Timothy's Thoughts

O ur church is doing a new pictorial directory using this service called Instant Church Directory . The service makes pictures and addresses available through a mobile device app. Using your smart phone, or a tablet, you can scroll through the pictures and find the person you’re looking for. But what it doesn’t allow you to do is to access the information from a website. Okay, that’s not exactly true. What they will allow you to do is download a PDF, which most people will be able to use if they have Acrobat Reader installed. Okay, it’s great that they implemented it as an app, but what about people who don’t have one of the supported devices? Have we reached the point where those of us who prefer to use a PC are the dinosaurs of the technology world? Is the PC dead? No, an here’s why. If you do a lot of typing, you’re going to want something more than a phone or a tablet. If you are doing graphics of some kind, you’ll want a larger screen, and maybe two or three. If you are doing proc...

C heck you’re e-mail and you’re likely to find a few spam messages. We’ve come to expect it and when the spam filters let some of it through, most of us hit the delete button and away it goes. Or maybe we don’t read our e-mail at all because most of it is stuff we don’t want to see. Many of us communicate more through Facebook than we do through e-mail. Unfortunately, Facebook has its own problem with spam. Worse, many of us perpetuate it without realizing what we are doing. Let’s take a look at how Facebook spam works. Troll Linking One of the most obvious forms of spam is the work of trolls and can result in click-through profits for the troll. It works like this: first, the troll finds a Facebook page that has several thousand followers. He then adds a comment to the page along the lines of “That’s interesting, but you should check out http://e4htWos.jnk.com.” The people curious enough to follow the link will be taken to a site advertising some product and the person who placed the ...