Seminars for May 2008

Thumb Drives and Their Hidden Secrets

Monday, May 5, at 10:30 am, in the Classroom

Presenter: Bill Wilkinson
A Thumb Drive is one of several miniature, lightweight and portable external hard drives that can be used to physically transport data from one computer to another using a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection. Most are the size of an adult’s thumb (thus the name) and have capacities ranging from 128 MB to 8 GB and larger. This presentation will show you how to easily and conveniently copy or move your important data files (including photos and music files) back and forth between a thumb drive and your hard drive; how to safely remove the thumb drive from a USB port or hub without risking damage to your data; how to recover a thumb drive that has been erroneously reformatted, how to utilize your portable drive’s storage capacity to its fullest, and how to password-protect the drive’s contents.

Introduction to the Microsoft Works Database

Tuesday, May 6, at 10:30 am, in the Classroom
Presenter: Jim Wilkinson
Using Microsoft Works, a program that is frequently “bundled” with other software products on many new computers, this presentation will demonstrate how to set up a database and use it to make labels or address envelopes, record your CD music collection, or other data storage files.

Photos from Your Camera to Another Medium

Monday, May 12, 10:30 am, in the Classroom

Presenter: Bill Wilkinson

It is one thing to take photographs with your digital camera and have them automatically (but temporarily) stored on the memory card that’s housed within your camera. It’s another thing to successfully transfer the photographs from your camera to another storage device, such as your computer’s hard drive, a flash (thumb) drive, a compact disk, or DVD. This seminar presentation will take you step-by-step through the process.

Creating Panoramic Videos

Tuesday, May 13, 10:30 am, in the Classroom

Presenter: Jack Spargo

This presentation will demonstrate how to stitch  photos  together  to make a  single panorama  picture and  then create a video with music from the panorama photograph.

Preparing Your Own Living Trust

Wednesday, May 14, 9:00 am, in the Classroom
Presenter: Charles Johnson
A trust is an arrangement under which one person, called a trustee, holds legal title to property for another person, called a beneficiary. You can be the trustee of your own living trust, keeping full control over all property held in trust. A "living trust" is simply a trust you create while you're alive, rather than one that is created at your death under the terms of your will. This presentation will show you how to use the resources of the Internet to plan and prepare your own living trust.

Phishing, Pharming, Spoofing and Other Scams

Monday, May 19, 10:30 am, in the Classroom

Presenter: Howard Verne
Phishing is defined as the act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The e-mail directs the user to visit a Web site where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization already has. The Website, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user’s information.

Pharming  redirects your efforts to link to a Website by infusing false information into a server, resulting in a user's request being sent elsewhere to a scammers site. Your browser, however will show you are at the correct Web site, which makes pharming a bit more serious and more difficult to detect. Phishing attempts to scam people one at a time with an e-mail while pharming allows the scammers to target large groups of people at one time through Internet domain poisoning.

Spoofing is the act of forging an e-mail header to make it appear as if it came from somewhere or someone other than the actual source. Unfortunately, the main format that is used when sending e-mail – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) -- does not include a way to authenticate the identity of the sender.

This presentation will provide you with some strategies for fighting phishing, pharming, spoofing, and other scams designed to separate you from your identity.

Photoshop Elements II and Google’s Picasa

Tuesday, May 20, 10:30 am, in the Classroom

Presenter: George Keelen
This seminar will combine presentations about Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Google’s free Picasa. Adobe Photoshop Elements is a powerful photo editing program that is a favorite among many of our Computer Club members. This seminar will introduce novice users to some of the basic functions of this popular and highly-regarded product. As a bonus, Google’s free Picasa program will be integrated into the presentation. Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC.

Gmail and Other Google Programs

Wednesday, May 21, 9:00 am, in the Classroom

Presenter: Pat Lemay
Do you think GMAIL is just another email program?  If you do, you are wrong.   GMAIL has nearly three gigabytes of free storage, so you can keep emails stored on their server  – not on your computer.   Email attachments open on their server so the chance of getting a virus is almost impossible.  The best part is that with a GMAIL account you have access to numerous other programs.  This Seminar will also cover creating documents and spreadsheets that will be stored on their server.  Would you like to safely store 4,000 photographs on their server?  This Seminar will show you how.  If your computer ever crashes, you will never lose the information in your Google email account, or your documents, spreadsheets and photographs.  You can also access the above information from any computer in the world with your user name and password.  The best part – it is all FREE!

Las Vegas Websites at Your Service

Thursday, May 22, 10:00 am, in the Classroom

Presenter: Harvey Lawrence

Do you want to know the current weather conditions and five-day forecast for Las Vegas, or the current traffic conditions between Sun City and the Strip, or the exact moment that a flight that is bringing friends into McCarran has touched down, or the ratings and locations for some of the valley’s eateries? How about getting special prices on show tickets or discounts on buffets? Perhaps you’re interested in comparing the Cirque show “Love” with its sister shows “Ka”, “Mystere” and” O”.  This seminar will show you how to make some great Websites work for you as you access Las Vegas information on your PC or Mac.

Managing Favorites, Cookies, and Temp Files

Thursday, May 22, 1:00 pm, in the Classroom

Presenter: Ken Bentley

Managing Favorites: Favorites make a great way to bookmark your frequently visited Web sites for easy access. Eventually this constantly growing list of handy shortcuts can become a real challenge, when quickly trying to find your favorite Web site. You need to consider establishing a file system that will make it easier for you to classify, store and retrieve your favorite sites.  You also should know how to backup your Favorites just in case you are unfortunate enough to experience a computer problem that results in the loss of all your Favorites. This seminar will show you how to create, rename, sort, organize, delete, import, export, and how to backup your favorites. We'll also show how to access your favorite Favorites in your Toolbar and Taskbar.

Managing Cookies: Cookies are messages that a Web server transmits to a Web browser so that the Web server can keep track of the user's activity on a specific Web site. The message that the Web server conveys to the browser is in the form of an http header that consists of a text-only string. The text is entered into the memory of the browser. The browser in turn stores the cookie information on the hard drive so when the browser is closed and reopened at a later date the cookie information is still available. We will discuss the differences between first party and third party cookies. We will demonstrate how to control your cookies using your Privacy settings to allow or block cookies.

Managing Temporary Internet Files: Temporary internet files can be useful in speeding up access to frequently used Web sites. However, with constantly changing websites many of the files become worthless and just take up space. We will demonstrate how to manually delete these files or how to set your computer to automatically delete them.

Managing Temporary Windows Files: You would be surprised at the number of temporary Windows files stored on your computer. Although an application will usually delete Temp files when the program shuts down, this doesn't always happen. At this seminar you will be shown four options on how to delete these useless Temp files.

Macintosh in the Daytime
Saturday, May 24, 1:00 pm, in the Classroom

Presenter: Bill Euler
This presentation will provide Macintosh users and Windows PC users alike an opportunity to view some of the amazing features that are contained within Apple’s Macintosh operating system. For years, Apple has been on the cutting-edge of the newest technologies designed for the typical home computer consumer and has always had a reputation for having easy-to-use “consumer friendly” products. If you are at all curious as to why Macintosh users are so dedicated to their computers, you will not want to miss this presentation.

Most of the Macintosh presentations are held during the evening hours, times that are not always convenient for all Mac users. This “daytime” presentation will provide a special opportunity to have your questions answered and demonstrated by one of the Club’s Mac Users Group experts.

Imbed Photos with Text in an Email Message
Thursday, May 29, at 10:00 am, in the Classroom

Presenter: Bill Wilkinson

If you have ever wanted to wrap the text of an email message to a family member or friend around a photograph in that message, you will be provided with the “how to do it” details by attending this demonstration.