USB flash drive and a laptop.

The device is available for less than £150 excluding PlayEngine. Not that I have ordered PlayEngine, but they did pay for the advertisement so it’s only fare I give them a mention. :-)

I came across this little tool a while ago and have found it most useful in figuring out when a site is legitimate and worth a visit when googling. It also works when yahooing and msning. :-)

This simple but effective software is installed as a plug-in with either FireFox and now IE. When installed you get a small coloured icons on search results from Google, Yahoo or MSN. The colour identifies when a site has been checked and thought to be legitimate, when a site has not been checked or when a site is either probably not, or definitely not trustworthy.

Site Adviser also places an identifier on the task bar to identify the trustworthiness of the site that you are currently viewing and can identify if the site spams users who register. The information is collected by reports form the user base, checked made by volunteers, and a few automated test.

The software can be downloaded from the Site Advisor web site that can also be reached from the official McAfee web site.

Rumors that Orange (now including Wanadoo, formally Freeserve) will join the free broadband battle have proved to be true but it is not as exciting as I was hoping. The £17.99 package offer is only free if you have a £30 per month mobile contract and the minimum term of the contract is also appears to be 18 months.

This week I needed to download a Linux distribution and decided to use BitTorrent to download it. Not having used BitTorrent before I decided to download a few clients to try and was presently suspired with the usability, stability and efficiency of µTorrent.

It is not often I find myself using a piece of software and instead of thinking how it “should” work I found myself thinking “this is good”. The interface at first appears very simple, that is good, but when you go routing around you will find many extra features.

The feature I found very clever and useful was the ability to prioritise the download of select files in a torrent and skip others so you can read the installation notes while the rest of the download completes. The ability to restrict bandwidth in the day is a great feature for me, and the ability to monitor ever little aspect of the transfer in not practically useful but very interesting. The full list of features is immense and if there is a BitTorrent feature it is most likely supported or under development.

To show just how efficient the software is it will allegedly run on a 486 running Windows 95 and less than 16 meg of RAM. Unlike most BitTorrent clients it is not using the original Python basted engine but uses it’s own native engine that dramatically improves performance and efficiency.

The software is not open source and is Windows only so is not the total solution for everybody. It also has some leaching protection that is not appropriate for the evolving UK ADSL market and resulting in my dramatically restricting my downloads in the day so not to swamp the companies upstream Internet.

You can find out more abut µTorrent and download the free software from http://www.utorrent.com/.

After listening to an interview on the Inside the Net podcast (number 21) I had a look at and registered with ClaimID.com .

This is the first time I have managed to resister the user ID of “alistair” that I always used in the early days on the Internet when it was available. Nowadays I tend to use “alistair_uk” but now and then someone else uses this ID as well. A prime example is alistair_uk on eBay is not me.

Strangely this is just the purpose of ClaimID.com, to allow you to specify what is to do with you and what is not. Once registered you can add web links that are related to you and flag up those who are about you but written by someone else, about someone else, or about you but just wrong.

I get the impression that the creators hope search engines will use the information when building search results but currently you can link back from your own websites and profiles.

Features I would like to see added is the facility to validate various IDs (IM, Skype and that kind of thing) as well as email addresses in a way that will confirm as apposed to just list. A way of building up a “web of trust” to stop fake entries being built would also be a useful if not totally foolproof feature.

So check out my entries at http://claimid.com/alistair and sign up yourself at http://claimid.com, but remember my golden rule “It’s a small world” and the Internet is open to all.