The screen in this offer has a display size of 17″ which is comparable to a 19″ conventional CRT monitor (*1). So what are the benefits of swapping your current screen for a modern TFT flat-screen?

1. Reduce your electricity usage. In a set of a computer system and a 19″ CRT monitor, the monitor alone can be good for half the total consumption. A 19″ CRT monitor consumes in between 80 to 120 watts, a comparable 17″ TFT flat-screen only uses 20W to 60 watts, reducing consumption by more then half! This results in savings on your electricity bill (*2) and an increase of the running time of your UPS or inverter in case of power failures. (read more in this interesting article)
2. Reduce the office temperature. Reduced use of electricity means a reduced generation of heat, quite important in our Tanzanian climate. This creates a better working atmosphere and reduces your A/C needs.
3. Increased desk-space. A 17″ TFT flat-screen is up to 80% smaller then a 19″ CRT monitor, giving you more desk-space and improving the ergonomics of the work place by putting more distance between the eyes and the screen.
4. Longer life-span. A typical TFT screen has a life-span of 50,000 hours, as opposed to only 35,000 for conventional CRT screens.

So why wait? With all these benefits, and a professional look for your office, you’ll be ready for the coming 10 years! Please note that we also stock very competitively priced complete refurbished systems from HP and Dell, and a wide range of new TFT flat-screens, from 17″ to 21″.

Notes:

*1: When the size of a conventional, or ‘CRT’ monitor is specified as 17″ this does not reflect the true viewing surface since the sides of the glass display are hidden behind the plastic monitor cover. For TFT flat-screens however, the specified size is the true area available to the user. As a rule of thumb, a 15″ TFT flat-screen compares to a 17″ CRT monitor, and a 17″ TFT flat-screen to a 19″ CRT monitor.

*2: Each 19″ CRT monitor will cost you, at current rates, between 17,000 and 21,000 shillings on electricity per year, as opposed to the 4,000 to 11,000 shillings of a TFT display.

With the dawn of Open Source software in East-Africa, thanks to the growing communities involved, translation has over the past few years taken a good step forward. Whereas Microsoft had been dragging its heels for years, soon after fully Kiswahili versions of OpenOffice.org and FireFox Web-browser became available (see below) Microsoft announced a Kiswahili Office. Though the latter was costly, cumbersome and badly translated, and as such failed. So what is available today?

An overview of what is available free of charge:

• Jambo OpenOffice – The Kiswahili version of the OpenOffice suite of applications.
• klnX -The Open Kiswahili Localization Project from the University of DSM (with, amongst others, the Swahili Firefox Web-browser and Swahili SpellChecker)
• Microsoft Office Kiswahili Dictionary Language Interface Pack for registered versions of Office 2003

Kiswahili resources on the web:

• The Kamusi Project – The Internet Living Swahili Dictionary (their Software page).
• Google’s live translation of words, sentences or entire pages:  Kiswahili > English &  English > Kiswahili
• Ungefanyaje? A kiswahili computer game made by the UN to stop the spread of HIV (BBC News)
• Surfing in Kiswahili (article on BBC News)
• Bongo Radio – Swahili Internet Radio
• Swahili Centre – Sharing Swahili Culture & Experiences

News on Kiswahili Computing:

• Follow Kamusi on Twitter, the latest news on Swahili Software and Sites

Gone forever? It might be. But in case the thief does not immediately formats the hard-disk but instead uses the laptop or PC anywhere it’s connected to the internet, there’s a number of services that actually track and locate your stolen equipment, using IP addresses and more. There’s LocateMyLaptop, LocateLaptop, and so on (read the WikiPedia article on this). Trouble with all these, is that they are subscription (and European/US) based.

For some time though, there’s been a free alternative; giving you all the functionality of the above minus the dedicated detective and automatic notification of the police. Living in Tanzania though, these services are not available to us anyway, so why not try ‘Prey’, the free, Open Source application available to Windows, Mac and Linux users that installs once and then runs quietly in the background, until it’s needed.

The Prey website

If that day arrives, your laptop or desktop computer has gone missing, all you have to do is enter your Prey Control Panel and set it’s status to ‘Missing’. From then on, every time the PC or laptop has an active internet connection (and Prey will actively search for open WiFi connections so no user interaction is needed), it’ll gather evidence which will be available to you, most importantly:

• The computers IP address, leading you to the ISP and possible internet cafe in question
• If your computer has a web-cam built in, you’ll be able to actually see the thief!

The prey control panel, where you can mark your equipment as missing

All of this info, and more, available to you from your control panel, or sent to you by email. Armed with the (approximate) location of your pc and hopefully a nice clear mugshot (picture) of the thief, off to the polici!

NOTE: Almost left out the other free, Open Source solution, doing roughly the same as Prey but just a tad less polished: Adeona…

A legitimate looking email arrives from one of your contacts, a potential client, paypal, facebook, twitter or even from your own email server (see below). Something is wrong with your account and they need you to login and verify your password. Click here. Or one of a thousand other reasons why you would want to follow the link they provide.

This link is false. As is this one: http://www.client-x.com/cpanel

Hover over it with your mouse and see it links to an entirely different place on the internet. There, you’ll be greeted by your familiair (but fake) logon screen where you enter, or verify your name and password . These are now, of-course, in someone’s database, along with your IP address and possibly email address. The site might then send on your credentials to the real site and log you on so you will never even know the difference.

Or, you might not even fill in anything but an applet, or script, hidden on the page you were sent to has installed a virus, trojan or Adware on your PC. The possibilities are endless, take for example this example I was asked about this morning by client X.

Subject: your mailbox has been deactivated
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:52:46 +0100
From: notifications@client-x.com
To:

We are contacting you in regards to an unusual activity that was
identified in your mailbox. As a result, your mailbox has been
deactivated. To restore your mailbox, you are required to extract
and run the attached mailbox utility.

Best regards, client-x.com technical support.

Now luck has it, we are actually technical support for client X and we sure had not sent the email. When the client wanted to forward the email to us, their anti-virus solution gave a first indication of trouble, the attached ‘utility’ contained a virus.

So how can you know what emails to trust? It is impossible to be 100% sure. There are, however, a number of red flags and things you can do yourself.

Red Flags & What to Do

1. Read the email closely. Does it make sense? Why would a system that you own ‘lock you out’?
2. Look closely at the ‘from’, and possibly the ‘reply to’ addresses. On close inspection, are they real? In the above case, the notifications@client-x.com address does not even exist.
3. Is there a link to click? Don’t. First hover over it and see where it will take you. Is this the same location as it looks to be? You can copy and paste the link into word or notepad if you cannot see it on hovering over. Is it really a link at facebook.com ? Or if you look better, does it actually goto facebook.com.23789myserver.ru ? If the link looks legitimate, BEFORE you fill in any personal information, check the URL or location bar in your browser. Do you see a lock indicating a secure connection? Again, are you really on facebook?
4. Copy a bit of the email and paste it into Google. If anyone else has writen about it, anywhere in the world, you’ll know. I copied the first line of the above virus into Google and got 16,700 hits.
5. And do we need to say? Don’t run any attachment. And if you have to, make sure your anti virus software is up to date and running!

And if you’re worried at all, DO contact us. We probably either heard already, or can find out about it.

UPDATE 8/12/09: The ever useful on-line magazine LifeHacker just posted an article on this subject with lots of useful info and links. Find it here…

UPDATE 25/01/10: Another email in our inbox, another variety of the same scam. We’ll be adding them as comments to this post as they come in…

Simply put, the authors took hundreds of freely available solutions and put them together with a simple bootable menu. Download the ISO, burn it onto a CD/R and take it with you wherever you go.
To quote from their website, you need the Ultimate Boot CD if you want to:

• Run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. More and more PCs are shipped without floppy drives these days, and it is such a royal pain when you need to run diagnostic tools on them.
• Free yourself from the slow loading speed of the floppy drive. Even if you do have a floppy drive, it is still much much faster to run your diagnostic tools from the CDROM drive, rather than wait for the tool to load from the floppy drive.
• Consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Wouldn’t you like to avoid digging into the dusty box to look for the right floppy disk, but simply run them all from a single CD? Then the Ultimate Boot CD is for you!
• New! Run Ultimate Boot CD from your USB memory stick. A script on the CD prepares your USB memory stick so that it can be used on newer machines that supports booting from USB devices. You can access the same tools as you would from the CD version.

When you boot up from the CD, a text-based menu will be displayed, and you will be able to select the tool you want to run. The selected tool actually boots off a virtual floppy disk created in memory.

Interested? Read more on the Ultimate Boot CD website, download the image for yourself or come to our shop and get your own copy!

For this reason, we’ve opened up a new category on our site, ‘Technicians Toolkit’, under which you’ll find articles, tips and tricks helping us (and you), Arusha ICT technicians, with our daily work. All solutions and tools listed are free to use, copy and share amongst your friends. And because we know from painful experience how long it can take to download a CD image using our flaky Tanzanian internet, all of the tools mentioned are available for free from our shop! Just drop by with a memory stick or empty CD and we’ll fill them up for you, free of charge…

To break the ice, click here for our first few articles in this category… and to make sure you never miss any updates, ensure you’re subscribed to the ‘Technicians Toolkit’ category of our update service!

Fortunately, as with many technologies, full time camera surveillance is now something available to anyone, anywhere, using no more then standard PC equipment and easilly available camera hardware. Instead of using an expensive ‘time-lapse’ videorecorder, we can now digitally record any video source, from a web-cam to an wireless outside camera, straight onto a standard hard-disk using a technology called ‘DVR’, or ‘Digital Video Recording’.

Using no more then a standard personal computer, abeit one with a reasonably large hard-disk, a video capture card and one or more cameras, we can ensure 24×7 recording of your property. You can access your recordings from any workstation in your office, or even remotely, from the internet.

Our preferred software for the professional monitoring of your assets is made by ‘Argus’ (see their website here); their uniquely flexible and schaleable software allows support for almost all available camera’s, DVR cards (a card you plug into the central recording server, allowing connection of 4, 8 or 16 cameras), USB-webcams, wireless IP-cameras etc..

And what to think of:

• scheduled, motion detected or full-time recording of up to 32 simultaneous cameras,
• support for zooming & panning (moving the aim of your camera),
• automatic notification of activity on SMS (when supported by the cellular network), email and across your company network,
• access to any recorded materials by date, time and/or detected movement,
• etc..

Have a good look at the Argus DVR pages for a full overview of possibilities and if you are interested, why not visit our shop in town to see for yourself! We are using two cameras to record all movement in our shop to a central computer and will gladly give you a full demonstration of the possibilities of the system.

Using our own system to the full, combined with a number of installations in town, has given us ample experience in the setup of camera surveillance, bringing this specialised technology to the Arusha market at very affordable prices. Interested? Let us know and we’ll be in touch with more information!

However, your website that looks so nice on a big screen, will be almost impossible to access from the small screen of most mobile phones. Pictures, fancy menu’s, the entire site was designed to be viewed at much higher resolution. This is where you can experience the benefits of a dynamic website, as offered through Mica’s WebSite Plus. Just like this website, using this approach completely separates your information from the presentation of it all.

Using this technology, things are no more complicated then using a different ‘look and feel’ for your site, chosen when the website determines the visitor arrives using a mobile phone. This is done automatically, as you can see when you navigate to our website from your mobile phone.

Simply open up your web/wap browser on your mobile phone and point it to: http://micacomputers.com and see. Or, if you want to see what things will look like but you have no phone at hand, simply click here for a demonstration on your pc.

Each item in our shop has passed the Mica criteria of giving excellent value for money whilst still offering you with high-class quality on which you can build your business. From computers, displays, printers, scanners and networking equipment to a wide variety of spare-parts to replace (or expand) parts of your current equipment, all at very affordable prices…

These powerful computers come fully licensed with Microsoft Windows XP Professional and are therefore completely ready for use. A perfect combination to expand your internet cafe or the computer science lab at your school! Why not drop by our shop and convince yourself?

Option 1: HP-Compaq D220 + TFT = TSH. 470,000/=

Specifications:
Pentium 4, 2.4Ghz / 40Gb HD / 256Mb RAM / DVD-rom, CD-R/W combi drive, 15″ TFT flat-screen

Option 2: DELL GX260 TOWER + TFT = TSH. 450,000/=

Specifications:
Pentium 4, 2.2Ghz / 40Gb HD / 256Mb RAM / DVD-rom, CD-R/W combi drive, 15″ TFT flat-screen

Option 3: COMPAQ PC + TFT = TSH. 3800,000/=

Specifications:
Pentium 4, 1.5Ghz / 40Gb HD / 256Mb RAM / CD-R drive, 15″ TFT flat-screen

Karibu sana!