Capture your screen freeware

• Do you sometimes want to show someone what is happening with your computer because words are not enough?
• OR do you want to add something to your blog presentation

and do you want to get it for free……….

Then this is a great program for you.

The old way of using PrScr and then pasting into an editor is too slow. To meet this need there is a great range of screen capture software out there. You can do it online or you can download a number of programs.

This one is working for me. It is the Gadwin PrintScreen. I like it because of the hotkey function that allows you to select an area of the screen by pressing a hotkey and then capturing that area. You can then adjust the picture to the size that you want using a simple interface and there you have it. A very simple solution to a common need that I have in my computer use.

• It works.
• Its simple to use
• And it costs nothing.

Great value all round in my opinion.

How to use WordPress as a CMS

I have been using WordPress for quite a while for blogging. But more recently at another site I wanted a simple Content Management System this site. There are lots of options out there such as Joomla, Drupal and so on. But WordPress was more than enough to meet my needs to provide a simple publishing platform. Here is the simplest way that I have found and the procedure that I used:

Step One: Download the static front page plugin from here (http://www.semiologic.com/software/publishing/static-front/). And then upload it into your plugins directory.

Step Two: Create two pages. (Not posts). Called Home and Blog.

Step Three: Activate your plugin in your wordpress dashboard.

And its all done.

What happens now is that the “Home” page is the permanent front page and you will have another link to your blog that will display you blog posts as normal in reverse chronological order.

A couple of things that I went on to do:

Create a new home template. I did this because the one used from my blog posts still contained a date marker. I didn’t want this on my front page. I deleted the scripts that fetched the features that I didn’t want and then uploaded that into the theme directory.

I copied the blog template and then pasted it into notebook, (any text editor will do) and once I had changed it i saved it as home.php.

This is also a place that you can add the features that you want to your front page as well.

Do yourself a favour – Get the age of conversation

The Age of Conversation

If ideas are the currency of our times then this is, undoubtedly, the Age of Conversation, for without the art of dialog, the cut and thrust of debate and discussion, then the economy of ideas would implode under its own heavy weight. Instead, the reverse is true. Far from seeing an implosion, we are living in a time of proliferation  ideas build upon ideas, discussion grows from seeds of thought and single headlines give rise to a thousand medusa-like simulations echoing words whispered somewhere on the other side of the planet. All this in an instant. In what began as a half dare, the editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan challenged bloggers around the world to contribute one page  400 words  on the topic of œconversation. The resulting book, The Age of Conversation, brings together over 100 of the worlds leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators in a ground-breaking and unusual publication.

All proceeds from sales of the book will be donated to Variety, the Children’s Charity. The proceeds will be earmarked to help children in the authors home countries.

The Age of Conversation

Some scary statistics regarding child safety online

These are statistics compiled by Protectkids.org.They highlight the dangers that our kids face while online.

• By the end of 1998, more than 40 percent of all American homes had computers, and 25 percent had Internet access. This trend is expected to continue. Children and teenagers are one of the fastest growing groups of Internet users. An estimated 10 million kids are online today. By the year 2002, this figure is expected to increase to 45 million, and by 2005 to 77 million.
  Youth Internet Safety Survey
  
• Only 1/3 of the households with Internet access are proactively protecting their children with filtering or blocking software.
  Center for Missing and Exploited Children
  
• 75% of children are willing to share personal information online about themselves and their family in exchange for goods and services.
  eMarketer
  
• About 25 percent of the youth who encountered a sexual approach or solicitation told a parent.
  Youth Internet Safety Survery
  
• One in five U.S. teenagers who regularly log on to the Internet say they have received an unwanted sexual solicitation via the Web. Solicitations were defined as requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk, or to give personal sexual information.
  Crimes Against Children Research Center
  
• One in 33 youth received an aggressive sexual solicitation in the past year. This means a predator asked a young person to meet somewhere, called a young person on the phone, and/or sent the young person correspondence, money, or gifts through the U.S. Postal Service.
  Youth Internet Safety Survey
  
• 77% of the targets for online preditors were age 14 or older. Another 22% were users ages 10 to 13.
  Crimes Against Children Research Center
  
• 75 percent of the solicited youth were not troubled, 10 percent did not use chat rooms and 9 percent did not talk to strangers.
  Crimes Against Children Research Center
  
• Only 25% of solicited children were distressed by their encounters and told a parent.
  Crimes Against Children Research Center
  
• Only 17 percent of youth and 11 percent of parents could name a specific authority, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), CyberTipline, or an Internet service provider, to which they could report an Internet crime.
  Youth Internet Safety Survey

These statistics reflect the use of the internet in most developed countries. The increasing use of the internet as a place where young people meet and communicate socially has introduced a range of new opportunities for them to be exploited. Most parents are unaware of the dangers faced by their children online.

What is needed is for parents to provide their children with the resources to be able to guard against any unnecessary danger. Just like we teach our children at a very young age not to cross the street without an adult, then as they get older to look both ways before they cross and then we allow them to venture out on their own as they mature the same applies to web use.

At a very young age it is very important for a parent to be in total control of their children’s online environment. But, as they mature it become more a matter of supervised learning. Children don’t know what they don’t know.. Hopefully by controlling the level of risk and implementing the appropriate safeguards children can use the web safely.

How to keep your children safe on the internet – Hoopaa

Hoopaa (http://www.hoopaa.com) comes from a Polynesian word that means safe or keep secure. The idea of hoopaa is to keep your kids safe while online because you are aware of where they have been and what they are doing. There is a range of programs available to purchase that allow you to keep track of what the kids are up to online.

Hoopaa is free. And it boasts and impressive range of features:

• Continuous monitoring of all web sites visited;
• Enables you to block web sites from any place at any time;
• hoopaa can automatically block web sites according to their category; Sexuality, Games, Hate, Personal, Gambling or Religion. It’s the parents not hoopaa that makes the decision which categories are to be blocked.
• All Internet access from a computer can be blocked during specified periods of the day.
• The ability to provide a screen capture (an image of the page) of each web page visited; very important if you wish to track blog’s that children may access on a frequent basis;
• Tracking and capturing of all MSN Messenger conversations from all computers in your house that hoopaa has been installed;
• Daily email sent to you containing all web sites visited by each user of each computer registered to your hoopaa account and all MSN Messenger conversations;
• You can login to hoopaa at any time to view all tracked information in real-time;
• hoopaa only monitors what you, the Account Administrator authorizes;
• You can cancel the tracking of any specific web site or MSN Messenger account at any time;
• hoopaa can monitor your children’s MSN Messenger conversations even when they are at a friends house – as long as hoopaa has been installed on that computer;
• hoopaa does not share or make available any information that can be tracked back to your email, your computer or MSN Messenger accounts;
• hoopaa is an absolutely 100% free service to all end users;

The main downsides of this program is that it runs best on Internet Explorer a program that I don’t like because of its security issues. And, it only runs on Windows XP. For most users this will be ok for a while but I expect that as more users move to Vista hoopaa will be upgraded to that OS.

I plan to use it on my children’s computer over the next week so I will keep you up to date on how it goes. I also plan to review a couple of the more popular commercial programs over the next few months and we will see how they stack up against this free service. At first glance hoopaa seems to provide most of the resources that you would expect from the commercial software that is available.

CyberPatrol, NetNanny and CyberSitter are examples of filtering software. http://www.cyberpatrol.com , http://www.netnanny.com and http://www.cybersitter.com

How to keep your children safe on the internet – Create a safe environment for you children

This is a very important aspect of keeping your children safe. Don’t just rely on monitoring software to keep your children safe online. More and more of our lives are going to be spent on the web and we need to make sure that the web world is as safe for our children as the physical environment that they live in.

from PC Magazine 2006

Just like the real world there are lots of hazards that face our children online. But with good management these risks can be minimized.

The first step is to create a safe environment for your children to use the internet. As I have mentioned my children are quite young so I need to recognise that at this stage in their life this is primarily my responsibility. Again life online closely parallels the principles of good parenting in the real world.

Make sure they use the computer in a public area. Don’t allow them to use the internet unless you are prepared to supervise them physically. Most parents wouldn’t send their children to another suburb to use a playground by themselves. The same is true of the internet, don’t let them go to an internet site unless you are aware of what that site contains.

Get familiar with the web yourself. Do a bit of research yourself about what are the best sites for kids and set up the computer so that they have easy access to those sites. Firefox has an excellent system for creating bookmarks in a toolbar near the top of the browser. Use this to provide sites that will keep the children’s interest. We tend to use the same sites over and over. I know that I have my favourites that I use to help me in my work and in creating my blog. This also applies to kids, they will mostly want to use the same sites over and over so make sure that you play a big role in choosing those sites.

Set up your search for safety. There will be times when children will need to go outside their familiar areas. This may be for a school research project or they may just be curious about what else is out there. Google has a number of options that you can choose to create a safer search. To do this in Google go to preferences and then choose safe search filtering. You can then choose the filtering level to stop explicit images and text at the extremely safe level. Google is the search engine of choice for most internet users today.

Educate your children about the web. Communication about what is going on is vital. Make sure you talk to your children about some of the dangers of the web. For example by nature they are trusting souls but make sure that they know not to give out their personal details to anyone. Make them aware of the dangers of opening files that they don’t know anything about. Talk to them about the sites they are visiting and let them know that not all websites are good.
Check your browser history.This is not as effective for older children but most younger children will not be aware of the trail they leave in their browser’s history. Even if you have minimal monitoring software you can keep an eye on where they have been by simply clicking on the browsers history button and having a look at all the sites that have been visited. Get to know where you children go on the web.
Set guidelines for their time on the web. Monitor the amount of time they spend on the web. Just like watching too much TV, too much time on the web is not healthy for a child’s overall development. They need to have time to do other creative things as well.

How to keep your children safe on the internet – Introduction

For many parents this is a big concern. We have friends who have banned their children entirely from the internet. They are not allowed to email, search or even play on designated kid’s sites. This will definitely keep their kids safe from any harm on the web but it certainly create problems for the way that they are able to deal with the modern world.

Keeping your children safe on the internet is not a one step solution. It takes a range of strategies to ensure that they are as safe as they possibly can be online.

What parents have to realize is that there is no silver bullet,says Herbert Lin, senior scientist at the National Research Council of the National Academies, where he directed a 2002 study on protecting children from sexual exploitation and online pornography. Filtering software has certainly gotten better, but do parents rely on it too much? In my opinion, they do. A filter is brittle. Even if it stops 90 percent of the bad stuff, what
do you do about the other 10 percent? You still have to have a thorough educational process.

I use my computer nearly every day for work. But more and more my daughter was wanting to search for things online for school projects or because she had heard about a particular subject. When I wasn’t busy I would let her use my computer to google the subject that she was interested in. However I could see that this was less than ideal because I wanted to work on my computer and she wanted to explore the web.
Recently we acquired a second computer specifically for the kids. I had a number of reasons for this:

1. It got them off my computer. There is no excuse for any nasty accidents happening to it.
2. It protects me from getting any nasties on my computer. My kids click and click. They don’t always understand what they are clicking on they will just do it so that the computer responds in some way. They know that much. The danger of this approach is that they could just as easily click on something that will introduce something undesirable to my computer.
3. It gives them the freedom to explore when they need it not when I am not busy.
4. It is a desktop PC that is placed in the play area that is overlooked by the kitchen and has a constant stream of traffic past it. It has gotten them out of my office and into the open. Whatever they are doing on the web is easily visible by myself or April.

The trouble with the internet is that it is full of unknowns once your kids are out there. The question that many parents ask is what can I do about this? What do we need to protect against?

There are the obvious and not so obvious things that we all know about like:

• Pornography
• Viruses
• Online child predators
• Dangerous chatrooms
• Stealing personal information
• Trojans
• Spyware
• Malware
• Phishing
• and so on

With my kids out their on the web I felt that I had to do some things to ensure that they were as safe as I could possibly make them without wrapping them up in a protective cocoon that didn’t allow them access to the resources and fun that they could have on the web.

The two main steps that I took were to:

1. Protect them from any nasties – Install some monitoring software
2. Protect the computer from any nasties – install user privileges

How I went about this I will outline in some coming posts. I will also take a look at some of the more popular software programs that are on the market ie. NetNanny and the like and see what you get for your dollar.

I actually installed a program called Naomi that has the following features:

• Heuristic analysis capable of recognizing new material automatically.
• Semantic analysis of web pages contents and analysis of their addresses and links.
• Recognizes all the major languages (10+).
• Recognizes ICRA labelling system.
• Monitoring is not limited to web sites, but covers the whole local internet traffic.
• Works with all service providers and software applications, and does not alter settings.
• Allows blocking of file-sharing applications.
• Password-protected (the password is chosen during the installation).
• Easy to use: does not require configuration.
• Can be used on slow connections (it does not perform any download in background).

And, its completely free. You cant get better value than that.
My kids are quite young and this system works just great I don’t want them to even get a glimpse of any pornography. Naomi does a great job in shutting it down very quickly. What all this means and how this compares to other commercial versions I will outline in the coming posts.

I realise that this is a bit of a diversion from the normal theme of ChrisGribble.com but I really want to be a responsible father and ensure that my children are safe. I am sure that there are plenty of other people who feel the same.

Living in a Red Light area

No this has nothing to do with living in one of the seedier areas of a city. This post is what we can do about having to continually work in in your red light area. Where every day you are doing things that aren't your strengths and where you have to deal with the insecurity of not looking your best. In my previous post I mentioned that one of the effects of working in a red light area was that negativity could become a part of your input into the rest of the team. I would like to look at ways that you can still be positive when having to work in a red light zone.

1. Take one day at a time. Yep a week can seem like an eternity but try to find good things in each day as they come. Try to find enjoyment in certain areas of what you are doing that day.
2. Enjoy the people that you are with. There is always an opportunity to be encouraging, to laugh or to enjoy the satisfaction of doing something with someone else. Try to focus in the goodness that you find in those around you.
3. Dream. Yep if you are stuck in something that is quite mundane use it as an opportunity to dream of something bigger. Use the red light time constructively to think of new ideas and opportunities that may be just around the corner.
4. Plan.  A good idea needs a plan. So use this time to plan for how you can make your big idea happen.
5. Do it. Don't get stuck in the rut for too long. Sooner or later you will have to do something about it. Take the plunge and be adventurous. In the Australian vernacular we would say, "have a go." There are lots of people out there who have been dissatisfied enough with their current situation who have had a go at something new and become enormous successes. The next one could be you or me.

We will all have times when we have to work in a red light area. Use these times as a motivation to push forward. They can help to clarify what your green light areas really are. They can motivate you to do something that may be the next really big opportunity for your life. Don't  fall into the trap of negativity. You will end up just feeling sorry for yourself and the only one who can do that properly is yourself so it can be a very lonely place to be.

Are you a team player?

In answering this question I would like to firstly define exactly what a team player does.

“A team player is one who responsibly carries out their share of the work load to expectations while contributing to the team’s goals. They have a positive, constructive attitude, and function co-operatively with team associates.” Richard Hagstrom

So I would think that you would expect to see some of the following things coming from a team player.

1. Lots of positive comments about other people with whom they work
2. A positive outlook on the future
3. A realistic understanding of what each person is contributing
4. A desire to share glory for any successes
5. A willingness to be open about mistakes
6. A good estimation of one’s own abilities and the contribution they make to the rest of the group

This is a short summary of some of the things that I would be looking for in a team player.

How do I understand this in terms of someone who has completed a Green Light Profile. Just in case you have forgotten here is a brief summary of the GLP.

Green Light Profile

The Green Light Profile (GLP) will help you form realistic expectations of your performance and facilitate the realization of your life purpose, career values and goals. It highlights areas in life and a work in which you will tend to be most effective and less effective. It helps assess present situations and sort through decision alternatives to maximize life satisfaction.

Work is a major contributor to our sense of identity and can allow us to feel like we are making a positive contribution to our families and community. Life satisfaction is influenced by the content of your work and how much it contributes to the achievement of your life purpose.

A traffic light is used to illustrate performance standards. Your Greens include responsibilities that give you the greatest job satisfaction and allow you to perform to the best of your ability. Yellows include responsibilities that you may perform effectively for short amounts of time. Reds cannot be avoided but awareness of them can remove the guilt for not being able to perform perfectly in this area. Reds are more palatable if they contribute directly to your life purpose.

Each of us has a set of core values that guides our perception of the ideal job. The GLP will help you find yours and apply your conclusions to your current or future roles.

Successful career choices are difficult to make if you don’t have a clear idea of where you want to go. Without a vision of a desired future state even a good career choice can end in confusion, weariness, burnout and powerlessness. The GLP will help you identify your strengths and view new possibilities for your future.

What is the Green Light Profile

The Green Light Profile (GLP) involves viewing activities and responsibilities through traffic light lenses.

Greens are your strengths, things you will tend to do well, these are the areas that you will excel in and find the most satisfaction in performing.

Reds are your limitations or things you will tend not to do well, a job that requires that you mostly work in your red area will not be as satisfying and can result in poorer performance.

You may perform Yellows somewhat effectively but should only do so in small amounts. Long stretches of Yellow work usually becomes distasteful resulting in a less effective performance.

Someone engaged mostly in Green work will tend to be a self-starter and great team player who is full of positive energy. Their work is meaningful and satisfying to them.

I believe that most people desire to be team players. After all we are very social creatures. The dilemma that we may discover in our work lives is that we can find that we are mostly involved in work that is in our red areas. After a while we will find that such work will suck our energy and we can begin to take from the team rather than give to it.

Someone performing mostly Red work may have a negative attitude and tend to procrastinate. They may be a reluctant team player experiencing only erratic energy spurts. They find their work meaningless, stressful and/or boring.

The effects of someone working mainly in their Red areas will be felt by those around them. It will impact on the team. A person who is a great team player when working in the Green Light area may become negative and begin impact on the overall effectiveness of the team.

So what do I do?

Sometimes you have to make a decision to look after the overall welfare of the team and disregard your personal Green Light areas for a while. This can only ever be a short term strategy. Anyone who has to work for too long in their red areas will stop being a team player.

Sometimes you cannot change your circumstances you have to change your attitude. I remember a several years ago working in a job that I didn’t enjoy very much at all. Every day while walking to work my head was saying, “I hate this job, I hate this job, I hate this job.”

Needless to say this effected my attitude and what I said to others. I had to make a decision about my attitude. First I realised that I needed a job to support my family. Secondly I needed to treat those around me with more respect and become aware of the team’s needs as well as my own. Thirdly I had to put in place the facility to eventually change my circumstances.

The solution short term was to change my attitude. The solution long term was to look for something to do where I could be more in my Green Light Areas. Interestingly at this point in my career I hadn’t come across the Green Light Profile but it all makes more sense to me now after understanding the Green Light Concept.