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The list: Five good sites for finding how to do something:
1. Instructables.com.
2. Wikihow.
3. Expertvillage.com.
4. Tipstrs.com.
5. 5min.com
Video challenge winner: Our 21st .TXT Video Challenge was won by Alison Walton, of Spokane. The challenge involved an online video of NASA engineers testing prototypes of lunar rovers near Moses Lake. Walton was the first to correctly identify chromium as the metal used in the main wheels of the rover. She gets a $5 coffee card on us. The next Video Challenge will be July 13.
How do I … make my browser open in a blank page without connecting to the Web?
You can do this with either Firefox or Internet Explorer. In IE, go to Tools and Internet Options. Choose the General tab next. Under Home Page, simply select the Use Blank choice.
In Firefox go to Tools, then Options. In the Main tab is a Startup pane with a box labeled When Firefox Starts. There, just select “Show a blank page.”
Have a question about the Web? E-mail us at TXT @spokesman.com.
Jargon 2.0: narrowband (n.):
The opposite of broadband is narrowband. If high-speed cable modems give you 10 megabits per second, narrowband connections provide right around 2400 bits per second. Figuratively, narrowband can also refer to any business or project that targets a tiny or not-large audience. Similar to the word “niche.”
Smart search: One should learn how to use the Simple Translation option Google has built into its engine. It’s found at google.com/ translate_s. The basic choice is to simply translate text from one language to another. The Translated Search feature is neater. Say you want to find French pages that refer to “Washington state wines.” You plug in the phrase and in the box for choice of pages, select French. You’ll get 295,000 results.
The results are arrayed with the English translated versions in a left-side column and the French results in a column on the right.
Tidbit: The origin of the term “computer virus” dates back to 1984. In a scholarly paper by Fred Cohen, the author used that phrase in the sense we know today, describing a program that could take over computers. The first “in the wild” virus was probably the Elk Cloner, released in 1982 and which infected only Apple computers.