WEB WIZ
Internet Hints & Tips for Newbies

Please note, all information on this page and indeed on this Buderim web site is of a general nature only. Relevance and application may change between readers, we are not responsible for outcomes from any action taken as a result of information displayed.

Hi there! Welcome to the Web Wiz Hints and Tips

This page is for those new to the internet. Every fortnight I place a column in the Buderim Chronicle, giving up the secrets that are mysteries to the novice. My aim is to make the internet a less scary place for newbies.

The concept of the internet is not that hard to grasp, imagine being able to communicate with anyone, anywhere to share information. What an amazing ability you would have! Well that's just what the internet does, connects you to a vast ocean of information. Okay not all of it is good, but lots of it is valuable and has made our lives better as a result.

Oh and here's a tip for the real new comers to the internet . . .

When you receive your computer, a search engine is often set as your home page. If you know the actual address of the site you want it visit, such as www.buderim.com , type this into the "address bar" at the top of your web browser. Do not type it into the "search for" box on the search engine's page. Type it into the address bar and you will get to the site faster. If you are not sure of the actual address, then use the search function.

Search Engines, what are they and how do you use them?

The internet is a big place and in some ways is like a giant library full of books without covers! Internet Search Engines are like having your own wizard on hand, to conjure up the information you need.The most famous are google.com, yahoo.com and msn.com, though there are many more available.

Using a search engine is easy enough, try this little excercise. Go to www.google.com and type "Buderim History " in the box on the page next to the button labeled "search". Wave your magic wand and click the search button . . . an instant later, the search engine locates 72,700 potential pages, ranked in order of relevance according to their filing criteria.

Naturally, www.buderim.com is number one on this list. Imagine having to sift through all those pages yourself! Search engines are not perfect, there are sites which get above Buderim's website for Buderim related searches which are inferior in content. That is why you should try more than one search engine to locate the most relevant web pages. A good alternative to google is www.msn.com, they often turn up more relevant results to the ubiquitous Google search! You will find it just as easy to find lots of local information on Buderim's best address, www.buderim.com, something we are working on daily to serve residents and tourists. If you have any questions or just want to say g'day, drop us a line at info@buderim.com anytime, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

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Trojan Horses and Spyware - a tip for Outlook Express Users

The ancient fortress city of Troy was finally taken down from within, thanks to a cunningly disguised tactic which let down their defences. So-called Trojan Horses are still found today in the form of secret pieces of code which enter your PC via a seemingly friendly email, a file you have downloaded off a site or file transferred from a friend's machine. The modern ploy often referred to as Spyware can enable someone to monitor your activities, send your data to them without your knowledge or even control your PC by remote.

The best defence is to use an anti-virus and firewall package, but sometimes a malicious program can sneak under the net.

Here's a tip for users of Outlook Express that could save you from a virus or Trojan that comes via email. First up, never use the "Preview Pane" function which automatically displays the contents of an email. Turn it off by clicking "view" off the top menu, selecting "layout", untick the "show preview pane" box and click the OK button. From now on you will have to double-click an email to purposely open it.

Now here's the power tip! When a suspect email arrives, simply "right click" on it and select "properties" from the special menu that appears. Select the "details" tab then click the message source button. Hey Presto! The content appear in a text-only format which you can safely read. You will see a lot of format data but should be able to read a legitimate message if one is contained. If there is a pile of strange suspicious code or an attachment you do not want or understand, you can simply cancel out and delete the file. Don't forget to delete it from the trash can!

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Sorting and Storing your Favorite Web Pages and More!

Bookmarking your favourite pages is a powerful tool; they make internet life much simpler when you want to revisit information. To bookmark a page in Internet Explorer, simply click on "Favorites" ( yes I know , but that's how the Yanks spell it) and click "Add to favorites".

You could just click OK and the link is stored at the bottom of your list, but that is for the basic surfer newbie who is soon condemned to searching up and down ever-extending lists.

Here's another Power Tip that will make things much easier the next time you go looking for that link. After you click "Add to favorites" select the "Create in" button and place the link in a folder. Don't have the right folder? Just click the "New Folder ." button and make a new one. That way you can group pages together under classifications. When you have four dozen favourites, you will be very pleased you kept up this simple housekeeping activity.

Netscape and Mozilla users have a similar procedure, but call them Bookmarks not favorites!

Did you know you can also bookmark more than web pages? You can bookmark your searches, newsgroups, a place on your hard drive, pretty much any file location on the net or your network.

Please note - the hints and tips offered by Web Wiz are done so in good faith. Any adjustments or activities taken in response to any of my advice is done so at your own risk. If you have any queries or suggestions I would love to hear from you. email me at info@buderim.com

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Avoiding a PC Virus

If you have heard of the internet, it is a sure bet that you have heard of viruses. So, exactly what is a 'computer virus'?

The virus found in a PC is actually a small program, written specifically to cause trouble for the owner of the infected machine. Some are just irritating while others are able to destroy your data or render the computer useless. The most destructive and virulent of these have hit the news worldwide. Those who write them are mainly thieves looking to steal your data or simple vandals seeking to hurt strangers.

The usual way a virus spreads is as an attachment to an email, sent out to multiple addresses initially, the attachment is opened by the unwary and sends itself to everyone in your address book before going to work on your machine. You should never open an email attachment, even if it looks harmless or is from a trusted source as the sender may not even be aware they are infected.

Virus makers are developing more innocuous titles to lure you into their trap, you may receive email with titles which pose as legitimate sources, such as 'message returned', 'your password has been compromised' and 'your account will be closed'. Virus emails are even disguised as Christmas greetings or jokes.

Your best defence is to have a trustworthy antivirus installed and keep it up to date.

Check my Power Tip to help detect a virus-ladden email before you open it.

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A Refreshing Experience on the Net

What do you do when a website does not download fully or seems the "hang" in time? If a website is info and image packed, they can sometimes not load fully into your browser. Murphy's Law states that the particular piece of info you are waiting for is the piece that does not display.

The answer is quite simple, just hit the Stop Button on the browser and then hit the Refresh Button on the browser. This will force the software to reload, it will be a little quicker this time because the images you just saw will be still in the cache. Here's a Power User Tip for those too lazy to reach for the mouse, hit F5 on your keyboard, it does the same job as refresh.

Why do sites seem to jam occasionally? The problem may be in your phone line, excess noise, even inaudible noise will cause the internet to jam and drop out. Sometimes the site's traffic or your ISP's load can be the problem, you will probably never know!

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Gathering info like a pro!

The internet is a boon for students and anyone seeking to store information and images. The ability to copy text and images into a document is one of the fantastic benefits of a modern word processor. Here are a couple of tips that will have you cutting/pasting and gathering information like a pro!

Select the text by left clicking your cursor at the start and click/dragging across the words you want to copy. Now just click the Ctrl and "C" keys together to put the data into the memory. Now click into your word processor and paste the info using the Ctrl and "V" keys. This technique will take both text and images into most word processing software.

Do you want to download an image directly onto your hard drive for inserting into a document later? Simply position the cursor over the image, click the right mouse button and select "save picture as" from the menu which pops up. Don't forget to take note of where you are saving the image to so you can find it again. You can browse to an existing directory to save your image, or you can create a new one by clicking the "create new directory" icon on the top right edge of the save window.

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Saving like a Pro!

When you save a file, picture or document, to your hard drive, does it end up where you want it to be? If you let Windows or the software you are working with decide and do not pay attention, chances are it be difficult to find later. Take a moment to create a strategy when you save files and save yourself a lot of bother later on.

Often a document save will default to a sub-folder in the "My Documents" folder. This is fine but after a while the folder will become messy and difficult to manage. A smarter strategy is to create your own sub-folders and maintain order. When you save a document, you can navigate to the place on your PC where you would like to store the file, using the drop-down menu. To easily make another folder within the overall folder just click the "create a new folder" icon to the right of the drop-menu.

This will create a new folder inside the one selected. As soon as you hit the icon, the folder name is highlighted and ready for you to type in your new folder's name. Once you have named it, just select the folder and save away!

In this manner you will make a storage strategy with clarity and useability as the volume of saved data increases on your computer.

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Time to come clean!

I know it is not Spring, but the truth is you need to conduct a little house cleaning work on your computer more often than once a year! Let's take a look at the physical world of PC hygiene. Surely, a little dust cannot be that harmful you say? Dust is likely to be the single biggest problem facing your computer. The destructive fluff has an amazing ability to permeate the casing and gather around the circuit boards, components, drives and fans. The cumulative effect of not removing it results in your machine running hotter than it should but most importantly, dust clogs your fans. This reduces their efficiency and can make them much noisier. Ultimately on a hot summer's day, it could fry circuits and cause breakdown in important components including the hard drive.

So how do you clean your PC? The safest but more expensive way is to take it to a PC service shop and have them clean out the offending matter. Indeed this may be the only option if warranty conditions mean you are not allowed to open the case.

Which brings us to the do-it-yourself method! First up, turn off the power and remove the power lead and the other cables, taking note of the placements. Lift the machine onto a light-filled, clear workspace, remove the screws or whatever method is used to secure the sides to the case. Carefully remove the sides, take your vacuum cleaner and a small soft paintbrush and carefully dislodge and suck out the dust from the corners, boards and fans. Be especially careful not to be rough with the brush or the vacuum hose to avoid damaging the components. The other thing you must be careful of is static electricity, this can damage your circuitry. Ensure you ground yourself to discharge any static before cleaning your PC.

Once you have removed the dust, replace the sides, leads and once it is all going again, pat yourself on the back, because next time it will be so much easier!

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Show Some Emotion in Your Email

Sending the right emotional impression with an email message can be quite difficult. Using words on their own can over or under emphasise the content's meaning. The answer is the emoticon , a tricky mix of colons and brackets to simulate a face on its side. The name is a new word created from emotion and icon. Let me demonstrate, here is the emoticon for a smiley face :-) for use when you want to say something with a smile. There are many more to use, here are the more popular, ;-) is a wink, ;-p pokes your tongue out will you wink, feeling unhappy? Then type :-( or if you feel like crying use this :'(

There you have it! Next time you type an email and are not sure how the message will be received, you can reinforce the intent through an emoticon.

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Gone Phishin'

You may enjoy wetting a line on the weekends but phishing is one activity, in which you do not want to be involved. Phishing is the name given to the practice of sending fraudulent emails to another, in the hope of having them divulge passwords and other information. The sender dummies up an email which looks authentic and encourages you to click on a link to go to a website. Common phishing attacks fool recipients into going to a banking website and log in, on the pretext of fixing a security issue with their account or similar. The site actually enables the sender to capture your passwords as you enter them and perhaps even invade your computer.

All the firewalls and antivirus software in the world is of limited defence when you unwittingly invite an invader into your domain.

If you think you are a target of a phishing scam you can try these tips:

•  Check the quality of grammar and spelling.

•  Do not trust any unsolicited email which asks you to update details or enter passwords at a website.

•  Contact the bank or organization personally to verify the email first.

•  Never send personal financial or credit card details via email.

The emails can look very convincing so be aware, you can also try my "preview" trick

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It's Easy to Care for your Hard drive!

Your hard drive is like your own memory; this is the place where all of your computer experiences are stored, for use further down the track. Just like your own memory, you need to keep things orderly and conduct a few timely exercises to maintain its integrity.

Here are a few tips to maintain your hard drive; first up you must never move your computer while it is turned on. This is especially important during start up and shutdown cycles, as you may cause your hard drive to crash while it accesses important system functions and corrupt data crucial to operation.

Once a month you should run Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter, these software tools are built into the Windows operating system and check the disk for errors and sort files in an orderly fashion, so the disk can run more smoothly and efficiently. To find this software, simply double click on the "My Computer" icon on your desktop, right click on the "C" drive and select the tab marked "Tools". The tools to scan for errors and defragmentation present themselves. Make sure you do not have any other programs running while scanning or defragging. Depending on the size of your drive, the task may take several hours, so give your PC time!

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Sending email to more than one person at once!

New to email? You are not alone! Although many people are quite computer savvy, there are lots of people just starting out. Here is a tip for the absolute newbee in cyberspace.

If you want to send an email to more than one person and use Outlook or Outlook Express, in the TO field you can simply type a comma after one email address and type a second address immediately after. Alternatively select multiple names from the address book and observe how the software does it. If you do this, the recipients can see the other addresses. You may have seen this in a forwarded email with many other addresses. Some people do not want strangers to receive their email address and with a little knowledge, you can do the "polite thing" to avoid this problem.

Here's the tip, you see the CC column? That stands for Carbon Copy , from the old times when carbon impregnated paper was used to create a duplicate. Most people understand the concept of why a copy would be sent to another party. The BCC field is another story; it stands for Blind Carbon Copy and is a way of sending a copy to another party without the obvious addressee knowing. If you want to send an email to a group of people without each one knowing who else received it, use the BCC field.

"AAAGH! I can't find the BCC field!" you say? In Outlook Express just open a new email, click on "view" in the top menu and select "All Headers". Presto! it will appear and will now be the default setting.

Simply send an email to yourself and put everyone else's email address in the BCC field. Be careful though, many businesses and some individuals used anti-spam software and because this feature has been abused by spammers, messages sent in this manner may be intercepted and deleted without the intended recipient's knowledge.

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Do you want to back up your emails?

If you use Outlook Express there is a simple way to back up your precious messages without fancy software!

First up you need to locate the folder, in which your email messages are stored. Start Outlook Express and go to the Tools menu, open the Options dialog box and select the Maintenance page. Click the Store Folder button, and locate the path to the folder containing your emails, select the path and copy using ctrl - c. To access the folder, open Windows Explorer, paste the path into the address field. You will see a number of .dbx files in the folder, these are the messages and other information. Hmmm, you cannot see anything that says .dbx you say? You probably need to display extensions for known file types , go to my Web Wiz page on www.buderim.com to learn how to do that.

Now you know have navigated to the folder using Windows Explorer, you can select and copy the files to your backup media. That way, you can get the messages back if you lose your hard drive or get a new computer. To restore you simply reverse the procedure above and replace the existing files with the stored ones. Please note, any messages you have received or sent since the backup will be overwritten and lost, so only restore like this if you are running email in a new system for the very first time.

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Display your extensions

For some reason, the good folk at Microsoft felt it was better that you should not know what types of files you have on your computer, just their names. So they chose to make the file type hidden as the default setting in Windows Explorer.

This is quite limiting when you search and even a frustration when you have 2 different files types (like images for example) with the same name. So if you want to do things your way and not just Bill's way, you can easily change the setting to display the file names.

Just open Windows Explorer, click on the Tools menu at the top and select Folder Options. Click the View Tab from the window which opens up. Then just untick the box next to Hide extensions for known file types. Click Apply and OK. Now when you look at files in Window explorer you will see what is what.

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Buying Online Safety Tip

If handled correctly, purchasing goods on the internet with your credit card is just as safe as buying in a foreign country, state, over the phone or via the fax machine. The first critical point is to check if the site is SSL secure, that is encrypted so nobody can intercept and use the details. At the bottom of your browser, a padlock icon will display if the site is secure, if there is no padlock there is a significant risk.

Credibility of the store is a major issue, if the online store is backed by a 'bricks and mortar' enterprise the likelihood of fraud is also reduced. Shops are only as trustworthy as their staff; someone could steal your card details from inside the store. One way to reduce the problem is to acquire a card with a low limit, eg. one thousand dollars, to reduce the value to thieves.

Alternatively you could use a PayPal account online wherever possible. You set up an account, entering your card details once at the PayPal site and when a store uses their facility, the store never sees your card details. PayPal offers another layer of protection.

Never send your card details in an email, they can be read by multitudes along the way, similar to sending a postcard without an envelope.

Buying online can be very handy, just be informed, careful and aware of the store from which you 'enter' before handing over your details. Read more tips on my page on www.buderim.com, keep sending your emails to Buderim's own web site.

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It’s the same difference

Whenever you have to deal with a new piece of software, the temptation is there to cover your ears, and moan “no no no”! There are quite a few characteristics however, found in common across many different types of software. Once you grasp these, learning the new program is much easier.
Menus are almost always laid out the same way with major categories being; File; Edit; View; Window and Help. Within these majors you find consistencies such as Cut, Copy and Paste are in the Edit menu and Open, New File and Print are in the File menu. You will see on some menu items, small triangles at the edges which indicate “drop menus” will appear when you click on them. If you see a menu which may not be selected with current options, it will appear dulled or “Greyed out”.
The Enter key is standard for executing the selected item on a page or menu; this can be hit instead of clicking the cursor on a button to speed to save you time. The Esc or escape button was heavily used in the “olden days” (ie 10 years ago) but now has little value. In some cases it can still be used to cancel a command or to stop a piece of software which is not acting as expected if you push and hold it down.
Have a look at the software you are using and take note of these consistent design attributes, this knowledge can make a new piece of software less of a challenge.

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Reading the latest files for free!

Keeping up with software versions and types can be expensive and confusing. Have you ever wondered how you will open a file sent from a friend who uses the latest Microsoft Office software, when you do not own and do not want to buy the same software? The answer could be to download a free viewer/converter!

Microsoft provide a number of free viewers and converters which enable you to access such files as excel spreadsheets, word documents even if you do not the software at all!

You will need to visit http://www.microsoft.com/office/000/viewers.asp  where you can choose the particular software from the list. The size of the downloads is several megabytes, which means you will probably need a broadband connection to keep download times more tolerable.
Chances are you may be able to make do without updating your software or perhaps not to need it at all.

Thank you to everyone who sends in questions and comments about Buderim’s website, the team appreciates your feedback and helping locals to make good use the web.

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Digital Downloads and Copyright

Computers and the Internet in general have made music, information and images more available than ever before. So your kids have been filling your hard drive with images, movies and music in all manner of new file types. They now want to make copies of the files as a backup or distribution to their friends. Do you know what they may or may not do with the files? The rules are complicated and are always under pressure, here’s a brief guide to what you and they can/cannot do.

You are allowed to make one back up copy of any digital media you already own, just in case the original media is damaged. You may not share this copy! However, you may not make a copy of any DVD movie as a back up. If you do you will break the law.

If you own media (other than a DVD) you may transfer it onto another form of media, for example from mp3 to a wav format. This “space shift” is okay, on the provision that you own a Legal copy and do not distribute your file. Giving a copy of the file to your friend would be breaking the law.

The rules concerning the software you own are governed by an “end user licence agreement” (EULA) which you are usually asked to read before installing. In most cases you may make a single backup copy, but may not loan the discs to a friend to install on their computer.

This information is just a guide to your rights, the laws do change and you should make yourself aware of them before you make any copies of any files you buy. A useful page on the subject can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

For more hints and tips on all things internet, visit the Web Wiz page on www.buderim.com, Buderim’s own website.

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Viewing and Using Internet Video

Internet video seems set to do the same thing to ordinary websites as the Talkies did to Silent Movies! The technology is rapidly evolving and the first opportunities are appearing right now. Sites such as youtube.com and googlevideo.com enable you to upload and share video from your phone or camera on the internet, plus add your footage to your website.

There are minimum performance requirements which your equipment must meet in order to successfully view online video. Most recent computers have the processing power to view video files, but in order to upload and download, you need something better than the old dial-up connection.

Video files which are embedded into a page, such as those beginning to appear on www.buderim.com, require no special software other than an up-to-date browser. When you click on the play button, the file will begin streaming and the message “buffering” should appear. Once a few seconds have been stored in the memory, the file will play. If it catches up to the buffer, the video will pause, waiting for the buffer to reload. If you have a fast connection and the site is not overloaded, the images may stream without pausing. Once it has completely loaded, the file can be viewed without interruption. If you don’t want the pauses, you can just stop the file by hitting the play button again and waiting until it is almost completely buffered before hitting the play button again.

Take a look at the video files here on Buderim’s web site and have some fun with video on the internet. This just may be the most important visual innovation since the talkies!

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