Wiki text can be a help, but writing’s poor - Gate House

By Bob and Joy Schwabach ON COMPUTERS

September 30. 2012 6:00AM

Wiki text can be a help, but writing’s poor

Wikipedia now lets you assemble a collection of articles into a book that can be either read off-line or published as a bound volume. It’s like instant textbook.

Go to tinyurl.com/2wikibook to start out, and click “enable book creator.” Then whenever you go to pages you want to accumulate, click “add this page.” Though it says add this page, singular, any number of pages can be compiled and will be treated as a “page.”

When you’re ready, click “show book,” and you can either download it as a PDF, or have it printed out by their PediaPress. The price depends on the size and other factors, but seems to start out at around $9 per volume. The options are impressive: You can have the book hard bound or soft, complete with a cover illustration. The contents can be either all black and white, or as text with full color illustrations. Impressive.

The cost might seem to mount up too quickly, but we went to a university bookstore recently and were shocked to see that prices of $100 and up were common for textbooks.

We could see the Wiki way as a good way to put together a textbook for a specialized subject. Such a book would be prohibitively expensive if produced by an established publishing house.

We put together a sample book of 650 pages and the quoted price was just $30 in soft cover. You can put your own name on the title, as editor of the collection.

On the downside: The writing in Wikipedia articles tends to be remarkably poor, but then again so does the writing in regular textbooks.

Hotel and library computers are easy to compromise. In short, they’re generally not safe from hackers wanting to steal your information or your identity.

We used a hotel’s “business center” computer a while back at L’Auberge in Del Mar, Cal., a three-star hotel, no less, and within a couple of days started getting scurrilous ads in our email. At the Conrad in Indianapolis, one of the Hilton upscale hotels, we noticed the computers in the business center had not been upgraded in more than four years and did not seem at all well protected.

Joy installed the latest Internet Explorer. She shouldn’t have been able to do that.

Almost no computer that can be accessed by the public is safe from someone installing the kind of software that logs your keystrokes — every letter and number you punch in. So we got pitched recently about a $30 program that encrypts every keystroke you enter, everything you type.

It’s called “GuardedID” and sells for $30. We were skeptical, because that is our natural state. So we asked the CEO of Malwarebytes.org, a leader in anti-malware products, if this sort of thing would work. He said that encrypting text at the keyboard level can definitely deter keyloggers.

OK, so whether you add GuardedID to your anti-virus and anti-spyware arsenal depends on how paranoid you are. We decided to install it. We may not need it, but remember: Even paranoids have enemies.

One thing that put us off was you have to enter your credit card information on the company’s website to get access to a free 30-day trial. If you don’t cancel within 30 days, bingo: You bought it. We think of this as “New Jersey marketing.” If you’re gonna give us a free trial, give us a free trial; cut the pussyfooting.

YouTube is a great source for free online training, but sometimes it’s not enough.

A reader asked us to find a book to help him upload videos to YouTube in the right format, with the right play options, etc. The latest books we saw on the subject were written in 2009 — ancient times in the computer world. So we turned to Lynda.com, our favorite source for online training.

Lynda tutorials aren’t cheap, but they’re worth it. For instance, you can do a one-month subscription for $25 and take as many tutorials as you want. They had YouTube user instruction and a lot more. You can also find Lynda tutorials for free on YouTube, but they’re just excerpts and not well-organized. At Lynda.com, be sure to click “Beginner” if you want to stay clear of professional-level courses.

Until recently, Google’s Chrome Web browser was our favorite because it’s faster and probably safer than Firefox or Internet Explorer. But recently it started crashing regularly on Joy’s computer.

Too many “extensions” bogged it down. Extensions let you launch games, music, chats, etc., right in your browser, but they also slow your computer. They accumulate faster than you realize and sort of sneak up on you.

To see your extensions, click the icon of a wrench in Chrome and choose “settings.” Then click “Extensions” and the whole list comes up. Click to disable the ones you don’t want.

Duplicate plug-ins can also cause problems. Type “About:plugins” in your address bar in Chrome to see if you have duplicates of “Adobe Flash,” for example, a common over-loader. Disable the duplicate that’s located in your “users” folder and leave the one in the Windows folder.

Education-Portal.com has 104 free courses that can earn college credits. We saw courses in biology, math, history, psychology and literature. They claim the site has been approved by Harvard. (That’s pronounced “Haahved.)

Here’s another “Head First” book in the ongoing series from O’Reilly. This one is “Head First HTML and CSS,” by Robson and Freeman, $40 at oreilly.com.

This is a great series, one of the best we’ve ever seen. HTML is the language of the Web, and Joy started building a website from scratch in the first evening. The lessons have plenty of illustrations and use crossword puzzles, games, retro photos, cartoons, and quizzes to nail down the basic concepts. (HTML, by the way, stands for HyperText Markup Language.)

Even if you plan to learn a Web-editing program, like Dreamweaver from Adobe, it’s helpful to know the code that underlies everything.

Joy uses Microsoft Web Expression to edit a statewide website for the PEO national women’s organization, but it sometimes bogs down and it helps enormously to look at the underlying code.

Head First HTML and CSS is now in its second edition. The new version brings in the latest HTML 5. Pictures and code can be downloaded from WickedlySmart.com to go along with the book’s exercises.
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