Digital Tips Today

Why PDF? Most computer users view pdf files frequently without ever knowing it. PDF is a Portable Document Format that was created by Adobe for standardization of viewing and printing documents. People have mostly forgotten how difficult it used to be to when you tried to print a document on different computers. The pdf document standard has fixed all those problems.

If you want to produce or preserve a document in a standard format you want a PDF printer driver. The driver installs on your system and when you print you select it instead of a real printer. It goes to a file which you can share or print later. It is simple and easy to use and works great.

For example imagine there is a great article on line about your grandson pitching a no hitter. This is important news to you and you want to share it with friends and family. You can send the link to the article but it may only be visible on line for a few days. Instead you can print it with a pdf driver. This will create a pdf file that can be printed on any printer and will look the same. You can then email this file to family and friends and know they will not miss the big news. Another time I frequently use a pdf driver is when I get my boarding passes on-line. If I do not have a printer immediately I just “print” them to a file for later printing. I might put the file on a thumb drive and take it to a printer in the hotel business center or an internet cafe.
You can buy Adobe Acrobat pdf creation software but it is expensive. There are a number of free or inexpensive pdf creators you can download and install. Some of the ones I have used are DORO PDF, PDF ReDirect, Magic PDF and PDF Creator.

Note you can get to the edit screen by double clicking on a photo or by right clicking and selecting “View and Edit” from the popup menu.  The Edit Screen will open and show the photo in a larger size.  Note there are arrows above the photo which allow you to scroll forward and back through the photos in that folder.  On the left you can select from a group of editing features.  If you click on I’m Feeling Lucky it will automatically adjust the color and exposure. 

On the left there are 3 tabs for the editing features.  The Basic Fixes allow you to Crop, Automatically adjust Color and Contrast, Straighten and add Fill Light.  These work very intuitively and cover most of the simple edits needed for adjusting your photos.

Once you have downloaded and started Picasa it will go out and find all your photos. The Picasa Main Screen is an easy and intuitive way to manage your photos.

When you begin using Picasa you should take a minute to familiarize yourself with the Main Screen. The largest area is made up of thumbnails of your photos. You can scroll up and down through all of the photos and it scrolls automatically from one folder to the next. In the lower right corner is a slide bar which allows you to size the thumbnails up and down. You might want to size this down to search for a folder of photos of a topic – perhaps last summer at the beach or a series of flower photos. You then might slide the slider to the right and enlarge the photos when trying to locate a specific photo.
Once you click on a photo it is selected. You can see what is selected in the lower left corner of the screen. You can select multiple photos by holding down the CTRL key and clicking on each photo you want to select. You might want to select a group of photos to copy or print them – but more on that later.
On the left hand size of the screen is the list of folders that have been found by Picasa with photos in them. These can be displayed in a list or in a tree structure. There are two buttons above this area which toggle between those two display formats. The drop down list allows you to select how you want the folders ordered. I like to see my folders in a Tree Structure, sorted by Name.
Finally in the upper right part of the screen are ways to located and filter the photos. You can find photos containing a specific word in the folder, description, caption or filename. You can also filter them to find only the starred photos. These capabilities become more powerful as you identify your photos when you upload them.

You too can be a HotSpot! And it really is the coolest thing! It’s about the size of a deck of cards and it is call MiFi! It is a wireless internet router that you can put in your pocket, your briefcase, or your backpack and up to 5 devices can connect to the internet. It is incredibly simple to use and has the encryption code on the outside.
It costs about $99 with a contract with a mobile carrier like Sprint or Verizon. These come in two flavors for around $40 or $60 a month depending on your need for bandwidth. But it will travel with you so you can take it to those meetings, on your sailboat or to your vacation home.
I haven’t bought one yet but I am just wishing for an excuse because this is really a cool thing.

If you haven’t see them yet they are the small laptops that are light and portable and called netbooks because they are primarily used for surfing the internet. I fell in love with my HP 1000 Mini as it’s called last February. It just was so light and bright and the 10.1 inch screen was easy to read. The keyboard on the HP is almost full size and is easy to touch type documents as well as emails. A gift certificate to Amazon just pushed me to decide to buy one. Mine has a 160 GB hard drive and runs everything I care about having with me when I travel or go to meetings. I can easily use it on any wireless network to get my email or set my calendar. I installed Microsoft Office on it easily and it handles complex spreadsheets and documents with no trouble. I am a dedicated Picasa user for my photos – and I keep over 40,000 of them on a little external harddrive… but that is a tip for another day.

So if you’re thinking of purchasing a netbook I can say that I absolutely love my HP 1000 Mini. And I think there are lots of other great choices including the Dell 10.1 and the Asus. It’s just what most people need most of the time.

If you aren’t familiar with Picasa you are in for a wonderful surprise. First of all it is FREE! And it works great for managing and doing simple edits for many, many photos. I have over 40,000 photos and it allows me to easily keep track and find the photos that I want to work on.

Most of us send and receive emails from groups of people. To preserve the privacy of the people in your group you should make use of the BCC or Blind Copy option. In the normal TO: line put your own email as the recipient. Then look for a button or line that is identified as BCC. Once you click on the button normally a new address field will open and you can put the email addresses or group here. When people receive this email they will ony see you on the address line and will not be able to see who else this email was sent to. This will preserve their privacy.

If you are over 30 you probably have a lot of non-digital photos. And for most people they are still in the envelopes and stuffed in a box or drawer where they are not only accumulating dust they are slowly fading away. Now that even most grandmothers have a digital camera and perhaps a digital photo frame it would be nice to have some of those old photos to look at and and preserve. And the only hope that your children and grandchildren will keep them may be to get them scanned to a digital format to share with them.
I know I was guilty of this problem. I had decades of photos of my children growing up and of my parents and other relatives who are no longer with us. I did not want to lose these images. While they are certainly not photographic art they are precious memories to me that I want to preserve.
So I was delighted to find a website, ScanMyPhotos that would scan 1,000 photos for only $49.95!  I know from personal experience it would take me many weeks of scanning photos to scan that many photos!  And it would never get done.  They have an even more affordable option where they send you a priority mail box to fill with as many photos as possible and they pay the postage.

I immediately set to work gathering up my old photos and putting them on some kind of order, elminating duplicated and disasters.  Even just this task took me the better part of a week to prepare about 2,000 photos for scanning.    I also ordered the photo index book which printed a thumbnail of every one of my photos.

I must say I was delighted with the results.  Browsing the book is like watching my children grow in fast forward.  I made copies of the disks with the photos to send to my sons and they browsed them all too.

I’ve been teaching some classes on digital photography recently. I have come across some great books and there is one that I would especially recommend for the amateur photographer who wants to make the most of their digital camera. Digital Photography, The Missing Manual by David Pogue is just what the doctor ordered. He writes for layman, he never uses technical jargon. He gives great, simple tips on photography and goes through all the necessary steps to load photos into your computer, how to organize them and how to print and share them using Picasa and iPhoto.
Note you can order this book at Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/David-Pogues-Digital-Photography-Missing/dp/0596154038/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243098337&sr=8-1