Queued For Sending

SMS now seems so clumsy and slow to me. I am sure that if you live in an area where you have great mobile reception then text messaging is almost the default way to communicate with anyone. I do get a bundle each day myself. The difference is that replying is such a pain.

Actually typing the message is OK, thanks to SwiftKey, but then comes the really annoying bit. You hit Send. And wait. Queued For Sending. Then, some time later, if you're lucky, you hear the derponk noise that accompanies a change to Cannot Send,  You try again. This time the display stays at Queued For Sending and there's nothing you can do. At least with Cannot Send you get a chance to Send Again. Not with Queued For Sending.  No way. You have to hope that it either does go or that you hear the kerponk.

On occasion I have resorted to copying an unsent message and sending it again and it has gone before the Queued For Sending one! Now that has really confused recipients sometimes!

All in all it's a bit of a drag. In complete contrast is GMail and, indeed, several other apps now which have message systems embedded in them - all, of course, using the internet rather than mobile data connection. In every case, I have been able to communicate far more quickly and reliably - and in the case of GMail, include all sorts of extras like links and images simply.

My problem, of course, is that not all my recipients have the appropriate apps on their phones but more and more do and, to a large extent, I am replying to those that come in that way so it's not that much of an issue anyway. More relevant might have been lack of an internet connection but I am finding BT WiFi hot spots in far more places than I find decent mobile reception! Not sure how long that will remain the case and maybe I have just been lucky. To be fair, most of my SMS problems are at home in a rural village and that is where I get great internet service in contrast to the non-existent phone service indoors.

It is frustrating, though, to see all the money being planned for 4G networks so that people can watch movies on their way to work when so many people are like me and unable to make a simple phone call or send a message on their mobile without wandering around outside or balancing on a window ledge.

It may be terribly embarrassing for teenagers to see a dad holding his mobile in the air to get a signal but that is what has to be done here and it is not always easy to remember to avoid doing that elsewhere!

Soon there will be a High Speed train whizzing past a few miles away and neighbours may be crowing about their new £40 a month fibre optic internet connections but none of us will be sending each other SMS to comment.

The people on the train will probably have 4G beaming down to their devices. They'll probably be beaming as they look out of the window and see me in the middle of a field waving my arms around.

Make sure your pc isn't infected with DNSChanger before Monday 9 July.

It takes just a few seconds to use the free McAfee tool to check that your pc isn't infected with a nasty bit of malware that affects the way it locates internet addresses. This is from PC Advisor magazine:

The FBI estimates that as many as 275,000 PCs are still at risk of losing access to the Web on Monday when it pulls the plug on the DNS servers it has maintained to redirect PCs compromised with the DNSChanger malware to legitimate websites.

Read more: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/security/3368412/there-is-no-excuse-for-still-being-infected-with-dnschanger/?cmpid=HTML-DN060712&olo=daily+news#ixzz1zx6tF8Jz

Chances are you're fine and if you have a decent and regularly updated protection system running then it should be keeping you safe but that sentence starts chances are... Make certain this weekend. Click this link or others available in their article and get the satisfaction of knowing that you have nothing to worry about. Remarkably, McAfee aren't even using this to try and sell us anything and I was pleasantly surprised at just how quick and ad-free the check was. So do it now. And relax.

Thanks For All The Fish. And Computers.

I've been thinking about all the things I do and have just updated my website, andrew-hill.net, to feature What I do and I realised just how lucky I am to be alive at this time and to have so many amazing tools just there, ready to use, so many people just there, ready to help. And it's all free. Well, apart from some electricity or phone rental, which isn't much. So I'd like to say thank you to everyone out there who makes all this possible.

My favourite author, Douglas Adams, was born in the same year as me. I share many of his interests and delights (although I never bought a Mac!) and I often think it was such a shame he didn't live to share in all this. I think he would have enjoyed it so much too.

Text design
I have always loved doing my own designs for leaflets, letterheads, posters and the like. That used to mean buying sheets of Letraset and carefully positioning each letter, rubbing over it with the end of a pencil or a stylus if I was being really careful, and hoping that the serifs would stick down properly and that I wouldn't run out of Rs or Ts. There were usually enough Es.

Now there are lots of lovely programmes that make this easy and, of course, there are web design tools too so that I can publish them and see them on screen.

ICT training
My first real experience of word processing was with golfball typewriters and then daisy wheel ones which did allow me to make mistakes and fix them without having to throw away too many sheets of company notepaper. The biggest leap was with a Digital Dual Display computer we bought for the office. It cost about £12000 and the printer was so noisy we bought a special box for it. Even that wasn't brilliant though and it finished up on the floor below where it could bother someone else! I often thought that was a bit unfair so let me say sorry now to Lyndsey, Katrina and Susan in particular, as well as thank you to Jeanne and Judy who had to go up and down stairs a lot to get whatever they'd printed.

We taught ourselves then, just as I have done since with all the programmes I've had to get used to since. From Locoscript to WordStar to Works to Word and 97 to 2010 and no doubt there'll be more to follow. I also started teaching others in the late 90s as people started buying computers either at work or for their children to use at home. I still have the Introduction to Access and Spreadsheet booklets I wrote and provided for the sessions as well as many more. That was a job that I just kind of fell into and have been doing in some form or another ever since.

Teaching
As well as ICT training, teaching other subjects has been made so much easier with places to store materials that students can access when they like. Having extra tasks on hand for those that complete the first ones, having examples I can share so that I don't have to try and explain or draw them on the board. Being able to find answers to questions within minutes as opposed to spending hours researching in books and magazines. All these internet tools have made that job something I could do and feel that I could contribute more to.

Working with pictures
I remember getting photos back from the chemist and being pleased with a few of them but seldom all of them! You could get enlargements but it was expensive and quite complicated. You had to try and indicate exactly which part you wanted enlarged and could seldom do much about the ones that weren't straight or with poor lighting. I so much wanted to do more with my photos and there was one school friend who understood developing and even had an enlarger and all the papers and chemicals at home but it looked difficult and I couldn't ask him to spend much time on my ideas.

Photocopiers were a great advance and I did quite a lot with them but the grainy and solely black and white images weren't really what I wanted. So when computers came along and I could actually scan my own pictures, crop them and do all sorts of editing I was in heaven! Then digital cameras arrived and, whilst the first one I had (free with some software and with something like a maximum of 320 pixels!) wasn't particularly great, the next one was and, in fact, had it not been stolen in 2004 I would probably still be using it now.

To be able to take as many pictures as you want and not worry about the cost is extraordinarily liberating and I can experiment and even when the results aren't quite right there are tools that can help fix them. More than anything, I think, this has been the most pleasurable development, even though it hasn't made me any money!

Writing
I have always written things, from articles to books and poems. I love writing. Whatever I did write, though, stayed virtually unseen in a pile of big books, little books and scarps of paper. I dreamed of publishing them but could never afford it. I did try printing a 450 page novel at one place where I was running some ICT courses. They had a super fast printer that did things like double-sided printing and could put two pages onto one. That enabled me to have an actual printed copy of the book and some spares to give to friends with page numbers that changed automatically if I made changes to the chapters too.

Previously, with an Amstrad PC and printer it took 1 minute to print a page and you had to remove that and insert a fresh sheet each time. I calculated that my 450 page book would take several days to print! (I did do it, though. Once.)

Now I have been able to publish my novels, with my own cover designs and jackets. I have poems on blogs and articles in a range of technical on-line journals. I'm not making any money from this but the feeling of holding your own hardback book after so many years is wonderful. To see my articles and poems on screen is good, too, and to be able to share them and hope others might enjoy them too is most satisfying.

I now write regularly for a range of TV shows and entertainment programme reviews. Again, it's mostly for fun but some of these are proving remarkably popular with lost of people seeming to read them so that makes it worthwhile too.

Whereas previously all I would have done is scribble away to myself and hope someone appreciates it when I'm gone or finds it of historical value of some sort, now I can get the kick of seeing people enjoy what I write shortly afterwards.

Numbers
I have played with numbers and been fascinated by maths since my school days. Now, with spreadsheets, I can produce all sorts of graphs and series and things and just play with formulae for hours if I ever have a few spare.

There are also great resources available on-line for those that wish to learn more. My children have enjoyed the Khan Academy courses and I have even tried to teach myself some python programming with Udacity recently.

Editor
Whilst I seldom spot my own mistakes very quickly, I do seem to be able to spot others' almost instantly and enjoy helping rephrase text as well as correcting spelling and grammar for people, especially where it's in an important document they're proposing to share with others. Word processors make this a simple task although I don't rely on their in-built checks! Even I will have trouble with some words, though, and to be able to look them up on-line and get a quick spelling idea saves me a lot of time. Word count, too, is a real time-saver!

Being able to compare students' texts to both other students' submissions and what might be published elsewhere is also an invaluable tool.

Business
I once had a client who wanted to develop a business and he provided me with new sets of figures almost every week. I spent days and nights setting up a sort of spreadsheet (although it wasn't called that in 1982) which would do all the calculations for monthly balances, cash flow etc. It was wonderful and meant that I could do more of that sort of interesting work more often. Now I can illustrate different scenarios and produce charts for this as well as nice sheets of numbers in a flash with software like Excel.

This led me into the world of helping new businesses assess feasibility of new developments and, of course, those that did proceed would need stationery, leaflets promotional material and logos, corporate identities and, more recently, web sites too. Great. Just my sort of work and I have had a wonderful time helping ideas become real and helping to make them look good too. The computer and all the software tools have made this possible whereas before I would probably never have got so involved.

Music
Then there is music. I love the sound of the Sixties as well as every decade since. As a teenager, I would have to try and record tracks with a microphone held up to the radio or TV speaker and hope no-one made any noise in the background. The tapes were fiddly and not brilliant quality but I was able to build a collection of favourites. Albums and singles were expensive for me. Yes, I bought quite a few but not nearly as many of the tracks that I would like to have done at the time.

Now, I have a really comprehensive collection of good quality music and can listen to what I want, when I want and almost wherever I want. It's crazy. There was even a track I thought I would never, ever find because it was something I heard for just a few weeks one summer. It never got into the charts but I sort of got hooked on it and never forgot it. A little while ago I discovered that all Radio London's Fab Forty Chart programmes were available on-line and, sure enough, there were a couple of weeks when that track was to be played. With a simple bit of recording software and some editing, I now have that track in my collection and can play it any time I want. That's all so cool.

In fact, everything I do is amazingly influenced by having software that is mostly free, on computers that are not expensive. I can compete with others for business. I can express my views on things and expect at least some people to see them. I can do so much that I love doing without spending a penny now that I have the essentials. I will never have time to do everything I'd like to.

The possibilities are now endless. But I shall enjoy every moment.

Censoring the internet

This chart and several others illustrating different attitudes to freedom to view internet content are featured in an excellent site by Evan You designed to promote awareness. You can also cast your vote there (scroll through the page). 

Scary stuff in the States

1 minute videos for absolute beginners, from Auntie

BBC Webwise have put lots of little videos on-line which answer those little questions you may know the answers to but perhaps some of your students, or your Mum, doesn't. Some seem a little pointless and one even confused me more but most are cute and you may be able to use some of them in a lesson or something.

They're all available at this link.

Here's the list:

• How do I use a digital camera?
• How do I stop getting spam?
• How can I make free phone calls online?
• What is the internet?
• What is a firewall?
• How do I prevent ID fraud?
• How can I build my own website?
• What is a search engine?
• What is social networking?
• What is podcasting or vodcasting?
• What is online shopping?
• Buying a computer
• What is e-mail?
• What are computer viruses?
• How do I download files?
• What is BBC iPlayer?

As I said, you'll know the answers but FAQICA has to broaden its appeal a bit and the Firesheep post was a bit heavy. Just keeping in with my dumber readers.http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009sbnn

Firesheep. Possibly the best web security learning tool!

So many other people have written about this new simple application that I won't go into detail. TechCrunch do that much better than me anyway. If you've managed to miss the news then there's a simple little tool available that will not only show you who in your vicinity is using an open wireless network but enable you to log in to their facebook, twitter, amazon accounts using their log-in (and there's a massively long list of more).

If you fancy trying it out the you need Firefox 3.6+ as Firesheep is an extension to that browser. The extension doesn't appear obvious in a search for Firefox extensions which is probably wise and I'm not going to publish it here. It isn't that difficult to find, though. Windows users will also need to install Winpcap first. Once you've installed the Firefox extension a sidebar is available which displays all the icons and screen names of people using unsecured sites around you. Click on one and you're free to run around their pages! Hacking my youngest could manage while reading Noddy Goes Shopping.

Being unusually responsible, here's a link to suggestions for another Firefox extension Force-TLS which will help you protect several (but not all!) of your accounts. The TechCrunch article author, Alexia Tsotsis accepts that this is of no help to the vast majority who'll be using Internet Explorer (or Google Chrome, Opera, Safari etc. etc.) but promises to publish more on that soon. Watch that space.

graphic by Dave Hoffman

Perhaps this will be the wake-up call we all need to be more careful about our on-line activity. I have no doubt that there will be patches and adjustments galore in the background, even attempts not to frighten us all with this story in mainstream news items, and a lot of people are very concerned to fix things today and it will all go quiet soon enough. In the meantime, though, just give it a try and I promise you it will be the most effective learning experience on the topic of internet security short of being fleeced for a few grand by a dodgy Luton fuel station till operator.

Internet Explorer 9 beta available

Well it certainly looks pretty. Internet Explorer 9 that is. You can download a beta version from here if you have Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7. And you do need to download the Vista Service Pack 2 before it will work. I could add what on earth are you doing using Vista but I won't. Oh, too late. Note the url - I wonder how much they paid whoever first registered that!? Anyway, as someone who only now uses Internet Explorer to work on moodle VLE pages and who has to tryreally really hard not to use bad language when forced to use it on classroom pcs, I can only hope that it's as quick, as intuitive and pleasant to use as Chrome.

I'll let you know in a while . . .



I presume it will be labelled IE Ja in Germany.

Browsers. You've always had a choice. Now Microsoft has to tell you.

A European Court ruling has required that Microsoft offers people a selection of browsers to choose from of which Internet Explorer will be just one. Starting around now, a Windows update will result in those with Internet Explorer as their default browser being presented with a screen showing what appears to be the five alternatives, in random order. So Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer will be offered on a panel with buttons for download.

This is good news and should result in a much more pleasant internet experience for lots of people who have never even thought there might be another way than the familiar blue e symbol and its continuous warnings and annoying pale yellow bars and boxes asking questions that even now I have to think about before clicking Yes or No.

What is particularly interesting, though, is that those five are not the only ones actually being offered. Those five are the applications that are the First Panel contenders. However, look carefully and there is a second panel. Scroll horizontally and you'll see a selection of a further seven that I have to say includes six I had never heard of before!

[screenshots by Stephen Shakland, CNET]

Goodness only knows what people will make of these! Those behind these currently lesser-known browsers are expecting to see downloads rocket as to date their growth has been 99% through word of mouth and mostly among pretty specific groups of geeky types at that. Maxthon is apparently second to IE in China and even a 1% addition to its current user numbers will double its present share of the browser market! It will be fascinating to see which of these seven do best and how they react to their new-found fame as, courtesy of some suits in Europe, an estimated 100 million Europeans could see their logos on their screens.

I say could see as the Second Panellers are a little miffed that in order to see their wares people have to perform that unnatural business of horizontal scrolling and the bar isn't exactly obvious either.

I guess I'd better download all seven now and review them on the webtools site before the European Commission start knocking on my door.

Internet Country Codes

If you've ever wondered where that .ky site relates to or what the suffix is for Guernsey then this list provides all the answers.

Now, can I find someone in Lesotho to register bal.ls . . ?

search tricks in Google

Well, I wouldn't recommend that you do that exactly, what this is about are some of the words and terms you can use in the Google search box which have a special meaning. For example, you may know that define:kerning will produce web pages with definitions for what kerning means and that searching for "Andrew Hill" in inverted commas will find results for someone with that name whereas just typing Andrew Hill will yield lots of Andrews and lots of Hills but not necessarily joined together!

New ones I've learned that I like are:
book Just type book [space] title and that will search the text of a book with that title
what is (or what are) [space] something and that provides pages with an explanation of something
something site:www.thissite.com will provide results just from the site specified

You can also do calculations in the search box. Type 75% of 60 and you'll get the answer 45.

For a pretty good list of these and more the Google Cheat Sheet is worth bookmarking.

Internet Explorer 7 update

Finally got round to adding some images to the notes. Blogger need to add a few tools to make image handling a bit easier, though, and it seems impossible to place them as in-line images that sit where I want them. Big pictures seem OK but not little ones so I may still finish up doing these notes as a Studyzone page and linking to it! Still, hope they're useful to someone.

IE7: where have all my toolbars gone?

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 is a great design improvement on earlier efforts and, whilst I still prefer Firefox, there are some useful new features like tabbed browsing (which Firefox has had for ages) and a simple zoom feature (which Firefox doesn't have) that narrow the gap between the two. It does look a bit different, though, to its predecessor, and default installations may hide some of the things that you have been familiar with. So here's a quick guide to displaying some toolbars and what some of the new buttons do.

The first thing you may want to do is get the Menu bar back. Click on the Tools button and select Menu bar.

You may find that you cannot move any of the toolbars. Under Tools, click on Toolbars and then on Lock the Toolbars if that is checked. While you're there you can restore a Links toolbar by clicking on that entry.



If the toolbars are locked the Links toolbar will only be displayed at the right edge with a chevron to click to access the links themselves. Unlocking will allow you to drag the Links toolbar across to the left to display as many link names as will fit which is usually more useful.

To add Links here, by the way, you go to the page required, click Favourites Add to Favourites and then select the Links folder to store them in. The contents of that folder are what get displayed. None of the other folders, or just Favourites generally, will feature in a bar like that, just Links which is a bit special. Sometimes that folder is stuffed with Microsoft links which you really don't need. Right click on these and delete them. No big loss. (None of this is different to IE6 or previous but thought I'd remind you).

Links and menu bar restored and now movable, you can play with some of the new toys.

The big new thing is the little square button, or tab, to the right of the one with the open page name. Click on that and you get a new window, probably with a helpful note from Microsoft on the subject. Put an address in the address bar and that will appear - but the other page doesn't disappear as it used to. It stays on its tab. You can have lots of tabs open as each time you open a new one a little square tab appears to its right (although that can be changed if you really want).



If you do have several tabs then try the four square button to the left of the row of tabs. Nice, isn't it? You get an attractive but maybe only marginally useful set of mini pages laid out on the page. Some people really like this and it does have an initial Wow factor, I suppose.

Top right is the built in search which Microsoft, being Microsoft, set to their Microsoft Live search facility. You'll want Google, or one of many others maybe. Click on the little arrow next to the magnifying glass and then on Find more providers.





This takes you to a web page featuring a range of search engines and you simply choose the ones you want to add and then set the one you like best as your default.


Bottom right is a nice zoom tool. It works simply and most effectively and will be a boon to those who find text too small or just want to get a closer look.

Nothing in these notes will be new to the experts out there but they may help those to whom it all looked a bit confusing. I'll write about some of the more advanced tweaks later.

Images to follow for this post.