New Google Search Series

This is a change from my normal blog. This time the article(s) and videos are in the LambtonShield online newspaper.

I am doing a 3 part series on the new Google Search. This is also part of a live presentation I am doing for the Sarnia Computer Users’ Group in Sarnia, Ontario.

CHECK OUT THE VIDEO AND ARTICLE: CLICK HERE

 

“The technician set up my laptop, now what do I do?”

NOTE: THIS ARTICLE CAN BE REPRODUCED

BY GIVING ACKNOWLEDGMENT TO THE AUTHOR.

“The technician set up my laptop, now what do I do?”

By Gregory West

Ah, the wonderment of getting a new computer. No more having to watch others show off their computer skills as they demonstrate their new digital slide show, or listen about how they talk with relatives across three oceans for hours at no cost. With your new computer you are ready to join the online communities around the globe.

Three gigabytes of random access memory, five hundred gigs of hard drive, a one year subscription to some antivirus / malware protection software utility and you are “good to go,” says the clerk in the computer store.

“But does it come with a manual,” you ask?

“The manual is in the OS software,” the clerk says as he gets you to sign his copy of the credit card slip. “Have a nice day,” he hollers as you lug computer through the doors towards home.

“Ya right,” you mutter under your breath.

So many choices, too many decisions, but at least you finally got it home. Once you open the lid and go to turn on the new computer you realize that you have no idea what you are doing. In fact, you don’t know a gigabyte from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and you couldn’t care less. All you want is to on the Internet and check your email, surf some websites and maybe learn how to get those 265 photos from your digital camera.

“So now what,” you say aloud to yourself? “Where do I begin, you ask your dog in desperation as she gives you that puzzled look?

There is an easy way to learn the various computer functions you need to catch up with your computer geek of a neighbour. First, you can take a formal course at your local college. These courses usually range from beginner to advanced. You can also take online courses (courses offered over the Internet), but this takes a special skill, as many people are not used to working alone and need to get out into a classroom setup with real humans. You can also join a local computer group. Here you will find people with similar interests who provide various seminars on tech-related issues.

I have been on a computer since 1972 where an IBM System/360 Operating System was the popular system in data processing centres. Over the years I have received computer training from all methods mentioned about. In fact, today I am taking two computer courses from books that came with DVD training programs.

However, if you simply need to know one certain function on the computer, learn a software program, or how to troubleshoot a problem in your computer, I suggest Google’s YouTube videos. Computer instructors, tech companies, libraries, schools and many knowledgable individuals upload training videos to YouTube. Here you not only get free training, but targeted training. For instance, if you need to know how to install a USB flash drive in Windows 7, you simply go to youtube.com on the Internet and there will be many videos to help you through this process.

One tip for searching within YouTube for help, try using the term: “tutorials” with your search. Sometimes this will give you a full training course on the particular subject you are interested in learning. I use YouTube all the time when I need help with a particular computer program. But it doesn’t stop there either. I wanted to learn how to winterize my RV and save the hundred dollar fee, so I searched for videos on YouTube and have winterized my own trailer ever since for only the cost of antifreeze.

You can get free training from the best of both worlds. If you are new to the computer, YouTube videos will help you get an idea what you are up against, but what if you still need the help of a human. Central United Church operates a free computer drop-in training centre where you can get free help on any computer-related issue. Since September 2010 over two-hundred people have found this training centre an excellent way to learn at one’s own speed. The only cost is a food item to donate to the Food Bank. For more info: go to the website ( http://central-united-church.org/training ) or phone: 519 344-4561.

[bi-line]

Gregory West is a Mac Instructor for Lambton College.
He is also Webmaster at Central United Church, the home of Sarnia’s new
Community Computer Training Centre at: http://goo.gl/76H15.
This is free and open to the public as a community service.

Learn at your own speed.

Gregory can be reached at: prospector16(at)gmail.com

Google Search Is a “Jungle” & NEEDS TO CHANGE

“you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more”

Vivek Wadhwa Tech Crunch

How many times have you done a search for something using Google Search and found that no very much concerns your topic? A lot? I know, it’s happening all the time now.

Google was once an amazing search engine but now it is a poor excuse often leading people in the wrong direction…A direction that is paid for by advertisers.

The at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, California found out just how insignificant Google Search results can be, especially if you need detailed information.

The author of this finding, Vivek Wadhwa,  is a “visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University” who says that “Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers”, and I cannot agree more.

THE MAJOR PROBLEM WITH GOOGLE SEARCH is that “when you visit these sites, they take you to the websites of other companies that want to sell you their goods”, and thus you are SPAMMED.

THIS IS WHAT IS MEANT:

“This is exactly what blogger Paul Kedrosky found when trying to buy a dishwasher. He wrote about how he began Googleing for information…and Googleing…and Googleing. He couldn’t make head or tail of the results. Paul concluded that the “the entire web is spam when it comes to major appliance reviews”.”

There is a new alternative to Google that the author recommends:

“We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko. It’s a new technology and is far from perfect; but it is innovative and fills the vacuum of competition with Google (and Bing).”

One that recommend is cooliris.com – An amazing adventure in HIGH TECH SURFING…

Let’s hope Google cleans up its act by removing SPAM SEARCH or a new kid on the block like Blekko succeeds to the point where Google first became a “household word”.

gmail STOP DON’T SEND just yet!

We have all pushed the SEND button in our email client program and immediately yelled: “NO, STOP”. But of course the email just kept on processing out to that person who is going to be really upset now.

We are talking about sending out those emails when you are not at your best. Those emails that can really piss people off and that you immediately wished you could take back.

NOW YOU CAN STOP THOSE NASTY/MEAN/EMBARRASSING EMAILS…At least you can if you are a gmail user. If not, well, sorry about your luck. Maybe this is the time to switch to gmail.

GMAIL USERS go to Settings and click on the tab:

Scroll down to “Undo Send” and click on the drop down arrow to set the delay time at 30 secs or whatever you desire.

Now if you send out that email that you will regret later IT IS YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT lol.

MAKE FIREFOX FASTER – It really works…

IE Browser

I admit to never being an IE browser fan. In fact, back in the day, I used Netscape. Well that is until Netscape 7 began to slow down and lose the browser war against IE

Firefox Browser

Is history repeating itself now with Firefox. Everyone is currently complaining about how slow Firefox has become.

RESULT: Firefox is now running slow…Just like the old Netscape.

HELP HAS ARRIVED and it REALLY WORKS:
3 steps listed below to make your Firefox FASTER…

Here’s 3  easy steps for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return (where it says http://). Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!
(from CNET.com)

Video Not Working On Google’s Chrome Browser

If you own a Macbook and are running Snow Leopard I can guarrantee that you cannot watch video using the Google Chrome web browser.

I have posted the question in many Google forums challenging Google employees to explain the “WHY NOT” or “HOW COME”.

If I do get an answer to why we Apple users cannot watch video on that browser it will be posted here. In the meantime it is back to ole Safari because Firefox is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay toooooooooo sloooooooooooooooow now. I am not fussy on Safari but what can I say that hasn’t been said about Safari.

Stay Tuned…as they say…

Google Chrome Help – VIDEO PROBLEM SOLVED

For the past while I believed there was a problem with Chrome browser playing flash, especially video.

I WAS WRONG…

CHROME HAS A BUILT-IN ADOBE FLASH PLAYER

Flash video will not play on Chrome, only Audio – Google Chrome Help.

Google CANNED Signatures

Now you can send email with CANNED RESPONSES…

This is handy for those who have to answer lots of emails with the same subject and answer:

Rich Text Signatures in Gmail NOW AVAILABLE

Everyone uses an email signature. What, you don’t? Come on, get with it LOL.

Rich text signatures in Gmail

Now, you can write your own rich text signatures in Gmail. Add colors
or change the font size of your signature, or insert images and links.
To add your signature, sign in to Gmail and visit the Settings page.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/rich-text-signatures.html

This works!!!!!!!

greg

Flash is BACK

FLASH is back working on CHROME

No word from Google as they may be testing html5???

Flash not working. – Google Chrome Help.

CHROME won’t play VIDEO

Google’s web browser is the BEST, well until today that is. Chrome stopped playing video, including all videos on Google’s own YouTube.

I have to switch to Firefox or Safari to watch flash video…HTML5 maybe?

For the full story go here…

Google ethos speeds up Chrome release cycle | Deep Tech – CNET News.

Free iPhone 4 Case: How About Switching to Android?

Who likes Android instead???

Free iPhone 4 Case: Apple To Offer FREE iPhone Bumper To Solve Antenna Issue.

Google gets nod from China to keep search page | Reuters

THIS IS AMAZING…A CYBERSPACE COMPANY RULES CHINA ONLINE

Google is bigger than China's Communist Regime

Google gets nod from China to keep search page | Reuters.

“FACE-SAVING COMPROMISE

Last week, Google offered Beijing a face-saving compromise: it stopped automatically rerouting the google.cn page to an uncensored Hong Kong-based search page. Instead, visitors to google.cn have to click once to go to the Hong Kong page.” Reuters

FarmVille Hype

FarmVille: 81 Million Users Online?
www.farmville.com
by Gregory West

Over 81 million active users flock to FarmVille to perform virtual farming daily. These people do chores they would have never dreamed of doing a year ago. Some are saying that this game is the largest and fastest growing game in history. Just think, this game started online June 19, 2009. The developer, Zynga, states that FarmVille “is bigger than Twitter and [was] valued at $1 billion last month (mashable.com)”.

FarmVille’s popularity is exploding online and won the most prestigious award this year: The 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards ceremony declared last month in Los Vegas that “the top honor in the ‘Social Networking Game of the Year’ category went to Zynga’s massively popular Facebook game FarmVille”.

Since this game is connected with Facebook, the developer Zynga, believes while people check in on their Facebook sites, they will also check into FarmVille and tend to their crops and help their neighbours with their farm work as well.

In the virtual farmland of FarmVille, farmers must first create their own avatar (a virtual image representing themselves). According to the rules there are “six plots of land, four of which are in the process of growing, and two (eggplant and strawberries) which are fully grown”. As in real life farming, the market calls the shots where items can be purchased such as “seeds, trees, animals, buildings, decorations, vehicles and more using “farm coins”.

The game comes with a few hooks as well and thus there is some controversy (depending on your viewpoint) in that you can buy virtual goods. “Zynga the game-makers encourage you to buy game things with real money. Some people (Techcrunch, Guardian) say that’s an exploitation of users who are swapping real money for fake things,” reports Leach. However, this is nothing new on the Internet and people can spend money virtually anywhere online if they so choose.

Upon beginning a farm, the player first creates a customizable avatar.[8] There are six plots of land, four of which are in the process of growing, and two (eggplant and strawberries) which are fully grown.
The game is based around the market, where items can be purchased: seeds, trees, animals, buildings, decorations, vehicles, and more land using “farm coins,” the generic money of FarmVille (which is earned by selling crops) or “farm cash”. (which the player earns at a rate of one dollar per experience level).

So, all of this begs the question: Why are people so drawn to FarmVille each day to milk their cows and chase chickens into coups and to “sow, grow and harvest crops (Anna Leach of shinyshiny.tv)”?

My wife is also working hard in FarmVille. She says that “you can play along, online, with all your friends” from across the globe. “You get a sense of guilt when you find your crops in desperate need of water and fertilizing,” she said.

“To me, Farmville works the same dynamic of calling on your nourishing instinct and then guilt-tripping you. The Tamagotchi effect, reported Leach. Tamagotchi is “a handheld digital pet [online] created in 1996. Over 70 million Tamagotchis have been sold as of 2008 (wikipedia)”. Remember the “pet rock” several years back? Even my mother bought one of those little pets.

For me, FarmVille is not an attraction. For those of you who are not into FarmVille you can go here to learn how to stop FarmVille posts on your Facebook site: http://tinyurl.com/ydk3ew2

Happy hoeing out there folks…

[bi-line]
Gregory West is a basic home computer consultant for MAC and PC and software
reviewer for major computer companies. Also come and join in on his free Basic
Computer Training sessions, held weekly at Central United Church this Fall. For info: http://www.centralunitedsarnia.ca/free_computer_lessons.html
Gregory can be reached at gregorywest@bell.net
Also, check out his Blog: Computer & Internet Tips:
http://tips4computers.wordpress.com

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Google411 for Travelers and More

Google411 – The Perfect Phone Feature

by Gregory West
prospector16@gmail.com

Probably by now most people have used or heard of the free directory assistance that is available on the Internet: canada411.ca. That service works for both individual and business phone numbers and addresses.

Google has taken this technology much, much further. Enter: Google411.
Google offers a free phone directory and calling service that finds businesses and their phone numbers. Google will also connect you to the business immediately, or you can simply listen to the list of businesses and then make your choice.

The service is quite easy to use. You simply dial up 1-800-GOOG-411 (I have GOOG411 on my cell phone’s speed dial) and state your city and province. Then you say what it is you are looking for.

I tested it out by saying: “pizza”. A google voice began voicing the area pizza restaurants. If I had been hungry I could have easily been connected to the pizza business of my choice. This proves to be an excellent travel tool as you may want to book ahead a hotel room, reserve a seat in a restaurant and maybe check if a certain store is still open. At the present time Google only offers this service for business and non-profit listings, but not for residential information.

I love canada411.ca on my laptop for looking up names, addresses, and phone numbers, but when I nowhere near a WiFi hotspot, my cell phone gets me the information, connection and listings fast and extremely efficient.
For more information, head on over to this website: www.google.ca/goog411 and watch a Google voice engineer demonstrate this highly excellent and free service.

Note: “ Google doesn’t charge you to access Google products from a mobile phone…Check with your provider for more information about fees associated with accessing the Internet from your mobile phone” (google.ca).

Gregory West is a Mac Computer Instructor for Lambton College.  He also holds free “Basic PC Computer and Internet Training” seminars at Central United Church: 
http://central-united-church.org – (Click on “Groups).
Gregory can be reached at prospector16@gmail.com
More TIPS on Greg’s Blog: http://tips4computers.wordpress.com

Email With Bank-type Security

Top Security for Gmail Users

Now you can get the same security as your BANK by using https.

In gmail (not using gmail? shame on you LOL) go to SETTINGS and scroll down to where it says:

Browser Connection:

Make sure you check the box for “Always use https“. As you see above it is not checked by default.

Hey…It can’t get any easier!

Get All Your Local News FREE

The Most Popular Way to Get News

Did you know that “Google News has 5 to 10 times the reach of MSNBC, the Guardian UK, the New York Times and Digg”

BUT NOW YOU CAN GET LOCAL NEWS FROM WITHIN YOUR HOME TOWN WITHOUT BUYING THE NEWSPAPER (that offers news that is well over 12 hours old) OR HAVING TO WAIT FOR THE RADIO STATION (which usually never gives you ALL the news).

Check out:  http://news.google.com/
On the left side of this site you will see “Personalized”. Click on the arrows and find your town…Enjoy

Here is an example of Sarnia, Ontario, Canada
http://news.google.com/news/section?pz=1&geo=N7V+2Y3&ict=ln

Bing vs Google – a New Engine In Town

Google Stand Aside – There’s A New Engine In Town

“Bing” – The Decision Engine by Microsoft – www.bing.com

by Gregory West
(as published in the July 2009 issue of First Monday magazine and SCUG Report)

Given Google’s supremacy, who would ever have thought that there would be any competition in the Internet search business? Most of us would bet the farm that would never happen. But wait, hold your bets, because there is a new engine in online who is giving Google employees a major headache. Welcome the brand new search engine owned by Microsoft named: “bing”.

So what makes bing a competitor that can stand up against Google? The answer is quite simple:

* “Searchers can choose the best scope for their search query
* Bing can provide best match and useful links and information
* Quick Preview of any website
* Bing can provide Instant Answers
* Bing will Auto-Suggest the search queries” (toputop.com).

Soon, many of us will do our searching using bing for everything from travel, to shopping, and targeted researches. The main reason to switch to bing is you retrieve accurate and related websites in your search, rather the clutter that Google is now producing in their first five or ten listings. Google is gathering too many junk results for search requests. In that regard, I believe, as many others do, bing will put a serious dent into Google’s dominance in the world of search.

Is Google scared?

You bet. The New York Post says. “You’d think nothing would get under the skin of search giant Google. But co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft’s rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service”.

Great praise for this new search engine is pouring in as INFORMATIONWEEK reports, “Bing includes features that allow users to book travel and engage in other e-commerce transactions with just a few clicks.”

To get a real taste of bing watch this VIDEO. It demonstrates the accurate search results that are more targeted results as Google squirms: http://tinyurl.com/mrsjum
One must admit, “bing” is kind of a wimpy name, but hey, what about the name Google?

“Back in the day”, or so they say, I remember when nobody used Google because it was a strange name. There was another strange named search engine along when Google started up named: “Dog Pile”. Dog pile never made the big time as Google certainly did and it never became a household phrase like “Google it”. However, “Dogpile search engine earned the 2006 and 2007 J.D. Power and Associates award for best Residential Online Search Engine Service”, according to Wikipedia.com.

This new engine in town is a “must” to test drive.
See for yourself: http://www.bing.com

[bi-line]
Gregory West is a software reviewer, basic home computer consultant and author. Gregory provides free basic Computer – Internet seminars at Central United Church. Gregory can be reached at gregorywest@bell.net
Check out his blog for free Computer & Internet Tips:
http://tips4computers.wordpress.com