We’ve all seen them. Those posts that promise a video of something astonishing. The poster says they ‘can’t believe what happened next’. Well, we know what happens next. People who click the link usually end up with malware on their computer or mobile device.
There are several ways that this scam works. We’ve said for a long time that when you’re inside Facebook itself, you are safe. Once you click something that takes you out of Facebook, you’re on your own. These posts that purport to shock and amaze you are known as ‘click bait’. Some are completely safe, some are very dangerous.
How do you know which ones are safe and which aren’t? You don’t. Our advice is to simply not click on anything that leads out of Facebook. If the post looks interesting, do a search on Google and find an alternative, and safe, link to the information.
Here is an example of click bait:
So Obama forgot to salute. So what? Is it really that important to click and see what happened?
If you hover your mouse cursor over the photo and look down on the lower left of your browser, you’ll see that it leads out of Facebook.
The photo is linked to this site. Once you click it, you’re out of the Facebook site.
If you hover over a few others posts on your newsfeed, you’ll see that most of them the links begin with ‘facebook.com’. These are safe, right? You’re still inside of Facebook’s protective screen.
This kind of link is totally safe. You’re still inside the Facebook site, just heading to another page.
Lastly, the most dangerous links are those that lead to a page where a video plays for a very short time then stops. The page then tells you that you need a certain flash player to view the video. Quite often the flash player starts to download automatically. Cancel the download immediately if you can. Whatever you do, do NOT click on the file or install it. Right click it, hold down the shift key and choose ‘Delete’. Windows will ask you if you really want to delete this file permanently. Click Yes to delete it forever.
Facebook is fun, we all know that. But it can be dangerous too. Think about what you’re doing when you click on a link. Don’t fall for the click baits and scams that are out there. Use your common sense and you’ll be safe.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading! Comments and questions are welcome but Likes on our Facebook page get immediate attention. Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook .
If you don’t know about keyboard shortcuts, you’re missing out on a lot. You may not even know what you’re missing. That’s why we’re here.
Example 1:
You do a search on Google and find a page that has the term/terms that you are looking for. Quite often that means a typed page full of seemingly everything else but what you want. How to fix that? Press your Control Key (lowest left key on your keyboard) and f at the same time. Depending on which browser you’re using, and you should be using Chrome, a little box up on the top right will open up. Type the word/s you’re looking for in that box and, voila! Every instance of your search term will show up, highlighted on the page. Cool huh? If the term isn’t on that page, you’ll see a 0/0 and a red search box. Try it on this page.
Here’s where the Control Key is:
It’s usually on the lower left but might be one key to the right on a laptop keyboard.
Example 2:
You open a document, could be from Word or a simple Text file, and you can’t find the word or phrase that you want. Ctrl/f again and a search menu opens up. Type in it and press enter, you’re home free. Click Find Next to get to the next location where your term shows up. Yes, it’s that simple.
The search box in Notepad. Remember to choose Up or Down, depending on where you are on the page.
TIP: You can use the same feature/shortcut in Word to find and replace words all through a document. Le’ts say you named your heroine ‘Sandy’ but want to change her name to ‘Abigail’. Search for Sandy, then type Abigail in the Replace line. Word will find every instance of Sandy and replace it with Abigail. (Notepad will do the same thing but not from the same menu. Under Edit, look for Replace and use that instead of Find.)
We’ll post about other keyboard shortcuts from time to time. If you know of some cool ones, let us know. That’s it for today, thanks for reading! Comments and questions are welcome but Likes on our Facebook page get immediate attention. Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
In this post we’re going to show you how to create a document that you can open on virtually any modern device with no special software. Since this document we’re going to create can be read on a phone, laptop, tablet or PC, etc., we are describing it as portable. While you can use it very easily on any of your devices, you will also be able to send it to any of your friends or relatives anywhere in the world and they will be able to open it also. Cool huh?
You may think that a PDF or a text file is universal, they aren’t. While Windows can open a plain text file by itself, it can’t open a PDF file without additional software. Your mobile device certainly can’t open a PDF file by itself and it probably can’t open a text file without some form of reader. That’s the problem we encountered when we were using our Blackberry Playbook. All of our password files were in ‘txt’ format, text files in other words. The Playbook, along with any Blackberry device, doesn’t have a default text reader.
What’s the magic bullet here? You’re looking at it right now, more or less. Every device that we can think of has a web browser built into it right from the factory. What kind of file does a browser open? A simple ‘htm or html’ file. That’s what we’re going to create today. If this sounds difficult, it’s not. We’re Computers Made Simple, remember, not Computers Made Complicated. Here we go:
1. To create or edit your new document, you’ll probably have to use your PC or laptop. Why? Because every Windows computer since time began has included the free Notepad accessory. It hasn’t changed much over the years, thankfully. On Windows 8, Microsoft has even put the icon/shortcut for Notepad down on your taskbar. It’s the one that looks like a blue scratchpad.
2. Open Notepad. You’ll see a blank white space with a cursor blinking up on the top left.
3. Highlight the following text, right click and choose Copy. Go back to Notepad, right click anywhere in the white area and choose Paste. This is the text that you will copy and then paste into Notepad:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
This is a truly portable document. Put your words in here, below the first body above and above the second body below.
</body>
</html>
4. Either press the Control key and s at the same time or click on file and choose ‘save’. A Windows menu will open. Down at the bottom of the menu you’ll see the words ‘Save as type’. Click on the far right of Text Documents (*.txt), you’ll see a little arrow icon there. Another choice, All Files, will pop down.
Make sure All Files is showing then make up a name for your new portable document.
5. Click on All Files and in the little box above it type ‘document.htm’ or ‘document.html’. The last three or four letters after the period could be htm or html, it doesn’t matter. The name of the file doesn’t matter either, just make sure you put a period after the name you choose as well as either htm or html.
6. Click Save and you’re done. Remember where you’ve saved this file, find it and double click on it. Your default browser will open and this is what you’ll see:
Note the the brackets and spare words are missing. Your browser knows to only show the words between the brackets.
7. Once you have the html/htm file saved, you can edit it in Notepad. Anything you type into it has to be between the opening ‘body’ and the closing ‘body’, right where ‘This is a truly portable document’ is now. Essentially, you can use this as a seed for any future portable documents that you might want to make.
Text files, and that’s basically what this is, are small. That’s the second advantage to all of this. A document created in Word is substantially larger than one created in Notepad. Whether it’s an .htm/.html file or a .txt file, it will be as small as a file can be. On a flash drive or a cell phone, it won’t take up much room at all.
Once you’ve written everything you want in the document, you can email it to yourself and retrieve it on any device that you’ve got linked to your email account. When you want to open it, your device will know what it is and automatically open it in your browser, no matter if you’re using Windows, Android or iOS or, in some cases, a Blackberry tablet or phone. Nothing special needs to be installed, just click and choose Open.
TIP: At this point, you will only be able to put words into this document, not photos or videos. These things can be put into an .html document of course, but we’re only talking about text here, words not pictures. They make things substantially more complicated.
There is one more step to all of this if you want to use a foreign language, in other words something other than English letters and numbers. We’ll get to that in our next post. Stay tuned!
That’s it for today, thanks for reading! Comments and questions are welcome but Likes on our Facebook page get immediate attention. Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
VHS ruled the home entertainment world for about two decades, from around 1980 up till 2000 or so. The switch from analog tape to digital video discs (DVDs) happened rapidly. Unfortunately many of us were left with hundreds of hours of VHS tapes, usually sitting in boxes in storage.
Getting the information from those tapes used to be a very laborious process. The tapes are analog as we said earlier. Analog data can only be transferred in real time, there are no files that can be copied and pasted as there are with digital data.
We’ve written about VHS transfers before. Here is a link to our original solution: Archive VHS Tapes Unfortunately the process listed in that post is very hands-on. We’ve recently found a simpler, somewhat faster answer to the analog to digital problem. Yes, the process is still done in real-time but it’s pretty much hands-free.
The Toshiba DVR630:
This is the front view of the DVR630. Tape player/recorder on the left, DVD player/recorder on the right.
Priced around $200.00, the DVR630 is one of very few DVD recorders that has a VHS tape player built into it. Memorex has one also, we hear it’s the same unit as the Toshiba, and there may be others. We chose the Toshiba based on the name and the online reviews.
The beauty of this particular machine is that it has an HDMI out port. Why is that important? This means that you can hook it up to your new HDTV with only one cable. The VHS image you’ll see on your screen certainly isn’t High Def but it’s as good as you can possibly get plus there’s only one cable to hook up. Most HDTVs have more than one HDMI port. If yours doesn’t have enough, you can buy an HDMI splitter for less than ten dollars. Here are the ports on the back:
The HDMI out is on the upper left side. Quick and easy; sound and picture all in one cable.
Transferring VHS tapes is a bit confusing to set up but once you’ve done it once, it’s basically a two second job the next time. Here are some of the steps you need to perform:
1. VHS to DVD or DVD to VHS? Yes, you can go both ways but VHS to DVD is the norm.
2. Quality of the recording. You can jam 8 hours of VHS tape on a DVD or just 2. Obviously the quality is better on the latter setting.
3. Once the recording has been completed, you must finalize the DVD before you can view it on another DVD player or on your computer. That process takes less than two minutes.
TIP: To save yourself time, record all of your tapes at the lowest quality, highest time per DVD setting. Why? Because once you get the data off of the VHS tape, you can scan it quickly on your computer or standalone DVD player. If you find something that you’d like to save in higher quality, you can re-record it later. Running through a VHS tape from start to finish takes a long time, even on fast-forward. The process is much faster on a DVD.
If you have a large number of VHS tapes, the whole recording process will take a month or more, broken up into six hour stretches. The beauty of the DVR630, aside from its HDMI out port, is that it stops recording once it has sensed that there is no image data for three seconds. If the VHS tape runs out, the DVD recording stops. All you have to do then is to finalize the DVD, switch the VHS tape to a new and insert a blank DVD and start over again. Let it run overnight, you can’t hurt anything by doing so.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading! Comments and questions are welcome but Likes on our Facebook page get immediate attention. Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
If you are one of the millions of people using WordPress on your website, here are two simple ways to make your installation more secure. One involves a plugin, the other is just common sense.
TIP: If you don’t know who is trying to get into your WordPress site, you’re in for a big surprise. Small or large, your site is most likely under attack from hackers 24/7.
Step 1:
By default, every WordPress has a user account under the name of ‘admin’. Your job is to get rid of that account entirely. Here are the steps you need to go through in order to do that.
1. You can’t remove the admin account until you create another account with admin privileges. That’s rule number one.
2. When you create another user, use a unique username that cannot be guessed by someone trying to log in to your site. In other words, create a username that has nothing to do with your name, your site’s name or the name of anyone who writes for the site. If all the site’s posts are by Francis and Francis is also the username of the admin account, a hacker has 50% of the information needed to get into your site.
3. Once you create a new user with admin privileges, delete the old admin username.
TIP: If the old admin had posts written under ‘admin’, make sure you rename the author of those posts before you delete the account or the posts might be lost forever. You can do that from the All Posts menu by choosing all posts by admin then selecting Edit under Bulk Actions then switching author to another username.
Step 2:
Download the WordFence plugin from Plugins, New. We’re not affiliated with WordFence but we’re very glad that it’s around. The fact that it’s free, at least in it’s basic form, is good too. Install WordFence, sign up for notices using an email that you check daily and you’re pretty much home free.
WordFence is free, simple to use and it will send notices to you every time someone logs in or is locked out.
Just so you know, we had some security concerns recently. Because of these concerns we went on a search for plugins that would help us lock down our site. WordFence came out on top. It’s free, too. There is a premium version but we find that the free one works fine for us.
Just after we installed WordFence, we received an email that someone had tried to log in to this site. How many times did they try? Twenty. After that WordFence blocked them. Since then, we’ve installed WordFence on every site we own. We’ve also limited the number of unsuccessful log in attempts to four, a reasonable number.
Protect your website now, before you lose it. It is possible for someone to gain control of your WordPress installation, locking you out in the process.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading! Comments and questions are welcome but Likes on our Facebook page get immediate attention. Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
