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Maybe you don’t even know that your phone is probably capable of T9, or predictive text. T9 actually stands for Text on 9 Keys, which is the format of the normal cellphone keypad. If you set your phone to use T9 (check your user manual or google your specific phone for that), you can greatly increase your texting speed but it helps to know some basics first.

T9 allows you to type on your cellphone’s keypad using only one tap per key. Normally, to type the word “bet” you need to tap the 2 (abc) twice to get the letter “b”, then the 3 (def) twice to get the letter “e” then the 8 (tuv) once to type the letter “t”.  With T9, you would just hit the 2 then the 3 then the 8. Predictive text will give you the most likely word you are trying to type and if it’s not the one you want, just hit the Next key (cellphone dependent but most likely down arrow, #, *, 0, or +key) to go to the next possible word, based on the numbers you’ve pressed.

Newer cellphones usually have T9 that will adapt to your texting and start to predict words based on the ones you most use. They have thousands of words but sometimes it won’t know the word. In such cases you’ll have to type in the word yourself. Usually you will be asked if you want to add a word. T9 even understands emoticons and chat phrases like LOL. If you want to type numbers, just hold down on the number key you want.

It’s one thing to tell you about T9 but if you want to know more and maybe practice a bit with an interactive web page, check out T9’s Learn Page.  Happy texting (or 42779 8398464)!

When we go to my parents’ house in Aspen Cove for a visit, my son will always ask how to pause the TV while he goes to the bathroom. He can’t because they don’t have a PVR like we do here at home. The boy has been spoiled but so have I. I love my PVR or Personal Video Recorder. Such a device is sometimes called a DVR or Digital Video Recorder, depending on where you get it from. It is a recorder for your television that records shows on a hard drive. This means you can keep a lot of shows on the disk (50 hours or more of regular TV but much less than that when you are recording HD shows). You can also get, as mine is, a dual-tuner DVR so you can watch one show while recording another, record two shows at once, or record two shows while watching another you have recorded previously. You can also, as pointed out before, pause and rewind live TV. This is because the DVR records the last 45 minutes of whatever channel you are watching,  (or however many minutes you’ve been watching that channel, if it’s less than 45). It is a wonderful and convenient thing, especially when you have small children and you never know what crazy thing might interrupt your show. The DVR also includes an interactive channel guide which allows you to search for programs and use one button to record shows or to choose to record an entire series. Shows can pile up there too when you know they’re being recorded but you don’t get around to watching them. Just ask my PVR with its 23 episodes of Coronation Street waiting to be watched. Here’s a Rogers commercial about their PVR:

A PVR costs extra money for the service and to rent or buy the actual recorder but if you like to watch TV, and can’t always get to watch it when you want, a PVR can be a very convenient option.

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus and just about everything technological you can buy these days can attach to your computer via USB. USB is great because it configures automatically when you plug something in. It also allows your device to communicate at a high speed with your computer. Back in the day (five or six years ago, maybe), we had to plug our devices into the computer with various other connections like a serial port connector or parallel port connector, then configure everything and install software for it. Now, USB is that all important thing–Universal–so it allows you to plug your digital camera, printer, mouse, headphones, cellphone,and most other peripherals directly to your PC or MAC with ease. Your computer will recognize your device, install software for it and you just have to figure out what it is you want to do with the darned thing once you’ve got it attached to your computer.

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.

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!

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.

If you’ve ever set up email software to retrieve your email, you’ll know that there are some weird sounding settings you have to give the software. For most you have to give the POP and SMTP settings while for some others you need to know your IMAP server settings. Maybe knowing what these acronyms stand for will make the whole email setup thing a little less overwhelming. We’ll start this week with POP.

POP stands for Post Office Protocol. When someone sends you a postcard in the mail, it doesn’t leave the mailbox and go straight to your door. It goes to a post office and someone sorts it and sends it onto your address, possibly even in a timely manner. Very simply put, this is what your Post Office Protocol server does. In tech-world, a protocol is a set of rules for communicating. A POP server uses Post Office Protocol like the person at your post office who gives you the package that was sent to you, but only after he makes sure you are who you are. It’s the rules for how your ISP’s (Internet Service Provider) mail server communicates with your email software.

First, your email program goes to the POP server, makes a connection, then provides the username and password you’ve typed in. If the username and password are correct, your software ask “any mail for someone@somewhere.com”? And the server uses POP to first let your email client know there is email, then how many email there are, and what size they are. It then retrieves your emails so you can read them and, depending on the settings you’ve given it, deletes them from the server or keeps them on the server.

So, the POP server setting your email software asks for when you first set it up, is just the address your email software can use to start these communications. It’s, again very simply put, the address of the post office where you’ll pick up your mail. Your Internet Service Provider (the people you pay every month for your Internet) should provide you with the email address, password, and POP settings you need but if you’ve lost the POP settings and need them, you can usually Google your ISP’s name and POP settings to find what you need to know.

When I worked on a help desk and people would call in, they would sometimes have to bring their computers in for service. They would inevitably ask, “so do I have to just bring in the hard drive?” They, like many people referred to their computer as the hard drive. They meant the tower, that’s the tower part which holds all the computer stuff, as opposed to the peripherals of a computer like a mouse, keyboard, monitor, and printer. The hard drive actually resides inside your computer’s tower and it’s where all your files, folders and your operating system hang out.

The hard drive looks a bit like a record player (if you remember them). There’s a little arm and even a platter that goes around and around. The data for your computer is on that platter (or platters). How it gets there involves magnets and alloys and stuff you really don’t need to concern yourself with but if you want to know more check out this article at How Stuff Works.

What you need to know about your hard drive is that it is one type of memory in your computer. There’s another type of memory in your computer called RAM or Random Access Memory and we’ll discuss that one next week. The hard drive is usually measured in hundreds of gigabytes these days and the more gigabytes the more files and stuff you can put on your computer. The hard drive will hold all your data until you delete it or until it fails. You should remember that hard drives can fail and that’s why keeping copies of your important data, like pictures and important documents to name just a couple of things, is vital. Back up those things to other media like a recordable DVD, a recordable CD-ROM, a flash drive or an external hard drive. And if you ever have to bring your computer in for repair, you can ask if it’s just the tower that you need to bring in because you know it’s not called the hard drive.

Many of you, even the tech-reluctant have heard of facebook and may very well already be part of facebook. But for those who are wondering what all this is about, let’s talk facebook. Facebook is another one of those things referred to by the way overused and all-encompassing term of social networking. Basically, facebook is a way to catch up with your friends. Once you sign up, you can create a profile where you put information about yourself and a picture of yourself. Well, it should be a picture of yourself but I find a lot of my facebook friends turn out to be cats or cars or, more often, children. You can include your address, workplace, web pages, email addresses, etc. on your profile but note this profile will be available to anyone if you make your profile public or all your “friends” if you restrict it to friends only. So, provide information carefully.

You’ll note that I put the word friends in quotes before and I did so for a reason. A facebook friend is anyone who asks you to be a friend and you accept or vice versa. So along with you best friend and your sister, you might also end up being friends with an old classmate you barely remember or the parent of your child’s classmate who you met twice at birthday parties. So, again, be careful of who you become friends with and if you choose to have more friends that you don’t really know well, be careful what you share on facebook. Do you really want that fellow Kindergarten parent to see your picture from a drunken night in Cuba?

Yes, you can add pictures to facebook and video as well. That’s one of my favourite parts of facebook. I like looking at other peoples’ pictures and catching up with old friends without having to call or meet them and look at the pictures of their kids in real life. Maybe at first glance, that last line sounded sad, that I would rather meet people in cyberspace than in real life, but if I had to keep up with all the people I keep up with on facebook, I would have to spend hours with people every day and travel from here to Florida to Texas to Vancouver and well beyond. And really, while I might want to see an old teacher’s retirement party pictures, I don’t necessary want to call her and speak to her about it. Take note, though, that when you add photos and videos, pay attention to the privacy settings. You can choose who can see your photos and videos and the choices include everyone, friends of friends or friends only. I always choose friends only but I know lots of people don’t because I can see their photos even though I’m not a friend. Even choosing friends of friends means hundreds and probably thousands of people you don’t know can now see your photos or videos.

Then there’s the status updates on facebook. Like Twitter, these updates are people letting you know about what is happening in their lives, from the mundane to the exciting. There are all kinds of status updates and I’ll refer you to a post on my other blog at tinachaulk.com to get a taste of what they are.

Each person in Facebook has a wall where you can post messages to the person. Again all the friends can see the wall so private messages are best handled by another feature, a kind of email service in facebook so you can send private messages. There is also facebook chat for people who want more immediate discussions with friends. There are so many other things you can do on facebook like play games with friends, invite people to events, join or create groups, post interesting links, tell people what music you like, recommend books, I could go on and on. The easiest way to find out more about facebook is to join yourself and start looking for your friends. But a warning, it can be quite addictive.

Okay,  maybe you know what a browser is but a lot of people don’t. I know this because I used to work on a computer help desk and nine times out of ten when I’d tell the person on the other end of the phone to “open your browser” they would reply “what’s a browser” or “where can I find that”. You are almost certainly using your browser right now to read this web page. That’s what a browser is—a program that reads the code on a website and displays it to you as a web page. You are probably using Internet Explorer, the most popular browser, mostly because it comes with Windows. But there are other browsers out there, other better browsers in my opinion and that’s the reason I’m explaining the word browser to you now. On Friday I’ll tell you about what I consider to be the best browser and why.