The Computer Tutor

Today we’ll learn about a free service that let’s you talk into your computer, and have those words made into a document.

Since I type on my computer keyboard all the time, I’m able to type pretty quickly. I haven’t measured my typing speed lately but I do okay. Which is kind of funny, since I absolutely despised typing class in high school.

But here is something that’s true for me, and probably for almost anyone: you can talk faster that you can type.

So if you would prefer to just talk to your computer and have it translate your spoken words into digital words (such as in a document, a blog post, etc), the Speechtexter service let’s you do that.

And they make it pretty easy. If you go to Speechtexter.com, you’ll see a pretty obvious button right in the middle of the page that says “Start dictating”:

When you click that, you’re immediately presented with a big white space, similar to a blank document. Then you can tap the ESC key on your keyboard, and start talking (assuming you have a microphone connected to the computer, or that you’re using the laptop’s built-in mic).

This is when you’ll want to start experimenting. Just say a few words and watch them appear on the screen. When I played with it, it didn’t really seem odd since I often speak into my phone to dictate a text message. It’s just much faster than typing it on my phone.

One of the big conveniences with Speechtexter is that you can also say what punctuation you want to use. There’s a chart just to the right of white area that lists what the program recognizes:

And when you’re all done and all your words are on the screen, you can click the Download icon in the top right corner, and choose whether or not you want to download it as a plain text file (.txt) or as a Word document (.doc). And now you have literally spoken something into existence!

I think the way I would be most likely to use this is if I have a long letter or document that is in print form, and I need to get it into digital form. So I could just read the document into SpeechTexter, then save it. Would you use this online service? What kind of situation could you imagine it being a handy tool? Let me know in the comments below.

Today we’re talking about three things that a lot of people believe to be true about computers, but in fact they are not true.

Myth #1: Turning the computer off, then powering it up again, is a restart. FALSE

I always tell people, you need to restart your computer every day or two. This resets the uptime counter, refreshes the memory, just gives the whole thing a fresh start. And often when I tell them that, the response is, “Oh, I do that every night!” Meaning, they turn the computer off at night, and turn it back on the next morning. But doing that is not a restart. Intuitively, you’d think it would be a more THOROUGH restart, but the opposite is true. You need to click  the Start button, then the power Icon, and then click on the word “Restart”.

Myth #2: Formatting wipes all the data off the hard drive. FALSE

If you have a portable drive, and you plug it in to your computer, you can look and see exactly what is on that drive. All the files and folders are there for you to look at. Then, if you do a right click on that drive letter and choose “Format”, you can wait a minute until it’s done, and if you look again, you won’t see any files or folders listed there now. They must be all gone, right? Nope. They are still there. Formatting just tells the computer that all of that space is now open for you to put new files and folders on there. So if you have sensitive data on a drive and you’re planning to dispose of it, don’t just format it and assume that data is gone.

Myth #3: If your computer is running too slowly, you must need to defrag. FALSE

This is something every computer tech has heard. A client walks in the door with their computer, and the complaint is that it is running very slowly. “I tried defragging it, but it didn’t seem to make any difference!” That is correct. Defragging will almost never make any difference, for two reasons. First, your hard drive would have to be extremely fragmented in order for defragmentation (the actual term) to make any difference. Second, your computer is already defragging on its own, on a regular schedule. It’s part of the default maintenance that’s already set up in Windows.

Did you believe any of these myths before reading this? Let me know what you think in the comments below!

If you do Facebook on your desktop or laptop computer, you probably see a lot of posts that have a bunch of comments that are just animated GIFs. I find nothing more annoying than that. But now I don’t see them any more!

There are actually a lot of things that I find really annoying about Facebook:

Fortunately for those kinds of posts, I have one tried and true solution. I just unfollow that person. So we’re still Facebook friends, but I never see anything they post after that. And they can still see what I post. And they have no idea that I have unfollowed them. Quick and easy.

But there’s a different annoyance that cannot be fixed by unfollowing. It’s the animated GIFs in comments.

You probably know what I’m talking about. Someone will create a post in Facebook, like usual. But then someone will reply with a comment that’s just this animated GIF image, like a person clapping their hands, or a cat jumping up and down, or something with lots of movement. And the movement repeats like every 2 seconds, over and over and over. For me, this is incredibly distracting and annoying. Yes, you can click on the moving image itself to make it stop, but there could be a whole barrage of those images in separate replies to the same post, so you have to click on each one individually to make them stop moving.

And guess what – even if you click to make them all stop bouncing around, that same post will probably show up in your Facebook feed in a few hours, and they’re all moving again. It was driving me bonkers. And Facebook does not offer any setting to be able to turn those things off. Yes, you can turn off having video automatically play in a FB post, but that does not apply to these images that are added through the comments.

But recently I found a wonderful solution. It’s a Chrome extension called FB Purity. Now I’m sure if you took a guess you might think that stands for Facebook Purity, right? But I think the app developers were concerned about using the name “Facebook” in the app, so the actual name is Fluff Busting Purity. But everyone knows that the whole purpose of it is to clean up a bunch of junk in Facebook. And it does a LOT more than just what we’re talking about here today.

You can get the Chrome extension here: https://www.fbpurity.com/install.htm (it also works with Firefox and some other browsers).

Just download and install, then the next time you open Facebook, you’ll see the FBP icon at the top:

When you click that, you’ll see a new window with a HUGE variety of options for you to choose from, about how you want Facebook to be displayed. This is what mine looks like:

You might notice some of the choices I’ve made – I have hidden all Sponsored Posts – so on my Facebook I don’t see any ads. I love that! Then, further down the list, I have chosen to always display the items in my News Feed with the Most Recent ones starting at the top. And then you’ll see that I’ve checked “Show Full Date/Time on posts” – so if you see an older post, it doesn’t just say “3 weeks ago”. It will give me the actual date and time it was posted. Not a big deal, just my preference.

So let’s get to wiping out the animated GIFs. Over on the left side, click on the category “Font, Colour and Design”. You’ll see in this section you have all kinds of control over the size and color of the text in Facebook. But when you look way down the list, you’ll see the checkbox for “Hide Animated GIFs”. Just check that and click on Save and Close (on the right).

So that solves that problem. But as you can see, there are MANY other options available for you to tweak how Facebook works and displays on your computer. Play around with FB Purity, and let everyone know in the comments which setting you like the best.

And please note – FB Purity is offered free, but by donation. So you aren’t required to pay anything, but the developer has put a LOT of work into getting this thing working so it would be nice to send over a few dollars or whatever you’re comfortable with.

How to hide all animated GIFs in Facebook comments

If you buy a brand new computer, there’s a chance you might turn it on and find that it’s not just running Windows 10. It might be running Windows 10 in S Mode. Most people don’t want that. Here’s how to get out of S Mode.

What exactly IS “S Mode” anyway?

You could think of S Mode as being sort of Windows 10 in “Lockdown”. Maybe with the recent Coronavirus situation, “lockdown” might not be a good term to use. But it’s accurate though.

Windows 10 S Mode means you cannot install the software that you might normally use. You can ONLY install apps from the Microsoft Store. You can’t use Chrome or Firefox – you’re pretty much stuck using Microsoft Edge, which almost no one uses willingly. And you can’t even set your default search engine as Google – you are forced to search by default using Bing, since that’s Microsoft’s search engine.

What if you want to use Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc)? Of course you can do that – because Office is a product of Microsoft!

But seriously, for most users, the restrictions on a computer running Windows 10 S Mode are just too much. So if you buy a computer that happens to come with S Mode already running, you’ll probably want to get it out of that status and back into “regular” Windows 10 like you’re used to.

How to get your computer out of Windows 10 S Mode

First a warning: once you get out of S Mode, you can’t go back. It will never be able to go back to S Mode again. I’m guessing you’re probably okay with that, since you’re about to learn how to get it out of S Mode to start with.

You need to go to the Microsoft Store. To do that, you can either click the Start button in the lower left and scroll down alphabetically and click on “Microsoft Store”:

Or, you could just click the Microsoft Store icon that is probably on your taskbar:

When you click that and go to the Store, find the search function in the upper right (the magnifying glass), then click on it and search the phrase “Switch out of S Mode”. When you see it, click on “Learn More” and it will just take you right through the process. You don’t have to pay anything for this.

After you’re done (just takes a few clicks), it would be good to restart your computer (in fact, it’s always a good idea to restart your computer). Now the fun part starts – getting all your software installed!

Fun topic today! I watch a bit of Youtube each night before I drift off to sleep. I have a few channels that I subscribe to, and these are some that I think  you might find entertaining as well. I’ll tell you about them below, and include one of my favorite videos from each one. Warning – some videos have swearing.

Favorite #1: The Lock Picking Lawyer

For most of his videos, he takes a particular brand and model of lock and shows how ridiculously simple it is to bypass. And wait til you see what he does. He uses a simple lock pick and I don’t think there is ANY lock he can’t open. It’s really incredible. All the major brands – Master Lock, Brinks, any of them. He especially likes to take the ones that are advertised as “pick proof”. Even if you’re not really into lock picking yourself, this guy is very entertaining to watch what he does.

In this video, he gets into a home safe – using a coat hanger.

Favorite #2: Gas Station Encounters

There’s a gas station/convenience store located somewhere in northeast Ohio (I don’t know exactly where). They have cameras mounted throughout the store so that virtually every square inch of space can be seen and recorded (it’s not a huge place, just a typical convenience store). And the guy that runs the place, Brandon, takes huge pleasure in catching shoplifters. There are two big monitors right next to each cash register, so he can actually be watching someone steal something even while ringing up another customer. If he is 100% sure of a theft, he’ll follow the person outside and confront them, and make them come back in and pay for the item.

What’s really funny is Brandon’s narration when he edits the video to be posted on YouTube. Here’s one where he catches a guy stealing some nail clippers.

Favorite #3: Jose Barrientos

Normally you wouldn’t think that a computer geek would have much of a sense of humor, right? Well, Jose is the exception. In fact, in the videos he makes, he often uses his sense of humor and his computer skills to bring justice and entertainment wherever it’s needed. And Jose has a heart for helping people: I work with a local non-profit group that gets things for the big homeless population here in Florida, and Jose bought and donated a brand new pair of work boots so that a man could be able to get a construction job.

This video is one of my favorites from a while back, and it went viral. Jose played a little prank on his speech class all semester, then did the big reveal during the final class.

Bonus favorite: Surveillance Camera Man

In some cases, he’s out in public, so he could probably say he has the right to be there and people can’t really have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But in other situations he’s kind of a jerk, walking into private establishments and not leaving when he’s asked to.

I believe the person that created this sees it as “art” and I guess you could make that argument. Or maybe it’s a social experiment. I also think I saw somewhere that he did this to increase awareness that there are already cameras everywhere, so we are already being watched all the time – it shouldn’t make any difference that an actual person is holding the camera and doing the filming right in front of you.

Whatever the story is behind it, I find it entertaining. It’s one of those videos that you just can’t stop watching because you want to see more reactions from the people.

https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg

And what is YOUR favorite YouTube channel? Leave it in the comments below.

If you have any kind of vision challenge, or if your eyesight is just gradually getting worse over time, you aren’t the only one. One nice feature of Windows 10 – you can make everything bigger and easier to read.

I grew up wearing glasses since I was 8 years old. I could see things fine up close, but everything was blurry far away. About 12 years ago I had LASIK surgery to correct my vision.  LASIK stands for “laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis” and it’s amazing. The whole procedure lasted about 15  minutes and the next day I just couldn’t believe it. I could go outside here in sunny Florida and see faraway things, perfectly clearly, without glasses.

But there was a downside. After I had the surgery, I did not have the same close-up vision I had before. So I could see things far away with no problem, but I needed to wear reading glasses to read a book or to see something up close.

And to be fair, the doctor told me this would most likely happen. In fact, he said that if I wanted to, I could have one eye corrected to see far away, and the other eye corrected just to see things up close. That was an option I pretty quickly declined. I knew I would probably eventually get used to it, but I just didn’t like the idea of having drastically different vision in each eye. And I really don’t mind too much having to wear reading glasses.

Quality of vision definitely comes into play when you’re using a computer. I’m on my computer most of the day so it’s a big factor. I actually have a particular pair of readers for when I’m using the computer, and I use a different strength for when I’m reading a book. This is because the computer screen is farther away from my eyes than a book I’m holding.

One thing Microsoft has done well with Windows 10 is allowing adjustments to be made for people with different eyesight abilities. There are several settings available to make it easy to see what’s on the screen.

And here’s how you get to those settings: hold down the Windows key, and tap the letter U.

This brings up the Display options, and there are a few controls on here you might want to experiment with.

First, you’ll see a slide bar where you can make the text on the screen bigger. When it’s the size you like, click Apply.

Then below that is the option to make everything bigger – this includes the apps AND the text that you see on the screen.

You’ll also notice an option to make the cursor bigger, in case you have trouble seeing it on the screen:

And finally, you’ll see a link where you can control the brightness of the screen. For me, everything is easier to see when it’s brighter.

If you’re on a computer for much of the day like I am, it makes a big difference when everything is easier to see and read. And it’s better for the health of your eyesight in the long run too.

It’s one of the big frustrations with MS Word – you hit the Enter key, and the next line in your document is a DOUBLE space down from the last line. There are two ways to fix this.

You know what I’m talking about. You open a new blank document and start typing a letter, and the first time you hit Enter, there’s that huge space between the lines and it looks like you are double-spacing the whole thing. Why does Microsoft set that as the default? Are there that many people who are actually double-spacing every document they create? No idea.

To fix this, there are a couple of options.

The quick, “right now” fix is this: hold down the Shift key while you’re tapping the Enter key. This will cause that line return to just be a single space so you won’t have that big gap. But that only solves the problem for the document you are typing right now. Next time you open a new blank Word document, it will still be double spaced.

The permanent solution is this:

Open a new blank Word document. With the Home tab selected, look over to the Paragraph section.

In the Paragraph section, find the drop down menu called Line and Paragraph spacing and click the drop-down menu, then choose “Line Spacing Options”.

In the Spacing section, make sure the “Before” and “After” numbers are set to zero. Then, at the bottom click on “Set as Default”.

You’ll get a little question that pops up asking if you want to set this as the default for just THIS document, or for all Word documents. For me, I chose all documents since that’s the way I prefer to create documents.

Then just click OK, and you’re done. Now, on the probably rare occasion you need to have a double-spaced line in Word document, you can just hit Enter twice.

Microsoft Outlook is the most popular email software in the world. But there’s one thing about it that sometimes frustrates users – the search function. Today we’ll talk about a common way to fix Outlook’s search process when it doesn’t seem to be working.

You know how it’s SUPPOSED to work – you type something in the little search field, and Outlook is supposed to find the emails that match that search:

And they give you that nice drop-down menu so you can limit where you are actually searching. It can be in the current folder that you have open at the time, or you can include subfolders, or you can search all of the folders in a particular mail account, or you can search all of your mail accounts, or you can search everything in Outlook (this would include calendar entries, contact list, etc.)

But what about those times when you KNOW you have a particular email from someone, and you have not deleted it, but you just don’t know where to find it? It could be in your “Business” folder among the other 10,000 emails in there, or it could be somewhere in your inbox, or who knows where. But you know you have it, yet when you enter that person’s email address in the Outlook search field, the results come up with nothing.

There are a couple of reasons why this might be happening:

It might sound a little intimidating to think about a project like “rebuilding Outlook’s search index”, but it’s really pretty easy. Here’s how you do it.

1. Open Outlook, then click on File up in the top left corner, then click on Options

2. This will open a new window. In this window, click on the Search tab on the left, then click on the button that says “Indexing options”:

3. In the next window, click on Advanced:

4. In the next window, click on Rebuild. That’s it!

Now you just wait for Outlook to rebuild its entire index. But fair warning – you might be waiting a while. But it’s not really a problem, because Outlook will do that rebuilding in the background, and you can continue to use Outlook to send and receive email while it’s doing that.

This tip is based on what is probably the most common question I get, which is “Why is my computer running so slowly??” It is definitely frustrating when the computer lags behind. If your computer suddenly starts to run a lot more slowly than you think it should, there are a couple of things for you to check on.

First, you need to check on how long it’s been since the computer has been restarted. It’s important to note, I’m not saying how long since you turned it off, and then powered it back up again. I’m talking an actual restart. This means you clicked the Start button, then right above that you click the Power button, then in the menu options you click on the word Restart. This is what actually resets everything, refreshes the memory, and can resolve a lot of issues.

To see how long it’s been since you last restarted, just hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys, and tap the Escape key. That brings up Task Manager. Then click on the Performance tab, and look for the Up time counter. It will show Days, Hours, Minutes and Seconds since the last restart:

I just checked it on my own computer, and you can see that mine has been running for 19 hours, 31 minutes and 15 seconds in that screenshot.

A good guideline is to restart your computer every day or two. So many times, I’ve been asked to check a computer that’s doing all kinds of haywire things and running really slowly, then when I check the Up Time counter, it’s been running straight for like 51 days. For that computer, a restart will be like a drink of cold water to a man who’s been crawling in the desert sun all day.

Second, you need to see if the hard drive is failing. Hard drives can fail gradually over time, or they can just stop working and not boot up again. So if it suddenly gets really slow, or some programs don’t open, or some programs take forever to finally run, those are often signs that the hard drive could be failing. Hopefully you have a backup, if there is anything important stored on your computer!

To check the hard drive, we use a little program called Crystal Disk Info. It’s free, and you can download it here.

Once you have downloaded the installation file, double click to run it and just follow the instructions for installing it. It’s very straightforward, and it doesn’t try to add any junkware or bad stuff to your computer.

The very last screen on the installation process will give you the option to launch the program, and that box will already be checked, so go ahead and do it.

When it runs, it will come up and show you a window full of numbers and other details. You can ignore all of that. The only thing you really need to look at is the big button on the left side. It will either say Good, Caution or Bad. This is mine:

Of course, you want that button to say Good. If it says Caution or Bad, that means you will need to replace your hard drive. And at that point if you don’t have your important stuff backed up, now would be a good time to try to do it, if you still can. Once that drive completely fails, you may not be able to get your stuff from it. Or you may have to hire someone to recover the data from it. Having a backup ahead of time is much less expensive, and much less stressful.

There are other factors that can contribute to a computer slowing down, but these two things are a couple of the big ones. Definitely check them first.

If you think having security cameras in your home would be expensive and complicated, I have good news! I got some recently and they were really easy and affordable.

When you’re not at home, it’s nice to know that everything is okay. And even when you are at home, being able to see in another room, or outside, can be pretty convenient. When I’ve thought about implementing security cameras inside and outside my house in the past, I just put it off because it seemed like a “big project” – research all the cameras, compare features and cost, make the purchase, figure out where to put the cameras, and get all the alerts in place. I always have a bunch of things going on, and I never really wanted to set aside the hours I thought it would take to make this happen.

But I happily discovered that it’s not really that difficult or expensive at all.

I came across the Wyze cameras and found that they are fairly popular, and the people that use them are happy with them. So I dug a little deeper, found more good reviews, and decided to try them out myself. Now I have them, and I’m happy with them too.

One note: to really use these, you will need a smart phone because everything is controlled through an app on the phone. But just about everyone uses a smart phone these days anyway.

Here’s what I got. I purchased two of these on Amazon:

WyzeC2 camera

And I got one of these:

Wyze Cam Pan

You can see right in the image that the pricing is very affordable. And as I mentioned earlier, all you have to do is get the Wyze app on your phone. It walks you through the whole setup. You can set the cameras to record everything, or you can have the recording process start when motion is detected. And you can upload everything to the cloud, so even if someone broke into your home and destroyed the camera(s), their picture would already be recorded and accessible.

The difference between these two models is that the second one offers the ability to pan left and right, and tilt up and down. This way you can see more of the room. You might not need that feature though, since the cameras have a “fisheye” quality that really enables quite a wide viewing area.

And both models also have full 2-way audio. So you can also hear what is going on in the room, and you can also speak to someone in the room if you want to. Again, this is all live-streamed through your phone, so it doesn’t matter if your camera is in your house in Texas, and you’re on vacation in Hong Kong. As long as you can get on the internet, you can see and hear what is happening in front of those cameras.

For me, I’m using two for viewing a couple of rooms in my house. The third one I have mounted on my office window, pointing outward. So I can see when someone is in the driveway, or if an Amazon delivery truck has stopped.

This is a screenshot from that camera:

I even figured out a way to have the app send that live picture to a TV in my office (through an app that is connected with the Amazon FireTV device), so just to the left of my two computer monitors is an always-on screen showing what’s going on outside.

At a cost of USD $24 or $35, you don’t have the excuse of “too expensive”, and the app makes it so easy, anyone can set these things up.