Addington.net at the Addington Fair

Armed with stickers with the text "Get connected with addington.net" and a display of the Summer Holiday courses. the addington.net promotion team went to meet the community.

Kay Skyla and Marja promoting Addington.net at the fair on Saturday the 31st of October 2009. It was a sunny day and information about our courses were shared with interested people.

It was great to exchange ideas, answer questions and to talk to the people from Addington and the wider community of Christchurch.

Printing pictures with Picasa

When you print your own pictures it is good to know something about pixels and megabytes

Pictures are usually stored on your Computer in My Pictures. The filename has at the end a code what tells you what type of file it is. We deal mainly with JPG or JPEG files (Joint photographic Expert Group)

All cameras use the standard JPEG file format. They are widely used because they can be made smaller by compression while still giving an acceptable image.

All cameras have a set amount of pixels 3 to 5 mega pixel cameras are widely used. A mega pixel is 1 million pixels. The more pixels on your photo the higher the resolution and the larger you can print.

If you have a 3mp camera, this means you can make pictures at 2048 by 1536 pixels; 2048x1536= 3.145728 or 3 mega pixels.

It depends on the printer settings which picture size is best. Commercial photo printers are often set at 300 to 360 dpi (dots per inch)

For printing at 300 dpi the ideal size to print at would be 5x7.  ( 5x300x7x300=3.150.000 dpi)

On the left side of this website is a link to an Excel sheet which helps you to convert pixels into print sizes. Just enter the dpi and the width and height of your image in pixels. (link http://www.shortcourses.com/uses/using1-5.html)

To see at which pixel size your photo was taken, within Picasa select the photo you want to print. In the library, on the bar underneath the photos it will show for example 1728x2304. Hold your picture in the Photo Tray and click the print button. In the Picasa print program it shows you at which dpi your printer is set.

You can take a picture with a higher amount of mega pixels than you need for printing. The number of pixels will be downsized to match the number of pixels to print. Removing pixels doesn’t effect the quality a lot. Adding pixels to a photo never looks good.

Picasa has a default option e.g. to print two photos at 5x8 on an A4 sheet. If you want to change that size to 5x7 then click in the menu at the top Tools>options>printing. Click the arrow next to 5x8 and change the size to 5x7.

Within the printing program in Picasa the result of how your pictures will be printed will be shown. By default Picasa is set on Crop to Fit. Picasa will crop the picture to fit the chosen print size if necessary.
If you select Shrink to fit Picasa will add white spaces to the side or top to get the whole picture printed.

In border and text options you can select if you want to print the caption, filename or Exif information and where you want to print it. You can add a caption to your photo in the Picasa editing section.

By clicking the plus you can increase the number of copies you want to make.

Printing text from the Internet

When you would select File>Print to print of a Webpage you will find that part of the text doesn’t fit on the page you print. What can you do:

• A lot of Web pages have a Printer Friendly Button above the text. When you find this printer symbol, click it and a new screen will appear with the text on A4 size. Click Print
• If you can’t find a Printer Friendly button you still have the following options; Click File>page setup, make sure A4 is selected and change the orientation to Landscape.
• You can also leave the page on portrait and make the Left, right, top and bottom margins smaller.Check out if all the text fits into the A4 by Clicking File and selecting Print Preview.
• If you only need to print of a selection, highlight it by clicking and dragging through the text.          Click File> Print> Tick selection
• If you want to safe the selected text, copy it first into a Word document. After you highlighted the text, click Edit>Copy. Go to start>programs>Microsoft Word and a blank page will appear. Click Edit>Paste and safe the document.

Send an email message to a group

Within Gmail and Hotmail there is a feature which makes it easy to send email to a group of people.

Send a message to a group of people with Gmail

Add contacts to a group

• Go to Contacts.
• Tick all contacts you wish to add to a group.
• Click the Groups button. 
• Select the group to which you wish to add the contacts or select New Group. In the contact information you are able to see to which groups the contact is added.

Delete a contact

• To delete a contact from a group, select the group in My Contacts.
• Tick the contact you want to delete.
• Click delete contact.

Change the name of a group

• To change the name of the group, select the group in My Contacts.  
• On the right panel click Edit. 
• Change the Name and click Save  

Send an email to a group

• When you want to send an email to a Group click Compose Mail to create a message. 
• In the To: Box Type the Group Name. 
• Gmail will search for it and the name will appear below the box. Click on the name of the Group.
• Finish your email and click send send. 

Send a message to a group of people with Hotmail

Add contacts to a group

• Click Contact List on the left panel.  
• Tick all the contacts you want to add to a group.  
• On the top click categories.  
• Select the category to which you want to add the contacts or select New Category. 
•  Give the New Category a name and click Save.

 Delete a contact  

• Click Contact List.  
• Click Manage Categories on the left panel.  
• Tick the category from which you want to delete a contact.  
• Click the X behind the Name of the contact you want to delete and click Safe

Change the name of a group

• Click Contact List 
• Click Manage Categories on the left panel. 
• Tick the category of which you want to change the name. 
• Change the name and click safe

Send an email to a group

• Click New 
• In the To: Box type the name of the category you wish to send the email to.  
• Hotmail will search for it and the name will appear below the Box and click on the name of the group. 
• Finish your email and click send

Google Friend Connect and Blogger

Google Friend Connect is primarily a social tool. It enables you to connect with your friends. It is built within Blogger and to use it go to Layout>Add a gadget>Followers. Once the gadget is added visitors can sign in and join your site. Accordingly their picture or logo will be added to your member gadget.

Google Friend Connect also provides a feed reader within Blogger. Go to Dashboard and there you will find a Reading List where the Blogs you are following are in alphabetical order. On the right side of the list a part of their updates is shown. You are also able to add new Blogs you want to follow, on this page.

Google Reader is an independent Feed reader. The Blogs you are following within Blogger will automatically be added to Google Reader. There is a link to Google Reader on the dashboard of Blogger. In  Google reader you are able to read whole Blog posts.You can also go straight to Google Reader and sign in with the same Gmail address you use for Blogger.
There is also a website for Google Friend Connect. Here you can find additional gadgets and graphs.

Feedburner and Blogger

Feedburner is a Feed management provider which provides RSS feeds and management tools. You can sign up for Feedburner with your Gmail account and then you enter your Blogs URL. Some of the options to select within Feedburner:

• In Feedburner you can choose a button to let people subscribe to your feed. Click publicize tab>chicklet chooser (under services) Select the icon you want and add it to your Blog as a widget.
• Turn on Pingshot Service. This informs search engines and feed Readers that you have published a new post. Click publicise tab>Pingshot>activate
• Turn on email subscriptions. Click Publicize>email subscriptions
  It gives people the opportunity to receive the feed by email>click activate
  It will also provide a code for a subscription form to add to your page.
  
• Click Publicize>email Subscriptions>email branding and you can customize your font, headlines and include a logo to the email feed
• Add feedFlare. Click Optimize>FeedFlare to include extras to your feed, like links to dig.com, stumbleupon.com and Flickr
• Click Optimize>Title/description burner and you can change the title and description of your feed
• Click Optimize>Feed image burner and you can add a logo to your feed
•  Click edit Feed Details and you can change your Blog address without sacrificing your subscribers
• Check the Feedburner stats and you can keep track of the average number of people per day, who access your feed. Click analyse.

When you are all set up you go to your Blog. Select Blogger settings> Site Feed. Check Allow Blog Feed is set on Full. Enter your feed in Post Feed Redirect URL like http//feeds.feedburner.com/”the name you gave it” You can find this name within Feedburner by selecting Edit Feed details>Feed Adress:…….

Feeds and Blogger

A web feed is a part or the whole of the update of a website, within a Feed reader.
A visitor can subscribe to your Blog by using a feed reader. In the feed reader they enter your Blogs URL. When someone subscribes to your Blog, a feed will be provided using XML RSS or Atom. XML, RSS and Atom are tools for transferring data across the internet. You can also add a Feed button to your Blog which makes it easier for the reader to subscribe to your Blog.

The feed will usually appear to the reader in the form of a link or as a part of your new Blog post in their feed reader. In this way they find out about updates to your Blog without having to visit it.

There are about 2000 different feed reader available; Web based readers and readers that run on your computer. Some examples of feed readers are Google reader, Bloglines, NewsGator, Feed Demon and Blog Navigator.

The button with share on the sidebar of this blog supports 54 popular feed readers. You can also make you own button with a feed button generator. Search for it on Google. Another option is to get a button from feedburner. Feedburner not only pulls a feed, but delivers many extra services e.g. It provides a gadget for your Blog to give your readers the opportunity to receive a feed by email and it has statistics on how many people subscribe to your Blog. You can read all about it in this post.
Within Blogger you are able to receive feeds of your friends by using Google Friend Connect.

Interview with a Picasa student

I spoke to one of the students who attended the Picasa course. Her name is Jennifer. Jennifer has been working in Real Estate for over 8 years now and computers play a big part in her life. She is however only knowledgeable with some programmes like email and Facebook because she never had any training to learn about computers. She doesn’t have a computer at home as she uses the computer at work where she has a PA to do the paperwork “I’ll pay somebody to use the computer for me” she says.

I asked her how she came to do the Picasa course. Jennifer said:”My son bought a digital camera. I wanted to learn how to get the photos on the computer “I heard about the course and it was on a convenient time for me and it was only 3 sessions. That was easy for me to fit in. I was very excited about the course I loved to make collages and it was great how you just could drag the pictures around and how easy it was to remove red eyes from your photo. I am now looking at buying a computer and want to learn more."

I told her that Addington.net is running some new community courses which are being held in the School holidays at daytime but that she could always come in at lunchtime between 12.00 and 12.50 and I would help her with the things she wanted to know more about, like how to find things on the internet.

I asked her what other topics she would be interested in as we are planning to set up some new courses. “I would love to know all the details about Facebook, learn more about email as I don’t use all the features and a workshop on Trade Me would be good. I don’t know all the possibilities of my cell phone either. That is something I need to learn. Or maybe a taster courses to get a glimpse of the several things combined. Jennifer left me with plenty of ideas to work with.

If you have ideas or things you like to learn leave us a comment or email us at addington.net@gmail.com