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I’ve been handling my e-mail for years and years, but only now have I discovered the simplest way of doing it, assuming you‘re using the preview panel. No more going back and forth between the inbox and the preview panel with the mouse, you just use the space bar instead. With the first email in the inbox highlighted, hit the space bar to view it. Keep hitting the space bar to read more of it until the end. The next hit automatically brings up the following email, and so on. At any point in this process, get rid of unwanted emails with the Delete key. To complete the no-mouse approach, use Ctrl+R to Reply, Ctrl + Shift +R to Reply All, and Ctrl +F to Forward. This works both in Outlook and Outlook Express and the spacebar trick also works in the Internet Explorer browser. (SNUG Oklahoma) Want to share your life story, or any important document, with one or many Internet users? Let others edit it if you want? Best of all, Google’s new Writely website (beta) looks just like your Word application, so you can upload, download, or edit documents any time you like. It’s also a great way to handle a collaborative project. And it automatically saves it every ten seconds, so there’s no more lost work. Don’t use Word? No problem, Writely supports nearly all word processors. (Kim Komando) A number of organizations, such as universities, now offer a lifetime e-mail forwarding service. Choose a new address related to the group and all e-mail sent to it will be forwarded to your regular e-mail address. (It also makes it easier to change your ISP any time you want.) These are free services but if your alma mater doesn’t offer it yet, there are economical commercial offerings at places like POBOX Lifetime E-mail. (Shirley Miller) It’s one thing to scan your PC for infection by viruses and other malware, as hopefully you do regularly. It’s quite another to determine if you are vulnerable to an infection in the first place, and that’s where WindowSecurity comes in. Figuring that email is a major source of nasties, this site lists a number of known email vulnerabilities and sends your PC a test email for each one. I didn’t understand all of them, but uncovered three potential problems. (Smart Computing) I've produced a monthly David's Links for quite a few years now, but I had no idea someone OUT THERE was keeping an archival copy of them, or at least some of them. Then I discovered The Wayback Machine. When I typed in my web address it popped up links to ten versions archived at different times since 2000. It's rather strange to read stuff you put together years ago: Oh yes, I remember that! In addition to the 40 billion web pages, this massive and growing Internet Archive also includes (12/2005) some 24,000 texts and books, 37,000 music files, 26,000 live music concerts and 20,000 movies. Most of these are available for free download while some, notably the Live Music Archive, can be played online. (Tourbus) There are some 128 million Americans with Internet access, according to a survey. But what do folks do when they get online? They surf the web, play games, research their genealogy, and of course send each other e-mail. To see what they do most and what they have done at least once, click on the two brief reports at the Pew Internet and American Life site. Other surveys on the Pew parent site looked at how the Internet affects musicians, how it affects religious life, and what the impact of broadband has been. (Netsurfer Digest) Suppose you are a railway enthusiast; you may visit a railway website on a regular basis. Check the bottom of its first page to see if there is a WebRing link there. This allows you to connect easily to a railway webring, which is a series of other sites that all have a similar interest. Or you can go to the WebRing master site and enter "railways" to view one of several webrings of differing railway subspecialties. This is a great way to surf the web whatever your own special interest area may be. (David Henry) What was the general feeling about the Internet ten years ago? There's a nice 1993 video clip from CBC, maybe on its nightly news, describing what the Internet was then, and how it might change our lives in the future. It described how questions and answers were typed in flickering white letters on a black screen. There was plenty of enthusiasm about "communities of interest" around the world, but no downside since hackers, spam, viruses, firewalls, and the like hadn't yet darkened the vision. Emoticons, anyone? (Netsurfer Digest)
You may have noticed my occasional recommendations for websites courtesy of Tourbus. So why not get the free Internet Tourbus newsletter yourself and enjoy Bob Rankin and Patrick Crispen's chatty and helpful weekly? Subscribe through their Tourbus website, where you can also access archives of earlier issues as well as view articles on topics of interest to all Internet users (search engines, spam, viruses, cookies, urban legends). (Tourbus) We have all suffered the frustration, on following a trail of website links and getting close to our objective, only to click and see a "404" or site not available message. All may not be lost however, so before you give up, take a look at the Wayback Machine and enter the URL there. This Internet Archive has stashed away ten billion web pages since 1996, and you just may be lucky. I indulged in a frisson of excitement when it retrieved an ancient page from David's Links for me. (Tourbus) It seems like the Internet is spawning yet another social change, via Meetup.com, a Webby award winner for 2003. Cueing off the long-established Usenet and similar discussion groups, Meetup goes a step further by facilitating meetings of real people sharing a common interest. It spells out the topic, location (usually local cafes), date and time (usually 7 pm) for thousands of meetings across the country. For my zip code in Tampa I found the most popular topics in forthcoming meetups were: Dean in 2004; Witches; LiveJournal; BookCrossing and SlashDot. Remarkable! (Webby) In the beginning -- of the Internet that is -- there sprang up certain understandings among users about how one should behave when communicating on the Net. You didn't flame (use all capitals in e-mails), you punctuated properly and you avoided the use of naughty words. Not all users today follow the guidelines gathered for our edification at Online Netiquette, but we can and should follow them. Courtesy and civility are the watchwords. While there, click on Internet 101 ( Dr. Internut's Internet Resource Clinic) for much more useful advice for newbies. (Netsurfer Digest) What
is the World-Wide Web? What are hypertext and hypermedia? What is the
Internet? These and a dozen other related FAQs are answered in a Guide
to Cyberspace written in October, 1993. This intriguing document describes
the state of the art just a few years ago, when "Today there are at least
100 hypertext Web servers in use throughout the world" and the only
browser was Mosaic, long before Netscape or Internet Explorer. (Net Surfer
Digest) AARP
has added a new course to their Open Classroom series.
The Internet: A Smart
User's Guide is a self-paced tutorial covering E-Mail Management,
Searching, Cookies, Shopping and Chat. There are six lessons, each with an
Assignment and a Quiz. The Open
Classroom has many other courses such as Golf Basics, A Brief History of
Elvis, Understanding Poetry and Holiday Entertaining. (AARP) The
2001 Webby Awards
are just out, along with The People's Voice awards. Here you'll find the winning websites for 2001 in 30
categories. Don't miss the
Best of the Web! (Netsurfer
Digest) One
of the better sites for checking on misinformation on the Internet can
be found at Truth or Fiction.
It covers what are sometimes known as Urban Legends and includes
warnings, bizarre happenings, prayer requests, calls to action, funny
stories, inspiring stories, promises of riches, amazing stories. It also has a useful list of the more common viruses and virus
hoaxes. (Shirley Miller) Whatever
has happened to the Free ISP movement? Well, some have quit and others have become a bit restrictive.
You can find out the facts at Here
on the Web where you'll find them listed, "best" first and
each with FAQs, ad information, user comments and an overall subjective
evaluation. Finally,
at last we have a first-class stripper! I mean of course, a program which will clean up those email
messages you want to forward to somebody, but are hesitant because of
all those nasty > > sequences and line spills that make it
difficult to read. Download
Strip Mail and put a
pointer to it on your desktop. Place
a copy of the offending message on the clipboard, then launch Strip Mail
and read the instructions. When
you click the Do It All button, the instruction text is magically
replaced by a cleaned version of the message, properly formatted into
paragraphs, ready to be moved via the clipboard into a new message.
This is neat. At
last! I've found it! The web site that millions upon
millions of
web surfers have been searching for. I believe it will be the web
site
that helps increase the production and profit for many businesses around
the world. It may also aid in the reunification of the
family. Check it out!
(Wayne Sperr) We
all know Al Gore didn't invent the Internet, but who did? That's one of
the many questions answered for the layman at Living
Internet. Other sections
include the World Wide Web, Electronic mail and Mailing Lists; for each
section there are articles on How it was Invented, How it Works and How
to Use It. Y'all
click on over to The Netizen's Guide to Flame Warriors.
First things you'll find out are what are Netizens and Flame Warriors.
Plus many other humorous inhabitants of the Internet, nicely illustrated
and written up by one Mike Reed. Then check out his wonderful Sketchbook
and Portfolio on the same site. Those
who use the Yahoo! and similar Web directories know that the quality of
its indexing is superior to that of computer generated directories;
that's because they are constructed and maintained by humans. Trouble is, professionals just can't keep up with the torrent of
new and changing sites. Enter the Open Directory
Project. "As the
Internet grows, so do the number of net-citizens. These
citizen-volunteers can each organize a small portion of the web and
present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and
useless and keeping only the best content." Have
you ever received an email notice from someone you may or may not know
stating that a child was missing from home and you were asked to resend
the message to a number of your friend to aid in the search? Many such messages lack critical facts or somehow don’t ring
true and may only serve the purpose of perpetuating a chain letter or
getting a reaction from the recipient. Check out the Urban
Legends site that maintains a listing of current urban myths and
other stories to help you decide if these types of email messages
deserve your attention and concern. (Joe Barnes) If you are curious to find out how much information about your PC is viewable by an outsider every time you connect to a website, visit Privacy Net. Click at the top of the page for an interesting web-tracing routine which shows the sometimes tortuous path taken by data between your PC and the privacy.net website.
BotSpot
is the home page for Bots, or Internet Robots. For example try
BRIAN, a computer program that thinks it is an 18-year-old college
student. Do
you receive much spam in your e-mail? Then help to get spammers
off the 'Net by pasting any annoying spam message, including all its
headers, into the box provided at Spam
Cop. They will then do
their best to get the offender off the 'Net. Read the FAQ's at the
site to find out how they do it. You
don't have to be cut off from your AOL based e-mail if you're out of
town, as long as you can get to an Internet browser. Then just go
to AOL's Webmail site, enter your
screen ID and pasword and proceed to send and receive your
e-mail just as if you were at home. If
you have a web page, or plan to make one, you'll find it helpful to read
Jakob Nielsen's Top
Ten Mistakes in Web Design of
1996 and also his reassessment three
years later. He
concludes that all ten mistakes are still mistakes in 1999. There
are two sites maintained by the government you should visit if you want
to check out any e-mail you suspect may be a hoax
or part of a chain
letter. You'll also find
information about specific e-mail propagated viruses here. You
probably know that it is desirable to disable Call Waiting when you are
online. Unfortunately that
also means you could miss an important phone call. No longer; with
Boca
Research's Tidal Wave 56 kbps modem
you can take a call while online, and the modem automatically resumes
your PC session when you hang up. To
find somebody's e-mail address, try BigFoot
that includes private and business addresses. One
of the early online services was Delphi
that has now metamorphosed into the primary website for forums (or
bulletin boards or newsgroups). Each of the thousands of topical
forums categorized here provides a link to its messages, another to its
Chat and a third to an appropriate website. Delphi allows you a
free forum of your own (including a free website). By
the way, did you know that the AOL
parent site offers many of the features of the AOL service even if you
aren't a subscriber? It also allows you to access your AOL e-mail
even if the PC you are using doesn't have AOL software installed. Try
a visit to the Webby
Awards site. Yes, you
guessed it! Webby Awards are the Oscars of the Web, and attempt to
identify the most creative and innovative web sites of the year in
several categories. See if you agree with the independent judges! Wouldn't
it be nice if you could designate certain sites and be notified by
e-mail whenever their contents changed? The ChangeDetect
free service does exactly that. You could even register this site
(David's Links) this way! Several sites are designed to help newbies (beginners) make the most of the Internet. The Help Web offers basic introductions to the features and concepts of the Internet. If after that you are still confused by computer terminology, help is available at Whatis.com where you can find a simple explanation of practically every term you are likely to come across. Anyone
with a PC and Net2Phone
software can call anywhere in the world to an ordinary phone. It
costs, but less than regular phone services. (If you try this
please e-mail David Henry your Webmaster of your
experience.)
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