As David Weinberger notes, it is, eerily, like the inverse of a seismograph.

Adblock Plus
This does pretty much what you’d think it does - it blocks ads. And it does quite a good job of it too. After installation, you are prompted to select a server from which a list of known advertisers is downloaded periodically. All content from these servers is blocked from appearing on pages that you visit. Even the space that they would have occupied disappears.

If you install this Add-on, keep in mind that many sites (especially small ones) depend on ad revenue to pay the hosting bills. When you find a site that you visit often, find some other way of showing your support.

Delicious Bookmarks
The Official Delicious Add-on (by Yahoo! Inc.) seamlessly integrates your browser with del.icio.us, one of the leading social bookmarking services on the Web. It allows you to both save and retrieve bookmarks stored in your del.icio.us account, making them available to you from any computer connected to the Internet.

Screengrab

Screengrab saves entire webpages as images. It will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images. You can then send the image to someone else, so they can see the web page as you did at the time. Very useful for sending information about broken web sites to tech support.

PDF Download

Some web page links go to PDF documents, rather than other web pages. This add-on makes managing these links much easier. When you click on a PDF file, PDF Download lets you know, can tell you how big it is, and can then give you the choice to open, download, or convert it to HTML.

Tabbrowser Preferences

Firefox pioneered the use of tabs for opening additional pages in the same browser window. This add-on gives you more options for controlling their behavior. This add-on integrates so will into the standard Tools|Options menu that I no longer remember which features it adds. Suffice it to say that this is one of the add-ons that I install with any new Firefox installation.

IE Tab

Using this add-on, you can open a new Firefox tab that will behave exactly like IE (in fact, it contains an embedded copy of the version of Internet Explorer that is installed on your computer). The only caveat is that it still won’t download the program components (called ActiveX) that only run in IE. This can be a blessing in disguise, as some of these components can contain viruses or other malware. But for display purposes, give it a try if you regularly visit certain sites that look all wonky in Firefox.

Firebug

This one is so geeky that I hesitate to bring it up but if you’re in the 1% of people who want to look under the hood of any web page, this is the way to do it. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. In my work, I often need to see how various parts of a web page (called the Document Object Model, or DOM) fit together and what styles are being applied to them. The DOM can get very abstract and Firebug allows me to visualize it easily. A must-have tool for developers.

These are some of my picks but there are many, many more available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/. Try not to go overboard though, as each one will eat up a little bit of memory and impact the performance of your browser.

Now to be fair, Internet Explorer 7 has add-ons too but I have no experience using them. Some quick Googling turned up these posts:

Seven Best Add-Ons for IE7
Mozilla Firefox is known as the world’s most extensible web browser, which is a big reason for its appeal among web geeks. But users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, Windows Vista’s native browser, need not be left out in the cold when it comes to add-ons.

Best Of: Internet Explorer Addons
With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), Microsoft has provided the ability to create and use IE specific add-ons to enhance the browser’s functionality. Unlike almost all of Firefox’s add-ons, many IE7 add-ons, though, are not free. That being said, there are numerous free IE7 add-ons that can increase productivity and make the IE7 browsing experience more pleasurable.

Now that we have fairness out of the way, let me know in comments, what’s in your browser?

Many of our viewers are just starting out on the Internet and wanted to know some basics that will help them conquer the Internet. This series will get you started on understanding the Internet and making it work for you.

For more from Lee and Kim, you can watch part 2 and part 3 of this video series on YouTube. You can also help me out by letting me know in comments if you prefer videos embedded in the post (like part 1, above) or linked to their original source (like parts 2 and 3 on YouTube). If you can’t watch videos at all, please let me know that too.

I have my Flash Drive plugged in. Where do I locate its presence so that I can safely extract it? I find if I do leave it plugged in, the next time I want to turn my computer on, I get a message indicating an error and am not allowed to log on.

The short and simple answer: To remove the flash drive, double click on the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the system tray (the icon circled in red in the image at right). From the next window, select “USB Mass Storage Device” and click the Stop button. Click OK in the confirmation window and you’ll get a message that it’s ok to unplug the device. It will automatically re-enable itself when you plug it back in.

You can also just unplug it while the computer is turned off, to prevent it from complaining when you restart. The reason it does that is that the computer tries to find it’s start-up (boot) files on removable devices before looking on the hard drive. When it finds the device but not the files, it throws an error. Seems silly to me; it should ask you if you want to boot from the hard drive instead. But there you are.

The longer, more complete answer: Devices like flash memory drives connect through an interface called USB (Universal Serial Bus). The first USB standard was introduced way back in 1995 and was intended to reduce the number of connectors (also called ports) needed on a typical PC and simplify the configuration of external hardware devices. It has succeeded so well at this that many new computers today use only USB connectors for everything except audio and video.

A Typical USB Hub

A modern desktop computer will have four to eight USB connectors built in. Some will be on the back panel and some on the front. External USB Hubs may be also be connected, further adding to the available connections. A maximum of 127 connections may be used by a single computer.

When a USB device is connected, it is automatically discovered by the USB host. If that device is supported, it is automatically configured and made available for use. Flash memory drives are almost always supported natively (i.e., support was built in to the computer’s operating system) but many other devices need to have special software called a driver installed before the device will be recognized. This is what happens when you pop in the installation CD that comes with new hardware. In most cases, the driver must be installed before you connect the device for the first time.

Driver installation is a one time process, although you will need to install one for each additional device (camera, printer, MP3 player, etc.) that you need to connect. Once this is done though, plug the device in and it will automagically start working.

If USB is so smart, I hear you asking, why do you have to go through this special process to unplug things? Well, don’t tell anyone you heard it from me, but a lot of the time, you don’t. You can just pull the plug and the sky will not fall. There’s a pretty good reason not to do this though, especially with devices that have data written to them, like flash drives and external hard drives. Here’s why: for greater efficiency, data is often held temporarily in RAM (non-permanent memory) and only written to permanent storage periodically. If you unplug your permanent storage before it’s received all of its data, bad things tend to happen. Going through the “Safely Remove Hardware” procedure ensures that all of your data has been moved onto the removable device and your great American novel remains intact (if unfinished).

Any other questions about USB or removable devices? Please leave a comment.

…[A] well meaning woman who handles *****’s online sales orders, mailing list, email list, etc. has been sending out horrible HTML emails. After informing ***** of the problem and encouraging him to get her to send simple email announcements until she can learn what the hell she’s doing, I decided to research the subject a bit and try making some myself. I thought browser compatibility of web sites was a pain, but it ain’t nothing compared to email reader compatibility. Any suggestions as to the simplest, most reader friendly html editor for emails?

It took me a few days to come up with a response, because there’s no easy and quick answer. I finally came up with this:

As I’m sure you discovered, there aren’t really any standalone HTML email editors out there, aside from those that are built into products that are designed to create and manage bulk mailings. And most of those are pretty clunky.

For simple text formatting (bold, italics, bulleted lists, embedded links, etc.), I’d just use whatever tools are available in my regular email client. If it looks right in the outgoing client, chances are good that it will at least be readable by most other clients.

To do anything more complex or including images, compose the message in an HTML editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Try to end up with the simplest possible HTML, because you don’t know how well the receiving client is going to render it. Avoid nested tables like the plague. When CSS styles are used, they should be inline, as many email clients don’t understand them otherwise. Images should not be embedded in the message. Rather, they should be hosted somewhere and referred to by absolute URL within the email. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1) sending hundreds or thousands of emails, each containing multiple embedded images, is rude to both the recipients who have to download them and to the Internet as a whole and 2) emails with embedded images are much more likely to be treated as spam.

Once the HTML is written, insert it into an email message and send it out normally, using a local email client. The method for doing this will vary depending on the client. I couldn’t figure out quickly how to do it in Outlook but it wasn’t hard in Outlook Express.

If I was going to do regular bulk mailings using HTML, I would use an online service, like www.ConstantContact.com. They have expertise in making this type of mail work in as many email clients as possible. They also have lots of tools to make mail campaigns easy to create and manage. This is probably overkill for *****, so he needs to keeps things simple.

[Note that, while these comments were written with bulk mailings in mind, the same general rules can be applied to sending single messages. Keep it simple and your recipients will thank you.]

Is there any good reason for me to install Safari [web browser]? I have no burning desire to do this, but wondered if I should be looking at Safari to see how the web sites perform on that platform. If no well known compatibility problems, I’d be happy to pass on the exercise.

From what I’ve read about Safari (I have no personal experience with it), the biggest advantage it has over Firefox is performance (this may change when Firefox 3 is released). It falls short though, of Firefox’s feature set and it doesn’t have the thousands of available plugins. I haven’t been tempted to use it as a daily browser. For compatibility testing, it would make the most sense to use it on a Mac, as that’s where the vast majority of Safari browsers are installed. Apple is getting a lot of heat for trying to “sneak install” Safari on Windows machines, along side of iTunes updates. I doubt they’re going to make much headway there.

Here’s a quick way of doing a Safari compatibility check on a single web page: http://www.browsrcamp.com/.

The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but to everyday folks like you and me, what comes to mind is, “Uh, I don’t get it?”

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

Go read the whole thing.

Every business and many individuals need their own domain name. This unique alpha-numeric address becomes the name used to identify you in a web site URL or an email address. The great things about a domain name are that 1) you own it and 2) it is portable anywhere on the Internet. You keep the same identity, regardless of which Internet Service Provider (ISP) or hosting company you use. There is however, a lot of confusion about how to register and then use a domain name, as well as their actual function in the structure of the Internet.

Why a domain name?

Every computer on the Internet (even yours) has an address and, being machines, these addresses are numeric. They are referred to as IP Addresses (for Internet Protocol) and they are written in dotted-decimal notation; four numbers, each ranging from 0 to 255, separated by dots (e.g. 147.132.42.18). Even in the early days, when the Internet was used mainly by computer scientists and academics, they realized that referring to everything on the Internet using dotted-decimal notation was not going to fly. So a system was devised to use a domain name interchangeably with its IP Address. In other words, a domain name is an alias to an IP Address.

In the beginning (and up until 1998), all domain names were registered and maintained by a single entity, called InterNIC (Internet Network Information Center). It was a fairly technical (and expensive) process to use but it had the advantage of being orderly. After that, the business of registering domain names was semi-privatized and domain name registrars began sprouting like mushrooms. The best news about this was that prices dropped drastically. The bad news was that many of them were no less confusing to use, some adopted predatory business practices and others went out of business in relatively short order. But love them or hate them (and I know of few people who love them), the domain name registrar is the first stop in acquiring your own domain name.

Note that many hosting companies (i.e. companies that provide web site and email services) are also domain registrars. You can often get a package deal for domain name registration and hosting services but it is not required that you use the same company for both functions. Where ever your domain name is registered, make sure that you retain control over the domain name record (see below).

What’s in a name?

This is the last bit of technical information, I promise. Every domain name ends in a top-level domain (TLD), the letters after the last dot. The most common TLDs are .biz, .com, .edu, .gov, .info, .int, .mil, .name, .net and .org. You can use any of these TLDs in your own domain name, except that .edu domains must be registered by educational institutions and .mil domains are reserved for the U.S. military.

There are other TLDs, such as two letter country codes and those that are privately administered (such as .mobi, for mobile devices) but these are beyond the scope of this post.

The portion of the domain name before the last dot is where you can get creative. However, you are restricted to the letters a-z (case does not matter), the numbers 0-9 and the hyphen. Spaces are not allowed. This part of your name must be unique across the entire Internet. It has long been true that there are no English, single-word domain names available for registration. If there is one that you must have, you may be able to buy it from its registered owner, as transfers are allowed. If you owned a name like fund.com, you too could sell it for $10 million.

You may have noticed a second dot in some domain names. The name before this dot is called the sub-domain. These names do not need to be registered, since they are guaranteed to be unique by being attached to your primary domain name. Sub-domains are used to divide domains into logical areas, like a web site, a blog or a media server. The most common sub-domain is “www” and this is usually aliased to the same IP Address as the primary domain name. Note that sub-domains require configuration in your domain’s DNS record and that’s the next step in the process…

Don’t you hate it when people lie to you?

I know I said there would be no more technical stuff. You believed that? When you register a domain name, you fill out a bunch of information that becomes your domain name record. This record is held by the domain name registrar and you should have access to this record. Now listen to me: make sure you have (and keep track of) the username and password that gives you access to your domain name record. It can be a huge pain if you don’t have access to this record when you need it (like when you decide to move your web site and email to a new hosting company).

A hypothetical example of DNS recursion

A very important part of your domain name record is the location of the nameservers for this domain. A nameserver is a computer on the Internet running DNS (Domain Name System) software, which is usually operated by an ISP or hosting company. Its location is expressed as a domain and subdomain (e.g. ns.hostingcompany.com) and there are usually at least two of them, for redundancy. Its purpose is to resolve domain names to IP addresses. If a nameserver cannot resolve the address locally, it will search other DNS servers for the correct record, a process called DNS recursion.

For each function that your domain will perform (web site, email, sub-domains, etc.) there will be one or more records in DNS, on the nameservers specified in your domain name record. Don’t worry, you should never have to deal with these records directly but your ISP or hosting company will.

If you decide to change the location where your web site and email are hosted, the location of these nameservers may also change. See why it’s important to have access to your domain name record?

Where to register

There are two types of registrars: those who are accredited by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and everybody else. There are several hundred accredited registrars worldwide and thousands more who resell though them. For what it’s worth, I use GoDaddy.com as my registrar, although I don’t use them for any other services. I find their prices reasonable ($7 - $10 per year, depending on TLD type) and I like their administrative interface for managing multiple domains. The amount of advertising and upselling they do during the purchase process is pretty irritating though. Just keep clicking the links that say, “no thanks, go directly to checkout”.

Conclusion

Registering your domain name independently from your hosting provider gives you the most flexibility when setting up Internet services. Your domain registrar and hosting company or ISP work together but need not be the same company. When you purchase a domain name, its domain record resides with the registrar. Within that record is a list of the nameservers that have knowledge of your domain name and the corresponding IP Addresses of the computers on which your various domain services are hosted.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_registrar

Image credits:

A. www.viajar24h.com
Lion Kimbr

My icons on the desktop need to be arranged. I’d like to have them start down about an inch from the top. I can’t place them where I want as I use to. Can you give me a clue how to do it.

Right-click on the desktop

When I was cleaning up the desktop, I set the icons to auto-arrange, which places them in vertical rows, starting at the upper left corner of the desktop. To turn this off, right-click on any blank space on the desktop, select “Arrange Icons by”, and uncheck “Auto Arrange”. Your icons will then stay where ever you move them. If you leave “Align to Grid” checked, the icons will remain aligned with each other both horizontally and vertically.

All in all, our plan (see Part 1) worked pretty well. Mom had to wait a few days after her new Dell was delivered for an appointment with Alyx, her computer consultant. During that time, Time Warner patched up a couple of loose ends and Dell delivered an additional box that had gone missing (I never did find out which one it was). As with most new computers, a large amount of effort went into moving data over from the old computer. The old HP had a CDRW drive, so everyone agreed that transferring the data to CDs would be the easiest thing. Not so fast, it said in an old wheezing voice. No CD’s for you!

Prompting my mother to write:

Belatedly naming my old computer: Remember Hal from “2001″. This computer is named after it. Hal is in charge and Hal does whatever he wants to do, disputing my authority. He is about to get the ax.

At the end of an evening’s work, Alyx had the new Dell set up with a working Internet connection and access to Gmail. There were no old files transferred yet but a plan was in place to get a couple of USB memory sticks to use for the transfers and later as backup devices.

A very important piece of the setup was making sure that I could access the new computer using LogMeIn, a remote desktop control service. There was a little miscommunication here and I had to send written instructions to my mom on how to get this service connected. It’s a credit to LogMeIn that their setup process is simple enough that in just a few steps, their software was installed and operating. Of course, it helped that the required accounts were already in place on their system. With this service in place, I now had access to a computer that was light years ahead of the old one, with a brand new name.

THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL MACHINE. My sentences are over a foot long. The screen is bright and the size of an IMAX…. I’M LOVING VERONICA!!!

Whenever I set up a computer, one of the last steps is to organize the Start menu and remove as many shortcuts as possible from the desktop. All of the programs groups that are related to the system go into a System Tools group, including the many Dell “helper” programs. The idea is to remove clutter and display only those programs that will be used on a regular basis. Everything else gets moved into lower level groups, accessible from the Start menu.

A key strategy in the success of this project was not to try and change too much at once. Yes, Veronica is a new computer but she’s running the same operating system and many of the same programs that Hal was. There is very little that’s new in the basic operation of the computer; startup and shutdown, running programs, browsing the Internet, etc. I’m sure that Mom will find differences along the way but she knows that she has resources available to help her on down the road.