Take Spybot and call me in the morning.

I have a friend of mine that many, many years ago, operated a bicycle store in a small town in the Midwest. One evening as we were discussing the previous ventures we had tried, he proceeded to tell me that one of the reasons he was successful in the bicycle business was that he gave away a spoke wrench with every bicycle purchased. This spoke wrench cost him about a dollar fifty. Which, considering the time that has passed since then, was a pretty good premium. So I asked him, what was it about the free spoke wrench that made him successful?

“People cannot resist trying to use the spoke wrench,” he said. People just don’t know what they are doing, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. They would inevitably break a spoke or get the wheel out of round and amazingly show up back at the bicycle shop and need their wheel straightened. This provided a steady stream of repair jobs for the slow times.

How many times have you decided that you can fix something yourself, and that the so-called trained professional simply paid his tuition and gathered his experience for nothing?

So, since I have a few spare appointments open for the next week or two, I am going to give you a free spoke wrench. (Figuratively speaking.)

The most intense battle going on in the computer world right now is how to direct you to the places on the web that others want you to see. You have heard the terms, spyware, malware and many others. Without going into a deep explanation of what they are, suffice it to say that these entities send you pop ups, pop unders, spam and in some cases actually hijack your PC forcing you to go to sites that you would never (well most of you would never) voluntarily go. In addition, if you have enough of these entities on your machine, it will actually slow down and even freeze up. Now, here is your free spoke wrench.

Go to http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html and download Spybot Search and Destroy. This program will search your entire computer for the little buggers I previously mentioned and remove them from your machine. This program is Freeware. This means that you don’t HAVE to pay for it. However, if you want the gentleman who has made it his life mission to wipe out spyware to continue, then please send him a donation. Some of you will carefully read all the details on how the program works, what to do with it, and the potential problems that may or could be caused by not following the directions. To you, I salute and good hunting. Your computer will now be inhabited by fewer of the little nasties. Those who don’t read the details, my number is at the bottom of the column. I can fix what you break.

Why do people create these insidious, perverse adware, spyware and malware programs? Pure and simple, MONEY. These things are actually little programs that are placed on your PC, often without your knowledge but more often with your uninformed knowledge. They are designed to put something in front of your eyes. An advertisement, or a chance to win something, or even sometimes to scare you into buying something. One of the most effective ones out there gives you a pop up window that looks very important and states that your computer may contain spyware. If your CD Rom drawer opens, then you are infected and please press the Buy Now button for some super duper monster spyware killer. The CD Rom drawer opens just as predicted and you click on the button. Please give your credit card number to them and you will be charged only $79.95 for this wonderful program. The fact of the matter is, they now have your credit card number and you just downloaded a program that will insure that you have a never ending supply of pop ups and spam. They infest a couple of hundred million PC’s with this little scam and maybe only one percent respond, and they just retired to Tahiti.

What are the symptoms of an infested PC? First, it will seem to take longer and longer to start up. Second, the pc will seem to run slower and slower. The Internet browser will not take you to the sites you want to go. And finally, the PC will freeze up and be non responsive.

Interestingly, I exhibit a lot of these symptoms myself, as I get older. I wonder if they sell a human version of Spybot at the drugstore?

Enjoy a good read? Grumbles from the the Keyboard is like no other “computer book” you’ve read before. It reads more like a series of short stories and oh by the way, there is computer lessons buried in the stories. Learn many tips and tricks about the computer without even knowing it happened. Many readers have emailed me to let me know the book is in the place of honor in their homes. That’s right, along side the toilet. Makes great reading while attending to constitutional matter. Enjoy.

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer (9781467985895): Courtland Nederveld: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Tired of computers? Just want to read something different? Here is just the thing. Quick, fun, and tasty.

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks! (9781456561734): Court Nederveld: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

How to Matriculate!

Have you watched some of the construction taking place around the county? Sunloft, LaQuinta Hotels, and many others. Ever wondered how an empty piece of land becomes a building with a roof, walls, plumbing, and electrical? Plans, plans and more plans. Drawings, pictures, descriptions, notes etc. This is how someone can be hired, brought on site and set loose building something and magically, that which was vision becomes reality.

Learning to use the computer is exactly the same. Yes, we all have grandkids that when we ask them to help us with something on the computer, they sit down, we watch their hands and fingers fly over the keyboard and push the mouse here and there and sure enough what ever problem we had is solved. Unfortunately, we haven’t a clue what they did, or how they did it. Even I am guilty of this with my own mother. She will call me with a computer problem and I will take over her computer from my office and quickly resolve the problem and not spend the extra time to explain what I was doing.

So some of us at one time or another have signed up for and taken some computer classes. We sit with rapt attention as the instructor uses a computer tied to a projector and explains exactly the steps needed to perform a series of actions and the results we can expect to see. Sure enough the instructor gets exactly the outcome he said he would. We sit there frantically scribbling copious notes and can’t wait to head for home and dazzle others with our new knowledge.

Sometimes though, our computer doesn’t look exactly like the instructor’s. We look at our careful notes and wonder when we learned to write Greek. Worse, we realize that while we can write it, we can’t read it. Lost and bewildered we sit for hours trying to reconstruct the lesson but it just doesn’t come together. There has to be another way.

In the late 1990’s I spent many years traveling around the states educating employees of the company I worked for on how to use their new computers and the programs they would need to carry out their job tasks. I found that to be successful, I need the employees to HEAR what to do, SEE what to do and then DO the task. Then I would tell them to go back to their desks and do it again and again. But, like us, memory would fail and many would be frustrated when they could not remember the steps. In order to save myself many hours of moving from desk to desk trying to get them back on track, I would create a handout of the steps with pictures, descriptions and notes that would guide them to a successful learning experience. By the time the project ended five years later, I had created a library of “How To’s” for almost every function the employees had to perform.

Let’s look at a couple different methods of helping us learn to perform a task we would like to complete. Regardless of what program we are trying to use, there will be a HELP button. Not all help buttons lead to a useful and fact filled primer but most well known programs, Windows and Internet Explorer along with most websites offer extensive help tools. These help contents are also searchable which means that we don’t have to read the entire 5000 pages but can use the help search to look up just the material related to our problem.

The next tool is the Internet. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Excite or any of the search engines out there can be of great use when trying to figure out how to use a program. Let’s pretend that we can’t figure out how to add a picture to a document in MS Word. Just type “tutorial: MS Word” (without the quotation marks) into any search engine and hundreds if not thousands of tutorials will come up for us to review.

Some of us want to “see” how something is done. The steps involved and the order in which they were performed. There is no better place to begin our lessons than youtube.com. Surf to the site and in the search field type in the lesson we want to take. For example, I downloaded the general license program called Gimp. This is a photo editing program, very powerful, filled with features but because it is free there is no documentation on how to do certain things like bend text or replace colors. A quick trip to Youtube and sure enough there are hundreds if not more video lessons covering every facet of Gimp.

I have even used Youtube to find a video on how to replace a side mirror on a pickup truck and how to diagnose the instrument voltage regulator for a 1966 Mustang. Just about any problem we would like to solve, someone has made a video on the steps needed to solve the problem.

Class dismissed.

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer (9781467985895): Courtland Nederveld: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks! (9781456561734): Court Nederveld: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

My Kingdom for a Closet?

Did you know that within twenty-five miles of Punta Gorda there are no less than thirteen mini storage facilities? There are also over twenty RV storage places. There are umpteen safe deposit boxes at local banks. There are thousands of two car garages with only one car and stacks of boxes stored in the other stall. Let’s not even think about attics, closets, drawers, under bed storage boxes and even the trunks of our cars. Walk into any home improvement store and there are items that will add additional shelves, more hangers, even a platform that suspends from the ceiling on pulleys so you can fill it up with treasures and hide it by pulling it up to the ceiling. We even occasionally store things at our friends and families’ homes when we run out of space. My previous move from one house to another found boxes in the attic still sealed with packing tape from some previous move we had made. It was like opening a time capsule only to look at my wife and ask why we had bothered to first, pack it and then move it as well.

We store old furniture, lamps, beds, dishes and obsolete kitchen food processors. In the corner are some bicycles that haven’t seen a rider in ten years. Old scratched 33rpm records, (for those under twenty, think large Compact Disc) half started projects, leftover belly bags that won’t fit around our… never mind. Dog food dishes for dogs that we buried a decade ago, ceramic tile from the kitchen of the house we had in…well I don’t remember which one it was. There really should be a law that says for everything we bring into our homes, two things must leave.

One storage facility that almost all folks use is the hard drive of their computer. 500 gigs, one Terrabyte, even two Terrabyte drives are becoming standard. With the advent of digital cameras, web cams, desktop publishing and online banking these storage facilities are being filled with more than just old stuff. Some of the pictures and information on the drives are priceless or irreplaceable. So what happens if a hard drive fails? What becomes of all these precious treasures? Can you spell G O N E?

More and more people are adding second internal drives, external drives, flash drives and copying files from their computers to CD’s and DVD’s. In my case I have my office PCs backing up twice a week to each other. While these are excellent secondary or backup storage tools, they still require the maintenance and yes even storage of CD’s, (where did I put that flash drive?) a spot on the desk for the external drive and constant monitoring of the second internal drive. Is there an easier and maybe even more economical way to insure we have a good, reliable backup of our important data?

Why can’t the stuff just disappear and reappear when we need it? Well, it can in a manner of speaking. There is a way to store files, music, pictures, emails etc. without purchasing additional hardware. And even better yet depending on your needs, it can even be FREE. (Martha, he said the magic word!)

There are a growing number of firms that offer online storage. That means files on the PC would copy themselves out to cyberspace (just outside Murdock Circle I think) to float around there until we require them. Then at our command they copy themselves back to the PC for immediate administrations. This works well with a broadband Cable/DSL Internet connection, I’m not sure I would try it with a dial-up.

What are some of the advantages of this type of storage? Many of these companies offer automated backup of critical files. This means we simply tell the program which files to back up and when to back them up. Now forget about it except for the occasional verification that the backups are executing as directed to. Another advantage is these companies offer the same services to large corporations and other entities for which the protection of data is critical. The same precautions to protect their physical plants, servers, backup systems, security against hackers, viruses etc will be applied to our files as well. Still another bonus is our data is “offsite” which is one of the commandments of data security “Never store your backups with the original data.” And even better, our files in cyberspace are available to us from any PC in the UNIVERSE, from our grandkids computers, or even a hotel in Oak Hollow, NC.

Take a look at dropbox at www.dropbox.com where 2GB of Dropbox for free, with subscriptions up to 100GB available. Another good site is www.mosy.com which offers fifty gigs of storage for just 5.99/m. Carbonite is another online backup service and the details of their offering can be found at www.carbonite.com. Another way to start is to search for “online storage” in the search engine of your choice. It appears that storage in the fifty gigs range runs approximately $6 per month. I suspect very few folks out there have more than fifty gigs of data to store, but some of the local businesses might find this a very economical alternative to buying backup and storage hardware/software and paying to have it maintained and replaced on a regular schedule.

Time to go clean out the garage and make room for more STUFF!

More articles just like this one can be found in my new book, Grumbles from the Keyboard. It can be purchased from Amazon.com or from www.grumblesfromthekeyboard.com

But life isn’t all serious computer stuff either. Take a look at my new book Epicuria: Adventures That Really Cook! for a whimsical read and some great recipes as well. Invite some friends over for dinner, serve one of the meals in the book and tell them they are enjoying a computer geeks food. That should bring some interesting expressions to their faces. Have your camera ready when you tell them.

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer (9781467985895): Courtland Nederveld: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks! (9781456561734): Court Nederveld: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

What a Character!

Special characters. We all know people that we call “characters” and we use the term because it signifies something special, out of the ordinary, or outside the expected. We apply the same term to things. We say it has character. Some good examples might be the new Sunloft and Thomas Ryan buildings in downtown Punta Gorda. We can’t specifically define “character” but we know it when we see it.

There are many characters we use when communicating via the written word as well. Things like copyright symbols, registered symbols, and even cents signs. Many of us know that inserting these symbols into a document is possible, but quite time consuming when hunting and pecking for the symbol from the computer’s character map. Did you know that you can make typing a document that uses special characters much easier?

There are probably one or two special characters that you regularly use. (for example, ® and ©). It can be a real chore to open the Character Map to insert one of these symbols every time you need one. So don't! Open the Character Map by clicking Start, clicking All Programs, and then clicking Accessories. Click System Tools, and then click Character Map. Click the © symbol. Notice that the bottom-right corner of the Character Map shows the keyboard shortcut used to insert the special character. On my PC and probably on yours, pressing and holding the ALT key plus typing 0169 and then releasing the ALT key gives you ©. Write it down for later use. When you want to insert that character, here's the trick: Position the cursor where you want to insert the special character, then with NUM LOCK key on, hold down the ALT key and use the number pad keys to type the character value. (ALT + 0177 give us ± for example) These short cuts can be real time savers.

Speaking of time savers, there is another area where we can pick up some time. Many folks use the default Windows setting that requires a double click on an icon with the left mouse button to start a program. This can also pose a problem for folks with arthritis or other problems that reduce the flexibility of their fingers. But with a few adjustments we can do in one click what used to take two. If you want to change your two clicks to one, click Start, click My Computer. Under the Tools menu, click Folder Options. Now click the General tab in the dialog box, click Single-click to open an item (point to select), and then click OK. This makes everything in Windows exactly one click faster.

Finally, just as Hurricane Charlie removed the background of Punta Gorda and allowed buildings with “character” to grace the new downtown, we can give our computers some flashy new tweaks. Let’s add a little character to our personal computers. How boring is it to have that little arrow cursor pointing here and pointing there? Nothing wrong with the defaults from Windows, but then again there isn’t anything wrong with carrots either. But who cares about carrots?

If you want to change your pointer scheme, click Start, and then click Control Panel. In Category View (vs. Classic View) click on Printers and Other Hardware, and then click on Mouse. Click the Pointers tab and browse the available themes. Select the one that suits you best, and then click OK. I think the conductor scheme is right for me. Little drums, metronomes and keyboards just seem to fit my mood right now.

While you’re in the pointer changing window don’t overlook the chance to change the set up of your mouse. For example: if you are a lefty, under the heading of Buttons the primary and secondary buttons on the mouse can be switched. Under the Pointer Options tab the speed with which the curser moves across the screen can be slowed down or speeded up, depending on your comfort level. There is also a check box to give the pointer a trail as it moves. This makes it much easier to find the pointer when it blends into the background of one of our projects.

Those Charlotte County folks, what a bunch of characters!

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer (9781467985895): Courtland Nederveld: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks! (9781456561734): Court Nederveld: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734