bruceb news

Keeping your computer up to date with patches has become the most important element of being secure online. New studies show that fully patched systems have significantly more protection against malware spread by poisoned web sites and the other forms of viruses and malware floating around.

The monitoring and updating service that I offer for a few dollars each month is just as important for your security as your antivirus program. If you haven’t signed up yet, give me a call or drop me a note. It takes seconds to install and gives you the peace of mind that Java, Flash, Adobe Acrobat/Reader, and other third party products are up to date all the time, in addition to Windows, Internet Explorer, Office programs, and more. […] continued

Microsoft will deliver five run-of-the-mill security updates for Windows and Office tonight, in the regular monthly Patch Tuesday release. There’s more information about this month’s updates in Microsoft’s security bulletin here.

Close programs and save any work in progress at the end of the day. Your computer will probably restart tonight.

Also on Tuesday, Adobe is releasing updates for all recent versions of Adobe Acrobat and Reader, for Windows and Mac. Reportedly the updates address a number of issues but we won’t know until Wednesday whether they fix the bugs introduced in the Acrobat 9.4.5 update.

The primary issue addressed by the Acrobat update stems from a hacked Dutch certificate authority. […] continued

It is increasingly necessary to send large file attachments by email. It continues to be a bad idea! It clogs up your mailbox and slows down your mail server and generates endless frustration when messages don’t arrive – but none of that matters. Businesses are creating larger and larger files and email is the way business is done, whether I like it from a technical perspective or not.

Microsoft has bowed to the inevitable and permits Office 365 subscribers to send up to 25Mb of file attachments to a single message. As businesses move to more recent versions of Exchange, mailbox size limits are slowly increasing at big and small companies. […] continued

Adobe has created a web-based tool for converting PDFs to Word documents. It’s so inexpensive that you might find a reason to sign up.

Adobe ExportPDF has a single function: visit https://www.acrobat.com/exportpdf and upload a PDF; the web service will convert it into a Word .DOCX file that you can download to your computer, with anywhere from good to very good OCR results. In the best case, you’ll have almost complete fidelity for formatting and page layout. In the worst case – bad scans or pages with handwriting or smudges or any of the usual things that cause OCR errors – you’ll get back a mess, just as if you had done the OCR yourself. […] continued

Lynda.com is a learning and training site with video tutorials to teach software skills. It has courses at all levels, from novice to expert, and it covers a wide variety of programs and subjects with something for almost everyone, from photography hobbyists to business and graphics professionals.

I’m frequently asked where to find help or how to get started with a program. Lynda.com is going to be one of my answers to that question for many programs.

It’s particularly good with deep and complicated business and professional software. There are extensive libraries of videos about notoriously difficult Adobe programs, for example. […] continued

Every time I opened a PDF file in Acrobat, a window would appear to notify me that I was reading an Untagged Document that had to be prepared for reading out loud.

Every time. Every PDF. I’d have to click “Cancel” on this dialog:

“This document is untagged and must be prepared for reading. While the document is being analyzed, your assistive technology will not be able to interact with this application.

“Reading Order: Infer reading order from document (recommended)

“Reading Mode Options: Read the currently visible pages only.”

That’s a sweet, generous offer by Acrobat but, hey, call me ungrateful – I actually did not want each PDF read out loud to me. […] continued

Previously:
The Problem Of Saving Email

Inspired by Small City Law Firm Tech
Saving Email – It’s Just the Right Thing To Do (Outlook – All Versions)
Simply the Best, Better than All the Rest – Saving Email in an Acrobat Pro Package

Email can be gathered on an ongoing basis into a single PDF file for each case. If a law firm or business puts together a system to save email regularly and convinces everyone to use it, the result is an up to date collection of all the communications relating to a case or project, gathered into a single file that is searchable and sortable, stored with the other related documents and scans for that case. […] continued

Inspired by Small City Law Firm Tech
Saving Email – It’s Just the Right Thing To Do (Outlook – All Versions)
Simply the Best, Better than All the Rest – Saving Email in an Acrobat Pro Package

There is no easy way to gather all of the emails related to a case from all the mailboxes in a small law firm. I have studied this problem endlessly and there is no magic answer. I’m going to suggest one very appealing possibility, though, courtesy of the lovely Vivian Manning, who gave me an “Ah hah!” moment last week.

It is the holy grail for law offices, or small businesses of any kind: gathering all the information about a case or project in a single folder on the server, all the documents and scanned mail and email messages, so anyone can come up to speed on all documents and communication in a single place. […] continued

Did your computer start last night? Mine did! Boy, was I surprised! Ha ha!

No, seriously, I was surprised. And sometimes I don’t like surprises.

Microsoft automatically installs updates on the second Tuesday of each month. It occasionally pushes out more patches two weeks later, as it did this month. I don’t always have to know when my computer will restart on a Tuesday night and I don’t always post something to warn you. It’s part of the game.

I read pretty widely, though, and I had no idea these were coming last night. Usually I see mentions of upcoming patches in the technical and support blogs but this one arrived with no buzz. […] continued

Almost everyone has to do business with Adobe at some point. Businesses and law firms rely on Acrobat to scan documents and manage the ubiquitous PDF file format. Adobe products continue to be the basic tools for artists, photographers, web designers, and graphics professionals.

It’s a frustrating company.

• Malware authors have been able to take advantage of security problems in Acrobat and Adobe Reader and create evil PDF files to distribute malware.
• Adobe software is expensive. Graphics professionals can pay more for a license for Adobe Creative Suite than they pay for their computer.
• The process for buying Adobe software has been difficult – confusing licenses purchased from a poorly designed web site.

[…] continued