The Computer Tutor

Some things seem so obvious. But, just about every week (if not every day) some new “research study” comes out with an end result that any reasonable person with half a brain could have come up with. And we the taxpayers are often paying for these ridiculous things! Some important “findings” include “students who do their homework get higher grades” (study), “pigs do love mud” (study), “weight gain is caused by overeating” (study), and “reading is good for your brain” (study). Well, here’s something that I think is obvious: Windows Explorer should display folder size by default. But it doesn’t.

Here’s what I’m talking about. On your Windows computer, click the Start button (the MS orb in the lower left) and choose the Documents folder. For this example, I’m assuming you have some sub-folders inside the Documents folder. Mine looks like the image below (yours may display slightly different if you choose to display Large Icons, Small Icons, etc. I choose to display in the “Details” format).

How am I supposed to know how much data is in each of those folders? Microsoft goes to all the trouble to have that column there titled “Size” and then for any of the folders, it is just left blank – no information! This just does not make any sense. But that’s how it has always been, and Microsoft probably doesn’t have any plans to display that info, regardless of how OBVIOUS it is that it should be shown there.

As is often the case, someone recognized this need and created a solution. The fix is a little program called Folder Size Explorer. It’s free, and you can get it at folder-size-explorer.com.

Folder Size Explorer runs on any recent version of Windows (although I only have it installed on my Windows 7 machine). Just go to the website and click the “Download” tab and you’ll see the link to download the file in .zip format. You can extract the files from the zipped folder and run Setup, and you’ll see that the installation is pretty routine.

Once it’s installed, you should see an icon for it on your desktop, and it’s also in your “All Programs” list in the Start menu. Just click to run it, and see what the difference is when you’re looking at your Documents folder (or any folder). Here’s what information is displayed:

As you can see, for each folder, it shows the total size of the data in that folder. In addition to that, it tells you how many individual files are in that folder, as well as how many subfolders are there. It’s beautifully simple. I really don’t know why Microsoft can’t figure out how to do this in Windows by default.

And that’s it! No fancy bells or whistles, it just does what it’s supposed to do. You probably also noticed on the Download page there’s a link to Donate. The software is free, but I always like to give some money to the developer when I find a program like this that does a great job and doesn’t try to sneak a bunch of other junk into your computer.

I like Facebook. It has a lot of good and useful features. But it also has a lot of stuff I don’t want or need. There are a couple of tools I use to filter out all the garbage in Facebook so I don’t waste time on stuff I’m not interested in.

Anyone that’s on Facebook knows what I’m talking about. These days, you can’t hardly look at the news feed without having to wade through the latest thing that Donald Trump said. Or one of your friends post the results of a quiz that tells them which Disney “Frozen” character they are. Or there’s a “news” story about the Kardashians. All of this is of zero importance to me, but my Facebook news feed is cluttered with it all the time.

Here are the two ways I clean that up (both are free). The first one you might know about.

Tool #1 for Facebook news feed cleanup: Unfollow

I use this liberally. Every time you see someone post something in Facebook, there’s a link in the top right corner of their post. When you click it, you have a few options. It looks like this:

When you click “Unfollow” it just means that whatever that person posts in the future, you won’t see it. Two important factors here:

So it really is the perfect solution, if you have someone you’re friends with but they are constantly posting their high score in Mafia Wars, or their status is always about how great their new Amway business is, you can finally declare yourself free of all of that.

Personally, I am very liberal with the Unfollow option. I might give someone a second chance (based on how annoying they are, and how close our relationship is in real life). But it really doesn’t take a whole lot for me to just Unfollow and filter someone right out of my news feed. Facebook is enough of a time waster already – there’s no point in having to see stuff I don’t want to see.

And I know the question that some people are already thinking – if a person is that annoying on Facebook, why not just unfriend them? Fair enough. For some people, unfriending is an option. In my case, I use Facebook as a marketing tool for my computer services and laptop sales. So even though I might not want to see what someone is posting, I do want them to see what I’m posting. So I keep them as a Facebook friend but unfollow.

Tool #2 for Facebook news feed cleanup: FilterFeed

This one is a browser extension. I just discovered it recently and I like how it works. Unfortunately, it is only available for the Chrome browser so if you use Firefox you’re out of luck (although there are other options for those browsers).

To get this, open Chrome and go here. You can install the extension into Chrome right from that page and it just takes a few seconds.

Once it is installed, go to Facebook. You’ll see up at the top there will be a an icon that looks like a funnel:

Now that you know it’s running, you have to decide – what do you NOT want to see in your Facebook news feed?

A good example at the moment might be Star Wars. Obviously the new movie is about to be released, and of course there are LOTS of conversations about it on Facebook. But you know you won’t be able to see it on opening night, so you definitely don’t want to accidentally read a Facebook post that reveals anything.

So you do a single left click on the Facebook FilterFeed funnel icon, and you type Star Wars and hit Enter.

You can enter lots of words (I don’t know if there is a limit). Just type the word and hit Enter, and you won’t see any posts that contain that word.

Maybe you get tired of all the political arguments. It’s so bad now especially, with the presidential election and all the campaigning and the televised debates. I get really sick of it. For something like that, you could enter all of the relevant names:

One thing you want to be careful about is to not enter a keyword that is too generic. In this case, it was probably a mistake to have just “Hillary” by itself. In politics, it’s obvious who that means but I also have some friends named Hillary and their posts would be blocked also.

And of course, the little “X” you see next to each name means you can remove that word from the filter whenever you want. But that list does look like a nice selection of things to not see any more.

The possible uses for this filter are endless. So whenever you find yourself scrolling past a bunch of junk in Facebook, don’t just stay frustrated – get rid of it for good!

I love new technology and I just heard about this recently. It’s not available to the general public yet, but it’s a good possibility that you’ll see this (or something similar) in the future.

This is a project called Heat Harvest. The Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design gave 12 people a couple of weeks to come up with some ideas on how to save energy and promote a healthier lifestyle. Two of the participants, Sergey Komardenkov and Vihanga Gore (both of whom are much smarter than I am) came up with this idea.

You know when you have a cup of coffee sitting on the table, and you’re chatting or watching the news or checking Facebook or something – what happens to the coffee? Over time, it loses its warmth and will eventually get to room temperature. Hopefully you will have finished drinking it before it gets cold.

The point is this: in terms of physics, heat = energy. So the heat that is lost from your coffee into the air in the room is really just energy that is lost and wasted. So these two people thought, “How can we put this energy into use, instead of wasting it?”.

So they came up with a process that converts the heat from an object (whether it’s your cup of coffee or any other hot dish sitting on the table) into electricity. That electricity is released at a certain point on the same table using a concept called thermal electricity. It’s been around for hundreds of years, but some recent developments have made it possible to be more efficient to actually harvest wasted heat and use it to power up or charge the objects that we use every day.

One of the sponsors for this project is Ikea – you’ve probably heard of them. We have an Ikea store here in the Tampa Bay area, and they do have some pretty cool furniture and household items. There have been times when I wish it came preassembled, but I guess that’s part of the fun. So I guess the most likely place to first see the Heat Harvest in action could be in an Ikea dining room table. Pretty smart!

Here’s a video that explains more about it:

https://youtu.be/JZ3B68rxkf4

There are some things in life that are really obnoxious and annoying.

And last but not least – the Get Windows 10 nag icon in the bottom right corner of Windows 7 and Windows 8 computers.

When Windows 10 was first made publicly available at the end of July, I made it very clear more than a month ahead of time that my recommendation was to NOT upgrade yet. I know some people who went ahead and got Windows 10. Some are okay with it, and I’ve talked to many people who have regretted the decision to “upgrade”. Some of my clients even purchased brand new computers with Windows 10 already installed, and ended up sending them back to the manufacturer (in this case, Dell) for a refund.

And now, each week I get the question – “Is it safe to upgrade to Windows 10 yet?” And my recommendation is still the same: not yet. When will I recommend you upgrade to Windows 10? I don’t know.

One thing I do know is this. Microsoft has been extremely and obnoxiously aggressive in pushing Windows 10 down the throats of Windows computer users. In some cases, they included it in a Windows Update and computers were upgraded to Windows 10 even without the permission of the user. Lots of Windows computers have already downloaded (silently, in the background) the Win10 installation files and folders so that all it takes is a click from an unknowing user, and the installation begins. Even if it doesn’t get installed, that download takes up several gigabytes of space on the computer’s hard drive.

When this first started happening, I found a way to fix it on my client’s computers. I would just go into the Windows folder on their computer, and rename the GWX (for Get Windows 10) folder to something else. With the folder showing a different name, the upgrade app and icon was not able to run automatically when you turned on the computer, so the icon would not be displayed.

Unfortunately, Microsoft caught on to that pretty quickly. Soon Windows got another update and the folder was renamed to the original name, and that icon started popping up again.

Well now we have a more permanent solution, and you can do this on your own.

A software developer in Portland, Oregon has created a small program that solves this problem, and he has made it available for free. It’s called GWX Control Panel.

There are a couple of ways you can get this program:

You can run the installation file and just leave everything as default – it won’t try to sneak anything in with it. When it’s done and you run the program, you’ll first see the Agreement window:

After that you’ll see the main program window. This is what mine looks like now, since I have already installed and run it. For most people, the first time you run it, the answers to the questions will be “Yes”.

While it may look like a lot of items to contend with here, it’s really this simple: the first 2 wide buttons near the bottom of the screen directly correlate with the first 3 questions at the top of the screen.

So you just click the first 2 wide buttons:

Optionally, if there are Windows 10 download folders found, you can click “Delete Windows 10 Download Folders” to free up that space on your hard drive.

Two other options:

I’ve been using this on client computers for a while now, and I’ve been very pleased with the results. No spyware, no bugs (that I have found) and it just works for the purpose it was intended – keeping Windows 10 off the computer, no matter how hard Microsoft tries to get it on there.

As a disclaimer, I did not create this program and have no control over it, so if you decide to use it, you do so at your own risk. But I use it on my own computers and I think it’s great.

And by running this program, it does not eliminate your opportunity to EVER upgrade to Windows 10 in the future. You can click the same buttons and enable that upgrade option whenever you want to. I just wouldn’t recommend doing it right now.

Last week I told you about how my backup process saved all of my critical data twice in the last couple of months. One of those backups is called a system image backup and it saves EVERYTHING on your hard drive. As a result, that backup can be pretty big. Today we’ll talk about an easy way for you to reduce the size of that backup, and also save some space on your hard drive.

I have a TON of files and folders on my computer, including a lot of pictures and videos. Those types of files take up a chunk of space, not to mention all of the audio podcast files as well as the typical documents, spreadsheets, etc. That means whenever I do a system image backup (which is overnight, every night) it takes several hours to complete. This works out fine for me since it happens during the night when I’m not using the computer. But what if you want to just do the system image backup during the day? The longer it takes, the longer you are without the use of your computer.

Not to mention, the more files and folders that are stored on your computer, the less free space there is on your hard drive. Of course, with hard drives today being quite large, space might not be an issue for everyone. But there are some people that would benefit from freeing up some hard drive space.

Here’s how you free up some space, and make your system image backup smaller:

In Windows, click the Start button (the Microsoft logo in the bottom left corner), then click on “Computer” (or click on “This PC” if you are using a newer version of Windows).

When you see the drive icons with letters, do a RIGHT click on the C drive and choose “Properties”. That brings up this window:

Now click on the little button labeled “Disk Cleanup”. You’ll see a small window that calculates how much space you are using and how much you can save. This might be here for a few seconds or a few minutes:

When it’s done with the calculation, you’ll see a window that shows you how much space you can potentially save on your hard drive, by removing some files and folders that are not needed:

As you can see, in my case it came up with a lot of files that I could get rid of and free up some space – 106 gb in fact. That’s a lot of space! For some perspective, the first Windows computer I bought had a hard drive that could hold 40 gb of data – that means I had to store the Windows operating system, all of my other programs, and all of my own files and folders inside that 40 gb of space. And today, I have “throwaway” files that are more than 100 gb! How things change!

You might want to go down the list and see what types of files and folders are included in this total. If you’re not sure about something, or if you definitely DON’T want to delete a particular item, just uncheck the box and it won’t be included in the total and it won’t be deleted.

But Scott, how do I know if I can delete something or if I should keep it?

You can click on the name of each item in the list, and in the area at the bottom of the window you’ll see an explanation of what that particular item is. That should give you some idea of whether it’s important or not (it’s probably not).

Best rule is this: if you’re not sure, keep it. But practically speaking, the reason the items in this list are in this list are because they aren’t really critical for the continued operation of the computer. So you probably won’t be hurting anything if you delete these things.

Once you have the preferred boxes checked or unchecked, click OK and the Disk Cleanup process will begin. It might take a while if you have a lot of non-essential things to remove. The progress bar will tell you how it’s getting along:

When it’s done, just close the open windows and you’re all set.

You may save a lot of hard drive space doing this, or you may not save much. It’s worth checking out though, especially if you have never checked it (or have not checked it in a while). I don’t check mine very often, which is why there were over 100 gb that could be eliminated. By doing this, the size of my system image backup went way down. Prior to this, my backup process overnight would take almost 7 hours. Now, with the smaller backup, it only takes 5 1/2 hours. That’s a significant difference!

Yes, here I am again preaching to you about backing up your computer. But this time, it’s from a personal point of view and it has to do with my own primary desktop computer. I’ve had two different, major problems in the last two months so I wanted to tell you about what happened and how each of them turned out.

Problem #1 was about 2 months ago. Everything seemed to be going along fine, then I started to get the Blue Screen of Death on my computer every so often. Maybe once every 7 to 10 days. I could be right in the middle of something, and all of a sudden my cursor would freeze, then both monitors would go black, then the blue screen would flash up there and the computer would immediately restart. I wasn’t too happy about this obviously. Otherwise, it seemed to be working okay.

When I checked the error codes, it looked like the problem might be related to an outdated video card driver. So I updated all the drivers, and yet it still kept happening.

I knew I would have to do something about it at some point, but I just hadn’t decided exactly what. Then, that decision was made for me one day when I got the blue screen, and this time it didn’t reboot. I would make sure it’s completely turned off, then when I would go to power it up, it would not boot to Windows at all. It just got stuck in that “Repair Windows” cycle but the Self-Repair was not able to accomplish anything.

Now just for a minute, I want you to put yourself in that situation. Your computer won’t boot up. You cannot access any of the data on your computer – no documents, emails, pictures, nothing. How bad would that be if it happened to you? Would losing all of your files and folders be a really bad thing?

Solution to Problem #1 : replace the hard drive

As I said, this is a desktop computer. In this computer, I have a second physical hard drive. Every night, my main hard drive is completely cloned to that second hard drive. So, when my main hard drive crashed, all I had to do was switch over to that second drive and everything was there. Then I just replaced the first hard drive. Hard drives crash all the time – sometimes gradually, and sometimes with no warning at all. 

This might sound complicated, but it’s really not. The process of cloning that drive every night is completely automated by software, so I don’t have to do a thing. This might be more of an effort than some people are willing to exert, but for me I like having it this way. And this cloning process is just one of the 4 ways my computer is backed up every single day. As I said, for some that would be overkill. Just personal preference.

Problem #2 was just a couple of weeks ago. The second Tuesday of each month is called Patch Tuesday. This is the day Microsoft sends out their monthly Windows Updates, to patch up problems and security issues that have been discovered in Windows. For my computer, those updates were installed on Wednesday November 11.

That day, I noticed I was having a lot of trouble with MS Outlook. Every time I would get an email that had any images embedded, Outlook would crash. Then I noticed that Skype would not run – it just would not open at all. I also use Sony Vegas, a video editing program, and that would also not open. There were a few other screwy things going on that I don’t recall specifically right now.

I checked the hard drive, and it was not showing any signs of crashing or failure. With a little research, I found out that one or more of the updates that Microsoft had sent out that week had a problem. It was crashing Outlook and other programs. For some of my clients, it was just a matter of removing the bad update. For me, it was worse – my computer went downhill pretty rapidly and before I could repair it, it would not boot up to Windows at all. I couldn’t even use System Restore to take it back to an earlier date.

So there I was with a perfectly good hard drive, but a completely screwed up Windows installation and unable to boot up, even in Safe Mode.

What would you do in that situation?

Solution to Problem #2: restore Windows from a system image backup

One of the other mostly automated backups I do each night is what’s called a System Image backup, using a program called Macrium Reflect (free). All I have to do is plug in my external drive at night, and unplug it in the morning. Overnight, Macrium Reflect takes everything on my main hard drive – programs, files, folders, settings, EVERYTHING – and puts it in a single file on my external hard drive.

So all I had to do was restore that System Image backup from a couple days earlier, and everything was back like it was on that day (Tuesday, before the Windows Updates came in).

This type of backup is one of two backups that I recommend for everyone. It allows you to get back in business within an hour or two after replacing a crashed hard drive. In my case, the hard drive didn’t even need to be replaced – I just need to restore a system image backup to get everything back the way it was.

So that’s what has happened to me recently. Yes, it was a slight inconvenience to deal with it – BUT I was back up and running very quickly in both cases, and I lost no data. I have gone through this same procedure with many of my clients who had a regular automated backup, and experienced a major problem. Let me tell you, they were very happy that I had encouraged them to have a backup process in place.

If you want help with setting up a backup for your computer, just email me at [email protected] or call me at 727-254-9078.

If no one ever opened a scam/spam email, the spammers would stop sending them. If you have checked your spam folder lately, you know that the flow of spam doesn’t seem to have slowed down much. One reason I like Gmail is that their excellent spam filters keep that garbage out of my inbox. But what if one slips through? How do you identify an email as a scam?

Let’s take a look at one of these that showed up in my email recently.

Gmail correctly sent it directly to the Spam folder, but I pulled it out of there just for the purpose of this blog post. Four things on this email jump out to me right away.

First, it does not state clearly who is sending the email. It just says that it’s being sent from “mailminion.net” on behalf “Payments Dept”. This is just an email sending service, not a person. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a scam, since many legitimate online businesses use an email service. I use one of the most popular ones, Aweber, to send out my Monday morning emails. But they fact that they have chosen the display name “Payments Dept” is suspicious.

Second factor is the blind link within the email message. This is exactly the type of link you should never click on, and for that reason alone this email is one that should just get deleted. But in the interest of investigation, I followed that link to see where it would go. Don’t try this at home!

The actual link behind that text is this:

http://mm-s399.com/campaigns/yc483c9l3taac/track-url/a621ea4bb5e6c/b63d0cc529d45c8aba3dba1cdcef66e03f0a5703

but once it was clicked, it forwarded from that address to this actual website address:

http://sarahsconfession.com/c/?clickID=2786033600&aff=StrongLead&c=US&tid=1023b209664a379305b8caeec13444&aff_id=5662#

So now we can actually see where we’re going with this junk.

On that page is a video sales pitch for some stock trading software that the video claims is currently making its other users $10,000, $20,000 or even up to $60,000 each month. And it’s all automated! You just click one button in the morning, and go out and do whatever you want to do during the day, and by the end of that day you will have thousands of dollars in your bank account. To any resaonable thinking person, this is obviously all garbage and a complete scam. Unfortunately, there are many people that buy it simply because they want so badly for it to be true.

But what about the Paypal payment that was already “processed”, that the original email talked about? Just a lie to get me to click on the link and hopefully get sucked into the scam.

Just what we’ve already talked about is enough to prove that this is not a legitimate email. But there’s more.

The third item – you can’t see it very well in the image, but at the bottom of the email there is what is supposed to look like a US mailing address. That’s designed to add some credibility and make it more believable. After all, a scammer wouldn’t actually give out his address, right?

Well, what it says is this:

Finance Rewards Society, 2205 Rose Avenue,, LA, 70171

They’re hoping people see that and just assume that it’s in Los Angeles, California. Except there is no 70171 in California. In fact, that zip code does not exist anywhere in the United States.

The fourth tipoff is that you can “unsubscribe” and you can even “report abuse”. But the place you’re reporting the abuse is the very place that’s sending you the email. They’re giving you the opportunity to THINK you have reported them, so you don’t actually report the spam/scam to any authority or group that can take action against them. They allow this type of scam email to be sent through their service, so your “report” doesn’t do any good. It’s like reporting a burglary to the burglar’s accomplice.

The other factor that is common in a lot of scam emails is bad grammar and misspelled words. It’s usually very clear that whoever wrote it is not a native speaker of English. In the email example above, there are only a few sentences so they didn’t really have any glaring grammatical errors. But I’ve often said this: if a convincing scammer ever teams up with someone that knows proper written English, that’s a team that will be able to scam a lot of people. The bad guys already snag a lot of people even with their broken English; who knows what they would be capable of if it sounded legitimate.

Every day, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of new malicious websites coming into existence on the internet. It’s very common now, when you do a Google search, for many of the search results to be websites that you should definitely not click on. You’d think Google would have that figured out by now, so that those sites don’t show up so well in the rankings. But they are still there, so you have to be very careful.

The question is: How can you know if a site is safe or not, unless you click on it?

The answer is: Let Google check it for you

Not many people know about it, but Google offers a “safe browsing” check so that you can get their evaluation of whether or not a site is malicious – and you never have to visit the website itself to do that.

Here’s an example of how you would check on the safety of visiting a particular website:

Let’s say your computer starts crashing sometimes, and it’s starting to happen often enough to become annoying. And, you don’t really know what is causing it to crash. But every time it freezes up, it comes up with this error message that seems to be giving you some kind of report of what happened, but it looks like a bunch of computer code that doesn’t mean anything unless you’re a computer geek that knows that language.

So you do a Google search for “Windows crash report” to see if you can find any helpful information. And what do you know – there’s a website that comes up in that Google search that seems to be just what you’re looking for. The website is Windows-Crash-Report.info. Wow, it sounds like exactly what you need, right? It must have all the answers! WRONG.

When a scammer is creating a website, he wants you to think it’s a legitimate website. He wants you to think this site has the answers you are searching for. He wants you to think it’s safe to click and view the website. Don’t fall into that trap – because in some cases, as soon as you click, you’re in trouble.

Instead, check the site using this website address format:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=SuspiciousWebsite.com

But instead of “suspiciouswebsite.com” at the end, you would just put in the website you want to check on. Note that you don’t include “http” or “www” or anything like that, and nothing after the “.com”. Just the domain name by itself.

So if we wanted to check on the site I mentioned above, we would type this address into the address bar:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=windows-crash-report.info

When you hit enter, Google comes up immediately with a brief report that tells you what their evaluation is for that site and whether it’s probably safe to go there.

In this case, Google has this to say about that website:

As you can see, Google is not coming out and clearly stating “this site is dangerous”, but they do state that the site had some suspicious activity detected over 90 days ago, and for me that’s enough to keep me from clicking through to it.

Does this seem like a lot of hassle to go through, just to see if a website is malicious before you visit it? Yeah, maybe. But from my standpoint, I can tell you that I have people bring me computers all the time that have gotten infected just because someone decided to click an unknown link “just this once” out of curiosity, and almost immediately they regretted it. You can avoid that. Be safe!

Everyone knows what a YouTube video is. But not everyone knows what a GIF video is (even though just about everyone has seen one on Facebook or somewhere on the internet). Did you know that you can easily take a YouTube video, and create a GIF video out of that? Today I’ll show you how.

A GIF video is pretty much just a short video that usually plays on an endless loop. Here’s an example of one. In this, you first see the dog get up and run out of the camera range, for no apparent reason. Then you see what he sensed before any of the humans did (an earthquake):

Sometimes short little videos like this can be pretty handy. Since this one appears to be a video that was taken by an office security camera system, the original video was probably hours long and full of just boring footage that showed nothing of any interest to anyone. But that little animated section of it is interesting. It’s true that animals sense something like this before a human ever would, and that dog clearly jumps up and runs before anything starts happening visually.

The good news is – you can make your own GIF videos, and it’s really easy! Here’s how.

Let’s say you find this great video on YouTube. For our example, we’ll use this “military homecoming surprise” video. This father was deployed for 9 months and his young daughter was not expecting him to come home already, and he surprised her by showing up at her baseball game. Here’s the full video:

That video is almost 2 minutes long. A lot of that is the silent intro, then the narrator sets up the story, then the actual reunion of father and daughter, and then the long wrap-up. But you might only want to make a quick GIF video of just the actual reunion.

First, while you’re at YouTube on this video, look up at the address bar at the top of your web browser. It should show a website address that looks like this:

Now, click your mouse so that the cursor is flashing just in front of the “y” in “youtube”. Then, type the 3 letters “gif” (without the quotes). So now the website address looks like this:

Now hit the Enter key on the keyboard, and you’ll be taken to a video editing page and you can decide how long the GIF video will be, and exactly where it will start and end. You can also put a title at the top of the video, and you can even create a caption to last for a certain period of time (I just put the caption “Wow” for a short time in the middle of the GIF). Then you click the big button at the bottom that says “Create GIF”.

Shouldn’t take long for the GIF video to be created. Then you are presented with a menu that gives you the link to the actual GIF file, and a website link where you can send people to view it, and a few other things. The first time you play it, it might play in sort of slow motion, because it is also loading at the same time. After the first play, it should be at normal speed.

You can see what my final creation looked like here:  https://gifs.com/gif/mLrV27

They also give you the option to share your new video on all the social media sites. The nice thing about this whole process is that there is no software to download or install on your computer, so you probably don’t have to worry about malware or viruses sneaking in. I would guess they are making some money from ads, but I didn’t see any because they were blocked by my ad-blocker software.

Every so often I do a post where I feature several websites that are interesting, informative, funny or just somehow intriguing in some way.

Documentary Addict

If you’re not looking for anything in particular, it can be a little overwhelming. But if that’s the case, you can also check out their subsections such as “Just Added”, or “The Week’s MOST RIVETING” or the “Top 100” and you’re sure to find some really good content. Or, you can just pick one of 26 categories to narrow it down to a particular field of interest.

And one other advantage of Documentary Addict – it’s completely free.

FaxZero

BUT – there are still some businesses and some individuals that use faxes. If you are dealing with one of them, it’s rather unhandy if you don’t have a way to send a fax from your location.

FaxZero allows you to have this ability, and it’s free for most situations. You can create a document in Word, then go to the FaxZero website and upload that document with the fax number you want to send it to. It’s free to send up to 3 pages + the cover page, and you are allowed to send up to 5 free faxes per DAY. This is probably perfect for that one time in 5 years that you need to do this (it certainly wouldn’t make sense to own a fax machine for those rare occasions, not to mention you would need a regular telephone line and many people don’t even have those at home anymore).

If you need to send a longer fax, it’s just $1.99 per fax for up to 25 pages – still a bargain.

SuperCook Recipes

For example, I went on the site and told it that I only have American cheese, eggs, a potato, and some sausage – and it came up with 70 different ideas for a meal. These included:

And a bunch more. Of course, the more ingredients you have, the more options it will come back with. But for nights when it’s suppertime and your brain is too tired to come up with something on its own, this website could help.

Amazon Filler Items

That’s where the Amazon Filler Items website comes in. You go to the site, and enter the dollar amount that you need in order to get your total purchase up to $35. The site comes back with a list of dozens or even hundreds of “filler” items that fit the bill. It’s almost a certainty that one of them will be one that you would have to buy at some point in the future, so you’re not really just wasting money.

Flight Radar

Stuff in Space

When you go to the site, you’ll see a black screen with Earth in the middle. You can click and drag to rotate the earth left and right, or up and down. What you’ll also see are little dots – many thousands of them. Each one of those dots is a piece of junk floating around. You can click on it and get the details. There are leftover rocket bodies, payloads, or some things just labeled “debris”. Space exploration sure leaves a trail of garbage behind.

Khan Academy

The site offers multiple classes in categories such as Math, Science, Economics and Finance, Arts and Humanities, Computing and more.

Then if you just take one category, such as Math, you can zero in on specifics such as what grade level or what areas of math you want to learn, or just take the fundamentals:

And that’s just the one category of Math. Each category has multiple sub-areas like that. And it’s all free.

Don’t throw my package

The “Don’t Throw My Package” website is a collection of videos in which delivery people have been caught mishandling the packages they’re supposed to be taking care of. With home security cameras becoming more common, you’d think they would be aware that they could be “on stage” at any time during their daily deliveries.

This is what I think of whenever I’m shipping a laptop to a client. Fortunately, in the hundreds of laptops I’ve shipped over the years, I’ve only had two instances where packages were damaged in delivery. I always send them insured, and in both cases UPS paid the full claim amount.

For an example of the videos you’ll see on this website, check this one out.

For the websites featured here on my blog today, some of them are ones that I found and some were suggested to me by readers and listeners to my podcast. If you know of a website that is interesting, funny, educational or unusual in some way, let me know about it so I can tell everyone else!