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Still doing occasional changes |
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Jardine Electronic Services
Some Clues to Searching the Internet
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Still doing occasional changes |
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Directory
Search Engines and Browsing
More searching plus shopping New
1/05
E-mail
Forward!
Digitizing Your World New
3/05
Basic Computer Hints
Keeping Out the Hackers!
Hoaxes, Chain Letters and Spam
Definitions
Latest update: 7/3/07
Purpose
This page was designed as an aid to help you get more out of your internet browsing. The concept came about when I was asked to give a talk to a small investment club about browsing. "Sure," I said. "Just get a room with a high-speed connection, check out an LCD projector and we'll be in business." Much better, of course, would be a station for each person, but the projector would be better than arm waving or blackboarding stuff about the internet. "Well," came the answer. "No, it's going to be in someone's home, in the living room. She only has a dialup connection and a Mac, and it's in her closet-sized office, so just come and answer questions."
I could envision spelling out a bunch of URLs and giving suggestions that people would scribble down on their notepads, and that didn't sound too good, so I finally settled on taking a tape recorder to capture all of the Q & A, and distribute only one thing: the URL for this page. Now the participants could go home and - hopefully - by the next day direct links to answer their questions would be on-line.
But there would be things that they wouldn't ask about, so before the talk I put together everything else I hard learned the hard way: finding stuff and keeping it, and keeping stuff and people out of my PC. Hence this page evolved into a general information page, but it is not comprehensive, merely reporting the solutions I have found for problems I encountered.
A note about links to products on this page: these are hardware devices or websites or programs that I have used personally. In most cases I used them on recommendation or as the result of an internet search. In all cases there are competitive products that may work as well or better, or even worse, but these all worked for me and I have no commercial interest in any of the companies referred to.
A technical note
All links on this page open a new browser window so that you don't lose you place on this page or have to wait for a re-load.
My most favorite search engine of all time is Dogpile.com, because it will take you to around 15 other search engines. This way you get a cross-sampling of how each engine returns different results for the same search string, and you only have to enter the string once.
The advantages of (my)(a) multi-search-engine search engine are:
However...
You would think that a university library should have researched and found the best search engines around, and maybe even put up a page for just that purpose. And my favorite university, the one in Berkeley, has just such a page: just click here.
Browsing Hint Links
Skipping the Backstep
Let's say you are down about 10 levels into a slow-loading website and you want to go back to where you started. If you came into the home page http://www.george.com and you are now at http://www.george.com/products/veggies/carrots/juice/uses.html. Instead of using the Back button on your browser and waiting for each page to s-l-o-w-l-y reload, you can simply go to the location/address window, click on the text therein, then hit End on the keyboard. Now use the backspace arrow until you are back to ...com/ and hit Return. This is also a short cut to get to the home page if you came into a lower level link and cannot find a Home button. You can also highlight the unwanted portion and use the Del key.
Alternatively, there is the Go button on the Netscape menu that has the last n pages you have been on and you simply select the one you want with the cursor and click on it.
In IE you click on View/Go To and select to previous page you want to go back to.
And, in most current browsers, you can click on the History icon or in the dropdown menus, and find the list of your search history. The actual presentation varies and you have to learn that part by using your browser. If you have several browser windows open (another useful tool, by the way; I never work from one window - try Control N to open a new window) some history functions show the browsing history for all windows and some only from the active (the one visible) window only.
Hidden Dangers
Once you connect up to the internet, there is a world of unscrupulous, uncaring but highly determined people trying to get something for nothing via the internet. I am not speaking of spams, which I cover below, but "the rest." Here are a few of the more common:
Hot Links in Incoming E-mail
In most home computer e-mail (AOL, Netscape, Outlook) a URL is automatically "hot" if it appears underlined and blue (usually) just like a link on a webpage. This may sound obvious, but I have seen people laboriously copying these ready-to-go links into their browser address bar. You only need click on the link in the e-mail and your browser will get right to the site without your having to type it in yourself, which can lead to many frustrating errors. However:
Some people (including my very own daughter!) don't put anything in the subject line when they create e-mail. This creates problems at two levels:
Reading Your Mail
Once you download your mail it has been received, so anyone sending mail in may assume that it went thru. Most mail clients can be set to leave the mail on the server or download it to your PC. But if you want to make people stop sending mail to your e-dress, you can use a program called MailWasher which "peeks" at the mail on your server and allows you to bounce it, as if your e-dress were no valid.
Personalize Your Mail Program
All mail programs have many options that are settable via something like Settings or Properties that are found in the pull down menus at the top of the window. You should look thru all of options and take the time to track down the ones that you don't understand in the help files. Knowing how all of these settings work can make quite a difference in how your mail is processed, stored, etc. One thing to avoid until you have more experience is setting up fancy font and other effects in your outgoing mail: some are difficult for others to read, some are annoying and many people have their incoming mail set to plain text and your efforts will not be seen.
Viruses
Misc Mail Links
New 3/05Digitizing the World ...or at least your corner of it!
Last September I decided to convert all of our old vinyl to some sort of computer format. None of the software I had available seemed to do what I wanted to do: digitize (convert from the record to a format playable on the computer or on a CD player. I could record a whole side of five or six songs, but I wanted access to individual pieces in the digital version, just as I could select and repeat songs on the LP record.
I finally found a program to do it: RIP Vinyl by Wieser Software in the UK, and only U$S 7.00. With its settable levels for Silence (the space between the tracks) and time before creating a New Track, you can set the levels to automatically generate a new file for each cut. Problems come with live performances (no silence due to applause) and records with very little (<1 second) of space between the tracks, these were rare and had to be "hand fed". Next problem came in adjusting the Silence level high enuf (to the right) to have it recognize the empty space between songs on a scratchy record. There are little "flecks" of black that appear between the two extremes of the Silence Level setting that move around, showing the sound level samples. Using this you can set the pointer slightly above the lowest flecks seen during the gap between songs, and then the software will start a new file after the time interval (New Track after...) setting.
Now with classical music - well, I am a 3-B's musicologist. No, silly, it's not Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; it's Bach, Beethoven and Bluegrass! All that Romantic period stuff that came along after Rossini lost all of the rhythm that is a true part of the human existence on this earth.
OK, back to the high tech stuff! You don't want the individual movements of classical pieces to end up as separate files, because when you play it back in shuffle or random mode, you'll sound like a modern-day, non-classical radio station, playing music "from" Mozart's 40th, instead of the whole symphony. How I handle this is to turn the Silence Level to zero and play back the various movements in WinAmp.
First you start the music in WinAmp and find the loudest parts, checking the record levels (that lower right vertical graph thing on RIP Vinyl) and adjusting the little rectangle next to the graph to keep the loudest notes just hitting near the top of the graph. If they go to the top and hold there you are liable to get distortion in the sound.
The younger people, used to DJs, like to start a song before the previous one is finished. We old timers - and classical music buffs - want a breather between songs. RIP Vinyl allows you to do this by setting the Silence to zero, and the New Track high (>6 or 7 seconds), then click Start and wait for 3 or 4 seconds before clicking the Play icon in WinAmp. After the last movement is recorded, wait another 3 or 4 seconds, and you will have a nice buffer of silence between pieces.
Playback. So now you have your music digitized, what do you do with it? You can pipe the computer's audio out to the AUX input on your stereo (you may need a miniature-stereo to RCA adaptor cable - try Radio Shack ~$5) and play the songs thru WinAmp; or your CD toaster software (such as Nero) will allow you to put about an hour's worth of music on a standard audio CD. You can also convert the songs (RIP Vinyl saves as .wav files) to MP3 format (most newer PCs will have a file conversion routine in the media playback programs) and record them on a CD as data files [Too complex for you? Ask one of your grandchildren!] which can be played back in both your PC and most DVD players.
If you play the music back thru the DVD player in Random mode, you can listen to over 200 songs (200 x 3 min = 10 hours) in shuffle mode, sort of like listening to a radio station without the commercials.
Sound like a lot of work? You betcha. When I started my own "Project Vinyl" I thought I would offer a service to our retirement community of converting their record collections. After going thru ~50 LPs, 30-odd CD, several tapes and some downloads, I have determined that I would gladly convert your old-format music at $25 a record.
"Hoo-hah!" you will say. "I can buy the damn CD for $12 thru Amazon!" Good on ya, Go for it, and all that sort of stuff. If I weren't so damn cheap (and didn't have such a bad case of OCD) I wouldn't do any more myself, and I sure don't want to do any for anyone else. The worst part came when I dropped a CD case into the turntable while it was playing Mozart's Adagio, breaking the tip off of the diamond stylus and putting several audible scratches in the record I had kept safe for over 20 years. Sniff, sniff!
Oh, yeah, I digitized a bunch of VHS and Beta tapes as well, but I'm even less impressed with the results, so I won't bore you with it!
Security
New 3/05 A few on-line self-teaching sites. These are sites I found by just hunting around for how-to mouse links. Another searching hint here: when looking for uncluttered, lo-impact, popup-free sites to learn about something, enter the subject in your search engine, but only click on sites that have a ".edu" or ".org" in the name. There are very few ".com"s that give much for free.
The Right-click Trick
Note: don't try this on your Mac! However you can get alternate clickable functions by holding down the "Apple" or Command button. For a complete list see this site at Apple.com.
It's quite amazing to me how many people have never been told about using the right-hand button on the mouse to bring up many options in the Windows environment. These options are all available on the menu bar, but the most common guys come up with a right-click without losing your place on the page to search thru the menus.
Shortcut Keys
These can come in handy if your mouse fails (doesn't happen too often nowadays) or if your screen gets set to low resolution and you can't reach the control buttons on your windows. Sometimes I find it quicker to hit Ctrl F4 to close a window than to move the pointer to the upper right side.
Here are links to Microsoft's keyboard shortcuts:
Backing up files
Compared to what we had to work with even ten years ago, today's HDDs (hard disk drives) are almost trouble-free. Still there are crashes where the disk drives simply stop working and you can't get your data out. The least expensive solution to me is to simply always buy a read/write CD drive. CDs are extremely inexpensive and the data cannot be accidentally erased as it can with any magnetic medium. Now - in 2005 - I can say that a read/write DVD and CD unit is a great bargain at ~$65 (including tax and shipping) and blank CDs are ~30 cents each and DVDs < (less than) a dollar.
Of course if you have relatively small files sizes to store there is nothing "bad" about floppy disks, until you buy a newer computer without a floppy drive!
I have two PCs and periodically go thru my working files and send the ones with recent dates to the other computer and when I get enuf material I burn a CD. In the meantime I have backup in PC #2 if I need something. Oh, I don't run #2 but a couple of hours per week, so it is "younger" than its twin.
With a single computer I could use the "multi-session" option in the CD writer software, and add current work every few days. Some people who create a lot of files in their computers do daily or more frequent backups and use a variety of methods to assure that hours of work are not lost.
Lots of options, but at least you should give some thought to what you would have to do to recover from a crash or even an accidental overwrite.
Phone line problems
Saving a Few $$ on Your Printer Ink
If you have an ink jet printer you know how expensive those stupid cartridges are! Of course laser jets are more expensive, but the cartridges (generally) last a lot longer. The next time you are about to print out something non-critical, use the File/Print command instead of clicking on the printer icon. Instead of beginning to print, a window will come up with options for number of pages, etc. Click on the Properties button and on the next window click on the Paper/Quality tab. Look at about the middle of the window and if there is a Draft mode, select it.
I print almost everything in draft mode because I send out very few letters and I certainly can't tell the difference if I'm going to fax someone. This has cut my black ink usage by ~1/2.
Listening to Your Computer
When I first got onto cable I bought a copy of Black Ice. There were alarms going every few minutes as people tried to hack into my machine. That was five years ago, and things haven't got any better.
Here's a couple of links where firewalls are discussed:
I suggest a hardware firewall and software to back it up. The hardware firewall can also be a router (splitter) for your cable or DSL line if you have more than one computer.
Here is a software firewall you can try for free.
The hardware firewall I have been using for over five years is from D-Link. There are other companies, but this has been trouble-free and I ordered a newer version in spring of '05 because eventually the hackers will figure a 'workaround' (software guys' jargon for how-to-do-it-regardless) and also, D-Link had no new updates for the old unit.
Another general hint: if you think something that works OK in your computer shouldn't be replaced, GET OVER IT! Anything in there that's four or five years old is outdated and a potential disaster waiting to strike. It'll either be outdated, won't run (properly) on an operating system upgrade, or will not do what it used to do properly due to any number of things that are constantly changing in your PC.
Hoaxes, Chain Letters and Spam
and how I handle them
You receive an urgent e-mail from a trusted friend. She states that she got it from another friend who is a lawyer. Wow!
I don't know what it is, but when we see something written, and especially from the Internet, our brains seem to go into du-uh mode. Think about it a bit: In the pre-internet days, if someone told you something that sounds a bit off center, you might have called a friend to say, "Joan, have you heard this rumor about...?" But until you got some feedback from Joan you most likely would not call everyone in your phone book.
With hoax or chain e-mail however, all of this is forgotten. "My god, this is terrible! Let's see who should I tell...oh hell, send to everyone in the address book! They need a wakeup call, and it'll remind them I'm still around!"
A fellow "clean up your act" enthusiast gives these hints: "One of the biggest flags to a hoax or bit of chain mail, to my mind, is a subject something like "IMPORTANT!! PASS THIS ON TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!!!" A phrase like that takes my hoax-0-meter(tm) to 75% or more...if the phrase "THIS IS NO HOAX" is included, the meter pegs, the needle breaks off, and I hit the delete key. Sadly, most people aren't that clueful!" Oh, clueful is the opposite of clueless.
So, the next time you receive something like this - especially if it has lots of >>> and !!!! and UPPER CASE (= screaming), copy keywords from the subject line or the article title and check it out with one of these great sites:
If you find a page that de-bunks the e-mail, hit the Reply to All button and send them the URL of the "Truth" page. This will at least get the message to all of the people to whom your friend unwittingly forwarded the hoax.
Personally, I go one step further, suggesting that all of the recipients mail to all of their friends, thereby creating a reverse pyramid scheme, eventually getting the "stop the chain" message to millions.
Has it worked? Well, I still get mail from the same friends, but never another hoax or chain. So, to use the vernacular, "Hey, it works for me!"
Virus Messages
In this same category are the fake virus messages. You can verify them quickest by going to Norton or McAffee sites (these links have the latest virus alerts) and be careful, McAffee has a pop-under ad!
Now, how effective are virus warning e-mails from your friends? In my experience I would say that I have had somewhere over 50 of these since being on full-time e-mail in 1994. None of them was true! This lead me to the following points:
My solution:
One of the ways that spammers get your name on their lists is due to the discourtesy of your "friends" in sending your name in the list of recipients. I am certain that all of you have received at least one mail that had several lists of addresses to previous recipients. Let's do a little calculation, and we'll err on the side of caution. Let's take mail that has been sent to five separate levels (count the number of ">" down the edge of the body text and add one to it and you have the number of "Fwd" operations it has been thru). Now let's say the first level had 20 names on it, and that only 1/2 of all of the recipients passed the mail on to another 20 friends. By the time you have the mail, the original 20 people on the list have had their e-dress sent on to 100K ... yeah, that's one- hundred thousand people. Now if you do the same thing, it raises to a million.
Simple question: how many people in 100K to 1M people are involved in or connected to a spamming operation?
Ways around it:
SPAM
The most persistent spam agency I know of is SpamCop. They have a full service for only $30 / year. For more than five years I used their free service to simply report spams I receive because SpamCop goes after the illegal links, careless (or uncaring) mail hosts, etc. SpamCop's full service requires that you send all of your mail thru their system, and they weed out the spam. In August of 2003 my spam suddenly increased, in spite of MailWasher, SpamCop submission, etc., and I took SpamCop's $30/year service until I can change my website.
I thought the downside for me would be the delay. I have a DSL connection thru SBC, and I had cable the @Home/AT&T/Who-Knows-What-Now, and they are both extremely sloppy and careless about e-mail. You can test this on your own system: instead of saving your outgoing mail in the Sent file, enable the Bcc: line in an outgoing mail and put your own e-dress there. Then watch to see how long it takes before you get your own copy back. You will have to click on your Get Message button continuously for a while to see if it comes back right away, then just wait while your mail program does its periodic check for new mail. At Berkeley my copy took less than 10 seconds, and if it didn't I knew that there was a system problem. For a couple of year my mail went thru my website, on A1 WebHosting (~$150 / year for hosting and domain registration dues) and the return copy was about as fast as I can find the Get Message button. On DSL and Cable the turnaround sometimes got up to six hours, which indicates how long your outgoing mail may be taking to get out or how long your incoming mail is being delayed by their overloaded or poorly managed systems.
The good news is that SpamCop's system is extremely fast and I see delays mostly on the order of 15 seconds, and that's thru my web host, forwarded to SpamCop, checked by them and fetched by my mail program. Purty damn fast.
There are other schemes to stop spam thru your ISP, but most are of the type that you have to build a "friends" list or set up specific subject content filters, and spammers are constantly changing their tactics.
Another spam catcher that I tried is MailWasher, which was available for free in the simple version and was quite effective. It gets between my mail server and my mail client and analyzes the mail, then gives you a list of mail with check boxes: Delete, Bounce, Blacklist. To me the Bounce concept is the best feature, because it will eventually get me off of some of the lists.
404 = page not found error while browsing. There are two main causes for this: the pages has been moved or removed or you made a mistake in entering the URL in the browser address window. For ways to recover from a 404 error, see my special 404 page here.
BIOS = Binary Input/Output Software
Client = your computer when it receives information from a Server on the internet, also a program on your computer that handles mail.
default = the settings that a program (including browsers) have when they are installed. Most programs have a menu item called Preferences or Options where many setting can be modified.
DSL = Digital Subscriber Line. An intermediate-speed internet access system. It is usually brought in on the same phone line as an existing line in the user's home or business. The speed is approximately 5 to 10 times faster than the 56K dialup systems, and about 1/3 the speed of cable. In spite of the lower speed, DSL usually costs more than cable, if there is already a TV cable line installed. If cable has to be run in just to have internet access, the total monthly cost may be more than DSL.
e-dress = electronic address. Yes, I thought that up on my own, I've used it for years with hundreds of people and it never caught on! :-(
HDD = hard disk drive, so called because they replaced the removable floppy drives of early desktop computer days. If you have a "floppy" drive in your PC (they are fast becoming an option in the newer computers) you'll notice that it is hardly "floppy" but appears to be reasonably stiff plastic. This is the 3.5" floppy, and replaced the 5.25" which was could almost be bent double, and that replaced the 8"....
LAN = Local Area Network, any connection between computers that is not connected directly to the internet. Can also be called intranet.
Search string = the information you enter into a search window
Server = a computer somewhere out on the internet that feeds information to your computer (the Client): both webpages and e-mail are stored and sent out from servers.
Unix = an operating system (different from Windows and Mac systems) that is used in most universities and on many web servers because it is more secure and much faster than Windows-based servers.
URL = Uniform Resource Locator. The sequence of letters in an internet address such as: http://www.thecompanyname.com
More definitions? Mystified by the alphabet soup of hi-tech goobledy-gook? Wonder how that ram got into your computer? Try my Definitions webpage!
Copyright © Jardine Electronic Services 2003-06
Last update: July, 2007.
Comments or questions?
