Happy Christmas!

May all your computing be jolly and fun!

Keep a note of your passwords in a special place.  Don't use the same one for every site you visit.

Christmas Shopping

Many of you will be getting ready for Christmas and buying presents for your friends and family.  Shops are busy but full of atmosphere and lots of ideas, they open later so that you can shop after work, and are often less crowded in the evenings.  If however you want to avoid queues and bustle, you may want to shop online.  This can be done at any time of day, but is as about as time consuming.  

Here are a few tips to help you cut down on some costs this Christmas whether you are visiting shops or online:

·      Write a list and stick to it.

·      Make your own presents or cook them.

·      Make the most of buy one get one free.

·      Gather up loyalty points and use up your vouchers on presents or food.  Look out for triple points days to get more points on shopping.

·      Shop when there are promotions or price matches in store.

·      Use cashback credit cards.  Earn money as you spend.

·      Visit Aldi, Lidl, TK Max and Primark for great deals, or treat yourself to a day out at Bicester village, Clarks village or Swindon.

·      Get on eBay, but check the prices against Amazon and other online retailers.

·      Amazon in other countries can be cheaper despite the postage.

·      Look up discount codes for online shopping at www.moneysavingexpert.co.uk and Hotukdeals.co.uk before you buy.

·      Compare prices with mysupermarket.co.uk, Kelkoo and Pricerunner.

·      Avoid paying postage by using “click and collect”.

·      Try a cashback website such as Topcashback.co.uk and log on to shop at selected retailers and get cash back on your shopping. 

·      Buy vouchers but careful with the expiry dates.

On this note, I would like to mention that I offer vouchers for computer lessons, which I can customise for you to give as gifts for Christmas or any other occasion.  If you know someone who is struggling with technology or is about to receive a new gadget for Christmas, this could be a good option.  I would like to thank Mrs Jones who wrote in last month to propose that I should make this suggestion.   She thought there would be many people who could do with a helping hand, and being taught how to do things on a PC, laptop, tablet or phone. 

I teach on Windows computers and Apple, which includes Mac, iPhone, iPad as well as Kindles, cameras, smartphones.  My technicians can offer help with setting up new devices and transferring data, as well as trouble shooting and Wi-Fi networks.

Lessons are an hour long and technicians and teaching is the same price per hour.  Currently £40/hour.  We come to you and if it’s a lesson, it’s geared around what you want to learn.  There a lots of small things that can be done to make your computer time easier and simpler.  We aim to give confidence so that you learn to love your computers and make the most of what you have.  We have years of experience and patience really is our speciality.

Do get in touch to arrange a voucher.  Send an email to info@mrspc.co.uk or call me on 

07920 578194.

Wishing you and your families a very Happy Christmas and do try some of my shopping suggestions.

Dropbox

Dropbox

I really can’t recommend Dropbox enough.  It is free online storage/backup for important documents or photos.   It will also allow you to share files easily with others.

Once downloaded on your system you will have an icon on your desktop and a new folder in your folder structure.  You can copy files and photos into it as easily as you can with your other folders.  Using drag and drop or copy and paste.

Whatever you put in there uploads to your Dropbox cloud and if you also download an app on your iPad and phone you will be able to access those things in Dropbox from whichever device you choose, where ever you are.

When you share things in Dropbox and other people can be invited to share and collaborate on your stuff- or in fact delete it- so be careful when sharing.

I use it for documents that I am in the process of working on.  Dropbox allows me to work on whichever device is most convenient- phone, laptop or desktop and the document is always the most up to date version.  No more renaming and losing files!

I also use it to share photos after a trip with friends, so that we can see each other’s photos and download the ones we want to keep.

It can be used to store important documents that you wouldn’t want to lose, such as scans of your passport, NI or NHS number, or driving licence, so that you always have the details to hand.

You get 2GB of storage free, and can add to this by recommending friends.  If you recommend someone to use it, both of you get 500GB of free storage up to a maximum of 16GB. 

You can also pay for a Pro version, which many people do.  It costs £7.99/month, which gives you gives you a whopping 1TB of storage.  The business version and up to 5 users has unlimited storage.  That costs £11/per month.

It can be used on Windows, Macintosh and Linux desktop operating systems. There are also apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and other devices.

The data is encrypted, so it is safe to use it.

Needless to say, this article is being written and stored on Dropbox.

So give it a try. When you download Dropbox, you get a free tutorial.  It is really easy to use, and one of the best free software packages around.  I couldn’t do without it.

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor

When it comes to planning a trip, be it in this country or abroad, TripAdvisor www.tripadvisor.co.uk can come in very handy to help you decide where to stay and what to visit and where to eat.  You are drawing on the experience of thousands of fellow travellers, who give their unbiased opinions on this valuable website.  You can also see photos taken by people who have visited the places listed.  It is free to use and one of the biggest travel websites in existence.  280 million people visit the site every month.

Incredibly, Trip Advisor came into being 15 years ago.  The logo of the owl is now well recognized worldwide.  Had you ever noticed that one of it’s eyes is red and the other green?  This symbolizes how travellers use the site.  Red means don’t go and green means go.   Travellers give places a rating, which is measured in circles or bubbles and not stars.  The highest rating is 5 bubbles.

London is one of the most reviewed cities, but you will be able to find reviews on hotels, restaurants or tourist attractions in any country or city in the world.

I find that you do get some bad reviews.  Some of them are really quite funny.  People who are annoyed with small things will sometimes lash out at the owners of hotels or restaurants by posting a bad review.  You can usually sift through all the latest reviews and get a good overall feeling for a place.  Don’t let one bad review put you off. 

There is a wonderful country pub just outside Bath which we visit from time to time.  The landlord there seems to polarise opinions on TripAdvisor.  Some find him charming, and others describe him as being rather too jovial. 

I enjoy writing reviews for Trip Advisor as well as drawing on it for guidance in planning trips.  Once you start reviewing, it can be quite addictive, and a nice way to keep a record of the places that you have visited.   As a reviewer, you will get emails from TripAdvisor telling you how many people have read your reviews.  Travellers can give other reviewers a “Helpful badge”  if they find their reviews useful.   A reviewer in Hong Kong has written over 3200 reviews

You can work your way through the ranks of reviewers and become a senior reviewer after so many reviews.  You can hide your full name, and appear under your first name, and where you live.   If you have had a good experience somewhere, it is a lovely thing to do, and restaurants and hotels really do appreciate your comments, and often thank you for them.  If you have made any negative comments or put forward suggestions, the management can also comment about that. 

TripAdvisor has suffered from it’s fair share of controversy.  There were instances of guests being bribed to leave good reviews of a hotel in Cornwall, and of reviewers posting an alarming amount of reviews of places in too short a short time to be possible.  One hotel in Blackpool fined guests £100 for leaving bad reviews, and rival hotels busied themselves writing negative reviews about each other!  There have even been spoof listings of non existent places, which climbed up the rankings and took some time to be spotted.  The site has now started to check reviews, and only posts them once they are satisfied that it is genuine.  Some of the reviews are not from real travellers, so I do urge you to read through at least 10 reviews before making a decision. 

Photographs

Photographs and the best way to save them.

Last month, I returned to my hometown and met up with some old friends.  One of them brought along some old photos of times we had spent together 20 years ago.  We had such fun reminiscing and catching up on news.  One photo in particular was particularly poignant.  It was a family snap, with my friend and my family all together.  I hadn’t seen it before.  I have now borrowed it, and taken a copy.  My scanner was broken, so I went to Clifton Colour in Clifton Down Shopping Centre, and they did it for me on the spot. 

When I went to pay, there was a photocopy on the desk, printed out from The Daily Telegraph. 

Google’s vice president has warned internet users to print out treasured photographs or risk losing them.

 “Vint Cerf, the internet pioneer, said it was time to start preserving the vast quantities of digital data which are produced before they are lost forever.

Warning that the 21st century could become a second "Dark Ages" because so much data is now kept in digital format, he said that future generations would struggle to understand our society because technology is advancing so quickly that old files will be inaccessible.

Speaking at a conference in San Jose, California, Mr Cerf likened the problem to the Dark Ages, the period in Britain between the 5th and 8th centuries where little is known, following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

 “If we don’t find a solution our 21st Century will be an information black hole.”

“Future generations will wonder about us but they will have very great difficulty knowing about us.”

“We think about digitising things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don't understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse than, the artefacts that we digitised.”

“We stand to lose a lot of our history. If you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives which is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people's tweets, all of the world wide web, then if you wanted to see what was on the web in 1994 you'd have trouble doing that. A lot of the stuff disappears.

“We don't want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them the same way we preserve books and so on we need to make sure that the digital objects we create will be rendered far into the future.”

Mr Cerf said there was a huge problem with the ability to preserve and run software over long periods of time. He said he felt a ‘great burden’ to find a way to create digital formats which can still be accessed in thousands of years.

He is recommending the creation of a system, which will not only store a digital format but preserve details of the software and operating system needed to access it, so it can be recreated in the future.

In the meantime, he recommended printing out important documents such as treasured family pictures to avoid losing them through outdated operating systems.

“We have various formats for digital photographs and movies and those formats need software to correctly render those objects.

“Sometimes the standards we use to produce those objects fade away and are replaced by other alternatives and then software that is supposed to render images can't render older formats, so the images are no longer visible.

I thought that the article was worthy of sharing with you.  Do make sure that your most precious photos are printed or at least saved.  Don’t just leave them on your camera or phone, transfer the photos onto your computer and then back them up elsewhere too.

So many photos are taken on phones- such as this “Selfie”.  It is likely that many will remain in digital format and often be lost with the phone if that goes astray.

Treasure your digital memories, and take care of them!

Rude but True!

Scams, hacking and backup.

Funny how in the click of a mouse, things can go very wrong on your computer.  If you are very careful what you click on, you shouldn’t have any problems.  Once you have made a mistake, it could be very costly to put right or take you a lot of time. 

This email arrived for me a few weeks ago.

Refund Reference Number is: Ref/14377/2014

Dear Taxpayer,

*Refund Amount : GBP 521.78

>> Your *Refund Reference Number is: Ref/14377/2014 <<

*************************

Account ID: 748200162

E-mail ID: 930155328

*************************

NOTE: If you've received an Income Tax 'repayment' it will either be following a claim you've made or becouse

HM Revenue & Customs has received new information about your taxable income or entitlement to allowances.

The refund may come through your tax code or as a payment and could relate to the current tax year or earlier years.

CLICK HERE to submit your tax refund request

Thank you,

HM Revenue & Customs

Would you have known that this was a scam? 

The email is appealing as it is offering you a refund, but look carefully again and see if you can spot the warning signs.  There are usually spelling mistakes and poor grammar in scam emails, and there is always a “LINK”, or blue web address or words in blue and underlined which the email asks you to click.  HM Revenue would not email, nor would Microsoft or your Bank, so ignore any emails from them, even if they look official.

Never click on links in suspicious emails, even if you know the sender.  If the sender doesn’t usually email you, or you have any doubts, give them a call to check first.  Clicking on an unsafe link can download malware, or nasty viruses onto your system.

You can be a victim of this on Facebook too, so if there is a post from a friend saying, please check out my private video, or tagging you in a post saying you were there, and you weren’t, it is more than likely a scam.  Don’t click or you will be infected and infect all your friends.

So what should you do if you think you might have clicked on something that you shouldn’t? 

This free software is extremely good for Windows users.  It is also free.  https://www.malwarebytes.org/  It’s not a bad idea to run it once in a while to see what it picks up. 

If your email has been hacked or you suspect someone else’s has, act immediately.  If you have received an email from a friend with a strange link in it, and no subject, do tell them right away.

I had this from a client recently:

Subject:  Re:bss18 f

http://www.creativeinfotech.info/er/jgabpxybgkaibtr.rpiwzorevcjvnhcmaozty

huish773

1/19/2015 6:30:50 PM

The client did not know she had been hacked.  Her friends didn’t know that they shouldn’t click on the link.  It was an advert for slimming.  I advised her not to click and to change her email password.  Make sure you know what yours is, and when you change it, make a note somewhere.  If you use email on computer and a phone, or tablet, you will need to reset the password in all of them.

Finally, do ensure you have a good antivirus on your computer and that you back up all your files regularly.

Stay safe online with Mrs PC.

Can you relate to this? Mum learns to use her iPhone.

Mum learning to take photos on her iPhone

You need a lot of patience

Mum needs more help to understand

Text abbreviations can seem like another language

I can sympathise

New Year Blog

Apologies that I have neglected this blog for a while.  It's a new year (Happy New Year!) and I will try to blog more regularly.  It's quite an odd that I have no idea of who is reading this blog and if they are enjoying it or not!  Send some feedback to encourage me if you like!

Here is my article for the start of 2015

Health and fitness with the help of technology.

January is often the time for people to make New Year’s resolutions, and these often include trying to lose weight or start exercising.  Diet books fill the bookshelves and magazines are full of ideas to help.  Technology is also available to motivate you.

If you have a smartphone, you can use Apps to help you in your quest to lose weight and/or become fitter.  There are many to choose from.

If it is weight loss you are after, one of the best Apps is My Fitness Pal.   It can become quite addictive!  You can record your calories with it.  You can scan the barcodes of your food, and find most foods and their calories by using the massive database online.  The App helps you to set your weight loss goals. The calculator will forecast your weight according to the calories you have eaten.  This is available in graph format.  You can also deduct calories if you have recorded exercise in the App.  The App will tell you if you are short of certain foods or nutrients, and help you to have a balanced diet.  It is easy, fast and free.  It cleverly remembers what you tend to eat.  You can post your achievements online and become part of a weight loss community.  Medical studies show that keeping a food journal DOUBLES your weight loss! 

There are many tools to help you record your exercise.  RunKeeper is a free App to motivate and record exercise.  Track your runs, walking or cycling.  The App can track users by GPS, and see how fast they are travelling, what their pace is and what their average pace is as well as timing the activity.  It can be programmed to give announcements and review progress – you can choose how frequently you want this to happen. RunKeeper can access your music and let you listen to your favourite playlists and the announcements will override your music.  You can upload achievements to Facebook and share them with your training partners.  All your training is stored and is interesting to look back on and compare over time.  When you have finished your activity, you can see a map of where you have been and all the changes in elevation, as well as a graph of your elevation.  When I have it turned on, I do find that I try harder!

If you are a serious athlete or have particular goals, Strava is another amazing free tool.  It brings an element of competition to solo riding (both bike and run versions are available), Strava tracks you, but crucially also allows you to compete virtually with other racers over the same segment of road or path, at different times. It’s also a good way to discover new routes and rides near you.

Couch to 5k is a free NHS App designed for the novice runner.  It is designed to get you off the sofa and running 5km within nine weeks. Its simple step-by-step, day-by-day programme gently guides total beginners from walking to cruising around a 5km race.

Moves is a simple and free app that helps you track your daily movement – whether you ran, walked, cycled or sat in the office all day.  It requires almost no effort on your part. There’s no need to enter data or wear a movement tracker – just carry your phone with you and monitor your progress (or lack thereof!)

Hope that you might try using one or several of these suggestions in 2015.  Wishing you all a very happy and healthy new year!