Automating Shutdown & Startup

TIP OF THE DAY

Automating Shutdown & Startup

Automating Shutdown & Startup

By Brandon Watts

Q: I would like to be able to schedule my computer to shut down at a specific time. How do I do this?

A: Some people wish to allow certain tasks to run while they are away from their computer, and this makes a lot of sense. Why be stuck in front of the computer when these things are taking place? Scheduling your computer to shut down is another reasonable goal. If you're going to be away from it for a majority of time during the day/night, you may want to just have it automatically turn off.

A great way to do this is to download a free program called Switch Off. This program runs on all 32-bit versions of Windows, and is incredibly compact, weighing in at only 64K. You can schedule it to make your computer shut down, restart, go into hibernation, etc. The program even has a Web interface, which will allow you to execute these commands remotely from any computer with a Web browser. Switch Off is a very nice tool, and is suited perfectly to this task.

Surf Your Way to a Campsite

TIP OF THE DAY

Surf Your Way to a Campsite

Surf Your Way to a Campsite

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/travel/13prac.html?ex=1402459200&en=db097921c41f0fe5&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

By BOB TEDESCHI

FINDING good information online about campgrounds can be an exercise in wandering in the wilderness, with trail markers that point in conflicting directions or send you deep into the electronic woods.

Take the federal park system, for instance. Should you look for guidance to NationalParks.com, a privately owned site? Or try nps.gov, the site of the National Park Service? Or ReserveUSA.com, which has the right to allot campsite reservations for a handful of national parks?

The answer on all three counts is it depends, since the federal campground you're considering may not be run by the National Park Service, but rather the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, all of which have their own Web sites.

Add to this the fact that some state tourism sites and national travel sites provide competing information on the parks, and would-be campers could be forgiven for pitching a tent in the back yard and forgetting the whole idea.

But hard-core campers who muddle through the weeds of cyberspace will often be rewarded with tips on great campsites, advice on how to find a campground that meets one's needs and even an occasional online reservation system to save them from having to compete with a thousand other phone callers.

A good place to start planning for your camping expedition online is Recreation.gov, which is a consolidated site for federally managed (and some state-managed) parks. The Web site offers information and reservations for roughly 3,000 federal parks and other recreation sites, including about 2,000 campgrounds, representing about 150,000 campsites.

Charlie Grymes, project manager for Recreation One-Stop, the federal agency in charge of the consolidation effort, says: "We're still consolidating information for all our different sites. We have numerous sources for the campsites, but it's hard to keep updated, say, when Hurricane Isabel wipes some of them out, or wildfires force temporary closures."

The Overview

Still, Recreation.gov does a decent job of putting its arms around a system that resists enclosure. By clicking the Camping link in the list of activities on the site's home page, users can find a state map, which yields a list of federally managed campgrounds in each state. Each park has its own Web page on Recreation.gov, including a link to the park's Web site and, thoughtfully, a five-day National Weather Service forecast.

However, Recreation.gov gives users no sense of the park's location within the state. The listings for New York, for example, included 11 parks. Some, like Fire Island National Seashore, I recognized. Others, like Seaway Trail Scenic Byway, were unfamiliar. Was it eight hours away, or one?

I clicked through to the page on Recreation.gov for the Seaway Trail Scenic Byway to find an up-close map of the park, along with a description that the byway is located "along the coast of the eastern Great Lakes." Which ones? On another site I found that the Seaway Trail skirts Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

Those who are past the brainstorming phase should go directly to ReserveUSA.com, which is owned by InteractiveCorp, the same company that runs Expedia, Hotels.com and other sites. ReserveAmerica, which operates ReserveUSA.com, is one of two companies that have been granted federal contracts to provide online reservations for federal campgrounds. That arrangement explains why, when you click through to make your reservations on Recreation.gov, a ReserveUSA.com window opens on your browser.

ReserveUSA.com allows you to reserve a site at any of the Forest Service and Army Corps of Engineers campgrounds that take reservations, like the Pinecrest Recreation Area in the Stanislaus National Forest in central California, or Deer Lake, in the Chippewa National Forest in Minnesota, as well as 12 National Park Service campgrounds. Not all of the campgrounds that take reservations are online-enabled yet. For instance, only about 40 of the 220 campgrounds of the National Park Service accept reservations. But most the federal campgrounds don't take reservations, a testament to their remoteness, perhaps, or simply to lack of demand. At highly sought-after campgrounds, though, an online reservation system can be a boon for consumers.

Getting the Best Sites

Valerie Southard, a detective in Gwinnett County, Ga., says she uses ReserveAmerica.com to secure campsites for her family at Lake Sidney Lanier, a park in northern Georgia run by the Army Corps of Engineers. The campground, which Ms. Southard's family uses about four times a year, has a few choice sites that, she said, tend to sell out quickly.

"You can reserve six months ahead, so for the peak times like Memorial Day weekend, it's pretty much a race," Ms. Southard said. "You mark it on your calendar: 'Must reserve today!' ''

ReserveUSA includes some nice touches, like campground diagrams showing the location of each site, with a page for each site that tells you whether it's shaded, for instance.

The National Park Service Reservation Center, offers camping reservations for 31 parks, including some highly popular destinations like Yosemite, Acadia and the Grand Canyon. On those sites, you can add a note with your reservation requesting a specific site, but the service doesn't guarantee that you will get what you want.

Of course, national parks represent but a fraction of the available campgrounds in the United States. But state parks are frequently a step behind their federal counterparts in terms of Internet capability, making online research difficult at times.

State park service Web sites can be helpful too, although some of them lack sufficient information. The Web site of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (www.fwp.state.mt.us), for instance, just shows its seven regional boundaries, along with phone numbers for more information.

In a search for Maine state parks I fared better. The Web page for the Bureau of Parks and Lands of the state Department of Conservation (www.state.me.us/doc/parks) has a tool for selecting parks that offer certain features. I selected Camping, and found a list of 36 parks.

At the top was the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in northern Maine. But the page devoted to the park gives few details on camp sites.

Gorp.com, the outdoor travel site, also had some camping tips for Allagash. After clicking the Camping link on Gorp's home page, I found a heading for Top 10 Lists. There, I clicked on the Secluded Campsites, and found page for McKeen Brook at Allagash.

The accompanying narrative, originally published in Outside magazine, described a "weeklong canoe trip along the 92-mile waterway, three miles below the thundering crash of Allagash Falls," and a campsite at the brook "brimming with trout and salmon."

Imagine the sight of a riverside campfire and a dinner of fresh trout, and you might forgive all the clicks it took to get there.

Finding and Install New Fonts

TIP OF THE DAY

 Finding and Install New Fonts

By Brandon Watts

Q: I'm starting to experiment with graphic design. I know that I can expand my font collection, but where can I go to download some cool fonts, and how do I install them?

A: Despite the rather numerous amount of fonts available on your system, it can be easy to grow weary of using your favorites over and over again. If you're doing a lot of type editing in your designs, it only makes sense to grab some more fancy looking fonts. There is a rather large community of sites that feature free fonts for download. Here are a few that you may want to take a look at:

• Font Freak
• The Font Foundry
• 1001 Free Fonts
• Font Paradise

The next step after downloading some groovy new fonts is to install them. This task is simple - just go to your Start menu and open up the Control Panel. Double-click the Fonts icon in the Control Panel. You'll then see a window that lists all of the fonts that are already installed on your system. To add your new fonts, just go to the File menu at the top and select Install New Font. From there you just select where you extracted your fonts from the zip file, choose the ones that you want to install, and click OK. You could also extract the fonts directly to your Fonts folder in your Windows or WINNT directory. Programs such as Word and Photoshop will now display the recently installed fonts.

didtheyreadit.com

TIP OF THE DAY

didtheyreadit.com

June 3, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/technology/circuits/03spyy.html?ex=1401681600&en=1f25d1286e981ca4&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

Who Got the Message? There's a Way to Know

By MARK GLASSMAN

NEW service promises to pull back the curtain on anyone hiding behind the common white lie "I never got your e-mail." Users of the service, DidTheyReadIt (didtheyreadit.com), can clandestinely track when and where their e-mail is read.

The service, which has already drawn complaints from privacy advocates, offers a new and quiet way to harvest behavioral information about friends, colleagues and potential consumers.

"There's a type of covert surveillance here," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit privacy advocacy group. "Just from a technology viewpoint, it's basically an evil service."

E-mail programs like Eudora and Outlook have long offered an optional return-receipt feature, which prompts the recipient of a message to inform the sender that they have opened the message, and another service, Msgtag (www.msgtag.com), notifies users by e-mail when their outgoing messages have been opened. But DidTheyReadIt is the first such service to keep itself a secret from the recipient, as well as the first to report on where the message was read.

"It's a potential invasion of privacy, but it's also a potential tool for changing communication," said Alastair Rampell, whose company, Rampell Software, developed the service.

He said the software was a defense against overzealous spam filters that route legitimate messages to junk folders.

"Who knows if it gets through?" Mr. Rampell said.

Subscribers to the DidTheyReadIt service receive an e-mail message notifying them of the time, rough location and duration of the the recipient's viewing of each message the subscriber sent. The service is available in quarterly, semiannual or annual subscriptions and ranges in price from $25 for three months to $50 a year. A free account allows users to send five tracked messages a month.

"I won't deny that it has a potentially stealth purpose," Mr. Rampell said, adding that he has received more than 1,000 negative e-mail messages about the service, which became available on May 24. He said his detractors usually offer one of two criticisms. "One of them is that they think that this is evil and that I should go to jail," he said. The other is that, for all of its controversy, the product does not always work.

DidTheyReadIt depends on what are known as Web bugs, graphic files so tiny that they cannot be seen that can be embedded in an e-mail message or downloaded from a Web site. In the case of DidThey- ReadIt, a Web bug is embedded in each e-mail message sent through the service. When the recipient opens that message, the Web bug is downloaded and the DidTheyReadIt server records the circumstances of that exchange. But some e-mail programs do not automatically download Web bugs, and many can be configured so that they do not.

Mr. Rampell likened his service to caller ID, which can be disabled by users. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to throw away my caller ID," he said.

Some privacy advocates say the caller ID analogy is imperfect because Mr. Rampell's product is more invasive. "When you call a friend, you just by nature know how long the conversation was, but you don't know where they are, what room they're in," said Ari Schwartz, an associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, another privacy advocacy group.

Regardless of consumer sentiment, DidTheyReadIt does follow the privacy guidelines enacted by federal law.

"It's definitely pushing the line of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, though it probably does not violate it," Mr. Schwartz said.

The privacy act and state wiretapping statutes impose restrictions on the recording, storage and sharing of the content but not on the circumstances of communications.

"It's also something that would be very difficult to legislate out of existence," Mr. Schwartz said.

Mr. Rampell said he did not believe that online privacy should be held to a higher standard than privacy in any other medium. "Why do you have the right to hide from somebody that you got their message?" he said. "Whom is it hurting to say: 'Your message got through. Have a nice day.'?"

Mr. Rotenberg said he was concerned that service would become merely another tool for spammers seeking to learn more about consumer e-mail habits. "I don't think, at the personal level, there's much value to people who know one another," he said.

But Mr. Rampell emphasized that how subscribers use the service is up to them. "If you're upset that your friend sent you an e-mail using DidTheyReadIt, then that's a problem between you and your friend," he said.

Locking Your Camera Focus

TIP OF THE DAY

Locking Your Camera Focus

Autofocus point-and-shoot cameras produce terrifically sharp pictures when you use them properly. But getting sharp results sometimes requires telling them where to focus.

A common focusing problem occurs when you deliberately place a subject off-center in the viewfinder frame. Say you want to compose the shot of your friends and the mountains this way. You ask your friends to stand to the right so that they block less of the background, giving the mountains center stage in your composition. You point and shoot. But the camera focuses on the mountains because that's where your composition has landed the focus point and your friends end up unsharp in the print. Call it tunnel focus.

Unintentional focusing on the background is, along with unwanted camera movement, the main cause of unsharp point-and-shoot pictures. And here's a simple way to avoid it ? a photographic one-two punch called locking the focus.

Locking the focus

Lock the focus any time your composition does not place the viewfinder's focus point on the most important part of the scene you're shooting. Locking the focus means that you deliberately make your camera focus on some object in the scene ? a person, or something interesting in the foreground ? and keep the focus locked at that exact distance until you take the picture. Here's how you lock the focus:

1. Look through the viewfinder and position its focus point on the most important part of the scene ? your main subject.

In effect, you center that subject.

2. Press the shutter button halfway down, until the green focus-OK lamp in the viewfinder eyepiece glows steadily.

See the next section, "Making sure your focus is locked," for more on the focus-OK lamp.

3. Holding the shutter button halfway down, reorient the camera so that your desired composition appears in the viewfinder.

4. Press the shutter button all the way down to take the picture.

Back to those friends and the mountains, you lock the focus by aiming the focus point at your friends (which temporarily puts them in the center of the viewfinder) and pressing the shutter button halfway. Then, keeping the shutter button halfway down, you swing the camera to place your friends off-center (see Figure 1). Now press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.

You may need to use this technique with vertical composition, too. Say you're standing on a rock to shoot a vertical picture in which your friends are at the bottom of the viewfinder and the mountains in the background are at the top. To maintain the focus of your friends, first aim the camera down to place the focus point over one their faces and press the shutter button halfway. Hold the shutter button halfway down and swing the camera back up to include the mountains and reestablish your desired composition. Press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.

Regardless of your composition ? centered or off-center ?always keep your eye on where the focus point lands. Even if your two friends are smack in the middle of the viewfinder fame, between them is a little gap and the viewfinder's focus point falls neatly into it. First "aim" the focus point so that it's on one friend's face, then reorient the camera to center your friends.

Particularly if you're a landscape fan, you may be wondering what happens to distant objects when you lock the focus on closer objects. "If I focus on my friends in front of the mountains, instead of the mountains," you ask, "then won't the mountains be out of focus?" Not necessarily.

With most scenes in which you photograph a relatively close object in front of a distant background, if you focus on the close object, the background will be reasonably sharp in the print. But the reverse is not true. Focus on the background ? those mountains ? and the close object simply won't be sharp.

Making sure your focus is locked

When you lock your focus, you can't actually see the subject getting sharp in the viewfinder. However, you can verify that your point-and-shoot has autofocused on something by looking at its focus-OK lamp.

The focus-OK lamp lights up whenever you press the shutter button halfway. If it glows steadily, it's telling you that the camera has successfully focused. If the focus-OK lamp blinks, or doesn't light, or lights briefly but then goes out or starts blinking, it's telling you that the camera can't focus.

More often than not, your camera can't focus because you're too close to the subject. Fix the problem by easing up on the shutter button, stepping back a foot or two, and then pressing the shutter button again.

If you move, the focus doesn't

Locking the focus is vitally important to getting consistently sharp pictures. But remember that when you have that shutter button pressed halfway, the focus doesn't budge. If you ask your subject to move closer or farther away, or you move closer or farther from it to adjust your composition, your subject's no longer in focus. If the distance to the subject changes after you've locked the focus, let up on the shutter button and repeat the focus-locking procedure.

Zoom before you lock the focus. With most point-and-shoot cameras, locking the focus also prevents you from adjusting the zoom. If you want to zoom in or out after locking the focus, let up on the shutter button, adjust the zoom, and then lock the focus again.

Source: Dummies.com