Spam – no, not the luncheon meat of dubious origin and even more dubious taste, SPAM of the email variety.

We’ve all experienced it to some extent – whether someone trying to see us Viagra, “DHL” or “FedEx” wanting our bank details to collect some mysterious parcel or our friend the Nigerian Prince wanting help only we can provide in moving millions of out of the country. And, when you get used to what these look like the majority are of such obvious fakery as to be laughable.

Recently I have noticed some slipping through my rather excellent SPAM filter, SpamSieve on OS X, and I thought I’d bring some of these to your attention, and suggest some “tricks” for testing their validity.

1. Make your dong long – the latest Viagra spam.

Usually these are pretty easy to filter via keywords in the email – anything containing VIAGRA, PENIS or several ...

How do you pick your ISP?

Is it price? Bundled offerings? Technical capability? Service? Are you loyal to an ISP or would you switch at the first opportunity?

For years, I was with Ozemail for dialup Internet. I jumped ship to Telstra as soon as ADSL was available - because they were the only choice at first. And I stayed with them for some time - the service was decent, the prices were exorbitant, but I had very little downtime.

Then money started to get a little tight. I looked around for alternatives - needing ADSL, but not wanting to pay Telstra's premium. By then, the wholesale market was well established. It didn't take much research to find Internode as easily the most recommended ISP I could find. I certainly could find cheaper ISP's, but Internode would save me quite a lot over the Telstra offering; and, of course, I wanted VOIP. I'd tried the engin offering but found it .. lacking.

Internode is one of these funny companies. They inspire a lot of passion in their ( ...

Yes, Yes, I know, I work for ASI now. But this review is my opinion, not that of my employer.

But one of the reasons I joined AUTechHeads was for the love of technology, and this device just fits the bill for me for a technology option. I won't mention the price, but it isn't expensive for what it is.

Who can remember the old Tablet PCs, not the latest units like the iPad, the androids and every single incarnation that every manufacturer seems to be releasing, but the old notebooks with a swivel screen and a full keyboard?

Imagine a device like that, only in a netbook form factor. The nimu NL2a is a lightweight netbook, coming in at 1.74 kg with battery, but that isn't the best bit. It is a netbook and a pen based tablet. it is in a rubberised casing, has an accelerometer so that it detects where the screen is positioned, netbook or tablet, and the hard drive parks if it is dropped.

The device is neat, clean lined and, for what it is, surprisingly carrying a fair amount of ...

One of the great things that we can do with AuTechHeads is to support important and worthwhile charities. As a focus point for Australian technical professionals, we can make the community involvement and responsibilities more visible and organised, and do good while we're at it.

We previously announced our involvement in the World's Greatest Shave for 2011, but the timing of the announcement wasn't terrific given the Queensland floods and subsequent tropical cyclone! We essentially laid aside our promotion of World's Greatest Shave for a while, and devoted site space to promotion of the Queensland Premier's Flood Relief fund, and the Queensland IT Relief program. Both were also worthy causes, with more immediacy.

Now though, with the 10th - 12th March fast approaching, we've been working to kickstart promotion of our involvement in World's Greatest Shave again. We're hoping to raise at least $5,000 - and we have a long way to go. Last year I raised $1,200 myself, but it takes a lot of effo ...

The last post in this series looked at the DR scope, examining cloud and media recovery for individual and small business backups. These would most likely be a ‘cold’ recovery, where hardware and software is purchased to replace missing or damaged equipment. It’s unlikely that the individual and small business budget will stretch to having spares on hand, for the most part.

The larger the business, though, the more likely that the Maximum Tolerable Outage (MTO) will shrink. A small business may be able to “get by” without its systems for a week or more, but a medium or large enterprise could quickly be dead in the water. New considerations come into play, such as large and automated payroll runs that are difficult to duplicate manually. And, of course, the business is more likely to have short response targets for customer service – meaning that key business systems need to stay available.

Any good DR solution seeks to meet and (preferable) bett ...

2 weeks ago, my employer realised that the best way to ensure the survival of the company was to shed staff. Not my ideal solution, considering that, as I was last in, I was one of the ones out. I don't know how they came to the decision, not do I want to, it was pretty hard for them to make - I have done it in the past.

So I started the campaign to get a new job. I scattergun replied to ads, and got quite a few rejections, the job has closed, you are overqualified, etc, etc. I have had a few interviews, and maybe one will drop. Anyway, one of the rejections blew me away. Apparently, I don't have enough experience in the canberra market, selling to businesses and govt. interesting.

I checked my resume, for a clue that may have brought this on. first job was in 1992, at an IT provider  (Communications wasn't sold by resellers back then) so, lets see... that means I have been selling to government and corporate in the Canberra market, to technical staff and CEOs for the past 19 years. < ...