Online Games to Keep Your Mind Sharp

Being summer and all, it's easy to let the ol' brain go into hibernation. Much easier though, to keep it sharp, instead of trying to jump start it once school begins. 

If you're in to puzzles, riddles, and other mind games, here's a collection of teasers guaranteed to keep you up longer than you wanted:

Pzzls

From simple riddles and puzzles, the site has lots of logic, math, and science puzzles to keep your brain on overdrive. You can browse through the puzzles or use the search tool.

Think Riddles

With 8000 brain teasers and riddles to choose from, you can really put your brain in a tizzy. So check out the popular riddles first. You can also go at them alphabetically with the letter links at the foot of the web page.

Mind Cipher

Mind cipher does not have a large number of puzzles, but the limited collection is arranged in neat categories. Two categories you should try out first are – Lateral Thinking and Logical. Answers along with detailed explanations are given for most of the riddles.

Brain Bashers

Brain Bashers is a collection of brain teasers, puzzles, riddles, games and optical illusions. Brain Bashers has thousands of puzzles and brain teasers, and with new material added every single day, including games and optical illusions, you can be sure there is always something to do. With over one hundred awards, Brain Bashers is the place to spend a boring Friday afternoon training your brain.

 Braingle

If your brain craves for variety, give it Braingle’s mix of quizzes, riddles, logic problems, and trivia. Try out the Puzzle Hunts on the site which is like a treasure hunt for the brain. There are only two as of now with ten levels each, but the site also links to others that may be found online.

Finally,....

A free dowload called Brain Workshop. The site says it's guaranteed to make you smarter. Spend the summer using Brain Workshop and go directly to High School.

Have Fun.....

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Free Online Photo Editors: Part I

Digital Cameras, Cell Phones, Web Cams; There are lots of ways to take a picture. After you've snapped all those photos, there are many sites that can help you dress them up or fix them up. We'll look first at a few ' sites where you can have some fun with your pics.

Dress them Up

Kizoa

is a Free service to create slide shows and edit photos with fun effects, animations, music and more. Share your creations on the Internet or burn them to DVD.

Loonapix

Make funny photos by embedding your face from the photo to the various templates.

PhotoFunia

One of the more popular sites with tons of creative backgrounds to play around with.

Fun Photo Box

If you don’t get what you want from PhotoFunia,  check out Fun Photo Box.

MyTradingCards.com

Create Baseball, Basketball, and other custom cards with your own photo.  Very Realistic looking cards.

Avatara

Create your own 3D avatar for use on the internet and animate it if you like.

 

There are other photo editing sites which have different options than the ones listed here. They will be covered in Part II.  But for now, let's move on to the fix your photo sites.

Want to remove the red 'vampire' eyes of someone in your photo? Want to remove someone completely from your photo? Maybe you have blurry pics, or ones that are too dark or too light.  These next sites are for more 'serious' photo editing. 

Fix Them Up

Photoshop

The Godfather of photo editing programs (used for all the graphics work in this blog) is Photoshop.  It's an expensive program to buy--around $200, but at Photoshop.com you can learn the program by doing real work on your own photos. If your photo's broken, Photoshop can fix it.  They also have tutorials where you can practice creating certain effects like the ones shown below. Registration required, but of course, it is free.

SplashUp

SplashUp is a easy to use photo editing software allowing everybody to create professional and experienced photo designs.

Sumo Paint

One of the finest online painting and photo editing programs. Create and share your art work with the world.

This is just a small sampling of the many sites on the net where you can be silly or serious with your photos.

Remember: If you find a site you like, bookmark it!!

Coming Next: Part II of photo editing and free places to create your own web site or blog. 

Hope you're enjoying your summer!

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Chrome's New Mega Button

 For all the Google Chrome users: 

The Chrome layout is built to give more space for viewing web pages and it’s a pretty good concept but sometimes using the little spanner to access everything from the bookmarks manager, extensions, history, to the download manager can take too long for your most often used functions. Mega Button is an extension for Chrome that gives you access to Downloads, History, Extensions, Bookmarks, Plugin, DNS details, Memory usage info, and more all in one button.

The extension adds a simple green button next to the URL bar; when you click the button a small toolbar appears just under the address bar with icons for downloads, history, extensions, bookmarks etc. Clicking any of the icons opens the setting in a new pinned tab. The button is similar to using the spanner button to access your setting only you don’t need to scroll through menu options to get to them.

I've tried it and Mega Button is definitely a time saver.

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Password Protect Folders

Let's say you've got some really important information stored in a folder on your computer such as the truth about alien life, the location of Noah's Ark, or who likes whom in the 7th grade. With information like this, you must secure your folder from family, friends, terrorists, and double-agents.

To the Rescue: Secure Folder.  Secure Folder password protects any and all folders you want. No one, not even aliens or Noah's Ark survivors can open a file locked with Secure Folder.

Caution: If you do password protect any folder, WRITE THE PASSWORD DOWN SOMEWHERE, BUT DON'T SAVE IT ON YOUR COMPUTER IN A FILE NAMED 'SECURE FOLDER PASSWORDS'

Remember the Holiday on Friday, June 10th.

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Creating Invisible Files & Folders

There may be times when you don't want certain eyes to see certain files on your computer. This is pretty easy to accomplish actually.  The following 4 steps should take care of it:

1.  Create a folder and name it something people won't care about. Something like 'Science Homework', or 'Spelling Words', should do the trick. Do not name it 'Hidden Movies and Music' for obvious reasons.

2.  Put everything you want hidden inside that folder. You can have folders inside the folder also.  All folders inside of a hidden folder will be hidden as well.

3.  Right Click on the folder and select the last item, 'Properties'.

4.  In the dialog box that opens, simply click the hidden button.

Note: Before hiding the folder, you should open your hard drive and bury the folder deep...Inside a folder, inside a folder,etc. You will probably want to write down how to get to this folder (the path). You may forget where you put the folder a week from now, or a day, or an hour from now.

Next:  Password Protect your most Important/Private folders.

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Getting Your Deleted Files Back

Sometimes it happens; either you accidentally delete a file, or some type of system crash deletes them for you.  Either way, the good news is that your files aren't really deleted at all.  What happens to deleted files is that they are moved to an unused part of your hard drive where they stay in perfect condition until that part of the hard drive is needed for new data.  At that point, the new information overwrites the 'deleted' files.

In reality, files are not deleted, they are overwritten.  Provided your files have not been overwritten, there is a free program called Recuva which does a great job in 'undeleting' files so you can use them again.

Larger files may be recovered in parts, or pieces, but you just have to paste them together to get your file in its original form.

If not now, then sometime...Recuva will come to the rescue.

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Upgrade Your Windows 7

There are a number of free programs you can install to improve your operating system, Windows 7 Starter Edition. While Windows 7 looks and works great, the starter edition leaves out a lot and is very limiting.

One free upgrade you can make is to install Start Menu 7.  This program changes the look and function of your start menu, one of the areas that I personally think is plain bad in the starter edition.

This program makes it much easier to find files and folders, and change any settings in the control panel and elsewhere.  Here's a screenshot of the program when you click on start:

As you can see, most everything is available in one click. You no longer have to click and double click through links and folders to find what you want.  Give it a try. As always, you can delete the program if you don't like it and your system will appear exactly as before.

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Advanced System Care Free 4

A new version of Advanced System Care is out and it is worth downloading.  However, after downloading and installing, it is best to make the following changes:

1. Click on Toolbox, Optimize, Startup Manager
2. Uncheck any box that has to do with Advanced System Care, Quick Care, or IOBIT

Why? You'll want to run this program every week or two in order to clean up your system, but you don't want it running automatically when you start your computer. In the last post I mentioned your limited resources. You don't need ACS everyday and the more start up programs you have, the longer it takes to start your computer.

So download, install, make the quick changes, and use the program every 10 days or so. Very worth it.

 

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iTunes Not the Best for Your Laptop

Are you using iTunes as the music player/organizer on your laptop? While iTunes is good at what it does, it's just not the right player for your laptop.

Here's what you always need to keep in mind when it comes to your laptops: (actually they are netbooks, meaning smaller, less powerful laptops) You have limited processing, storage, and memory on your Dells.  iTunes is a program which commands a lot of resources from your computer, especially if it opens when you start up your computer. iTunes is a resource hog, what you need is a resource ant. 

One music player/organizer which is not a resource hog is Jaangle. It is a very small file compared to iTunes and is not always accessing on-line resources like the iTunes store, which slows your browsing.

You can download Jaangle here. Since it is a small file, you can install and try it out in almost no time.

You no like? No problem. Uninstall, then delete the installer.  If you do try Jaangle, let me know how you like it, it's always good to hear the opinions of people who have actually tried a program.

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Are You A Stargazer?

Do you ever look at the night sky and wonder if those reddish blue lights are stars or planets? Ever want to know what Taurus or Leo or Pisces looks like?  There's a great free program called Stellarium which shows you planets, stars, constellations, asteroids, and everything else in the sky at that exact moment.

In fact, this week just before sunrise, there are four planets grouped very close together looking toward the east.  I got up early Friday to see this, and was amazed at how bright Jupiter was and how red Mars is.

If you do download the program, the first thing you do is go to location on the left side and type in Saipan. 

After that, the sky you see on Stellarium will be the exact sky you see when you look into the real sky; any night, any day, the program and the sky will match.

It's not a program you'll use everyday, but sometimes you see something at night and might wonder what it is. Now you can load up Stellarium and know exactly what that object is.

Finally, there are quite a few events coming to the sky in the next few months which are very rare, once-in-a-life kind of events. Planet alignments, eclipses, asteroids coming close to earth and others. With Stellarium, you'll know what's going on.

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Weekend Break; The Future, Games/ Music & More

Want to see into the future? Sure, who doesn't. Check out in20years.com.  Take a picture from your web cam, upload it to the site, and see yourself 20 years and 30 years in the future.  Do you look like mom or dad?

In the last post, I mentioned the advantages of having a mouse. Here are some fun, time wasting, on line games that require a mouse to play.  The first one is Basketball. How many points can you score in the given time.  My high score is 90, try to beat it.....if you're not scared.

 Another fun, on line mouse game is Ricochet Kills 2. Test your aim and ricochet skills. Be careful, you can lose a lot of time playing this one.

 

For music lovers, especially those who like to sing or want to be in a band, there's Breakout Band. Using the built-in microphone on your computer and the breakout band's instruments, you can create, record, and post your songs. Send the song link to your friends if you like.  A great site to practice and be creative if music is your thing.

Last but definitely not least is an on line typing program called Z-Type.  I've mentioned the importance of learning how to type before. You'll be doing a lot of it in your 8th grade computer class. With Z-Type, you learn typing by shooting down the words as the drop from the sky.  If you want something that is fun and improves your skills, Z-Type is a great way to do it.

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Using Your Web Cam & V-Mail

 There are many things you can do with your web cam.  One of them is to create, save, and send v-mails. (Video mail).  Maybe someone is having a birthday, and instead of just writing them an e-mail, you can record audio and video from your webcam and built -in microphone and send them this file instead.

After recording and saving the file, you just add the file as an attachment to an email. When the person gets your email, they can open the video with VLC, Windows Media, or whatever player they use.

I'm not sure if your computer has video recording software on it, but there is a great free, and easy to use program called Cam Studio. You can download it here. After shooting your video, there is another easy to use program for adding special effects and text. This program is called Many Cam.

Try it out. You can always shoot a video, add some special effects, and email it to yourself just for practice.

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Best in Class: Media Centers

If you download movies and video clips, and have lots of songs and pictures on your hard drive, it's far easier to find, organize and play these media files if they are stored in one place. By far the best media center application is XBMC. I mentioned this program in an earlier post, but it's worth saying it again. XBMC will play almost any type of file, is skinnable (has many different 'looks' to it), can be customized with easy to find add-ons, and keeps all your files organized for easy  playing.  Here's a couple of pictures of XBMC:

You can download XBMC here. Select Windows from the list showing. As usual, since the program is free, it's worth a try. If you don't like it, or don't have a lot of media files, you can always uninstall and delete it.

If you like to look for pictures on the internet for your desktop or whatever, you may come across some pictures with writing or other markings on them that you would like removed. See picture below:

 Notice the writing on the bottom left. A website named webinpaint can easily remove this and almost anything else you may want removed from a picture. Even if you don't see a need for this now, you can always right click on the link, select 'bookmart this link', and you'll have the site saved in case you need it later. Below is the same picture after 30 seconds with webinpaint:

More to come this weekend including links from earlier posts like Avast!, Chrome, Firefox, and new stuff.

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No Powerpoint? ...No Problem

Because almost none of you have Microsoft Office on your computers, you are going to have to use Presentation Software other than PowerPoint. I'll show you alternatives which let you create presentations as good or better than PowerPoint and are, of course, free.

1.  Open Office Presentation:  Most of you have this free collection of programs (called a suite) on your computer and the presentation software is actually a very good one. However, it is much slower than PowerPoint, and there aren't that many templates and clip art.


2.  Sliderocket is a web-based program, meaning there is nothing to download. You use the program on the web. There is a free version, you just have to register. It is slick, professional looking and there are many templates, photos, and other clip art to choose from.  Here is a screenshot of sliderocket:

3.  Prezi:  Another web-based program, Prezi is different than Powerpoint and all the other presentation programs listed. An example of Prezi is shown below. Press the start button to begin.

4.  GoogleDocs: I mentioned this yesterday, and it is a site everyone should become used to. Free with a gmail account (required for this class), the presentation program is just like using PowerPoint and has many options available.

5.  Finally, there is 280slides.  It's listed last, but 280slides is every bit as good as the other programs shown. There are many options so you can create interesting and creative presentations. It is worth checking out.

Update:  As of yet, nobody has identified the latest landmark for our free computer time. Try using TinEye, I bet you'll get it.

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Google Docs & More

After getting your Gmail account, you should head over to Google Docs.  Here's a screenshot of the home page.

The blue Documents tab will open a program just like Microsoft Word and the Presentation tab will open a program just like PowerPoint. You can save your document on your hard drive, and it is also saved on the internet, so you can get it from anywhere and from any computer.  Of course, it's all free and a must have since you don't have Microsoft Office on your computers.

Also, if you need pictures of Saipan for a report or anything else, this site has one of the best collections in one place on the internet. You can always bookmark the site in case you need it later.

Finally, I said Email me with the correct answer. Comments left don't count because everyone can see them. As for Matt, lurker from the abyss; your request has been accepted, look for it shortly.

Links to Earlier Posts

Here's some quick links to help you find your way around the site.

For Avast! Antivirus, and the media players VLC and KLM, click here.

For the Browsers Firefox and Google Chrome, and the background changer Oceanis, click here.

To get a Gmail account, click here. To see some of the features and things you can do with a Gmail account, click here.

To get Xtra Credit on Tomorrow's Test, click here.

For video tutorials and the handouts you'll need on our next unit, click here.

For different Websites you may be interested in, click here and here.

For other categories and items on this site, check the 'Page' lists on the right side of the page, or scroll down and see each post individually.

                                                               Test Tomorrow!!!!
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Multimedia Software

Two nice software programs that just came out and are pretty cool.  The first one is for creative music people. Called Virtual DJ, (get it here) it's like having your own music studio. You can mix, edit, scratch, add sound effects, vocals, and crossfade in and out of songs like a professional. Create your playlist of customized songs. Get your DJ on and try it out.

The next program just out is another video player, like VLC or Windows Media Player, except that Splash Pro is designed for HD movies and videos. The picture is much sharper for HD videos than the other players. For regular, non HD movies, the other players work just as well. If you have something in HD to watch, download Splash Pro, and see for yourself.

More 'Must Have' Software

Sometimes when you download movies, music, or programs,  the folder will look like this:

This is called a 'zipped' folder. It compresses or squeezes the data so the download size is smaller. But to use the data, you must 'unzip' it first. The first link is to a free program which lets you unzip these types of folders. It's called 7zip and is found here. Click on the word download, to the left of .exe file.

After the installer downloads, you can install by double clicking. You will need to unzip folders which have Math videos, worksheets, and other assignments. When you have downloaded one of the folders with your assignments, this is what you do:  Right click the folder, select 7-zip, then select 'Extract to.....'

When you are finished, you will have both the zipped and unzipped folder. Since there is no need for both, you can then delete the zipped folder like this:

Now you can open the unzipped folder and use the documents inside.
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The next program you will be using for some of your assignments is called Print Screen. It is used to 'take a picture' of websites, or anything on your desktop. In fact, I used print screen for the pictures you see above. Download the program here.

After you install and open the program, make these two changes to the program:
1. Right click the Print Screen icon in the taskbar, and select 'properties'.
2. On the left side, select source.
3. Click the 'Rectangular Area' button.  This lets you choose the size of the area you want to copy.
4. Just below source, you will see 'Destination'.
5. Click here and find the Capture Directory section.
6. Click on the little box with the three dots to the right.
7. In the new window, find the 'Desktop' folder and select it.
8. Click 'OK' and you're done.

Now, practice using it. Find the 'fn' key on your keyboard. Hold this key down while pressing the 'insert' key once. (This key should be in the upper right)  Now press and hold the left select on the touch pad and drag to  select an area to copy.  You can practice without saving the selection. Practice using this program, as you will need to for class. If you need help, get help. You've got a tool you must know how to use.

Take a break from killing each other in Halo, and practice using your computer.

Adios

More Links... (And a Test Tomorrow)

First up today, is Avast! Antivirus. I like this program because it takes up less of your computing resources and allows the computer to run faster.  The link is here. Click on the blue download button on the left of the three blue buttons.

Important!  Before installing, disconnect from the internet ( so you won't get any viruses while changing programs), and first uninstall Norton. Once you have uninstalled Norton, install Avast. You will need to register one time only, this is just your name and email address. Updates are done automatically. As with all of these links, the program is free.

Next up is a program everyone should have.  It's called Advanced System Care. The purpose of this program is to keep your computer running its fastest and smoothest at all times. After installing, you should run once a week or so.  All you have to do is click on the buttons, the program will do the rest.  The download is here.

These next two programs are audio & video players.  They are both better than Window Media because they play just about any type of file you may want to listen to or watch.  This first one is KM Player. The download is here.  The second player is called VideoLAN or VLC for short. They both work fine and the files are not that large, so you may want to download both and see which one you like better.  Click on the installer package on the VLC website here.

Be back later with some math links including on-line exercises and videos.  Again, if a link does not work, let me know by leaving a comment.

Lots of Links

Now that you've got your laptops, let's make 'em even better,  I'll give you a few links at a time, so you have a chance to download everything.  The best way to do it is to right click on the link and open in a new tab so you don't have to keep clicking the back button to return to this page. Opening a new tab is a habit you should get used to when using the internet; it saves time and allows you to have multiple windows open at the same time.

Lastly, be careful when installing the new programs.  Some will install other programs like different toolbars and search engines if you do not uncheck the boxes.  So when installing, be sure to uncheck any boxes for other programs you are asked if you also want to install.

First, the browsers.  Both Google Chrome and Firefox are faster and have better features than Explorer.  You can get the Chrome installer here, and download Firefox here.  By the way, let me know if any of the links do not work for some reason.

Next: The version of Windows 7 you have is called the starter version.  It does not allow you to change the desktop picture.  However, there is a program called Oceanis which allows you to do so. You can get it here by scrolling part way down and clicking on the download button on the left side. You should also bookmark this page ( called Favorites in Explorer) so you can read how it works.

Finally for today, a great program for you digital pics is Paint.Net.  Like all the programs here, it is free and can be downloaded here. Use it to resize and fix up your photos, add a different background, get rid of unwanted text, red eyes, lighten or darken and fix your pic exactly as you want to.

Leave a comment if you have a question.