Geeks on Tour - Articles

Picasa’s one-click auto-correct button is called ‘I’m Feeling Lucky.’ Try it! You’ll like it. If you don’t like what it does, no problem, just click the Undo button and it will forget all about it.

I recommend *always* clicking on I’m Feeling Lucky whenever you’re editing a photo. You may be surprised that a photo you liked - you’ll like even better. Like the photo below that I took yesterday at White Sands National Monument. It’s nice. I like the picture, but it doesn’t pop out at you. Look at the difference just one click on ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ gives me!

Now *that’s* White Sands!

Another tool that can help you get whiter whites is the neutral color picker on the Tuning tab.  If you are a Geeks on Tour Member, I will show you how to use all the edits and tuning features in the tutorial videos below:

Picasa 3 Basic Edits (including I’m Feeling Lucky)
Picasa 3 Tuning
Picasa 3 Intro to the 12 Effects
Picasa 3 Redeye (free for anyone to view)
Picasa 3 Retouch Tool
Picasa 3 Sharpen and Batch Edit

More photos from White Sands (using Picasa web albums embedded slideshow):

Ever wondered how people (like me) are able to show you a picture of how their computer screen looks at any given time?  Like this screenshot of Picasa:

Or maybe you do already know about the ‘PrtScn’ key on your keyboard that will take a snapshot of your screen.  But then what?  Pressing the PrtScn key captures everything on your screen and puts it on your clip board, the same place any ‘Cut’ or ‘Copy’ text or objects go.  Then, you still have to open some application where you can ‘Paste’ it before you see anything.  It’s a rather involved process.

With Picasa 3, you get instant gratification!  With Picasa open, you can view any screen possible on your computer – your desktop, your email program - whatever is showing on your screen will be captured when you press the PrtScn (or Print Screen on some computers) *and* it will instantly become a picture file in the ‘Screen Captures’ project folder of Picasa!

Now you can use that picture like any other, crop it, print it, email it etc.

Chris Guld, www.geeksontour.com

Picasa Tutorial Videos

Yes, we’re trying to be part of the tweet generation! We also have facebook accounts. And FMCA Community, and Plaxo, and Linked In, and … and … and …

The proliferation of social networking sites is overwhelming. But, Twitter and Facebook have become just too popular to ignore, so we’re on there trying to figure out what it all means. (anybody know where Mr. Natural is?)

If you don’t know about Twitter - think of it like a micro-blog. People write whatever they want, whenever they want, but they’re limited to 140 letters. So each writing is short. Jim is doing the twittering for Geeks on Tour. If you’d like to follow along, you can do exactly that. It’s called ‘Following.’ You need your own Twitter account (it’s free and easy) and then you just go to the Geeks on Tour Twitter page and click on the ‘Follow’ link. After you do that, all of our Tweets will show up on your Twitter page. If you’d like to just see the last few ‘tweets’, we’ve added that to the sidebar of our blog … on the left, just below ‘Recent Posts.’

Most of us think that it’s weird and frivolous to write a sentence about whatever is on your mind and think that anyone cares. But, there’s no denying that a phenomenon is occuring here, and we want to know where it is leading. Check out this TED video by the co-founder of Twitter, discussing some of the unexpected uses of Twitter.

A while ago, in our personal blog I wrote about discovering Windows Live Writer. It is a program, freely downloadable from Microsoft, which allows you to compose blog entries offline. It works with several blogging systems, including the 2 I use - Blogger and WordPress. After you compose your blog post, it will take care of uploading it to the web, including the pictures.

Last week, we had some trouble with our Internet connection and I wanted to write a blog post, so I dusted off Live Writer and gave it another shot. It’s really an amazing little program! I’m using it now, even when my Internet connection is working fine. You may have noticed a couple of my posts last week had maps as part of the blog post, and the maps don’t come from my normal Google Maps. They’re from Virtual Earth, Microsoft’s competitor to Google Earth. That’s because I used Live Writer to insert the map. Since Live Writer is by Microsoft, it uses Microsoft’s maps.

Live Writer makes it just SOO easy to insert a map. It’s also waayy easy to insert a link, and the links automatically open in a new window! If you’ve been using Blogger, you know that making a link open in a new window is a painful process there. If you hate how Blogger adds new photos to the top of your post, you’ll love how Live Writer adds them at your cursor position. AND, you can even set it up to so that your photos get uploaded to your own hosted webspace (FTP) rather than Blogger’s servers!

Maybe the best part is that, since you’re writing the post on your computer and letting Live Writer upload it to Blogger, you have an automatic backup. The drafts are all on your computer. If something happened to your blog, these drafts could be re-uploaded.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. It’s a free download at the link above. The first thing is to set up your blog by clicking on the Blog menu and ‘Add blog account…’

From then on it’s pretty much like writing your post on Blogger. Give the post a title, type the text, use the ‘insert’ options at the right to add pictures, links, maps, etc. When you’re done, click ‘Publish’ in the upper left corner. If I hear from enough of you, I might just do some tutorial videos on Live Writer.

For all our videos on using Blogger to make a blog - it’s EASY, really, really easy! - see: Blogging Tutorials page

And to see *lots* of RVers blogs - many of whom learned how from our tutorials - go to our Blog listings page. If you have a blog, you can list it there too.

You may have heard of a nasty virus about to come to life on April 1. It would be nice if this was an April Fools joke, but odds are - it’s not. It’s called Conficker and its all the buzz in geek-land these days. If your computer is infected, it is supposed to start contacting servers on April 1 and get instructions as to what to do. No one knows exactly what this will mean, but it could be pretty awful. Millions of zombie computers around the world all set to march to the bidding of some dark lord. An infected computer could become pretty worthless to its rightful owner.

The good news is, if you’ve followed our ‘Safe Computing‘ advice and kept your Windows operating system up-to-date, then you’re fine. Microsoft has known about this vulnerability and they patched it back last October. If you’ve been running your automatic updates, you downloaded the patch last year that makes it impossible to contract the virus now.

The bad news is, if your computer is already infected, it’s difficult to fix. One of the features of the virus is that websites containing tools to remove Conficker are blocked by Conficker. For more technical info specifically on this new virus, we recommend the Windows Secrets newsletter.

So, here’s what we think you should do:
go to www.safety.live.com. That’s the direct address to Microsoft’s free safety scanner, ‘Onecare.’ If you can get to that site, you don’t have the Conficker virus. But, as long as you’re there, you may as well run the scan! Even if you have a good, up-to-date antivirus and anti-spyware an occasional scan with another program, like Onecare safety scanner, is a good idea. A second opinion, if you will.

This is also a good time to check and be sure that your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are active and up-to-date. A good place to look for this information is in your Security Center. You’ll find it in your Control Panel. Or, if you have Vista, all you have to do is click Start and type Security Center - now you’ll see it at the top of the list and you can click or press Enter to open it.

We think you’ll find the following videos helpful :

Microsoft’s Onecare Safety Scanner (members only)

Check your Windows Security Center (everyone)

We’ve made a lot of new videos over the last few months (we’re over 140 now - about 14 hours worth) and we’ve re-authored our disks accordingly. We’ve divided them up into 2 categories:

1. Boot Camp: videos on how to use your computer, Essentials, Vista, Safe Computing and Internet connections. Disk includes a 40 page self-study booklet.
2. Travelers Collection: videos on how to use fun software of interest to travelers. Picasa for managing digital photos, Photo Story for fancy slide shows, Blogger for travelog websites, and Google Earth and Maps.

$20 shipping included	$35 shipping included
Online Membership covers all of the above topics requires high-speed Internet connection $39
‘Geek Bundle’ all of the above ($94 value) $69
Why would you want the online membership *plus* the disks? Well, the disks can be used when you’re traveling and don’t have a good Internet connection; the online membership gives you access for a full year so you’ll be able to see all the new videos we make! To purchase, go to Geeks on Tour Shopping page.

When you think of a collage, most people think of a bunch of photos strewn about on a page. I want to use Picasa’s background feature to make you think of other ideas. Here’s a collage I did of our motorhome. Click on it for a larger version - then click your Back button to return.

Seems to me this would be great for pictures of a house for sale - as one example. So, how did I do it? First, you select the two pictures, then click on the collage button at the bottom. Choose Picture Pile as the top level setting. Under Background options, select Use Image. You can also use the tabs above the collage itself to select an image and Set As Background.

Now, you probably have the background photo also in the foreground. Just select it and click on the Remove button at the top. The remaining image looks best, I think, with a white border to set it apart. Just click on it and click the Picture border option in the middle.

You’re done, Create your collage.

You can also watch our free ‘Show Me How’ video called Picasa 3: Collage. You’ll find it on the Geeks on Tour Picasa tutorials page.

Someone recently told me that he had some old slides scanned and some of them came out backwards. Think of a photo like:

It’s kind of useless like that! He asked me if Picasa could flip the photo so it would read correctly. I thought a minute about how a click of the clockwise arrow would rotate a picture 180 degrees, but I couldn’t think of how Picasa could actually flip a picture so that mirrored text would read correctly.

Fast forward a couple days, and we’re here at a big RV rally giving our Picasa seminar with over 500 people!! One attendee, Frank Geister, came up to me later and said, “Let me show you something cool I’ve discovered about Picasa and collages ….” It was a cool tip, and I might share that with you in a future post, but what really excited me was in our continued conversation he mentioned a keyboard shortcut for ‘Flipping’ a photo. I asked him to demonstrate that one!

All you do is click on the picture (either single click, or double-click) and hold down the Ctrl, Shift and hit the H key … Ctrl-Shift-H … is the command to Flip Horizontal (Control Shift H on Mac). Here’s the result:

And, check out the list of all the keyboard shortcuts for Picasa.

THANKS Frank! I wish I knew who it was that asked me the question in the first place Maybe he’ll read this post!

One of our Geeks on Tour members recently posted a question in our forum about scanning a preprinted form.  A past Picasa tip explains how you can scan things just using your scanner and Picasa - no scanner software to learn.  This member needed to scan a preprinted form and she was disappointed that she couldn’t bring it into Word and fill in the blanks.

I started explaining to her that you can’t scan a form and then fill it in unless you were using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and that would be a lot more work.  She would either have to handwrite in the blanks, or find an old typewriter somewhere.

Then I got to thinking … ‘If it was just one fill in the blank, I’d try doing it with Picasa’s text tool!’  So, for the fun of it, I scanned a form I had from a doctor’s office and tried using Picasa to fill out the first blank.  Here’s the blank form after scanning it and viewing with Picasa:

It was pretty easy to use the text tool, size and position today’s date to fill in the first blank.  I assumed that you could only use Picasa’s text tool once per picture.  I was ecstatically wrong!

Just click apply after filling in each blank and you can then click the text tool and start over for the next blank.

OMG that was soo easy!

Members of our Geeks on Tour Online Classroom can watch the following Show Me videos:

Adding Text to Photos

Not a member yet?  Join now! It’s only $39 for a whole year.  And, it will not automatically renew.

Chris Guld
www.Geeksontour.com

Every folder of your photos that you see in Picasa has a date attached to it:

Where does that date come from?

When you import pictures using Picasa, the folder it creates will be dated according to the earliest date of the photos it contains. So, if your photos have the following dates:

Folders are Dated by the earliest photo
The folder above will be dated 4/30/2006. Notice in this example that most of the photos were from August. If you’re looking for this folder to be sorted with others taken in August, you won’t find it because it will be lower in your list, along with others from April.

I have one folder of pictures taken in June of 2008 that I thought had been completely lost. I was afraid I had mistakenly deleted them all! I finally found them at the bottom of my list because the folder was dated 1/1/2000. Huh?! Come to find out there was one photo in the group that I had taken with another camera. That camera had, apparently, never had it’s date set - so the photo was saved as having been taken on the default camera date of 1/1/2000.

You can change the date on the folder
Once you find a folder with a wrong date, it’s easy to fix. Just double-click on the folder’s name, and you’ll get a screen where you can type in any date you want:

If you are a Geeks on Tour member, you can watch these tutorial videos and learn a lot more about Folders in Picasa.

• Picasa 3: Folders
• Orientation to the Library View (free sample, you don’t have to be a member to view this one)
• Using the Tree Folder view
• Move a folder to an external hard drive