How to erase yourself from the internet

Anyone thinking off ‘going off the grid’, this article is for you.

* Gallery: How to erase yourself from the internet

“Destroying your digital existence—it’s not easy

Fed up with social media? Sick and tired of hiding from identity thieves? It’s not easy to eliminate your online presence, but it can be done if you’re willing to put in the legwork.

Here are some tools, tips, and strategies for getting rid of your internet footprint.” View slideshow

Addenda: This article does not mention some other obvious things, such as –> NEVER own an ‘Internet-connected’ device/toy/gadget (such s a ‘smart tv’ or ‘Internet security camera’..)

Today’s quote: “Nothing you wear is more important than your smile.” ~ Connie Stevens

Copyright 2007-2017 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.

Remove “Metadata” From Your Files Before Sharing Them

Whenever you create, open, or save a file or document, that file will store information — known as metadata — that you had no intention of including or disclosing to others. Taking a conscientious “extra step” can prevent  embarrassment, and also make you a bit more secure. Here’s the “how to”.

Hidden Attributes and Tags Might Reveal More Than You Would Like

You may not be aware that the documents you generate, and the photos you edit on your computer are “stamped” (if you will) with little bits and pieces of information that the computer thinks are useful — called “metadata“. This metadata is not out in plain site for you to notice, but it’s there. Fortunately, it is not difficult to remove.

[note: “Metadata is not necessarily “bad”. Metadata is essentially there to help the computers do their jobs better and faster, and can be helpful to us as well.]

Metadata for a photograph would typically include the date and time at which it was taken and details of the camera settings, such as focal length, aperture, exposure. It would also contain any titles or keyword “tags” we’ve added to help us organize our albums. (If your camera/smartphone has “geotagging”, your location is pinpointed.)

Metadata for a document would typically include the date and time at which it was created, title, author, subject, number of pages, and the language of the text.

But the metadata will also contain the number of revisions, how long you spent working on it, (possibly) hidden markups/edits, who it is “shared” with, who else it’s been sent to, the Save path (which usually reveals your User Name), computer name, and more.

This can open you up to embarrassment (What? They took 4 hours and 16 revisions to write this ??? And why did they show it Joe?) and/or provide info a hacker might use to gain control of your PC.

Tip of the day: Before you e-mail off your file as an attachment, or turn it in to the boss, it might be a good idea to strip it of the metadata. To do this:
1) right-click of the file and select “Properties” from the context menu. In my example, I’ll use a Word document named BarbaraInvoice.doc.

2) Click on the “Details” tab, and look to the bottom area. Click on “Remove Properties and Personal Information”.

3) A new window will open. Here you will see two choices represented by radio buttons. ‘Remove it all’ is the default, but you can be selective by clicking the second button, and using the window scroll, and remove just certain tags.

4) Click “OK”, and the metadata is gone.

Today’s yippee yahoo: 450,000 user passwords leaked in Yahoo breach

“A hacker group claims responsibility for attack on a Yahoo service, exposing more than 450,000 plain text login credentials.” Read more..

If anyone should know better than that, it should be IT Pros, working at a place like Yahoo..? Ya’ think?

One more reason not to Yahoo!

Today’s free link: Amazon’s Game Downloads area lets you try every title – including new releases – before you buy. There are games for all ages and interests.

Today’s free download: Photographers: I believe this small free utility – BatchPurifier Lite– will allow you direct control over exactly which EXIF (metadata) info you want to remove from your image files. (I have not used this myself, but, there you go.)

Germane to nothing at all: in my world/our local slang, a “yahoo” is a happy-go-lucky idjit (aka a “fool”.)

Today’s quote: “All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Copyright 2007-2012 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.

Quick Tip for Printing Out Web Pages

Free Software Avoids Paper/Ink Waste

A reader comment prompted me to do some quick research, which led me to a good tip on Gizmodo’s (a site I recommend). Which educated me to an option for saving ink and paper (and being “eco-friendly”) I had been unaware of…

“It’s a problem that’s all too familiar.  You find a useful web page and you want to print it.  So you hit the “Print” button in your web browser.  But rather than getting a single printed page that contains just the text you want, you also get 15 other pages that you don’t need, containing menus, comments, and other assorted junk. Which costs you real money in wasted paper and ink.“

The free tool is called iPrint (and no, it is not an Apple product..) Here is their demo video..

Vodpod videos no longer available.

iPrint Version 6 is free, simple to use and saves your wallet as well as the planet.

“Do you want to decrease your printing expenses by up to 60%? Do you want to help protect the environment while also protecting your wallet? iPrint is the solution! Think about how much your organization spends each year on paper and ink costs – iPrint will reduce that number by 30-60% and it costs you nothing!“

The iPrint website is here. Thank you Gizmodo!

Previously, I had been recommending a free browser “plug in” from HP, and still do for those who use Internet Explorer. It’s called Smart Web Printing.

“The whole internet just became print friendly.

With a simple plug-in for your browser, quickly Select & Clip or Select & Print web pages just the way you want them, and eliminate all that wasted ink and paper. Download HP Smart Web Printing and get print friendly today!

For Windows XP, Windows Vista® and Windows 7
For Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8 “

You can download the HP Smart Web Printing add-on here

Today’s quote: “One does evil enough when one does nothing good.” ~ German Proverb

Copyright 2007-2011 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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How To Copy From (Or Save) A Web Page

Working With Web Pages

Whether you want to share information you have found on the web with others, or keep a copy for reference at a later date, knowing how to “work with webpages” and copy online text and images are handy skills.

The first thing to understand is that “online” material – such as webpages – are stored elsewhere, and “served” to your computer, where they are assembled and “viewed” by your web browser — through the use of HTTP and HTML ‘coding’ (which is not visible to you).

The typical webpage will have many sources for what you “see”: the HTML code, and the page’s text are probably on one “web server”, the logos and other images may come from another “server”, or servers, and the advertisements from yet other servers. These various items can be “dynamic” (changing), so that a farmer in Minnesota won’t see the exact same web page as Florida retiree (at least, not the same ads..).

Short version: a webpage is not a simple file you can Save, Edit, or Delete, like Word document or Excel spreadsheet you have created “locally” on your own machine.

Sharing Web pages with others:
The easiest way to share a web page with others is to simply send them the URL. A “URL” is the “http://blah.blahblah.com/blah.htm&#8221; (found in the “address bar”) and the easiest way to send it is to Copy > Paste.

The easiest way to Copy a URL is to click – once – anywhere on the web page, and then click – once – inside the address bar. That will ‘highlight’ (turn blue.. aka “select”) the whole, entire URL.
* Click on Edit > Copy, or press the Ctrl + C keys, to copy the selection.

* You can now move to Email “compose” window, or Chat “send message” window, and click on Edit > Paste, or press Ctrl + V, which will paste the URL in, and you can…

* Now Send the recipient(s) the exact web page URL you want them to see. (Mind you, web pages are often dynamic, and your recipient might not see exactly what you see..)

Another easy method will fix the “dynamic” webpage, and turn it into a simple file (which you will have stored “locally”, aka “onboard”) which you can then “attach” to an e-mail and send – as you would a Word document or Excel spreadsheet – only it will be a PDF file, and the images will be “embedded” for you.

Fellow tech blogger Rick Robinette wrote a nice article on this method here, Easily Convert Web Pages to a PDF File, so I will let you read that instead of re-inventing the wheel. Trust me, it’s something you’ll want to know about. (And you may find out why his site is one of my daily reads.
[update: Rick posted a review today of a free program you can install for turning web pages into PDF’s. Please see Nitro – A PDF Reader that is a Whole Lot More.]

Extracting selected web page items:
Sometimes all you want from a web page is just a small section of text, or a single picture — perhaps as reference material, or just a really quotable Quotable Quote. Or a recipe.

For pictures and images, all you need to do is right– click on the image, and select Save image as. ¹ This will ‘download’ a copy of the image file to your PC, which you can then “attach” to an e-mail and send. (That wasn’t so hard, was it?) Text is a little trickier.

Q: How do I copy the text on a webpage into my document?

“There are actually a couple of different ways to do this, including the old “print-to-file” method that DOS users remember. The trick is to get just the text and information you want, and not all the advertising and hyperlinks and graphics/logos that most webpages incorporate…”

As the blurb states, there are a few methods, and I am running long. Good thing I wrote out the How To steps a while back and posted them in this article, How To Extract Text From Web Pages*!

So there you have it. Some basics, and two additional How To’s. Have a great weekend, folks.

¹ Addenda: Readers have chimed in with more tips; please see comments below.

Copyright 2007-2010 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved. post to jaanix.

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Another Way To Install A Program On A Netbook

A Thumb Drive Can Be Used In Place Of An External Optical Drive

Light-weight and small size make netbooks very portable. But, to achieve their compact size, certain items are missing from netbooks — most notably perhaps, internal CD/DVD drives.

This “disc deficit” is usually overcome by the purchase of an external (USB cable-connected) optical drive.

Today I want to point out that should you not happen to have an external drive available, frequently you can substitute, and use a “thumb drive” (“memory stick”) instead.. such as using the following method to watch DVD movies — see, Tech Tip for Travelers – Make Your Movies More Portable!

Tip of the day: Use a thumb drive to install programs on to a netbook.
To install a program (you have a CD for) onto a netbook using a thumb drive, you will need two things; one, access to a computer that has a CD/DVD drive and; two, a thumb drive large enough to hold the contents of the Install disc. [note: CD’s are roughly 700 MB’s (.7 GB’s) and DVD’s are typically 4.7 GB’s]

1) Go to the PC with the optical drive and insert the thumb drive. Then insert the Install disc into the drive tray.
Cancel (stop) any setup/install process from starting, should it try to “autostart”.

2) If the AutoPlay window opens, select “Open folder to view files” (which should be the bottom choice).
If you have disabled AutoPlay: Click Start > Double-click Computer (My Computer in XP/older) > right-click on the optical drive (CD-ROM) and choose Explore.

3) Drag the entire contents (all the files) of the CD/DVD to the icon for “removable drive” that is the thumb drive. Take mental note of what the installer executable’s name is – typically, it is setup.exe.

4) Use “Safely remove” and remove the thumb drive, and then insert it into your netbook. If the AutoPlay window opens, select “Open folder to view files” (which should be the bottom choice), if you have disabled AutoPlay: Click Start > Double-click Computer (My Computer in XP/older) > right-click on the removable drive (your thumb drive) and choose Explore. Find and then double-click the setup.exe.

That will “launch” the set up process and install the program on to your netbook, just as if it had been run from a disc.

Bonus tip: When you’re all done, you can drag all those setup files to the Recycle bin.

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

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How To Extract Text From Web Pages*

Today’s quick tip was inspired by a reader question. The gentleman used to use an old technique to “print” webpages to text files so that he could edit and incorporate the text into his documents, and he wanted to know if he could still do this, but in a more modern way.
I would like to take a moment here to remind my readers that I do answer questions sent to me; and also that if I believe the question-and-answer will benefit “everyone”, you could very well see it posted here.. like today’s.

Q: How do I copy the text on a webpage to my document?
A: There is actually a couple of different ways to do this, including the old “print-to-file” method that DOS users remember. The trick is to get just the text and information you want, and not all the advertising and hyperlinks and graphics/logos that most webpages incorporate.

1) If all you need is a small portion of text from a webpage, the easiest way to get it from your browser to your word processor is to ‘highlight’ the sentence (or paragraph) on the webpage, press Ctrl+C to Copy, click on the place in your document that you’d like to insert the text and hit Ctrl+V to Paste the selection into your document (you may have to change the font and text size to match the rest of your document’s format).

Sometimes, it can be a little tricky — working in the browser — getting your cursor to change from an arrow (navigation) to the vertical bar and selecting the page’s text. But rest assured that you can ’select’ the text on a webpage. Usually you have to get the point of the arrow very close the edge of the first letter, and make small, gentle mouse movements until the cursor changes. You could also try clicking in an easier part of the text, and use your arrow keys to move the cursor to where you want it.
(As a writer, I simply must express my hope that you will pay some mind to the concept of Copyrights, and original work, and properly attribute your “borrowed” material.)

2) But if you want all the information on the webpage, and you want it to be available as a file you can reference at your leisure, the Copy>Paste method is not the best, and another technique will serve you better.
Some people prefer to download the webpages in a method called “Offline webpages”, which is a whole ‘nother topic. Offline gives you the whole webpage — logos/graphics, links, ads — as if you were connected to the Internet, and this is more info than we need for today’s topic… we just want the text.

In Firefox and the older Internet Explorer 6 (Please, folks; IE 6 is quite probably the most hacked program ever written– update to IE8, or use an “alternative” browser), you can click on the “File” menu on your browser’s toolbar. IE7 users (who haven’t re-enabled the old Menu bar) should click on the “Page” button. Whichever manner you used, now click on “Save As”.

Now the Save As window will open, and here is where we will make our important decisions.

As usual, you will be presented with the ability to select the “where” the file will be Saved, and give it a name. But the primary thing is to select the “Save as type”, so that we will have a file we can use as we want to– in this case, a text file (.txt).
Once the webpage is Saved as a text file, you will be able to Open it with any word processor. And you will be able to edit it to your heart’s content.. and it will be available whenever you need it.

Note: If you decide to Save the webpage as one of the other options in the “file type” (or, made a mistake here) selection, and Save the page as an *.htm,*html file or even a “archive”, you will still be able to Open it with a word processor [by default, it will open with your browser, so right-click on the file and choose “Open with” and then click your word processor] and edit it… it will just contain a whole bunch of junk-looking code, as well as the text you want.

Today’s free download: I am not a real big fan of free all-in-one “optimization” programs, but I do have one that I like, use (occasionally), and can recommend. Advanced WindowsCare Personal From publisher: “is a comprehensive PC care utility that takes an one-click approach to help protect, repair and optimize your computer. It provides an all-in-one and super convenient solution for PC maintenance and protection.”

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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How To Remove Metadata From Your Files

Hidden Attributes and Tags Might Reveal More Than You Would Like

You may not be aware that the documents you generate, and the photos you edit on your computer are “stamped” (if you will) with little bits and pieces of information that the computer thinks are useful — called “metadata“. This metadata is not out in plain site for you to notice, but it’s there. Fortunately, it is not difficult to remove.

Metadata is essentially there to help the computers do their jobs better and faster, and can be helpful to us as well.

Metadata for a photograph would typically include the date and time at which it was taken and details of the camera settings, such as focal length, aperture, exposure. It would also contain any titles or keyword “tags” we’ve added to help us organize our albums.

Metadata for a document would typically include the date and time at which it was created, title, author, subject, number of pages, and the language of the text.

But the metadata will also contain the number of revisions, how long you spent working on it, (possibly) hidden markups/edits, who it is “shared” with, who else it’s been sent to, the Save path (which usually reveals your User Name), computer name, and more.
This can open you up to embarrassment (What? They took 4 hours and 6 revisions to write this ??? And why did they show it Joe?) and/or provide info a hacker might use to gain control of your PC.

Tip of the day: Before you e-mail off your file as an attachment, or turn it in to the boss, it might be a good idea to strip it of the metadata. To do this:
1) right-click of the file and select “Properties” from the context menu. In my example, I’ll use a Word document named BarbaraInvoice.doc.

2) Click on the “Details” tab, and look to the bottom area. Click on “Remove Properties and Personal Information”.

3) A new window will open. Here you will see two choices represented by radio buttons. ‘Remove it all’ is the default, but you can be selective by clicking the second button, and using the window scroll, and remove just certain tags.

4) Click “OK”, and the metadata is gone.

Today’s free link: Amazon’s Game Downloads area lets you try every title – including new releases – before you buy. There are games for all ages and interests.

Today’s free download: Recently, I was asked “what program will fix my computer ?” Well, that sort of depends on what the problem is, now doesn’t it? It’s a nice idea though, isn’t it? One program that fixes everything. (I’d be out of a job!) Advanced SystemCare Free from IObit comes pretty close to fitting that bill. One click will help restore your computer to its youthful vigor, and keep it running smoothly.

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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