Computer Tips for Travelers

Has this ever happened to you?
Your computer crashes and you take it to a techie who gets it working again but needs to reformat (erase) the hard drive.  You get your computer back with nothing on it.  No problem you think, you have a backup of your important data on Disk, either CD/DVDs or a [...]

The Kindle eBook Reader from Amazon is great for RVers.  I appreciate the ability to have hundreds of books and magazines in our motor home without taking up more space than a single book.
Books are usually delivered to the Kindle wirelessly in about a minute and cost less than $10 bucks, sometimes free.
Did you know [...]

This is actually a Picasa tip and a Blogging tip.  Many travelers have blogs (simple, instant, websites used as journals, photo albums, or opinion pages) to share their travels with friends and family.  Two very popular (and free) blogging platforms are Blogger, and Wordpress.  I use them both.  Blogger is the easier of the two.  [...]

We’ve made a lot of new videos over the last few months (we’re over 140 now – about 14 hours worth) and we’ve re-authored our disks accordingly. We’ve divided them up into 2 categories:

Boot Camp: videos on how to use your computer, Essentials, Vista, Safe Computing and Internet connections. Disk includes a 40 page self-study [...]

Aren’t digital cameras wonderful? You never have to worry about running out of film (just battery )You never have to wonder, “Is that picture going to come out?” because you can look at the preview. And, you don’t have to pay for processing. But you *do* have to learn a little about what [...]

An article that Chris wrote for the Family Motor Coach magazine – reproduced here (with permission), complete with links to all the free software mentioned.

If you’ve ever taken several photos of a scene and ’stitched’ them together into a panorama, then you have an idea of a new world to come with ‘Synthing’ photos. Although that comparison is rather like comparing a bicycle to the space shuttle as similar modes of transportation.
Photosynth is a new service from Microsoft. [...]

Last week I told you about Photo Story 3, a great way to make a movie from your photos. But, once you get the movie completed, then what? It plays great on your computer, but the people you want to share it with aren’t sitting next to you, they may be scattered all over the [...]

Photo Story 3 is a free program that will make movies from your digital photos. You can download Photo Story from Microsoft’s website. That’s right, I said Free. And, I also said Microsoft. Those are two words that normally don’t go together! Take advantage of it. This is a great program. It takes your digital [...]

I’ve been using a variety of computer software, and teaching others how to use it, since 1983. I’ve taught everything from DOS, to WordStar, to WordPerfect, PageMaker, Microsoft Access, Visual Basic, and dozens of others in between. I have never seen anything as quick and easy – and powerful – as Google’s Picasa…
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