Is PC World reading the Pulpit?

PC World has put up an article on 101 freebies. You'll see they've recommended many of the same programs I have, and a few new ones I'll have to try out.

Another reason not to use debit cards

Today's news brings us another example of why you shouldn't use a debit card to make purchases. Read this story, and imagine how different it would have been if the guy had used a credit card. Instead of worrying about making his mortgage payment, Mr Beane would have been disputing an obviously ridiculous charge. Stop giving strangers the keys to your bank account.

Oh, and kudos to Bank of America for putting a 3-day hold on the money when it was returned. Nothing says Higher Standards more than that.

More Freeware For the Masses

To follow up on my freeware security suite post, I'd like to point you towards some excellent, regular use freeware you might want to take a look at. These are all programs I use on a regular basis, and frankly, find indispensable. At the time of this posting, all of the software below was free, and these are in no particular order.

1. The Gimp - The poor-man's Photoshop - Awesome in it's capabilities. Not quite on par with Photoshop (yet) but probably more than you'll ever need.
2. AM-DeadLink - Checks your bookmarks, tells you which ones no longer work, which one's have moved and (if you want it to) downloads those nifty favicons for your browser.
3. HNSKY Hallo Northern Sky - Planetarium software. Very cool if you have any interest in astronomy.
4. Google Earth - Mapping and satellite images all in one.
   
5. Exact Audio Copy - Audio grabber (i.e. "ripper") for CD's.
   
6. Visual CD - Ever wonder which one of the 10,000 CDs/floppies you have contains that file is you're looking for? Wonder no more. With Visual CD you catalog your CDs/Floppies/removable media so that you can search the contents of all of them, right from your desktop.
7. Firefox - You haven't been convinced yet? 10X better than Explorer, and that's not even counting the endless free "add-ons" that have been developed for it.
   
8. Winamp - The de facto mp3/media player. The Shoutcast streaming music (Think: thousands of commerical free Internet radio stations) is more than worth the price of admission (Yes...free).
9. CD Burner XP Pro - Your new computer didn't come with any CD/DVD burning software? Try this out. Will even create/burn ISO images, rip and burn music cds.
10. Moffsoft FreeCalc - Makes the Windows calculator (Calc) look like the anemic, poorly designed calculator that it is. Even has a virtual paper history tape!
11. Process Explorer - Shows you what's running on your PC now, and what's chewing up all your system resources. Useful in determining if you have spyware/adware running on your system as well.
12. ZipGenius - An compression/decompression utility that supports 99% of the files you're likely to encounter.
13. OpenOffice - Wow. That about sums this one up. If you can't afford Microsoft Office, then you must have this office suite. Even if you can, you might want this one as well. It will open Word, Excel and Powerpoint files...but you can also create them as well. At a price of free, this is nothing short of amazing. The database piece still needs work, so if you need to create an Access database, you're going to have to buy Microsoft's product.
14. CutePDF Writer - A plug in that will allow you to "print" to a virutal PDF printer, so you can e-mail or archive documents you would have printed in the past. If you don't have a printer (or want to create Acrobat PDFs), this is a must. You'll also need to install Ghostscript as well (if you don't already have it...and you probably don't) for it to work properly.
15. IrfanView - The best image viewer/editor available. Oh, and it's free.
    

Debit Cards: Good for Banks, Bad for You

Here's something to think about the next time you use your debit card. Did you need to use your PIN? Probably not. More and more people are using debit cards these days. They usually have a Visa or MasterCard logo on them. They look like credit cards, but they're not. Debit cards are a direct, and immediate link to your money. It used to be that the banks issued debit cards that were used just like an ATM card. Every time you used it, you would give your PIN number, which was your protection. A recent security breach at Citibank has let thousands of PIN numbers fall into some hacker's hands. But why is this even a big deal? Now days, you can choose to run your debit card through as "credit" (so-called "off-line debit transactions"). This allows the card to be accepted in more places and eliminates the expensive keypads, but guess what? It leaves the key to your money in the hands of anyone who has your debit card!

The biggest difference between a credit card and a debit card is that there is no one between a crook and your money with the debit card. With a credit card, VISA or MasterCard pay out the money, then in turn ask for you to pay it back. If there's a disputed charge, you have time and a pre-defined path to get it removed from your credit card. With the debit card, you may find that all of your money is gone before you realize there's a problem. Many debit cards say you're not liable (except for the first $50, aww gee...thanks) if you report your card stolen/lost immediately. That's great. Except it might take them a month or more to get the money back in your account. That sounds like a very fun month, doesn't it?

The bottom line is this, Debit cards are good for banks because they're cheaper to process than paper checks. They're bad for you because you have much less protection than a credit card. Maybe you should stop carrying a debit card and start using a credit card (oh..and pay it off too).

What the latest coffee study REALLY says: Coffee is still good for you

In spite of the fact that the media is really trying to sir up some sort of controversy regarding the latest coffee study, you should know you have nothing to worry about. The latest study shows that the bodies of 1/2 of the 2,014 people in the study (all of whom have already had a heart attack), are slow at getting rid of caffeine and that might have had something to do with their heart attack.

The processing of caffeine is done in the body by an enzyme, called cytochrome. Lets look at what the study found:

• Carriers of the 'slow' form of the gene (cytochrome) who drank two to three cups of coffee a day had a 36% increased risk of heart attack, compared to those who drank less than one cup a day.
  

You might want to ask yourself why they didn't compare the risk of slow processors vs. normal processors when they drank the same amount of coffee. They did, but there was a reduced risk of heart attack for everyone...and that sort of thing doesn't make good headlines.

This comparison is like saying "Slow caffeine processors who were forced to run 2-3 miles had a 36% higher risk of heart attack than normal caffeine processors who were forced to run less than one mile." What can we get from that? Not much. This explains why the head researcher said, " It appears that one cup a day is not associated with any harm, regardless of your genetic make-up." Well stated, but actually, there's more to it than that.

Here are the statistics:

Coffee consumption (cups)
Group	Less than 1	1	2 to 3	4 or more
Slow Gene Carriers	1	0.99	1.36	1.64
Fast Gene Carriers	1	0.75	0.78	0.99

Now, I'm no statistician, but hey!, it looks to me like the fast carriers had a decreased risk of heart attack compared to the control group up to and including 4 or more cups of coffee! And the slow carriers also benefited (minimally) from the first cup of coffee. Hmmm... Yet here are the (mostly sensationalistic) headlines from the news:

Coffee-Gene Interaction Raises Heart Attack Risk - CNN

Study: Coffee raises, lowers heart attack risk - News 8 Austin, TX

Coffee may brew heart attacks - Newsday, NY

Enjoy that next cup of coffee: it may be your last - Times Online, UK

Drinking regular coffee may be linked to heart attack, study says - Toledo Blade, OH - 3 hours ago

Coffee hazard linked to genes - Toronto Star, Canada

The Austin News 8 article, was the first one I found that mentioned the lower risk:

"Surprisingly, what we found was that in individuals under 50 years of age who were fast metabolizers, had the fast version of this gene, consumption of as little as one to three cups a day was associated with a lower risk of heart disease ," El-Sohemy said."

According to Google news, of the 287 news articles about this study, only 27 (9.40% - Hey, now there's math I can do! ) mentioned the "lower risk".