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 We made the trek east from Arizona and are now settled till the end of May at our home base in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 2400 miles and $1,070 in gas. Our favorite stop was Balmorhea in Texas. If you go to our online map, you can click on the pin in West Texas and see more details of that stop. If you like that map, I hope you've watched the videos to learn how to make your own.
As always, you can keep track of us by watching our blog at: www.geeksontour.blogspot.com.
In this newsletter
- Article #1 is about burning DVDs with Vista.
- Article #2 is about organizing pictures with sortable dates
- Article #3 is for beginners; reboot = #1 troubleshooting technique
If you know someone you think would be interested in this newsletter, please forward it to them. If you have any requests for future articles, please send us an email.
Burning DVDs with Vista
As I discussed in the last newsletter, DVDs can be used as storage media just like CDs, they're just a lot bigger. But, many of us think of DVDs as those things that play movies, and that's the type of DVD I'm referring to in this article. Specifically, if you create a movie using Photo Story 3, you may want to put that onto a DVD so it can be played on your TV.
If you don't know about Photo Story 3 for making movies from your digital photos, you may want to read the articles I wrote for RV.net blog: Movies from Photos, and Sharing Photo Story Movies.
 The end result of making a Photo Story movie is a .wmv file. This is a Windows Media Video file. It needs Windows Media Player in order for you to see it. So, copying this file to a DVD and putting it into your TV's DVD player won't work. Your TV is expecting a very different type of file ... a .vob file (video object.) If you're using Windows XP, the only way to convert a .wmv movie to a .vob movie is with 3d party software like Sonic.
Vista has a DVD movie maker built in. It's called Windows DVD Maker and it is extremely simple to use. Just open it up, tell it where your source video files are, select your options, and burn the disc. You can read more about all the options on Microsoft's site.
There's still one more thing you need to know - what type of disc to use. It must be a DVD, but there are a few different types of DVDs. DVD-R, DVD+R, and DVD-RW. RW means read and write. Once you have the movie on the DVD, you don't want to add anything else to the disc, so there is no need for the RW type. +R is kinda the new and improved format over the -R, so that would be my choice. However, it may depend on your DVD player. I found a pretty comprehensive site that lists hundreds of different DVD players makes and models and what kind of disc it can play. Check it out.
Renaming Photos with Sortable Dates
Watch Video
This tip comes from my photo filing system that I've developed over the years. Filing systems are very personal. If you've devised a system that works for you - that's cool - no need to change. But, if you haven't ... read on. Making a date 'sortable'
I'm very date-oriented and I like my pictures to be in date order regardless of what program I'm using or what device they are being seen on. I get lots of emails about wanting photos to play in date order when a Gift CD is played on a TV. Usually, the TV is just going to play them in order by the filenames. Filename is often used for sorting whether you want it to or not, so why not have the filename be a sortable date? 
Notice that each file in the right column starts with 8 digits. This is the only way to represent the date that sorts properly. Spelling out the date will result in all the April's being sorted together, regardless of what day or year. Using standard 4-21-2008 type of date notation will produce equally erroneous results. The 8 digits that sort properly are referred to as yyyymmdd. That means the first 4 digits represent the year, the next two are the month, and the last two represent the day.
Using Picasa to rename files
In Picasa, you can accomplish this by selecting all the photos that you want to rename to a particular date, press F2, and type the appropriate 8 digits. Picasa knows that no two files can have the exact same name and it will add a -1, -2, -3 etc. to the end. That's OK. As long as the first 8 characters of the filename are a sortable date, these photos will automatically be kept in date order, regardless of what program you are using to view them.
Realize that you cannot add a prefix number to filenames when you rename. Therefore, I rename photos immediately after importing them from the camera. So, at the very least all my photos have a filename that means the date it was taken. Then, if you want words after the date, you can add them later. See the Picasa Show-Me-How video, "Renaming photos with a sortable date."
Date-based folders
I also like to group my photos together by month, so each month I create a folder named with the corresponding 6 digits: 200802, 200803, 200804 etc. This makes it especially easy to keep track of backups. At the end of each month, I create a backup of that month's folder.
I used to create a folder for a year, then have subfolders for each month: January, February, etc. However, in Picasa, if you sort by name - you would end up seeing all the April folders, then all the August folders regardless of year. Using the sortable date system for my folders works much better.
Show-Me-How video tutorial: It's a lot easier to show you what I mean than to explain it all in writing. Check out the new video on Picasa and Sortable Dates.
Reboot is still #1 fix
We leave our computers on all the time. In the Vista documentation it even promotes the notion that you should simply put your computer to sleep rather than turning it off. However, you still need to restart once in a while.
Like right now.
Something is clogged up in my computer. I click on my email program in the task bar and it refuses to come up. I click on another open program, and it just beeps at me. If I was a *real* geek, I might look into all my running processes, eliminate them one by one and discover the culprit. But, I don't have the time for that! Time to reboot - the good ole standby technique that fixes 90% of all computer problems.
I shouldn't say 'reboot.' That's what it was called years ago, when you would accomplish it by holding down the Alt, Ctrl and Del keys simultaneously. Back when Jim was a computer network administrator and technical support guy for a company with about 75 employees. He wouldn't even listen to their problem until they had rebooted their computer. Only if the problem persisted after a reboot did he consider it his job to fix it! Just like the famous Dilbert cartoon, 'Shut up and Reboot.'
Now it's called 'Restart', and you get to it by clicking the Start button (makes about as much sense as pressing the Off button to turn my cell phone on!) In XP, you continue by clicking on 'Shut Down', then you'll see an option to restart. In Vista - they've hidden it! After clicking on the Start button, move your mouse to the right and click the arrow to see the shutdown options. Aha! There it is:
I'll be back in a minute ...
Ahhhh ... it's all better now.
Sometimes it is not possible to close all your programs cleanly. You can always turn off your computer by holding the power switch for several seconds. It is possible to lose some data you might have been working on when you do this, but it will turn off.
I like to reboot my life once in a while too! I think that's what RVing is all about.
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