Thursday, November 29, 2018

Class Notes 11-27-2018

Windows Key Tricks
Try this out on your Windows 10 machine. With a window open, hold down the Windows key and tap any of the arrow keys. Up and the window is maximized, down it is minimize, and the left an right will send it the right half of your screen or the left.
http://tinyurl.com/y92yry6d

Searching for something?
If you are looking for a “what”, Google it.
If you are looking for “how to”, YouTube it.

Getting a New Computer
This question has come up a few time this month. How do I get my stuff from the old computer to my new one; from Windows X to Windows 10? We talk a lot about making an image backup of your computer on a regular basis.

You cannot take that image and using the recovery disk move it all onto your new computer. You will remove everything on the new and make it look like the old with the old operating system! It might boot but you will have wrong drivers and all the issues you had with the old computer.

Leave the new computer alone. Copy all your data from the old old computer to an external drive and then use that backup to copy the data to the new drive. You can mount the image backup you made of the old computer on the new computer using the same backup program it was made with (EaseUS or Macrium) and drag and drop the folders or files you need onto the new one.



You could also purchase a data transfer cable like the following. It allows you to do a direct transfer from one to the other at over 400Mbps.
http://tinyurl.com/ydh5o99e

Passwords
We talked again about the simple way of assigning passwords that you can remember. Here are the details of that methods:
https://dickevanstraining.blogspot.com/2018/11/passwords-simplified.html

Greeting Cards

Tis the season for sending Christmas Cards and all year birthdays and other events in life. I used to spend time and money searching for just the right card at stores around town. Then I was with a friend who create their own cards on their computer. Neat idea.
https://dickevanstraining.blogspot.com/2018/11/greeting-cards.html

Scam Phone Calls
If you have not tried it yet, use NoMoRobo.com to stop those annoying phone calls. Only works with VOIP phones (not Centurylink). It is free for home phones but $1.99 / mo for cell phones.

Passwords Simplified

By Dick Evans

Password creation has become a complicated process. We have hundreds of them and remembering them is a disaster for many of us. How about having one that is different for each website and yet always remembered?

Here is an effective way to do that.

Use the first letter of the site you are creating a password for and capitalize it. Use the last letter of that site as the last letter of the password, lower case. So if the site is Amazon.com start with A and end with n.

What you place in between will be the same for any site you use and should be at least 6 characters, contain a special character, and a number. I like to substitute numbers for obvious letters - 3 for E, 0 for o, 1 for i, 8 for B, etc.

Perhaps your dog's name is Snoopy. You could use $n00py which satisfies all the requirements and the password for Amazon would be A$n00pyn. The password for Staples would then be S$n00pys. Simple but useful.

All you need to remember is your 6 character word and you now know the passwords for all the sites you use. They will not change by themselves. You will have to open each site with the old password and locate its change password section to update them.

Greeting Cards

by Dick Evans www.rwevans.com

We can use templates in Word to create greeting cards. We can even design our own right in Word. But there are some websites where you can print your own and some free software you can install to make the job much easier.

Here are a few I found that do the job:



This one is free to try for 7 days, then you pay $3.99 per month, $19.99 per year, or $29.99 for a 2-year membership. You have to give them your credit card info to do the free trial, so be sure to cancel if you don’t want to buy it!

Print them on your computer and US mail them.


Or create them on your computer and email them

Click to view:
http://www.americangreetings.com/printable-cards
http://www.americangreetings.com/ecards/everyday-friend/best-friends-to-the-end/pn/3057280







As fun and friendly as its name suggests, Smilebox offers an easy way to create animated slideshows. It also includes templates for creating electronic greeting cards, photo albums, and scrapbooks, too. All you need to do in order to use Smilebox is sign up for a free account with your email address. But Smilebox's free offering is very limited. Many features—including the most popular templates—require the $40/year subscription.

http://www.smilebox.com/download-instructions.html




Sounds like a create place to go for free cards. But, free is for 7 days. They are owned by American Greeting (see above) After the free trial you need to pay them the same price as with their parent company. And if you do not cancel within the 7-day trial, you are responsible for the first term of membership that agreed to. Yes, you need to give them your payment information to get the free trial. However, every premium member is given two additional FREE memberships (subaccounts) to be given to family or friends. The subaccount members enjoy all of the features and benefits of membership free of charge!

http://www.bluemountain.com/printable-cards

They do have some free desktop calendars you can actually have for free:

http://www.bluemountain.com/downloads/display.pd?prodnum=3337800&path=2457242




Hallmark Card Studio

This one is not free. I use this to print all my cards using cardstock I purchase at Staples. It is a software product you install on your machine and it’s one time cost is only $29.99.

“For more than 100 years, Hallmark has designed greeting cards for life's special moments. Hallmark Card Studio Special Edition extends that tradition, making it easy to create one-of-a-kind Hallmark cards as unique as the people you care for. In three simple steps, you can add personal photos, sentiments and clipart images of your choosing.”

http://www.hallmarksoftware.com/



Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Class Notes 11-20-2018

The Best Windows 10 Apps
An interesting article that outlines what this author likes. Some line up with what we already use and there are a couple of new ones. He starts off with two of the cloud storage programs I already use, DropBox and OneDrive. Fotor is an all-in-one photo editor. It’s a worthy replacement if you don’t like Adobe Photoshop, he says. Sounds interesting as does Adobe Photoshop Express. It’s designed to be an on-the-go photo editor. Features include basic alternations like crop, straighten, rotate, and flip, one-touch adjustments for brightness, exposure, and shadows, and slider controls for exposure, contrast, clarity, and vibrance. Others mentioned look worthy to give a try.
http://tinyurl.com/yb2d9w5j

6 Ways You Can Use Microsoft Office For FREE
Yes you can access MS Office for free. Log in to http://live.com with your Microsoft credentials and access all the Office programs online as well as your OneDrive account. Download the cell phone version of Office and use it for free as well. Check out the article for other options as well.
http://tinyurl.com/y8v5y5sd

Chromefy turns any PC into a Chromebook. This is not the first Chromebook look-a-like we have seen. It turns an older slower laptop into a viable computer. It uses the real Chromebook OS.
http://tinyurl.com/yaujm6r9

Instead of Tiny…?




Shorten lengthy URLs
Have you ever copied a website address only to find that it seemingly goes on forever? Not only are these addresses difficult to comprehend, they’re difficult to share too. Especially on social media sites or sites that restrict character usage, shortening a URL can help fit it in a space where it otherwise might not be able to. In order to access this tool, all you have to do it right-click on a web page and select “Shorten this page with goo.gl”. Once this is done, you’ll be provided with a condensed URL and one that is automatically copied to your clipboard so all you have to do is paste to share.

Share better
Not only does goo.gl URL Shortener Unofficial shorten URLs, it provides users with QR codes that can be scanned to access the website. In many cases, this is even more convenient than a shortened URL, as it can be shared as an image and accessed on smartphones and tablets.

Short URL (goo.gl) is a free extension for Google Chrome to allowing anyone to take any existing URL and shorten it. You can also find the Google URL Shortener at:
https://goo.gl/

What’s the best replacement for the Windows 10 Snipping Tool?
This article speaks of a few possibles. Of those mentioned I like Greenshot and PicPick. Greenshot can be downloaded at ninite.com and PicPick at https://picpick.app/en/download/

Both are easy to use screen capture programs. PicPick lets you capture the screen and then opens the image in a Paint like screen. I do understand that the new Snipping Tool coming “soon” in 1809 works in a similar fashion.
http://tinyurl.com/ycops8vr

Pic Collage
With NEW seasonal stickers, backgrounds, and templates, PicCollage has everything you need to create amazing collages with your photos. Use our powerful web search feature to find the perfect photos to add to your creations, share on social media, or PRINT your collages at home. We installed this one in class and it worked as advertised making a neat collage of some pictures and added some graphs within the program.
http://tinyurl.com/y9lywdzd

Download a YouTube video or just the audio portion easily. Open the video in YouTube and copy the URL. Paste it into the browser address bar adding the letter DL just after the “www.” to open a website giving you the option of downloading it.

Ninite.com is a great site to download and install many of the useful programs we use. Today we looked at irfanview and geenshot, both available from Ninite. Irfanview has many functions one of which is to display a slideshow of a series of images.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Non Class Notes 11-13-2018

Sorry I was unable to make it to class yesterday. I trust Lydia did a fine job answering your questions. My Sherri is in the hospital recovering from a surgery last Friday.

I plan to be there for next Tuesday for class as usual. So get those questions written down…

I see 1809 is back with a promise from Microsoft that it will not delete any files this time. I hope not but I am going to wait before letting it into my computer. Just in case I am making an image backup with EaseUS. You should also. And maybe with Macrium if that is your favorite.

Also CCleaner has a new version 5.49. Go to www.ccleaner.com to get the latest free version. You do not have to pay for it.

Here are some windows keyboard shortcuts you might like to use:

Win R opens the Run menu

Win I opens the Settings window

Win Q opens the Type here box

Win P opens the Projector

Win Shift S lets you draw a box and saves it in the clipboard

Win L locks the screen and requires you to enter your credentials to log back in.

Win E opens a new File Explorer window.

There are many more, all to save you steps and keep your fingers on the keyboard.

Remember that you can email me with any questions. And I still do house calls!

Dick