The Computer Tutor

It used to be easy to just search Google for an image and download that full size image to your computer. Google changed their image download process a while ago, and it’s not quite as obvious how to get those full size images saved. But you can still do it! Here’s how.

Note: what you do with the images you download from Google is your business. I’m trusting that whether you’re using them on your blog, your website, your podcast cover art, or wherever, that you are only using images with the proper permission or licensing.

Remember the good old days – grabbing a high-res image from Google was super easy! You just did a search at images.google.com, and you were presented with a million beautiful pictures to choose from. You just clicked on the thumbnail, and right there in front of you was the full size image, ready for your right-click and “Save As” to have it on your computer. No more!

Google made this change because photo websites and professional photographers were tired of Google making it so easy for people to steal their images. So they made the process less intuitive, and they also made it more likely the anyone searching for a photo would actually end up on the website where the photo is displayed (which in some cases means you have to then go searching for the photo – the photo you already found on Google – on that website). This is good for the photo owners, but really inconvenient for the user who needs a photo.

In the steps below, I’ll show you the problem, and then I’ll show you the workaround.

Let’s say for example you want a nice high-resolution picture of a Tesla automobile.

You go to Google Images and type “tesla” in the search bar. And Google comes back with lots of great looking images of Teslas:

So far so good. You look at all the thumbnails, and you decide you like the red one in the top row. So you click on it. Now you see this – the thumbnail selection is still there, but the one you chose is now highlighted and displayed on the left. But that’s not the full size image. The actual image is nice and big – 2048 x 1335 pixels.

If you just click on the picture, it takes you to the Tesla Wikipedia page. If you scroll halfway down that long page, you’ll see the image – but it’s still not shown full size. In fact, it’s even smaller than when you saw it in the Google search results!

Here’s what you do – 

Do a RIGHT click on the image, then choose “Copy image address”. That means you’ll have the actual website address for the IMAGE, not just the website that is using the image.

Now, open a new tab and hit Ctrl + V (the keyboard shortcut for Paste). When you hit Enter, guess what you see – the full size, full resolution image!

Now you can right click and download, or copy it into Photoshop, or do whatever you need to do with it.

So there are a couple more steps involved now, but once you’ve done it a few times, it’s not a huge inconvenience.

There are a few things about Windows 10 that don’t really make sense. When I set up a new computer, or when I do the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, I make sure these things are all configured properly. If you’re running Windows 10, one of the things you should check on is System Restore.

Important note: If you’re still running Windows 7, you’ve probably been getting notices on your computer that time is running out. It’s true! You need to upgrade to Windows 10, because support for Windows 7 ENDS in a few weeks (January 2020). I can upgrade your computer to Windows 10, and I can do it remotely – so you don’t even need to bring it anywhere. You need to get this done ASAP. Contact me.

System Restore is a handy tool in some circumstances. It’s not something you would use regularly, but in some cases it’s a way to fix a computer that has problems. Here’s what doesn’t make sense: in Windows 10, System Restore is turned off by default. So unless you enable it and configure it, it will be completely useless when the time comes that you really need it. I’d really love to hear Microsoft’s explanation for this.

What this means is this: you need to enable System Restore, so you are able to use it if you ever need to (or if your computer tech needs to).

Here’s how you enable and configure System Restore:

In the lower left corner, in the Search bar, type the word create. In the search results, you’ll see an option called “Create a restore point” – click on that. That opens the System Properties window, and the “System Protection” tab.

In that window, click on the line designated as the C drive to highlight it, then click the “Configure” button.

In the next window, you will need to adjust two things:

The next part is to actually create a new restore point. When you click OK (above), you’ll be brought back to the main window. In that window, click on the button that says “Create”. Click that, then give this restore point a name. What you name it doesn’t matter a lot. You could just type in today’s date if you want to. Then click Create.

It will take a minute or so, and then it’s done. Just click OK and close that window.

It’s important to note – System Restore is not a way to recovery files or folders that somehow got deleted or lost. It really has no effect at all on your personal stuff like the Documents or Pictures folders. The most common use for System Restore is when a program gets installed and somehow messes up the rest of Windows or the computer. You can take the computer back to an earlier date – BEFORE that bad program got installed – and it will be as if it were never there. That’s pretty handy.

There are more than 120 million “smart speakers” in US homes. In our house, we have the Google Home speaker, and here in my home office I have Alexa. But most people just ask Alexa boring stuff, like “what’s the traffic like this morning” or “is it going to rain today”. There are lots of FUN things you can ask Alexa too. She actually has kind of a clever and sassy personality.

Next time you’re talking to Alexa, try out some of these:

Human: “Alexa, flip a coin”

Human: “Alexa, roll the dice”

Human: “Alexa, pick a card”

Human: “Alexa, play thunderstorm”

Human: “Alexa, give me a random fact”

Human: “Alexa, how much do you weigh?”

Human: “Alexa, what is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Human: “Alexa, how many days until Christmas?”

Human: “Alexa, give me a quote from The Office”

Human: “Alexa, are you blue?”

Human: “Alexa, open demotivate me”

Human: “Alexa, can you give me some money?”

Human: “Alexa, give me a tongue twister”

Human: “Alexa, find Chuck Norris”

Human: “Alexa, I am your father”

Human: “Alexa, what’s the first rule of Fight Club?”

Human: “Alexa, where were you born?”

Human: “Alexa, when were you born?”

Human: “Alexa, can you sing in autotune?”

Human: “Alexa, who farted?”

Human: “Alexa, surely you can’t be serious?”

Human: “Alexa, do you know Cortana?”

Human: “Play the Computer Tutor podcast”

Human: “Alexa, have a great day.”

And what crazy things do YOU ask Alexa? Leave them in the comments below.

“Spearphishing” is one of those terms used by computer security people to describe a particular kind of computer attack. I think it’s a pretty interesting strategy to learn about.

But to understand spearphishing, we have to back up a bit and explain a few things about the fishing/phishing analogy and how one translates to the other.

Most people know what traditional fishing is. You put some bait on the end of your line, throw it in the water and hope you get a bite. You’re kind of putting it out there to all the fish in the lake at the same time, hoping that just one of them falls for it. It’s kind of a “mass” effort in the hopes of succeeding with one target.

Spearfishing (we’re still talking about actual fish in actual water) is a targeted approach. Instead of throwing your bait out for ALL the fish, you wait patiently with a spear, and watch to target a specific fish. Maybe you’re looking and waiting for a really big one to come along. When you see the one you want, all of your effort is put into getting that one big fish.

Now we move into the world of computer security.

A phishing email is one that usually gets sent out to hundreds or thousands of people at a time. It’s usually pretty generic. The email might say that it’s being sent from your bank, and that your account may have been compromised. They want you to log in and confirm your account in order to maintain the account’s security. But when you click on the link, even though you are taken to a website that LOOKS like the login page for your bank, it’s really just a fake website put up by the scammer. When you enter your user name and password, you’re giving the scammer your login credentials.

So a phishing email is a pretty low-effort, wide-spread type of attack. Lots of potential targets since it gets sent out to a lot of people all at the same time.

A spearphishing email is different. It focuses on a particular high-value target. Here’s an example of how a spearphishing attack might work.

Let’s say there’s a dishonest home remodeling contractor in Dallas, Texas. He wants to get the client list for one of his competitors, so he hires a hacker to do this. So now the hacker has to figure out how to get into the computer of the owner of that competing business. How would he do that?

First, he might go over to the business location at night, when there is no one there. He doesn’t break in, but he looks in the dumpster where the office trash is thrown out. He finds the typical office garbage, but among that garbage is some business paperwork. He finds some invoices from vendors. These are not documents that a company would think need to be shredded, because there is no confidential information included. But the hacker can use that information.

He takes one of the invoices and sees that it’s from a cabinet manufacturer, All American Cabinets. Now he looks up all the information he can find about that company. He sees that they have a public email address for new business inquiries. So, pretending to be a remodeler himself, he sends an email asking about prices and inventory. The next day he gets an email back from the owner, Jack, and the email address is [email protected]. Now he knows Jack’s email address.

Next, the hacker creates a new Gmail account: [email protected]. See the difference? It’s similar enough that no one would really notice that the first part is “a11” instead of “all”.

Now, he uses that email to send an email to his target company (the competitor). The email might even reference the job that was listed on the invoice. But the point of the email is to make the recipient assume that it’s coming from Jack at the cabinet company. As “Jack”, he might say that they are beefing up security and requiring all their customers to read and agree with the new online security policy, which is attached as a Word document.

So the recipient of that email, seeing that it’s coming from a company they deal with all the time, and it’s being sent by Jack, who they have worked with for years, doesn’t even question that this might be a hacking attempt. They click to open the attachment, but nothing happens. At least that’s how it appears on the screen. So they figure it’s just a computer glitch and forget about it.

But what really happens is when they click that attachment, it activates a program behind the scenes that goes and collects everything in the Documents folder and sends it back to the hacker. And guess what’s in that folder – the client list with all the contact information and work history.

That’s the essence of spearphishing. Rather than send out a hundred emails to the employees of a company, the scammer just sends out one targeted one, to a specific person, with very particular and personal information on it, to avoid any suspicion in the hopes that that one person doesn’t suspect anything. It’s a lot of work for just that one email, but the payoff is potentially much larger because of the high-value target.

But you can prevent either of these types of attacks from being successful, by following these two rules:

There are a few exceptions to rule #1, but in general I just don’t open attachments. The exception would be when I know ahead of time to expect that email with that attachment, and I know exactly what the attached file is, and I trust the person who sent it to me.

When you get a new computer, you can’t just turn it on and start using it. Those days are long gone. Now, you have to navigate past Microsoft’s tricks and traps. And it’s important to do it right from the beginning – otherwise you could end up with a lot of frustration and wasted time trying to fix it.

Today I’ll tell you 3 of the important steps in the process I use for setting up a new computer. I go through the same process when I’m prepping a laptop for resale also.

When you get a new Windows 10 computer, the browser that’s set to be the default is Edge. Edge is awful. How awful is it? It’s so bad, only about 5% of Windows users use it – even though it’s the one that comes as the default browser. This means the vast majority of people install a different browser when they get a new computer.

The one I use is Chrome. It’s easy to use, and it’s also easy to use my ad blocking extension (uBlock Origin). Just go to Google.com/chrome and click the Download button, and follow the steps. At some point it will ask you to make Chrome the default browser, so go ahead and do that. Microsoft Edge will still be on your computer; you just won’t use it. In fact, Internet Explorer is even still in there (even though you don’t see it) but of course you won’t want to use it either. Chrome is all you need. If you prefer Firefox, it’s good too.

It makes no sense whatsoever, but when you install Windows 10, System Restore is turned OFF by default. If your computer has a problem, or if you install software that causes a glitch, it’s so nice to have the option of taking the computer back to an earlier date and time. When you take it back to a time that was before the problem started, the problem is gone.

BUT – you don’t have that option when System Restore is not enabled and configured. So you need to do that on any new computer. In the search bar in the bottom left, type the word “create” and then in the search results, click on “Create a restore point”. That takes you to the System Restore dialog box, where you will choose the “C” drive and click Configure. In that new window you can enable System Restore, configure it to use about 2% of your drive space, and then go ahead and create a restore point just in case you might need it.

This is another example of Microsoft’s sliminess. Click the Start button, then the Settings icon (it looks like a gear). Then click the Personalization category, and click the Start tab in the left column. In that windows, you’ll see an option that says “Show suggestions occasionally in Start” and it’s turned ON by default. Well, by “suggestions”, Microsoft really means “advertisements”. You want your Start menu clogged with their ads? Of course not. No one does. Slide that switch to the left to turn it off.

And here’s a bonus tip (which just might be more important than any of the other three we already talked about) – don’t connect your new computer to the internet until you get to the desktop screen. When you first turn it on, Microsoft will really – REALLY – want you to connect it to the internet before doing anything else. In fact, if you don’t want to do that, the phrase you have to click on isn’t “Don’t connect” or something simple. What you have to click on is “I don’t have internet”. Which of course will confuse some people, which means they might actually go back and choose to connect to the internet, which is exactly what Microsoft wants them to do.

When you set up a new computer that’s online, that means you have to sign in to your Microsoft account in order to get into your computer. Oh, you don’t have a Microsoft account? Well then, you’ll need to create one. And create a password for that account. And create security questions for recovering that password. And if you install Office later, that means your documents and other files will by default be stored in OneDrive, rather than in your computer’s Documents folder. Once Microsoft has its hooks in you like that, it’s a cumbersome process to undo it. That’s by design.

I prefer to not engage in any of that nonsense. Just don’t connect it to the internet, and don’t bother with a password. You can add one later if you need one, and it doesn’t have to be your Microsoft account – it can just be a local user account on your computer.

KEEP IN MIND – the things I talked about today are just a few of the MANY configurations I make when setting up a computer. If you buy a laptop from me, that stuff is already all done for you. And I do New PC Setup for many of my clients when they get a new computer (this can all be done remotely). If you need help just let me know.

I recently had a client forward an email to me. The email told her she had to confirm her agreement to the AOL Terms of Service, or she could no longer use her email account. She was concerned that her email would get cut off. She had nothing to worry about.

The email she got was a typical phishing email. That means it was just trying to trick her into clicking through and giving out her email password, which would give the scammer control over her email account.

I wanted to show you this actual email, and how it was identifiable as a scam.

The email she received supposedly came from AOL. But look at the “From” address:

If an email comes from the actual AOL, the email address will end with “@aol.com”. This one ends with “prodigy.net.mx” which indicates that the sender is not only NOT with AOL, he’s also somewhere in Mexico, using the ancient Prodigy email service.

The second big giveaway are the links in the email. In the screenshot below, you can see that there are 6 links:

Guess what – every one of those links goes to the same place. They don’t care which one you click on, they just want you to click.

That’s the one mistake my client made – she clicked on the link to see where it took her. You should never click on ANY link if you are not sure of where that link goes. Which brings up the question that I get sometimes: “Well how can I know where a link goes if I don’t click on it??”. Great question.

You RIGHT-click on the link, then choose “Copy hyperlink” or something similar.

Then, you open NotePad on your computer. In the blank area, do a right click and choose “Paste”. That will display the actual website address where that link would have taken you to. In this case, this was the link’s destination:

Hmmm…doesn’t really look like an AOL website address, does it? It’s not.

What the scammer did is create a fake form in Excel, and just uploaded it to his OneDrive account. This scammer is really lazy. But guess what – he doesn’t really HAVE to put a lot of effort into concealing the fake nature of this, because people still fall for it. This is what the fake form looked like (anyone can create these, for free):

You can see it’s pretty basic. When you fill out this form with your email address and password, now he has your login information.

And the irony is right there at the bottom of the form – Microsoft (who owns OneDrive) knows that their forms are often used for this scam, so they put the warning on every one – “Never give out your password.” Not to mention grammatical errors that are a common clue. But some people still type in their password because they just assume it’s real.

Fortunately, my client did not enter her password. Instead, she became suspicious and forwarded the email to me so I could check it out. You are welcome to do the same thing, if you get one you’re not sure about – just forward it to me at [email protected].

Well, it finally happened. I’m almost out of storage space on my Google/Gmail account.

I actually got this Google account back when the Gmail email service was first introduced, which was in 2004. So it’s taken me 15 years to almost fill it up. Google gives you 15 gb of storage space with each account, and I archive the majority of my emails, so that kind of tells you how much you can fit in 15 gb. It’s a lot.

But your Google account doesn’t just store emails. That 15 gb of space is also used by whatever you have stored in Google Drive and in Google Photos. To see the status of your account’s storage, go to this link:  https://one.google.com/storage

When I go there for my account, this is what it shows me:

So you can see about 1/3 of my usage is in Google Drive, and 2/3 is used by my 15 years worth of emails. I also store all of my photos in Google Photos, but if you let them optimize the images to reduce the file size, that doesn’t count toward your storage limit

And here’s an important thing to note: you definitely DON’T want to let that storage get to 100%, especially if you use Gmail as your primary email account. If you use ALL of your storage space, you won’t be able to send or receive any emails until you clear some of it out.

I’ll tell you right up front, the quickest and easiest way to fix this is to upgrade to a Google One account. It’s only $20 per year, and you get these benefits:

In my case, that’s probably what I’ll do. But what if you don’t want to pay Google for more storage? You can just delete some of the things you are currently storing. I’ll do that with my own account and we’ll see how it works.

First up, Google Drive. You may not even be using Google Drive for anything, but I do have several things stored there – documents, spreadsheets, videos, etc. Most of these things I don’t use now, so I don’t need them any more.

I went through and deleted a bunch of files from Google Drive, and checked my total storage again. Guess what – it made no difference at all. Documents take up very little space, so deleting them didn’t save space.

So now we move on to Gmail.

With email, it’s important to note that a standard email message does not take up much space at all. But if an email has an attachment – that’s what uses storage space.  So my first thing to try is to find all of my old Gmail emails that have attachments bigger than 5 mb get rid of the ones I don’t need (which is probably most of them).

To find all of the emails larger than 5 mb, go to Gmail.com and sign in, then go up to the search bar and do this search:

In my case, I had 142 emails that were 5 mb or larger. I deleted the 42 oldest ones. Still no difference. BUT – that’s because deleting them really just puts them in the Trash folder, and that still counts toward your storage limit. So I emptied the Trash. Now we’re seeing progress.

My new report:

Overall down to 86%, so that definitely gives me some breathing room. In my case, it probably gives me another year before I need to deal with this again.

There are also some third-party programs that can help you clean up your Gmail account. One of the more popular ones is called Find Big Mail (https://www.findbigmail.com/). In the past, you had to pay for this service, but at the time of this post it is free. They may start charging again in the future. They will ask you for a donation though, so you can decide if it’s worth paying for.

Just go to the website and follow the instructions. You’ll end up with a report that tells you what was found, and some of your biggest emails will have a new label, so you can just view them (and delete them if you want to). When I did this, and emptied Trash again, I got this revised storage report:

So I got it down to 81%. Not bad! Definitely better than almost full at 98%. When it starts to get full again, I probably will just go ahead and buy more storage space since it’s so cheap. But for now, I don’t have to worry about it.

Did you get rid of some stuff in your Google account? How much space did you save?

I didn’t like Windows 10 when it first came out several years ago. I’m fine with it now, since it has improved a lot since then. But there’s still one thing I can’t stand – the way it hides the scroll bars. Fortunately, this is fixable. I think you’ll enjoy using Windows 10 more if you make this little adjustment.

To see what I’m talking about, all you have to do is hit the Start button (the white Microsoft logo in the bottom left corner of the screen). See that thin little line at the top?

That’s where the regular scroll bar USED to be. In Windows 10 though, you have to put your cursor right in that EXACT spot, and you’re rewarded with the actual scroll bar that expands out so you can use it:

Better make sure you don’t accidentally move that cursor over by a pixel or two though, because then the scroll bar goes hidden again. Then you have to find it with your cursor again.

I know, for this particular example, I could just use the scroll wheel on my mouse to scroll down the list. But not everyone has that option (a lot of laptop touchpads don’t have the ability to scroll). But more importantly, there’s just no need for that scroll bar to disappear and have to be manually brought back by pinpoint-accuracy cursor placement. Some goofball coder at Microsoft just thought it up as a new “feature” and no one gave any thought to how impractical it is.

But you do have the ability to disable it!

Here’s how you UN-hide the Windows 10 scroll bars:

As soon as you turn it to the Off position, all your scroll bars will come back because they are no longer hidden. For most people, that’s a welcome sight!

Sometimes when you’re experimenting or learning how to do something in Microsoft Word, it helps to have a “dummy” document that has several pages of text to work with.

This came up recently with one of my long-term clients. In fact, this lady was probably one of my very first clients when I started my computer business up in Maine.

She works with Microsoft Word all the time, and recently upgraded to Office 365. Her previous version was very outdated, so there were a number of changes in the way Word was laid out – quite different than what she was used to using for the last 10-15 years.

She had a very specific need. She needed to be able to have page numbers appear on each page of a document, but with one exception. Page 1 would have NO page number, then the numbers would start on page 2 and continue from there. Kind of an unusual thing, but that’s how she always did it and apparently it was easy to do in MS Word 2007.

Turns out it’s not so easy in the new version of Word! I had to do a bit of research, but I figured out how to do it. The next step was to remote in to her computer and show her how to do it.

But for this instruction, I did not want to use one of her documents. I just wanted a “dummy” document of about 10 pages, so it wouldn’t matter if it got all messed up.

There are actually a couple of ways to do this: the old way, and the easier way.

The old way is to use the Lorem Ipsum website (lipsum.com). What is Lorem Ipsum? The website explains it. But all you have to do is choose how many characters or paragraphs you want in your document, and click the Generate button. There are roughly 5 paragraphs per page, so if you opt for 50 paragraphs, you’ll get 10 pages of Latin text. Then you can just copy and paste that into a Word document, and there you have it – your 10 page dummy document.

But I think the new way is much easier.

Just open a new blank Word document, and type this:

=lorem(50,20)

When you type that and hit Enter, you will immediately see that this formerly blank document now has 50 paragraphs of Latin text, with each paragraph containing 20 sentences.

Depending on how much dummy text you need, you can put whatever numbers you want in the parentheses. The first number is how many paragraphs you want, and the second one is the number of sentences in each of those paragraphs.

Go ahead, open Word and try it out!

Have you ever tried to read a serious article online, and you were just constantly distracted by the sidebars, the ads, and all the other “clutter” on the screen? Chrome has a secret “reader” mode to get rid of all that so you can focus on the content.

Most people don’t know about this option because it’s not all that easy to get to it in Chrome. In fact, Google still considers it to be “experimental” so that’s why it’s not yet on the regular Chrome menu. But you can put it there.

But first, you need to get Chrome version 75 or above. The good news is, if you use Chrome, you probably already have the current version. To check it, click the Options button (the 3 dots in the top right), then go to Help, then click on About Google Chrome. That screen will tell you what version you have, and even offer to update it for you if needed. As I write this, the current version is 76 dot something dot something. As long as you have 75 or higher you’re okay.

Now, you need to go up to the address bar in Chrome, and type this in and then hit Enter:

Note that it’s all lower case, and there are no spaces between any letters or characters.

When you hit Enter, you’ll see a page full of settings, including one called Enable Reader Mode. For that one, you just click the drop-down menu and choose Enabled:

You have now added a new item to your Chrome Options. If you click the Options button again (3 dots), you’ll see a new item there, called Distill:

Next time you’re on a web page and you’re trying to read an article, but there’s too much “web page clutter” that’s distracting you, click the Distill button and see what happens. Peaceful reading returns!