Since its raining, and I am not bringing my computer to class today we are going to talk about my favorite subject.
Gadgets, believe it or not there are more things you can do with your computer than email, solitaire, and surfing the web.
So geek out hint no one, aluminum foil for your wifi like your old fashioned rabbit ears, make a para-foil out of aluminum foil and tape your wifi antenna to it for cheap fast improved reception.
Then let's go to one of my favorite websites, and see what we can find. ThinkGeek
So here is my wishlist from ThinkGeek,
wifi detector
Stainless Steel 8GB Video Watch
USB Squid
USB Flex Light
USB Doomsday Device Hub
ImageLab Instant Slide Scanner
Levitron - Anti-Gravity Top
Nerf Vulcan Automatic Heavy Blaster
USB Rocket Launcher
Ok, I am being a little silly today but its raining outside, and I want you guys to know that your computer can be your friend, maybe your only friend if the need calls for it, one day you will be sitting around writting a cook book on all the things you can do with cheese slices like I am, and you will have wished you invested in a Nerf Vulcan Automatic Heavy Blasters and Stainless Steel Video watch. At least with the watch you can go outside, and take your movie with you.
Ok, on a more serious note I found some office supplies you might need:
Paper E-mail
Top Secret Password Notepad
Takeout Menu Organizer
And for any grand babies out there, or gift ideas for your grand babies.
Pet's Eye View Digital Camera
And on clearance today just for us.
Handmade Deluxe Magic Wand
Grow Your Own 1up Mushroom
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Tuesday April 21st, 2009
Lets Burn a music CD using Windows Media Player
Another good thing for us travelers, gypsy's and weekend warriors is taking our music along with us, no matter your taste in music, music always sets the tone of the day, at least for me it does.
So, let's burn a music CD using windows media player, then we will talk about other ways to bring your music on the road.
So the first thing I do is create a play list, go to your start menu and open computer or my computer, then go the file or drive that you have stored your music on. In my case, one of my external hard drives, or my J Drive. Then open the file where you have stored your mp3's. In my case the File is named MP3s.
So we are going to burn a new CD with some Johnny Cash Music, by boyhood hero. So I will open his file, which is filed under Country Music and select the songs I want to record and put on my play list.
I will select the songs by holding my control key, and clicking one time on the songs, once I have them all selected I will right click one time and click add to windows media player.
Ok, now that I have done that, look at your windows media player over on the far right you will see the list of songs you just added, you change the name of the play list (which is currently called "now playing") to any name you want, in this case I named it Johnny Cash, then look all the way at the bottom of the page on the far right, there is a save button, click on it and you have now saved your new play list.
Ok so now that we have some music playing lets burn that CD. So get a new CD out put it your CDRW Drive (CD player). Now just wait for the window to pop up a little box and ask you what do you want to do with that disk, select burn a music CD, then wait a little more and your windows media player will open back up, since we already have music playing and a play list up, the next steps are easy, look to the right again it will say drag items to be burned or burn Johnny Cash (the name of the play list we are playing) select burn Johnny Cash.
There will be an announcement in the upper right corner of how much space these selections will take up on your CD and how long it will take to burn them. In this case 17 minutes to burn and 79 :57 minutes of music.
Another good thing for us travelers, gypsy's and weekend warriors is taking our music along with us, no matter your taste in music, music always sets the tone of the day, at least for me it does.
So, let's burn a music CD using windows media player, then we will talk about other ways to bring your music on the road.
So the first thing I do is create a play list, go to your start menu and open computer or my computer, then go the file or drive that you have stored your music on. In my case, one of my external hard drives, or my J Drive. Then open the file where you have stored your mp3's. In my case the File is named MP3s.
So we are going to burn a new CD with some Johnny Cash Music, by boyhood hero. So I will open his file, which is filed under Country Music and select the songs I want to record and put on my play list.
I will select the songs by holding my control key, and clicking one time on the songs, once I have them all selected I will right click one time and click add to windows media player.
Ok, now that I have done that, look at your windows media player over on the far right you will see the list of songs you just added, you change the name of the play list (which is currently called "now playing") to any name you want, in this case I named it Johnny Cash, then look all the way at the bottom of the page on the far right, there is a save button, click on it and you have now saved your new play list.
Ok so now that we have some music playing lets burn that CD. So get a new CD out put it your CDRW Drive (CD player). Now just wait for the window to pop up a little box and ask you what do you want to do with that disk, select burn a music CD, then wait a little more and your windows media player will open back up, since we already have music playing and a play list up, the next steps are easy, look to the right again it will say drag items to be burned or burn Johnny Cash (the name of the play list we are playing) select burn Johnny Cash.
There will be an announcement in the upper right corner of how much space these selections will take up on your CD and how long it will take to burn them. In this case 17 minutes to burn and 79 :57 minutes of music.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 - The Internet
Today we are going to talk about the Internet, what it really is and the differences between the terms Internet, world wide web, web page, web browser, email and search engines. Last but not least the ultimate question, what the heck is an ISP?
So first lets define the terms by their actual definition.
Internet - The Internet was created in 1969, during the Cold War, by the United States military. It was meant to be a "nuke-proof" communications network. Today, the Internet spreads across the globe and consists of countless networks and computers, allowing millions of people to share information. Data that travels long distances on the Internet is transferred on huge lines known collectively as the Internet backbone. The Internet is now maintained by the major Internet service providers such as MCI Worldcom, Sprint, GTE, ANS, and UUNET. Because these providers make huge amounts of revenue off the Internet, they are motivated to maintain consistent and fast connections which benefits everyday Internet users like you and me.
Many people think the Internet and the World Wide Web are the same thing. They're not! The World Wide Web is what you are browsing right now. It is one of the many features of the Internet. E-mail, FTP, and Instant Messaging are also features of the Internet.
So, think of the Internet as a Library full of books.
World Wide Web (www) - the World Wide Web (www, or the web) is a very large set of interlinked documents much like volumes of encyclopedias sitting on your bookshelves at home. If the Internet is represented as the Library, then the www is your very large collection of books.
Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, the World Wide Web was started in 1989 by the English physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and later by Robert Cailiau, a Belgian computer scientist, while both where working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1990, they proposed building a "web of nodes" storing "hypertext pages" viewed by "browsers" on a network, and released that web in 1992. Connected by the existing Internet, other websites were created, around the world, adding international standards for domain names and the HTML language. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards.
Web Browser - Staying with the Library example now lets look at what a web browser is. Think of your web browser as the "old fashioned", card catalog.
You are probably using a browser to read this right now. A Web browser, often just called a "browser," is the program people use to access the World Wide Web. It interprets HTML code including text, images, hypertext links, Javascript, and Java applets. After rendering the HTML code, the browser displays a nicely formatted page.
Common Browsers used today.
IE or Internet Explorer, a Microsoft product and notorious for being buggy, insecure and slow. The new / latest versions of IE, IE 8 is trying to address those issues, but I still find it to be very buggy. By buggy I mean hard to make it do what it claims it will do, for example the new IE8 is supposed to allow you to use add on's, I could not make that feature work at all. If you would like to try IE 8, you can download it here from MSN (Internet Explorer 8 from MSN).
Google Chrome is a new web browser that is available, it is a very simple browser with no toolbar, just an address bar, and google as a home page, when I have found myself in need of running two different browsers at the same time, Google Chrome is my second choice, you can download Google Chrome here from Google (Google Chrome Web Browser).
Opera is another web browser used by many people, I think Opera is a good alternative as well, I do think its a little slow, but you may enjoy it's ease of use and simple toolbar, you can download Opera here from Opera (Opera Web Browser).
Maxathon another web browser, I installed it and it required me to register it to use it so I un-installed it.
Firefox is the web browser I use and will continue to use, why, because I have already taught myself how to use it and I am comfortable with it, because it is faster, because it has great features and add ons, and works very smoothly. You can download Firefox here from Mozilla here (Firefox Web Browser).
Search Engines - OK, now we have located the card catalog in the Library, we need to find that special book we are looking for, that's you, you get to search all those index cards for that special book you want to read.
Google, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Infoseek, and Yahoo are all search engines. They index millions of sites on the Web, so that Web surfers like you and me can easily find Web sites with the information we want. By creating indexes, or large databases of Web sites (based on titles, keywords, and the text in the pages), search engines can locate relevant Web sites when users enter search terms or phrases. When you are looking for something using a search engine, it is a good idea to use words like AND, OR, and NOT to specify your search.
There are many search engines available, believe it or not, google and yahoo are not the only search engines. The following list of sites are all search engines.
Google - Yahoo - Dogpile - Goodsearch - Lycos - Excite - AltaVista - Ask - WebCrawler - alltheweb - exaled - infoseek (GO)
That just a few of them and enough to keep you busy for awhile, lol (Laughing Out Loud).
Lets move on to Email.
Email - Email is another tool, in your Library, consider having the convenience of your own postal service and that's what you have with email. A postal service of your very own and right inside your Library. How convenient.
It's hard to remember what our lives were like without e-mail. Ranking up there with the Web as one of the most useful features of the Internet, e-mail has become one of today's standard means of communication. Billions of messages are sent each year. If you're like most people these days, you probably have more than one e-mail address. After all, the more addresses you have, the more sophisticated you look...
E-mail is part of the standard TCP/IP set of protocols. Sending messages is typically done by SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and receiving messages is handled by POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3), or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). IMAP is the newer protocol, allowing you to view and sort messages on the mail server, without downloading them to your hard drive.
Though e-mail was originally developed for sending simple text messages, it has become more robust in the last few years. Now, HTML-based e-mail can use the same code as Web pages to incorporate formatted text, colors, and images into the message. Also, documents can be attached to e-mail messages, allowing files to be transferred via the e-mail protocol. However, since e-mail was not originally designed to handle large file transfers, transferring large documents (over 3 MB, for example) is not allowed by most mail servers. So remember to keep your attachments small!
There are lots of free email service providers out there that are free, (OK I just made that term up, esp or email service provider). The following list are esp's.
Google - Yahoo - GMX - Mail - Fastmail - Inbox - AOL - Want more here is a list of 1400 free esp's Free Email Providers Guide or FEPG
Should you ever consider paying for an email address? Only if you want the following: a very specific address, like your name @ professional sound / or fun sounding place. For example, skp000000@myskpmail.com and yes there is a @myskpmail.com.
I have left one subject off this list but since we are talking about the internet I need to discuss this as well. What the heck is an ISP?
Internet Service Provider ISP - In order to connect to the Internet (or walk into your Libary), you need an ISP (or a library pass). It is the company that you pay a monthly fee to in order to use the Internet. If you use a dial-up modem to connect to your ISP, a point-to-point protocol (PPP) connection is established with another modem on the ISP's end. That modem connects to one of the ISP's routers, which routes you to the Internet "backbone." From there, you can access information from anywhere around the world. DSL and cable modems work the same way, except after you connect the first time, you are always connected.
Do you need to have a paid ISP today? Sometimes yes and sometimes no, if you are a sticks and bricks then yes, a good solid DSL or Cable Modem in your home is a good thing. If you are a full time RVer, maybe not, depends on your patients, you can simply rely on finding free wireless access where ever you travel, or a temporary wireless ISP's like Tengo Net in Rainbows end.
Some full time RVer's use Hughs Net and Wildblue which are satillite ISP providers like Direct TV and Dish Network. Some full timers use air cards from Verizon, AT & T etc., I have mixed emotions about any of those, and I don't use them, they are expensive, air cards are limited to the amount of "Internet" access you get per month, and wireless access points (WAP's) are becoming more and more common.
So first lets define the terms by their actual definition.
Internet - The Internet was created in 1969, during the Cold War, by the United States military. It was meant to be a "nuke-proof" communications network. Today, the Internet spreads across the globe and consists of countless networks and computers, allowing millions of people to share information. Data that travels long distances on the Internet is transferred on huge lines known collectively as the Internet backbone. The Internet is now maintained by the major Internet service providers such as MCI Worldcom, Sprint, GTE, ANS, and UUNET. Because these providers make huge amounts of revenue off the Internet, they are motivated to maintain consistent and fast connections which benefits everyday Internet users like you and me.
Many people think the Internet and the World Wide Web are the same thing. They're not! The World Wide Web is what you are browsing right now. It is one of the many features of the Internet. E-mail, FTP, and Instant Messaging are also features of the Internet.
So, think of the Internet as a Library full of books.
World Wide Web (www) - the World Wide Web (www, or the web) is a very large set of interlinked documents much like volumes of encyclopedias sitting on your bookshelves at home. If the Internet is represented as the Library, then the www is your very large collection of books.
Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, the World Wide Web was started in 1989 by the English physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and later by Robert Cailiau, a Belgian computer scientist, while both where working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1990, they proposed building a "web of nodes" storing "hypertext pages" viewed by "browsers" on a network, and released that web in 1992. Connected by the existing Internet, other websites were created, around the world, adding international standards for domain names and the HTML language. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards.
Web Browser - Staying with the Library example now lets look at what a web browser is. Think of your web browser as the "old fashioned", card catalog.
You are probably using a browser to read this right now. A Web browser, often just called a "browser," is the program people use to access the World Wide Web. It interprets HTML code including text, images, hypertext links, Javascript, and Java applets. After rendering the HTML code, the browser displays a nicely formatted page.
Common Browsers used today.
IE or Internet Explorer, a Microsoft product and notorious for being buggy, insecure and slow. The new / latest versions of IE, IE 8 is trying to address those issues, but I still find it to be very buggy. By buggy I mean hard to make it do what it claims it will do, for example the new IE8 is supposed to allow you to use add on's, I could not make that feature work at all. If you would like to try IE 8, you can download it here from MSN (Internet Explorer 8 from MSN).
Google Chrome is a new web browser that is available, it is a very simple browser with no toolbar, just an address bar, and google as a home page, when I have found myself in need of running two different browsers at the same time, Google Chrome is my second choice, you can download Google Chrome here from Google (Google Chrome Web Browser).
Opera is another web browser used by many people, I think Opera is a good alternative as well, I do think its a little slow, but you may enjoy it's ease of use and simple toolbar, you can download Opera here from Opera (Opera Web Browser).
Maxathon another web browser, I installed it and it required me to register it to use it so I un-installed it.
Firefox is the web browser I use and will continue to use, why, because I have already taught myself how to use it and I am comfortable with it, because it is faster, because it has great features and add ons, and works very smoothly. You can download Firefox here from Mozilla here (Firefox Web Browser).
Search Engines - OK, now we have located the card catalog in the Library, we need to find that special book we are looking for, that's you, you get to search all those index cards for that special book you want to read.
Google, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Infoseek, and Yahoo are all search engines. They index millions of sites on the Web, so that Web surfers like you and me can easily find Web sites with the information we want. By creating indexes, or large databases of Web sites (based on titles, keywords, and the text in the pages), search engines can locate relevant Web sites when users enter search terms or phrases. When you are looking for something using a search engine, it is a good idea to use words like AND, OR, and NOT to specify your search.
There are many search engines available, believe it or not, google and yahoo are not the only search engines. The following list of sites are all search engines.
Google - Yahoo - Dogpile - Goodsearch - Lycos - Excite - AltaVista - Ask - WebCrawler - alltheweb - exaled - infoseek (GO)
That just a few of them and enough to keep you busy for awhile, lol (Laughing Out Loud).
Lets move on to Email.
Email - Email is another tool, in your Library, consider having the convenience of your own postal service and that's what you have with email. A postal service of your very own and right inside your Library. How convenient.
It's hard to remember what our lives were like without e-mail. Ranking up there with the Web as one of the most useful features of the Internet, e-mail has become one of today's standard means of communication. Billions of messages are sent each year. If you're like most people these days, you probably have more than one e-mail address. After all, the more addresses you have, the more sophisticated you look...
E-mail is part of the standard TCP/IP set of protocols. Sending messages is typically done by SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and receiving messages is handled by POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3), or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). IMAP is the newer protocol, allowing you to view and sort messages on the mail server, without downloading them to your hard drive.
Though e-mail was originally developed for sending simple text messages, it has become more robust in the last few years. Now, HTML-based e-mail can use the same code as Web pages to incorporate formatted text, colors, and images into the message. Also, documents can be attached to e-mail messages, allowing files to be transferred via the e-mail protocol. However, since e-mail was not originally designed to handle large file transfers, transferring large documents (over 3 MB, for example) is not allowed by most mail servers. So remember to keep your attachments small!
There are lots of free email service providers out there that are free, (OK I just made that term up, esp or email service provider). The following list are esp's.
Google - Yahoo - GMX - Mail - Fastmail - Inbox - AOL - Want more here is a list of 1400 free esp's Free Email Providers Guide or FEPG
Should you ever consider paying for an email address? Only if you want the following: a very specific address, like your name @ professional sound / or fun sounding place. For example, skp000000@myskpmail.com and yes there is a @myskpmail.com.
I have left one subject off this list but since we are talking about the internet I need to discuss this as well. What the heck is an ISP?
Internet Service Provider ISP - In order to connect to the Internet (or walk into your Libary), you need an ISP (or a library pass). It is the company that you pay a monthly fee to in order to use the Internet. If you use a dial-up modem to connect to your ISP, a point-to-point protocol (PPP) connection is established with another modem on the ISP's end. That modem connects to one of the ISP's routers, which routes you to the Internet "backbone." From there, you can access information from anywhere around the world. DSL and cable modems work the same way, except after you connect the first time, you are always connected.
Do you need to have a paid ISP today? Sometimes yes and sometimes no, if you are a sticks and bricks then yes, a good solid DSL or Cable Modem in your home is a good thing. If you are a full time RVer, maybe not, depends on your patients, you can simply rely on finding free wireless access where ever you travel, or a temporary wireless ISP's like Tengo Net in Rainbows end.
Some full time RVer's use Hughs Net and Wildblue which are satillite ISP providers like Direct TV and Dish Network. Some full timers use air cards from Verizon, AT & T etc., I have mixed emotions about any of those, and I don't use them, they are expensive, air cards are limited to the amount of "Internet" access you get per month, and wireless access points (WAP's) are becoming more and more common.
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