The RIGHT way to use computers, for you and your kids

Right now, as you read this, my neck and arm hurt. Not just a little, a lot, all the time. And I’ve only been working on computers for about 20 years. I don’t like to think about what’s going to happen to my daughter when she’s my age and she’s been working on computers for 40 years.

There are things that we adults can do to not only relieve our own computer-related stress but to teach our children good workstation habits at an early age. Of course the best teaching you can do is by modeling the appropriate behavior yourself.

Here are the top 4 tips for being comfortable at your computer and doing your body the least damage. These apply both to adults and to children, though you obviously will have to rearrange the computer workstation with footrests and seat cushions in order to accommodate a child’s smaller body.

1. Limit the amount of time that you’re actually at the computer workstation. Encourage children to play outside, not on the computer. They’ll have to spend enough time in front of a workstation actually working throughout their lives that they don’t need to spend their playtime in front of the computer.
2. Your eyes should be level with the text on the monitor, your head straight, and your neck slightly bent forward.
3. I have learned through hard, sad experience that your keyboard should virtually be in your lap, not on the desk in front of you. Your arms should drop naturally to your sides, your shoulders relaxed, with your elbows at a 90 degree or wider angle, and your wrists at a “neutral” angle. The keyboard, if it tilts at all, should tilt to accommodate the straight angle of your wrist. Unfortunately, most keyboards don’t do this, they tilt the wrong direction. However you can get keyboard trays that fasten underneath your desk and that can be adjusted for different users, including a “negative” tilt.
4. Your knees, too, should be at a 90 degree plus angle, with your back supported, and your feet on the floor or on a foot rest.

To provide a workstation that is comfortable both for you and for your children, especially at several different ages, you might need to provide a booster seat and foot rest for younger children and a height-adjustable chair for older, taller children.

Laptops present an added challenge. Because the display is attached to the keyboard, if the screen is at the right height, then the keyboard is too high and far away. Conversely, if the keyboard is ergonomically correct then the screen is too low. One solution, perhaps the least expensive and the most portable, is to attach an external keyboard that can rest in your lap and put the laptop on the desk in front of you, perhaps on a stand to raise it to the right height. Or attach an external display and hold the laptop in your lap.

There are input devices that to some degree can replace the mouse and keyboard. They are not cheap, and they do require some training to use. For example, for around $100 one can purchase a digitizing tablet. (For more information go to the URL: www.wacom.com). This is a pressure sensitive tablet and a pen-like stylus that can be used in place of a mouse and allows you to hold your hand at a more natural angle. Children can learn to use these more easily than adults and they are a lot of fun to draw with. Voice recognition is more expensive (around $200), more difficult for children to learn to use, and problematic because of the high pitch of their voices, but as they mature, voice recognition becomes more useful. (For the PC version, go to the URL: www.nuance.com; for the Mac version, recently released, go to www.macspeech.com).

Your attention to yours and your children’s habits now may save you all pain later.

Making Memories

Scrapbooks are a time-honored way to memorialize events in our lives. In them we can record memories, tell stories or record history, leaving a legacy for our children, family or even an organization. However, traditional paper scrapbooks are time-consuming, messy, expensive, don’t lend themselves to modern media like digital photos and video, and when you’re finished, you only have ONE of them.

So turn to digital scrapbooking. No glue splotches on the dining room table. Don’t need a home addition to accommodate the supplies, workspace and storage for finished books. Make copies for all your relatives, all over the world. Use the software and the digital embellishments over and over again. If other areas of life need attention, stop and save your work and go do something else. And your productions can include VIDEO. What a 21st century concept!

If you own a personal computer, a digital camera and/or a dv camcorder, most of what you need you already have. Round out your “supplies” with software, digital doodads and imaginative ideas and you’re all set. For example, with every new Macintosh sold, Apple includes an ideal digital scrapbooking environment, a suite of programs called iLife. iLife ‘08 is available for older Macs for $79. iLife’s superbly integrated programs include iPhoto and iTunes for managing and organizing digital images (including scans of photos or other objets d’art) and digital music, respectively. The iMovie component allows you to edit digital video and slide shows created using photos stored in iPhoto and music from iTunes. To complete your disc based project, iDVD outputs slide shows and movies to DVD. With iWeb you can create beautiful websites (without having to get your hands digitally dirty) with one-click publishing to a dotmac (.Mac) account. Garageband is a tool with which you create original music, loop-based soundtracks for your iMovie creations, or even podcasts. Several Mac applications stand out if your desire is to create a digital version of the traditional scrapbook, iRemember and iScrapbook both allow the user to create pages, based on templates with digital photos, and scans, journaling and embellishments. Both integrate closely with iPhoto. iPhoto itself has a feature that enables the user to create books which can be ordered in hard or soft cover or printed on your desktop printer. There is not much in the way of embellishment but some of its built-in book layouts do provide for adding text.

Windows users can substitute Picasa (free or $39 for more useful features) for photos, Windows Movie Maker (included with XP and Vista) for movie editing and in Vista, DVD maker to burn DVDs. Roxio’s MyDVD 9 or Adobe Premiere Elements are around $100 and work in Windows XP. iTunes is also available for Windows XP or Vista. There are a number of template-based website creation programs, including online offerings like googlepages, angelfire and geocities. Garageband’s loop-building ease-of-use is best approximated by a Windows program called Mixcraft. For more traditional scrapbooks, Windows software offerings include Scrapbook MAX!® and Photomix. The hitch with the piecemeal Windows approach is not the number and variety of software and embellishment choices but in its lack of integration between programs, but if Windows is where you’re at, you can still do the digital work.

Adobe Photoshop Elements, available for either Mac or Windows, does an admirable job adjusting the appearance of your photographs beyond the limited image editing capabilities of photomanagement programs like iPhoto or Picasa. With it you can easily eliminate red eye and improve the brightness, contrast, and cropping of photos that are not quite up-to-snuff.

The right software provides you with the tools with which to build a digital scrapbook, and now you need the building materials and most importantly, the creative juice. Do a quick Google search for “digital scrapbooking” and thousands of businesses will present innumerable offerings of digital tags, papers, buttons, flowers, templates and other doodads for traditional style scrapbooks or templates for websites or DVDs.

But the real point is the memorabilia – photos of your vacation, wrapping paper from a baby shower, tickets from the concert of a lifetime, video from the wedding – and the journaling that creates the story of your book. This is the meat of the project. This is the time to organize your photos, scan your paper items, edit your video, storyboard your production, pick your music, write your text or podcast narrative. This is what the scrapbooker lives for, and the digital scrapbooker is no different. The drive to record the history of our lives and the lives of our families, or for that matter our pets, is not changed by the motion and sound of video and audio, but the 21st century audience appreciates the multimedia enhanced product.

The Leopard is in the House

But I don't have it yet. I will soon and I will post my observations asap.

In the meantime, I highly recommend the take control books:

* "Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard," by Joe Kissell, shows
readers the best ways to install, clean up after installation,
troubleshoot problems, and even downgrade if necessary. 125 pages, $10


* "Take Control of Customizing Leopard," by Matt Neuburg, provides a
tour of new and revamped features in Leopard, including Time Machine,
Spaces, Quick Look, Cover Flow, and the Path Bar. 138 pages, $10


* "Take Control of Users & Accounts in Leopard," by Kirk McElhearn,
describes all the different types of accounts in Leopard, how to
share files between accounts, and what can be limited with the new
options in Leopard's parental controls. 88 pages, $10


* "Take Control of Sharing Files in Leopard," by Glenn Fleishman,
makes file sharing easy between two Macs, among a mixed-platform
office workgroup, or between far-flung computers on the Internet. 89
pages, $10


* "Take Control of Fonts in Leopard," by Sharon Zardetto, explains
everything Mac users need to know about fonts in Mac OS X and what
has changed with Leopard, with a focus on Leopard's new and updated
fonts, font activation capabilities, font previewing, and font sample
printing. 217 pages, $15

Evil Email

Who among us can function in the modern world without our email? On the other hand, who among us would not be delighted never again to see an ad for fake Rolexes, fake ED cures and offers of millions of dollars from fake sons of dead captains of imaginary Nigerian industry? The name for this junk email, spam, may have originated from the song in Monty Python’s comedy sketch about spam-loving vikings that goes: "Spam spam spam spam, [ad nauseum]..." The vikings, sitting in a restaurant whose menu only included dishes made with spam, sang this refrain over and over, increasing the volume until it was impossible for the others in the sketch to be heard.

However it originated, we all just want it to stop. While experts generally agree that, like flies and mosquitoes, there is no way to permanently rid ourselves of their annoying buzz, there are ways to control the flood of spam that inundates us.

The first step is to recognize the evil email though this is getting harder. Obviously an email whose subject line offers you a million dollars is spam but spammers are getting sneakier. Because of how spam filters work, using “innocent” phrases like, “DUI Drama for General Hospital Star” or “Good luck, dear friend” can fool us and our spam filter, tempting us to open the email. If you don’t recognize the sender, don’t do it. Spam filters are also fooled by junk words in the subject and by messages that appear as graphics in the body.

Never respond to spam. Don’t click its links, don’t try to unsubscribe, don’t reply to tell them you are a woman and therefore not interested in enlarging body parts you don’t possess. All of your indignation will accomplish one thing only: it sends up a flag that marks you and your email address as “a live one,” thereby increasing the amount of junk mail in your inbox. If you are not certain whether an email is real, like one from your bank, call your bank to verify.

If you must do something about particularly egregious or offensive spam, reporting the abuse to the appropriate organizations is satisfying and useful but time-consuming. Very good instructions for doing so can be found here: http://www.emailabuse.org/report.asp

You can hide your “real” email by creating throwaway emails specifically for registering on websites, listserves, newsgroups. You can do this through Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and others. Yahoo and Gmail are pretty good about filtering the junk, but Hotmail’s filters are less robust. Even if your disposable address does start letting junk through, you can just open a new account and discard the old address, and then those annoying marketing messages go away. Earthlink now offers a “ProtectionPack” to its customers that features anonymous email addresses. Make sure when you order something from an online company that you review the privacy check boxes – there might be a box checked that authorizes that company to send you marketing email.

Don’t post your actual email address on your website. Use tricks like “Karelle at BestMacSolutions dot com” or make the @ symbol a graphic so it’s unrecognizable to the spider bots that crawl the web harvesting email addresses. Most webhosts also provide a formmail script that you can use for readers to contact you, but that spiders can’t hijack.

Lastly, to cope with the spam you are already getting, check into spam filters. There are three main categories: those that work on the server, over which you have no control and that don’t allow you to check for false positives - email that fits the filter’s definition of spam but which is email that you want to actually receive. The second option includes those programs that reside on your computer, giving you some control, that filter your email, letting “good” messages through to your email program and storing junk in a junk folder. There are lots of good PC spam filter reviews on the web, including: http://www.download.com/Spam-Filters/3150-2382_4-0.html and http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,115885-page,1/article.html . The email client built in to Mac OS X, Mail.app, contains a very efficient spam filter but there are other even better Mac options, like SpamSieve (http://c-command.com/spamsieve/), Em@ilCRX - 1.6.5 (http://www.emailcrx.com/Welcome.html), or Spamfire http://www.matterform.com/mac_software/spam_email_filter/index.html . The third option is to use a third-party system that utilizes the challenge system. Basically, whenever anybody emails you they have to go to a special website and confirm they know you. This is great way to stop spammers. You can often preset it to allow everyone from your address book to email you. On the other hand it can be a nuisance to legitimate emailers who are not in your address book. If you use email for business, annoying your customers can have undesired consequences.

If you are looking for more suggestions about keeping your inbox free of spam check out these websites:
http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page4782.cfm
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000477.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/email/spam.mspx

It's not clear why it is that for the last several days, many times during the day, I think of all sorts of things which would make good blog material and then when I actually have time to log on and write, I CAN'T THINK OF A THING.

Is this some kind of a plot?

So Florida is hot, just as I expected. And though I have received few calls for the last week, suddenly today I have 5 calls from clients, when I am nowhere near Boulder. That is a plot. I know that you are conspiring against me.

So, in my physical absence from Boulder, my words of wisdom for today are these:

Backup. I mean really backup. Not just pulling a few files to a different drive at the end of the day. I mean incremental ongoing backups so that if the universe decides to play hockey using your hard drive as the puck, you can remain cool, calm and collected and be back on your feet in a few hours.

And the second? Don't drink around your computer. If you must have a cup of joe or a glass of fresh orange juice at arm's reach, please, PLEASE put it somewhere where if it is knocked over, it is NOWHERE near your computer - any part of your computer including your mouse. You laugh... but I know several different people who are minus one computer because of liquid in an inappropriate place. This is so easy - just put the freekin' glass somewhere else - the floor works.

The first one

Let me introduce myself.

I'm Karelle, I am your host here. I am many things: mother of a college student, Kether; daughter of Elaine and Jack Scharff; sister to Jackie; partner to Lloyd; a Macintosh consultant; an animal lover (three dogs and a cat); resident of a tiny town which is home to recluses and misfits; avid cross country skier (when I have time); and an angry Progressive.

And, of course, I am more than that.

But right this instant I want to go for a walk with my dogs. So this will have to wait til entry #2