Show me what's wrong

In the past, I have written about the value of being able to send a screenshot. A screenshot is just a picture of your screen, and many times it tells me what is going on or what problem you might be having. It's much better than just telling me, "My email won't work" - that could mean a million different things.

Now there's a free service that is even better (and I know my friend Lynn, owner of a bed and breakfast in Maine, is going to want to try it out!). With this service, you don't just send a picture of your screen - you send an actual video of it. The service is called Show Me What's Wrong.

Here's how it works:

You go to this website: http://tinyurl.com/yj6kbm2 (you can bookmark it if you want)

At that site, you will see a place to enter your full name, and a button that says "Start Recording". When you push that button, you will see some big numbers on your screen counting down 3 - 2 - 1 and then you are recording whatever happens on your screen.

You get 5 minutes of recording time, so you can click on things, make error messages pop up, open programs, whatever you feel demonstrates whatever problem your computer is having. You can even include audio - just connect a microphone to your computer, and you can talk while you are recording the screen. This way you can explain the problem verbally while showing it visually.

When you are finished, just click the big red STOP sign in the lower right corner. When you do that, the recording stops, and the video is processed and sent to me by email. It couldn't be any easier!

Keep in mind a couple of things:

1. When I get this video, all I receive is your name and the video itself. Don't assume I know your email address, even if we have communicated by email in the past. In the "Name" field, you can type your first and last name, and your email address. At least I can then reply to you.

2. I wish I could invite everyone to just send me your screen videos and I will diagnose and fix your problem, but there are not enough hours in the day to do that as a free service. I am available for hire though! You can buy an hour of my time and then use it in chunks whenever you need help - it doesn't necessarily have to be for a PC Tuneup.


This week's video: How would you react if you thought a spider was crawling on you? Maybe like these people did:

Making a video into a playable DVD

Last week we went over how to download YouTube videos to your computer. It's really pretty simple.

What if you want to take those videos and burn them to a DVD, so that you can play them on any DVD player? That's easy, with DVD Flick.

First step is to go to www.DVDFlick.net and download the free software:

It's a simple installation and it is completely free. Once it is installed, run the program. You will see an option to "Add title". When you click this, you need to navigate to wherever your video is stored on your computer and select that video to add. You can keep adding videos to this project, and there is a bar on the left side of the program window that will keep track of how much space you have used until the DVD will be full.

Once you have added the videos you want on the DVD, you can actually just click "Create DVD" to let the burn process begin.

However - if you want to get fancy, click on "Menu settings" and choose a nice background image for your DVD menu screen.

One word of warning - the process takes a while. A 10-minute video will take about 30 minutes to burn to a DVD. If you are burning a lot of video to disc, get it started just before going to bed and let it work overnight.

I would also recommend doing a short video first as a test, to make sure the process goes as expected. If you have any questions about how to use DVD Flick, they have a user forum here.

This week's video is the brief story of a kid with a problem. He's stuck behind the couch.

Downloading YouTube videos to your computer

(Welcome! I publish a new computer tip every Monday - if you want to subscribe by email, just enter your email address in the subscription box on the right.)

YouTube has millions of videos available, and a ton more are being added every day. In addition to the stupid ones (of which there are quite a few), there are many that are entertaining, informative, even educational.

What if you're watching a video on YouTube, and you want to download that video to your computer for your own archives? You can look for a "Download" button, but you won't find one. Youtube doesn't want to make it easy for you to save videos to your computer, because they would rather have you come back to their website (and see their ads) whenever you want to view one.

Yet, thanks to a free service, downloading a YouTube video is pretty easy. Let's walk through it.

Let's say you're watching the Annoying Orange video. Watch the video on the YouTube site (here), and then of course you will see why most people would want to download that one and save it. Okay, maybe not, but it will work as an example for us anyway.

When you are watching that video on the YouTube site, you can look up at the top of the screen at the address bar and you will see the URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL_qGMfbtAk

If you click once on the address, it will highlight the whole line in blue. Then click one more time, right after the "y" in "youtube". If you don't click in exactly the right place, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the cursor to immediately after the "y":

When the cursor is in the right place, just hit Backspace one time to erase the "y" and type the number 3. So you just replaced the "y" with a "3".

Now hit Enter on the keyboard. You will see a screen that offers to download the video to your computer - you just need to choose which format you prefer (.mp4 or .flv). In most cases you will probably want .mp4.

When you click that link, you will have the option to save the file to your computer. If you plan to download more than a few videos, it would be a good idea to create a special folder for just that.

This week's video is a foreign commercial for caviar (it's not actually caviar, since the product is spelled "kaviar"). This baby has a unique way of showing that he really likes the taste.

Vintage ad browser

Some fun today - found a website that has a large collection (over 100,000) of old print advertisements (www.vintageadbrowser.com).

I found a few that I thought were interesting (you can click for full size):

My question on this one is, what can you do with a 10 mb hard drive?

Wonder how many people today know that MasterCard used to be Master Charge?



Back in 1905, whenever ladies were thirsty, weary or despondent, they could just have a Coke!



This week's video: this guy has some sick friends:

How to read paid content - without paying

Has this ever happened to you? You are looking at a popular news website, and you see an article that looks interesting. You click on the article to read it, but then you only see the first few lines. To read the rest, you have to purchase a paid subscription. You really don't want to buy a subscription just to read that one article.

For some sites, there is a way around that - thanks to Google.

To show you how to do this, I will use the Wall Street Journal as an example.

Let's say I go to the online version of the Journal (here). I see an interesting article on earnings reports. But when my mouse goes to click on it, a little window pops up that says this article is only available to subscribers. However, I can read a "preview":


When I click to read the preview, I only see the first couple of paragraphs:

Here's how I can read the whole article. First, highlight the title of the article and click Ctrl + C to copy it.


Then, go to Google and put your cursor in the search bar. Click Ctrl + V to paste it, and click the Search button. When the Google search results come up, you will be pleasantly surprised to see that the article you wanted to read is right there at the top of the list (in this case, it was the first 2 results):

When you click on that title from Google, you will see the entire article, in all its financial splendor, right there on the Wall Street Journal website.

The Wall Street Journal is completely aware of this procedure, so don't feel like you're scamming them by reading their articles for free. They know that the articles show up in the Google search results, and they want it that way because of Google's value to their website. They could turn this off at any time (but they probably won't).

Practically speaking, if you find yourself using this workaround regularly to read all of the paid articles on a website, you might find it a lot easier to just pay for a subscription. That's up to you.

This week's video is a commercial that made me chuckle:

Just got this email

From: Kenneth Tucker (cohesion7@gmail.com):

Hello,

How are you? I'm Kenneth Tucker, The Computer Analyst of John Holts Associate Minnesota, we need to know if you are capable of repairing computers in large volumes, the organisation distributed few computers to a missionary home in Lefkosa, Cyprus, and there objectives was to hold a free computer training section for the kids at the Mission Home, we got information that the computers all malfunctioned and They are shipping the computers back to us, we need to fix them and have it returned in time,are you available for this job? we need your urgent response to this ad.

The Computer Analyst
Mr Kenneth Tucker
John Holts Associate,
Minnesota.

I guess I don't have to wonder where this is going.

They all ask the same thing - "Are you capable of repairing computers in large volumes".

Are scammers so brain-dead that they can't even think of a new sentence?

How to call a big company

One thing is for sure about large corporations in the US: they really don't want you to call them. That's why you can't usually find their phone numbers on their websites. They would much rather communicate by email or through website forms.

Just try going to www.google.com and look around the site to find the phone number. They hide it well, because if everyone knew their phone number, they would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year just to have people answering the phone.

Now, you can have the phone number of just about every major corporation. Just go to this site, and at the top of the page start typing in the name of the company. You will then see the phone number for the company, instructions for quickly navigating through the phone menu, average wait time and the customer service rating from previous users.

To really save time in the future, scroll down the list and find the ones that you might ever have a reason to call - then enter them in your cell phone.

And if you need to call Google, it's 650-623-4000 and press 0 for an operator.

This week's video is a pretty cool optical illusion: