NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, May 2011
This And That
By Elizabeth B. Wright, Member,
Computer Club of Oklahoma City
February 2011 issue, CCOKC eMonitor

http://www.ccok.org
wright599new(at)sbcglobal.net (click to email author)

Last Fall my husband and I were part of a tour group which visited several countries. The most amazing part of the trip was how many of our fellow passengers had brought laptop computers and Kindle book readers. Since nearly all of us had digital cameras, we used our computers to download the images after each day’s adventure. That gave us some reassurance that even if our cameras had been lost or stolen, the downloaded images would be safe on the computer. We were able to leave our computers in the care of the tour company while visiting the various sites of interest. Then we would have them with us later in our hotel rooms. The smartest thing I did was take with me a very small ACER Netbook and a very small Seagate 500G external drive. Also several USB flash drives for extra storage. The netbook computer was so much easier to carry than a full sized laptop, and all I needed it for was photo downloading and email. I did not try to do any photo enhancing or editing while still on the road. That was saved for my return home. And here it is January, and I still haven’t finished!!

It is a bit difficult to explain how I nearly lost some of my pictures, but here goes. We took four cheap point and shoot cameras with us on the trip. Three of them used SD memory cards. At some point during the trip at least one card was interchanged between two of the cameras. In addition to that confusion, somehow the numbering system was duplicated in two of them, causing pictures with the same numbers appearing on two memory cards. Somehow, almost surely because of the daily downloading procedure, both sets of numbered images were salvaged. It took me quite a while after we returned home to figure out the problem and actually retrieve all of my images. At least I think they are all accounted for.

My personal accessories included, in addition to the still cameras, a newly purchased FLIP video camera. It has limited memory, so each day I not only downloaded the videos but also erased them in the camera. This was a bit risky, and I am not too sure some videos were not lost. I don’t remember taking any that I can’t find, but it is possible. In my defense, most of my videos were not any good anyway. Word of advice: If you are going to travel with a new device, purchase it far enough in advance to learn how to use it. If I could do it over again, a small hand-held tripod would have been very useful for stabilizing the camera as well as keeping my clumsy fingers off of the very sensitive controls. Amazingly, the videos are of very high quality for such a small device, so even though mine are not particularly good, it should be possible to lift some still shots from them to use with the rest of the still pictures we took.

Upon returning home, I copied all of our pictures, even the bad ones, to flash drives and gave them to our son. Not only will that give us a backup if something happens to our computers, but he actually wants to look at them. That is the greatest compliment of all.

Hover Craft I recently received one of the slickest SPAM emails I have ever seen. The website was made to resemble a Microsoft offering, complete with pictures of products that looked like Microsoft Office programs. But when you hovered over the link, it did not go directly to Microsoft.

Hovering is NOT clicking. Remember this. When you hover the mouse pointer over the link, i.e. placing the mouse over the link on the screen but not pressing any buttons, it should produce the actual link at the bottom of the screen. Using our club webpage as an example, pretend the fancy arrow is your mouse pointer and that it is hovering over the option to view details for Randy’s study group. (The real mouse arrow does not show in a “printscreen” image.) At the bottom of the page, under the curved arrow, is the actual web URL which will transfer you to the page containing the information for the group. It is in very small print and hard to read, but it is there. It says: “Go to http://www.ccokc.org/documents/Win7_Resources.pdf (http://bit.ly/h2TmCh)”, and the quotes are included in the URL.

In the case of the suspicious website, the URL address contained some words after the initial part of the link, including “Microsoft,” which would again lead you to believe it was a legitimate Microsoft offering. If this had been truly from MS, I think that company’s web address would have been in the first part of the link, in other words “microsoft.com”. Since the Golden Rule is to never click on links incorporated in unsolicited email, I decided the offering was SPAM and deleted the email from my web server, never to be seen again (hopefully).

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