What do you actually know about how money works? With the current state of the economy you might find this informative, animated film by Canadian artist Paul Grignon of interest.

I came across the film a few months ago and was really impressed - as have been a lot of other people on the net (but not the bankers I suspect!). “Is it worth putting on the blog?” I asked my 18yr old son - “Definitely!” was the reply, so here it is. The film’s 47minutes long, but certainly worth watching.

Do you want something for nothing, no strings attached?

Or are you trying to get rid of something that’s cluttering up your house, but is just too good to throw away? Why not give it to someone who could use it - much more environmentally friendly than taking a trip down to the dump.

That’s the idea behind Freecycle. I first came across this when a neighbour asked me to help him collect a nearly new bed settee from Taunton. (It was damn heavy to carry up 3 flights of stairs!).

Freecycle is a not for profit organisation first started in the US in 2003 and has since expanded somewhat. For example the Taunton group, which was founded in 2005, currently has nearly 5,000 members and the Bridgwater group, founded in 2006, nearly 3,000 members. People are giving away all sorts of things from furniture and clothing through to paving slabs and plants. As their web site says:

The Freecycle concept has since spread to over 85 countries, where there are thousands of local groups representing millions of of members — people helping people and “changing the world one gift at a time.” As a result, we are currently keeping over 500 tons a day out of landfills!

To join a group all you have to do is visit the Freecycle web site and search for a location near you. Then just click to join that group (free). Groups are hosted on the Yahoo! network which means, if you haven’t got one, you will have to sign up for a free Yahoo! account, which is quite straightforward.

Just a quick post prompted by yet another person telling me that the ‘Print Screen’ button on the keyboard is not working.

The ‘Print Screen’ button is located just to the right of the Function buttons on a full sized keyboard (F1, F2 etc.) It has ‘Prt Scr’ written above ‘SysRq’. Now, you might reasonably assume that pressing this button would cause a snapshot of the screen to appear from your printer. But no! What actually happens is that a snapshot of the screen is saved on the ‘clipboard’.

After pressing the ‘Prt Scr’ button you simply have to paste the contents of the clipboard into another program, such as Word. So, ‘Prt Scr’ to capture an image of the screen, open the program you want to use and then paste into a new document (right click on mouse and select paste) - now you can print it out!

Tip: If you have several windows showing on the screen and you only want to print one of them - click in the window you require, hold down the ‘Alt’ button (bottom left of keyboard) and whilst holding down the ‘Alt’ button press ‘Prt Scr’. Only the window you require will be copied to the clipboard.

You might have noticed that I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently. Well, it all comes down to computers - you see, like cars they go wrong and, like cars, there is never a good time for it to happen.

I had a week off over half term. Feeling relaxed and full of good intentions on Monday morning I set about sorting out a few things on the server, something that had been on the ‘to do’ list for a while. As usual all data is safely backed up to another disk, so I confidently set about the job. Next thing I know and a message pops up informing me that one of the hard drives is failing. Still, that’s no problem we’ve got a mirrored RAID array (which means that there are two disks in the computer that acts as a server, both holding identical copies of everything, including the operating system).

But…I had forgotten about the law of sod, which decided to choose that moment to come into play (and he even had one more trick up his sleeve!). To cut a long story short everything on the server was lost - but remember the data was all backed up safely on yet another disk so there was still a get-out clause. Quantock Online is safely tucked away on an Internet server, so that was quite safe - but several years worth of family photos, correspondence etc. I do not want to lose.

Wait two days for new disks to arrive. Put disks in computer. Re-install operating system. Replace data on system from backup files. Sort out connections to other computers (thanks Chaff, the help was really appreciated - especially as it went on into the small hours!). Everything back to normal. Well, not quite. You see the server also has other software on it that is used for testing out the web site - which means (if you’re really that interested), Apache, PHP and MySQL still has to be re-configured to how I’d set it up before. Ho,hum, there go a few more hours…

Sod. Remember him? Well the sting in his tail was this. My other job that week was to talk myself into parting with cash for some clever software that could have saved hours of work in re-configuring everything in the event of serious failure…

Still, looking on the bright side, at least all the data was safe. I hope your data is. Maybe that should be the subject of another posting.

According to NetCraft as of January 2008 there are over 155.5 million web sites out here on the Internet.

Hmm, that’s a lot of web sites. Don’t know about you but, if I’m looking for something specific, using Google and following links on relevant web-sites seems to get me the information I need. But what about something new and interesting? I can remember sitting in front of a search engine thinking ‘I fancy seeing what’s out there, I just want to be entertained - but what the hell am I going to type in? Arrrgh! This is already taking too much thought.’

Then came the answer: StumbleUpon. Just download a free toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer, hit a button and you’re presented with a random web site. But it’s actually rather more clever than that. You can choose from categories of interest for the types of site you would like to visit - the sites have been recommended by other ‘Stumblers’, currently about 4.5 million of them. Give a site the ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ and StumbleUpon refines the offerings it serves you. Press a button, what you see doesn’t grab you? Press the button and move on. Stop when you find something of interest. No thinking required! Oh, joy!

Usual warnings

Don’t just download anything from the Internet unless you’re sure it’s safe. You will see that StumbleUpon has lots of awards and is recommended by IE add-ons. It is also a recommended add-on for Firefox

Make sure your computer is adequately protected - you will be visiting a lot of web sites. Check out my posting, Essential Security .

MAKE COFFEE - it could be a late night!

How come other computers can do £’s and mine can’t? All I get is #

It must be really annoying if your computer doesn’t do £ signs and you live in the UK. And it’s also frustrating when the @ symbol is in the wrong place.

If you’re having this problem it’s because the language settings on your computer are set to ‘English-US’ rather than ‘English-UK’. This is easily fixed.

There must be a lot of you out there because, from our web statistics, I can see that over 80% of our visitors come from the UK, but less than 10% of our visitors have ‘English-UK’ configured as the preferred language!

Here’s how to change the language setting.
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OK, so you need to be able to create and read Microsoft Word, Excel or Power Point files. Why? Because in the real world that’s what nearly everyone else can do - and it’s handy if other people can read and print out that book you wrote and sent on disk! Equally handy if you can read what they sent you, and useful if you want to transport files between home and work or school.

Problem is how to do this without shelling out even more cash for Microsoft Office? In fact how can you do it for free?
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Have you noticed that your computer seems to be slowing down as time goes on?

There can be a number of reasons for this, one of them being failure to keep on top of some basic housekeeping. If the terms ‘Disk Cleanup’ and ‘Defrag’ (defragment) don’t mean anything to you then the following should help you to speed things up on a Windows operating system.

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Eyes not what they used to be? Hate to admit it, but neither are mine - and I’m forever losing my glasses.

Well, over the past few years most web designers have put an awful lot of work into making their web sites easier to read. Trouble is, I find that most people don’t know how to take advantage of this fact.

How many of you know how to make everything on your computer easier to read? Maybe your hands aren’t as steady as they used to be and using the mouse is a pain, that can be sorted out quite easily too.

If you, or somebody you know, might benefit then read on…

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Feel safe because you’re using the Windows firewall? Don’t - it’s not very good. Firewall? What’s a firewall? Using the anti-virus program that came with your computer? Are you sure it’s up to date, and have you got anti-spyware software?

This posting tells you how to keep your data as secure as possible when connected to the Internet. And how you can do it for free! Oh! - and it’s easy.
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