First today I would like to thank all of you who read and applied what you learned from last week’s column.  It was regarding the cloud storage platform Dropbox.com.  Because some of you used the link I mentioned, I gained an additional 2 GB of storage.  They have a maximum of 8 GB allowed free so if you still wish to sign up and haven’t yet, this is still a good link, http://bit.ly/aszzao.

No, I don’t really need that much cloud storage but it is a fun experiment…so thanks again to those of you who registered!

I gave you all a link several weeks ago that generated a lot of email, bit.ly/965cg3.  It is a scrabble-like game site called, “SSCrabble”.  I am sure the naming is due to copyright issues.  Many of you wanted to know other games or gaming sites I regularly visit.  Well, I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon but I don’t game as much as I used to in the last century.

I stopped buying gaming consoles when they changed too often to the latest and greatest and my old games were no longer playable.  So, “No” I don’t have an Xbox or any of the latest.  I gave up somewhere after the Atari 5200, Nintendo (NES) and the Sega Genesis.  I finally put them in a garage sale with all the Mario games and stopped trying to keep up. 

For a while I bought a few PC games but found that unless you upgraded your computer to the fastest and best, the newest games were unplayable.  I think my favorite PC games were the Myst series and Morrowwind.  I still have both and occasionally fire one up.

I play a couple of other online games now.  I wrote about Evony.com last year, which too time-consuming so I quit that one.  Today I wanted to mention a couple I occasionally play, just to relax sometimes.

One that I like is called, “Defense” at bit.ly/cQoWtu (shortened link for space).  You set up an arrangement of armament to defend your area from attack by land and air.  There are many games at the main site and when you get there and see the link, chop off all but the “.com” part to see them.  The main site is onemorelevel.com.  I will shorten the others here too.

Next is, “Dogfight”, bit.ly/agxQ35 think WWI.  

Last but not least (my favorite actually) is, “Double Wires” at bit.ly/cy0uEj, which plays best in MSIE.  Once you get there you should get a gangly Spiderman type guy who jumps around a lot.  If you get to the main ‘onemorelevel.com’ page you may need to go to DoubleClicks.info and type in the actual link which I will post here  (www.themaninblue.com/experiment/SSCrabble).  You can find a mass of games are at miniclip.com too.

Have fun gaming!  Let me know if you like any of these and tell me your favorites.

Tags: cloud, games, online

I often receive questions about where you can save your documents in the cloud (online).  In the past I have written about Mesh.com and Google Docs.  However, I have found another one which, I believe is even better.  Over the past several months I have started to depend on Dropbox.com.

With Dropbox you get 2GB of free storage or more if you meet certain criteria.  If you decide to sign up for Dropbox use this link, http://bit.ly/aszzao. If you use this link, they give me 250 MB of additional free storage, so thanks in advance.  If you want more storage you can get 50 GB for $9.99/month or 100 GB for $19.99 per month.

First, let me supply some info about file sizes.  I have stored all of my columns from the past nine years on Dropbox.  That is about 750 columns and research documents.  They take up about 50 MB.  With the total of 2 GB of storage in Dropbox I could store another 40 years worth of columns. You could also store about 750 digital photos, depending on the resolution.

It is easy to use.  Install the software and sign up with an email address and password.  Then you will have a “My Dropbox” folder in your “My Documents” files.  Any files or folders you put in that folder are automatically transferred to the Dropbox cloud.  If you make a change to any file in that new folder it will automatically be updated to the cloud.  Smooth… and it takes no extra input or thought from you.

In my case I moved my “Columns” folder into the newly created “My Dropbox” folder.  After about three or four minutes all of those files were online.  As I type this column today and save it, the new version is online almost instantly.  By-the-way, as you try it keep in mind that the file will not be uploaded until you close it on your local computer.

That is not all it does for you.  Let’s say you have a desktop, a notebook and a netbook computer.  You can install Dropbox on all three systems. The entire contents of the “My Dropbox” folder will be duplicated on all three.  That way your important files are always available a few seconds after you start your computer.  If you only have one computer it is still a good thing since the files are safely backed up online in case your hard drive fails.

There is one last feature I will mention.  If you have a file you want to share with an individual or a group of people go into Dropbox.com and share it with them using their email address.

If this sounds like something you could use why not give it a shot?  I don’t think you will be disappointed.

Tags: cloud, dropbox, files, free, storage, sync

Two free Microsoft Office Suite-like applications:

Open Office

http://www.openoffice.org/

Lotus Symphony

http://symphony.lotus.com

When do they sleep?
http://www.sleepingtime.org

Try mine out if you don’t know anyone else who uses Twitter, search ‘RonDoyle’.  In reality it is off about an hour for me.

Tags: Jim Britt, radio, WSVA

I had quite a few emails after the screenshot column last week about the print screen key.  Thanks for emailing me and please keep them coming!  A couple of them inspired this column.  Send them to me any time… they often make great columns. You will not usually see extremely specific questions answered here since they do not affect nearly as many people.

One very astute reader asked why I said you had to hold down the "Prnt Scrn" key for a second or so.  They stated that they only had to press theirs for a split second and it would copy the screen.  The reason I said longer than a split second is that some (usually older) PCs required that. However, on newer computers you can usually press the key quickly.  Try yours both ways to see which works for you.

Next, a couple of readers stated having seen that I sometimes added arrows, text, boxes,  circles, etc. to screen shots on my site.  They wanted to know how to do that.  OK, I do not use the "Prnt Scrn" key all by itself.  I actually use a program called SnagIt (techsmith.com). Go to the Techsmith website and scroll down to the bottom left of the page you will see the link for the product.  It is $49.95 but will also allow you to record videos of your screens.  For me it is worth the cost of a license when they upgrade only once every several years.

There are also several other free screen capture utilities out there.  Use your favorite search engine (Google.com and Bing.com for me) to see what you can find.  Screentoaster.com is also good. I have used it for making videos of screens as well.  Be advised, screen videos are sometimes complicated to create.

For stills you can even use a program like Microsoft Word.  If currently own Word, you can add effects like arrows, lines and many more to any graphic for free.

With Word, you first copy and paste the screenshot into a Word document using the "Prnt Scrn" and "Ctrl + V" keys we talked about last time.  Then you can size it as you desire with the sizing handles.  Once that is done you may use some of the advanced features under the "Insert" commands.  Play with them to see all of the available options.

You will be creating your own graphics in no time.

Tags: editing, graphics, microsoft, screen shot

I had a great email from AP telling me about someone teaching her a great windows feature this week.  I thought I had written about this hidden feature long ago.  In searching through all of my columns I found that I had not, so today we will take a look.

You know how it works… you are emailing a friend about something strange happening on your computer.  It would be much easier to put a picture of what is happening in the email instead of trying to describe it.  Or take my example, when writing a training manual; pictures are always needed for the step-by-step explanations.  Or you just made that big score playing online scrabble.

Wouldn’t it be neat if Microsoft provided a free tool to allow us to grab a “screenshot” of what we needed? The answer to that is, “Yes!” They have and it has been available in most all Windows versions.   It  is still available in Windows 7.

The perceived worthless “Print Screen” button on your keyboard used to do something slick in the old “DOS days”, back before Windows ever put in an appearance.  By pressing the “Print Screen” button you could print out the screen that was displayed.  That is very boring by today’s standards; however, in those days it was high-tech.

To get a picture of your window all you have to do is press and hold down (for a second or two) the “Print Screen” button.  This key is usually found on your keyboard in the upper right corner labeled, “Prnt Scrn”.

Try it now.  Go to your computer and open a window of anything on your computer.  Press the “Prnt Scrn” button a hold it for a count of “two”.  There you have it; you have just copied whatever was on your desktop into your system’s clipboard.  If you are using two monitors you just copied both windows.

How can you prove it?  Simply open a program like Word that allows graphics and paste as you normally would paste text.  The easy way to paste is to use the “Ctrl-V” button combination.  There it is, your screenshot is now in your document.  You can paste the graphic in most programs including email; though, you will have to check to make sure yours will allow this.

Now let’s look at one last print screen trick.  Use, the “Alt-Prnt Scrn” keys if you only want to copy one active window and not your entire desktop.  The only rule here is that the window you want to copy is active, i.e., you click on that window before copying.

This screenshot remains in your clipboard until you copy something else into it or you restart windows.

Tags: computer, picture, Print, screen