March has been busy. We left Fort Lauderdale and visited our favorite Thousand Trails park at Peace River for a couple days, then stayed at Torrey Oaks park just up the road and gave a couple of our seminars there.

The FMCA convention was a huge success for us, the special hands-on boot camp was sold out within one hour. And, registration started at 7am on a stormy morning!

So you don't miss anything, here's a list of other articles we've written this month:
Picasa Tip: Outdoor-Indoor Collage
Internet with Tethered Cell Phone
Picasa Tip: Flipping Photos
GPS - Which do you prefer?
Picasa Tip: Fill-in Preprinted Forms
Adding Video to your Blog
Picasa Tip: How folders get Dated

In this newsletter

• Geeks on Tour Videos on Disk
• Is your Computer Safe?
• Offline Blogging with Live Writer
• We're all a-Twitter

www.GeeksOnTour.com  
An online classroom offering Computer Education for Travelers with 'Show-Me-How' tutorial Videos on Picasa, Blogger, Google Earth, Basic Windows Computing and more

Geeks on Tour Tutorial Videos on Disk

We've made a lot of new videos over the last few months (we're over 140 now - about 14 hours worth) and we've re-authored our disks accordingly. We've divided them up into 2 categories:

1. Boot Camp: videos on how to use your computer, Essentials, Vista, Safe Computing and Internet connections. Disk includes a 40 page self-study booklet.
2. Travelers Collection: videos on how to use fun software of interest to travelers. Picasa for managing digital photos, Photo Story for fancy slide shows, Blogger for travelog websites, and Google Earth and Maps.

Is your computer Safe?

You may have heard of a nasty virus about to come to life on April 1. It would be nice if this was an April Fools joke, but odds are - it's not. It's called Conficker and its all the buzz in geek-land these days. If your computer is infected, it is supposed to start contacting servers on April 1 and get instructions as to what to do. No one knows exactly what this will mean, but it could be pretty awful. Millions of zombie computers around the world all set to march to the bidding of some dark lord. An infected computer could become pretty worthless to its rightful owner.

The good news is, if you've followed our 'Safe Computing' advice and kept your Windows operating system up-to-date, then you're fine. Microsoft has known about this vulnerability and they patched it back last October. If you've been running your automatic updates, you downloaded the patch last year that makes it impossible to contract the virus now.

The bad news is, if your computer is already infected, it's difficult to fix. One of the features of the virus is that websites containing tools to remove Conficker are blocked by Conficker. For more technical info specifically on this new virus, we recommend the Windows Secrets newsletter.

So, here's what we think you should do:
go to www.safety.live.com. That's the direct address to Microsoft's free safety scanner, 'Onecare.' If you can get to that site, you don't have the Conficker virus. But, as long as you're there, you may as well run the scan! Even if you have a good, up-to-date antivirus and anti-spyware an occasional scan with another program, like Onecare safety scanner, is a good idea. A second opinion, if you will.

This is also a good time to check and be sure that your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are active and up-to-date. A good place to look for this information is in your Security Center. You'll find it in your Control Panel. Or, if you have Vista, all you have to do is click Start and type Security Center - now you'll see it at the top of the list and you can click or press Enter to open it.

We think you'll find the following videos helpful :

Microsoft's Onecare Safety Scanner (members only)

Check your Windows Security Center (everyone can view this one)

Blogging Offline with Windows Live Writer

A while ago, in our personal blog I wrote about discovering Windows Live Writer. It is a program, freely downloadable from Microsoft, which allows you to compose blog entries offline. It works with several blogging systems, including the 2 I use - Blogger and WordPress. After you compose your blog post, it will take care of uploading it to the web, including the pictures.

Last week, we had some trouble with our Internet connection and I wanted to write a blog post, so I dusted off Live Writer and gave it another shot. It's really an amazing little program! I'm using it now, even when my Internet connection is working fine. You may have noticed a couple of my posts last week had maps as part of the blog post, and the maps don't come from my normal Google Maps. They're from Virtual Earth, Microsoft's competitor to Google Earth. That's because I used Live Writer to insert the map. Since Live Writer is by Microsoft, it uses Microsoft's maps.

Live Writer makes it just SOO easy to insert a map. It's also waayy easy to insert a link, and the links automatically open in a new window! If you've been using Blogger, you know that making a link open in a new window is a painful process there. If you hate how Blogger adds new photos to the top of your post, you'll love how Live Writer adds them at your cursor position. AND, you can even set it up to so that your photos get uploaded to your own hosted webspace (FTP) rather than Blogger's servers!

Maybe the best part is that, since you're writing the post on your computer and letting Live Writer upload it to Blogger, you have an automatic backup. The drafts are all on your computer. If something happened to your blog, these drafts could be re-uploaded.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. It's a free download at the link above. The first thing is to set up your blog by clicking on the Blog menu and 'Add blog account...'

From then on it's pretty much like writing your post on Blogger. Give the post a title, type the text, use the 'insert' options at the right to add pictures, links, maps, etc. When you're done, click 'Publish' in the upper right corner. If I hear from enough of you, I might just do some tutorial videos on Live Writer.

We're all a-Twitter

Yes, we're trying to be part of the tweet generation! We also have facebook accounts. And FMCA Community, and Plaxo, and Linked In, and ... and ... and ...

The proliferation of social networking sites is overwhelming. But, Twitter and Facebook have become just too popular to ignore, so we're on there trying to figure out what it all means. (anybody know where Mr. Natural is?)

If you don't know about Twitter - think of it like a micro-blog. People write whatever they want, whenever they want, but they're limited to 140 characters. So each writing is short. Jim is doing the twittering for Geeks on Tour. If you'd like to follow along, you can do exactly that. It's called 'Following.' You need your own Twitter account (it's free and easy) and then you just go to the Geeks on Tour Twitter page and click on the 'Follow' link. After you do that, all of our Tweets will show up on your Twitter page. If you'd like to just see the last few 'tweets', we've added that to the sidebar of our blog ... on the left, just below 'Recent Posts.'

Most of us think that it's weird and frivolous to write a sentence about whatever is on your mind and think that anyone cares. But, there's no denying that a phenomenon is occuring here, and we want to know where it is leading. Check out this video by the co-founder of Twitter, discussing some of the unexpected uses of Twitter.

That's all for now. We hope you learned something. Your next issue will be next month. Any questions, please email us. If you like this newsletter, please forward it on to your friends! If you received this issue forwarded by a friend you can subscribe to get your own copy delivered to your in box - it's free. To see the archives of past newsletters, go to www.geeksontour.com/newsletters.

Happy Computing!

The Geeks on Tour website is an online classroom for Travelers who want to learn to use their computers for managing digital photos, making blogs, using maps and other online resources. Anyone can watch our free sample videos, read articles on our Articles and Links Blog, sign up for our free monthly newsletter, or Picasa weekly tips. A small fee makes you a 'member' and you can then view any of our 140+ video tutorials on these subjects. If you're an RV traveler and you have a Web site, please add it to our list.