Top Tips

5 tips for online shopping from work

Top Tips

Christmas is getting closer (yay!) and most of us work and most of us like to shop. Check out these 5 top tips for staying safe when shopping on line in the holiday season.

1) Use your desktop PC, not your mobile device, to shop, because your desktop browser is likely to be more secure.
2) Protect sensitive information, like credit card numbers, by password-protecting both your mobile device and its memory card.
3) Make sure you update your anti-virus and anti-malware programs continually.
4) Treat social networking sites with the same caution as other web sites-social sites are a growing target for fraudsters and virus writers.
5) Be cautious of special offers. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Fake online offers and coupons may lead to harmful sites, so be suspicious.

Top Tip: @spam dodgey Twitter accounts

How annoying is it when you get a follower on Twitter and you check out their page and they are a dodgey spammer. Top Tip: next time you suspect a Twitter user is a spammer, tweet their handle to @spam - Twitter’s spam watcher. It checks out the account and removes it if is just another spammer.

Girl Geek Top Tip: inserting an image into your signature

A small .gif or .jpg above or beside your signature can look quite professional when you’re sending out emails (a large one, however, just looks like you’re a saddo/narcissist).

Different e-mail clients make inserting an image easy, difficult, or nigh impossible. Here are some top tips for the various Microsoft clients, as well as for Google Mail. Woop Woop even Gmail.

Outlook 2007


This is the easiest one. Just select Tools, Options, Mail Format, and then click the Signatures button. The resulting dialog box has an editor into which you can easily insert an image by clicking the picture icon and selecting the image you want. Easy Peasy.

Outlook 2003


Click the New button to create a new message. In that message, design your signature, inserting the image and typing the text. Once the signature looks right, press Ctrl-A to select it, and then Ctrl-C to copy it to the Clipboard. Close the message window without saving it.

Select Tools, Options. Click the Mail Format tab, the Signatures button, and then the New button. Name your signature, select Start with a blank signature, and click Next. In the resulting text box, press Ctrl -V to insert the signature. Save the god darn thing. More time consuming than 2007 version.

Gmail


Oh no, not easy to do it with this one. The Gmail’s editor or its signature tool do not support inserted graphics. Neither does the free Firefox add-in Signature. Booooo.

The solution is easy to set up, but honestly is a bit of a pain in the bum bum to use. Create the signature as a Google Docs document, with both the image and text. When you want to insert it into e-mail, open the document, copy and paste its contents into your message. Oh that’s very streamline Google - not!

PS…

There are a  few greasemonkey scripts intended to add  HTML signatures to Gmail messages.   

Website Wednesday: www.toptipsforgirls.com

This a really useful site which has real life advice for all you girls out there covering a whole variery of topics.

It’s a practical, speedy resource, all tips are short and to the point, and there is no need to plough through interminable, irrelevant chat. Tips are rated by users, so the best are soon evident. Tips can be found either by a keyword search or by browsing by particular categories.

Check out www.toptipsforgirls.com to have all your questions answered!

Girl Geek Top Tip: Don’t reply to unsolicited email aka SPAM

By responding to spam email you only confirm that your email address is active - no no no not good!

Another thing you shouldn’t do is click the “remove me” link in the message. Links in email can point to an IP address other than the one you think it references.

The best thing you can do is delete the message. Many free email service providers will allow you to easily report it as spam if you received it through MSN hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL or GMail.