Cisco Networking

The book I read to research this post was Cisco Networking All in One for Dummies by Edward Tetz which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Cisco have 4 major class of networking product. There's enterprise class which is for large networks & the increased capabilities of these products is reflected in the price. Incidently  Cisco holds the world record for having the most powerful router in the world. Then there are small medium business products these are obviously for smaller networks & they carry the Cisco name. Then there are Linksys small medium business products, these are cheaper but that is reflected in the capabilities & quality. Linksys was purchased by Cisco a while ago & made lower end networking equipment, eventually these will carry the Cisco badge but in the meantime they are branded Linksys. Then come the home products which are the cheapest, they also carry the Linksys brand name. A lot of the higher end products need Cisco iOS which is a brand specific operating system. Two programs often used for identifying what is on a Cisco network are Cisco Works which is a $10,000 for upto 300 workstations program & the free & easier to use Cisco Web Console. A free program often used for mapping networks is Nmap & its windows version Zenmap. When they're administrating a wireless network a lot of administrators use wireshark which analyzes information packets.

The Moses Legacy

The book I read to research this post was The Moses Legacy by Graham Phillips which is an excellent book which I bought at a car boot sale. The supposed idea in the bible that we are all descended from Adam & Eve is nonsense because their son Cain got married so there must have been others. Also it says they built a city which I think would be beyond one family. The name Moses probably comes from the egyptian word mose meaning son & Moses was probably the son of the pharoah who took an interest in the jews. Obviously for literary purposes it's better to make him a jew in the bible. There were probably 2 Moses one who led them out of egypt & got the pharoah to release them & another who guided them to Israel. In the original bible it didn't tell you which mountain Moses died on & it was due to Justinian the first, leader of the byzantine empire who claimed it was mount sinai & that appeared in later bibles. The old testiment bible wasn't written down for hundreds of years & the jews memorized it & there are certain things like the domestication of camels which happened later on but before the bible went to print. Around the time the jews left egypt, the egyptians followed similiar religious practises to judaism ie they worshipped one god called Aten which means giver of life but their god didn't have a specific name, these were the only 2 religions in the world at that time to not name their god. The egyptians must have got disillusioned with their gods prior to that. For more on that have a look at my Act of God post which explains that. A couple of generations later the egyptians went back to worshipping lots of gods.

King Arthur

The book I read to research this post was King Arthur by Graham Phillips which is a very good book which I bought from amazon. There never was a person called king arthur, the name comes from the old english word for bear. It can't be a coincidence that the king of powys in the 6th century was called the bear & in all probability is the person arthur is based on. There really a Battle of Badon & the king of powys was slain there. There really was a custom among briton kings of throwing their sword in a lake when they died so the part of excalibur being thrown in the lake is probably accurate. In olden times historians used to forsake facts in the name of entertainment so there is a lot that has been written about king arthur that almost certainly isn't true. No matter what source of king arthur tale you look at they always have the tale of king arthur leaving mordred in charge in his kingdom while he takes an army onto the continent to fight battles, & when he returns mordred turns on him, so that's probably. Excalibur in reality was probably short & light like a roman sword because we know that was fashionable in them days. The anglo saxons first came to britain by invitation & were used as mercenaries but got greedy & wanted more, they eventually conquered all of britain. The king arthur is based on created the kingdom of powys & was its 1st king so must have been a good fighter.

More Holy Grail

The book I read to research this post was The 21st Century Grail by Andrew Collins which is a very good book which I bought from amazon. This book is a kind of sequel to the book on the same subject I reviewed the other day. Collins tends to write about psychic questing whereby using mediums & friends who are psychic they find historical artefacts. That doesn't strictly happen in this book where the holy grail the book is about was discovered behind a statue at Hawkstone House in 1917 but they try to verify it. Incidently the scientific community that Graham Phillips had found the Holy Grail one argument being it's not mentioned as being in britain until the 12th century. At the end of this book they do tests on the Holy Grail & discover it's made of alabaster & does appear to be a roman scent jar from that period so as Collins says it does appear that out of all the artefacts that claim to be the Holy Grail & there are rather a lot, this jar probably has the best claim. Something it says in the book is the early christians especially the gnostics & later the cathars & the albigensions focused on spiritual development. They used meditation & prayer to achieve this. I've read books on wicca although I have never been practised it & I'm not a wiccan. Apparently a lot of the wiccan beliefs come from these groups like the gnostics. When Aleister Crowley was developing his own version of wicca, he used psychic questing to find long forgotten beliefs. Someone even accused him of giving away the cathars secrets & Crowley because he didn't know where his beliefs came from, didn't have a clue what the chap was on about & they had a big argument. The knights templars kept these beliefs.

Data Leaks

The book I read to research this post was Data Leaks for Dummies by Guy Bunker et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The most common forms of data loss are 1 theft, 2 losing stuff 3 hacking. The most common forms of hacking are social engineering & via an employee. Something new in this book I didn't know is something called smishing this is when someone sends you a text message on your mobile phone saying you have subscribed to a text service & are being charged & you must get in touch to cancel it. When you get in touch you have to give your bank details to cancel this nonexistent service & they plunder your bank account. If you have VOIP they do vishing which is phoning you on VOIP & pretending to be your bank & getting all your bank details again to plunder your account. The beauty of this is often the calls are free or are extremely cheap. Something I was surprised is if someone wants to do phishing that's sending you an email that claims to be someone like your bank & sends you to a fraudulent site that gets your details & rips you off. Interestingly you can buy phishing software including online support for $1,000. I wonder if you can search google for that. Something a lot of companies that have sensitive data should consider is having their data on a central server & if the employee has to access it on a workstation or laptop keeping the data on the server so that ie if a laptop is stolen it limits the damage caused. Finally a lot of companies are concerned with employees storing sensitive data on things like USB sticks when there is potential for espionage. One idea is put a dab of glue in the USB ports & the other is ban camera phones from sensitive areas. It's easy to take a shot of the screen with one of these so make them hand it in at reception a lot of companies in china do this.

More Welding

The book I read to research this post was The Welders Handbook Revised by Richard Finch which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. If you just want to learn the basics to the different types of welding & maybe want to do a bit of welding yourself this book is perfect. One word of caution start small & definately don't do anything that's structural like a key part of a motor car until you are more experienced & preferably after maybe doing a course at your local college. To start do things that are ornamental or relatively simple things like brackets. There are 2 main types of welding for the beginner which are mig or metal inert gas, & tig or tungsten inert gas. With a lot of mig welders that are good quality you can buy an attachment that allows you to do either. Mig welding is quite distinctive in that it leaves quite a stubbly strong joint & that type of joint is often used decoratively on things like motor bikes. Something you can do in welding is temper steel & you can buy a special heated rated chalk that you mark the steel with & then it disappears when it reaches that temperature. Another item you might want to invest in is a spot welder, the starting price for a steel spot welder is quite low but aluminium ones are $50,000 & aluminium has a higher melting point so don't be tempted to use a cheaper one on it. If you buy a mig or tig welder buy at least one that is 175 Amps & one that will use a decent size core stick the thinner ones are often harder to obtain as well as limiting what you can weld. Before welding always thoroughly clean the area including & around the joint. This will probably mean using quite a coarse sandpaper & in severe cases using phosphoric acid in the form of rust remover. Use caution in using anything like a grinder or electric sander as it will thin the metal so make sure it's not structural. One final bit of caution get tuition especially before using anything like oxyacetylene as it can easily blow up in fact at the very least I would find an experienced welder who will show you the ropes before welding.

The Search For The Grail

The book I read to research this post was The Search For The Holy Grail by Graham Phillips which is an excellent book which I bought from amazon. I have another very similiar book to this which is by Andrew Collins & which I will do soon. According to this book the stories of robin hood & king arthur which are essentially fiction are based on much older stories which are factual. The king arthur name is based on the word arth which is an old english word for a bear. While there was no king arthur there was an ancient briton king from around 500BC whose capital was Wroxeter, a now disused ruin near Shrewsbury Shropshire England. His kingdom was Powys & Wroxeter was the most important city in the UK. At that time there was an offshoot of christianity in england based it's claimed on Joseph of Arimethea's teachings. These teachings were more or less the same as what gnostic christians believed. One of their beliefs was that the soul was trapped inside the human body & that through meditation & prayer we could reach a higher self. The christian church sent an army to england which sorted out these rebels. They also believed that Empress Helena who was Constantine the Greats mother had exhumed Jesus's burial site & found the holy grail or what they thought was it. This then eventually found its way to England. Someone in shropshire in 1600AD claimed to have found the holy grail on his deathbed but died before he could say where it was. What Mr Phillips thinks was the holy grail was found at Whittington Chapel in side a statue. It was identified as an onyx roman perfume jar & it had a missing lid. It was said the Knights Templar looked after it for many years. The King Arthurian tale of Percival searching for the holy grail could be based on the apparently true story of the Earl of Whittington who also happened to have a white castle & didn't live far from Wroxeter which Phillips thinks is Avalon.

Blocking Spam & Spyware

The book I read to research this post was Blocking Spam & Spyware for Dummies by Peter Gregory et al which is an excellent book which I bought from amazon. At one time spam was just dodgy messages but the dividing line between spam, spyware & viruses has blurred rather a lot. I think spammers think if they can get their spam onto your computer they might as well make money from you ie find your bank details, and they might as well cause some mayhem. As time goes on anti virus, anti spamware & anti spyware will merge into one program. One trick they use with spam is to send a picture, often pornographic, with no separate text so as to fool the anti spamware. For a business spam is a real concern if employees are bombarded with pornography & other nasty things via spam & the firm isn't doing enough to protect them they can sue the company. Anti spamware will either filter spam too much or too little that is a fact of life. A concern with spyware is it can be a key logger & record all your keyboard commands including potentially your bank details & passwords. One problem with many anti spyware programs is they allow your computer to become infected before they remove it, some now scan for it & remove it straight away. If you run a business you should have these types of anti malware on your servers & separately on your workstations. Another issue is employees putting software on their workstations especially stuff off the internet which can potentially contain malware.

The Marion Conspiracy

The book I read to research this post was The Marion Conspiracy by Graham Phillips which is an excellent book which I bought from amazon. One of the theories in this book is that Jesus was Herod's grandson. Antipater who was Herod's son had a wife called Marion who disappeared & Antipater's children all mysteriously disappeared when it's known Herod didn't want them to inherit his throne. It would explain why Herod wanted to kill Jesus. Also why didn't Pontius Pilate have Jesus crucified for sedition when claiming to be king of the jews was that offence surely he must have thought there was some truth to it. Another theory is that Joseph of Arimethea was Jesus's brother & that he along with his mother Mary went to Glastonbury in England with the holy grail. This isn't as far fetched as it sounds there were roads as far as northern France & indeed many christians settled in England to escape persecution. At that time even though britain hadn't been annexed by the romans many romans lived here. Another theory which is mentioned although Graham wrote another book about it is that the King Arthur legend is based on a real King of Powys & that Camelot is Anglesey in North Wales. Since publication of that book it has been proven settlement at Wroxeter the capital of Powys lasted longer than they thought which goes along with Graham's theories.

Sewing

The book I read to research this post was Sewing for Dummies by Jan Maresh Saunders which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. There's 3 ways to do sewing one is by hand another is by sewing machine & the other is with an overlocking sewing or serger. A sewing machine will use one or 2 threads & the material will be fed through by hand, a serger will use 3 or 4 threads & the material will be fed through automatically. A serger will give a professional finish to things like buttons but can only be used for certain jobs. A sewing machine can be used for sewing anything. A serger is also quite a lot more expensive than a sewing machine. Some high end sewing machines use a pattern card to specify to the machine what stitching to use. Many people use patterns when making things. Sometimes the pattern just contains instructions if they are making something quite variable like cushions for a sofa. Sometimes the pattern is made from a kind of tissue paper & other times it's made from a good quality paper. If you have to make marks on the material you should use either an air soluble or water soluble marker either way you can wet it to remove it. If you are doing pleating you will work out where the folds need to be & use a marker to mark it then sew it across the top to maintain the positions.

Act of God

The book I read to research this post was Act of God by Graham Phillips which is one of the best books I've ever read & which I bought from amazon. This book presents a theory concerning atlantis, tutankhamen, moses & the minoan civilisation. At around this time which was when Amhotep 3rd was pharoah there was an enormous volcanic eruption at Thera which is in the Mediterranean. This eruption was many times bigger than even krakatoa which is the biggest eruption of modern times. The author believes atlantis was the minoan civilisation on crete & that it was virtually wiped out by this eruption & the resulting tidal wave. It's believed moses lived around this time but he wasn't called moses & he was a high ranking egyptian who left with the jews when they were released from slavery & allowed to leave. The author argues could the plagues in the bible have all happened at the same time & be the result of the volcanic eruption.  After mount St Helens erupted there were similiar plagues. The nile would turn blood red for example because iron oxide would be thrown into the air & could quite feasibly have gone into the river. Daylight would have blocked out by the ash from the volcano for some time. People would have come out in boils because of what was in the air. There would have been plagues of things like frogs & locusts because there predators would take longer to recover in population. A short while after the eruption there would have been disease from all the rats & all the rotting carcases which would have littered the place. Then when the jews where released & travelled to the reed sea not the red sea the sea level would have dropped due to the impending tidal wave allowing the jews to cross & of course the tidal wave would have wiped out the egyptians. It's known the egyptians around this time adopted similiar religious practises to the jews could this be because they thought their gods had forsaken them. It's known around the time tutankhamen came to the throne which was a bit later on they went back to their traditional religion.

The Tutankhamen Deception

The book I read to research this post was The Tutankhamen Deception by Gerald OFarrell which is an excellent book which I bought as part of a boxset at a car boot sale. I think I have to watch what I'm saying in this blog because I don't want to get accused of libel. Basically in this book they accuse Lord Caernarvon & Howard Carter who discovered the Tutankhamen burial site of being a couple of rogues. They had an agreement with the egyptian authorities that if they found a tomb that had been disturbed by robbers they could have a share of the treasure but if it was undisturbed the egyptian authorities kept the lot. The discovery of Tutankhamen is one of the greatest archaelogical discoveries of all time. Anyway the theory in the book is that they discovered the tomb several years previously plundered it, sold some of the items on the black market & smashed some of the artefacts so it looked like it had been robbed. They used a rear entrance they had discovered to carry this out. There attitude was that they were providing employment to the local people & that they were helping the egyptians find out about there history so they were entitled to make money. The egyptians attitude was that the property in the tombs was their heritage & they shouldn't have to read the Times newspaper to find out what was going on. They sold a lot of treasure to the americans in particular the Metropolitan Museum in New York it was thought they paid a good price & didn't ask too many questions. Another theory in the book is that the people who allegedly died of the mummies were in fact murdered to stop them from spilling the beans.

Moodle

The book I read to research this post was Moodle for Dummies by Radana Dvorak which is an excellent book I bought from kindle. Moodle is an open source piece of software which can be either hosted on moodles servers for free or hosted on a 3rd party server, it's unlikely you would host it on your own server although that is possible. It's primarily for teachers & trainers so that they can deliver elearning to their students. You can incorporate paypal & charge for courses & there are lots of plug ins like youtube. When you set up a moodle site you can allow students to do blogs & another feature is it can be set up for them to talk to you & each other. You might be thinking it is a lot of extra work especially if you are a teacher but you can mark work online & you can set online tests for your students which is a time saver if you can type. The man who invented moodle did a degree in computer science & education so he was qualified to do it. The code to the program is open source which means anyone can change it to suit there needs.

Macrobiotics

The book I read to research this post was Macrobiotics for dummies by Verne Varona which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Macrobiotics was originally linked to zen meditation but is now seen as a form of alternative therapy in its own right. The main principles are you try to have your food raw, you don't have animal protein, you avoid dairy products & you don't have processed food. A friend told me if you smoke & have dairy products it gets mucus in your arteries & when you smoke the poisons from that stick to the mucus making you more prone to things like cancer. Fruit is quite acidic so you avoid that, you try to have food which is as close as possible to a neutral ph. This is good because if your blood becomes too acidic or alkali it can make you ill. Your diet should be predominantly sea vegetables, vegetables & fermented food. Fermented food is things like sauerkraut & prebiotic yoghurt which supply your gut with friendly bacteria. These produce some of the vitamin B's among other things. It also helps with your immune defences. You do eat an unhealthy meal once a week to shock your body into taking healthy food once again. Sea vegetables are things like kelp & are often forms of seaweed. If your diet contains too much acid your urine will contain a lot of the distinctive smell of ammonia. Where macrobiotics was linked to zen meditation is that they both teach mindfulness when eating. You should chew slowly & focus on the taste of the food. Practitioners of zen meditation follow the same guidelines as taught in macrobiotics. Finally pickled food is often consumed by people following macrobiotics but brine is used instead of vinegar because it has a more neutral ph.

Hacking VOIP Networks

The book I read to research this post was Hacking VOIP Exposed by Mark Collier which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. VOIP stands for voice over internet protocol & is the practise of routing telephones via the internet. Especially in the last couple of years this has come a long way it used to be you used a softphone which is a phone that plugs into your computer & you used the software skype to route the phonecall which is done cheaper than by conventional means. Now there are VOIP phones that just plug into your network & the price on these is gradually coming down. As with practically everything in the computer world there are certain weaknesses that certain malicious people use. It does say in the introduction of this book that hacking VOIP is a huge subject & if it was to include everything it would be a huge book so it looks at it from a business enterprise class perspective. The most common reason people hack VOIP networks is monetary gain. This often means getting important information in the company files. An example in the book is if someone finds out a company has made more profits than expected they can buy lots of shares before it's announced & hence make lots of money. It's a good idea to use a piece of software like asterisk which hides your IP addresses & component information from snoopers. Usually when someone does this kind of hacking they use programs like Nmap & Wireshark they can analyze what packets of information are going in & out & work out what components make up your network. They will then go to a website that tells what weaknesses & issues that hardware has. It's worth mentioning that there are websites that store the IP addresses for every network on a particular continent which is very useful to hackers. Incidently if you use asterisk software your hardware needs to be compatible. Also a good way to strengthen a VOIP network is to use hardware that doesn't have many weaknesses or issues. A VOIP network is particularly susceptible to a denial of service attack as an ordinary network will often just slow down but on a VOIP network it will become impossible to communicate.

Writing a Dissertation

The book I read to research this post was Writing a Dissertation for Dummies by Carrie Winstanley which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Incidentally if you are reading this I did a post on this site on Writing an essay which might be relevant. If you are doing an arts or humanties based course at university there is a good chance that you will be called upon to write a dissertation maybe in your 3rd or final year & it will count towards your final result on the course. You will be given a dissertation supervisor & this person may or may not specialize in your subject. This shouldn't matter very much because the basic principles of doing a dissertation are the same regardless of subject. One thing it says in this book is a common mistake students make is thinking they know best & not following the supervisors advice but that person has almost certainly a good understanding of what will get you good marks. At the beginning of it you need to write an abstract which is a statement of what the dissertation is about. Your introduction should run for about a couple of pages. Many students make the mistake of thinking a dissertation is the same as an essay but longer. In fact a dissertation has more structure & keeping everything integrated is difficult. Also you may need to rewrite parts of it several times before you get it right. You may need to send out questionnaires & obviously you won't be able to do this on a grand scale a common mistake is they get skewed results & don't adequately explain it. When doing research particularly on the internet you need to check your facts at several sources as some of it can be inaccurate. Finally another mistake a lot of students make is not listing their bibliography alphabetically & they can lose marks on this which are easy to gain. You also might need to include a citation to say where you got some ideas from again easy marks.

Sports Psychology

The book I read to research this post was Sports Psychology: A Students Guide by Matt Jarvis which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The difference between a sportsman at the top of his profession & someone who is merely good at a sport is the one at the top can change up a gear at the crucial times. In the 60's when russian & east german athletes were doing really well, although they are still quite secretive about it because it was the cold war, sports psychology was quite prominent in their training. It was later on that the rest of the world started to catch up. To become a registered sports psychology you need either a 1st degree in psychology followed by a masters degree in sports psychology or a 1st degree in sports studies followed by a masters degree in sports psychology. There are 2 major types of sports motivation 1 is extrinsic where you do the sport for external recognition ie money or a reward, 2 is intrinsic where the acheivement in itself is reward enough. Often if someone is intrinsic a big payout will demotivate them. In some sports like weight lifting anger is essential to doing well in the sport. In other sports like snooker it's more important to stay calm & relaxed. I remember John McEnroe the famous tennis player played his best often after he'd been arguing with the umpire. Another factor is often if someone is doing badly in a match he will improve his game to avoid humiliation. Using imagery is important in sports psychology & athletes will often visualize themselves winning or coping with a situation differently.

Virtualization

The book I read to research this post was Virtualization for Dummies by Bernard Golden which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Moore's Law states that in the computing world processing power doubles every 2 years which basically means if you are a computer user you have to buy a new computer every 2 years. Anything which helps you upgrade less often has to be a good thing. Virtualization does just that. The most common virtualization is server virtualization where particularly with hard drives the price per gigabyte has plummeted. What would at one time have been on separate servers can now be put on one server. You still need a spare though in case one crashes. The beauty of client servers is you can set up an account that limits what the user can do on that client pc then use that for going on the internet & if it gets infected by a virus the damage it can do is severely limited. This book was released prior to the release of windows server 2008 which was due to have virtualization features included so the information on virtualization products is a bit limited but I think VMware which is featured in the book is still one of the major players in this field. Another aspect of virtualization is cloud computing or software as a service a good example of this is google search where you enter a search term, googles many servers process your request & send you the results. Can you imagine how long your home pc would take to do the same job? Salesforce.com is probably the most well known cloud computing service although there's many companies getting in on the act. With cloud computing only a minimal amount of processing is done on your computer because most of it's done on the service providers server. Another aspect of cloud computing which has been pioneered by IBM is charging people & companies according to how much use they make of a cloud computing service which I think is fair & has potential.

The Ancient Egyptians

The book I read to research this post was The Ancient Egyptians for Dummies by Charlotte Booth which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This subject isn't quite as the ancient greeks which I recently did a post on. In ancient egypt a number of pharoahs built there own capitals which then fell into disuse after they died but there are 2 cities which featured as capitals most of the time, they are cairo which was called memphis & luxor which was called thebes which is the greek name but is generally acknowledged. We don't now how the egyptians did their carvings out of rock it would have needed something as strong as steel & steel hadn't been invented. We also don't know how they placed the rocks that make up the pyramids so precisely, you can't even insert a piece of paper between them. Egyptologists can decipher hieroglyphics because something called the rosetta stone was discovered which contained the same message in ancient greek which they could translate & also hieroglyphics & demotoglyphics neither of which were understood at that time, some code breaking followed & while they don't understand them fully, they have a sort of working knowledge. Up until 5,000BC a lot of egypt was fertile & the people were nomadic, at around that time there were geological changes which resulted in the sahara being formed this resulted in people having to settle where there was water. When the egyptian dynasties were finally vanquished it was the result of being invaded by the assyrians.

Space Exploration

The book I read to research this post was Space Exploration for Dummies by Shana  Priwer et al which is an excellent book & I bought it from kindle. The russians & the americans harnessed the know how of the germans who were behind the V2 for their space programs. Until the russians sent sputnik up the americans had no space program & the americans were playing catch up until they put a man on the moon. One of the most important people in the american space program was Wernher Von Braun & I did a post on him a while back. To many people putting a man on the moon was mankinds greatest achievement. Most people know about the 2 mishaps involving the space shuttles often especially in the cold war the russian fatalities were hushed up. Most of the fatalities have been either during lift off or returning, one exception being Soyuz 11 whose hatch malfunctioned in deep space & blew off. Apparently the crew were dead within 40 seconds. As a result of that the crews had to wear pressurized suits in the space craft. Soyuz 1 crashed when there was a problem with the main parachute on re entry & when the reserve chute was used it became tangled with the main chute. When it hit the ground the impact was at over 90 mph.

The russian space station Salyut 3 had a particle cannon which apparently destroyed a test satellite when tested. Since glasnost the russians & americans have collaborated quite a lot ie on the mir space station. The european space agency uses spacelab not to be confused with the similiar sounding skylab used by the americans in the 70's. Cassini which explored several planets used more than half its onboard fuel in slowing down & going into orbit around saturn such was the huge gravitational pull of the planet. There was a lot of controversy as well because onboard was over 70 pounds of plutonium.

Woodworking

The book I read to research this post was Woodworking for Dummies by Jeff Strong which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. I'll tell you something funny when I bought this ebook only 1 person had rated the book & he had given it 1 star & the only conclusion I can come to is it must be someone who isn't really interested in woodwork believe me I'm tempted to copy & paste this article onto that site in the reviews. There's 2 major types of wood softwood & hardwood & softwood has a springy quality & isn't necessarily any weaker than hardwood. Poplar is cheap & a good wood for doing many projects. Many of the traditional hardwoods particularly walnut & mahogany don't necessarily come from sustainable forests are difficult to source & are expensive. Softwoods tend to come from sustainable forests. A good softwood which is also quite cheap is douglas fir. Oak is a popular hardwood but red oak doesn't handle the wet very well because the wood is open.

A waterstone is best for sharpening chisels you need to apply water but they are now quite reasonably priced. Oilstone needs oil & is cheaper but the oil messes up your overalls. A lot of workshops have a table saw which are quite reasonably priced. A cabinet saw which is the same as a table saw but has legs & a cover all around tends to be expensive for what you get. A popular tool is the bandsaw the band part of the word refers to the belt that drives the saw. A 6 inch joiner is usually sufficient, an 8 inch one is double the price although it maybe necessary if you do alot of fencing. A biscuit joiner makes an incision & then inserts a piece of wood called a biscuit into the joint. You may need a special vacuum cleaner as the dust is bad for your lungs. Often people use a normal vacuum with a special attachment. You should never remove the guard off equipment the only possible exception being if you have bought a special guard to replace it with.

Google Sites & Chrome

The book I read to research this post was Google Sites & Chrome for Dummies by Ryan Teeter et al which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Google sites allows you to construct a website using an intuitive wizard & the basic site is free but you have to pay if you have a business site or if you want to register a domain name for the site. If you read my post on google apps you may remember that when you register to use googles docs you are given a website where you can save your work. This site is identical in practically every way. You can have gadgets which are mini programs ie calendar, in your website & google has made it as simple as possible. The neat thing about calendar is when it's set up others can see your schedule at a glance. I would suggest if you are new to computing & want to have a website that you consider having a blog & maybe when you have experience of that move onto google sites which has got a similiar interface to microsoft office & many blogsites.

Google chrome is the browser I use & I particularly like the fact that if there's a website I particularly like I can drag a shortcut button onto the taskbar. It also incorporates google search which is convenient. Also it's worth mentioning that google has specialist search engines like this one for ebooks.

http://books.google.com

Network Security

The book I read to research this post was Network Security for Dummies by Chey Cobb which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. An interesting point in this book is that if you hire a network security consultant you should if he finds anything suspect on your network what will he do? You might think that he'd report it to you but actually he's under no obligation to. What if he finds a password cracker on your network that someone has installed to test the network but without your approval? I'll mention there's a good website at ciac.org which is an american government department which is surprising because normally government departments don't do the best websites normally consulting firms do the best network security sites. You obviously have to update your antivirus software weekly & run it every 2 or 3 days. You should have strong passwords which means a minimum of 8 character and a combination of upper & lower case letters, numbers & special characters. Everything that possibly can should have a unique password. If you have accounts on the internet you should vary your email adresses & password. Your server should be locked away if someone goes in that room ideally things like their baggage should be searched in case they're copying information from the server onto ie a flash drive. In fact ideally the person should be searched. A final interesting point is the W3C made a statement that the safest kind of website is a barebones mac running a barebones website. That was made prior to OSX coming out which despite being comparatively safe has got its own issues. Also if you run a database & have ecommerce on your website that obviously has vulnerabilities.

Eating Clean

The book I read to research this post was Eating Clean for Dummies by Johnathan Wright et al & is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Some rats were fed junk food & then were offered wholesome food & the rats chose to starve to death rather than eat it. It's anything but easy going from processed food with all its chemicals even things like cooked cheese can be addictive which is why cheeseburgers are so popular. Even something that seems as harmless as water probably comes through lead pipes if your house was built prior to 1986, probably contains fluoride which can discolour your teeth & there's no evidence fluoride in water has any good qualities as far as your teeth are concerned. Your body simply can't absorb it. On top of that there are claims it's a carcinogen & it can dull your mind. On top of that the treatment plants weren't designed to remove modern pesticides although they have often been upgraded since. The safest thing with things like fruit & veg is to grow your own & failing that from a market or health food shop. Even packaging can be toxic. When it comes to meat you don't want to know how they treat the animals it's so horrendous it would put you off your food. Some of the things mentioned which I can tell you only scratches the surface is they feed plastic pellets to the animals as fibre & they mix the animals poo with cement & feed it back to them. Also when they battery farm chickens they chop their beaks off because they would peck each other to death, they are so over crowded.

Cryptography

The book I read to research this post was Cryptography for Dummies by Chey Cobb which is an excellent book which I bought from amazon. The ancient greeks & romans developed which were things like wrapping a long piece of paper around a stick of a certain thickness writing vertically to be read on an identical stick or using a code that was merely advanced say 8 characters & might involve a ring with 2 lots of letters one of which rotated. In them days they got away with codes like that because most people were illiterate. In the first & second world wars codes & their use advanced in a huge way. It's interesting to note that nowadays most cryptography is in use by the public & by companies because their has been a lot of concern about the safety of peoples passwords in things like credit cards user accounts on the internet. Also the use of cryptography is on the increase for the same reason. Governments have whole departments devoted to making and breaking codes although they are often at least partly based on commercially used ones. Also when a new encryption method comes out there are loads who try & find a weakness in it. One method called DES was deemed too easy to break so they brought out 3DES where DES is performed 3 times the number of permutations is huge & contrary to what you see in films often the only way to break a cipher is brute force or cycling through the possible where you are looking at several hours at least. Often the tools for breaking ciphers are freely available as freeware or shareware on the internet. Something of concern is wireless networks where passwords can often be broken in a few hours & literally thousands of companies have freeloaders piggybacking on there networks going on the internet.

Xbox 360 Forensics

The book I read to research this post was Xbox 360 forensics by Stephen Bolt et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is primarily for members of the police or organisations like the FBI who may be called upon to carry out a forensic examination of an xbox 360. I really enjoyed reading it & even if you only read it for the information on xbox live I would recommend this book. If an xbox 360 has been stolen, it has a unique identifier chip that as long as it has been registered on xbox live will enable it to be traced back to its original owner. If someone uses xbox there's a good chance that there are messages on his xbox 360 these can be directly from playing games against people on xbox live or emails or social networking sites like facebook. The kind of things a law enforcer might investigate are maybe a paedophile is stalking children on xbox live or maybe someone is trying to find out where he can buy drugs by email. There are 3 major types of filetypes on an xbox 360 which are Con, Pirs & Live. Most of the files exclusive to xbox live are Live files. It has to be mentioned that if you disassemble an xbox 360 hard drive you invalidate your warranty so I don't recommend it. The book contains a tutorial on how to map an xbox 360 hard drive onto a computer. Some of the software they use is EnCase which is used a lot in forensics, Xplorer 360 it's primary use is to unlock hidden levels in games, and wxPIR which is freeware that deconstructs Pir files.

The Ancient Greeks

The book I read to research this post was The Ancient Greeks for Dummies by Stephen Batchelor which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The ancient greek civilisation lasted for 2,500 years & died out around the time of Jesus which was as a result of a roman invasion. The ancient greeks are thought to have descended from the minoan civilisation which was the 1st organised civilisation originating around 7,000 BC. Eventually the minoans were invaded by the athenians. The greeks gave us the 1st history book The Pellopennessian War written by Thucydidine who was a high ranking athenian army officer who actually fought in that war hence historians know all about that war. There was actually 2 wars between Sparta & Athens & what started it was a slaves uprising in sparta hence they asked the athenians for help but most of the soldiers they sent sympathised with the pelots or slaves & they made it quite clear to the spartans who decided to deal with the slaves themselves. The first war was won by athens but sparta won the second war. It's interesting that sparta had the greatest army in the ancient but athens had what was thought to be an indestructible navy. A lot of people regard the athenians as being the 1st democracy in the world although only a minority were represented. Much of the ancient greek history is unknown & called the dark ages because it was only later on that writing was developed. The film 300 is based on the battle of Thermopyllae when the persians tried to invade & while some aspects of the film are made up it does a good job of depicting the horror & cruelty of that time.

Google Apps

The book I read to research this post was Google Apps for Dummies  by Ryan Teeter et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Google is most famous for its search engine which is the most used worldwide. Google also does a lot of other programs most are free most are free & you are normally eligible to use them if you have a gmail or googlemail email account. The email account is normally free although there is a premium option available for a small amount monthly. Google docs comes in team, standard, premium & education versions. The team version doesn't come with gmail. The premium version costs $50 per month & comes with 25GB of storage, the education has many of the same features but only 6GB of storage & the standard version has limited functions & the same amount of storage. Google docs includes documents, a word processor, spreadsheet & presentations which is similiar to powerpoint. When you register to use google docs google give you a free website to store your work, this is cloud computing, if you want to register a domain name for the site that costs $10 per annum. There are many programs in the google collection among them google talk that is similiar to skype & allows you to place IM or VOIP telephone calls. All you need is a microphone & speakers.

Beekeeping

The book I read to research this post was Beekeeping for Dummies by Howland Blackiston et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Bees have to get nectar from 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey & will pollinate the plants in a 6000 acres area. The most common breeds kept for honey production are the buckfast famously created & used by buckfast abbey & the italian strain both produce lots of honey & are relatively docile. Incidently a bee sting will help relieve the pain of arthritus & it's more or less a science the use of bee products to relieve ailments. Most beehives are made of cedar which is attractive & at the same time quite rot resistant. The honey is pooled in a special tray called a super but you have to leave them enough to survive & they need about 35 pounds of honey to survive the winter although they produce far more. Incidently don't use africanised honey bees there sting is no worse than any other bee but they are vicious & if there hive is disturbed can remain angry for several days also they do sting in groups although they're only found in the americas. If a hive gets overcrowded or gets in a poor state the bees will swarm which is basically them looking for another home young hives are less likely to indulge in this activity & also it can cause problems because if they do this they do this they aren't collecting honey which they need to survive. If you move a hive you should smoke it, stopper the entrance, only do at dawn or dusk & wear protective clothing. You will probably need help & also will have to put straps around the hive to prevent it from falling apart. If you have a good hive & a weak one you can combine the trick here is to put newspaper between the 2 hives & when the bees finally chew through it they will hopefully accept each other. A final note some people breed & sell queen bees which can command £30 each on the open market.

PRINCE2

The book I read to research this post was PRINCE2 for Dummies by Nick Graham which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. PRINCE2 in a previous version was purchased by the UK government in 2006 & was then tweaked over the next couple of years & was released as PRINCE2. Originally it was a method for project managing computing but it was found its principles could be applied to any project. The government has also made it open source & doesn't take any kind of commission when it's taught. The UK treasury department has released a free ebook called the green book which you can google but anyway it explains how the treasury apply the principles of PRINCE2. There's also a PRINCE2 manual which is a good resource but you have to buy that. I must admit I am quite interested in PRINCE2 & at the very least am going to read the treasury book & do a blog on it so watch this space. PRINCE2 adds structure to a project & if done correctly should only create a modest amount of paperwork. If it's only a small project you might be able to carry out some of the steps verbally & it's worth mentioning many projects fail due to unforeseen problems. One of the initial steps is to appoint a project executive who oversees the project although he doesn't actually carry it out, & also a project manager who actually carries out the project. Both of these jobs require an actual person so it's no good appointing a committee although they can report back to a committee.

Mom Blogging

The book I read to research this post was Mom Blogging for Dummies by Wendy Piersall which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. A lot of the information in this book applies to any kind of blog. First of all if you want to run adverts on your blog you have 2 major choices you could use blogger where you have to have a blogspot domain name or you could run the wordpress software which is a free download from wordpress.org on a 3rd party server. Wendy does the latter. She advises if you hire writers for your site that you pay them a percentage of the advertising revenue that way you aren't paying out more than you have got coming in. Some good advice if you are on twitter 10% of the time you should advertise your blogs, 20% you should retweet others & the rest should be giving people informative information. Apparently she reckons facebooks better than twitter because you can write longer messages & you'll probably have a lot of friends already there when you join. I must admit I prefer twitter because my followers have grown without a lot of effort on my part. Also you should blog on something you enjoy & that seems effortless to write. I think even if you are mom blogging you still have to do research ie say if your child has measles you have to read a book on that subject & also maybe alternative medicine so that you can compare the potential cures & thereby keep your blog interesting. By the way if you enjoy my computing blogs have a look at my proper computing blog at scratbag.me it has over 450 posts.

Researching Your Family History Online

The book I read to research this post was Researching Your Family History Online for Dummies by Nick Barrett et al which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. When you are researching your family tree the first thing you should do is interview each member of your family & find out what they know about your family history, ideally record the interviews on an mp3 player with a record feature, they are quite cheap. In this phase you are particularly looking for family addresses & names particularly surnames & how they have changed. Then you need to visit a genealogy site, some are free incidently, if your family was english try ancestry.co.uk which has a free trial if your family was more international try ancestry.com which has many foreign databases although you need to pay for that. A free site that is useful for genealogy is genesreunited.com . A good idea is to google the terms parish records & the county the person lived in. When you have researched a family history & family tree why not do a family web site which your family can visit. Ideally because your family web site won't be a commercial enterprise you should look at free hosting or maybe have a blog site.

Identity Theft

The book I read to research this post was Identity Theft for Dummies by Michael J Arata which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Even quite prominent people like Robert DeNiro have been victims of identity theft. Most cases of identity theft are done by someone known to the victim although in a lot of cases the victim has no idea how the perpetrator got his details. The main details needed are the social security number & the date of birth. The perpetrator can then get credit with them & even open a bank account. The first sign that something is wrong is when your bills don't arrive on time because the perpetrator has had them diverted. You should only give out your social security number if you get a new job or you apply for credit & shouldn't routinely carry it in your wallet. While we are on that subject you should only carry 1 credit card & then it's easier to deal with it if your wallet gets stolen. It can take years to deal with the consequences of identity theft particularly the bad credit rating you are left with. The people most at risk are those with an excellent credit rating. Identity theft can take the form of someone going through your garbage to get things like bank statements or tax returns you have thrown out, or someone can peer over your shoulder to get your pin number, a similiar thing can be done with camera phones, dodgy websites are another problem & also dodgy emails. You should never reveal your bank details or pin numbers to anyone especially online. Any legitimate company will never ask for that information.

Electronic Health Records

The book I read to research this post was Electronic Health Records for Dummies by Trenor Williams et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Apparently britain is one of the leading countries in terms of converting health records to electronic means where in 2009 over 90% had been converted. An issue which does come up is what do you do with the old written records do you use them as a back up & do you continue to maintain them or do you shred them to make space & save money & then of course what do you use as a back up. Software which allows you to create & manage electronic health records typically costs $10,000 per practitioner or if you have it as a cloud computing solution is $500 per practitioner per month. My local doctors surgery did a deal where they get the software free but the company that supplies the software can use the general data. That means they won't have the data that ie a certain person has heart disease but ie they know what percentage have heart disease & what treatment they receive etc. A final point something mentioned in the book is google health which has been discounted but microsoft health vault which is more or less the same thing it's basically a patients repository. Also it's free. Particularly if somebody needs a lot of treatment it allows a patient online space where the patient & people that are treating the patient can leave notes obviously they can't put anything controversial down because the patient has got access to it but I thought what a good idea. 

Hacking Wireless Networks

The book I read to research this post was Hacking Wireless Networks for Dummies by Kevin Beaver et al which is an excellent book which I bought from amazon. This book was written in 2005 so some of the information might be a bit dated. At one time most people who had to hack a network for whatever reason would use network stumbler often called net stumbler & kismet because they were the main ones that were available but now the options are endless. However if you are new to hacking the safest ones to stick with are net stumbler & kismet. Many wireless networks use the default passwords that came with their equipment & if you know what equipment the person has you can easily find these passwords on the internet. One interesting fact in the book which is probably only of interest if you intend wardriving is that you can import your results from net stumbler into ms map point & plot them on a map. Wardriving is when you drive around & try & hack into peoples networks via a laptop.  An issue in ethical hacking in unofficial wireless access points often placed there by employees who want to get on the network easily but a weak target that potential hackers can use. It's definitely something you want to locate.

A final warning if you are doing ethical hacking on any kind of network get permission in writing & make sure it states exactly what you will be doing ie testing passwords, & make sure there's no discrepencies.

Stained Glass

The book I read to research this post was Stained Glass for Dummies by Vicki Payne which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. I am going to write about the tools needed for creating stained glass. Basically there are 3 types of stained glass, there's copper foil which is the easiest to use, there's lead camed where you have to solder it & there's warm glass where you heat the glass in a glass kiln & one of the beauties of that is you can make 3d shapes. There is also hot glass which is glass blowing but that is very advanced & not covered in this book.

I personally wouldn't buy a glass kiln unless you intend making a career of it because they are very expensive plus a bit dangerous. There are 2 main types of glass cutter, the barrel type which is the most common, and the pistol grip type which gives you more control & is particularly good if you have something like arthritus. There is various types of power saw like the camed saw but if you are starting out you just need a hacksaw with 32 teeth which is apparently the best type of hacksaw. A glass grinder is useful for levelling the glass. Make sure you use a glass shield & goggles. You need a 100 watt soldering iron & a rheostat which controls the temperature of the iron. Finally there are several types of glass pliers which are used to just break tiny bits off the glass & they have to be smooth in order to do the job properly.

Advanced Blogging

The book I read to research this post was Blogging by the Million, Selling by the Millions by Laura Maya which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Some of you may remember a while back I did a post on social bookmarking  which was based on an ebook which was promoting a book you could buy. This is the book & although it's fairly short there's a lot of information covered. The book is basically about selling digital products which are things like mp3s, ebooks, web space, domain registration & affiliate marketing where you sell something on your web site & somebody sorts out delivery etc. I've some affiliate sites which are.

www.ebay.co

www.amazon.com

www.yahooshopping.com

Some resources are

www.befree.com

www.linkshare.com

I think the best ebook conversion is

adobe.com

Apart from things like a computer & broadband connection there is very little outlay. Another idea in the book is you can rent so much space on a server & sell it off in 20MB web site segments. There is a company called exabytes that will do it as an affiliate marketer. www.exabytes.com

Also although I don't think it's such a good idea there's selling forex & commodities etc

www.easy-forex.com

These are some ecommerce sites

zencart.com

paypal.com

A blog is a good idea as they are often free & can drive traffic to your main site. Some less well known ones are

vox.com

xanga.com

blog.com

Also often you can copy & paste from one site to another.

Apparently there's a search engine called baidu which is very big in china which I'm definately going to submit my blogs to. Did you know if you go to a foreign language site most browsers will translate it.

If you are interested in search engine optimization there's

seolite.com

Some blog catalogs are

www.blogcatalog.com

www.bloglisting.com

Here's a couple of article submission sites

www.articlerich.com

goarticles.com

A rather less well known social bookmarking site is

socialize-it.com

Finally some rather less well known social networking sites are

hi5.com

xanga.com

tagged.com

xing.com

I have only used a fraction of the sites in the book & if you are serious about promoting a web site or blog I would recommend it.

Google Adwords

The book I read to research this post was Google Adwords for Dummies by Howie Jacobson et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Before reading this post it might be an idea to read my post on google adsense if you haven't already done so. Adwords is part of the google search engine. When you do a search for something there's a separate part with just a few search results. Them people have paid google for that placement & that's part of google adwords. You can either have CTR or click through rate where you pay for anyone clicking on your link or CTC or click through conversion where you connect up your shopping cart & pay for each order. Obviously what you pay on CTR is a lot less than you pay on CTC. Also only one CTR click per person per day is counted to prevent fraud through multiple clicking. If you run a company it's a good idea to try both systems to a very limited extent at first because google lets you specify a limit for how much you wish to spend per day. If you are using adwords you need to let growth build up gradually & some companies are put off when they don't see loads of orders straight away. Alot of people need to see your adverts several times to help them trust you. There's a free downloadable adwords editor that lets you configure adwords offline. They tell you how popular keywords & phrases are & then you bid on them & finally it's worth mentioning some companies spend over $1million dollars a month on this.

Building a Chicken Coop

The book I read to research this post was Building a Chicken Coop for Dummies by Todd Brock et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. There are several major types of chicken coop. There's chicken tractor which is one on wheels making it portable, there's A frame which has 2 sloping roofs, there's hoop which is semi circular & all in one which is like a converted shed. In the old days people just let the chickens run freely which makes them vulnerable to predators. You should include a run which should have thick chicken wire or similiar. Bear in mind some predators will try to burrow into the coop. Nest boxes should be all identical to avoid fighting over a superior one. Perches should be at least 2 feet in the air. There should be a ramp upto the coop. All the materials used should be weather proof. You should allow 12 square feet per chicken. A concrete base covered in wood trimmings is a good idea although lino can also be used. Chickens need light for about 14 hours per day to optimize egg production & a power supply for this & heating is essential. In very cold weather chickens can get frostbite. You need a roof with flaps & flaps on the outside of nesting boxes to make it easier to collect eggs.

Building a Chicken Coop

The book I read to research this post was The Templar Code for Dummies by Christopher Hodapp et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The templars was originally known as the order of the temple. They assisted people in going to the holy land as either part of a crusade or a pilgrimage. At one time they were the wealthiest institution in europe. They also advised popes & kings on anything to do with the holy land. When someone went to the holy land they would mortgage their home to the templars who would give them a check which could be redeemed for cash at any of the templars properties. This was an early forerunner of international banking. It was dangerous to carry cash so this was a good arrangement. Also the templars would provide travel & accommodation. If there was a problem with them it was that they were always pleading for more money. The french king at that time envied the wealth of the templars & trumped up a load of charges against the templars so he could get his hands on their wealth. He claimed that the templar wealth disapeared but that was probably a lie. The templars were monks & knights who took vows of poverty. Some organisations like the scottish freemasons claim to have descended from the templars but they are probably trying to make themselves more prestigious. They were looked down upon by the english freemasons at that time.

The Templar Code

The book I read to research this post was The Templar Code for Dummies by Christopher Hodapp et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The templars was originally known as the order of the temple. They assisted people in going to the holy land as either part of a crusade or a pilgrimage. At one time they were the wealthiest institution in europe. They also advised popes & kings on anything to do with the holy land. When someone went to the holy land they would mortgage their home to the templars who would give them a check which could be redeemed for cash at any of the templars properties. This was an early forerunner of international banking. It was dangerous to carry cash so this was a good arrangement. Also the templars would provide travel & accommodation. If there was a problem with them it was that they were always pleading for more money. The french king at that time envied the wealth of the templars & trumped up a load of charges against the templars so he could get his hands on their wealth. He claimed that the templar wealth disapeared but that was probably a lie. The templars were monks & knights who took vows of poverty. Some organisations like the scottish freemasons claim to have descended from the templars but they are probably trying to make themselves more prestigious. They were looked down upon by the english freemasons at that time.

Thermodynamics

The book I read to research this post was Thermodynamics for Dummies by Mike Pauken which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book takes a very complex subject & makes it reasonably easy to understand. Thermodynamics comes from 2 ancient greek words thermo means heat & dynamic means movement. There are 2 laws you must understand. The 1st is you can neither create or destroy energy it merely travels from one form to another. The 2nd is energy flows from a high concentration to a low concentration until equilibrium is acheived. The steam engine was mans 1st means of harnessing thermodynamics but the same principles can even be applied to a nuclear power station. 1st you have the pump which delivers the fuel. Then it's heated, then it drives a turbine & then it's cooled in a condenser by cold water. Admittedly in a nuclear power station it's not heated. Terms like celsius are often named after famous people. Fahrenheit was constructed by 0 being the freezing point of salt water & 100 being what he thought was the temperature of the human body in fact it's 96.

Candle Making

The book I read to research this post was Candle & Soap Making for Dummies by Kelly Ewing which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. If wax gets too hot it will explode so you can't apply direct heat to it. A lot of people use a small pan which houses the wax & is boiled inside a larger pan which contains water. Never use the microwave because it definately will explode. Also it's possible to over heat wax & change its properties. You should use a thermometer & only heat it to its melting point a 300f one is suitable & never use a mercury one. With small candles it's best to place them in a holder which will enable it to burn longer by raising the level of the wax. Some wicks are free standing & need to be appropriate for the melting point of the wax. A lot of people use paraffin wax which is a good one to start out with. Gel has a higher melting point & also is more likely to catch fire. Honeycomb won't shatter if you drop it & is suitable for a childrens project because you don't heat it. A wick can have a paper or metal stem. If the candle produces soot or if it goes out midway through burning you are using the wrong type of wax.