Most of us have taken some sort of Quiz on the internet whether it’s on Facebook or some other website. These quizzes include IQ tests, biological age, personality tests, and scads more. They seem harmless enough, but there are some things you need to be aware of.

The majority of web quizzes are created by companies so that they can collect information about you. That information they collect via quizzes are valuable to advertisers seeking to connect with you. They use this information to place targeted advertisements in front of you. Some display these ads while you are taking the quiz. Others will send you junk e-mail. Some will try and install spyware on your computer that will display ads on your computer. And others will try and hijack your web browser.

Another tactic is to let you take the quiz. Then, before you can see the results, you are shown a series of offers. You can skip each offer, but you can’t just skip all offers. You have to wait for each one to load and then skip it. One report stated that after skipping 105 offers, they gave up without seeing the results of the quiz. This isn’t dangerous to your computer, your data, or your identity, but it sure is annoying and what a waste of time.

Instead of inundating you with offers at the end of the quiz, some websites will say you have to pay a fee to see the results. Some even try to charge monthly fees.

While most quizzes on Facebook are safe, some quizzes advertised on Facebook aren’t. A quiz advertized on Facebook may actually go to a website other than Facebook. If you start a quiz, make sure it’s on Facebook’s website.

Don’t let a quiz website install any software on your computer and don’t give them your credit card number. You don’t really know who’s on the other end. Could be anyone in any country.

Share on Facebook

If you are active on Facebook, you may get quite a few e-mails from Facebook telling you about what’s going on. Notifications like when you have a friend request or when someone writes on your wall. Did you know that you can change the settings and specify what types of things it notifies you about in e-mail. If you are getting more notifications than you want, you can change these settings to reduce the number of email notifications you get.

To change it, login to Facebook. In the upper right-hand corner in the blue bar, look for settings. Click on settings. When the settings page comes up, click on the Notifications tab. Now you specify what types of things you want to be notified about via email.

And while you are in the settings area, poke around and see if there is anything else you want to change. There are lots of things you can change.

Share on Facebook

Cloud Computing is a term used to refer to software and services delivered via the internet. Traditionally, you install a computer application on your computer and  you store your data on your computer. Then you run that computer application to modify the data stored on your computer. For a business, the data might be stored on a local server. For example, if you wanted to edit a document, you might run Microsoft Word on your computer, open the document file which is stored on your computer, and edit it.

In cloud computing, the computer application isn’t installed on the local computer and the data isn’t stored there either. The local computer becomes more af a dumb terminal. An interface to the internet, if you will.

Instead of running software (like Microsoft Word) on a PC,  you would simply run a web browser to access word processor functionality over the internet. You would open the file and edit it, but now the file is located on a server somewhere on the internet. This type of functionality is available now through Google Docs. All you need is a free Google Account, and you can create, edit, and store documents on Google. You can also do the same with presentations or spreadsheets. But it isn’t quite as powerful as having Microsoft office on installed on your desktop. Not yet, at least.

In a business environment, data, e-mail, file storage, applications, and other services traditionally provided by a server would be provided over the internet. Each of these services may be provided by a different service provider.

Anyone who uses the internet is using some form of cloud computing. When you read your e-mail using a web interface, access your financial information on your bank’s website, and perform other similar actions, you are using cloud computing. In a nutshell, the software and the data are not on your computer, they are somewhere on the internet.

The advantage for a business is that there is no capital expenditure on computer hardware or software. In the cloud, a business would simply subscribe to a service and begin using that service over the internet. Software for running your business, email, calendaring, and ton of other services are available. Quick and easy to set up. Cheap to implement and no maintenance fees.

Cloud computing isn’t perfect, though. Many people don’t like the idea that your data is not in your possession. Someone else holds it for you. Not only that, but your data may be spread out all over the place. One type of data may be with one service provider in California while a different set of data may be with a different service provider in Dallas.

Share on Facebook

When you hear the word RAID, you probably think of those bug killer commercials where the bug screams RAID in fear. In the world of computers, however, RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

The initial idea behind raid was instead of spending a large amount of money on one large disk, why not come up with a way to put a lot of smaller less expensive disks together in one array. A RAID array of disks looks like one drive to the computer even though it is a collection of several drives. This is called striping. For example, you can take 4 100 GB drives and make them look like one 400 GB drive.

Another type of raid is mirroring. You can take two hard drives and have one of the hard drives always be an exact copy, a mirror, of the other hard drive. Then if the primary hard drive fails, you can just use the mirror hard drive.

In these times of large and cheap hard drives, RAID isn’t as useful as it used to be. The biggest problem with raid is that it adds a level of complexity. Trying to recover information from a failed hard drive in a RAID Striping array is extremely difficult. Newer forms of RAID try to improve this. RAID mirroring is a good local backup strategy, but there is a performance price for having an always up to date mirror copy of your hard drive.

We don’t recommend RAID striping for anyone. We don’t recommend RAID mirroring for home users. For businesses, it’s a good idea to have RAID mirroring on your server to protect your data. But you will still need to have some sort of offsite backup to protect your critical data in case of fire or theft.

Share on Facebook

Anyone who can read or write knows that a letter can be in upper case or lower case. A computer actually sees upper case letters and lower case letters as seperate things. For example, an uppercase ‘A’ is ASCII code 65 while a lower case ‘a’ is ASCII code 97. Computer software, however, can be written so that case doesn’t matter.

So how do you know when case matters? There are no hard and fast rules for every piece of software. It just depends on how the software is written. But there are some standards. First off, passwords are always case sensitive. A good password should have a mix of upper case letters, lower case letters, and at least one number.

Login ID’s are usually not case sensitive, but sometimes they are on some websites.

Email addresses are not case sensitive. JOE@NOSPAM.COM is the same as joe@nospam.com.

Captcha’s are the funny looking letters that websites often make you type to make sure you are human and not a computer program. These are not case sensitive.

Website addresses, however, are a little tricky. A website address like www.google.com or www.ct-cp.com is not case sensitive so you can enter it in upper case, lower case, or a mixture. However, if the web address you are going to has a slash (/) and then more stuff after that, that part is usually case sensitive.

For example, if you went to our website at www.ct-cp.com and clicked on the Newsletter link, you would get the page of our website that allows people to subscribe to this newsletter. If you look up at the address bar on your web browser, you would see that when you are on that part of our web page, the address is http://www.ct-cp.com/?page_id=72. This is a direct link to the Newsletter Subscription page of our website. The first part of it, http://www.ct-cp.com is not case sensitive. Th e part after that is. so the /?page_id=72 is case sensitive.

Share on Facebook

We all use some sort of search engine to find the websites we are looking for with the information we need. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and more are vital to finding what you need on the world wide web. It doesn’t seem very complicated to go to a search engine, type in some search terms, and click on Search. And it’s not complicated. But if you know how to use a search engine, you can get better search results and that saves you time.

Here are some tips on how to use a search engine. For the purposes of this article, we are only going to talk about Google. Most of these tips are true for most search engines, although there are differences between them.

The first thing you should know is that almost every word you enter into the search box matters. There are only a few words that don’t matter. Those includes small common words like “the”, “a”, “for”, etc.

When entering your search terms, you should only enter words and numbers along with any special operators (we’ll discuss that later). Don’t bother entering any punctuation because most punctuation is ignored. When deciding what search terms to enter, think about how a web page might look and what it would say and enter words and numbers that you visualize being on that web page.

When entering search terms, the case of the letters doesn’t matter. So it doesn’t matter if you enter COMPUTER, Computer, computer, or CoMpUtEr. It also doesn’t matter what order the words are in.

When you search, the search engine looks for web pages that have all of the words you entered. So for example, if you searched for CEDAR PARK, it would return all of the web pages that have both the word CEDAR and the word PARK in them. But it doesn’t matter where those two words appear on the web page. As long as each one appears somewhere on the web page, it will be returned in the search results. This ends up giving you a lot of noise in your search results that you have to sift through. In this example, I get hits for Cedar Point Resorts, Cedar Point Amusement Park, etc.

If you wanted to only find websites where CEDAR and PARK were together in that order, then you would enclose those two words in quotation marks like this “CEDAR PARK”. To make your search results even more specific, you could enter this: “CEDAR PARK” TEXAS. Note that I am just using upper case to make it stand out. As mentioned earlier, case doesn’t matter. By entering your search terms this way, your search results will be more specific to Cedar Park, Texas.

How many times have you searched for something only to get a lot of hits in your search results relating to something that you aren’t interested in? For example, search for the word “JAGUAR” and you will get hits on an animal, a car, a football team, and a computer operating system. If you just wanted information on the animal, you could exclude a lot of the noise by excluding search terms like cars, football, and os (Apple OS X operating system), and more. You can eliminate some of the noise by excluding certain search terms.

To exclude something from your search results, enter a minus sign (dash) in front of the search term you want to exclude. So if you entered: jaguar –cars –football –os
You would get a list of web pages that have the word “jaguar”, but it would not include any web pages with the word “cars”, “football”, or “os” on them. You’ll probably still get some noise, but not as much. You can still use the dash, or minus sign, in the middle of words. For example, the words anti-virus and e-mail will work normally. It will only exclude a search term that start with a minus sign.

Google uses synonyms when searching. For example, if you entered childcare, Google will also search for child care (note the space between the words). If you search for Charles, you get results for Chuck too. For most searches, this is a good thing, but sometimes you don’t want all of the extra search results. Sometimes you are searching for something specific. In that case, preface your search term with a plus sign. So in the above example, you would search for +childcare. You would only get web pages with the word childcare. If a web page had childcare as two words, it would not be returned.

If you do a search on Google, at the top of your search results you may see where it says something like, “Did you mean …” If you get this, you may have a typo in your search terms or Google may think you meant something else. Look at the search that Google lists after “Did you mean…” and see if that is what you meant. If that’s what you wanted, all you have to do is click on it, and it will redo the search for you with the new search terms.

As mentioned earlier, when you do a search, it looks for web pages that have all of the words you entered. However, there may be times when you want to look for web pages that have this OR that. For example, let’s say you want to go to a dude ranch for vacation.

You could search for: “dude ranch” vacation

But many dude ranches no longer use the term “dude”. They call themselves guest ranches, so you might not get as many results as you would like. In that case, you can enter the following: “dude ranch” OR “guest ranch” vacation
This will give you any web page that has the word vacation and also has either “dude ranch” or “guest ranch”. Note that the word OR must be in uppercase or Google will think you are just searching for the word “or”.

Let’s take a look at the search results you get back from Google. For each search result, Google displays several lines of information. First, it shows the title of the web page. This is where you can click to go to that web page. Under that, it shows a few lines of text from that web page. This is helpful in determining if that web page has what you need. It saves you having to click on every search result to see what’s really there. Under that it shows the address for the web page and then it will usually have two links. One called “Cached” and the other called “Similar”

Cached (pronounced like the word cashed) is a snapshot of what the web page looked like the last time Google visited that web page. Because web pages change frequently, Google periodically visits web pages to collect information about them so that it can provide accurate, up to date search results to you. When it visits a web page, it makes a copy of it and saves that on Google’s servers.

You may be wondering how this feature is useful. Let’s say you search for something on Google and you get a result that seems to be exactly what you are looking for based on the few lines of information Google displayed in the search results. You click on the web page to view it, and it has nothing to do with what you are looking for. That’s because the website has changed since Google last visited it. You can hit the back button to go back to your search results and then click on “Cached”. Now you are viewing the copy of the web page just the way it looked when Google last visited it. The information you were looking for is probably there.

The other link, “Similar” can be useful as well. Let’s say you need to purchase a new washing machine. You want consumer information on washing machines so you can make sure you get a good washing machine. You know about consumerreports.org, but you also know it’s not free. You want to find similar free websites. To do this, go to Google and enter “Consumer Reports” in the search box, including the quotations, and click search. Now find www.consumerreports.org in the results and click the “Similar” link just to the right of it. It’s next to the “Cached” link. Now you get a list of a bunch of websites that offer the same type of information. In this example, I got epinions.com, consumerreview.com, consumerwo rld.com, consumersunion.org, and more.

Share on Facebook

If you listen to music on Pandora.com, you know what a great service it is. If you have never tried Pandora, it’s unique. You enter an artist or song, and it will play that music, and similar music. Of course, you need a high-speed internet connection. The cool thing about Pandora is that you can discover a lot of music that you weren’t exposed to before.

The reason I mention this is that Pandora recently announced some changes to Pandora’s service. Free users will now be limited to 40 hours of music per month. Previously, there was no limit. However, due to heavy licensing fees they have to pay, they are forced to implement this policy. If you are a free user and  you hit the 40 hour limit in a particular month, you can either stop listening until next month, or you can pay $0.99 to get unlimited listening for the rest of the month.

Another option is to upgrade your Pandora membership from free to Pandora One. By doing this, you eliminate all advertising. You get higher quality audio (192 kps). You can download the Pandora player and use that to listen to music so you don’t have to use your web browser. You can personalize how Pandora looks too. It won’t stop every hour and ask you if you are still listening either. And, of course, you get unlimited play time. The cost of Pandora One is $36/year.

Share on Facebook

You are probably aware that several years ago, Google unseated Yahoo as the most popular search engine. Google has some very popular software like the Google Toolbar, GoogleTalk (instant messaging), and Picasa.

Although Google’s Gmail is very popular (currently ranked #11) and gaining market share very quickly, it’s not yet number one. However, it is consistently picked as the best. And if you look at the statistics, there isn’t a long way to go to get to the top. Yahoo Mail is #1 with just under 10% of the market share , Microsoft is second with about 3.5% while Gmail is at 0.9%. But considering Gmail is still fairly new, that’s pretty good.

Last year, Google introduced their own mobile phone operating system called Android. Android phones are currently only available through T-Mobile much like IPhones are only available through AT&T. Android phones have garnered much praise and are rapidly gaining in popularity.

Last year Google also introduced their own web browser which is called Chrome. Chrome is now being used by about 6% of people when accessing websites. This doesn’t seem like much compared to Internet Explorer’s 40% share. But Chrome is new and it doesn’t come with Windows which gives Internet Explorer a huge advantage. In case you are interested, Internet Explorer is no longer the most popular web browser. This year Firefox passed it and currently has a 47% share of the browser market.

If all of that wasn’t enough, this week Google announced the Chrome operating system (Chrome OS). In case you don’t know, an operating system is the software that provides the user an interface to the hardware. Microsoft Windows is an operating system. Google’s new Chrome OS is in direct competition with Microsoft Windows. No release date has been announced yet, but this should get interesting.

Share on Facebook

Unless you have been eating some blue candy, I hope not. Bluetooth is a strangely named wireless technology. Named after a Danish King who united dissonant Danish Tribes into a single kingdom, this wireless technology has been gaining popularity.

In a recent article, we talked about how wireless a computer can be. One technology that has made computers more wireless capable is Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a wireless protocol that can be used over short distances (up to 30 feet).

Most cell phones these days have Bluetooth built-in to them. You probably know that you can purchase a Bluetooth headset for use with your cell phone. But did you know that you can use Bluetooth on your cell phone to exchange information with another cell phone? Contacts, music, and pictures are among the things you can transfer between cell phones using Bluetooth. You can also synchronize your cell phone to your computer using Bluetooth assuming you have a smart phone and a Bluetooth capable computer.

Many laptop computers have Bluetooth. Most desktops don’t have it. When you order a new PC, adding Bluetooth is usually a very inexpensive option. You can also purchase a Bluetooth USB adaptor that you can plug in to your computer to add Bluetooth capability. They only cost about $20 or so. The picture to the left shows a Bluetooth USB adaptor.

Once you have Bluetooth on your computer, what can you do with it? The following Bluetooth accessories can be purchased and used with a Bluetooth capable computer. They include mouse, keyboard, printer, earphones, speakers, headsets, digital picture frames, numeric keypads, and barcode scanners.

The best thing about Bluetooth wireless is that it’s one adaptor for all your wireless accessories. You can purchase non-Bluetooth wireless accessories, but each one comes with their own adaptor. And many accessories only use the Bluetooth standard. So if you want to go as wireless as possible, you really need Bluetooth.

Be aware, however, that your current wireless mouse and keyboard probably aren’t Bluetooth capable. So if you are going to switch over to Bluetooth, you’ll probably need to purchase new accessories that support Bluetooth. While adding a Bluetooth adaptor to your computer is cheap, the accessories that use Bluetooth aren’t cheap. You can find a Bluetooth mouse for around $40. A keyboard for around $100. Speakers for around $150. All-in-One printers for around $200. Bluetooth headphone prices start at around $50.

You get the idea. It’s expensive. But if you want wireless, it’s the price you pay. If you replaced your mouse, keyboard, speakers, and printer with Bluetooth, it would cost you around $500. You would certainly reduce the number of wires, but you won’t eliminate wires. You would still have to have 2 power cords, one for your computer and one for the monitor. You would also have a cable going from your computer to your monitor. Bluetooth speakers and printers often require a power cord, but there is no wire between them and the computer and you can set them up to 30 feet away from the computer.

The biggest drawback to Bluetooth, or any wireless device, is batteries. You either have to feed your Bluetooth devices batteries on a continuous basis, or purchase rechargeable devices that must be charged when you aren’t using them. Until they invent wireless power (they are working on it), wireless devices won’t be totally wireless.

By the way, if you are going to purchase a new laptop, we recommend you get one with Bluetooth built-in to it and get yourself a Bluetooth mouse. That way there will be no need for a wireless adaptor for your mouse. And it will allow the use of all of these other Bluetooth accessories I mentioned.

Share on Facebook

Think about the types of things use computers for.

We use computers to communicate with each other. We use email, instant messaging, chat, forums, blogs, voice over IP (i.e. Skype), and much more. Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace are huge conduits for communication.

We also use computers for entertainment. We play games, we watch video on websites like youtube, and some of us record and watch TV. You can even watch TV episodes and movies online. We also listen to music both on our PC and over the internet. We even buy our music online. And we load up our music on our mp3 players. And when was the last time you bought a roll of film? That’s all digital now. And you can share your photos online.

We use our computer for financial activities as well. We pay bills online, track our bank accounts, transfer money, analyze our financial situation, keep records, and trade stocks.

Computers are big with education as well. We take online classes. We use computers to do our home work. And we find the answers to the questions we have.

Our health is dependent upon computers. Think of all of the medical equipment, medical records, and so forth. You can look up your symptoms on the internet and find out what your problem is and what you should do about it. You can also look up a drug.

Computers are Huge in business. Most businesses these days pretty much run their businesses on their computers. For most businesses, if the computers go down, the business is pretty much dead in the water.

And we use our computers for reference. When I need to know something, I no longer pick up a dictionary, encyclopedia, or any other printed reference book. I hit the web!

This is by no means anywhere near a complete list, but it gives you an idea.

Now think about how much of this would be possible if you didn’t have the internet? You can play games on a computer without the internet, but the list of games you can play without the internet is getting smaller every year. You can watch video on your computer without the internet, but you have to get it on your computer by physical means like a DVD. The same goes for music. You can record and watch television on your computer without the internet, but you wouldn’t have any program guide. You would have to look in the newspaper or TV Guide to see when something is going to be on. About the only financial things you could do would be to do some analysis and record keeping.

Having no Internet at your business would be a serious impediment to doing business. You might be able to access your database and take phone calls, but with no e-mail or web access, it’s going to be difficult to do all of the things you need to do.

As far as education goes, you could order some DVD’s and watch a class that way, but you could do that with a DVD player too. And you used to be able to purchase reference material for medical conditions, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and similar on CD. But the information on them was stagnant.

All of this goes to make a point. The Internet is what has made the computer so invaluable in the home and in the workplace. The popularity and importance of computers is due to the Internet. Before the internet, computers were used primarily by the government, big business, researchers, nerds, and gamers.

 In a way, the Internet is more important than the computer itself. Your Internet connection speed is often more important than the speed of your computer, although the speed of your computer is certainly important. As time goes on, however, the computer will become less and less important while the Internet will become more and more important. The computer is basically becoming an appliance for accessing the internet.

Share on Facebook