Techreluctant.com

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.

This one is new to me. Instead of typing the whole web address (or, as you know, the URL) into your browser’s address bar, you can just type the part that usually goes between www and .com then press Ctrl+Enter. www will be put before what you typed and .com will be automatically placed after it. So if you type techreluctant then press Ctrl+Enter, you’ll automatically get www.techreluctant.com. I think this is one I am going to start using a lot. It works in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, and the new Google Chrome.

Is any email ever private? Probably not. Anything out there in cyberspace sits on a server somewhere and can be accessed by someone else, whether it’s an administrator or a hacker. In most companies, email from the company account and on the company server is considered the property of the company. So that joke you sent out about Santa and the pretty blond could be considered to be the property of your office. Ouch. Or even worse, that email making fun of your boss’s ear hair could be used against you one day. Beware. If you’re sending private emails from work, especially if you wouldn’t want your boss to know about them, always use a web-based account like gmail or hotmail. But don’t think they’re 100% safe either. Anything can be hacked. The rule to remember is don’t  send anything in an email you wouldn’t want the world to see. Scared? Me too. I’m guilty of emails I’d cringe about if they became public but we should all be a bit more careful.

Freecycle is one of those things that is not really a technological thing but would be impossible without technology. At its heart, it is people sharing and helping each other out. The Freecycle network is made up of 4,734 groups with 6,680,000 members all over the world. Its mission is clear, to keep stuff you don’t need anymore out of the landfill and into the hands of someone who’d like to have it. The old truism one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure is a truism for a reason. And so Freecycle was started.

It’s pretty simple. You sign up for a group in your area, you peruse the group for things people are giving away that you might be interested in and if you have something you’d like to part with and think someone else can use, you can post about that on the group. The one in my area, for instance, on one random day I chose, had a dinner table that sits 4-6 which was offered and picked up, a scanner and computer monitor offered and picked up, somoene who was looking for an office chair, and another person who was looking for an old crimping iron (as in 80s hairstyle crimping iron). It keeps these things out of the dump and someone gets to use the things you may just throw away. Or  it may be the perfect chance to get rid of the crimping iron down in that box in your basement. We’re all cleaning up around these days and getting out our summer stuff so maybe there are some things you’d like to offer up. If so, check out Freecycle.org.

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)