I tried, but just couldn’t come up with a legitimate use for the website I’m offering you today.  Its only redeeming feature is that it is fun to play with, and interesting.  You can choose from a large variety of facial features and make a face.  Maybe you can create someone that you know!

That’s a face that I created.  Give it a try at http://flashface.ctapt.de.

I suppose if you were really good at it, you could create a face of someone you know, or someone that is famous.  There are options for hair, head shape, eyes, eyebrows, and lots more.  The site is totally free, of course, and it allows you to save your creations or print them.

Can you think of any useful purpose for this?  Your comments are welcome below.

Some websites are just plain hard to read.  It might be that the background color is dark and the text is too dark, so there is not enough contrast.  Or maybe the background is actually an image, and it makes the text difficult to see.  Or it could be that the font is just too small.

Whatever the reason…if you find yourself having a hard time reading the words on a website, remember this: it’s not your fault (at least in most cases).

When a website is created, it is the responsibility of the website designer to make the site easily readable by anyone who might visit the site.  If it’s not easy to read, that’s who you blame.

But what if you are at a website that you actually need to read?  It’s nice to know who’s at fault, but that doesn’t help you with being able to read the information.

Here’s a trick you can try:  Hold down the Ctrl key, and tap the letter “a”.  What this does is highlight everything on the page, so the text usually becomes more visible.

Let’s try an example.  Here’s a link to one of the most poorly-designed websites ever: Cherokee Rose Border Collies.  These people may be great with dogs, but they should hire someone to do their website.

Anyway, if you look down the left side you might be able to see that there is some black text there.  It’s difficult to see because of the background image.  Click Ctrl + A, and see what happens.  The website design remains completely awful, but at least you can read the words if you need to.

(Side note: if you have a website that needs to be found on Google by your prospective customers, contact me.)

This week’s video is comedian Tim Hawkins talking about the creepiness of children’s bedtime prayers:

]]> http://computertutorflorida.com/2010/03/reading-websites-that-are-hard-to-read/feed/ 2 http://computertutorflorida.com/2010/02/works-just-like-photoshop/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=works-just-like-photoshop http://computertutorflorida.com/2010/02/works-just-like-photoshop/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:00:51 +0000 Scott Johnson http://computertutorflorida.com/?p=984 Read more »

Undoubtedly, Photoshop is just about the best program there is for working with digital images.  It is really the standard application that is used by people all over the world – professionals and amateurs alike.

However, using Photoshop isn’t always practical.  What if you happen to be on a computer that doesn’t have Photoshop installed? What if you don’t want to pay the exorbitant price that Adobe charges for it, or maybe your computer doesn’t have the resources to handle running it.  A good example would be the new netbooks – they have very little storage space and not much memory.

If you find yourself in any of those situations, but still need to edit a photo, you can – with a program that is completely web-based, so no software has to be purchased or installed.  It’s an online photo editor called pixlr.  Check it out at http://www.pixlr.com/app.

You need to have Flash installed (you probably already do anyway).  If you have never used Photoshop, you will have a bit of a learning curve (I can help with that). If you have experience with Photoshop, the interface will look very familiar:

Not all of the menu items are in exactly the same place as they are in Photoshop, but it’s close.  The big advantage is that it’s free to use, and it’s available on any computer that has an internet connection.

This week’s video: the best Super Bowl commercial this year.  Betty White is great.

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My website had gotten old, outdated and clumsy.  I kept putting off overhauling it because I knew it would be a chore, but I also knew it would be worth it.  This week, I made the plunge.

I am now using a WordPress theme as a template for my site overall, so it’s much easier for me to update, and it’s also easier for website visitors to navigate.  Now, when someone comes to my site, the first thing they see is my most recent blog entry.  Of course, that means that those of you that bookmarked by blog will have to change that, since the previous blog page no longer exists.

Now I have the big task of going back through all of my old blog posts and putting each into one or more categories.  That will happen over the next several weeks.

New for you: if you want to look up an old blog post, just type a key word in the search bar at the top right side of the page, and you can get to that post pretty quickly.

Sorry if I bored you with this information – future posts will certainly be something a little more practical!

By this time, just about everyone knows about Craigslist. It’s the biggest online classified service available anywhere, and it’s almost completely free.

Craigslist was started in 1995 by Craig Newmark, and all he really wanted to make was an email distribution list for himself and some friends, describing some of the local events going on in San Francisco. Since that time, it has exploded in popularity and is currently the 11th most-visited website in the US. Craigslist has classified ads covering 700 cities in 70 different countries.

The problem with Craigslist is that it is stuck in the past. The website itself has not been modified or updated since it was first created back in the 1990s. Let’s say you live in Atlanta, and you want to buy a used car – a Honda. Here is what you have to do in order to find one on Craigslist:

- Go to www.craigslist.org
- Look in the list of states and find Georgia – click it
- Look in the list of Georgia cities, find Atlanta – click it
- Find the “For Sale” section, find “cars & trucks” – click it
- Now you are looking at the list of ad titles – to see one, click to open the ad (on this screen, you can type to search “honda civic” and see only ads containing those words)

You can only look at one ad at a time. To look at another one, click Back and open the next one. And you can only see pictures by opening that ad – there are no thumbnail images to browse.

AND – you can only search one city at a time. If you want to look in a nearby city (or any other city for that matter) you have to go back to the first page of the site, find the state, and find the city.

It’s a very cumbersome and outdated way to search for something you want. Craig Newmark doesn’t care and has no plans to update it.

That’s okay – someone has created an easier way to search Craigslist.

When you visit Craiglook.com, you will see that the interface is much more intuitive. Right on the front page of the site, you can type in what you are looking for, and the city where you want to find it. Then click Search. Super simple!

The results that come back are also much more informative than just an ad title. Here is what came back from a search for “Honda Civic” in Atlanta (click to see full size):

You get to see a thumbnail image (if the ad has a picture), when it was posted, the phone number to call, a link to send an email to the owner of the car, or to forward the ad on to someone, and even a partial description. Of course, if you are interested, you can click to see the full ad.

Note – this is not a different classified ad site. These are the actual ads currently on Craigslist, but they have been rearranged and displayed on this site in a much more user-friendly manner. Thanks, Craiglook!

Some people cry at movies if they are particularly sad or emotional. This woman cried at the end of Star Wars (and other films). Note – before you assume he’s a jerk for recording her, read the FAQ section on their website.

In the past, I have written about the value of being able to send a screenshot. A screenshot is just a picture of your screen, and many times it tells me what is going on or what problem you might be having. It’s much better than just telling me, “My email won’t work” – that could mean a million different things.

Now there’s a free service that is even better (and I know my friend Lynn, owner of a bed and breakfast in Maine, is going to want to try it out!). With this service, you don’t just send a picture of your screen – you send an actual video of it. The service is called Show Me What’s Wrong.

Here’s how it works:

You go to this website: http://tinyurl.com/yj6kbm2 (you can bookmark it if you want)

At that site, you will see a place to enter your full name, and a button that says “Start Recording”. When you push that button, you will see some big numbers on your screen counting down 3 – 2 – 1 and then you are recording whatever happens on your screen. If what you are trying to show me has to do with going to a website, open a new browser window to do that.

You get 5 minutes of recording time, so you can click on things, make error messages pop up, open programs, whatever you feel demonstrates whatever problem your computer is having. You can even include audio – just connect a microphone to your computer, and you can talk while you are recording the screen. This way you can explain the problem verbally while showing it visually.

When you are finished, just click the big red STOP sign in the lower right corner. When you do that, the recording stops, and the video is processed and sent to me by email. It couldn’t be any easier!

Keep in mind a couple of things:

1. When I get this video, all I receive is your name and the video itself. Don’t assume I know your email address, even if we have communicated by email in the past. In the “Name” field, you can type your first and last name, and your email address. At least I can then reply to you.

2. I wish I could invite everyone to just send me your screen videos and I will diagnose and fix your problem, but there are not enough hours in the day to do that as a free service. I am available for hire though! You can buy an hour of my time and then use it in chunks whenever you need help – it doesn’t necessarily have to be for a PC Tuneup.

This week’s video: How would you react if you thought a spider was crawling on you? Maybe like these people did:

Last week we went over how to download YouTube videos to your computer. It’s really pretty simple.

What if you want to take those videos and burn them to a DVD, so that you can play them on any DVD player? That’s easy, with DVD Flick.

First step is to go to www.DVDFlick.net and download the free software:

It’s a simple installation and it is completely free. Once it is installed, run the program. You will see an option to “Add title”. When you click this, you need to navigate to wherever your video is stored on your computer and select that video to add. You can keep adding videos to this project, and there is a bar on the left side of the program window that will keep track of how much space you have used until the DVD will be full.

Once you have added the videos you want on the DVD, you can actually just click “Create DVD” to let the burn process begin.

However – if you want to get fancy, click on “Menu settings” and choose a nice background image for your DVD menu screen.

One word of warning – the process takes a while. A 10-minute video will take about 30 minutes to burn to a DVD. If you are burning a lot of video to disc, get it started just before going to bed and let it work overnight.

I would also recommend doing a short video first as a test, to make sure the process goes as expected. If you have any questions about how to use DVD Flick, they have a user forum here.

This week’s video is the brief story of a kid with a problem. He’s stuck behind the couch.

(Welcome! I publish a new computer tip every Monday – if you want to subscribe by email, just enter your email address in the subscription box on the right.)

YouTube has millions of videos available, and a ton more are being added every day. In addition to the stupid ones (of which there are quite a few), there are many that are entertaining, informative, even educational.

What if you’re watching a video on YouTube, and you want to download that video to your computer for your own archives? You can look for a “Download” button, but you won’t find one. Youtube doesn’t want to make it easy for you to save videos to your computer, because they would rather have you come back to their website (and see their ads) whenever you want to view one.

Yet, thanks to a free service, downloading a YouTube video is pretty easy. Let’s walk through it.

Let’s say you’re watching the Annoying Orange video. Watch the video on the YouTube site (here), and then of course you will see why most people would want to download that one and save it. Okay, maybe not, but it will work as an example for us anyway.

When you are watching that video on the YouTube site, you can look up at the top of the screen at the address bar and you will see the URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL_qGMfbtAk

If you click once on the address, it will highlight the whole line in blue. Then click one more time, right after the “y” in “youtube”. If you don’t click in exactly the right place, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the cursor to immediately after the “y”:

When the cursor is in the right place, just hit Backspace one time to erase the “y” and type the number 3. So you just replaced the “y” with a “3″.

Now hit Enter on the keyboard. You will see a screen that offers to download the video to your computer – you just need to choose which format you prefer (.mp4 or .flv). In most cases you will probably want .mp4.

When you click that link, you will have the option to save the file to your computer. If you plan to download more than a few videos, it would be a good idea to create a special folder for just that.

This week’s video is a foreign commercial for caviar (it’s not actually caviar, since the product is spelled “kaviar”). This baby has a unique way of showing that he really likes the taste.

Some fun today – found a website that has a large collection (over 100,000) of old print advertisements (www.vintageadbrowser.com).

I found a few that I thought were interesting (you can click for full size):

My question on this one is, what can you do with a 10 mb hard drive?

Wonder how many people today know that MasterCard used to be Master Charge?

Back in 1905, whenever ladies were thirsty, weary or despondent, they could just have a Coke!

This week’s video: this guy has some sick friends:

Has this ever happened to you? You are looking at a popular news website, and you see an article that looks interesting. You click on the article to read it, but then you only see the first few lines. To read the rest, you have to purchase a paid subscription. You really don’t want to buy a subscription just to read that one article.

For some sites, there is a way around that – thanks to Google.

To show you how to do this, I will use the Wall Street Journal as an example.

Let’s say I go to the online version of the Journal (here). I see an interesting article on earnings reports. But when my mouse goes to click on it, a little window pops up that says this article is only available to subscribers. However, I can read a “preview”:

When I click to read the preview, I only see the first couple of paragraphs:

Here’s how I can read the whole article. First, highlight the title of the article and click Ctrl + C to copy it.

Then, go to Google and put your cursor in the search bar. Click Ctrl + V to paste it, and click the Search button. When the Google search results come up, you will be pleasantly surprised to see that the article you wanted to read is right there at the top of the list (in this case, it was the first 2 results):

When you click on that title from Google, you will see the entire article, in all its financial splendor, right there on the Wall Street Journal website.

The Wall Street Journal is completely aware of this procedure, so don’t feel like you’re scamming them by reading their articles for free. They know that the articles show up in the Google search results, and they want it that way because of Google’s value to their website. They could turn this off at any time (but they probably won’t).

Practically speaking, if you find yourself using this workaround regularly to read all of the paid articles on a website, you might find it a lot easier to just pay for a subscription. That’s up to you.

This week’s video is a commercial that made me chuckle: