Tips of the Week

This year, I'm trying to send out a weekly tip via e-mail to all our staff. Just short, quick things that might help them with their technology. It isn't all limited to work stuff...but I just try to make it all fairly current stuff.


And I decided I might as well share them here, as well. Today will be Tip #5 in our building...so below, you can get caught up with all of the first five.


Tip #1 - E-mail Attachments

When you receive an e-mail with an attachment, many folks highlight the attachment and hit Open. Oour experience with this has been mixed. For that reason, I've always encouraged folks to hit "Save" and save the attached document to their Desktop. Then go and open the document. That has always been more reliable.

Tip #2 - AccountKiller

We all create lots of accounts around the web...facebook, flickr, skype, ebay, amazon, iTunes, Windows Live, etc, etc, etc. Many of them we use – but some we create and then realize we don’t want or need. And we would like to get rid of the account rather than just go away and leave it hanging.

But how?

Sites don’t always make it easy to figure out how to delete an account. They like to add up users...not eliminate them.

If you have an account you would like to delete as effectively as possible, visit AccountKiller ( http://www.accountkiller.com/en/ ). This site gives you direct links to instructions for deleting accounts on many of the most popular sites.

And if you are considering creating an account, it is sometimes fun to check out AccountKiller first. They list sites by color code...with the “black” sites being those that are nearly impossible to actually delete without calling upon super powers and counting on a lot of luck.

Tip #3 - facebook help

There have been lots of new changes going on with facebook.

If you are trying to figure out the basics of the new changes that are in place, here are a few resources to help you sort out Lists, the Ticker, the Top Stories and Recent Stories breakdown, and some of the things you can do to manage what shows up on your wall and what you share with others. http://www.avitricks.info/2011/09/how-to-use-facebook-new-features-to-protect-your-privacy.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-privacy-2011-9#1-know-that-anything-you-post-or-comment-on-a-friends-wall-is-public-your-posts-will-show-up-in-others-news-tickers-1

http://www.bloggerclick.com/2011/09/new-facebook-news-feed-guide.html
(scroll down and watch the video at the end of the post) http://kikolani.com/new-facebook-timeline-profile-privacy-settings-news-feed.html

http://blog.identified.com/2011/09/how-facebooks-new-privacy-settings-can-be-beneficial-.html 

Tip #4 - VLC

We all watch videos online. We all get videos sent to us via e-mail. And we’ve all had videos that we could not play. But there is a simple solution that Mac-lovers have relied on for many years now...VLC.

VLC will play almost any video or audio. If VLC doesn’t play it, you can usually just give up.

Here is a quick review of VLC... http://www.cultofmac.com/116284/vlc-plays-just-about-any-video-file-you-can-find-50-mac-essentials-45/

And here is the site to download it. It is a free and safe download. http://www.videolan.org/

Tip #5 - Screenshots

There are lots of times you may want to share what you see on your screen. Grabbing a quick screenshot is amazingly quick and simple. It can be a quick way to grab a section of a web page and share with another person as an e-mail attachment. It can be a great way to save an error message to share with the tech folks when you ask for help.

Here are the instructions for the Mac folks...

To get a photo of your entire desktop, press Command-Shift-3 (all at the same time). If your volume is turned up, you'll hear a snapshot sound. And a document named "screen shot" with the date and time as part of the name will appear on your desktop. 

To get a photo of a specific area of your screen, press Command-Shift-4. Your cursor will turn into a crosshair. Click and drag to highlight the area of the screen you want to capture. When you release the mouse button, you'll hear the snapshot sound and the image file will be saved to your desktop.

Lastly, if you do a lot of screen captures...or if you want to take that shot of your desktop and then label items, draw arrows to highlight certain features, etc...download Skitch. It is a great free tool for capturing and working with screenshots.

The Best Thing On A Mac Might Be Preview

There are a lot of things I love about my Mac. But one of my favorites is Preview. Preview is a little application that comes pre-installed on every Mac computer. And it does so much more than just give you previews!

I use Preview to open and view graphic images.

I use Preview to open PDF files. I know, you can do it in Adobe Acrobat Reader. But I like Preview much more.

I use Preview to import from my scanner.

I use Preview to crop and do quick color adjustments to graphics.

And I thought I was using Preview for most of what it could do. But I was wrong. There is so much more Preview can do for you. Check out Fun With Preview in Mac OS X for ten things you can do with Preview. Well, ten plus a bonus!

Searching By Color

A terrific new tool for searching by color is the Multicolr Search Lab by the folks at idée.

The idea is simple enough - choose any color or combination of colors you desire and the search engine will search through more than 10,000,000 Creative Commons images on Flickr to find images that match your color choices. In the sample below, you can see I chose the combination of a medium blue, pale yellow, and pale sorta peachy color.

The color palette on the right allows you to select your colors just by clicking. You can click the same color several times to increase its prominence. Down below, you can remove some of your color choices just by clicking the little trash can.

This is a great tool for finding images that match a color scheme or for working on activities around a theme.

While visiting the idée site, don't miss out on their other search engines. The Visual Search lab allows you to choose one photo from a collection of nearly 3 million photos, then find other photos that are visually similar. There is also the BYO Image Search lab. In this engine, you upload one of your own photos and it will search for a visually similar photo.

All of these are nice tools for quickly finding photos that "match" according to color or other visually similar details.

The Eyes of the Blog - Teacher Challenge #5

This challenge is all about using good photos on your blog. A photo tells a story. A few photos can tell a very detailed story...or even more than one story. And photos definitely make the blog more appealing visually.

But I very rarely use photos. My blog is about tech stuff - links to good resources, short tutorials for doing different things with the computer, and a few bits of opinion and advice about technology. Not a lot of reason to break out the digital camera and take photos. And not much reason to use Flickr or Google Image Search in an effort to find the perfect image.

Nope, most of my graphic enhancement comes from capturing screen images right on my computer as a way of demonstrating a certain technique or of showing off a web site.

For instance, I recently wrote a little post about the tools I use to capture those screen shots. And my favorite tool among this is a free download called Skitch. Skitch can do a lot of things, but for me, it is a tool for capturing images on my screen for sharing. And for marking up those images, as needed. For example, here is a capture of the Teacher Challenge Activity for today...

And here is a capture of that same section of the web page with a couple of highlights thrown in as an example of how to draw your attention to key words on the page.

I know, boring stuff. But those types of images are consistent with the purpose of the blog. And I've enjoyed learning more about doing screen captures for the purpose of my blog. Though I suppose I should stretch myself a bit and explore some ways to incorporate some actual photos. I'm just not sure the best way to do that and still really serve the purpose of the blog.

Maybe a photo of me sitting at my desk typing a blog post. Now that would be exciting.