Fixing a wet cell phone

I can't say it's ever happened to me (yet). But for thousands of people each year, it's a sinking feeling. You're in the bathroom, taking care of business, and suddenly *ker-plunk* your cell phone takes a swim. You look into the bowl and your worst fear is confirmed - there's your phone looking up at you, as if to say, "Please...get me out of here..."

Is there any hope? Can your phone be saved? In many cases, yes - depending on how you handle the situation.

(Preface: if this happens to you at the State Fair while you're using one of those Porta-Potties, ignore the rest of this article. You gotta buy another phone.)

Here's what you do:

First, get the phone out of the water as quickly as possible. Yes, it will be disgusting. But you do want it to work again, right? So quickly do the Plunge and Grab Maneuver, and get that thing out of its watery grave.

Next, take the battery out and quickly towel-dry as much of the water away as you can (from the battery and the phone).

Third, lay the phone - open, with battery still removed - on a bath towel and blow dry with a hair dryer for several minutes. We want to get as much of the water out of it as we can before step 4.

Finally, fill up a bowl with dry white rice and submerge your phone in it for a few days. Yes, it means you will be without your phone for a while. You can handle it. The rice has the effect of drawing moisture out of the phone and into the rice, so hopefully at the end of the three days you can put the battery back in and watch it power up just like it used to.

Get a warning beep from your Caps Lock button

Have you ever been typing away, and then you look up at the screen and see that the last full line was done in ALL CAPS? Yep, you accidentally bumped that Caps Lock key. It's a pretty common thing actually, but frustrating nonetheless.


(As an aside, I know that there are computer users who type all of their emails in all caps intentionally. You people know who you are. This will be the subject of a blog in the near future.)

This problem is easy to fix. There are some instances in which the All Caps button is needed, so you probably don't want to disable it completely. But you can set it so that you hear a little "beep" each time you hit it. As soon as you hear that beep, you can stop typing instead of wasting time typing a line (or paragraph) that you will just have to delete and do over.

In Windows XP:
Click Start - Control Panel
Double click Accessibility Options and you should see the Keyboard tab open
In the "ToggleKeys" section, check the box that says "Use ToggleKeys"
Click OK to close the window

In Windows Vista:
Click Start - Control Panel
Double click the "Ease of Access Center" icon
Click "Make the Keyboard easier to use"
Check the box that says "Turn on Toggle Keys"
Click Save and close the Control Panel window

You will now be alerted each time you hit that Caps Lock button (and the same alert will sound if you hit the Num Lock or Scroll Lock). Now if we could just come up with some kind of self-destruct mechanism each time the "Forward" button is clicked in the email program...

This week, we have several video clips and they have a theme: military fathers coming home from Iraq and surprising their kids. We need to remember that it is not just the men and women overseas that are making a sacrifice for us; it's their families also. Grab some tissues and enjoy these great reunions.

Not everyone is a pro at Photoshop

When you read a print publication, virtually every picture you see on the page has been processed in some way by Photoshop. Whether it's a model that needs a skin blemish removed, or the sky having a few too many clouds, Photoshop comes to the rescue. With this great program in the hands of a skilled user, just about any photo can be changed to what the editor needs it to be.

However, Photoshop user does not necessarily equal Photoshop expert. Sometimes an edited picture will slip through with some kind of error, and the goofed-up image will appear on the printed page for the whole world to see.

There's a blog called Photoshop Disasters that collects just these types of images (readers find them and submit them for the site to use). Here are a few examples (you can click the image to see it larger).

Someone deleted part of the dresser then forget to put it back in:


Sears model's left hand just a little too big:


Model's head not in proportion:


There's an extra hand resting there:

Can you kick the clicking habit?

As human beings, we truly are creatures of habit.

Look at you there. You're sitting at your computer with your hand on your computer mouse, your finger on the button, waiting for the next time you need to click something. It's a habit we learn quickly almost as soon as we start using a computer.

What if you no longer had to click on anything? What if you could completely navigate a website just by moving the mouse - no clicking allowed. Would you still click out of instinct? Probably. When I was 16 and learning to drive, my mom would ride with me while I practiced. Even though she was in the passenger seat, if I had to suddenly stop, her foot would instinctively hit the "brake" - even though on her side there were no brakes. Just instinct. Sometimes I would pretend to run a stop sign just to see her try to stop the car with her imaginary brake pedal (sorry mom!).

Today we have a website that tests how well you can fight the urge to click your mouse button. It's pretty interesting. Check it out here.

Make your Windows folders different colors

Whenever a new version of Windows comes out, it seems that Microsoft tries to make it all flashy and shiny (maybe that's so we won't notice the bugs because we are so bedazzled by the other stuff). Yet, there's one area where Windows continues to be pretty boring: folders.


They still give us the same old dreary manila-colored folders each time. Of course, in Windows Vista, they turned the folders on their side (those are the ones you see above). I don't quite get the logic of that, since a folder like that in the real world would dump out all of its contents. But I digress.

If you are bored with the same old folder images, you can change them! There's a free program available called Rainbow Folders, which you can download here.

The download will be a zipped folder which you can save to your desktop, then just drag the program icon out of the folder to your desktop and double click to install. Installation is pretty standard. When finished, you will see the program listed in your programs list.

When you run the program, you will see this main window:

All of your top-level folders are listed on the left side. You can click the "plus" sign to expand those folders and see the sub-folders. When one of those folders is highlighted, choose a color from the slidebars on the right. When you get the color you want, click the "Colorize" button, and your folder is now in a bright new color.

There are other features to the program but you can explore and find those out. There is a full help file should you need it, but the program is pretty simple to use.

You can categorize your folders by color if you want, such as all financial-related folders are green or all picture folders are blue. This just makes it easy to tell at a glance what each folder contains. You can even choose to make your folders look like the old-fashioned ones (like Windows 98), or the newest style (Vista).

This week's video is an old Candid Camera clip - it shows how we humans want to conform to the group.

No one writes letters any more

I guess I am a sucker for an effective advertisement. This ad is sort of a knock on email/texting/instant messaging and the other fairly non-personal ways we communicate these days. I can't even remember the last time I sent a handwritten letter to someone.

You can click on the picture to see it full size, but the text at the bottom says "If you really want to touch someone, send them a letter." It was created by the postal service of Australia.

How to drown out distractions while working

Something we don't hear very often today is white noise. If you turn on an old TV or an AM radio and stop the tuner in between stations, that constant, steady static is called white noise. Now, with digital tuning and XM radio, white noise just doesn't happen much.

Personally, I like white noise. When I am working at my computer I prefer to have the distracting noises covered up by a single, non-distracting noise. With the constant white noise, I don't hear the TV in the other room, or the neighbor's dog barking, or someone whistling. Or at least I don't notice those noises.

The source I use for my white noise is a website called Simply Noise (www.simplynoise.com). When you visit the site, you will see that there is not much there other than a brief explanation, and a slide bar so you can control the volume (you can also adjust it by your own speaker volume). You also have the option of pink noise, which has a deeper tone that some people prefer.

Warning: if there are other people in the room with you, the white noise sound may drive them nuts. Not everyone likes it. What do you think? Vote in the poll, and leave comments if you wish.

The best FREE parental control software

Recently I was assigned the task of finding and installing a good parental control program on a laptop that was being given to a 13-year old boy as a birthday present. Since my children are both adults now (wow, it's a little weird to write that), we really don't have a need for that type of program in our home any more. So, I started to do the research and tested a few programs. I came up with one that I think will meet the needs of most families. Best of all, it's FREE.

The program is called K9 Web Protection and is available for download here. To get the free download, you have to fill out a brief form and they email you the license key which is required in the installation process. Also, during the install, you have to come up with a password that only YOU (the parent) will know. Choose one that your child would never guess, but that you would remember. After the installation, you have to reboot your computer.

Once you restart, the program is running and you really don't need to configure it initially. I tested it by going to a few "normal" sites:

www.yahoo.com - site loaded normally, although I saw no images or ads (but this may have been due to the AdBlock Firefox add-on; I rarely see ads on websites anyway).

cnn.com - the front page loaded fine, but when I clicked on the "Entertainment" category, that page was left blank (I think this was an issue with the site, not a block from K9)

google.com - page loads fine, but search results may or may not be accessible.

Then I tried some sites that have some good content, as well as some content that you may not want your kids to see:

YouTube.com - as you probably know, this site has some wonderful videos and it also has some pretty awful ones. K9 blocked it. This is what you see (you can click on the image to see it full size):

You also have the option to change the settings for this particular site for 15 minutes, or you can authorize the site permanently:

But, as you can see, any special authorization requires the password. This is a good feature, because there may be a legitimate reason your child needs to see a particular video on YouTube. In any event, what he or she is seeing is only by your authority.

I browsed the web for quite some time, and K9 didn't really hamper my ability to use the internet the way I normally do (I did have to manually authorize the StumbleUpon function, but that makes sense too).

The next question of course is, "That's great - but my kid is pretty good with computers, so he/she could probably just disable the K9 program."

I don't think so.

The first, most obvious thing to try is to just turn off the program. If you hit Ctrl + Alt + Delete, the new window that opens is the Windows Task Manager. The K9 program won't show up under the Applications tab, but if you click the second tab over, called Processes, you will see it in that list. It is called "k9filter.exe". If you click once to highlight the program name, and then click the button that says "End Process", that is supposed to just shut down that particular program and you go on your merry way. At least that's what would NORMALLY happen.

If you try to "End Process" the K9 program, you run into a problem. When you click the button, the process does seem to end. But so does your ability to connect to a website - ANY website. It's like you aren't even online. In order to get back the ability to see any websites, you have to restart the computer. And of course when you restart the computer, you are also restarting the K9 program.

What about just uninstalling the program? Any kid knows how to do that through Control Panel. Well, not so fast. Uninstalling K9 requires the password that only you, the parent, have memorized. So that won't work either. I would feel pretty safe with this program guarding my child from the nasty stuff that's on the net these days.

Just one slight downside - since all web pages that are viewed on your screen have to first pass through the K9 server and be approved, you may notice a slight slowdown in website loading speed. But this is negligible, and well worth it for the protection that it provides.

Is this type of software review helpful? If so, is there any particular program (or type of program) that you would like to see reviewed here? Please let me know in the comments section, just below the video.

This week's video is not funny. It's actually a commercial. It's pretty sad, and it will make you think.

Are you neurotic?

I came across an interesting website recently.

I think we are all neurotic in some way(s). I mean, everyone has their little oddities and unusual behaviors that are outside the "norm". What is interesting is reading about the neuroses of other people, in their own words. That's what you will find on the website www.Iamneurotic.com.

Here are a few samples:

Whenever I eat cereal with milk, I systematically eat it so that there is always the same amount of milk and cereal at all times. It drives me crazy though. My heart beats so rapidly. Each time I do it, I hate it and want to stop, but thinking about stopping only makes it worse.

I cannot use a hairdryer while no one is home. I think must be to do with the fact that I’m scared someone will sneak in and kill me without me hearing. It’s so bad I didn’t wash my hair for two weeks because no one was home.

The tv has to be on a certain channel when I turn it off at night. If someone else was watching and turned it off, I have to turn it on, set it to the channel, and turn it off again. I can’t sleep if I don’t make sure of this.

I can’t stand other people touching me. At all. If anyone so much as accidentally brushes up against me, I immediately rub the part of my body they have touched until I feel like all traces of this person are gone.

It is interesting to read, and encouraging also - it's good to know that some people in the world have much weirder problems than you do!

An email from a frustrated Windows user

I found this very interesting. Yes, I get emails all the time from people who are having problems with their computer. I get great pleasure in helping them get it working properly again. But the email below is very special. Read it all the way through and you will understand why.

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn't in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system ... and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like "Open" or "Save". No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

What is different about this email? It was not sent to me. It was sent about 5 years ago, directly to some of the engineers at Microsoft that work on developing programs. And who was the computer user that sent the email, the one that was having all of those problems? Bill Gates.

It's kind of ironic that the person that invented Windows has that much frustration with using the system he created. Of course, if he called me, I would have walked him through it.

How to speed up your Windows XP computer

Most people have wondered at times, "How can I speed up my computer?" I know many of you have, because it is the most common problem I am asked to fix.

Problem solved.

I have just completed Scott's Ultimate Guide: Speeding Up Your Windows XP Computer. This guide contains 50 separate procedures that you can do today - right now - to make your computer run faster. (These simple procedures apply to Windows XP; I am going to start writing a similar guide for Windows Vista shortly.)

The procedures are accompanied by lots of screenshots, so that you can see exactly what to do. Those of you that have worked with me in the past know that I avoid "tech-talk" - each step is spelled out clearly so that you can perform it and see an immediate benefit.



Click the link below for more information and instructions:

Scott's Ultimate Guide: Speeding Up Your Windows XP Computer

Get rid of the Windows Update restart nag

I have Windows Update set to download updates automatically, but it does not install them. It lets me know that there are updates ready to install, and then I check to see exactly what updates it wants to install before going ahead with it (yes, this is a little more "update-aware" than the average person - for some users, automating all update processes is preferable).

Anyway, once I go ahead and install the updates, Windows tells me that a restart is necessary to complete the installation:



I almost always click "Restart Later" because I don't want to wait for my computer to restart right at that moment.

Then 10 minutes later, the nag screen is back wanting to restart.

And again in another 10 minutes. It's like a snooze control with an extra minute built in, and I am not even enjoying any bonus sleep.

This continues until I get so sick of it that I finally give in and restart.

That won't happen any more, because of a small program called "Leave Me Alone!". You can download it free here.

When the nag screen comes up, you simply run this little application and click the "Leave Me Alone" button:


Now you won't see that message any more (at least not for this current set of updates) and you can get back to work. Of course, you will want to remember to restart when it is convenient for you, because that is necessary for the updates to get fully installed.


We've seen it before - an anchorman on live television that gets cracked up about something, and just can't stop laughing. Here's another one:

When does case sensitivity matter?

I find that sometimes people are confused about when it makes a difference to type capital letters or lower-case letters. Here are some guidelines to follow:

1. An email address is NOT case-sensitive. This is always true (at least I have never heard of an exception to it). So you can type an email as pctutor@gmail.com, PCTUTOR@GMAIL.COM, or PcTuToR@GmAiL.cOm (although that last one is pretty annoying) and it will still get through.

2. A website address is not case-sensitive before the ".com", but it is probably case-sensitive after that point. So if you are only typing "www.yahoo.com" or "www.google.com" it doesn't matter if you type it in upper or lower case. But if you have a longer URL, such as "www.mydomain.com/FunnyPictures.html" you may have to pay attention to the capital letters. If you are not sure, try all lower-case first and then some other variations if that doesn't work.

3. A password may or may not be case-sensitive. If you are creating an account and have to come up with a password, some sites require that at least one character be capitalized. If the site does not designate a password policy, it probably doesn't matter.

4. Captcha verification may or may not be case-sensitive, but it usually is not. This is that "we must verify that you are a human" test in which you have to type a word that is barely legible in order to submit a form on a website:

Yes, they are annoying and they slow down the whole ordering process for a lot of sites, but they are unfortunately necessary due to the large volume of scammers in the world. But they are not usually case sensitive. Even if you get it wrong the first time, you can try again.

Search Google more accurately

Let's face it - the amount of information offered by Google is simply overwhelming. Go to Google and type in a random word like "toolbox" and it comes back with roughly 89 million results. That is pretty much useless.

When using Google, you have to be specific about what you are looking for. Most people just type in a word or a phrase and hope their desired result is in the first page or two, but that is not efficient. We want to use our computers effectively, right? Here's how.

The way you have to look at it is to imagine the perfect website for the information you want. If you are doing some research on the history of radio broadcasting in Canada, what words would appear on that page? Probably "radio", "broadcasting", and "Canada". So most people would go to Google and do this search:

radio broadcasting Canada

That results in 1,170,000 pages. However, the pages in that list are pages that contain either the word "radio", or the word "broadcasting", or the word "Canada". We can get much more specific with this search:

+radio +broadcasting +Canada

That tells Google to only bring up the pages that have all three of those words, and that narrows our results down to about 727,000 pages. Better, but still not ideal. Some of the pages that come up talk about both radio and television broadcasting, and we are not interested in television. So we can eliminate the television results by doing this search:

+radio +broadcasting +Canada -television

That means Google can only show pages that have those first three words, and any pages that have the word "television" will NOT show up in the results. Now we're down to 418,000 results pages. But still too many.

How about this - let's search on an exact phrase. Maybe the internet is so wonderful, and Google is so good, that there is a website out there that has exactly what we need! So we search on this:

"history of radio broadcasting in Canada"

That means Google can only bring up web pages that have that exact phrase (because of the quotation marks). Guess what - there is one single page in the search results. Bingo!

So don't be afraid to experiment with the plus sign, the minus sign, and the quotation marks. They can change Google from being uselessly overwhelming to precisely helpful!