Techreluctant.com

Everyone needs a little silly sometimes and facebook has recognized this. Even many tech-reluctants have signed up for facebook so the next time you check in on it, change your language settings… to pirate. Why check your Inbox when you can check your Bottle O’ Messages and who wouldn’t rather have Me Hearties than Friends? To start walking the facebook plank, just

1. Scroll to the bottom of your facebook page;
2. On the bottom left corner, click English: US (next to Facebook © 2009);
3. When the language selection appears, click English: Pirate;
4. Check out your Home Page, er, Home Port. Arrrrhhhhhh.

From time to time you have probably heard or read a mention of a URL. I usually get a “what’s that” in response to using the word. You could say it is really another word for web address but what does it really mean? URL (Pronounced U-R-L) stands for Uniform Resource Locator (so thank goodness we use the short form and don’t have to say that all the time). It tells browsers where to find certain resources on the Internet and what type of resource it is. To be more detailed, it tells you the protocol used to access the file (protocol again? yup, another  set of rules the for your web browser), the domain name of of the server where the file is located and the  file name of a file you are accessing on the web.

The protocol is the first part of the address, most often Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP. So, for instance, the URL of the banner picture on this website is http://techreluctant.com/wp-content/themes/grayband/images/header.gif. This tells your browser a bunch of stuff. The http part tells it that you are looking for file on a web page, and which set of rules used to get that file; the techreluctant.com tells you the domain name, or the address of the server that file is on. The “/wp-content/themes/grayband/images/” is the file path and show all the subdirectories (or subfolders) on that server, and the “header.gif” is the name of the image file you are looking for. It’s like if I told you to look for a picture file on your computer and then told you to look for it in your Documents folder and in a subfolder called Pictures. The URL tells your browser all that information and also tells it which set of rules to use in order to do it.

And that’s the URL. Now you know why you usually just call it a web address.

Sometimes friends and family members ask me to do stuff on their computers, you know, as long as I’m there and if I don’t mind. One of the most frequent requests is to change their home page in their browser. This is a very simple task and is similar across browsers. The first step is to go to the website you want as your home page. Mine is Google News Canada. Once you’re there you do the following, depending on your browser:

In Firefox:
1. Click the Tools menu in the browser.
2. Select Options.
3. Click the Main tab.
4. In the Startup section, Click the Use Current Page button.
5. Click OK.

In Internet Explorer:
1. Click the Tools menu in the browser.
2. Select Internet Options .
3. Click the General tab.
4. In the Home page section, Click the Use Current button.
5. Click OK.

In Google Chrome:
1. Click the Tools menu (the little pic of a wrench) in the browser.
2. Select Options.
3. In the Home page section, select the ‘Open this page’ option (make sure the right address is there for your home page).
4. Click the Close button.

There you have it, just in case you don’t have a geeky friend like me around to do it for you.

In part 1, we talked about your POP server settings. Now, it’s onto SMTP which is another setting you’ll have to add when configuring your email software. SMTP is another protocol or set of rules and this one is for sending your email. SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is the set of rules your mail software (like Outlook Express or Windows Live, for instance) uses to send your mail from your computer to the mail server where POP will take over and get it to the correct recipient(s). Very simply, your email software uses SMTP to first connect to the SMTP server you’ve set up the email software to contact (most likely, the one that your Internet Service Provider has given you), then to tell the server “hey, I’ve got some mail here for someone”. It then sends the mail to the server and finishes its job with the Quit command. Your email has now left your computer and gone out in the world. Hope you didn’t just send it to the wrong person by mistake. Send carefully!

Most of us who use the computer for anything from work to just emailing, tend to type certain phrases over and over. And if you like to do things the easy way, like I do, then Texter is a fantastic tool to help you with this. You can setup Texter to type out any phrase you want by basically setting up your own hotkeys. It stays in your Windows system tray to save you lots of trouble whenever you want.

Setting up a new “hotstring” is easy. Just press the little Plus Sign then put the string of characters you want to use as your shortcut in the hotstring area, then enter the text you want to use to replace that string and the trigger for that string. Now, the trigger part is very important. You have a choice of triggers: Enter, Space, Tab, or Instant. Instant means that that string will instantly be replaced with the text you’ve set up for it. This is where you have to be careful because unless you have some bizarre string of characters set up, you could accidentally replace a simple word with a big, long phrase (my friend Trudy has a funny story about doing just that, although, not with Texter, and I’ll ask her to drop by and fill you in on the details, so check the comments).

I have a hotstring set up to replace tr+Tab with “techreluctant.com”. There, I just did it and saved my poor fingers all that work. Texter also comes with a universal spelling auto-correct which is enabled by default (you can turn it off by going to Tools–>Preferences) and is even set up to make a sound when it replaces text or does a spelling auto-correct (which you can turn off the same way). I know it might be hard to understand all this as it’s written so check out the  short video of Texter above and for more details and ideas of what to do with it, the longer video below.

I’ll admit that Twitter and all the talk of Twitter is getting on my nerves (but that won’t stop me from twittering that I have this new post up). So anything that makes me feel that there is something interesting and different related to Twitter makes me happy and Twistori is just such a thing. Twistori is based on another very cool website called We Feel Fine which sets about “harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs” (really, it’s worth it to drop by We Feel Fine and just see all the cool ways you can maneuver through all the information on the site). Twistori does the same thing with Twitter posts and limits the feelings to Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel and Wish. It’s interesting to drop by from time to time and just check out the kind of things people are twittering about. There’s also a very cool Twistori Desktop for Macs that lets you create your own Twistori and choose certain words you want to see but unfortunately there is no such program for Windows at this time.

Don't you just love "I wish that I could rinse off my eyeballs"?

(Special thanks to Dale Jarvis for bringing this to my attention)

Last time we learned about the hard drive and this Wednesday we’re talking RAM, as in Random Access Memory. It’s the thing you hear about when buying a computer or if you want to upgrade and the more of it you have, the faster your computer is.

The term ‘random access” in Random Access Memory comes from the fact that you can access any part of the memory at any time. At the time the term was coined, it was different from sequential memory which was being used such as tape, where you had to fast forward or rewind to get the part of the tape you needed. Now, most computer memory is non sequential so the term is kind of an antiquated one but it sticks.

There are three important things about RAM I want to tell you. First, RAM is the place that your programs and operating system and stuff hang out while you’re using them. Let’s say you open a program, the browser that you’re using for example. Your hard drive stores all the files necessary to use the program but your hard drive is not really that fast so RAM takes the stuff you’re using off your hard drive and holds it for you, making it a much faster process. People compare RAM to a desktop and the stuff on your hard drive as a file cabinet. You take the stuff out of the cabinet and put it on the desktop so you can use it. Bigger desktop, more stuff you can have on the go and the faster you’ll be able to work. It’s a good analogy but where I am in my life lately I’m more apt to think of the hard drive as my children’s’ toy box and the RAM as the playroom. There’s tons of stuff in the toy box and most of it never gets used. Whatever toys they’re playing with are on the floor and the bigger the floor, the more toys they can have out of the toy box where they can be easily and quickly accessed.

The second point I want to make about RAM is that it is temporary. Once you turn off or restart your computer, all the stuff that was in it is cleared out to make room for you to start over again. So that 30 page research paper you were working on but didn’t save is gone once your computer restarts, unless you save it on the hard drive. In these days when you probably leave your computer on for long periods of time, you should restart your computer every few days or if you notice your computer having problems. Just like when I go insane when I can’t walk around on the floor because of all the toys cluttered there, your computer just needs everything cleared out every now and then to make things work better.

The third thing I want you to know about RAM is that it is one of the best ways to speed up your computer. Now, if you have an old 286 and want to run Windows Vista, all the RAM in the world won’t help you but if you have a relatively new computer and would like to speed things up a bit, especially if using memory-intensive games like 3D video games or photo editing software, buying RAM is a fairly inexpensive way to do this. You have to make sure you have the right kind of RAM for your computer though (you didn’t think they’d make it easy and just have one kind of RAM did you?) so make sure of what you need before you buy. You can install it yourself if you dare, as you basically plug in RAM but beware that opening your case can void most warranties and you can screw up your computer if you’re not careful installing RAM. If you do want to try it, just google it or check out the many videos on youtube about installing RAM.

Now, I’m going to restart my computer right before I clear all these toys off the floor.

Whether it’s some documents you’re trying to back up to a disk, a bunch of MP3s you’re transferring to your MP3 player, or some pictures you want to send to a mail recipient, there are times you want to select, or highlight, multiple files. To make the task easier, don’t forget to take advantage of your Ctrl and Shift keys while highlighting.

In order to select consecutive items, just click on the first file you want to highlight then press and hold down your Shift key until you click on the last file you want to highlight. Now the whole group, whether it’s three files or three thousand, are selected.

If you’re highlighting nonconsecutive files just press and hold down on the Ctrl key while you select whatever files you want (don’t let go until you’re done).

And if you want to just select all files in a folder, go to Edit on the toolbar on top of the open folder and then click “Select All”.

I know I was going to continue with mail account settings this week but I’ve been hearing so much about a scam to get information from you that I wanted to bring it to your attention. There’s a phishing scam where you get an email alleging to be from the CRA (Canada Revenue Service) saying that you will receive a refund but that all your information wasn’t received so in order to get the refund (I’ve heard a variety of amounts you are promised) you need to provide information including your Social Insurance Number and date of birth or, in some cases, your credit card information. Don’t fall for it. On CBC Radio’s Radio Noon today a rep from the CRA said that they never send email. You’ll receive snail mail, not email from them (even then you have to be oh so careful). So if you get such an email, ignore it.

To edit in most Windows programs, you can use the following keyboard shortcuts, using the oft misunderstood but very helpful Ctrl button along with other keys:

• Ctrl+z undoes your last action (if the program has an undo function)
• Ctrl+y redoes your last action (if the program has a redo function)
• Ctrl+a selects all
• Ctrl+x cuts
• Ctrl+c  copies
• Ctrl+v pastes
• Ctrl+p prints a file
• Ctrl+s saves a file