Thursday, February 13, 2014

Class Summary 2-13-2014

Discussed a number of topics today. Here is the list as I remember them:

Backing up photos to CD's, external drive, or the cloud.

Photos from today's cameras and cell phones take a lot of room. It is no surprise to have 1-3 mb per image. Even though we have lots of room on today's hard drives we should find a place to save copies in case we experience a crash.

The first line of defense is our backup utility. I use EaseUS ToDo backup and do that about once a month to an external hard drive. This creates an image of my drive allowing me to rebuild after a crash without having to install any programs; it does may data and everything else on the C: drive.

My second line of defense is Mozy. See the Useful Links above to get the address and the code to enter to get an additional .25 gb of free space. With it you get 2.25 gb of space. You can pay them a small fee for unlimited storage. Additional 20 gb for $2 a month. It backs up your data only and automatically a couple of times a day. You do not even have to think about it.

Personally I do not use Mozy to back up my images; trying to keep within the free allotment. I rely on my image backups and some cloud storage for images such as Facebook, Flikr, Picassa Web, Shutterfly, SnapFish...

Free Cloud storage is available on a number of different sites. You can add additional storage by paying a monthly fee. Great places to save you data and pictures. It is not automatic; you have to drag and drop your files/folders. One nice feature of Dropbox is the ability to share a link to a file or a folder by email and give them access to without the ability to edit your file.

With Windows SkyDrive you not only get free storage, you get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint web apps for free. These are not the full Office versions, but fit the bill for most of us. You can save your work in the cloud and can download the files to your computer.

Google Drive is where your gmail data is stored and where you Google Docs files are stored. Google Docs gives you a free Office Suite that is cloud based like Windows Live. I use this for most of my word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation needs.

Dropbox 2 gb
Windows SkyDrive 7 gb
Google drive 15 gb
Amazon Cloud Drive 5 gb

Back to the pictures to CD question. Insert a blank CD-R in your CD-RW drive. Open the folder if it does not open for you. Open the folder that contains the images you want to save and drag them over to the CD folder. You can drag folders as well as individual files. When you are done and remember the limit of about 700 mb per CD, Click the burn button or try to eject the CD--Windows will do the burn before ejecting the CD.

Roku vs. Chromecast. Roku is a small box that connects to your WiFi and to your TV with a HDMI cable or RCA connection (red, yellow, white wires). You purchase the box for a one time fee ($50-99$) and add the channels you want. Many are free and some you have to subscribe to for a small monthly fee like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Nice watching TV series without the commercials and one right after the other. And when interrupted by a phone call or drop in company you just hit pause and resume watching when you finished.

Discussed cookies, what they are and how ccleaner cleans them up. Cookies are like sticky notes saved on your hard drive to let programs or websites you visit know what choices you made in the past so you don't have to answer the questions again. There are some bad cookies and utilities like Ccleaner takes care of removing them for you.

Looked at two more programs you can get at ninite.com:

A screen capture program
This program lets you tap the Print Screen key on your keyboard and then using the onscreen plus sign to draw a box around what you want to capture. When you release the mouse button a menu displays allowing you to choose what to do with the image. Choose Greenshot from ninite.com

A PDF printer
Instead of printing to your attached printer, you choose this "printer" from you list of printers. A PDF file is generated instead. you can save it for later printer or email it to someone for them to readd or print. Select PDF Creator from ninite.com.

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