All posts by Computers Made Simple

Facefeed, Snapchat, Social Networking

Snapchat vs. Facefeed – and the winner is?

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Snapchat and Facefeed are two popular and relatively new mobile apps which share a similar purpose: meeting people. No, these aren’t replacements for the online dating sites, they’re far more casual, less intense and a lot more fun. Initially we were going to do separate posts but since they’re more the same than different, we decided to do a comparison. Here we go!

Similarities: 

1. Both Snapchat and Facefeed are available for Android and iOS devices. Facefeed started out as iOS only but now it’s available at Google Play for Android.

2. The two apps require a camera, something that WeChat etc. don’t. Like Instagram, both of these are image based. They let users display themselves and/or their lives. Facefeed requires a front facing cam, Snapchat can use either front or rear cam.

 

Differences: 

1. There is no log-in with Facefeed. You show up, give your preferences and you’re on your way. Snapchat requires a username and an email address.

2. The camera thing mentioned above. Facefeed cannot use your rear cam, just the one that sees, guess what, your face. Snapchat lets you shoot your own ugly mug or those of your friends.

3. You can keep track of friends/strangers on Snapchat. You can add them to your feed and send messages directly to them. While Facefeed allows you to follow people, you can’t directly message someone unless you keep a continuous stream of messages going back and forth. Facefeed is not one-on-one, at least as far as broadcasting messages (snaps) is concerned. It’s easy, almost too easy, to lose connections.

4. Facefeed is pics and text on pics only, no video and no art. Snapchat uses still photos, videos as well as art. You have to take a photo or video before you can draw on your screen but most users shoot a pic of a blank ceiling, for example, then draw on it. You can add text and/or your own drawings. Here are a few examples from Snapchat users:

Photo of Ryan Seacrest
Cyreneq is a real artist, here shown with a pretty good Ryan Seacrest.
Photo of Drawing of Cat
A smiling cat. Take the pic, add the art and send it off.

 

5. Of the two apps, Facefeed is more instantaneous, more current. The feed is always there, sometimes with repetitions but more often than not, fresh every time. Snapchat only shows the current snaps, ones that the people you follow send out. If everyone is busy, you’re got nothing to look at.

6. On Facefeed, the stream of faces is your source of contacts. You can’t add people from a list of names, you can only send them a message when you see their face on the flow. With Snapchat, there are sites that allow users to share their Snapchat names. Here’s a link to one of those places:

http://www.the11thsecond.com/

Photo of website
Cyreneq seems to work at or run this site. Lots of names here.

Decisions, decisions: 

Which app is best? We like both but we lean towards Snapchat. It’s more fun, has far less of a single’s bar atmosphere and it allows you keep in touch with your contacts. Facefeed is frustrating, to be honest. While we’re not going to get into instructions for these two, we will warn you to be very careful with your swipes. Swipe the wrong way at the wrong time and your contact is lost, often forever. You can be in the middle of a conversation with a friend and, bam, they’re gone. Once you install the app you’ll see what we mean. Just read the comments on many of the photos and you’ll get an idea of exactly how exasperating Facefeed can be.

One feature that we like on Snapchat is the weekend feeds from various social events. Things like college football games, rock concerts, charity events, conventions, etc. These come automatically, you don’t subscribe to them. Watch them or not, it’s up to you, but they add a whole other element of fun. At this point they’re all from the U.S. but we hope to see more from around the world.

Snapchat also allows video chats, text chats with no photos and, of course, the drawing function. Add both but we think you’ll grow to like Snapchat more. Single guys and girls can play around with Facefeed but we think you’ll see it’s not much different from WeChat’s Shake feature. Everything about it is a shot in the dark.

There you have it. A short synopsis of Facefeed and Snapchat. If you have questions or comments, use the comment form below this to share them with us. Alternatively, Like our Facebook page and make a comment there. Here is the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook.   Thanks for reading!

 

Facefeed, Snapchat, Social Networking, WeChat

Things We’re Working On – Social media, apps, low-tech stuff

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We’ve been quiet this summer, and we use the term summer very loosely. Our short break from several posts a week trickled down to a couple a month. That’s about to end. Here’s what you can expect from Computers Made Simple in the near future:

1. Reviews of a few new software products, one is a somewhat confusing app that syncs such things as your Facebook photo albums as well as some cloud storage sites. We’ve got strong reservations about recommending this one. Another is a VPN product that we just haven’t had time to experiment with.

2. Lots of social networking reviews and updates. We’re heavily involved in some of the more popular apps such as Instagram as well as some fun new apps that few people know about. Feedly is one of those, we can tell you know. We’re also revisiting some of the older S/N (social networking) sites such as Tumblr and Pinterest. Stay tuned for updates and news/reviews on these and others.

3. In the last few months we’ve been trying out some cool mobile apps too. (Yes, Instagram is a mobile app but you can access parts of it from your computer.) The ones we mean in this area are things such as Facefeed and Snapchat, etc. We’ll jot down some short notes on those two farther down the page today.

4. More how-to/do-it-yourself posts on networking, computers, gaming hardware, etc. Sometimes the mass of wires in our entertainment room drives us crazy even though we know that they all do, mainly because we put them there. It’s still a ball of confusion and we’re going to try to straighten it all out for you.

5. Reader suggestions. Alright, we don’t have any yet but our readers are loyal, dedicated and VERY smart. We’ll get suggestions, hopefully, and we’ll write about them, solve them, answer them…well, you get the idea.

For now, here are some comments about Facefeed and Snapchat.

Facefeed: We’ve already written about this app. Read our post here: Facefeed  This simple and fun mobile offering has the potential to take over the world, we think, but it keeps getting mired in the silliness of spontaneity. Once wrong swipe on your screen and you’ve lost someone who looked interesting. Talk about ships passing in the night! We’ve written to the creator, tweeted him, bugged him on Facefeed itself but he doesn’t seem to want to change the way people interact on his creation. It’s still fun, don’t get us wrong, but many, many users are frustrated with it.

Snapchat: We don’t have a full grasp of this app’s potential but we’re working on it. Recently, let’s say in the last three months, Snapchat has moved from a frivolous adolescent time waster to a real, almost artistic time waster. Besides text and photos or videos, users can draw on their screens. While that sounds pretty simple, you should see the kind of art that comes out of it. That change alone has made Snapchat a very entertaining bit of fluff. Try it, tell us your experiences. We’ll share them here.

Photo of cyreneq from Snapchat
Art from the very popular cyreneq. This Snapchat user draws amazing pics. Check her out.

Of the two products mentioned above, Facefeed has the most potential, we think. Why? Simply because you can meet 100s of new people a day if you have the time to spend. We loved WeChat for its promise in that area, specially with its Shake and People Nearby features. Facefeed is a much easier way to interact with strangers. It’s also completely safe. You choose who you want to say hi to and a simple swipe gets rid of the obnoxious idiots who sometimes troll the Internet.

Finally, just so you don’t get stressed out, we’ll continue our posts about Facebook. We’ve covered this prime social networking site for a few years but we’re still noticing things that need explaining. All in all, stay tuned for our posts and updates. As always, check out our Facebook page. Like it and you’ll be the first to hear our news. Here is the link:  Computers Made Simple on Facebook

Thanks for reading! Feel free to share us with your friends.

 

Computers

My Laptop Died! (Maybe it just sleeping…)

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When your laptop stops working, it’s hard to figure out exactly what the problem is. Here are some simple tips to try and resuscitate it. These tips are based on several scenarios. Sometimes you can see something on your screen, sometimes you can hear sounds, sometimes it’s deader than a door-nail. Here we go:

1. Simple fixes. Make sure your battery is charged and/or your power supply is plugged in to a working outlet. Some laptops won’t start until they have a certain amount of charge in the battery. You could try booting the computer without the battery, just in case it is at fault. Resetting the memory chips is another simple solution, one that you can easily do yourself. Find the repair manual for your model online. It will tell you which little door on the back covers the single or double memory chips. Make sure they’re firmly in place.

Make sure that you don’t have anything connected to your laptop that might be preventing it from working. By this we mean things like USB drives, digital cameras, external hard drives, etc.

2. If you can see something on your screen, that means that your laptop is trying to boot up. For different reasons, it doesn’t quite make it. It could ‘hang’, meaning that it gets partway through the boot process and stops, or it doesn’t get past the setup screen, meaning that something is wrong with your operating system.

In these cases, try booting from your optical drive. Put your current operating system CD in the drive and try to boot from it. Your laptop can usually spot a boot CD in the drive and will shoot up a message, something like ‘press any key to boot from CD’. That means  hit any key to instruct the computer to start up using the CD in the drive. If you don’t have an internal optical device (CD/DVD drive), you can use a USB stick.

If you don’t have your original operating system on CD, find your recovery disks. You can use those disks to reset your laptop back to its original condition.

Another path you could take is to use a bootable anti-virus disk/USB stick to bypass your hard drive’s boot system. If a virus is preventing you from starting your computer, a bootable anti-virus disk can help. It will start your laptop and give you the option to scan your hard drive for viruses and/or malware.

Photo of broken laptop
Hopefully your laptop doesn’t look like this.

 

3. If you can’t see anything on your screen, there are a couple of options for you. Virtually every laptop has a VGA port which will allow you to connect an external monitor to it. This makes it the same as a desktop computer, you’re just bypassing the laptop’s own screen. Some laptops have a keystroke combination which tells it to use the VGA port instead of its own screen. Get out your instruction manual or look for it online and see if you have to press a couple of keys to get it set up.

Many modern computers have HDMI ports. These are a bit like the VGA ports but you use a different cable and connect to an HDTV instead of a computer monitor. You can use the same cable that runs from your BluRay DVD player or your Apple TV, basically anything that is already connected to your HDTV. Once the HDMI connection is made, make sure your HDTV is set to receive a signal from the port that the HDMI cable is feeding. Many HDTVs have multiple HDMI ports. Make sure it’s set to ‘see’ the right one. If you can see your laptop’s output on your TV, that means your laptop’s screen is not working. Time to send it back under warranty or get a new laptop. You could continue using the TV screen, too. It’s up to you.

 

4. If there is a blinking dot or if your laptop tells you that it can’t find a boot device, this usually means that your hard drive needs to be removed and backed up, if that is possible, before you do anything else. If you have important photos and documents on your drive, you must back these up immediately. Don’t keep trying to start your computer, get the drive out and backed up. If you can’t do that yourself, ask a trusted tech friend to do it for you. You can use TestDisk or Recuva to do this. Both are free. Our last post explains how to connect the drive to another computer. 

 

5. Noises. Some noises are good, some are bad. If you have used your laptop for a while, you know what its normal sounds are, all of those buzzing and whirring noises. If you can hear them but you can’t see anything on your screen, things are bad but not a total disaster. You can attach your computer to a monitor and use it that way or you can remove the hard drive in order to back it up. If you’re a bit of a techie yourself, you could try to reset any of the cards that may be attached to the laptop’s motherboard. Normally this isn’t possible but it’s worth a shot.

If your hard drive is making noises, stop what you’re doing and go back to number 4 above. If the problem is in your hard drive, back it up and buy a new one or get one under warranty. The important thing now is to back up  your drive in order to save your photos and documents. Once you get that done, you can get a new drive, install the operating system and software, then start all over again.

There are many different ways that our laptop can let you down but, in general, they are very dependable. We’ve got some laptops that are very old, we’re talking more than ten years, and they still work just the same as they did when they were new. The new laptops are almost as well built as the older ones, some that have SSDs in them are even more dependable. An SSD is a solid state hard drive with no moving parts. No moving parts means that you can’t really damage the hard drive. With the various cloud options that are out there, storing your data on a hard drive is  almost a thing of the past.

Thanks for reading. If you have computer problems, use the comment form below to ask us for help. Better yet, head over to our Facebook page and ask us there. Here is the link:Computers Made Simple on Facebook.

 

Backing up your computer, Basics, Computers

How to Rescue Your Hard Drive

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We just ran into a situation at Computers Made Simple that looked like helpful topic for a post. One of our laptops died. It wasn’t a slow death either. One day it worked, the next it appeared dead. Nothing showed up on the screen, the Caps Lock key blinked slowly and the normal boot-up noises just weren’t there. After a few minutes of trying to get it to boot, we decided to simply buy a new laptop. Here’s how we rescued the information from the old hard drive.

1. Most laptops allow you to get at the hard drive bay quickly and easily. Find the model number and search on Google using terms such as  ‘CQ42 remove hard drive’. That worked for us and in a matter of minutes, the hard drive was out of the laptop. Since most hard drives have moving parts inside, they shouldn’t be dropped or bumped, specially when they are being used.

2. We have quite a selection of computer tools in the office but one of these tools is absolutely essential if you’re going to attempt to recover information from a hard drive. Here’s what this tool looks like:

Photo of Hard Drive Recovery Kit
It looks confusing but really isn’t. Connect some of the pieces to the drive, connect the drive to your computer and you’re away.

Ours isn’t exactly like this but they are all pretty much the same. There is a power supply that connects to the power connector on the hard drive. The other connectors, in this case the red one, connects to the data port on the drive. Once that is in place, the unit is linked to the computer through a USB port. Two separate things are going on here. The first is a power feed to the drive. The second is a data stream. Once you get this set up properly, the hard drive will appear in Windows Explorer, allowing you to sort through the information on it. At that point you simply copy and paste that information onto your computer.

3. When you find the drive in Windows Explorer, click on it. If the old laptop had a password, Windows detects that you’re probably not the owner of the drive. A menu pops up that says something like ‘you don’t have access (or permission)’ to complete this action. It will have a Continue button, just press that.

4. Windows will slowly open the drive which allows you to see the contents of it, just be patient. All of this depends on which version of Windows you are using. If your old hard drove had Windows Vista on it, the process is much more complicated. This post is about Windows 7 and/or Windows 8. Vista requires you to change the permission for each folder and sub-folder, a daunting job even for an expert.

5. Once you can see the old hard drive in Windows Explorer, right click the icon of a folder down on your taskbar and choose ‘File Explorer’. This will open another instance of Windows Explorer. Navigate to your desktop, then right click in the open space on the right side of your screen and choose ‘New Folder’. Give it a name, something like ‘Files from Old Laptop Drive’ or something similar. Hit enter to set the new name then hit enter again to open the new folder.

6. Your job now is to copy and paste your data from the old hard drive to the new folder. Remember that you can search for files using universal parameters, we’re talking about ‘*.jpg’ for instance. If you type *.jpg into the search slot, Windows will find every jpg file (photo file) on the drive or folder you are searching. *.doc or *.docx works the same way. The asterisk represents ‘any’ and the letters after the period represent the type of file you want to search for.

7. Alternatively, you could copy complete folders from one drive to the other. The problem with number 6 above is that Windows stores some files in two places. Inside of Windows/File Explorer files with the same name will appear. In any other folder in Windows, you cannot have two files of the same name; separate folders yes, same folder no. If you copy all of your photos from the old drive, you will most likely run into a filename conflict. In that case choose to keep both files but let Windows rename one. If there are hundreds, and there often is, put a check in the little space that reads ‘do the same for the next 300 conflicts’. That will save you lots of time, believe us.

8. If you think about where you store data on your computer, it is easy to find that data and transfer it. There are some key files to look for: photos, documents, music and video. Remember that all of these types of data may have different file types. You may be searching for MP3s thinking that all of your music is in that format. iTunes, however, stores its music as MP4s. If you’re not sure what you’re doing here, get some help or simply ask Google ‘where are my music files in iTunes’, for example.

Good luck! Remember that we are always here to help. Use the form below to ask questions. We usually get back to you in a day or two.

Lastly, this whole post assumes that your old hard drive is still functional. We’ve written other posts on what to do if the drive itself is dying and/or dead. Our next post will tell you how to diagnose laptop problems. Stay tuned for that and thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Fitbit Flex

Fitbit Flex – Getting fit was never this easy

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If you don’t have the gumption or resources to get to the gym, check out the Fitbit Flex. Fitbit makes several different products, here’s their website: Fitbit.com, but we found the Flex best suited to our needs. Here’s a photo of what we’re talking about:

Photo of Fitbit Flex
A simple wristband with five flashing LEDs. Available in two colors.

 

The Flex might seem like a toy but it’s not. Besides being reasonably fashionable, it effectively keeps track of your motion, or lack of it, during the day. Amazingly, it also registers your hours of sleep, not automatically but just as effectively. A few taps tells the Flex to go into sleep mode then a few more taps tells it that you’re up and ready for the day. In between, the Flex gauges your motion in the night. If you are a restless sleeper, the Flex will tell you.

How does the Fitbit Flex differ from a simple, and cheaper, pedometer? The difference here is the transmitter that’s built into every Fitbit device. Using a simple USB dongle or your Smartphone, either iOS or Android, it’s an easy task to sync the Flex to your very own page on the Fitbit.com website. This is what the page looks like after you’ve set everything up:

Photo of Fitbit Personal Page
Everything you’ve done is right here. Your friends and their daily progress show up just to the right of this.

Hours slept, minutes walked, calories used, distance covered, it’s all there. We didn’t show your friend list in the photo but you can add anyone who has a Fitbit device for some friendly challenges. You can even trash-talk them to get them up and moving. All you need is their email address or Facebook account for the invitation.

Is the Fitbit accurate? It certainly is. We map our exercise routes on MapMyRun.com as well as with the Fitibit. Each time we’ve compared distances, the Fitbit was bang on. You have to put in some parameters, of course; simple things such as your height and weight, and the Flex does the rest. It averages your paces and comes up with a total distance which relates to the number of paces you took on your hike. Your objective is 10,000 steps a day and at least a half hour of ‘very active minutes’. We took that a step farther and walk an hour a day, just about every day of the week.

It’s suggested that you put the Flex on your non-dominant wrist. Why? Well that’s because the Flex registers every movement you make as a step. Brushing your teeth? The Flex thinks you are walking very fast. Hammering a nail? The Flex often thinks that you are telling it to go into sleep mode. It will vibrate and flash accordingly. If we were active with both hands, such as when we were building our shed this summer, we found it best to put the Flex into our left pocket. It will register movement from there almost as accurately as when it’s on our wrist. Don’t leave it in your pocket when you’re out walking though since it may not register every step.

Another cool thing that the Fitbit devices tell you is when the battery is low. You’ll get an email, believe it or not, telling you the situation. Simply slip the Flex into the USB holder, provided in the package, and insert the holder into an open USB slot. You might have to jiggle things a bit to get a connection since the Flex is very light. Once the little LEDs are flashing, you’re good to go. Your dashboard page will show the charge level.

Using the Flex is a bit like having someone nag you, very gently, to get up and get moving. Although you barely notice it on your wrist, you pretty much know it’s there, quietly waiting for you to step up and let it do its job. Since we got ours, through AirMiles as a matter of fact, we’ve been walking an hour a day, every day except one or two. In that time, basically two months, we’ve logged over 3/4 of a million steps. Total distance is more than 500 miles. That is made up of our daily walking routine as well as our normal movement around the office and home. Unfortunately this will drop significantly in the winter time but we expect to keep chugging away, despite the weather.

The Flex costs about $99.00. You can use your air miles points too, as long as the device is listed on the site you use. The only usage problem we had was the wristband splitting but that was because we weren’t removing the plastic internal device properly. Fitbit sent us a new one for free and we’ve been fine since.

Give it a shot, see if this simple exercise partner is what you need to get off the couch and into the world. Walking is fun, refreshing and very easy to do. No matter how slow you might be now, after a few weeks you’ll be out there chugging along with the rest of us. Look at it this way, the Flex is cheaper than a dog, right? Plus there is no poop and scoop involved! Good luck!