Didja Know?

A little bit of keyboard trivia has improved my life more than I care to admit.

Did you know that if you type something into the URL bar of your browser, you can hit CTRL-ENTER and it will add “.com” and go to the site?

It’s true!

Just type “cnn” into the URL bar, and hit CTRL-ENTER and you go straight to “http://cnn.com”.

If you use Firefox you can make it even easier by hitting CTRL-L to go to the URL bar, then type your word and hit CTRL-ENTER. You don’t even have to move your hand to click the mouse! This has saved me at least 50 calories a day worth of energy expenditure, I’m sure.

Places like Lifehacker (that’s CTRL-L, lifehacker, CTRL-ENTER) are always touting the benefits of keyboard shortcuts for commonly used things, but I really haven’t caught on much. For some weird reason, though, this one has made me very happy.

Yes, a keyboard shortcut gives me a little bit of glee every time I use it.

Hi. I’m MrPages. I’m a geek.

Anyone have any other little-known favorite keyboard shortcuts?

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I think I’ve blogged about this before,but every time the K9 Blocked Page page comes up, I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s doing it’s job, and it’s doing it well.

K9 Web Protection from Blue Coat Systems is a free Internet filtering system.

A few years ago, before we had K9, the LittlePages opened an E-card from a friend that took them to the American Girl site. I let them poke around the site while I prepared dinner in the kitchen. (The computer is temporarily living at the kitchen door. We have been temporarily without baseboards for ten years. Sometimes it’s the small delusions that keep me going!))

Suddenly I heard one of the LittlePages say”Let’s go to the American Boys site”. They typed in a web address similar to the American Girls site and then I heard a comment about how it was sure taking a long time to load (the computer savviness of my children sometimes concerns me) Somehow, my dinner-drenched brain kicked into action and I went flying across the room screaming, “NO! TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF!”

In fear, my little ones slammed off the monitor button and scattered. I hit the reset button on the computer and rebooted. I checked the web address they had typed here. It told me that someone had rated the site as p0rnography. I’m so thankful that the Holy Spirit protected us. I’m so thankful that those images never loaded. And now I knew we needed some internet filtration.

I tried all the paid ones out there. When some of them were installed, they wouldn’t let me go to their competitor’s sites! Some of them were easy to break. Some of them were just too expensive.

Then I stumbled upon K9.

K9 offers an impressive, fully-customizable array of blocking categories. You can set them from high to none, or customize which categories or sites you want blocked. It will email usage reports and alerts, if you wish. It has a three-strikes-and-you’re-out option. It also allows custom overrides for blocked categories, either permanently or temporarily. It will monitor Peer2Peer and Instant Messaging. It can automatically set all online searches to a safe mode. You can limit time spent on the internet and prevent phishing. It maintains both a comprehensive list of categorized sites as well a real-time dynamic rating system for uncategorized sites.

Pheww. There’s probably more that I’m still not aware of, but for now I think I’m set.

K9 does not monitor email at all, but we solved that by having a single log-in on our computer. Nobody has their own desktop. We all share one desktop. Which means we all share the same email program. We all have our own email addresses, but we all use the same email program to look at them. That means I can read my children’s mail. And my children can read mine. Mutual accountability. Mutual respect.

None of us uses online chat or instant messaging. None of us maintains any social networking accounts, like Facebook (I hate being trendy!) I want my children to value fellowship and accountability, which I don’t think happens online. Many may disagree with me, but I’m not sure that you can really get to know someone online. You can’t be true friends with someone you have never met. You are merely acquaintances, if that. But I digress into another post.

Please be careful about what little eyes in your home see. Get K9. It’s free. It works.

Okay, not chocolate. But if it were chocolate, that would be the only way it could be better than this: Free worship stuff!

Sovereign Grace Ministries recently opened their entire resource library for free download.

Many of the conference messages also have a PDF of the notes handed out by the speaker. If you like, you can buy the messages on CD as well.

Sovereign Grace hosts an annual worship conference, so there are dozens and dozens of great sermons about worship, and practical discussions about being a musician and writing songs to check out.

The conference I was talking about in my last post is here.

If you are interested in starting your own blog, for instance to post some great deep thoughts for WonderfulWorship, here is a great set of short web videos on how to get started.

Knowledgeable, patient folks from blogger and wordpress talk you through the process of getting your very own place on the web.

Sometimes I think others spend as much time as I do collecting small shiny objects online. So I don’t often share links of things I find interesting. Yet, on those blogs I read regularly, one of the things I love, is that they share other links of things they found interesting.

So, I’m sharing the following link, because I find I’m constantly mentioning it to people.

Alex and Brett Harris (sons of Gregg Harris from HSLDA, and brother to Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and others) run a website blog dedicated to helping young people rebel against the current youth culture of rebellion: The Rebelution.

In February, they unveiled a Modesty Survey that is both well done and informative.

My daughters and I spent hours pouring over the numbers and the responses. It is wonderful to have some outside confirmation for my daughters about some of the guidelines we have in place in our home.

I’m not a trendy person (in fact MrPages and I have been known to do the exact opposite of the trends!) and I do not believe in getting on any bandwagons, but I do think that every parent and every child, approaching or in their young adulthood, should spend some time reading this survey.

I thought I might add my two cents worth to MrPages blog about Useful Computer Utilities - All Things Audio.

As a homeschooling momma I love Media Monkey and Audacity! (I haven’t used the Multi Track program yet, but I can see lots of potential!)

Our CD collection began to dwindle quickly as little hands began growing and using the CD player. The strangest damage would occur to what I once thought of as highly durable items.

Me: How did the silver on this CD get scraped off like this?

Them: ???

We began to copy all our CD’s onto the computer and pack away the originals in child proof containers. Then we would use Windows Media Player to listen to music. It’s a temperamental little program though, and the LittlePages kept having problems.

Me: Who changed my background? Where is the Start bar? Why is my computer hung?

Them: ???

So MrPages set me up with Media Monkey and it was love at first use. Now I load it up, put it in Party Mode and the Little Pages can listen to whatever music choices they desire, including their French and Latin CD’s. (Which we sporadically pretend to be learning…) (That’s another blog…)

The best part? No damage to any of our CD’s or the computer!

My children love the freedom of picking tunes from a myriad of CD’s and I love the security.

Audacity is just plain fun to use! We have a microphone that plugs into our computer (MrPages can give details about that, if anyone is interested) and then we use Audacity to record my childrens’ narrations. They don’t need my immediate presence, and they improve their oration as well as their narration because they get to hear exactly what they sound like!

The best part? You can use audacity to make yourself sound like Alvin & The Chipmunks!!

I want to post some notes on the utilities that I find useful. I’m on my PC 9 or more hours a day. I work on the PC and I have a lot of my hobbies on the PC, so I have some definite likes and dislikes, and I have the time to research best-of-breed solutions for problems that I have. So, you get to hear about them. Lucky you.

For the inaugural post, I will discuss all things sound-related.

MP3 Player and Organizer - Windows Media Player comes free with windows. Everyone likes iTunes and it comes free with an iPod or with the install of QuickTime. I happen to like neither.

I use MediaMonkey and love it. I like the way I can manage my MP3s exact locations on disk, I like the tag management utilities, I like the disk utilities, I like “party mode” which lets the kids add songs to the playlist but not mess around with the database, I like the player. The free version has almost everything the paid version has, but you need to tell it to look for new songs when you add them to your hard drive. The paid version does that automatically.

We have it installed on two different computers, and all of our MP3s on a computer on the network. MrsPages and the little Pages can listen to what they want upstairs while I have my office door shaking with my own choices of music. Great stuff.

Audio Editing - No question here at all. Whether you want to get into detailed editing of a sound file to remix a song, or just to cut a long ending off an MP3, you need to try Audacity. It’s free, it’s high-powered and it’s simple.

“But I’ve never needed to edit audio!” you say? Well, how about being able to move some of those old cassette tapes to MP3 so you can listen to them on your iPod? (Want to know how specifically? Let me know and I’ll write up a set of easy instructions). Want to make some of your MP3s smaller file sizes so you can cram more of them onto your iPod? Want to remove some hiss from those old vinyl recordings? Want to trim that stupid “hidden track” that makes your favorite song 34 minutes long on the CD? Audacity does it.

MultiTrack Recording — I know there are some musicians that read this page, and this one’s for you. Reaper Multitrack. Free (they ask you to pay if you can, but it’s uncrippled) software that does most of what very expensive studio packages like CakeWalk, ProTools and Cubase can do, but for free. It supports VST, VSTi and DX plugins. Great piece of software, especially given the price of its “competitors”.

If you want any more information of help with these programs, let me know. I’ve used them all pretty extensively, or can get you in touch with people who can help.

I’ve looked for a while to find a program to use to organize and view and edit my digital photos.

I quite liked the slick interface of Picasa by Google, but the feature that is touted as its strength is one I hated: the ability to have virtual albums without rearranging the files on disk. I like having the files rearranged on disk into directories and subdirectories. I don’t have the time or desire to tag every image with the names of every person in the picture and the location and all of that so I can call up every image of MrsPages in one fell swoop. If you do, this program is for you. You take the pictures off your camera and leave them where they sit. Picasa lets you organize them, and keeps track of which picture belong together, so you never have to reorganize the files on your hard drive.

I want my photos to be divided into subdirectories by year, then by month, then by event:

I want to be able to automatically browse them that way. I had a hard time getting Picasa to even show me a directory structure, because it was so “friendly” that it wanted to keep me away from all that.

I now use (and love) Faststone Image Viewer. It doesn’t have “albums”, it just lets me look through my carefully named folders on disk. It has some great features for doing touch-ups, cropping, resizing and other basic (and not-so-basic) photo operations. A great viewer, powerful editor, and it’s FREE.

As a bonus, it comes with a fabulous batch editor. You can take an entire directory of photos and resize them (for upload to a website for example) and add watermarks or text. Check out the galleries on the Manitoba Living History website to see that in action.

Faststone is easy to use, very powerful, and lets me work the way I want to work. What more can you ask?