Tag Archive | computers

Getting Your Favorite Android Sounds

May16

ringtonesRingtones, Alarms & Notification Sounds

If you’re like me, you set up your alarms, notifications and ringtones with specific sounds that help you identify what’s happening before you even look at your phone. Then you went to a new phone and all those sound files aren’t on the new phone. Come on! I want my old sounds to notify me of events that I still need on the new phone!

There are two safe ways to get ringtones, alarms and notification sounds onto your Android. They come with the phone or you create them from sound files yourself. That’s it.

Yes I know there are a ton of websites that offer downloads for your phone and you’re crazy to use them. Either they spam your phone number with texts out the wazoo, or they sell it to every annoying hacker and spammer in the world. Or they load malware onto your smart phone with the sound file.

If you can’t find a reliable download site, such as one that’s offered from your carrier, don’t bother with downloading. Stick to what’s on your phone and what you can make yourself.

There’s one exception to that rule and that’s an app that provides sound files from all makes and most models. I LOVE this app! Though I wish it had the sound files from the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Maybe they’ll add those later; crossing fingers. Continue reading →

Android Weather Apps

May16

weatherbugHow’s The Weather

There are a lot of weather widgets out there. Local News outlets have their own apps now and most include weather tracking and notifications. But what if you travel? Some don’t go outside their own area. So if you’re at home and need to go to Atlanta, you’re out of luck finding out how the weather is in Georgia.

The Weather Channel App ☆☆☆☆
Has a lot to offer. Almost too much. Sometimes I don’t need video or images from around the world bombarding my display. Let me look at things quick and simple and I’m good. But other people like a lot of graphical interfaces. If that’s you, you’ll like the Weather Channel’s app. You can add locations and follow weather back home, where your move lives, or where ever your favorite sports team might be playing this week. You can set notifications for alerts, look at lightening and more.

Weather Bug ☆☆☆☆☆
This one is my most favorite. I have used Weatherbug on my desktop for years. I love this app on the phone. WeatherBug weather widgets display live, local weather conditions, forecasts, severe weather alerts and it can be specific to your location. So if you’re driving down the road, you can bring this app up, look at the radar and see what you’re driving into..or away from.  You can add locations and set a primary Home location.  Continue reading →

Emergency Flashlights

May14

flashlightThe First App You MUST Add To Your Cell Phone

The most important App you need is a flash light. Seriously, it sounds funny but in addition to coming in real handy during your day to day life, you most definitely need it in an emergency situation.

I have used mine several times in the late evening and even a few times in the day. I can’t always find that flashlight in the utility drawer, but I know where my cell phone is. And it’s dark in the bottom part of the pantry, even with the kitchen light on! I use it in the house for little things, like plugging in the power cord in the power strip under my desk. Or looking for the splinter in my son’s finger.

It’s handy for Concerts, finding your way through the driveway when you’ve forgotten to turn the porch light on before you left the house. Or looking for that quarter you dropped in the floorboard of the car. Continue reading →

Our Varied Interests

May9
windstone-emperor

Windstone Editions

We’re Pretty Eclectic

We Love a lot of different things and we enjoy sharing those interests. Especially with family and dear friends who are spread out across the country and even the world.

From the U.S. to Australia, from Washington, DC to Washington State, Alaska and even some dear friends in Hawaii. We can go north into Maine to find friends and south into Florida to find family.

If we share a few things that interest you too, come on in and share your thoughts and experiences too!

We love trains and technology. But we also love dressing in costume and attending the Renaissance Fairs throughout the south-east. We are a sports family, but only with certain sports.

We’re a huge NASCAR family. We love football and enjoy Hockey. We live on a lake so we can also slow down a bit and relax with a pole and a quiet morning or evening enticing the resident Big Mouth Bass to come for a visit.

My boys love engineering, astrophysics and building things. And we all like history, living in the center of the Civil War region, there is a lot to see and visit. So our adventures generally takes us to some interesting places where there’s always a camera ready to capture the historical, unusual or unexpected. Continue reading →

Samsung Galaxy S5

May9

galaxys5I LOVE My New Phone

Each week it seems like we’re moving the DomlyDude’s business one step closer to being in full operation. We registered it in March and started the final set-ups for funding. That includes the business plan and the really tough part, the financial projections. We’re up to getting the licenses that will allow us to go into full operations in June! Yeah.

Part of my part in all this is being the person who answers the office phone. We decided the best way to take care of that in today’s world is through a cell phone. That meant we could take AT&T up on a recent offer they sent him and pick me up a new phone. A brand spankin’ new Samsung Galaxy S5!

I’m slightly in culture shock. My last cell was a Samsung Galaxy Nexus. It’s a big upgrade! But I’m loving my phone! I’ve spent 3 days setting it up and transferring data. Most of the transfer was a breeze! The set up has taken the bulk of the time, because I have so many new features and capabilities that I never had before!

There’s a lot of kewl things about the S5 that I didn’t have on the Nexus. One of the biggest things I like is that I can add Home Screens! Yes!! My close friends tell me I’m overly organized and not being able to organize the apps I use most was driving me nuts. I didn’t add too many more. I only have 7. smiley-wink
Being the teacher person I am, I like sharing what I learn in hopes someone else out there will find it help and overcome their frustration a little more quickly than I might have trying to find an answer. Oh and I LOVE sharing my reviews of new apps I’ve found and fallen in love with. I have several of those to add! So check out my new GalaxyTech section.

I’m having a blast!

© 1997-2014 Springwolf, D.D., Ph.D., Springwolf's Kosmos. All Rights Reserved.
© 1997-2014 Springwolf, D.D., Ph.D., Springwolf’s Kosmos. All Rights Reserved.

 

HyperLink To Open Local Files

May6

pcworkingOpen A File In A Local Program

So you have a file on your PC and you want to make life easy for yourself and create a link from a personal home page in your browser to that file. But you want a program, like NotePad to open that file. What do you do?

You can search the internet high and low and you’ll find several javascript, php and visual basic solutions. But isn’t that a little over kill? Yes, yes it is. There’s a lot of information about why you can’t do this, or don’t want to do this. And some of that is valid. If this webpage was online and available to the world, the last thing you want to do is click a link that will run an executable file. That’s a huge security risk. Yes indeed it is.

But recently I had a need to simply open a text file  on my pc, in Notepad. Now I could have changed how the browser handles files like this and anytime it finds a .txt file, it can open Notepad instead of displaying the file in the browser. But that’s not what I wanted to do. I only want Notepad to open for this one file, on this one page, for this one link. There’s got to be an easier way than all that overkill coding!

Of course there is. And a huge thanks to my very smart friends on MozillaZine – a Message Board for everything Mozilla. And in particular a big thanks to Gingerbread Man! I love that place. Now let me say this solution does not work with Chrome or IE. All I can suggest there is…use Firefox. Continue reading →

HTML 108.2 – Captcha

Apr13

web-forms3Installing Form Security

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. Computer programs can be bots that surf your site looking for information to use for malicious purposes. This type of phishing can capture email addresses on your contact forms and then begin spamming you endlessly. Or hackers can attempt to use your email for the spamming purposes.

Captcha creates a generating and grading test that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot.

You can acquire a free, secure and accessible CAPTCHA from the reCAPTCHA project. This is a Google project and it can be used for WordPress, MediaWiki, PHP, ASP.NET, Perl, Python, Java, and many other environments.

They’re becoming very popular because they are affective in dealing with the phishing problems. And for the most part, they’re pretty easy to set up and use. You’ve probably seen these tests when you’ve filled out a request form or tried to email someone through a contact form. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t. Continue reading →

HTML 108.1 – TheSiteWizard Form

Apr13

web-forms2Finding The Right Contact Form Program

In HTML 108 – Web Forms I mention my favorite site for creating a Contact form program and webpage: TheSiteWizard.com.

You can build a customized script specifically for your site at TheSiteWizard.com. At the time of this writing – I really love this place! They advertise their Wizard as:
TheSiteWizard.com’s Free Customized Feedback Form Wizard creates a FREE feedback form for your website. This allows you to put a Feedback Form or Contact Form on your site so that visitors can send you messages / email or make comments.

In full disclosure, TheSiteWizard site isn’t the greatest user-friendly site I’ve seen.  But I’ve written instructions for what to do on their site for a few friends and it seemed silly not to add that here to my blog as well. So here are my easy instructions for using TheSiteWizard.com site for creating your own form. Continue reading →

HTML 108 – Web Forms

Apr13

web-formsBuilding A Form

There are many reasons you might want to create a web form for you site. It can be a contact form to gather specific information from visitors, feedback on a particular topic for a school project or perhaps you’re hosting a tea part and need information from guests in an RSVP.

If you’re a business you may want to design a job application, or service request form for customers to complete. Forms aren’t just for email! You’ve probably filled out dozens of forms online for a wide range of reasons.

There are several ways to design a form and there are two parts to that design. The form itself and a program that processes the data entered into the form. That program can be easy, such as a Contact Form. Or it can be complicated, such as those used by corporations to take in data, process it and give you a specific result.

This post isn’t about the programs. It’s about the forms and how to set up an easy Contact Form that you can use for eMail contact, a questionnaire or that RSVP and anything else you might want to have eMailed to you. Continue reading →

HTML 107 – Using Tables

Apr12

3d-tablesBasics, Tips And Tricks

Tables are a common addition to a web site. They can be used for more things than just displaying spreadsheets or organizing tabular data. A table can be used to create a certain look or presentation to a web page. They can be used to create a certain format for text, to show the separation of topics within a subject and even, show off your latest picks for this seasons Football picks. You can even have tables embedded inside other tables.

A number of the posts here in the HTML Tutorial, use tables to section out the information for a particular tag, or part of a tag with the instructional text that describe how it works. But tables can also be extraordinarily frustrating. Especially if you’re using them on a blog. Continue reading →