We did a video just now that we’ve put on Youtube. It’s all about inserting a photo (or video clip) into a video. That seems easy but we show you how to keep the soundtrack from the video constant throughout, including the section where the photo is.
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We’ll do more videos on Windows Movie Maker in the future, including one on how to do this with the current version of WMM. We used an older version of Movie Maker, version 2.6, that you can download here: Windows Movie Maker 2.6 (came with Vista but you can install it on Windows 7 or 8.1. It’s free, too.
Over the last little while, more and more cable/satellite subscribers have been cutting the cable. In other words, these folks have unsubscribed from their local cable company or satellite provider, mainly to save money. Since almost all of us have relatively fast Internet coming into our homes, people have found that there are many other entertainment sources out there, some free and some available for a small monthly fee. Today we’ll examine some hardware that will help make your transition from cable-TV junkie to streaming entertainment aficionado.
If you own an HDTV (high definition television), you almost certainly have one with an HDMI port. All recent HDTV sets have them. These ports open up a completely new streaming world for you, one that you can take advantage of for very little money. There are two gadgets that we’re interested in today but you can get the same kinds apps that these two offer on other hardware. These alternatives are substantially more expensive, however. All of this technology will turn your HDTV into what could be termed a Smart-TV, one that allows you to watch old-fashioned TV via cable/satellite or OTA (over the air with an antenna) as well as streaming offerings such as Netflix, Hulu, etc.
If you’ve never tried any of these streaming services, you really don’t have to spend a lot of money to test them. The two bits of technology that we’re interested in right now are the Chromecast from Google and the Streaming Stick from a company named Roku. While you could spend hundreds of dollars or more for a Smart TV that does all of this in one package, the cost of entry with either of our two suggestions is much, much less. The Chromecast retails for $35.00 in the United States, slightly higher in Canada, while the Roku cost $49.95 ($59.95 in Canada). It seems to us that either of these two gadgets would be a terrific way to test the waters, at least as far as online streaming goes.
This is what the Chromecast looks like:
Looks like a USB stick, doesn’t it?
And now for the Roku product:
The Streaming Stick from Roku comes with a remote, something the Chromecast doesn’t really need.
The Chromecast is available now, March 2014, while the Roku Streaming Stick won’t be available until April. The main difference between the two devices has to do with the availability of a remote control with the Streaming Stick while the Chromecast uses an Android or iOS app on your mobile device as a controller. Each product has different features and specs so you’ll have to figure out which one fits your needs but we think the low prices are a great way to enter the new world of streaming entertainment over the Internet.
Streaming Basics:
Here’s a link to the Roku site which gives you a rundown on the various types of channels available: Roku Channels
Keep in mind that while many are premium channels, some are free. Additionally, some of the sports packages, for example, have preview periods where you can check out the games at no charge. Here are some of the channels that Chromecast offers:
The Chromecast lineup is small but you have the additional ability to play files from your computer, something the Roku gadget doesn’t offer.
Both Google and Roku offer Netflix, as does every other streaming console, TV or Smart DVD player. Beyond that, you’ll have to compare the packages provided with each device. Since these things are all digital, however, there is always the possibility that the channels could change in the future. Updating the firmware, basically the part that is the brain, is quick and easy, substantially faster than any of Windows updates. If you want to test things out, get one of these gadgets and try some of the free channels, Youtube or Vevo, for instance. Heck, you can even get a free month of all-you-can-watch entertainment with Netflix. For the relatively small price of this new technology, you’d be surprised at how much entertainment you can get for little or no money.
TIP: Streaming, obviously, involves a LOT of bandwidth. Before you can think about watching something on Netflix, you’ll have to consider two things. The first is the speed of your connection. We’ve got a 5Mbps connection here and everything works perfectly. The second consideration is your data cap. We have unlimited Internet but some of you may have caps of fifty gigabytes or less. For an average home, you’d really need about three hundred gigabytes of data a month, unlimited is preferred. Check all of this carefully before springing for any of the ‘smart’ products.
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We’ll get right to the point of today’s post. Here’s an example of a bad and very dangerous email:
We expect that you’d recognize this as fraudulent. We hope you would anyway.
A credit card approval in sixty seconds, supposedly from First Premier Bank. A telltale clue is the address up on the top left. Do you think the First Premier Bank would use ‘edanasupermoistnep.com’ as their email address? Apparently, some people do, otherwise criminals wouldn’t bother sending out millions of these junk emails. If only one half of one half of a percent even answers one of these emails, the mission would be successful.
Here’s more:
Look down on the lower left to see where this link actually takes you.
The link in the email does NOT take you to First Premier Bank. Additionally, although the bank’s address in South Dakota seems to be correct, the Texas address isn’t. It’s a well known source for this and other suspicious emails. If you received an email like this one, you’d delete it right? We hope you would. If your credit isn’t that good, however, the attraction of a ‘Bad Credit’ card might be very attractive. Unfortunately, after a bit of digging, we discovered that a First Premier Credit card is the last credit card you’d want. With interest rates up to 79%, you’d almost be better off borrowing from a loanshark.
We did not click on any of the links here, obviously. It was a simple matter to block further emails from this address, at least it was on hotmail/live/outlook. We suggest you do the same.
Here’s an example of a real email from a bank.
This is a real email from one of our banks. Still, there are things to look out for in it.
We’re in Canada and we deal with several banks here. The Royal Bank is one of the largest banks in the world so we feel pretty safe doing some of our online banking with them. This email is simply a notification that our electronic statements are ready to be viewed online. No big deal, right? How do we know that this is a real, and safe, email? Well, it contains a real name, for one. The account numbers (blacked out) match ours and, as we said before, we actually have accounts with this bank.
Still, there are some things in this email that we should warn you about, primarily the contact telephone numbers. While the numbers shown in this email are virtually 100% safe, don’t use them to contact the bank. Why? Because sometimes hackers have access to some of your information but not all of it. Let’s say that someone knew we dealt with the Royal Bank and somehow obtained the last four digits of our account numbers. How could they do that? Maybe from a slip of paper blowing in the wind on garbage day, for one.
If this person needed the rest of our information, it wouldn’t take too much time to draw up an email like this and zip it off to us, complete with phone numbers that would be answered by that person. If you want to contact your bank, how would you find the real number? Easy. The number is on your bank statement, on your credit card and your debit card as well as on your cheques, at least in some cases. Additionally, make sure that you type in the url of the bank’s site, don’t trust the link. We are pretty sure that this email is completely safe but you never know, right? Why not take the extra bit of time to look up both the phone numbers and bank url yourself? If you get in the habit of doing that every time you contact one of your financial institutions, you’ll be well on your way to keeping your identity and your assets safe.
What have we learned? Mainly that you have to be suspicious of just about everything.
1. An email from your bank should have your name either in the body or in the subject line. Emails from Paypal, for instance, always have your name in the subject line. This simple precaution has virtually wiped out phishing emails attempting to steal your Paypal credentials.
2. Don’t click on links or phone the numbers in these emails, even if you are sure that the email is safe. Enter the bank’s URL yourself. Look for the bank’s telephone number in a bank statement, in the phone book or on your credit/debit card.
3. If you don’t deal with the bank that supposedly sent you the email, delete it. Most banks don’t use email to contact their customers except for simple statement notifications similar to the one we showed you above.
4. Above all, if a bank or credit card company has found ‘unusual activity’ surrounding any of your accounts, don’t you think they’d call you on the telephone? Think about it. Stay safe.
Thanks for reading! We’ll continue this series over the next few posts. We will share more thoughts and links on our Facebook page. Here is the link to it:Computers Made Simple on Facebook.
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Just this morning we read that 100% of attacks on computers are criminal in nature. What does that mean? Simply that hackers aren’t out just to have fun, they are actively trying to steal your personal information. It’s not only personal computers that are under attack. Read this story about how a major Canadian bank was scammed out of $87,000.00: Bank of Montreal Gets Scammed Once you read the story, you’ll see how all of this started. The customer’s email account, which had been hacked, was used to initiate the process.
We’ve written posts about how you can protect your email account(s). Here’s a link that shows some of them: Email Password Protection Make sure you read as much as you can about using a strong password as well as how to enable two-step authentication. For that matter, make sure you use multi-level authentication for virtually everything you do online. Most email providers as well as banks, social networks and financial institutions already require this. Make sure you take advantage of it.
Enough preamble, let’s get to a new type of scam that you might fall prey to. This involves Google Maps. Bear with us while we explain how it works:
1. If you run a business, you can put your location and business information right there on the Google map of your city, complete with your street address, your logo and your phone number. This is where the danger is, that phone number.
2. Hackers have found a way to install fake telephone numbers in Google Maps. Let’s say you’re looking for a bank branch in another city. It’s easy to check a bank’s name, just type it in and you’ll immediately see little flags all over the map. This works for anything, restaurants, hardware stores, police stations, etc. Here’s an example of the information you might see:
There’s the bank’s number. Wait, is it a real number or a scammer’s number?
3. Before you call the Citibank number, it might be a good idea to check the number somewhere else, let’s say on Citibank’s real website. Use the map for the location but NOT for anything else. This doesn’t apply only to banks. Here’s a link to the story explains the exploit and how several people thought they were calling the FBI but were really calling a hacker, this time an honest one:
These are a few things to watch out for when you’re online. In our next post, we’ll get into a bit more depth on these scams and how you can protect yourself from them. Stay tuned. In the meantime, ask questions or comment below or on our Facebook page. Here is the link to it:Computers Made Simple on Facebook.
Thanks for reading!
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Facebook has been pressing us to boost or promote every post we make on our page. Here is the link to it: Computers Made Simple on Facebook. We don’t post too often, only if we have something to share. The only reason we have the Facebook page is because our posts about Facebook seem to be the most popular. The problem is that Facebook doesn’t share every post we make. They would love for us to promote our Facebook page by paying them money to boost the things that we post. Since Computers Made Simple is primarily a goodwill site, we won’t pay to promote anything. But there is a way for our followers to receive notices about everything we share on our Facebook page. Here’s how to do it:
1. For any Facebook page that you have ‘liked’, either hover over their name in a recent post or go right to their page. What you’re looking for in either case is the word ‘Liked’ with a check mark beside it. Like this:
Look for the checked Liked icon.
2. Hover over the word Liked and a menu will pop down. Here it is:
On the menu that pops down, click on the words Get Notifications.
3. What you want to see is a check mark beside the words ‘Get Notifications’. This is how it should look:
Make sure Get Notifications is checked.
Now all of the items that our page or any other page you follow will show up on your timeline. Some pages share a lot, some not so much. We’re in the latter category so feel free to like our page. We’ll be glad you did! By the way, if a page posts too many updates simply reverse the procedure to receive fewer notifications.
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a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
