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Riding Shotgun with Rick

Yelp – Real world reviews

On my most recent travels, I discovered yet another great travel web site that I will be using every time I travel. The site’s name is Yelp. Yelp bills themselves as a site of Real People. Real Reviews. Yelp reviewers review everything from restaurants to schools to religious organizations. As their slogan describes, anyone can write a review about any service. I think the service works so well because it works like the feedback on eBay. Everyone has an opinion about everything, but after reading a dozen or so reviews for whatever topic (I used it for finding good restaurants) you can easily titrate the advice into something usable for you.

Why print pictures at home?

We talk about this topic many times here at HelpMeRick.com, but too few people are reaping the benefits (and cost savings) of printing their digital photos via a print shop instead of at home. Printing pictures at home costs a lot of money and takes up way too much time. And unless you spring for the more expensive printers, inks, and paper, the results of home printing are sub-par at best.

Vacation from technology

I just disembarked from a 7 day cruise to Alaska with my family. The scenery was fantastic, the weather was unbelievable, the food was edible, but the availability of technology was virtually absent. The cruise line brochure mentioned that Internet would be available online, but it didn’t say that it would be a $1.00 per minute! And it didn’t mention that an old-fashioned dial-up connection would be faster than the connection provided.

After spending about $6.00 and realizing that resistance was futile, I stored my laptop and didn’t pull it out until today when we left the ship.

I already knew that cell service would be unavailable on the high seas, but I didn’t realize that my cell provider did not cover Alaska.

I no longer recommend Ubuntu or Macintosh

If I keep recommending Linux/Ubuntu and Apple Macintosh to my customers, I will have to find another line of work.

Admittedly, I came to the Linux table very late (just over a year now) and have only been luke warm to Macintosh over the years. Windows Vista put me over the edge last year, and I started looking seriously at other operating systems. What I found in both Ubuntu and Mac OSX was an extremely stable, secure, easy-to-use operating system. I estimate that over the past 18 months or so, I have recommended and help setup more than 2 dozen Apple computers or Linux computers that I either installed Ubuntu on or were bought new.

“If it is free, it must not be any good.”

This statement was uttered by an imbecile. A customer of mine told me last week that he heard this quote from a tech person from some company after a discussion of AVG Free.

The week before this customer’s computer was almost crippling slow primarily because it had one of the newer versions of Norton Internet Security installed. After taking Norton off the system (approximately 20-25 minutes to do so) and adding AVG, the system sped up by at least 50%.

You all know that story, however, I want to instead focus on the “free is inferior” statement. My first rebuttal is Google. Google is free and arguably one of the most useful offerings to mankind in the last 30 years. Is Google inferior?

Space – The Final Frontier

Saturn storm 

I couldn’t resist the title. Red, one of our long time supporters here in Colorado, told us recently about a site that lets you look through telescopes from around the world right from your computer screen. The site is called simply Space.com.

Thanks Red. The photo I chose from their site is of a storm on Saturn.

Zoho now supports Yahoo or Google accounts

Zoho.com If you haven’t had a chance yet to try out the Zoho.com online productivity applications and you have a Yahoo or Google account or email address, you can now use that account information to sign-in to any of the Zoho.com applications. This new feature from Zoho gives literally millions of computer users the opportunity to see what online applications are all about without going through any new sign-up process.

Use Disposable Email Addresses to thwart spam

In our monthly computer user group today, the discussion some how made its way to disposable email addresses. Many web sites offer free, disposable email addresses you can create for one time use to sign up for a temporary web services, or make an inquiry to a web site that you don’t want to have your real email address. Beyond anonymity, using a disposable email address will reduce the amount of spam that comes into your real email inbox.

3 Important Steps to practice when confronted with a computer problem

Throughout my week I receive many exasperated calls from computer users and encounter flustered users when I visit their home or office. In the almost 13 years that I’ve been helping people with their computers, I have found that many problems can be resolved quickly IF the following three steps are practiced:

Using the power of time, people and the Internet

I Stumbled on this extremely interesting video the other day answering the questions, “How do people find the time?”

The speaker explains how many hours are spent watching TV and how just carving 10% of that time can harness tremendous amounts of brain power to work together on the web. The more I thought about the video, the more I was amazed so I wanted to share it with you.

Click here to watch the video and then come back here and leave me a comment about your thoughts on the subject.