Web to PDF – Quick Reading Reco

Fellow tech blogger Rick Robinette has discovered a free service I think you, Dear Reader, might like to know about..

Easily Convert Web Pages to a PDF File

“I have always been one where I try to find ways to avoid using the printer by electronically converting and storing my documents on my PC so that they can easily be retrieved later. As a result, I very, very seldom go to the printer to print anything. One example is when I need to print a web page…”

PDFmyURL is a new tool that lets you convert any url / webpage to a .pdf and download it instantly. The online tool is free and easy to use – simply enter the url you want converted, click the button, and receive the .pdf on your desktop.

Please read the rest of Rick’s article, here, and find out more. While you’re there, explore his site a little bit. Discover why What’s On My PC.. is one of my daily reads.

Warning! The Worst Virus Ever! (Verified by Snopes!)

Folks — I have written articles advising you to immediately delete these types of e-mails, which are inevitably forwarded to us by well-meaning friends and family. There’s one going around right now, warning about “the worst virus ever! (verified by Snopes!)”.
I think I first saw this particular one in 1996.

Please read my article, SEND THIS E-MAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!, and then please send the link to those friends and family members who show a proclivity to fall for this type of Internet scam. (You know who they are.)

These “warning!” e-mails will contain an image (attachment) which will automatically be downloaded when you open the e-mail (please see, HTML e-mail and image spam) ) which automatically gives the cyber-criminal a matching valid e-mail address and machine/IP address – yours! You don’t need to click any links, you just need to view (open) the message, and the damage is done.

So even though the Subject line may advise “DO NOT DELETE”, go ahead and do so– immediately and unopened. You’ll be protecting your Inbox and Identity. And, need I say it? The “warning” is a bogus fraud, carefully crafted to play off people’s ignorance and fear.

Short version: if you believe these letters, and forward them, you are essentially handing criminals your Contacts list, and your friends and family will get spammed.

Today’s free link: Today’s link is to a bargain shopper’s Website recommended to me by a Loyal Friend and True of Tech–for Everyone. FatWallet.com has the steals, online coupons, price comparisons, and forums you’re looking for.

Copyright 2007-2010 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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SB Pick

Okay. Okay. Okay. Stop writing in. My pick for the Super Bowl is a not-so-confident…

Image On My Screen Is Upside-down. Help!

Accidental Click “Rotates” Screen Image 90 Degrees. Helpful Hubby Rotates It 90 More.

I don’t think you need to be any kind of computer genius to realize that you may have accidentally clicked something wrong, or pressed the wrong button, when suddenly your screen looks like this.

Which is what happened to a reader, which prompted them to write the following e-mail:

Paul, we’ve run up against a snarl with my wife’s computer. We hope you can help us get it straightened out. She was reading her e-mail this afternoon, and suddenly—-for no reason she is aware of—-the picture rotated 90 degrees to the right. Insane! We fiddled around with various approaches to get it back to normal. We clicked on an icon on the desktop, which brought up a set of options, which included 90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 270 degrees. These sub-windows and option bars kept disappearing on us, if we didn’t do something quickly enough, so I hastily clicked on 180 degrees.

Bad choice! Now everything is upside down. And I can’t remember what I did to get to that set of choices, except that it did not seem very likely, yet it worked—-that one time! It is just that I blew it by making the wrong choice. There was probably a choice called “normal” or something like that, which would have solved our problem. But, Can you suggest what would be the way that we could most likely get to work?

Solution: I suspect that an accidental click (probably) changed the monitor’s orientation from “landscape mode” (horizontal) to “portrait” (the original 90° rotation error).
1) Get into your Display Properties by right-clicking on a blank area of your Desktop.
A menu will open: click on “Display Options” or “Display settings” [note: each machine is a little different, and your menu may say "Graphics" instead of "Display".]

2) Look for the setting (aka “option”) labeled Rotation, and set it back to 0°.

3) Click on the Apply button, and then on OK.

That’s it. You should be back to normal.

Copyright 2007-2010 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Be The First To Get Your Free iPad

Cyber-criminals have been quick to jump on the buzz around Apple’s new tablet PC, and are hoping to lure more victims by sending out (spam) e-mails offering a chance at a free iPad. Please see, Spammers dangle iPad carrot.

(I hope I need not tell you, Dear Reader, that bad things will happen if you think you can click your way to a free computer?)

Today’s Guessing Game

Q: What Do These Three Items Have In Common?

A: *People* Click On Them.

Get More Out Of Your Browser – Learn How To Use Tabs And Favorites

I am doing a big on-site job today, and so I must re-post a prior article. This article describes how to get more out of IE 7 with the use of bookmarks (“Favorites” ) and tabs. Though Internet Explorer 7 debuted some time ago, the basic lessons are the same for the current version, IE 8; and the principles apply to other Web browsers, such as Firefox, as well.

Once again, I am reminded that the simple things often make the best topics. I showed my screen to a client during a support session, and they asked me “how do you do that?”

I didn’t know what they meant, and was startled to learn that what they wanted to know was how did I have Internet Explorer “pre-set” to several of my mailboxes, and Google’s search page. To be more specific — they didn’t know about tabbed browsing, and weren’t real sure what Favorites were either.

Tip of the day: Stop repeating yourself, get the hang of IE 7’s features. New to IE (but not to Firefox, Opera, Netscape, and others) is a feature called “tabbed browsing” which allows you to open multiple websites within a single window, and quickly switch back-and-forth between them. In this screenshot you can see how my IE usually appears.

As you can see, I typically have five “tabs” open: my Google home page, an online dictionary, Tech–for Everyone, Hotmail (now “Windows Live Hotmail”), and my ISP’s home page. When I shut down at night, I click IE’s red “X” — the big red one in the upper-right corner –and am presented with the window (You may see “You are about to close multiple tabs. Do you..?” Click on the “Show Options” link.) shown below.

and I select (check) “Open these tabs the next time I use Internet Explorer”. This option allows me to skip having to open five tabs and navigating to each of my regular websites each morning.

To open a new tab, and this works in every browser I’m familiar with, press Ctrl+T. Depending on your Settings selection (under “Tabs” in Internet Options) this new tab will open to your current Home Page, or to a “blank page”, as shown below.

Now I can type “http://www.mychoiceofsite.com” (no quotes) into the browser bar, and there I am. Or I can click on the gold star for my list of Favorites, and launch (open) a site from there.

“Favorites” is Microsoft’s word for “bookmarks”, and in the world of PC’s the two words are interchangeable. If I stumble across a particularly interesting and/or useful Website that I know I will be returning to frequently, I can “bookmark it” by clicking on the green + on-top-of-the-gold-star icon and select “Add to Favorites” (or hit Ctrl+D). My mailboxes, my favorite tech websites, Google, and an online dictionary are in my Favorites list, so I can launch (open) them with a click — which saves on my typing.

To close a tab, simply click on its “x”; which is not red but grey. The tab must be “active” (selected) to be closed.

Now set your Tabs options to keep all your browsing in one instance of IE (instead of opening another IE, a new tab will open). In the upper right corner, click on the “Tools” menu and select “Internet Options”. Look down to the Tabs area and click on the Settings button.

Now select the radio buttons to change “in a new window” to “in a new tab”, as shown below.

Related articles:

Restore Missing Favorites In IE*

Internet Explorer Runtime Error!!*

Quick Tip: Turn on ClearType in Internet Explorer

Can’t Download? Reset IE

How To Clear Your Cache

View Multiple Mail Identities in One Browser

Extracting text from Web pages*

Precautions for your Internet privacy*

Quick Tip: Customize new tabs behavior

IE’s Menu bar, Taskbar icons, and bad Updates*

Internet/E-mail Troubleshooting – JavaScript

What is a “homepage”?

How to use tabs in IE 7

Saving webpages as files

Today’s free download: (You knew this was coming … right?) An application that has gained quite a name for itself is the “alternative” browser called Firefox. If you haven’t tried this powerful, free program, nor learned about its nifty “Add ons”, I suggest you give it a test drive now. Click here to download Firefox and then click the Tools menu and then Add ons. I suggest you start with NoScript and AdBlock Plus, and then explore the vast assortment.

Copyright 2007-2010 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Quick Tip: Easy Trick Creates A File List

This quick and simple trick will produce a list of the files in any folder, which you can then paste into any text editor, then Save and/or print. (Possibly a handy way to keep track of your music/videos collection.)

1) Open the folder you would like to list.

2) Click on one of the files to “select” it (turn it blue), and then hit Ctrl+A (the keyboard shortcut for “Select all”) to highlight all the files in the folder.

3) Right-click on any of the (now highlighted) files, and click on “Send To“, and then “Mail Recipient“.. as shown below. (This right-click menu is called the “Context menu”, btw.)

4) This will open your computer’s default e-mail client (Outlook Express, for example) and the ‘body’ of the e-mail will be your list of files.

5) Highlight (aka “select”) the list, and then press Ctrl+C (or, in the Menu bar: Edit > Copy) to copy the text to the clipboard.

6) Open your text editor (Word, Notepad, etc.) and press Ctrl+V (or, in the Menu bar: Edit > Paste) to ‘paste’ the list into your document.

Now you can Save this text file, or simply print it out.

[note: you can 'paste' the list into other programs as well, such as a spreadsheet program - like Excel.]

Copyright 2007-2010 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Would You Recognize A Scam? Are You Sure?

Scammers, Frauds, Conmen, ID Thieves, Cybercriminals, “Phish“-ers – call them what you will, but they all are attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity. (This is called “social engineering” in today’s vernacular.)

The methods they use to trick us are many and varied — would you recognize a well-crafted scam? Could you spot a fake “look-alike” website? What if they mentioned your supervisor’s name and put you on hold and you heard the company musak?

Social Engineering: Eight Common Tactics

“Famous hacker Kevin Mitnick helped popularize the term ’social engineering’ in the ’90s, but the simple idea itself (tricking someone into doing something or divulging sensitive information) has been around for ages. And experts say hackers today continue to steal password, install malware or grab profits by employing a mix of old and new tactics.

Here’s a refresher course on some of the most prevalent social engineering tricks used by phone, email and Web.”

Folks, a quick reading recommendation today. This article by Joan Goodchild describes and explains how the cyber-criminals try to trick us. Please Click here to read this terrific primer. (And if you are an employer, you may want to ask your employees to read this too…)

Copyright 2007-2010 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Error: JavaScript Not Installed

JavaScript Makes The Web Go Round

I received a call for help with an e-mail problem. The caller was getting errors when trying to access their webmail (online e-mail, such as Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail). Which had them quite upset, naturally, but was really no problem at all, and was quite easily fixed with a few clicks of the mouse.

My caller’s errors all referred to JavaScript – which is (short version) a programming language used extensively on the Internet; mostly to make Web pages dynamic and interactive with the viewer. Many websites rely on JavaScript to function, and Gmail and Hotmail do too.

My caller’s computer was suddenly saying that JavaScript was “not installed”, but in reality, all that had happened was it had been somehow inadvertently “disabled” (aka “turned off”), and needed to be switched on again.

Tip of the day: enable (or, re-enable) JavaScript in your Web browser.
1) Open Internet Explorer and in the upper right find the gray gear icon “Tools” menu. Click it, and then click on “Internet Options“

2) Now a new window will open. Click on the “Security” tab (top), as shown below.

3) Click the “Custom level…” button.

4) Use the slider to scroll down the list of options until you come to “Active scripting“, as shown below.

5) Click on the “Enable” ‘radio’ button, and then click on OK, twice.

6) Close Internet Explorer and then re-launch (aka “Open”) it again.

Now JavaScript (should be) is enabled and functioning and you can surf the Web and access Webmail as you had before. Problem solved!

[note: if you found that JavaScript was already enabled, please see Internet Explorer Runtime Error!!*. I have several other how to's on repairing your browser as well, should you need further guidance. Enter "error", or "repair" in my Search box.]

Today’s free link: Technology We’ll Miss When It’s Gone
“As tech speeds inexorably forward, many gadgets and services will be left in heaps on the roadside. Problem is, we’ll truly miss some of them.” (This is a rather astute op-ed.. and a fun read.)

Today’s free download: Trillian Astra
More than three years in the making, Trillian is back with a slight name change and a slew of new features. The chat client now supports Google, MySpace IM, Skype, and Facebook, as well as AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and IRC. It  has both POP3 and IMAP e-mail checking.
Trillian now has deep hooks into Facebook and Twitter. It will automatically shorten URLs in your tweets, as well as allow direct messages, re-tweets, and replies. Twitter Trends can show up in your contact list, and you can get tweets to appear in Tooltip form. Facebook features include news feed integration, Facebook Inbox checking, and synchronized message updating in addition to Facebook IM.

Copyright 2007-2010 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Technology We’ll Miss When It’s Gone

As tech speeds inexorably forward, many gadgets and services will be left in heaps on the roadside. Problem is, we’ll truly miss some of them.