Rick Answers his Email Videocast – 053

The summer has kept me busy and I let a few too many question stack up (remember that you can make a small donation when asking your question to get priority). I answered all the questions you asked the last 2 weeks in these two videos. The first video contains questions from Doris, Henry, Andrew, Jean, John, Rae Ann, Craig, Janet, Maurice, Leo, Ryan, Shirley, Jason, Donna, Jeannie, Dave, and Scott. They asked questions about...

Control Photo Size in Email Attachments with Picas...

For you Picasa users, this quick tip shows how to control the size of the photos that you attach and send via email using Picasa. The default settings might not be to your liking, so leanring how to contol the size of your photos can let you get the results you want. If you aren’t using Picasa to manage your digital photos yet, I recommend reading some of my other tips here at HelpMeRick.com to get up to speed. Google...

How to attach iPhoto images to Gmail & Yahoo ...

Currently, iPhoto only lets you send photos via email from within iPhoto if you use the Apple Mail program. For web based email users like Gmail, HotMail or Yahoo email, follow the easy steps in this tip. Start a new email as normal in your Gmail, HotMail, Yahoo mail, etc. Complete the address, subject, and body of the message as normal as well. Look for and click the Attach Files option The Select Files screen will...

Digital Readers and E-books

Amazon released their version of a digital reader, called the Kindle, in late 2007. It received a lot of attention at the time, but not as much as its new version released this spring. Amazon states that more than 285,000 books are available for download and purchase, 50,000 audio books, and there are many magazine and newspaper articles also available for download (including my blog). A full text book can be downloaded in...

Digital Photography School – Digital Photogr...

I stumbled on this fantastic web site the other day and wanted to share it with you. Tons of great tips for digital photographers of all abilities. Check it out! Digital Photography School – Digital Photography Tips for You.

2 laptop suggestions for college students

Millions of high schoolers will be graduating soon and will be leaving for their respective campuses (campii?) at the end of the summer. These students will more than likely go to college with a computer…probably a laptop. I would like to suggest two possible laptops ideas for these students. Both of my ideas involve good systems that will allow college kids to word process, chat, email, listen to music, watch...

CleVR – Free and easy panoramic photo stitch...

Web 2.0 (using the Internet to do work instead of your computer) truly gets more powerful every day. CleVR is a free online application (actually uses the Adobe AIR platform) that lets you upload digital photos and then it automatically stitches them together into a panorama format. And it does it quickly! I did the one shown here in just a few moments. It also automatically creates an interactive version of your panorama...

Digital Photography Basics – February 2009

Adam Cochran ran our Digital Photography Special Interest Group (DPSIG) for almost six years and all that great information he shared during that time is archived here at HelpMeRick.com. Make sure to use that information. In today’s class we covered the basics about digital photography divided into three quick, hard hitting segments: Using the camera Transferring the images Organizing and using the images (including...

Windows 7 – First Impressions

I just finished installing the Windows 7 Beta version released by Microsoft on Friday. I installed it on my Toshiba Intel dual-core processor with 4 GB of RAM. It was running Windows Vista which took more than 4 minutes to fully boot (I consider the boot up process to be finished when the hard drive stops spinning and I don’t have to compete with a still booting computer to do what I want to do), and running any...

Rick answers his email Videocast – 027

A great question this week about how to fill out a paper form using your computer. Many other good questions as well including my answer to a writer who downloaded an illegal copy of Photoshop. This week, the Videocast is brought to you by questions from: Terry, Fern, Marcia, Sudarshin, Richard, Gayle, Kim, Bernie, Bill, Azumah, Jack, and Mike. ...

Another dead hard drive

External hard drives are spacious, cheap and relatively easy to use, but… I resisted talking about backup this early in the year, but a phone conversation I had today illustrated my philosophy about backup perfectly. The gentleman I spoke with suffered an external hard drive failure, and he used it as the sole storage of his digital photos. Once again, my heart sank with his story of woe. He didn’t want to spend...

What do you really do with your computer?

In my travels, it seems that most home computer users primarily use email. I would love to see 100-200 comments attached to this short article so you can tell me what you use your computer for from day-to-day. You don’t have to be statistically accurate or detailed, I’m just curious and this topic is too broad and detailed for a poll. Here’s how I use my main computer: Internet (web browsing, pay bills, web...

Acer Aspire One Netbook

Today, I had my first opportunity to get some hands-on time with Acer’s entry into the netbook craze, the Acer Aspire One. The young lady I helped bought a blue Aspire One on Black Friday for just over $300. Sporting a 120GB hard drive, an extremely nice 8.9″ screen, 1 GB of RAM, and Windows XP, this little unit was very impressive to look at and use. After some discussion with me, she decided that she...

Rick’s Answers his email Videocast – 0...

I answer questions about Palm handheld computers, custom XP & Ubuntu computers, the AVG update outage (relax, you are protected), resizing photos for email, freeing up disk space and more. This episode is brought to you by: Gail, Gene, Salma, Jason, Jean, Elizabeth, Greg, Rajesh, Laurie, J, and Joe. Oh, and I also reveal who I voted for in Tuesday’s presidential election…but you have to watch! ...

How can I increase traffic to my site?

What a week! For some reason, my scheduling went a little awry this week and made for some long days. In addition to my scheduling problems, however, I could have saved a ton of time (thus the 3 day hiatus of new posts) and my clients could have saved a lot of money if they were more diligent about backing up their data and keeping track of passwords and software. This web site is exactly the same age as my...