Techreluctant.com

On Wednesday, I explained what a browser was and told you I’d be telling you about my favourite browser today. And here we are. My favourite browser is Firefox. I haven’t used Internet Explorer, except for work-related stuff, since I first found Firefox. The reasons  are many. For me, I like the tabbed sessions (where you can open multiple websites on tabs inside one browser window) and the fact that if Windows crashes for some reason, you can restart all those tabs just where you were; one-click bookmarks; built in search engine; and a built-in spell checker to mention a few. My two favourite reasons are safety and add-ons. Firefox comes with lots of safety features: anti-malware (to stop viruses, torjan horses, spyware and other Internet uglies); anti-phishing(which you know about because you read my post about phishing); popup blocker, and a download manager. But I think the top security feature might be that it’s not Internet Explorer. If you are someone who wants to make a virus and do maximum damage, you are going to target that virus for the most used browser around like, say, one that comes with Windows as Internet Explorer does. That doesn’t mean that Firefox is 100% safe and you’ll never get a virus, but I feel more secure when using Firefox.

Add-ons are probably the coolest thing about Firefox. There are thousands of them you can add to Firefox to do anything from opening all of your favourite websites in tabs within one browser with the click of one button to tracking how much time you spend surfing the net, to previewing web pages before you open them. Since add-ons can be developed by anyone (but they are tested as experimental first), you can find a huge variety of add-ons that will make your tech life much easier.

Now, some argue that Firefox is not as safe as Internet Explorer and Microsoft has adapted some of the great parts of Firefox for Internet Explorer (gasp, I know, hard to believe, hey?) and IE 8 was just released last week so it may even have more Firefox features on it, but I love the little fox. Maybe you will too, so if you’d like to try it click on the fox.

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.

Last week, I went over the basics of googling, This week, I’m going to tell you about Google’s advanced search and also some pretty cool things you can do in that little Google search box.

Google has an Advance Search link on their page (in smaller letters to the right of the search box). With this you can do more specific searches without the minus signs and quotes (sure, now she tells me). It also allows you to change how many search results you see on your results page and is a way to search for something on one specific site (or you can type in your keyword in the main Google search page and then type site:[name of site] such as tech site:techreluctant.com). So, that’s most of the basic searching advice and where to find the advanced search, but there are some extras that Google searches can provide and these can possibly make your life easier (don’t forget that instead of clicking on the Google Search button, you can just hit the enter button once you’ve typed your search).

• Google has a calculator so if you type 144+17 in the search box then click Google Search, you’ll get your answer.

• Looking for the definition of a word? Type the word define followed by a colon and the word you want to define  such as define: easy.

• In these days of economic woe, maybe there’s a stock you’re following. If you want a quick stock quote, just type the ticker symbol in the search box and click Google Search.

• I use Google all the time to convert measurements. So, last week when I needed to know how many cups were in 48 ounces, I just typed 48 oz in cups, hit enter and there was my answer.

• Your friends are vacationing in Australia and you’d like to know what the weather is like there. Just type in weather sydney australia.

• Want to call those vacationing friends but don’t want to wake them up by calling at the wrong time? Just type time Sydney Australia and you’ll know exactly when they are (although I couldn’t get this to work for my city).

Probably the thing I like the most about Google though is the way it checks my spelling. I am not usually a bad speller but I do not want to look up the proper spelling for armadillo every time I want to google it (yes, I have searched about armadillos before and I’m not telling you why). Also, I have a tendency to transpose letters while typing. Each time I type Newfoundalnd in a search, Google always comes back and says “Do you mean Newfoundland?” with not a hint of judgment in its tone.

The Internet is a wealth of information. Finding exactly what you want in cyberspace can be the biggest task but your friendly Google (or other search engine) can make that search much easier, especially if you know how to find what you’re looking for. Happy Googling.

Ever sent a link to someone and the link was longer than the text you wrote in the email? A link made up of two lines of weird letters and numbers and all you said was “thought you’d like this”.  Or ever sent a really long link in an email and then got an email back that said the link didn’t work (because an email program inserted a break in it somewhere)? It doesn’t have to be that way. With TinyURL you can make any long, unwieldy web address into a short link or, aptly enough, a Tiny URL.

Want to waste some time? Feel free to try something called TinyURL-whacking. It’s when you use the basic link for TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com/) and add random letters or numbers after it to go to some random link that someone created a tiny url for. TinyURL is up to six letters or numbers after the slash now (soon not going to be so tiny) so any combination of up to six letters or numbers could work. A variation on this, for the truly bored, is Vanity TinyURL where you put your (six letter or less) name after the tinyurl.com/. Mine is reaaallllly boring. http://tinyurl.com/tina. Stock charts. But the actual address it goes to (http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?c=$hui,uu[e,a]dbcayyay[db][pb50!b200!d20,2!f][vc60][iub14!lo14!la12,26,9!le12,26,9!li14,3!lk14!lm12!lh14,3!lp14,3,3!lf!lya7,14,28][j9343036,y]&listNum=1) is a perfect example of why we need TinyURL.

I am a note-taker. Blog ideas, to do lists, story ideas, website addresses, I open up Notepad on my computer and take notes about them all. At least I used to. I kept losing track of notes or having to leave my laptop and go to my desktop so I could email myself notes on that computer. Or, back when I worked at MUN as an IT Consultant, I would need notes I had on my computer at work when I was home or vice versa. I kept thinking there had to be a different way. I knew about Google Notebook but I didn’t really like it. Then I found Evernote. I am typing this in Evernote right now and then I’ll paste it in the blog. Evernote can be downloaded for either a PC or Mac so you can use it on your computer. But what I love about Evernote is that you can access it on the web and also on your mobile device (my iPod Touch for me). If you use the desktop version you can sync it to make sure you have access to all your notes, whether on your computer, the web or your mobile device. There’s also web clipping so you can save full web pages or just sections of them. I only use the web version because I can just pop open the web page and start writing my notes.

Evernote is free but there is a premium version too if you’d like more monthly storage and the ability to sync a number of different file types but I’m pretty sure tech-reluctants will be very happy with the free version. There are other free, similar programs out there like the previously mentioned Google Notebook, and UberNote, to name just two. But for me, Evernote has made my tech life simpler and more organized. I hope it does the same for you.

I know a lot of writers. They can weave stories and give you in-depth looks into the latest news but some of them can’t spell that well. And many of them, myself included, get mixed up in certain words or phrases. It can happen to the best of us and often does. I know it seems kind of boring to think about grammar these days in the time of the much overused apostrophe S for plurals (my pet peeve of late–there’s a large sign on my way home from town that says something like Quilt’s For Sale and I feel the urge to scream every time I see it) and when the spelling I see on  Facebook makes me fear for the future of our world, but some people care about how they say things, even on the Internet and for you I have a great website.

When in doubt about the correct use of a word or phrase, I turn to Paul Brian’s Common Errors in English. It has saved me some embarrassment. I almost submitted a manuscript with someone having her brow furled. It didn’t seem right so I went to Common Errors in English and phew, that would have been silly because, as Brian points out in his furl/furrow entry,  “If you can furl your brow you belong in a sideshow.” Even if you’re not too concerned about getting it right all the time, I bet if you go to his site, you will learn something you didn’t know before. If you do care about grammar and spelling, you should bookmark Common Errors in English as your go-to place when you’re just not sure.

The term “viral video” sounds scary. Is it a video that carries a computer virus on it and can infect your computer? Nope. It’s much less harmful, well, unless you’re the unwitting star of a viral video. Viral videos are online videos, such as YouTube videos, that become very popular and spread like wildfire, usually through emails, blogs and even Twitter and instant messaging. No one knows what makes a video go viral. They are often funny or could be embarrassing for the person in the video. Recent examples are the ruckus that happened during the auditions for America’s Top Model, or my current favourite, Bizkit the Sleep Walking Dog:

So, the next time someone sends you an email with a link to a video and you forward it on, you may actually be helping to create the next viral video. I’d love to hear from you about your favourite viral video.

Google has become a verb in our language so that if you want to find something out you google it. Google (www.google.com or www.google.ca for the Canadian version) is a search engine for the Internet and there are others like Yahoo and MSN, to name only two, but I’ve been a fan of Google since before it was cool so I’ll stick with it unless they change their clean and crisp site to something flashy and cluttered.

As much as I like Google, a tool is not much good if you don’t know how to use it. It can be pretty straightforward of course. Just type a keyword into the little box on Google and press the search button but the problem is that you will probably get millions of results and lots of them won’t be anything you’re looking for. The key to good googling is knowing how to find what you are looking for and Google provides plenty of ways to do it.

First of all, if you are looking for a specific phrase or sentence, just put quotes around it. This is especially true if there are words like “the”or “and” in your phrase since these words are so common Google just ignores them if you don’t use them in a phrase with quotes around them. So when I did a search for Canada council for the arts I got 759,000 results but when I put quotes around “Canada council for the arts” I got 220,000 results. Still a lot of results, I know, but a big difference and that difference makes it much more likely that you’ll find what you want. But note that when using the quotes, you have to be careful. If I searched for “fish and chips”, I wouldn’t get results for “fish n chips” or “fish & chips” so make sure you know what you want.

Another thing you can do with Google (and many other search engines) is add a minus or plus sign. Let’s say you’ve been hearing about glucosamine to help with your arthritis. If you want to know more, you can type in arthritis glucosamine and find lots of sites that want to sell you glucosamine but you want to get some real information, not sales pitches from GlucosamineRus, so you simply put a minus sign before the words you don’t want included in your search. If you try arthritis glucosamine -shop -buy -order you’ll find 77,800 results. That may sound like a lot but if you just type in arthritis glucosamine, you’ll get 178,000 as of  today. It’s much more likely now that you’ll find relevant information. A plus sign in front of a word will ensure that the word will be included in the search since, as I mentioned before, Google ignores some common words. So if your search really needs the word “the” in it then make sure you use +the in your search.

Google also has a number of other cool features that can help you with your searches. We’ll check those out next week on Tips & Tricks Tuesday.

Phishing is when someone tries to get your information by pretending to be someone they are not. It is called phishing because they’re trying to hook you, or, more specifically, hook information from you such as your banking information, credit card numbers, social security/social insurance number or usernames and passwords for your Internet or email account. Once a person gets these they can take your money, steal your identity, and/or use your email account to spam, or for who knows what kind of illegal activity. So it pays to be careful whenever you receive an email asking for such information.

Phishers are good. I know all about them but they almost fooled me once. I mean they almost had me hooked, I had my mouth open ready to bite but I knew to be careful and was one of the lucky ones that got away. It was a very official looking email from my email provider, or at least I thought it was. It said there were problems with my account and to log in using the link provided. The warning about my account was scary and my first instinct was to address it right away. But then I thought to be cautious and I hovered my mouse over the link in the email (using my mouse, I put my cursor over the link in the email but I didn’t click).  Doing that, I saw the actual address the link would send me to and it was not the address of my email service provider. This is one way to avoid phishing scams. But again, be careful because they might use a simple misspelling to trick you. Instead of “yahoo.com”, the link might send you to “yahooo.com” and by just glancing at the real URL (web address), you might miss that extra “o” and get into a heap of trouble. You could get to the site they linked you to and it would look exactly like the website of your bank or that auction site you always use, but looking up at the address in the top of your browser, you’ll see it is not that site.

Besides ensuring that a link is for real, there are some very simple things to remember in order to avoid phishing scams. Banks, Internet Service Providers, online auction sites like eBay, or payment sites like PayPal, will not email you in order to ask for your account information or your credit card information. If in doubt, call the company or contact the company on their website by typing their website address into your browser. If an email includes a form for you to fill out, asking for any personal information, usernames, or passwords, don’t do it. And beware of sensational subject lines meant to make you scared enough to forget common sense security, such as “urgent - your account details may have been stolen” or “Online Banking Alert”.

Here is a link to some more tips about phishing from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). My last piece of advice about how to avoid being caught in a phishing scam is to doubt all emails from organizations. You can’t be too careful and no respectful bank, credit card company, or any other organization that deals with your private information, would ask for that information over an email anyway. Again, if in doubt, contact the organization (but not through the email they allegedly sent you). And when the bad guys go phishing, make sure they end up empty-handed.

Whenever I need to go somewhere and I’m not sure how to get there, I turn to Google Maps. I know it’s already a popular thing but maybe some of you tech-reluctants haven’t tried it out yet. Google Maps in Canada, the US, and a number of other countries allow you to browse a map and to search for a location based on longitude and latitude (which we all have handy when you’re looking for the location of a kid’s birthday party, right) or street address and city. Once you get the location you’re looking for, you can print the map or, using my favourite feature, click on directions and enter your current location. It will then give you turn by turn directions on exactly how to get where you want to go. You can even choose if you want driving directions, walking directions, or public transit directions. I like trying to get Google Maps to give me wrong directions, but they haven’t steered me wrong yet (oooh, bad pun). Google Maps also allows you to choose different views of your map like satellite images or terrain. You can also find photos, videos. or Wikipedia articles related to the area you are displaying on your map. You can really spend a lot of time fooling around with the features of Google Maps, if you are so inclined or you could just use it for directions. Either way, it’s a piece of technology that can make your life easier.

Oh, and if you’re feeling really tech-adventurous, you can, depending on your location, make your own Google Map. Who knew maps could be so interesting?