July 2007 Newsletter
Thanks to everyone who told me more about good and bad places to buy your PC things. I’ve updated the webpage, which you can read here: www.helpfulbooks.co.uk/goodandbad.htm
This month you get to read about putting digital photos on CD, getting organised, popup blockers and Linux. Oh, and I get a bit of a rest!
Mini-article – emailing digital photos from abroad
This month I get a bit of a rest! Here at The Helpful Book Company we’ve just acquired a new Editor. Claire is one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with (and I’ve worked with plenty) so she’ll be helping us get some more books published this year. She’s also a keen photographer and the first book she’s getting on with is “Digital Photography One Step at a Time”. More on that next month but for now, here’s an article she originally wrote to help a friend of hers:
Hi Mike, hope you arrived safe and sound in Brazil! As promised, here’s a reminder of what you do to attach a photo to an email if you’re in an internet cafe.
On your laptop you need to save a copy of each photo to resize and give it an obvious name so you can find it again. To be on the safe side, shrink it, save it and check the file size – you want it no more than 1 MB ideally. Then you can stick your pictures onto a CD.
When you get to the internet cafe you need to make sure they have usable CD drives – in India internet places generally didn’t like you putting anything external in their machines in case of passing viruses on, but that might not be the case everywhere.
When you put the CD in it’ll probably pop up with a window asking you what you want to do with the files on the disk – you can ignore or close this window. Open your email account in the normal way. I’ve not used Talk Talk’s webmail before, but as far as I know, they’re all pretty much the same – when you create a new message, there’ll be an option saying “attach” or “add attachment” or something along those lines, and will probably have an icon of a paperclip.
When you select “Attach”, you might get option of what type of file you’re attaching – I’d usually just go for “attach file”. You’ll then probably get an option to “Browse” or “Browse for files” – when you select, you’ll get to a window that’s like Windows Explorer, where you can navigate through all the files on the computer. Look for the CD Drive – it’ll probably be labelled “D:” or “E:” and will probably have an icon of a CD.
Find the picture you want, and then select “attach” (or “upload” or something along those lines). It’ll take a while to think about it – depending on the size of the file and the speed of the connection, this could be a few minutes so don’t worry if it seems to be taking ages!
Once it’s finished uploading/attaching, you might get the option of attaching other photos, which you do in the same way, but I wouldn’t recommend attaching any more than 1 MB worth to any single email, so you might have to send a few separate emails. Most pcs and internet connections can cope with sending/receiving more, but to be sure, 1 MB is your limit. Hotmail for one throws a wobbly above this amount.
You’ll probably get an option to “finish attaching files” or “return to message” or even just “OK” – select that and you’ll return to your message, which you can write and send as normal.
Hope you get everything sorted out. Have you learnt the Portuguese for “I want an air conditioning system installing please” yet?
Thanks Claire!
Download of the month – Organiser
You can get expensive programs to help you stay organised – for example Outlook (not Outlook Express). They let you schedule work, create a to-do list and make notes, all tied together in one project. They’re useful if you organise lots of things at work or even if you’re doing a big project at home (eg adding an extension or comepletely redecorating the house). Normally they’re a bit pricy but here’s one that’s you don’t have to pay for. It’s not as powerful as the top-end ones but it’ll handle the basics. You can download it from:www.konradp.com/products/organizer
Reader’s Question
How do I reset the count in my popup blocker?
This is a feature of the google popup blocker, not the one that comes with Windows. And handily, google have a page telling you exactly how to do it: www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?answer=9161&topic=116
Word to the Wise – Linux
Linux is an operating system – alternative to Windows. There are several versions of it around… and some of them are free. It can’t directly run Windows programs but it can open files created in Windows.
Right, that’s it for this month. Next month there’ll be a bit more about what Claire’s up to…
Thanks
Tim Wakeling
All the above © Tim Wakeling 2007