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Description
| Table of Contents (Click
on title to jump to article, or scroll down.) Good Google Search Skills Sites for the Curious Google's Picasa: for handling all your photographs An easy and fast way to download photos for many or most laptop users Online TV and Radio How to Speed Up Your PC |
Good Google Search Skills
This site teaches more than good google Search skills, but this article alone is worth looking at. Many of you may know about putting things in quotes, but you may not know about the + and - signs.
Google Search Skills
Sites for the Curious
If you have time for a fascinating 20 minute talk on a variety of subjects, go to www.ted.com. Click on "most favorite all time", and look at the talk by the Hans Rosling about debunking 3rd world myths. He is very funny and has 2 talks. Another good talk is by Andrew Mwenda on Africa. And there is much much more.
Another amazing site: www.wolframalpha.com/. Look on the left for "Stephen Wolfram's Intro" for a video of what it does, such as geography, calculus, physics, chemistry, genetics, disease risk, help with cross-words, etc. For example, type in "integrate x**3 + x" and it will do it. Type in "a_t___e" and it gives you 10 words like "actuate" that contain those letters in that order. Type in Peanut M&Ms and it gives you the nutrition label.
Create your own radio station with your favorite artists at www.jango.com.
Google's Picasa: for handling all your photos
Picasa 3 is free photo-editing software from Google. If you have a 1mb photo and want to email it, it will automatically change the size to approximately 50 kb. This means you can email lots of photos in one email rather than one email per photo. It will also crop pictures, fix red eye, fix contrast, create slide shows, and it will let you write directly on the photo itself. It also does the collages you see in this website- for example the tree collage and the booksale collage. All for free! Go to www.picasa.google.com for the download, and be sure to watch the video introduction.
Some things to note: If you want to email photos, look at the rectangle on the lower left of Picasa. Every picture you select will appear there as a thumbnail; To email several pictures, you need to put more than one picture in that box, and to do that look for the little green thumbtack and click it for each picture. After all the pictures are in that box, click on "email". It is good to crop photos before sending email. If you double click on a photo, the photo will appear larger with editing software on the upper left.
An easy and fast way to download photos for many or most laptop users
First, be sure the software for your camera is installed on your computer. It comes with the camera. Then look at the very front of your laptop for a slot about an inch wide. Remove the memory card from your camera and push it into this slot. This downloads, in my experience, much faster than a cable, and is especially useful if you misplaced it.
The new trend is to watch TV online and even cancel cable subscriptions. You could buy an Hi Def monitor or laptop rather than a Hi Def TV. Here are some of the better known sites where you can also watch full length shows:
| http://www.pbs.org http://www.cspan.org http://www.fox.com http://www.syfy.com |
http://www.nbc.com http://www.abc.com http://www.hula.com http://www.joost.com |
Sometimes you have to go to the specific show's website to find a show, but it may not be on until a week later. The Daily show is an example. I went to BBC TV to see what they had, and there was a show called Merlin that I thought worth trying, a new twist on King Arthur's Tale. But BBC rejected me because I did not have a British email! I then bought the show from itunes for $1.99 per episode and quite enjoyed it.
Not everyone is aware that you don't have to have a Mac to use itunes©, and that it is a free download. Put all of your CDs online and you don't have to bother with those horrid jewel boxes. Get a couple of good computer speakers, and you will have wonderful music from your computer. Also itunes accesses hundreds of online radio stations.
A common problem is that your wonderful computer has gotten too slow and bogged down. There are several things you can do to restore the speed. Sometimes just rebooting helps, or closing down open pages.
My son Dylan, who is a network engineer, once restored a friend's computer that had nearly ground to a halt by, chiefly, installing Microsoft update security service packs. (see below for site) These updates can be done automatically, and generally occur on the first Tuesday night of the month, but may occur any night if there is an urgent security problem. It is Saturday and my computer was updated last night for that reason. If you sign up for automatic updates, you must leave your computer turned on overnight. Here is an article
on the subject of slow
computers, but much of it may be more than
you want to do, although it is easy enough to clean up temporary files.
Installing real RAM requires opening the box.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071212165044AAmtN5i
My son wrote this about the article above:
Those
are good tips except for the last one, it would be
much better to buy real RAM, rather then increasing virtual RAM. I
usually recommend that you have at least 1 GB (1024
MB) for Windows XP, or 2 GB for Window Vista & Windows
7. If they have
Windows 2000, it's time for a new PC. To find out how much RAM, you
have go to the Start menu, then
right-click on Computer (or "My Computer" for XP) and click
Properties,
Another thing that can slow down computers is
spyware
infection. This is a good program to use in addition to your antivirus
software:
http://www.malwarebytes.org
I do recommend installing the latest
Microsoft service packs
and security updates by going to: http://update.microsoft.com
For more questions/help, contact Judy Steeh or Mary Cowmeadow. See the AAUW directory for contact information.