For any free Internet service or application
E*Trade Free Online Financial Education
I’ve been with E*Trade for some time now–over a decade, as a matter of fact. One thing about that company, they provide a lot of value add.
In this short posting, I provide a link to some of their free online financial education. Check it out at: http://www.etrade.com/education.
Be advised that because this is their own site, they may illustrate matters using their own product offering–nevertheless, the information can be generalized.
Yesterday while driving, I heard that there is a way to make a couple of bucks…or $4 to be exact…by selling your services online.
There is a web site that does just that. It is called www.fiverr.com. Through that site, people can basically buy and sell service. Those selling, sell what they have to offer for $5. Those buying, purchase a service for $5.
In the end, the buyer gets something for $5, the seller get $4, and Fiverr.com gets $1! So who said you can’t make money online; with Fiberr.com you can.
Have you ever wished you can save some of those YouTube videos for later viewing? This is especially true if you plan on going somewhere with your laptop with no Internet access.
If your answer is yes, then read on…
There is a file conversion site–zamzar.com–that can actually convert YouTube video postings to any video format your computer can play. All you need to do is open your browser to http://www.zamzar.com. There make sure to do the following:
If you have several YouTube videos you wish to save for later viewing, repeat the above steps for each and everyone of them.
Have fun!
Warning: Some videos are copyrighted. Be careful not to contribute to such illegal activities.
I’ve been hoping to get invited to beta test Google’s new online application called “Wave”. Well, after submitting two requests over a period of a month, I finally got an invitation!
I am now one of the lucky few who will get a chance to test drive what could be one of the most paradigm changing revolutions in our Internet times.
As I go through the use of Wave I will post my opinion of it and it possible applications, and how this new communications medium can possibly impact the way we do things online or with our daily lives.
Most people with very minimal computer background use their web browser without thinking about web safety. They just expect their computer to do its job. Well, there is more than meets the eye when surfing the Internet, especially if you are using someone elses computer or a computer shared by many other people. Here’s what I mean.
When you are browsing the Internet, your web browser leaves a trail of where you’ve been, what you’ve typed, what you’ve seen, and the various information you’ve been entering in web forms. In Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), it even remembers the state of you browser so that if it crashes, you can be restored to the last state of your browsing activity.
Now think about who could potentially see this if you are using a public computer or a shared computer! This is an identity theft scenario just waiting to happen.
IE8's Safety
This is where IE8 Safety feature comes into play. Microsoft has updated IE8 with Internet safety as a major change. As an example, one of the key things you will notice is that IE8 has an InPrivate Browsing feature–a way for you to browse without leaving a trace. Note that IE8 has no Phishing Filter as it has been replace by SmartScreen Filter.
Clicking this menu item will bring up the Delete Browsing History dialog box where you can select the specific items in your browsing history you want to delete. The options include:
If you are paranoid like me, you’ll want to make sure that any trace of your browsing history is truly deleted by making sure you check all of the above and uncheck the first one–Preserve Favorite Website Data.
InPrivate Browsing
Selecting this menu item or pressing CTRL-SHIFT-P, will open a new IE8 window running in “InPrivate” browsing mode. This means that your browsing activity isn’t leaving any trails behind. Be advised that this InPrivate protection is only in effect for this window. By default, IE8 will open in its normal mode.
You should use this mode when using public or shared computers to prevent others from finding information about your web activity.
This is basically a report of which sites you’ve visited showing if cookies were accepted or blocked. Depending on your browser’s privacy policy setting, you may or may not have any reports of cookies being accepted by your system.
Privacy Report
If you select one of the sites in your privacy report, you will notice that the Summary button becomes enabled, and if you click it you will get the following dialog box:
Privacy Report Summary
If you decide that the current browser privacy policy isn’t sufficient or you simply wish to change it, you can click the Settings button Privacy Report dialog box. When you do you get this:
Privacy Policy Settings
As you can see, it can get pretty involved just trying to make heads or tails of Privacy Policy. Suffice it to say that in this window you can control how cookies are allowed or disallowed on your computer. You can also control the pop-up blocker and control InPrivate browsing settings. I’ll cover this area in more detail in another article.
When you select Safety then InPrivate Filtering from the command bar, you toggle on and off this feature. What exactly is InPrivate Filtering? It is a feature that allows you to block the sharing of information about the sites you visit to third party content providers. This information can be used to generate a profile about you which then can be used for targetted advertisements.
You can choose to automatically block, choose which ones to block/allow, or to simply have it off by selecting the InPrivate Filtering Settings menu item from the Safety command bar drop down menu. The window for InPrivate Settings is shown below.
InPrivate Filtering Settings
The feature activates when the site you are visiting is secure–meaning it is using HTTPS in the URL. When you select this from the menu (under Safety in the command bar), IE8 will bring up a little pop up window that provides information about the site. The example below show what I got when I went to the logon page of gmail.
Security Report on gmail
As you can see, it provides information about who the certificate of authority (CA) is and other information related to the site’s certificates. Typically, the CA is the one vouching for the sites identity. In this case the CA is Verisign–a very reputable CA company.
There isn’t really much information about this function in IE8. The closest thing on this I can find from Microsoft is an article on “What are International Domain Names?”
This item appears to be disabled or grayed out all the time. So there was no way to determine exactly what it does. Although, I’m guessing that if a site is an international site where the domain name can be shown in its native language, then this feature might allow you to show it in its original form or standard text encoding.
This appears to be a security feature because it is possible for text encoding to look like a legitimate looking domain when, in fact, it is a foreign site!
You’ll probably not even use this, but it is good to know what it may be used for.
This is IE8’s replacement for the Phishing Filter that was introduced in IE7. When it is on, IE8 will send the website you are visiting to Microsoft to check to see if it is in the list of phishing or malicious software distribution sites. It it is, you will get an RED background in the address bar and you will get a block message from IE8. You can ignore the message and continue to the bad site or you can go to your home page (recommended).
If you suspect a site is a suspicious or potentially malicious site, you can submit a site to Microsoft for review by selecting Check This Website from the SmartScreen Filter submenu.
Although it isn’t recommended, you can turn off this feature by selecting Turn Off SmartScreen Filter from the submenu.
If you visit a site that is obviously a malicious one, you can simply report this abuse by selecting Report Unsafe Website from the SmartScreen Filter submenu.
As you can see, this is a very powerful feature of IE8 to help protect users from malicious sites that are there to potentially steal your identity or to spread malware to your computer.
This feature will navigate you out of the page you are currently viewing to Microsoft’s update site. There Microsoft will assess what updates your computer needs and you can opt to install them.
I recommend installing critical security updates at the very minimum as these will close any vulnerabilities your computer might have from hackers who will exploit them.
IE8 is a major change from the previous versions due to heavy focus on security. The Safety feature of IE8 is a testament to that.
The Page function of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is probably where most action takes place for web page related functions the user will take. It has the following basic menu items
Most of the items here are common knowledge to the general user population; so we will only cover those functions that are more obscure to the most casual user. We’ll cover those that are in bold above: compatibility viewing options, style, encoding, caret browsing, and view source.
Previous versions of Internet Explorer have the reputation of not following web standards, as it relates to how web page mark up codes are interpreted. In addition, they were known to use their own unique mark up code–forcing web masters to create various hacks just to make sure their pages work in IE6 or IE7.
Well, after many years, Microsoft finally saw the light and have come to adopt web standards–resutling in the release of IE8. Now, what happens to the pages that were designed to be best viewed in IE6 or IE7? In some cases, they might not look right. This is where the compatibility option comes in.
If you enable the Compatibility View option, IE8 will allow you to run in a sort of IE6 or IE7 mode. So if you ever find a site that may have been designed for the older Internet Explorers, you’ll want to enable this option, and add the site to the list of sites you wish to view in compatible mode. You can add them by selecting Compatibility View Settings.
Bottom line…if a page doesn’t look right, try enabling the Compatbility View option.
The Style menu item has two submenu items–no style and default style. As some people know, web pages may have styles associated with it. Styles can be embedded in a page or it can be included using CSS (cascading style sheets).
Styles control how content is displayed. So by default, IE8 uses styles. You can disable Style by selecting No Style. When you do, IE8 will simply show you content in a linear fashion–pretty much in the order they appear in the page, with no style.
When would you use “No Style”? Probably if you want to keep the view to the content plain.
Encoding is the language and character set to use when displaying a web page. Most people don’t have to mess with this because the default setting is “Auto” and most pages have information to tell the browser what language encoding to use.
However, if for some reason the page does not include that information, and you have the Language Encoding Auto-Select feature on, IE8 can probably determine the correct encoding. For the case it cannot, the Encoding feature allows you to choose.
No. This isn’t some new browsing trend where you eat carrots while you browse. It is an accessibility feature on IE8 that allows one to browse using the keyboard.
When it is on, a movable cursor will become visible. Using the keyboard, a user can navigate the browser with that cursor. That same cursor can be used to select and copy snippets of the page being viewed.
This feature can be applied on a per tab basis. Pressing F7 toggles it on or off.
Most people would probably not care about using this feature, but if for some reason you want to see how a web page is coded in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), then this is how you would see it.
By getting yourself familiar with these features, you will become more knowledgeable about IE8 than probably 99% of the population! As a result, you can be more productive in how you deal with a web page.
Basic Google Search
Almost everyone uses Google to search the Internet; but not everyone really knows how to take advantage of some of Google’s basic search capabilities. Knowing how to use Google’s basic search capabilities can narrow down your seach quickly from several hundred millions down to a few thousands relevant results.
Open your web browser to google.com. This should open up to google’s simple, yet effective home page–the search page. At this point, you can search the WEB, look for IMAGES, find some VIDEOS, or search for NEWS. Most of the time, the default–WEB–will suffice. Regardless, click the type of seach you wish to do.
In the search field, you can type relevant words that simply describe what you are looking for. Say for example you are looking for an article on basket weaving. If you simply type the words “basket” and “weaving” in the seach field, Google will come back with 1,150,000 results. This is because google will look for articles that contain “basket weaving”, “basket”, or “weaving”. Now, do you have time to look over that many articles? Probably not.
To narrow down your results to more relevant searches, you can begin by using the “+” operator. You can enter “+basket” and “+weaving”. This will force Google to only return articles with both “basket” and “weaving”. This approach narrows down the search to 704,000. Better than the original 1,150,000 results earlier, but still too many.
To further narrow down the search, you can enclose your search criteria with quotes–i.e. use “basket weaving” including the quotes. This forces Google to only return articles with the term “basket weaving”. This narrows down the search to 370,000. This is a significant improvement to the original result of 1,150,000.
Several hundred thousand articles are still too much to search through. Think about what is unique about your search. Say for example that you are only interested in nylon basket weaving techniques. You can update your search to use ‘+nylon +”basket weaving”‘. This asks Google to find web articles that have the terms “nylon” and “basket weaving”. This narrows down the search to 3,190! This is definitely orders of magnitude less than the original 1,150,000 search result. Most people will probably continue to get results of this magnitude; however, you now know basic Google search capabilities and should be able to limit search results to a few relevant thousands.
In this article we will quickly cover the three basic functions that allow you to get input or output from Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). These functions are as follows:
IE* RSS Feed Function
The image on the left is the icon representing the RSS Feed function. RSS
Active RSS Feed
stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, but lately it also has come to mean “Rich Site Summary”. When you browse a site with RSS feed, this icon will change in color from it grey color to bright orange. At that point, you can click it and you will be able to subscribe to the feed using your RSS reader (mine is set through Google). Thereafter, any new update from the site will show up in your RSS feed. Thus RSS feed is a way to get input through IE8.
IE8 Read Mail
Next is the Read Mail function. This is tied to your default email program. On my Windows Vista machine, it defaults to launching Windows Mail. I don’t quite see how this ties to IE8, but I suppose it makes it convenient to have email readily available from the IE8 interface.
IE8 Print Function
Your Internet browser’s setting for home page is your very first view into the Internet the moment the browser is opened. It only makes sense that you set it to a page that you use most often so that you can save time in your Internet surfing activity. This page is called your home page.
What if you have more than one page you wished you could open everytime you ran your browser? Well, with Internet Explorer (IE) 8 (or IE 7 for that matter), you can open more than one. As a matter of fact, you can open up to 8 home pages when you launch IE 8.
Home Page Icon
The Home Page icon is illustrated on the left. When you click the icon IE 8 will take you to your home pages. If you only have one, you can add 7 more by clicking the down arrow immediately to the right of the Home Page icon.
When you click on that down arrow, you can choose from the list of your up to 8
Remove Home Page
home pages or you can manage your home pages. Specifically, you can
If you are setting your home pages for the first time, the quickest way to do it is to open IE 8, set each tab to browse to the appropriate page, then click the Tools item from the command bar, then select Internet Options from the drop down menu that shows.
In the Internet Options window, make sure you are in the General tab. From there, simply click the Use Current button, and that will set your home pages. Click the OK button of the Internet Options window and you are done.
Internet Options dialog box
Most people don’t know these about Internet Explorer 8’s Home Page function. You are now one of the few who does; make sure to pass this information on.