The Computer Tutor

My default web browser is Google Chrome. I also use Firefox for some things and it’s fine, but I really like Chrome. Recently I came across a couple of interesting things in Chrome.

Feature #1: Customize website zoom level

Have you noticed that as you get older, some of the text on certain websites gets smaller and harder to read? It’s an interesting phenomenon. I’m sure it has nothing to do with my eyesight changing as I age. Must just be a defect in the computer, right? Of course.

I’ve found this to be an issue only with some websites, not all. So certain websites I view at 100%, some 125%, some 150%. The nice thing with Chrome is that you don’t have to adjust the zoom each time you visit a particular website – you can set the preferred zoom level, and Chrome remembers it.

Here’s how you do it:

Note: as an alternative to scrolling with the mouse wheel, you can click the Customize button (the 3 horizontal lines in the top right of the Chrome window), go down to the “Zoom” area and hit the “+” or “-” buttons to adjust screen content size.

You can do this for every website you visit. And if you want to see all of the websites that Chrome is storing for you at customized zoom levels, you can click the Customize button, then click Settings, Show Advanced Settings. Under Privacy, click Content Settings, then scroll all the way to the end and click on “Manage” under the Zoom Levels section. Nice list of all your customized sites:

Feature #2: Customize website notifications

I had a client ask me about this recently. He kept having a recurring, annoying problem:

Scott – I do like to use Facebook sometimes. But when I’m doing some actual work or research on my computer, I close Facebook and email and other distracting websites so that I can focus on my work. But then while I’m working, all of a sudden I see a little window pop-up on my screen, and it’s a Facebook notification that someone has liked my post, or someone commented, or something else has just happened on Facebook. I don’t know how this is happening when I don’t even have Facebook open! How do I get rid of that?”

Yes, sometimes it does seem like Facebook follows us everywhere even when we want to get away from it. I noticed this same thing happening a while back. Fortunately, there is a way to turn off those Facebook notifications.

And now you can work without Facebook popping up every 30 seconds to distract you!

And of course, you can probably customize Firefox to resolve these issues as well but I have not really researched that specifically since I usually use Chrome.

There’s an email scam that’s not new, but a lot of people have not heard about it and it has some elements that make it seem very legitimate. I was a target in this scam recently so I’m laying out the details here so you can avoid being taken.

This is the email that was sent to me:

The interesting thing here is that this email actually WAS sent from the email account of my friend (for the purpose of this blog post, I’ll call him Steve). Steve either inadvertently revealed his email password at some point, or (more likely) the password he used when he created his account was a simple one and easy to remember. This means it was also easy for the scammer to guess.

In this situation, I know Steve primarily from church. He also owns a local business. We definitely don’t have the type of personal relationship where he would ask me to loan him money. Because of that, and the fact that I have heard of this scam before, I knew it was not a legitimate email.

The first thing I did was to call Steve’s office and make sure he was aware of what was happening. But beyond that, I wanted to “play along” with the scammer and see how it played out. I replied to the email:

Not too long after that I get the whole scam story:

Poor Steve. His mother is dying and he is without the needed funds to pay the doctors to save her life. There are a few things about this email that are important to note:

So I respond:

I really wanted to see if he would give me a dollar amount at this point. When I ask him directly about this, it would be difficult for him to avoid the question because obviously the hospital or doctor would have already told him how much is needed for the medical procedure. Also, I played dumb about the actual money transfer process – in almost every case it’s through Western Union since that’s worldwide and cash can be retrieved anonymously (which is why scammers love Western Union).

He replied:

As predicted, he requests that I send the money via Western Union. If you send someone money via WU, then realize later that it was a scam, there is no way you are getting that money back. It’s like walking through a crowd in Times Square and handing people $100 bills – you could never hope to get anything back, or even know who actually ended up with the money. It’s just gone. He’s asking me for 2000 pounds – roughly about $2800 in US dollars.

Usually when I’m stringing a scammer along, this is where the story ends. Obviously I’m not going to send the money and he doesn’t want to waste any more time on me since he is playing with a bunch of other targets at the same time. But I wanted to see how he would react if I told him WU was not an option. I told him I didn’t know how to use Western Union and asked if there were any other way to get the money to him. He replied:

Ah, here we go. He’s hinting that there may actually be a way possible other than Western Union. In reality, what he is suggesting is really silly though. He’s supposed to be in a foreign country, without any resources, and yet he’s saying that in this strange city he will be able to locate someone who has an offshore account and can receive the money from me, then transfer the money to Steve after deducting a commission. Pretty unlikely scenario, but at this point he probably figures he has nothing to lose since Western Union is out of the question.

So I told him yes, please set it up. Shortly after that, he emailed me with the new arrangement:

I have to admit, I was a bit surprised to see this. He has apparently given me an actual bank account number with Bank of America. This doesn’t quite make sense, since obviously a bank account can be traced back to a person. I reported the incident to Bank of America but I never heard back from them in any way (not a big surprise).

What I suspect is that the actual account holder is also being scammed. The scammer could have gotten her account number from a check or by some other means, and he is playing a scam on her such that she will be expecting $5000 to be deposited in her bank account for some type of purchase, then she needs to forward on $3000 to the scammer via Western Union.

There are a lot of different ways for this to be explained, but that’s where it ended for me. Heard nothing more from the scammer, and I guess Bank of America can’t be bothered with something so trivial as this.

Think about this from Steve’s point of view – he has no idea anything unusual is happening until he starts getting phone calls from a bunch of his friends asking about this. But what if he has 300 friends in his email contact list? They will all get that same email. And even if most of them realize it’s fake, all it takes is ONE person to fall for it and the scammer has had a very profitable day.

The keys to remember from this situation:

A lot of people want to be reasonably knowledgeable about one or more aspects of their computer. Not like a computer programmer or someone that works on computers all day, but familiar enough to use popular software and be able to handle things that come up from time to time. But how do you learn? There are several ways to learn, and today I’ll compare the pros and cons of 5 methods of learning.

Learning Method #1: Books

Pros: Books are readily available. You can find one or several online and have it in your hand very quickly. Often, there is a book available specifically for what you want to learn. And once you own it, you always have it for easy reference.

Cons: Not all books are very well written so the instruction given might be confusing. Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of the “For Dummies” series of books. The ones I’ve read seem to be trying too hard to be humorous. Not to mention the whole “you need this book because you’re a dummy” idea is kind of condescending. Also, a book is “one size fits all” – the instruction is not personalized for you.

Learning Method #2: Website tutorials

Pros: There are lots of websites available that can offer instruction on a particular topic, and the vast majority of them are free.

Cons: Since anyone with a computer and an internet connection can create a blog or a website, there’s really no telling how accurate the information is. The person that created the site might be the foremost authority on the subject, or it could be written by a teenager living in a basement in Cleveland. In some cases you can research the author’s credentials, which is a good idea. Also, a website can be taking down at any time so this might not be a permanent or even long-term source of information.

Learning Method #3: Instructional videos

Pros: Probably the biggest advantage with online videos is the fact that they are visual. You can actually watch “over the shoulder” so to speak while someone does what you want to learn to do. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in many cases a video is even better.

Cons: If anything is incorrect or unclear about the video, you might be kind of stuck. On YouTube, there’s no button for “Contact the video creator” and many people don’t include their contact information with the video. So if you have a question there’s no one to ask. Also, like a website, a video can be removed from YouTube at any time so you might go back to watch it a second time and find that it’s gone.

Learning Method #4: Classroom

Pros: The biggest advantage of this process is the more personal approach. You are actually being taught by a human. In most cases, you can also ask the instructor questions and get personalized answers.

Cons: Class size can be an issue. If you are one of 200 students, the teacher may not have enough time available to give personalized help to you or any of the other students. Also, the teacher may or may not be an expert on the subject (though you can research this before enrolling usually). Finally (and this is a big one), not everyone in the class will be at the same level. So even though you grasp the material and want to move on, there may be several others that are constantly asking very fundamental questions and keeping the rest of the class from moving forward. Or the reverse – you could be struggling but the instructor is moving ahead with new material and you could feel left behind.

Learning Method #5: One on one tutoring

Pros: The biggest advantage is that you learn exactly what you want to learn, and at your own pace. If something confuses you, you can stop the instructor right there and ask a question. And with only one student, the teacher will have a better idea of how well you are grasping the material. This is the kind of instruction I do. If there’s a particular task someone wants to learn, for example, how to format a cell in an Excel spreadsheet – we do it three times. First, I do it and the student just watches. Second, I do it again but slowly and step-by-step, so that the student can write down each step. Third, we switch seats and the student performs the task following those notes that were just written down. That way we know that task can be done after I leave.

Cons: Personal computer instruction is generally more expensive than taking a class or buying a book and learning on your own – that’s part of the price for learning the material more quickly and more efficiently.

With remote access technology, personal computer tutoring can be done without you or the instructor leaving home.

Enough Windows 10 nonsense – let’s have some fun with some great websites!

Every few months I do a blog and podcast about some interesting websites I’ve come across. There’s no exact criteria for what makes the list. I just look for ones I find interesting, entertaining, or educational.

FotoJet

FotoJet makes it easy to make really nice images with overlaid text, and they know exactly what size the photo needs to be for each type of social media account. For example, a header image on a YouTube channel should be 2560 pixels wide and 1440 pixels high. FotoJet already knows those types of details so you don’t have to learn through trial and error. To see what is available for you to create, click on the “Samples” link at the top of the website.

Run Pee

When you run the app, it displays a list of movies. New movies are added every week on the day the open in theaters. Through the magic of crowdsourcing, each listing will tell you when there is a 3-5 minute stretch where you can leave and come back without missing anything important. Most films have a few of these, and they are summarized in a sentence or two.

If you start the app and start the timer when the movie starts, you can even get a vibrate alert on your phone when one of the “pee times” comes up!

All My Faves

They’re laid out like this:

And they fit all of it on one page! Here’s a smaller, abbreviated version but you should just go to the website to see all that’s there.

Status History

The Status History site allows you to see all of your previous Facebook status updates – right back to when you first got on Facebook. It took about 6 minutes for it to find all of mine (2196 total). Pretty interesting to see what I was posting back as far as 2008.

You can also see some other interesting numbers:

It’s interesting to see this information, but when I see these historical totals, I also can’t help but think about how much time is wasted on Facebook. Maybe my dad has the right idea.

InnerBody

When you first see the website, there’s a human body displayed, and you can mouse over (without clicking) the list on the left to highlight a particular system:

Then when you actually click on the system you want to explore, you’ll find much more detailed information on that area. And the image also becomes interactive – you can even see a 3D image, which you can rotate and zoom in on with your mouse.

There is a LOT of information here so you could spend a lot of time on this site. And the graphics, while anatomically correct, are done tastefully. Very useful and informative.

The Kitty Convict Project

Here in the US, over 7 million pets go missing every year (I had no idea it was that many).

For dogs, about 26% are reported and end up returning home. But for cats, it’s less than 5%! Here’s why:

This website offers a solution to that problem: If your cat is an indoor cat, dress them in orange – such as an orange collar or an orange scarf.

One reason for orange is that it’s easy to see. But more importantly, it brands your cat as a “Kitty Convict”. This tells anyone that might happen to see it that this cat belongs INSIDE, so it has probably escaped its home and needs to be reported.

If you have a cat, you can get an orange collar on Amazon, here: http://amzn.to/1mv4BJu and it can have a custom ID tag, or you can get your phone number embroidered right on the collar itself.

Google Feud

This game works pretty much like that. But what you’re trying to guess are the top ways a Google search is autocompleted. You know, when you’re typing in Google and before you do an actual search, Google tries to predict what you’re wanting to search for. This is based on what thousands or millions of people before you have searched on. For example, if you type in Google “Baseball is” you’ll see some potential searches that might match what you want.

So on GoogleFeud, you’re trying to guess what the top “autocompletes” were for a given phrase. You have 4 categories to choose from:

When you go there and try it, you’ll see it’s pretty easy to figure out. The game keeps score for you so you can try to beat your previous high score.

And if YOU know of a website that you think people might like to hear about, send me an email and it just might get featured in an upcoming blog post.

With an announcement this past week, Microsoft made sure that millions of unsuspecting Windows 7 and Windows 8 users will be surprised to find their computer “upgraded” to Windows 10. You can stop it, though.

What Microsoft announced is that they are now going to re-categorize the Windows 10 “upgrade” as a Recommended update. (sorry, but I always have to put that term in quotation marks in reference to Windows 10 because “upgrade” usually implies that what you’re getting is an improvement).

Here’s what this means.

Microsoft sends out Windows Updates monthly. It’s on the second Tuesday of each month and has become known as Patch Tuesday. This month, it’s February 9.

When those updates are sent out, they are classified as either “Important” or “Optional”. An Important update would be something like a security hole that’s discovered in Windows that needs to be patched so that hackers cannot exploit it and cause problems. An Optional update would perhaps be a driver update for your mouse – might be good to have, but not critical.

But in addition, Microsoft designates some Windows Updates as “recommended”. These are the ones that THEY think you should get. And in your computer, in the Windows Update settings, there’s an option related to how your computer handles the “Recommended” updates. You have the option to either get the recommended updates the same way you get your Important updates (which for most people is automatically installed at 3 am the day after they come in), or you can choose NOT to get them automatically. Here’s what the option looks like. It’s just a simple check box:

Here’s the key point in this discussion: When you get your computer, that box is already checked by default. Therefore, unless you have unchecked that box, you are going to get whatever updates Microsoft categorizes as “Recommended”. And they just classified the Windows 10 “upgrade”as “Recommended” with this recent announcement.

So, lots of people – probably millions – will be getting Windows 10 this week, even though they really don’t want it.

Here are three things you can do to prevent Windows 10 from getting into your computer:

The more I hear about Windows 10, the more it really sounds like a computer virus.

What are the characteristics of a virus?

Those things all describe any common computer virus, but they also describe Windows 10. Not something I would want on my computer.

I love little pieces of software that focus on a single problem and solve it efficiently. A while back I found something that does this, and now I use it every day. In fact, if it’s turned off for some reason, I notice the difference almost immediately. And it’s free.

Here’s the problem:

Windows has this thing called “focus”. This basically just means that one window is always “in front of” any other open windows. Whatever window you’re currently working on, that’s the window that is in front of the others – it has the focus. Even if two windows are side by side, only one of them can have the focus at a time.

If you’re working in one window and then move your mouse over to a website and try to scroll down the website page, nothing will happen because that window doesn’t have focus. In order to do anything in the web browser window, you have to first click somewhere in that window to tell the computer “Hey, give this window the focus now” – and then you can scroll down the page.

It’s just one of those weird things that has been in effect in Windows computers for many years. Most people have gotten so used to it that it might not even seem like an inconvenience.

But wait til you get used to NOT having that inconvenience!

Wizmouse is a free program (get it here) and it’s very small so it uses almost no resources. When it’s running, it eliminates the “focus” feature in Windows. You don’t have to keep clicking on whatever window you want to work with in order to do anything – all you have to do is move the cursor to that window and start working.

Wherever your mouse is, that window has the focus!

When you download and install Wizmouse, you’ll have a window that has some options available to you. For me, I just check the boxes to make sure Wizmouse is enabled, and I have it start with Windows so that it’s running all the time. And I have it run as Administrator.

Sometimes when I’m recording my podcast, before I hit “Record” I’ll go through and shut down whatever programs are running in order to give the audio recording the full use of the processor and memory. Later on, when I start using the computer for other things, it’s a very short time before I realize Wizmouse is disabled and I need to start it up again because I am so used to the way it makes windows work. I’ll bet you get spoiled by it pretty quickly too.

Also – Wizmouse is free, but you’ll notice on the website and on the settings screen in the program, there’s a button to click if you want to donate to the programmer who created it. Always a nice thing to do.

You just got back from the trip of a lifetime. For some people that would be a cruise to Alaska, for others it might be a guided tour through the Holy Land of Israel, and for some it could be visiting some of the old castles of Ireland. Personally, I would enjoy any of them. But now that you’re back home, you have a computer folder full of pictures, and each one has a name like “DCF2016070901.jpg” which of course tells you nothing about the pictures itself. Those pictures – all 1000 of them – need to be renamed.

Of course, one option is to open up the folder that has all your pictures, and start at the beginning. On the first picture, do a right click, then choose “Rename”, type “Disney1” and hit Enter. Then do the same thing with the next picture and call it “Disney2” and hit Enter. Yeah! Only 998 to go!

As you might guess, that’s not really the most efficient way to go about this since it would take a very long time and most people would just get tired of it and quit before they got all thousand pictures renamed.

Here’s the much easier way. This process assumes you have all of your Disney pictures in one folder.

In just a few seconds, every picture you see in that folder is renamed. So now the list is Disney1, Disney2, Disney3 all the way up to Disney1000. So much easier to have the computer to that work!

Now, I can hear some of you saying, “But Scott, our vacation was divided up and we weren’t at Disney the whole time. We went to Disney for 4 days, and Sea World for 3 days, then we went to Busch Gardens for a day.”

That’s fine. This just means you have to divide them into their own folders first. Just make 3 folders:

Then just drag each of the pictures into the appropriate folder based on what you see in the thumbnail image. Once the large group of folders is divided into those 3 folders, then go into each of those folders and do the same renaming process as before.

You can really narrow it down as much as you want, although the more specific you want the file names to be, the more time it will take to get it that way. Even so, the process I outlined here (called “batch renaming”) is a whole lot faster than just renaming each image individually.

Microsoft Word does so much more than any of us can imagine. I could probably create a whole blog just on MS Word tips and tricks. Today, I’ll show you some of the cool things you can do in Word by using the CTRL key in combination with some other keys.

The Control key (usually abbreviated on the keyboard as “Ctrl”) does a lot of things that most people aren’t aware of. If you use these shortcuts, it can definitely save you some time. If you’re using a Mac keyboard, I believe the key you would use for these functions is the Apple key (also known as the Command key or cmd key).

Note: for this list, I did not include the commonly-known Ctrl key functions such as Ctrl+C for copying or Ctrl+P for printing.

Action: [Ctrl] + [k]

Action: [Ctrl] + [m]

Action: [Ctrl] + [click]

Action: [Ctrl] + [backspace]

Action: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [>]

Action: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [<]

Action: [Ctrl] + [=]

Action: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [=]

Action: [Ctrl] + [a]

Action: [Ctrl] + [z]

I’m not sure what to think about Microsoft lately. They’re sending good and bad messages. Recently, they issued some really good news about Internet Explorer, but they also made some statements about Windows 7 that seem to be designed to deceive.

The good news:

Internet Explorer, the web browser that we love to hate, will only be supported if you have the most recent version (which is Internet Explorer 11). Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 will no longer be supported – so if your computer still has an old version, you need to update it. You need to do this even if you don’t usually use Internet Explorer.

Why is this good news? Because the older versions are full of security problems and are a constant source of headaches for people that make a living creating websites. Not to mention the risk to the people who actually still use those outdated versions of IE.

To check what version you have, open Internet Explorer and click on the gear-shaped icon in the top right, then click on “About Internet Explorer”. If you see this, you’re good to go:

Note: this change of support goes into effect Tuesday, January 12, 2015 – that’s Patch Tuesday, the day Microsoft sends out all Windows Updates for the month. So you should check this and make any necessary changes right away. Unfortunately, there are lots of people – millions probably – that still use outdated versions of IE and won’t bother to get the update. That’s what keeps computer repair shops in business.

The deceit:

Microsoft is so laser-focused on getting every computer worldwide on Windows 10, they are now starting to look really desperate. And usually desperation means you start to do stupid things, like making statements that are pretty misleading.

In a recent episode of Windows Weekly (podcast), there were some comments made by Chris Capossela, the Marketing Chief of Microsoft. He said that Windows users that continue to use Windows 7, do so “at your own risk, at your own peril“.

He went on to say, “We do worry when people are running an operating system that’s 10 years old that the next printer they buy isn’t going to work very well, or they buy a new game, they buy Fallout 4, a very popular game, and it doesn’t work on a bunch of older machines.”

That is just irresponsible, fearmongering nonsense.

The printer issue: If you were a printer manufacturer, would you build printers that are incompatible with over half of the computers currently in use? Currently, 55% of computers worldwide are running Windows 7. Virtually any printer you buy today (or next year, or the year after) will be compatible with Windows 7. Nothing to worry about.

Here’s the irony in this statement – many people have “upgraded” to Windows 10, only to find out that they can no longer use their printer. That’s because the printer was designed to be compatible with Windows 7. When their printer was built, Windows 10 didn’t exist so there are no Windows 10 drivers for that printer. So if you like your printer and you want to keep using it, better think twice before moving to Windows 10.

The game issue: This statement is just as ridiculous. First, just do a Google search for “Fallout 4 minimum requirements” and you’ll see that the game is compatible with Windows 7, 8 or 10. If a game doesn’t work on a particular computer, it’s not usually because of the version of Windows (and obviously that wouldn’t be an issue with Windows 7 and Fallout 4). The problem is most often hardware-related – meaning there’s not enough video memory, or the processor isn’t fast enough, that kind of thing. Clearly, this guy – a software company executive – knows this already. This really amounts to nothing more than deliberate misinformation.

Oh, and the line about “an operating system that’s 10 years old“? Windows 7 was released to the public in July of 2009. So it’s not yet even 7 years old. Sounds like Mr. Capossela might be better suited for a career in used car sales or politics.

Windows 7 is stable, secure, and will be fully supported through January 14, 2020. I’m not upgrading yet, and I don’t think you should either.

Part of the fun of Facebook is seeing something new, or learning to do something you never knew was possible. Unfortunately, most of what is posted on Facebook is just fake junk that gets repeatedly posted because people don’t research or verify; they just click the “Share” button. But what I’m telling you about today is definitely real, and I’ll bet you didn’t know you could do this. Plus, you can verify it works by trying it yourself.

If you use Facebook, you obviously know what a status update looks like. It’s very plain. You can’t make any changes to what the letters look like – all of the billions of posts on Facebook look exactly the same.

Until now.

If you want to make YOUR Facebook update stand out from the crowd, now you can – through a free website called FB Font Changer. You can check it at FBFontChanger.com.

At that website, you just enter your Facebook status content in the field at the top of the page, then hit the “Convert” button. Let’s say for example you want to post on Facebook “Taking my dogs to play at the park”. When you enter that and convert it, you now have these options to choose from, depending on how you want it to display:

As you can see, you get lots of choices. When you see one that you like, you just click the “Copy” button out to the right of that particular line. Then go to Facebook and in the status update box, do a right click and choose “Paste”. There it is!

Obviously this is not something earth-shattering, but not every computer trick has the ability to change the world. Do a few posts with some of these fonts though, and I’ll bet you have some friends that will ask, “Hey, how did you do that?”.