Help! I'm Not a Geek

Sites to Help Plan Your Vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:38:00 +0000

So, are you planning a summer vacation? One thing you can do is to type the location you are going into Google and get lots of information about it. You can go to expedia.com or kayak.com to search for the best flights, rental cars and rooms.

There are other options that may be new to you.

Vacation Rentals By Owner is one of

many different sites where people can post their own property as a rental by the day or by the week. Many of these are really interesting houses that sleep 6 or more. It is a great way to find a place to stay that costs less than a hotel room depending upon how many different people divide the cost.

I have experience with this site and have only had very good experiences with the houses that we have rented. It is so nice to have a living room where everyone can gather to spend time together. They usually have kitchens with dishes, pots and pans, and everything you would need to make meals in the home.

A few other sites like this were listed and so I have included their links below.

Home Away Home Away is the parent company of VRBO and Vacation Rentals. They also have some other sites like Bed and Breakfast

Vacation Rentals

Vacation Listings by Owner This site is a separate business not related to Home Away. It is possible that different listings would be found on this site.

A few years ago I traveled for vacation to London, England. My husband and I stayed in an apartment very similar to the arrangements above. We shared it with a couple who are friends of ours. Each night we would have to decide where to eat out.

That is where I learned about Trip Advisor My friend would go to the site and type in what type of restaurant she wanted to try and it would return multiple possibilities. They came with a map, menu and reviews, so it was easy to figure out which one to try. Another thing that was fun was that we could write our own reviews after trying it.

Since then I have used another site Yelp.com more often. I am not sure why. I guess that Trip Advisor looks more like a far away vacation site and Yelp looks more local, but really they both do the same things. I often look at Yelp to help me decide which restaurant to go to or what activity got good ratings. Reading the reviews is so helpful. You should always pay attention to how many reviews the place you are reading about has had. a 5 star place may just have one review and so it is possibly NOT as good as the average of a place that has 100 reviews.

Tell us about other sites that you use to help plan your vacations!

Pinterest, Doodle and Instagram

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 23:47:00 +0000

Every day there are more and more Web 2.0 sites showing up that solve various problems in our lives. I assume that some of them do not get used and so they disappear after a while and others take off and become favorites. Today I am going to review three of them that seem to have made it and are well-liked and used by many people.

Probably the most popular of sites is Pinterest. Here is the description from their website:"Pinterest is a tool for collecting and organizing the things you love. Browse boards created by others to discover new things and be inspired by people who share your interests. People use boards to plan their trips, decorate their homes, and share their favorite recipes."

It is really a way of bookmarking websites that is very visual. You are keeping a collection of PICTURES of different webpages. You can share your "pins" or keep them private. It is easy to go back to something you have pinned and look at it later. I am going to start a Board with sites relating to a coming trip to California.

First of all I logged into Pinterest. I think the one thing that has made all of these sites possible is the ability to keep track of users by making them log in. Because you are logged in you can also keep your "Boards" (collections of things that you have pinned) private or share them with only certain people.

What makes Pinterest easy is the Pin it marker on the Browser. It shows up no matter what website I go to and in order to save a site I just click on the P! In order to get mine I had to go to the Chrome store because I use Chrome. There are instructions for how to get one no matter what browser you are using.

After logging in I created a Board called Trip to California I spent some time searching sites relating to the trip I will be taking. At each site that I want to save I click on the P on my browser to save the site. Pinterest offers me several pictures from the website to use as the one that will show when the Board is viewed. I click on the one I want and then it shows me a list of my boards and I tell the program which Board I want to add it to.

Some of the best uses I have heard of for this site involve planning the visual part of events like weddings or DIY projects. It is great to have a picture of each of the things that you are interested in after you have searched. Sometimes the words describing the site do not help you remember.

If you want to see boards you can just search for "pinterest dogs" or whatever interests you. The first site returned should take you to Pinterest pins on that subject. It is a fun way to search for something you are interested in.

Doodle is one of the most helpful sites that I have ever used and you do not even have to log in to use the site, but if you do log in there are more things that you can do. It is a site created for scheduling a group.

With any group it is extremely difficult to get everyone together and find out what is the best common date and tme for the next meeting. Doodle solves that problem. Whoever is in charge of the meeting creates the Doodle and then mails a link out to all of the others who are involved in that meeting asking them to designate what times they are available. If the person in charge of the meeting puts down 5 or 6 times that they can meet then each person is able to check ALL of the times that they can meet.

As each person confirms the meeting everyone can see what the results are. Then all the person in charge of the meeting has to do is to look at Doodle to see what is the best date for the meeting (when they most people can be there). They can then send out this information to the group.

Finally, Instagram is a fun way to send photos to people or to Facebook and other places easily. There is no need to attach something to an email. Instagram is different than the sites above.

It is an app that you can get on your iPad, iPhone, or other Smart Phone. First you need to download the free app from the app store or the Google store for the Android version.

After that all you do is take a picture with your Smart Phone or tablet. The picture shows up and you can edit it automatically. I just play with this until it looks the way that I want it to. When it is ready click NEXT and fill in any of the information. You can click Add People if you want to put markers on the picture so that people can see who is in it by rolling their mouse over the picture.

Then you can decide who you want to share it with. It can be posted to Facebook, put on Twitter, Sent in your email, sent to Tumblr, Flickr or Foursquare automatically. When you click share the photo is automatically shared. You will still have a copy saved in your instagram profile also. You can follow other Instagram users to see all of the photos that they post.

You can use keywords with hashtags in Instagram. Those are words that have # in front of them. You can put important describing words about your pictures with the # mark in front of them in order to help people searching that word to find them.

To search go to the symbol on the bottom of the screen that looks like the compass rose on a map (showing West, North, East, South) and click on it. It will take you to a screen where you can type in what you want to see. You can search for a specific user OR for a hashtag. I searched for #cats and it returned 6,795,304 photos! I guess I need to narrow my terms next time! Also, when I looked at them very few were actually cats although they were not offensive photos.

Finding a Job Using Online Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:10:00 +0000

It can be daunting it to look for a job if you are not comfortable with technology. Many of the places to look for jobs are online. If you go to many places to apply they have a computer right there that you can use. You may even feel that your outdated computer skills will make it hard to get any job, even if you successfully apply.

Here are some things that might help with your job hunt. I assume that if you are reading this blog you can use a mouse and know how to get onto the Internet.

1. Linked In is a network similar to Facebook, but rather than connecting to friends and family the goal of Linkedin is to help you connect with people professionally. It can provide you with job possibilities while also helping you to connect to people who can write you a recommendation. You can also follow a company so that you are notified when there are changes on their profile.

2. Workplace Reviews: Looking online to find out what employees of places you may apply are saying might be helpful. I just typed "employment 'name of company' reviews and got many helpful websites. The two most common are listed below. The Glass Door allows you to see all sorts of things about the company that you are considering including Salary, Who is Interviewing, and a list of Job Openings. You can create a notification so that it sends you email whenever a new job you are interested in is posted. On Indeed you can post your resume and employers can post a job

Glass Door
Indeed

3. Filling out an Online Application: Some online applications require that all of your documents (resume, cover letter, etc...) need to be uploaded in .pdf format. If you have typed your resume using word it probably has a .doc ending. To make it a .pdf often you have to go to FILE>PRINT and then choose PDF (usually at the bottom of the window). The computer will ask you where you want to put it (the same as saving) and will change it into a .pdf. Unlike saving as, a .pdf makes a picture of your document, so it cannot be edited or changed.

4. Writing a Resume In your word processor (Word, Open Office, Pages, etc) there are often templates built in. These are pages that are already formatted like a resume. All you need to do is to type and replace words that have been put in the right spaces. To find out if your program has templates for this go to FILE>OPEN>TEMPLATES and look through what is there to see if there is a template you like. If not, you can go online to look for a template. Here are some links to free templates online.

http://resumizer.com/free_resume_templates.htm This one has a free version and a for pay version.

http://www.resume-now.com/rna.aspx Build your resume online with several choices of format. You must log in and create a password.

http://www.primermagazine.com/2011/earn/7-free-resume-templates This has an article about things you should include in a good resume.

http://resumecompanion.com/resume/resume-templates This has 1500 templates that are all sorted by job type.

There are lots of other sites that provide templates. There are also courses that teach you how to make a resume. Below is a link to one example. Search Google for resume writing course and you will see 15,000,000,000 results. There are also courses at your local Junior College and through Employment Centers at your city government.

http://www.universalclass.com/i/course/resume-writing-tutorial.htm This is an online class. It costs $35 and will give you 1.2 CEUs.

Another possibility that is a bit more expensive is to have someone write your resume for you. If you have trouble putting your experience into words this might be for you. This is an example of a list of services in Austin, TX.

http://localresumeservices.com/Austin-Resume-Services-Writers.php

5. Job Search Websites

http://www.Monster.com - There is lots of information and job hunting advice as well as a searchable list of jobs on this site.

http://www.careerbuilder.com/ - This site has other resources as well. You sign up and create a password so that you can get back into your account.

http://www.simplyhired.com/ - Simply Hired allows you to search for a job by category.

http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/294523/the-10-best-job-search-websites - This site reviews the links above as well as many others.

Finally, remember that EVERYTHING you have done online is easy for any employer to find and lasts forever. It is important that you do a search on your name to see what comes up.

If nothing shows up when you type in your name it is not always good. It means that you have no digital footprint and depending on the job you are looking for that might be bad.

It is always possible that something surprisingly bad might come up. A friend of mine did a search and several years ago she was arrested for a minor issue. Some company takes mug shots and posts them for anyone to see. In order to have them to take your picture down you have to send them money. At least if you know that something like that is out there you can explain it in an interview or a cover letter.

http://mugshots.com

One last thing! You can call I'm not a Geek.com at (512)560-2609 and spend 1 hour brushing up on your skills or getting help with writing that resume or searching for jobs!

10 Ways to use a Spreadsheet (Excel)

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:02:00 +0000

Spreadsheets are one of the most under-appreciated pieces of software. People don't realize how helpful they can be. I use them all of the time. With a spreadsheet you can easily sort by any column to bring up the information that is helpful to you. You can also put in formulas and graphs to give your information more meaning. My favorite way to use a spreadsheet is to do a Google Drive Spreadsheet. If you use Google Drive you can share the spreadsheet with others and work on it together or even make it so that the other person can see it, but not edit it.

Here are 10 ways that Spreadsheets can make your life easier!

1. Any Check List - There are other ways to make check lists, but a spreadsheet is a great way to keep track of dates. You can also sort or create a notes column to remind you of anything that is important. I used to use a spreadsheet to keep track of students who brought in signed field trip forms. I had a column for their first name, last name, a column with the date they handed it in and a column with notes that would remind me if I had called their parent. When most were brought in I could easily sort on the column with the dates and find which ones were blank and follow up on them.

There are many things in life that you can keep track of this way if you want/need to. You can keep a list of what you ate, figure out car mileage easily, keep track of dates and where you ate out, keep track of medications dates and times for taking and check off if you have taken them. Comment below if you think of other things!

This How To article might help you.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/use-excel-check-boxes-to-create-a-list-totaling-spreadsheet/1041101

2. Login/Registration/Password Data - These days you have to keep track of SO MANY different passwords and log in names for different websites that you use. Most people have a system of scraps of paper or notebooks where they keep lists of all of their passwords. What if you created a spreadsheet with one column that has a link to the website, one column with the login and a third column with the passwords. What if you kept all of this on a thumb drive that you could take with you easily anywhere? That way it would not be on your computer where it could possibly get hacked into or on little pieces of paper that get lost or that you don't have when you are somewhere away from your desk.

3. Christmas Gift List - I tend to forget what I have given people from year to year. I am sure that I think of giving certain people the same thing from year to year. So, I started a spreadsheet where I list the people I give gifts to. It has columns with a year title for each column. Then when it is Christmas time I add the gifts next to each person. I can see what I have given people for the last years. It is really helpful. I suppose if I cared I could add a column for money spent each year and total it at the bottom so that I can have an idea of how I am doing with spending.

4. Anything that you might want to sort. I enter clients into a list on a regular basis, but occasionally want to sort by last name, or where I met them. Sorting is extremely easy. Depending on the Spreadsheet you use all you do is click on the letter at the top of a column and then either look for the down triangle to click or got to DATA-Sort Ascending or Sort Descening. This will sort the whole table by whatever column you have chosen. It really helps to bring to the top the information that you might be looking for. One example is a spreadsheet with data about what was donated to a Silent Auction. One of the columns was who asked for the donation. If I wanted to find out who got the most donations I could sort the spreadsheet by the ASKED column. It would be easy to scan down and see who got the most. OR it is possible that I have forgotten to type some information into a column. To find the blank spaces I can sort by that column and the blank spaces will come to the top. This does not permanently change anything. A spreadsheet can be sorted any way and then sorted back.

5. Anything where you have to add or average a lot of numbers. There are tons of formulas for figuring out different things in a spreadsheet, but I do not have much occasion for using most of them. The two that I regularly use are SUM and AVERAGE. Spreadsheets are made to put in formulas very easily.

Click on the space you where you want the answer to showClick on one of the three symbols to the side. fx means Formula, the second one that looks like a capitol E means Sum and of course the third means Equal.
If you choose fx it will give you a list of all of the fomulas you can choose from. There are a lot. If you choose the second one it will give you the formula to sum the numbers you indicate. If you use the third one you will have to choose from the pull down list to your left and choose one of the formulas.
When you choose this it should put the answer to the formula in the box you have selected.

I know that these instructions are a bit hard to follow, so feel free to call and set up an appointment if you want to really learn how to do this. Or check on YouTube to see a video of how to do this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJPjs-lITAw

There are lots of videos to help you learn how to use various formulas in Excel. It is worth checking out!

6. To create a graph to show information in a way that is easy to understand. You have seen lots of graphs that help you to better understand various information.

Here is one that shows which the places that people use to get to this blog.

Here is a pie chart showing the World Distribution of Wealth in 2000.

To create a graph first enter all of the information that you want to show in your graph. Then highlight the columns that contain that information and click INSERT>CHART and select the type of chart that you want to create. When you are done the chart will be inserted onto the page. The chart is editable by color and titles and many other things.

In order to learn better how to do this you can go to http://youtube.com and search for creating a graph in a spreadsheet.

This is a good one, but there were about 7,000 to choose from!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv5m00YS_4I

7. Financial Record Keeping - There are lots of premade spreadsheets for keeping financial records, so I will not go into this thoroughly. I do simple things like keeping track of my mileage so that I can get an easy total of it at tax time. I also use it to keep track of what I make working with people each week. When I want to do more complicated record keeping I use Quicken. Many people use Quickbooks or other software already created to keep that sort of information and give you the reports that you might need. There are also templates that can give you a preformatted spreadsheet so that all you have to do is fill in the cells with information and numbers.

Microsoft Office-Recipe Tracker, Invoice, Financial, Personal Inventory, Flow Chart and many more
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/excel-templates-FX102828204.aspx

Free Spreadsheet Templates - Wedding Planner, Vacation Home Manager
http://www.spreadsheetmarketplace.com/frsp.html

There are many others. To find them I went to Google and typed "spreadsheet template" and there were a whole bunch of them listed.

8. Donations to a silent auction - The board I am on kept this one on a Google Spreadsheet. It was easy that way for all of us to share the document. We could add to it and see a current copy. This allowed us to check before going to a business to ask for donations. It also allowed the person coordinating to see that donations were coming in regularly.

9. Keeping track of about anything - I use a spreadsheet to keep track of the places that I have called to make contact for I'm not a Geek.com. I have a column for the name of the place, the date I called or visited, who I talked to, the phone number, the website and other notes.

10. Managing Vacation Property, Gardening, Wines, Exercise Plans, Grades, Investments, Sports, Games, Household Budget, Calendar, Agenda, etc... Again, there are templates online for all of these that you can freely download and use. They have the formulas built in and so are easy to use.

Dewitty Computer Center

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:50:00 +0000

Last week I attended a day out of a two day forum on the Digital Divide which took place at the LBJ school. People were there from lots of different states and I learned a great deal. One of the main things I learned about is the:

DEWITTY JOB TRAINING AND EMPLOYMENT CENTER

It is located on Rosewood Dr. here in Austin, Texas. One of the services that they offer is a free computer lab staffed by people who will help you with what you need to do. It is called Austin FreeNet. Since it is part of the Dewitty Job Training and Employment Center there are many people there who need help with Resumes and Filling out Forms. They said that in April there are lots of people working on filing their taxes online. It is free for people to use the lab and they help you with whatever you need.

Austin FreeNet http://www.austinfree.net/ This page has a good summary of the meeting that I attended. They run computer labs and training in lots of different locations. See this page for a list of their locations.

If you need to learn technology you will want to check this place out!

Do you Tweet? Some ideas on Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:54:00 +0000

Twitter is everywhere.

Recently....

when I watch TV, especially the news shows, I am being invited to follow someone.
I can follow my favorite grocery store or clothing store.
When the bomb first went off in Boston a person who was there first thought of checking Twitter to see what happened. When there was nothing yet he sent out a tweet to his followers.

Twitter is a way to send a short message to a group of people who follow you. It is great for stores because they can send out one short message to let all of their loyal customers know something like what will be on sale soon. It is a way to connect to other people who are interested in the same things that you are.

TIP #1 After you sign up the next thing to do is to find some people to follow. You can follow regular people who are also using Twitter, movie stars, newspapers and shows, and stores. There is a Search window at the top right side of the page. Type the name of the person, or organization that you want to follow in the search window. If they are on Twitter the program will find them and you can click on the Follow button.

TIP #2 Often when you choose to follow someone they follow you back, but not always. President Obama has a Twitter account and you might want to follow it to see what he is up to. Here is what his page says about who follows him and who he follows. You can actually click to see who these people are.

TIP #3 It is easy to stop following (unfollow) someone. There is no notification when you stop following someone, so you can be sure that no feelings are hurt. To stop following someone you just open the list of who you are following and click on the word Following next to their name. When you roll over the button it turns red and says "unfollow" and then if you click they stay on your list, but the button next to them says Follow. You can click it again to begin following them.

TIP #4 If you want to look at everything that one person has said on Twitter just search for them by typing their name in the search window. It will take you to their profile and then you will see ONLY what they have posted. Try it out with my Twitter. My twitter name is @jfriesen. If you do this search you will find a note especially for Blog readers. Also if you see @jfriesen (or another name) on a tweet it means that the tweet was written especially for that person.

TIP #5 Hash tags # are used to create one word that everyone can agree upon so that when you search for that word you get all of the tweets about that topic. For example, yesterday was Earth Day, so there was a #earthday hash tag. If you search for that it will bring up all of the posts from everyone, not only your followers that have the #earthday in them.

TIP #6 RT means Retweet. If you read something you really think is important on Twitter you may want to retweet it. That will send it out to all of your Twitter followers. Retweeting helps get important news out.

TIP #7 DM means that you want to send the message directly to one person rather than to your whole list of followers.

This symbol indicates that you can follow this person or place. They want you to keep track of them and keep in touch with what they are doing.

There are lots of programs that allow you to see Twitter in different ways. It is worth looking at them to see if you like how any of them work. These are programs that download to your computer and connect with your Twitter feed so that it shows up in columns or in other ways that may make it easier to read or follow. There are many others than those listed below.

Tweetdeck

Twitterific

HootSuite

A STORY

When I was writing this I wanted to check on what was "trending" on Twitter. Trending is a measure of what is getting the most attention. Someone had hacked the Associated Presses Twitter and sent out a note that the White House had been Bombed and that President Obama was injured. It was not true, but it was retweeted quickly by many people so much that the stock market dropped. A few seconds later the Associated Press sent out a note about it being untrue and the market went back up. Look at this interesting graph!

The ease of using and following Twitter on a Smart Phone has made it very popular. With just a glance I can check to see if I have any new "tweets" and keep up to date on the people I am following. The other reason that Twitter has become so popular is that it is instant. At SXSW in Austin where it was first used people were using it to communicate to their followers where the cool things were and where to meet. You could easily tweet "Come to Antones to see Willy Nelson! He just walked in!". Pretty cool. It is good for conferences where there are lots of people and places to be and you want to keep in communication in a quick way.

Windows Tricks in Windows 8 and earlier versions of Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:24:00 +0000

Windows Explorer is extremely helpful. It is allows you to see all of the things that are on your computer and work with them. This post will guide you through using Windows Explorer or File Explorer (in Windows 8) to set up your computer and to understand what is in it.

Getting to Windows Explorer

Earlier Versions of Windows

Right click on the "orb" or little colorful windows icon that is in the bottom left of the screen when you start up the computer. One of the choices that comes up is Windows Explorer.

Windows 8
To get to File Explorer which is the same as Windows Explorer first choose the Desktop from the Ribbon Menu. Then click on the file folders on the bottom left of the screen.

A Walk Through

When the window first opens on the left you see a list of all of the things that are in your computer. When your arrow is pointing to them you see little triangles next to each item. These triangles mean that there are sub folders inside each of the folders. When you click one of these triangles it will change the left side list by showing you what is in the folder, but it will not change the right side at all.

The right side shows what is inside whatever folder or item is select. Try clicking on different icons and you will see how the right side changes.

Changing the Look

Sometimes it helps to have the programs and folders on your computer look a different way so that you can find them easily. For example this is shows the same list of files as above in Detail View. This is nice because you can see the size of the file and when it was last edited. You do that by choosing the icon that shows the way that you want the files to look. The picture above is in Windows 8, but a very similar picture can be found in other Windows programs.

Folders Creating and Organizing

To create a new folder right click on the area where you want the new folder to show up. A window will appear. Look for the word NEW and put your mouse on it. Another window will open up that says Folder (or Library) and when you click on it a new folder will open up. You can change the name of the folder by typing in the name you would like it to have.

You can think of a Library as the top level in a system of file folders. It is like the drawer of the file cabinet. Inside the library are folders that have files in them. Libraries can even have documents in them that are NOT in a folder. You decide how all of this is organized.

Windows comes with four Libaries to start with: Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos. Inside each one of those are files and folders. When you save a file you can choose to save it anywhere that you want to, but this structure is supposed to make it easy to find your work.

Let's say that two people are using the same computer. You may want to have a Folder for each person and then inside that folder create Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders to keep the two accounts separate. There are other ways to do this that are beyond the scope of this post.

Moving and Deleting Files or Folders

I think that using Windows Explorer is the easiest way to move and organize my files.
1. Get the left side arranged so that all of the folders needed are showing.
2. Click on the folder that contains the file I want to move so that I can see it on the right side and drag it to the left side to move it where I want it to go.
3. When the folder is highlighted let go of the file you are moving and it will drop into the folder.

Cut or Copy and Paste?

If you want to MOVE the file so that it is in the new place and there are not two files in different locations choose to CUT and PASTE the file.

If you want to have one copy of the file in the original location and create a second copy in another folder you can COPY and PASTE the file.

If you press down the "ctrl" key when you are moving the file it will switch between "copy" and "cut".

Clicking Once or Twice

People I know and have worked with seem very concerned about when you click once and when you click twice. This has never bothered me. I click once and wait. If nothing happens I click twice. I guess that doing that for a while has made me intrinsically understand when to click once and when to click twice. I usually just do the right one, but programmers have made these rules. It could be that some people learn better by knowing the rules and applying them, so here they are:
1. To open any program on your desktop click twice.
2. To open any program listed at the bottom of your screen click once.

You can also change how many clicks or how quickly you must click by going to mouse in the Control Panel and looking at what settings there are.

Right and Left Click

Almost everything is a Left Click. The left click should be your default. Right Clicks do EXTRA things and are very helpful. Usually they bring up a list of choices of things that you can do for the item you are clicking on. For example if you right click on the desktop you can create a folder, change the background picture, personalize your computer, sort the folders on the desktop, etc...

This post was inspired by a class on Windows at the Austin Groups for the Elderly Computer Center in Austin Texas. It is a great place to come for low cost computer classes.http://www.ageofcentraltx.org/computer_lab.php

Taking a Screen Shot with various Devices

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 22:39:00 +0000

Mac
You can take screen shots with keystrokes or with a program on the computer called GRAB. Grab always gives you a chance to save your screenshot as a .tiff with whatever name you want. The keystrokes automatically name them Screenshot with the date and time it was done. They are saved as .jpg

Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop

Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop

Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop

Command-Control-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it to the clipboard

Command-Control-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it to the clipboard

Command-Control-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it to the clipboard

Grab is a very basic free software on Mac that does exactly what the keystrokes above do. The main differences is that when you use the keystrokes your screenshot is saved automatically as a .jpg on your desktop and named Screen Shot with the date and time. If you use Grab the screenshot opens as a .tiff and you can save it in with a name and location of your own choosing. If you want either one to be in another format you have to open them in a different program like Preview and save them again in the new format.

Some of this article is copied from MacRumors http://guides.macrumors.com/Taking_Screenshots_in_Mac_OS_X This Wiki is a guide for Macs and other devices. A wiki is a shared webpage and members add the content.

PC
The Snipping tool can be found under Accessories in Windows 7 and many other Windows Operating systems. Snipping a screen or window allows you to save it with your own choice of name and location.

Another way to do a screen shot that is built in is to use the Print Screen button. It will take a screenshot of the whole screen. Alt-Print Screen takes a screenshot of the window that you click on rather than the whole desktop.

These methods both create a picture that is on your clipboard. If you want to use the picture on a document you can just paste it onto the document (Edit-Paste)

If you wanted it to be a picture file and to use it somewhere else or email it you need to open a different image program. Paint is a free program on your PC. Open the program and then paste the picture on your clipboard onto the blank picture space that you see. You can then save it.

iPad and iPhone
Both the iPad and the iPhone will take screenshots when you press the home key and the on/off switch at the same time. The screenshot goes into the Gallery and you can download it to your computer the same way you do any other picture.

Surface with Windows 8
To take a screenshot hold down the windows key at the bottom of the keyboard while hitting the down volume button on the side. The picture will go into a folder in the Picture Library called Screenshots. The files are .png files and you can email them as attachments to get them onto your computer from the Surface or use them directly on the Surface to insert into a document.

The Surface also has a tool program called the Snipping Tool. It will allow you to take a screenshot of a window, a rectangular selection or a freeform selection.

Android
A screenshot with any device running the Android system (most Smartphones that are not iPhones) can be done by pressing the volume down and the power keys at the same time. You must have a SD Card in your phone to take and store pictures.

Downloads

All of the methods above come with the device that you are using. If you want better quality screenshots or if you want screen video that shows what you are doing the following are free or low cost programs that you can download

Jing Great for screen shots, video recording and has an extremely useful online sharing feature.

Snapz Pro X is very popular and can even record movies. It has a large range of features, $69 with free 30 day trial

SnapNDrag is also popular and offers several features in addition to those offered by the default screen capture tools. With SnapNDrag, users take a screenshot, then drag it to their destination. SnapNDrag is freeware, but also has a pro version.

Virus Protection on Windows 8

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:13:00 +0000

This is NOT an April Fool's Post!! Have a great day!

Windows 8 comes with Virus Protection built in. You do NOT have to purchase McAfee, Norton or download AVG like I wrote about in an earlier post.

Here is what you can do to see what is already set up.

Go to the Charms Menu (the bar to the far right of your screen that appears when you put your mouse in the top corner)
Click on SEARCH. There is a picture of a magnifying glass to represent it.
Click on Apps if it is not already chosen and type in “windows defender”.
A window will come up showing you how Windows Defender is set up.

It is set up to automatically do real time protection and to keep up with new virus and spyware definitions. You can do a scan manually by clicking on Scan Now. A full scan took me less than an hour while I did other things on the Surface. My copy of Windows 8 was set to do quick scans and it had just done one when I was working on it and I didn’t even notice.

There are four tabs on the window that appears:

Home-This tab is the one that always appears when you set up the program and is described above.

Update-This tab shows you when the virus and spyware definitions were last updated. There are new viruses and spyware everyday, so it is set to automatically update, but you can click the button and manually update if you want.

History-Virus protection programs quarantine items that might be harmful. You can see a list of these items or a list of the ones that were scanned and allowed or both by clicking on the View Details button in the middle on the bottom of the window

Settings-If you know of certain files that you never want scanned you can designate them from the scan here. There is probably no reason to do this since the scan is done in the background and doesn’t take too long, but if you want it to go faster for some reason you can designate that certain things are not scanned. You can also set how long the computer keeps quarantined files (that were identified as having viruses)

SHARING VIRUS INFORMATION

Microsoft collects the virus information from your computer to help protect everyone who uses the Microsoft Security program. You can opt out of this or allow them to collect more information by going to Settings and choosing MAPS (Microsoft Active Protection Service). The default is set to Basic membership.

THE SEARCH FUNCTION

Something I learned when trying to find apps and while writing this is that SEARCH on the Charms Panel is really powerful. If there is anything that you used to do with your computer and need to find out how to do it with Windows 8 you can just type the item into the search window and then choose Apps, Settings or Files and you will be given a list of the items it finds. I used it to find Windows Defender and Control Panel.

Prezi

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 23:17:00 +0000

If you have to make a presentation and you are tired of Powerpoint there is a different way to do one and it has some real advantages for certain types of presentations. You can find the program at http://prezi.com.

Powerpoint has been around for a long time and some people are tired of the same templates and the fact that it is linear. If you are working with content that is best presented in a linear way you might want to use Powerpoint, but Prezi encourages you to be creative and show your information in a new way.

To begin you need to sign up for a Prezi account. You can sign up for free to try it out and upgrade later if you need more space or features.

Next choose a username and password. The account you create is nice because it allows you to work on them and show them from any computer. You can make them private or public. You have control over how they are used. So, create a username and password that you will remember (not the same one you use for your bank account and other important places you log into) and write it down on a piece of paper or booklet and keep it somewhere you can find it.

After you have signed in the best thing to do is to take a look at some of the Prezis that other people have created and made public. That way you can see how they work and start to imagine the way you might use Prezi. There are lots of great examples to look at to get ideas.

You start by choosing a template. There are many templates to choose from Then you can import pictures, video and of course use text. You can even import already finished Powerpoint Presentations. First put all of the content you want to use onto the page. It does not matter exactly where each thing is placed because in the end you will create a path to show what order you want to show it in.

Once everything is in place you choose to create a path and a line shows up with each item (text, picture, video) numbered. Then you can play it to see what it looks like. You can make it go automatically or have it move from each number to the other with clicks.

See the one that I created while writing this blog post.
http://bit.ly/YDRVxR

What is a BLOG READER (RSS Service)?

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 23:16:00 +0000

NEWSPAPER SUBSCRIPTION

Every morning when I get up, I go out to the driveway to get my newspaper and most of the time it is there. I have subscribed to it and so it comes every day. I pay for this service.

BLOG SUBSCRIPTION

Blogs are different. A blog writer may write twice a day or once a week or once a month. How is a person who reads blogs supposed to keep track of when new posts appear? What if you want to read more than one blog and don't want to keep going back and checking if there is something new?

That is what Blog Readers (or RSS Services) do! They collect notices of your favorite blogs all in one place so that you can look at one place online and the unread posts from favorite blogs will be listed. You can read the ones that sound interesting to you and skip the other ones. It is free.

You may have seen this symbol. The letters RSS stand for Really Simple Syndication (or easy subscription!) It means that a blog, or a newspaper column can be added to your Blog Reader. The blog with that symbol has a feed. A feed is code that allows it to show up in a way that you can read it each time there is something new. Sometimes you can click that symbol to get the blog into your reader and sometimes blogs have a link to "subscribe" and you click that. Below I will walk you step by step into how to subscribe to this blog.

So, if you want to SUBSCRIBE to my blog so that it is easy to check in your Blog Reader to see if a new post was written here are the steps:

1. Choose a Blog Reader. I decided to use Feedly. Google is retiring Google Reader, so many people are just transferring their "feeds" or subscriptions to Feedly. There are a lot of programs out there that will do this for you. I have made a list below. Find one that looks inviting to you and give it a try. You can change to a different one later if you decide it doesn't work for you. See below for a list of Blog Readers to try.

2. Sign up for the service by following the directions on their site. You will have to have a username and password like you do for most sites.

3. Click to open a new tab or a new window in your browser and come to the "Help I'm not a Geek" blog http://helpimnotageek.blogspot.com.

4. Look for the words "Subscribe" on the left side.

5. When you click on the button below "Subscribe" with the word Posts you will be given several choices. I am using Feedly and it is not listed, so I will have to click the one that says Atom and copy the URL (the web address that starts with html://)

6. Then go to Feedly and click on "+ website" paste the address into the window that shows up and it will find the blog and you can click on it to subscribe. If you just click + website you can also type just a word into it (I typed in "recipes") and the program will go out and find lots of websites about that topic. You can then look at them and click on the ones you are interested in subscribing to.

As I was going through these steps it was difficult to show you all that was happening. Feedly does a lot automatically. You will have to try it to see. In Chrome, Feedly shows up on the main screen after I scroll it to the right when I go to a new tab.

If you have not started reading some blogs you really should give it a try. There are great ones on every subject. I will list a few at the end of this post. Feel free to comment and ask if you are looking for a blog or information about a certain topic! I will look for it!

Great Blogs to try out
The Huffington Post   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
The Pioneer Woman Cooks http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/
The Laughing Squid Interesting Art   http://laughingsquid.com/
PopWatch (Celebrity Info) http://popwatch.ew.com
Arts Beat-Art Section of the New York Times http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com
Mental Floss   http://www.mentalfloss.com/
Golf   http://www.hookedongolfblog.com/
All Things Dog   http://www.allthingsdogblog.com/
Obsessed with Scrapbooking http://www.obsessedwithscrapbooking.com/

RSS Services (Blog Readers)
http://feedly.com
http://netvibes.com
http://newsgator.com
http://myyahoo.com
http://bloglines.com

Solving Problems and iPhoto Faces

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Sometimes this blog is personal. That is, I write about a problem that I have been having and how I resolved it (or didn't). This is one of those posts,

The other day I was meeting with a Mac Club and one of the members wanted to organize her pictures. I told her that since she had a Mac she might find that iPhoto was the best way to do it. We went into iPhoto and started looking around. I showed her how my pictures were organized into events and how to tag pictures and give them titles. Then someone else said that you should use FACES as a way to organize your pictures. Well, I have never used Faces. It seemed like it would just take too long and not be all that helpful. I am still not sure what I think about it, but I found out that my copy of FACES was not working like it was supposed to.

When you open iPhoto and click on Faces you get the message saying that to get started open a photo, then click Name and then type the name of the person in the photo. Well, after I had found Name icon (in the bottom left side) I typed in the name and the corkboard did not change. It should have put that person's picture on the corkboard and found all of the pictures that matched that person. My corkboard still had the picture above on it.

I tried this several times with no results. So I decided to do what I usually do to try to figure something out. I Googled it. I used the words "iPhoto faces no change in corkboard". There were lots of results, so I knew that this was a problem for more people than just me. Some of the results said iPhoto 11, so I had to confirm my version of iPhoto first. When I clicked on the iPhoto menu and then clicked "About iPhoto" I found out that I had version 9.0. Since there were still problems with iPhoto 11 I knew that upgrading would not solve my problem.

In one of the discussions that I scanned through there was a comment from someone

1. "While holding down the Control key (bottom left on keyboard-says "control"
2. we clicked the iPhoto library that was in my pictures folder

3. and selected the "Show Package Contents" menu option.

Then we threw out (click on the file name and drag it to the trash-usually at the bottom right of the dock) the face_blob.db and face.db and restarted the computer -

(my note) The files are automatically recreated when you restart your computer, so don't worry about losing them.

Now iPhoto works fine - the Faces thing ran showing some sort spinning clock icon as it found all the potential faces in all my photos - "

I tried this and it solved my problem! It took a long time to scan through all of my photos. Now when I click on NAME and Name someone it goes through all of the my photos and tries to find matches. I have to confirm or deny that they are the person that I typed and then their face shows up on the corkboard!

Places to find REAL Geeks

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:32:00 +0000

Today’s post is a little different. I want to share with you some things I have been learning while trying to make connections. One place I am contacting is small IT companies. These are companies that are started by people who are real Geeks. They know how to repair computers and they often buy, sell or repair all types of technology.

The very first thing you should do when you are going to purchase a computer is ask WHAT AM I GOING TO USE THE COMPUTER FOR? If you just want to type some papers or look at Facebook online and email a bit you will not need a brand new computer with lots of memory. However if you are wanting to watch movies or edit photos and video you need a computer with enough memory and speed that you do not have to wait every time you click until the computer works. Always be ready with that information when you talk to someone about purchasing.

I started by looking at http://yelp.com. I think that YELP is a good place to look when you are wondering about a service (or restaurant, or business). Many businesses are listed and ordinary people who use their services write short reviews of their experience with the business and rate them with one to five stars. Usually you can learn a lot by reading what people say about businesses and how many stars they give. There are always some customers who are not happy, but if it is only one or two out of 25 usually that is a pretty good sign.

Here are some of the companies I learned about through Yelp.

StarTech PC

http://startechpc.com

PC Genie

http://www.pcgeniecomputerrepair.com/

Voted the #1 Computer Repair place in Austin in 2012. They have a page on recycling computers. They will take your old, non fixable equipment (Desktop Computer, Laptop Computer, Hand Held Device, Mobile Phone, Games Console, or Flat Screen Monitor). Shocking Fact: Up to 20 million “obsolete” PCs are discarded annually in the USA alone. They say, “let’s waste less”

Nerd Austin

http://www.nerdaustin.com/

Mr. Notebook

http://www.mrnotebook.com/

Mr. Computer

http://www.mrcomputeraustin.com/

Computer Medic of Austin

http://www.computermedicaustin.com/

If you need a new computer or laptop and cannot spend what it would cost to get a brand new one you may want to check out these businesses (first on Yelp to see what other customers say!). Most of them have used computers for sale at a very affordable price.

Questions to ask about a used computer purchase:

1. How long will this computer in it's current condition last?

2. Are there some things that cannot be loaded on this computer? (older computers have smaller memories than newer ones and you may not be able to install more memory.

3. How long is the warrenty on this computer? As soon as you purchase the computer use it as much as you can during that time to be sure it does not have problems.

Besides the savings when you purchase a used computer think also of the fact that you are keeping one more computer from being thrown into a landfill, at least until you are done with it!

P.S. I have I’m not a Geek listed on Yelp. If you have worked with me and have anything to say feel free to rate your experience and write your comments!

Clean Up and Maintenance of Your Computer

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 23:46:00 +0000

This is one of those important things that no one tells you to do and you always feel uncomfortable knowing that there is probably something you should be doing. Then if your computer breaks down one day you think it must be your fault.

Actually taking good care of your computer is not too difficult or confusing. There are things that you can do beyond what I talk about here, but they are not necessary for most home users. See links below if you want to know more.

There are things that EVERY computer owner should do regardless of if you are using Mac or PC and then a few specific things to each operating system.

The MOST important thing to do for any computer is to BACK UP regularly. It can (and does) happen that your computer completely shuts down. You do not want to lose all of the files that you have on your computer, so it is important to have a second copy. You can use an external hard drive, a CD or DVD, or somewhere on the Cloud using a service like Dropbox, iCloud, SkyDrive, Google Drive or one of the many others. Here is a link to several reviews of free back up software. http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-backup-program. When you back up your files are all backed up so that you can get to them again, but not your programs. If you want to have a backup of all of your programs so that you do not have to download them individually again you can use Acronis or Norton Ghost which will "take a snapshot" of your whole hard drive.
Physical cleaning of the outside of your computer. This is important because the crumbs that get into your keyboard, the dust that gets into the fan and the general grime can cause your computer not to work as well as it can. Here are suggestions for each of the parts.

Screen - Use screen cleaner that does not have ammonia or alcohol. For a laptop, set the back of the screen onto a towel or something soft on a table while holding up the keyboard with one hand. Spray the cleaner onto a soft cloth and clean the screen gently with a circular motion.
Keyboard - Using a similarly damp cloth clean the outside of the keys. Use compressed air to clean out the crumbs and dust that collects under the keys. You can use an antibacterial wipe on the keys since lots of hands touch a keyboard.
Wipe outside with the damp cloth.
Clean up the files on your desktop by either putting them into folders that are meaningful OR moving them to other folders in your file system. Each thing on your desktop takes up some of the memory that your computer needs to run. Your computer can slow down if there are too many things just left on the desktop.

Always do the updates that your computer recommends. Most of the time a window will pop up saying that you should update something and you can press OK or cancel. If you always cancel these things you may be stopping your computer from doing some things that can really help.

One more good habit to get into is to empty the trash weekly or even daily depending on how much you use your computer. Everything in the trash is taking up some of your memory until you empty it out. The whole reason that the trash can exists is so that you can change your mind and drag something back out of the trash if you decide that you need it. Once you are sure that everything is not needed empty what is there so that it does not take up space.

Use a surge protector for plugging in your computer. If the electricity is interrupted (like when you are struck with lightening) it will protect your computer from burning out.

Completely shut down and restart your computer regularly (maybe overnight?). When your computer shuts down and restarts many things happen in the background that clean up some of that background stuff that the computer automatically does.

PCs (by this I mean any computer that is not a Mac. It could be IBM, HP, Dell or one of many other companies. You should add these practices to the above in order to maintain your computer.

Make sure you have a good Anti-Virus program and that you keep it up to date. There are lots of Anti Virus programs that you can download and you probably have one that came with your computer. There are free ones http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-anti-virus-software.htm and also ones that you can pay for like Symantec, Norton or Barracuda. Do not load more than one on your computer because they can conflict with one another and will not be effective.

Regularly download updates because hackers are always busy creating new ways to get into your computer. If you want to avoid getting a virus there are a few things that you can regularly do.
NEVER open links from email if you don't know the person or even if you know them and they JUST sent a link with nothing else. There are hackers that send out email with a link and make it look like it is coming from someone safe. The link might open to a website with an automatically downloading virus
Do NOT trust any email from a bank, PayPal, Amazon, Western Union, or any company that looks legitimate, but tells you to give them an account number, send them money or anything that sounds fishy. It probably is a scam. There are lots of these going around and it is REALLY easy to click on a link from one of these to find out more, but it is better to just delete them. If it is from a real company they will NEVER ask for personal information like account numbers in email. You can often look in the TO: section at the top to see who it was sent to. If it was sent to a bunch of people that you do not know it is spam.

Defragment your computer hard drive monthly. As you save, delete and move your files around they create gaps in the hard drive space which are not used because they are small bits stuck inbetween other stuff. Defragmenting pushes all of the stuff together creating more open space. This is less important than it used to be since Hard Drives are bigger than they used to be, but it might help if your computer is running slowly. The Defragmenter is on your computer. Most likely you will find it under System Tools-disk defragmenter.

On a Mac

Remember the things above that appled to both computers. Macs have TimeMachine installed which can do your back ups on a regular basis. There are some features of other programs that you can pay for which TimeMachine does not have. Macs get fewer viruses, but it can still be an issue. You can pay for a virus protection program or get one free. Here is a link to a free one: http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-edition.aspx
If your Mac gets slow and bogged down there are a few things you can try to see if they will help. Your Mac has something called Disk Utility which is a program that you can run to see if there are any problems on your hard disk and it will fix them. You can find it by clicking on Mac HD, in the Applications File under Utilities. You can also run a program like Onyx which can clean off the HD of any issues that are slowing it down. Some articles I read called for using the Disk Utility regularly, like every three months.

MacWorld's Maintenance Calendar - MacWorld offers a free download of a calendar to remind yourself when to do different maintenance tasks. http://www.macworld.com/article/1133696/maintenance_cal.html

For even more on cleaning your mac look at this MacWorld article:

http://www.macworld.com/article/1057796/2407mobilemac.html

Ten Tech Skills That Everyone Should Have: Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:37:00 +0000

Here are five more tech skills that EVERYONE should have. If you need help with any of these you may want to give "I'm not a Geek.com" a call at (512)560-2609. I am looking for some people who want to try learning long distance (giving me access to your computer screen so I can see what you are doing), so even if you do not live in Austin give me a call or email to helpimnotageek@gmail.com

Now to the tech skills:

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO USE NETIQUETTE WHEN USING THE INTERNET?

Internet/Email/Social Media etiquette - The proper way to use the internet, write professional emails, use social media in relation to your job.

The main rule to this Net-Etiquette is to consider who you are sending something to. Often people do not think before pressing "send" and end up forwarding lots of junk to other people or saying something private to a whole group. If you use ALL CAPS in an email it is like yelling since there is no intonation when someone reads your note. Also, it is easy to be misunderstood when you are sending a joke or being sarcastic. Be careful.

The first link takes you to Wikipedia which is a great place to learn many things. This article is helpful, but in some places difficult to understand. The second link is an online book which is much easier to understand and you can choose which pages you are interested in reading.

Netiquette - Wikipedia

Netiquette - Online Book - This one is easy to navigate

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO MAKE YOUR COMPUTER SECURE AND SAFE?

Some security and safety issues are: Antivirus, spam, phishing, sharing too much personal information sharing, stalkers and more. It also involves creating good passwords.

Most of us know what a Virus on your computer is and what spam is, but you may not have heard of phishing although it has been around a long time. Phishing is when someone sends you something in email that looks legitimate, but is not. They often have links to what looks like your bank or paypal, but actually are not. The goal of people who do this is to get secret information from you like your bank account number, passwords or other information.

When I get anything asking me to click on a link (URL) first I look to see if it is from someone I know. If not, I roll the mouse over the URL and it shows in the bottom left corner where it is really going. It may look, from the address like it is going to Paypal, but when I roll over and look at the left bottom of the screen it shows that actually it is going somewhere else. If I am not sure I just delete it. People who send messages will understand and resend the message if they do not hear from you. You should also never send messages that just have a link and no message.

Link to more information about phishing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

Cyberstalking means that someone is trying to harass you with multiple emails or saying things that are not true about you through Social Media

More about Cyberstalking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstalking

Google How You Can Protect Your Family Online - This has lots of links to information that is readable about different things you might need to know.
http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/familysafety/

Common Craft Video - How to make a good password
http://www.commoncraft.com/video/secure-passwords

DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU SHOULD BE DOING TO REGULARLY MAINTAIN YOUR COMPUTER?

Look for more information about this in the post coming next week called "Clean Up and Maintenance of Your Computer"

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO FIND PROGRAMS AND APPS THAT YOU MIGHT WANT TO DOWNLOAD TO YOUR COMPUTER OR MOBILE DEVICE?

There are so many apps (applications or programs) available and it is hard to know which ones are good and how to choose.

Qui xey is a helpful search engine that will look for all kinds of apps for you. There is a way to look for only free apps for a PC, paid apps for a mobile device

FreeNew (FN)
This is the place to go to find free apps for many different devices and download them easily, even doing several at once.

DO YOU KNOW HOW COPYRIGHT HAS CHANGED IN THE DIGITAL AGE?
With the addition of computers and the ease of copying and pasting everything Copyright has totally changed. It used to be something that only librarians, inventors, musician, artists and writers needed to think about. If you do anything that you would not like to see replicated somewhere else without your permission (photography is one example) you should take a look at the Library of Congress' Copyright Page.

http://www.copyright.gov/

These tips are rewritten and reworked from http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2012/01/10-tech-skills-every-student-should.html

Ten Tech Skills That Everyone Should Have: Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:21:00 +0000

This post is based on a blog that I read online a while ago. I thought it had some helpful tips, so I have edited it and added a bit of my own stuff. It was written by someone who was thinking about what students need to learn about using technology in school. We are all long passed school, so I wonder how many of these skills you feel comfortable with? Here is the URL of the post it is based on:

http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.fr/2012/01/10-tech-skills-every-student-should.html

Do you know how to do an

effective Internet search?

Common Craft videos are a great, simple and fun way to learn things about technology. This one is about searching. It does have some extra words on it to protect people from downloading and using it because they make their money from people who subscribe to use the videos.

Common Craft Video on Web Search Strategies

Do you know how to create, edit, and save

documents, spreadsheets and presentations?

These are common uses for computers. Almost everyone knows how to create, edit and modify documents. There are many people who are unsure of themselves when it comes to spreadsheets or presentations. Most people use Microsoft Office to create documents, spreadsheets or presentations.

There are other low cost and even free options now. Open Office is a free product that is very much like MS Office. You can download it for free and try it out. When you save your document you have to tell it that you want it to be a .doc so that anyone can open it. Otherwise it is automatically an Open Office document and can only be opened with that program. When I downloaded the newest operating system to my Mac none of my Intel programs would work. MS Office was one of the casualties. I have downloaded and used Open Office and it takes the place of word just fine. I have not tried it for presentations.

Another possibility is Google Drive. It used to be called Google Docs and was upgraded to Google Drive. The difference is that you can download a program to your computer so that you can access your Docs even when you are offline. A future post will have more about Google Drive. It has a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation software and some other things. All of your documents are automatically saved and you can even share them with other people and work on the same document collaboratively.

Open Office

Google Drive

Do you know how to get help when you need it?

Recently I have learned that you can find answers to almost everything by just going to Google and typing in what you want to know. I am soon going to do a post on maintaining your computer and so just to be sure that I don't miss anything important I am going to go to Google and type "computer maintenance". In the first page of links I will probably find links to some very helpful pages. The main problem with this approach can be that you do not understand what they are trying to tell you. If that is an issue here are some links to other sites that may be helpful.

This site is a lot of fun. It is posted as a letter to your parents where you send them videos about things that they may need to learn. You fill in all of the blanks and then press the PREVIEW button at the bottom and it takes you to where you can watch the video. This is a great way to learn and there are lots of choices of videos.

TechSupport help

Can you type?

For the longest time I have been told that "soon people will not need to type because they can just talk to their computers." This has been possible for a long time and maybe sometime we will get used to doing it. Until then it really makes a difference in how fast you can get something done if you can type. Here are a few free programs you may want to try:

Kiran's Typing Tutor

Learn to Type Free

Key Blaze Typing Tutor Software

Typing Tutor - This one has games

If you want to pay for a great program my favorite is Mavis Beacon. There are many others. Just do a Google Search!

Mavis Beacon

Do you know how to use Social Media

(Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc...)?

There is so much to learn in this area. It is like an explosion. The Internet used to be static, meaning that it basically stayed the same. You could not change anything on the Internet. Now everything has changed. You have the power to add, comment, post, and change many parts of the Internet. The most popular is Facebook. Many people have gone to using it as their main way of communicating with other people. There are also many more. I am adding links to many of them. It is not the purpose of this post to explain how to use them all. If you would like me to write specifically about one of them or a part of one of them (more than I have in other posts) please let me know.

Twitter

Facebook

YouTube

Flickr

Picasa

I have run out of time for this posting, so I will have to do the second five in the next post. Let me know what you think I may have missed and what you want to learn about!

Facebook-Constantly Changing

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:51:00 +0000

I guess Facebook has to keep changing in order to be responsive to all of their customers. It can be frustrating to think that all your privacy settings are set up and then to find out that Facebook has changed around how it works. Recently, it seems to me that they have been trying to figure out how to make your experience using Facebook more secure without losing all of the possibilities for networking that is the central purpose of the program.

I just read an article from USA Today (a paper that I usually do not take too seriously) at
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/komando/2013/01/18/kim-komando-facebook-settings/1827413/
It was sent to me by a friend and the article did have several good recommendations. One overall suggestion is that it is good to check your privacy settings every once in a while to be sure they are how you want them to be.

Facebook has added a new link to the right of your name at the top that looks like a lock with three lines next to it. When you click on it and the window opens up you can answer three questions. Who can see my stuff?, Who can contact me? and How do I stop someone from bothering me? Under these three questions is the link to See More Settings. When you click this it will bring you to a place where you can go into each one of your privacy setting areas and make changes. To make a change to them you click on the EDIT link, type in your changes, and then close the window.

There is also a link here for looking at your own profile so you can see the way it looks to someone else who comes to your page. That is really helpful because you can get a feel for what people are seeing about you and decide whether you want to be more private or more public.

To get there go to your privacy settings and look for the words "view as" in this view you will be able to see what people coming to your page see and also check if it is different for the public, your friends and friends of friends.

I suggest you take some time to click through these things and see what you think about the way your Facebook is set up. If this does not make sense to you or you have more questions please do add them as comments to this post and I will get back to them.

Tips on Working with Windows 8

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:44:00 +0000

First a quick review of Windows 8 after about a month of use

I like it. It is not intuitive (easy to figure out), but when you have figured out how to do things it works quickly and smoothly. I like the look of it. So far I have been able to download the apps that I need, but I really don't need many. It comes with Microsoft Office 2013 which is only out in trial form right now, but when it comes out it will automatically be updated on my Surface and I will have it without having to pay huge fees.

The keyboard takes some getting used to and I am much better typing on my MacBook keyboard. I think with practice I can get used to it and not make so many mistakes. It is easier to use than the screen keyboard on the iPad or the screen keyboard that pops up on the Surface. I do not have an iPad keyboard, so I assume that if I did it would work like this does for the Surface.

So, how does it compare to the iPad? They are just different, but both of them are great. The Surface does not have the camera quality that the iPad does and so it does not work well for taking picures or even for just looking at them, but it is OK.

Here are some tips for things that have baffled me that I figured out:

1. Closing programs

ONE

I am in the habit of closing programs that I have been using so that I do not have too many open at the same time. On most computers having too many programs running at the same time can cause the machine to run really slowly. For this reason it bothered me when I kept opening different things in Windows 8 and did not know where they went or how to close them. Here is what I learned:

Windows 8 is not like most operating systems. It has a way of keeping programs open without using a lot of the memory. It does not matter how many programs you have open.

TWO

When a program is open it shows up in the top left hand corner when you put your mouse there. You can then click on it and it will appear in place of the program you were on. Another way to switch is to use the touch screen if you have one and swipe to the right or left and if you have several programs open you can switch between them easily. If you do this slowly and do not slide the whole way across you can create two programs that are open next to each other.

THREE

I really like the way that you can close programs with a touch screen even if it is not necessary. All you need to do is using one finger and swipe from the top to the bottom. First the program shrinks to a small rectangle and then you can get rid of it by swiping clear off of the screen at the bottom.

2. Shutting down the computer

According to Windows website http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/settings-search-shutdown-basics#1TC=t1 (there is other helpful information on this website.)

"In Windows 8 and Windows RT, there's really no need to shut down your PC completely—put it in sleep mode instead. This uses very little power, your PC starts up faster, and you’re instantly back to where you left off."

They say that if it runs out of power it will automatically save everything and then shut down so you don't lose any of your work. If you just close your lid the Windows 8 chooses the sleep mode automatically.

The Shut Down Menu is still available by sliding your touch finger from the right side toward the left or putting your mouse pointer to the top right corner and then sliding down to the Charms Menu (that is what Microsoft calls the bar that shows up at the right side.) Then click on or touch Settings, which is the Gear at the bottom of the Charm Menu. You will see the familiar Power Symbol and when you touch it you will have the choice to sleep, shut down or reboot.

3. Filing email

I have been using the Mail Client that comes with Windows 8 for reading my email. It was not hard to set it up so that it downloads my Gmail. When it was set up it added all of the same folders that I had created on Gmail, but it was not clear at all HOW I could get my mail into those folders. This is also fairly easy once you figure it out.

When you are in Mail and want to file a message, slide up from the bottom with your finger or the mouse. Click on the icon that says MOVE and then click on the folder that you want to move it into. It has to be one of the folders that you have already set up in your email program before.

4. Creating new Folders

This was one of the most puzzling things for me. There did not seem to be any way to set up new folders and I searched and searched online for the answer and could not find it. I finally learned that you cannot create new folders or even delete folders in the Mail program on Windows 8. All folders must be created, reorganized or deleted using the email program that you normally use. For example, I have a gmail.com address, so I have to log into my Gmail account online and make any changes to my folders. The changes are made also in your Mail program on Windows 8.

You Ask, "So, why not just use the Online program like Gmail?"

Sometimes (like when on an airplane, riding in a car, or at a location without WiFi) you may want to keep up with your email. If you open your Mail program in Windows 8 all of your email is downloaded to your computer and then you can look at it and respond even when you are offline. The responses do not get sent until you are online again, but at least they will be saved and waiting for when they can be mailed.

I know that there will be other things that come up as I use this operating system. If you have any questions let me know and I will see if I can figure them out and post the answers I find. I would also love to hear from you if this blog has been helpful to you. It is hard to know if people are reading unless I hear back from you!

Freeing up Memory on your iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 18:28:00 +0000

In order to write this post I looked on line at several pages and I have tried to note below the URLs of the pages that I consulted. You may find more information at these places, but here is a summary with a few additional thoughts from my experience.

Check your usage

Before you start it is helpful to actually know how much memory you have and how much is used.

Open Settings and tap on “General”
Tap on “Usage” and look for the storage available and storage used data points at the top of the installed app list.

Before clearing anything off mine says 2.3 G available, 11.3 G used (the example I show is from the article). I think mine is OK. One of the articles I read said that you should always have more than one G available. if your available amount is in MB you need to clear off some stuff.

Scrolling further down you’ll find how much space individual apps use. This is really helpful because you may find that apps you do not use take up a lot of space. Any apps that you delete from the Phone can be reinstalled for free if you want them back.

http://osxdaily.com/2011/10/18/check-available-storage-space-and-how-much-space-an-app-uses-in-ios-5/

1. Delete Pictures

Make sure first that you have downloaded any pictures that you want to save to your computer. If you have a Mac with iPhoto it is easy. You can just plug in your phone and choose iPhoto. It will show your phone on the left side and then you can download any photos that you want to keep by choosing them and then choosing "download selected". You will be asked if you want to take them off of your phone. OR you can choose "download all" and all of your photos from your phone will be downloaded. It helps me to download them in groups because I don't do it often enough and so there are usually several events with pictures. I give them a name, choose the photos and click download selected. I choose delete from iPhone because I do not want to have all of those photos on my iPhone. Later I create albums of certain photos on my Mac and then put them onto my iPhone.

If there are photos on your iPhone that you do not want to have there you can go to Image Capture in your Applications Folder with your iPhone plugged in. It will show all of the photos that you have on the phone. You can choose the ones you do not want OR all of them and press the circle and line icon to delete them.

You also may have something called a PhotoStream turned on. This is a record of all of the pictures that you have taken. To turn it off go to SETTINGS and choose PHOTOS. In the Photo settings you can turn on or off the PhotoStream. If you turn it off it automatically removes all of the pictures that were in the PhotoStream in the first place which saved me LOTS of space.

I am not including instructions on how to do this on a PC because there are so many different ways. You may use Flickr, Picasa, or some other software. These are all free and are great ways of saving your photos.

2. Change the format of the music you have

"A little-heralded feature of iTunes 9.1 (My addition: The version of iTunes on your computer is the same that is downloaded to your device, so to find out the version go to your computer and look under iTunes>About and it will tell you what version. Mine is 11.0.1.) is the ability to convert higher bitrate songs to 128kpbs AAC files for iPhone or iPod Touch sync with iTunes. How do you do it? It’s a simple check box option in the Summary tab when your iPhone appears in the iTunes source list. When the box is checked, on the next sync, all your songs on your iPhone that are not 128kpbs AAC files will be removed and then re-added, being converted on the fly.
The first time I did it, about 400 songs on my iPhone needed to be converted. It took about ten minutes to do the conversion. Once the first large conversion is done, the iPhone syncs your music as fast (or slow) as it ever did (unless you’re refreshing your iPhone’s library every time you sync). If you keep “convert higher bitrate songs to 128kpbs AAC files” checked, any new songs added to your iPhone will automatically be converted.It’s important to note that this on-the-fly conversion does not alter your original files inside your iTuneslibrary — those will remain at whatever bitrate and in whatever file format you had them in.How well does this work? I saved a whopping 1.5GBs of space on my 8GB iPhone. Others here at TUAW saved between 2-5GBs. Of course, how much space you save will be dependent on what bitrate and file type your songs are now."

http://www.theiphonespot.net/how-to-save-space-on-your-iphone/

Make sure to click on APPLY on the bottom of the screen after you make the changes. On mine it did take a while to download the new versions. I had 352 songs. Now I have 2.6 G available and 11 G used. I saved .3 Gigabytes or 300 Megabytes... not a lot, but some.

You an always just delete the Music you do not listen to temporarily. It is stored in iTunes and can be added back easily.

3. Change email settings:

Download Fewer Emails
You can limit the number of emails that your iPhone downloads for each email account you have configured. Needless to say, the fewer emails downloaded, the less disk space they’ll take up.

To set this limit low, tap “Settings” from the home screen.
Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
In the Mail part of the page that shows up, choose "Show". In the “Show” line, you can set the phone to show only your most recent 50, 75, 100, or 200 messages. The lower the number you use, the less disk space the emails will take up.

Mine was already set to the lowest, so that is not somewhere I can get space on my phone.

Delete Emails Sooner

When you delete an email on the iPhone, the disk space isn’t immediately freed up. Instead, that happens when the iPhone periodically clears deleted content from its memory.

You can free up disk space by making sure that those messages are actually cleared after being deleted.

Once you get it set up here is how your iPhone works:
1. When you click on the Mail program and then get to the INBOX the mail that you have received is downloaded from an email server somewhere to your phone. In SETTINGS>MAIL, CONTACTS, CALENDARS choose your email address. If you then go to ADVANCED you can set up your phone to download 50, 100, 150, 200 messages. I recommend that you download 50. That will give you the 50 newest messages and not take up as much space.

I have a lot of folders for my mail and so if I do not open them the messages that are in those folders on my computer are not downloaded onto my phone and so they do not take up space. If I download them by opening the folder and then want to remove them I have to delete them.

2. You can also set up where your messages go after they are deleted. This is also in SETTINGS>MAIL, CONTACTS, CALENDARS>EMAIL ADDRESS 2X>ADVANCED. I changed mine to go to the Trash. Now when I go to the TRASH folder it shows me all of the mail that I have deleted and I can choose to delete all of them at once. Unfortunately for me, and maybe for you. I have not been doing this for a long time so I have hundreds of messages in my Inbox that I have to move to the trash one by one before I can actually clear them from the phone.

http://ipod.about.com/od/iphoneemail/a/iph_email_store.htm

4. Delete Voicemails

iPhone voicemails aren’t fully deleted until they’re cleared. Sure, you can mark the voicemails as deleted, but they’re still on the phone — taking up disk space — until you clear them.

I usually don't delete my voicemails just because I might want to look at them again sometime. I know how silly that is. Actually there are two steps to deleting the voicemails from the phone. If you don't do the second one, clear the deleted messages, you will still have them on your phone and you can restore them if you want to. Here are steps to fully delete your voicemail.

Tap the Phone icon.
Tap the Voicemail icon in the bottom right.
If you have deleted messages that haven’t been cleared, the Visual Voicemail list will include an item at the VERY bottom of all of the messages called “Deleted Messages.” Tap it.
In that screen, tap the “Clear All” button to permanently delete the messages and free up that valuable disk space.

When I did this my usage changed to 2.6G available and 10.9 G used. I guess that .1 G is not worth enough to open up more useable space.

5. Delete Apps that you do not use

iTunes keeps track of all of the apps that you have purchased (including the free ones). Even if you delete them from your iPhone you can download them for free again later. The list you first saw when you checked your usage told you what size different apps are. I found out that I have Pages on my phone. It takes up 289 MB (that is a lot!) I do not use my iPhone for writing, so I will take it off. There are other apps that I have downloaded to try (especially for free!), but don't use, so I can delete them.

I could delete apps right from the Usage screen. If you click on an app it takes you to a screen with a DELETE button at the bottom. Click DELETE and it is removed from the list.

This made the most difference for me so far. I now have 4.2 G Available and 9.4 G used.

6. Delete past Chat discussions

Maybe that is not such a necessary tip. It did not change my numbers at all. Maybe it was less than a MB, so it did not show up at all. I am not a big texter, so that may be the reason.

7. Remove watched Videos

In order to delete a video that is on your iPhone you first get to the list of videos and then touch the one you want to delete and drag to the left. The red Delete button appears and when you click on it the video is deleted.

This is a video that shows how that works.

8. Prefer Standard Definition Videos

In the explanation above about changing the format of movies I also checked that I Prefer Standard Definition Videos. When there is a choice between Standard and HD it will choose the Standard. This should not affect the way it looks on the iPhone since the screen is so small.

A BIT OFF THE TOPIC, BUT HELPFUL
In writing all of this up I came across a software called Tune Up My Mac that goes through your Mac to see what it has on it that is extra and may be causing it to run slowly. My computer has been running slowly, so I thought I would give it a try. For free you get a scan where it finds those extra files and then in order to remove them you have to purchase the software at $39 for a one year license. I decided to purchase it because I wanted to see how it would work.
Here is a link to it incase you are interested.
Tune up my Mac

P.S. After writing most of this and giving you my final total I found more mail that I could delete and learned about the PhotoStream. My final usage is 5 GB available and 8.6 GB used! I still have mail to delete and remove. It has been great figuring this all out. I hope it is helpful to you.

Keeping a Christmas Spreadsheet

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:12:00 +0000

I don't know about you, but I can never remember what I gave to someone from year to year. I will go to the store and see something and think, "That would be perfect for Susie", but I am not sure if I get it for them every year, or if it is a new idea.

So I have started to keep a gift spreadsheet. It is very simple. In the first column I type the name of each person I want to give to each year. Then across the top row I type the number of the year. Then every year at Christmas shopping time I get out the list and I can see what I have gotten people for the last several years. I then add a new column for the current year and enter what I am giving this year.

This could also be done for gifts that you receive. Start by typing names of people that you have received gifts from in the first column. In the second column you could type what gift you received. The third column could be for checking off that you have written a thank-you note.

We use Google Spreadsheet in order to share the information for a silent auction for Child Development Center. On this shared spreadsheet we collect lots of information. Some of the columns include the item donated, the value of the item, the value of the minimum bid, how much it sold for, the address of the business, who found the donation and a place to check off that thank you notes were written. This is really handy because we all have access to the spreadsheet and can enter our information as soon as we find a donation. We can also look at the list to see what companies have already been asked, so we are not sending people to ask for donations to the same businesses and irritating them. Each year we start a new sheet of the spreadsheet, so that we can compare how we have done from year to year.

You can create a Google Spreadsheet by going to http://drive.google.com and then signing up for a free account. Once you are into the program you can choose if you want to make a webpage, write a document, create a spreadsheet or create a presentation. All of these programs work similarly to the programs you have used in the past. The main difference is that they save automatically on the cloud (Google's server bank) and you can share them with someone else. You can give the other person the option to edit the document or limit them to just reading it. You can also make the document private so that only you can see it.
Take a look at Google Drive and let me know what you think about it and if you have questions for me to research.

And finally Merry Christmas.

I hope you have a wonderful break

and can spend some time with family

doing things you love.

Security Settings for Kids

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:28:00 +0000

One cannot protect their kids from every harm that may come to them. The most important thing is to love them and to be there for them. However, there are a lot of things that you can do as a parent to minimize the problems they might have online and to maximize your time and communication with them about how they spend their time online.

PLACEMENT OF THE COMPUTER
Do not set up a computer in your child's bedroom. All computer devices should be used in the central part of the house where anyone could see what is on the screen. You should be able to casually walk by and see what is happening on the computer.

COMPUTER SET UPAll computers and devices have ways to set up different identities with different rights. If there is a family computer that several people use, set different personal log ins for each person. Each log in will have a different password so that your identity will not be available to your kids. On their identity you can set it up so that they cannot download or purchase items. You can also adjust the level of different things like sex or violence that is allowed. Remember that this is not perfect. There are always things that cannot be controlled.

BROWSER SETTINGS
All browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc...) have settings that you can change that block out certain websites from searches.

COMMON SENSE MEDIA
http://www.commonsensemedia.org/
Common Sense Media is a non profit organization that reviews media (movies, TV, apps, books, games, websites, and music). They are very clear that they do not tell you what to think, but give you a way to decide what you think about different things. They are for media-sanity not censorship and their webpage says,"We can't cover their eyes, but we can teach them to see." The emphasis here is on discussion and understanding rather than blocking certain things. One parent I know said that after a while his daughter went directly to Common Sense Media to read the reviews before asking if she could go to a certain movie.
Each item is rated on these things:

Positive Messages
Role Models
Violence
Sex
Language
Consumerism
Drinking, Drugs, Smoking

It is easy to browse by many different qualities:

Age of Kids
Type of Entertainment (movie, game, app, etc...)
Genre (action, comedy, etc...)
Topics (dinosaurs, magic, sports, etc...), and more.

There are also many advice articles and videos on things like screen time, multitasking or keeping kids safe online.

COMMON PROBLEMS AND SOME IDEAS

1. Sharing too much information with others - Have talks with your children about the importance of not sharing personal information online. The law says that children must be at least 13 before signing up for different sites on the Internet, but the responsibility for that is put on the companies offering services. Usually they just have a place where the person registering has to enter their birthday. It is quite easy to enter a birthday that makes you old enough to register. Talk to your children about this and make sure that they have your approval before signing into any sites. Facebook is a good example. You can tell your children that they cannot have an account until they are 13 and make the point that it is not your rule, but actually a law. Once they do sign up think about having access to their account (their password) so that if it is necessary you can access it. You don't want to be constantly "spying" on them, but there may be an occasion where it would be helpful to have that access.

2. Getting into forbidden spots on the Internet - First set up whichever browsers you use (or all browsers on your computer) to the settings that you want for your children. Then be sure that they are aware that EVERYTHING they do on the computer is recorded. It is possible to trace back where they have been and what they have done. One simple way that you can do this is to check the History on the Browser. In Firefox this is one of the menus at the top of the screen. Beware though, the history can be deleted. All of the information is findable by a specialist at a cost, but it is not as easy.

3. Downloading copyrighted material - According to current Copyright Law everything published on the Internet (or anywhere) is copyrighted. It is NOT OK to save images or copy and paste someone else's text without asking permission. There are ways to find images through Flickr, Google, and many other places that are marked with a Creative Commons license. This is a type of copyright that allows you to use the work for different uses without asking. Usually the license spells out what you can use and what you can do with it. If there is something that you want to use that is not licensed with Creative Commons you can email the owner and most of the time they are flattered and will let you use it. Wikimedia is a great place to look for pictures that can be used!

4. Using the Internet to do schoolwork - Caution is the main thing to use here. The world has changed and new information is discovered and published on the web every day. It is a terrific place to learn all kinds of things. Wikipedia, for example, is a great place to find lots of information. However, it can be inaccurate. It is true that ANYONE can add to an article in Wikipedia. It is also true that it is constantly being curated by thousands of energetic people who want it to succeed. The only way to be sure about accuracy is to "triangulate" or find two other places that have the same information. Help your kids to be careful about what they trust on the Internet and to be able to "read" where a webpage comes from or who wrote it.

Common Sense Media has a Holiday Gift Guide
http://www.commonsensemedia.org/guide/holiday-gift-guide-2012

Wiping out your Hard Drive-on Purpose

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 17:48:00 +0000

A HARD DRIVE

A friend recently asked me this question: "I want to give my computer to someone else, but I need to back up and then wipe out the Hard Drive first. How do I do that?"

Mac

First you need to back up all of your information from the hard drive. You need to think about any software that you have purchased or downloaded and your own files. Since you will be deleting all of this you will want to make sure you have a way to transfer them to another computer. If you have your new computer you can just transfer files from one computer to the other. You can see my post about backing up to learn more.

Also delete all of your files and folders from the computer. Most of these are probably in My Documents, but you may have saved things in other places like the Desktop. To delete you right click on the file and choose "Move to Trash" or "Delete". If you are using a Mac after everything is deleted you can empty the trash to get rid of the files from there.

Next use the Disk Utility that is included in a Mac to securely erase your computer. To get it go to Applications>Utilities and look for Disk Utility. If you choose the Secure method it will overwrite your hard drive so that the files cannot be accessed. You can run it several times to be sure that everything is clear.

PC

First you need to back up ALL of the information on your hard drive. To do this you can use a software program like Nova Back Up. You probably need to do this onto a separate Hard Drive. You can see my post about backing up to learn more.

Find the disks and licensing numbers (OEM number) that you used to connect to your printer and to install Windows.

If you are giving away this computer you can use a program like Erase to wipe the machine so that your files cannot be found on it.

Erase http://eraser.heidi.ie/

If you are planning to reinstall and reuse the computer yourself here are some things to remember:

Be prepared to install dozens of patches after everything has been installed. It's very important that you do all Windows updates after installing a fresh copy of Windows on the computer.
Have installation discs or be prepared to download an antivirus immediately after installing Windows.
Finally, realize that re-installing any operating system to the point of completion is going to take several hours to complete.

An Update

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 20:58:00 +0000

I have been working on a post about "Wiping Out a Hard Drive on Purpose", but it is not done yet and I want to make sure to get something up by Friday every week.

So, today I have decided to talk to you a little bit about how it has been starting a business.

There are ups and downs. When someone calls and says they want to hire me that is exciting. When I talk to people and they like the name of the business that makes me feel good. However, there are days when there is not much going on and I have to force myself to keep working on it. When does the "word of mouth" begin?

One thing that a friend who is in business for herself suggested was to take advantages of any chance I had for networking and that has been really fun. I have met lots of new people and seen new things. I am going to start listing some of the start up businesses of others I have talked to on the sidebar of this blog. Yesterday I attended the Innotech Conference at the Austin Convention Center. I learned a lot of new things and met interesting people. One thing that I especially learned was about Windows 8. I have seen ads on TV showing how different it is, so I really enjoyed trying it first hand and going to a session where they talked about it and I could ask questions. If you are upgrading and need some help with Windows 8 I will be ready.

I also learned about a software that will allow me to work with people virtually. We could connect on the computer and communicate that way and then if I needed to I could, with your permission of course, have access to your computer. It is called Link and would cost me a small monthly amount, but you would not have to pay anything.

Other things I have been doing are substitute teaching at University of Texas Elementary School, volunteering with Trinity Child Development Center, making phone calls for Lloyd Doggett (a local candidate for Congressman) and working the Election Day Polls. That was an experience.

So, next week you can look forward to Wiping Out a Hard Drive on Purpose. Please send along any suggestions for topics.

Locked out of my Own Computer!!

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 18:36:00 +0000

Here is a question a PC user asked me:

"Someone played around with my computer and I can't log in any more. It keeps giving me the hint question and when I type in the correct answer it keeps telling me that it is not correct. What do I do?"

This is something that happens to people and so there are lots of places to look online to find help. Unfortunately if you have been locked out of your computer you cannot get online to get help or even see this blog.

In the hopes that someone with this problem can find this blog I will put the solution that I found online here. Since there are a lot of different versions of Windows this may or may not apply to your computer. It is advice for someone with Windows XP who has not put in an Administrator password.

I have not done this, so I cannot be sure that it will work. In fact, there may be many different reasons that you are locked out of your computer, but this is the first thing to try:

1. Boot up (Turn On) your computer.

2. Before it starts up hold down F8. This is one of the keys on the top row.

3. When it starts up you will see a black screen with white words. It will ask you if you want to start in SAFE MODE.

4. Choose to open in SAFE MODE.

5. It will take a while, but when it opens you should see the regular desktop and be able to get into an account called Administrator. Usually a new Windows computer is shipped out with an Administrator account with no password. If you have not put a password onto it you can still get in as an Administrator which will allow you to do anything you want.

6. With this account you can go to the Control Panel and remove or change the password of the user that you usually log into.

One other video on YouTube that I watched showed how you can just type in Administrator into the log in window that comes up. If no password has been set you can just click OK and it will open up the computer. To change any password at that point you can go to the Control Panel.

If neither of these things works for you I am sorry to say you may need to take it in to someone professional who can help you.

Gmail Offline and Fun after Fifty!

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Friesen) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:07:00 +0000

GMAIL OFFLINE

I am traveling today and I am also behind in reading my email. I want to catch up while on the airplane, but I use Gmail.

For anyone who is new to email/webmail I want to explain that there are two types of email: Webmail or eMail on your computer. For both of them you have to be online for them to get your new mail and send mail that you write. eMail on your computer can be opened up without getting online, but it does not give you any new mail. It keeps track of anything you write and when you are next online all of it is sent. Webmail only works when you are online.

Until now I thought that because I was using Gmail I only had webmail. That meant that when I was flying I did not have access to my email. That was the first thing that made me unhappy with using Gmail.

Now there is a way to create a mailbox on your computer that can keep up with your Gmail. Unfortunately it only works with Gmail on Google Chrome, so if you have another webmail program you are out of luck. Google Chrome is a browser. [A browser is something that connects you to the Internet like Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and others]. I use Firefox usually and really like it, but for this I have switched to Chrome.

First I had to set it up. I had to go to Firefox and search for Chrome. Then I had to download Chrome. It is free, but takes some time and space on your computer to set up.

When I opened Chrome I had to click to open a new tab so that I could see the Google Web Store Icon. Google offline is an Add On to Chrome which is sort of like an app that works inside the Chrome program. You have to go to the Chrome Store to get it, but it is free. When you have opened Chrome click on the shopping bag to get to the Chrome Store.

At the store search for "Gmail Offline" and a list of Add Ons will show up.

The top one is Gmail Offline. You can click on it for more information which will take you to a new window with more information or just click on the button that says, "Add to Chrome".

As soon as you do this the blue M shows up on the Chrome page which had only the shopping bag on it before.

Now if you are somewhere where there is no Internet access you can open Chrome, click on the diamond shape next to the tab and open up a new tab. On the new tab you will see the shopping bag, gmail offline and other add ons that you have chosen to add. When you click on the blue M it will take you right to your email...offline!!

CHROME ADD ONS

One other thing I learned while doing this is that there are all sorts of other Add Ons for Chrome. I need to explore them more to see what is there, but there seemed to be hundreds. One that sounded interesting to me was a remote access app. It would be nice to be able to help people over the phone with their computers and the software I have seen to do that is $40 a month. However, this application (and maybe the others also) makes your computer readable by the company that owns it. They can get all sorts of information from my computer and I did not want to risk that yet.

FUN AFTER FIFTY

As I try to get this business off the ground I am meeting lots of interesting people and today I want to tell you about one of them. Jackie has started a blog called Fun After Fifty (http://www.funafterfifty.com). In one post she says, "My passion is to help people approaching or past the age of fifty to thrive rather than just survive life. What’s your passion?" She told me that she often meets people over 50 who have given up. I guess that they feel that they are past the first half of life and on a downhill slide. She wants to meet people and help them for free! Eventually she hopes to get sponsors that will help her pay for her business. Check it out!

I hope to hear from you. I need more suggestions of what to write about. I will gladly take time to research and come up with an answer to your issue. Comments of all kinds are welcomed!