By Jon Kenton

Q. I am sure I must be the last person on the planet with dial-up Internet, but I have finally decided to get a broadband service. I have looked at my local cable and telephone companies who offer broadband, but just heard about Muni Wi-Fi. What is this?

A. Muni or Municipal Wi-Fi is where a city deploys a wireless network across all or parts of its geography. The equipment is mostly outside, and if you are in the coverage area you can gain access inside your home, in the garden, and anywhere else in the city. An independent company usually constructs and manages the network. Some cities offer the service for free; others do charge, but rates can be lower. Here in the Valley, there is a Muni network in Tempe. Chandler and Gilbert are in the works.

Q. I volunteer at a local charity and am putting together a newsletter. All sorts of people have sent me contributions. The pictures and graphics seem to be in loads of different formats: JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PSD, BMP, etc. This is very confusing. Can you explain what they all are and how I manage them?

A. That could be a very long answer, but let me try to give you a quick primer lesson. The first thing you probably already know about images is that they can be very large. This has lead to the development of compression techniques to make them smaller. There are two basic types of compression. One actually removes data, thereby reducing quality; the other does not. They are known as lossy and lossless compression techniques or algorithms; I bet you can guess which is which. Most of the files you will deal with are known as bitmaps. Essentially, the data represents a map of individual pixels, and the value of each pixel is a color. The more colors, the more bits, and the larger the file. The popular formats are:

GIF and BMP, used primarily for graphics, shapes, clip art, logos, etc. BMP is a Microsoft Windows bitmap and is usually uncompressed, creating larger files. GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format files, are limited to only 256 colors and use a lossless compression.

JPEG, now the most commonly known file type and used by all digital cameras, is a lossy format, but can support up to 24 bits of color information per pixel (that’s over 16 million colors). Its benefit comes in a variable compression scheme that can dramatically reduce file size, but at a cost in quality. If you don’t compress too much, JPEG quality is more than acceptable and is overall a very efficient and flexible format.

TIFF is a very high-quality lossless format; however, unless you have a need to keep every last pixel intact and create giant poster-size prints, I wouldn’t recommend using it, as the files are huge!

The PSD file you mentioned is the format used in Adobe Photoshop’s image-editing software. It keeps lots of extra manipulation information along with the bitmap. It’s a must if you are a Photoshop user.

The easy answer to how to manage all these submissions is to ask all your contributors to stick to one format. JPEG would be the best. If you have to convert files, invest in some simple image editing software. Do check that all the basic formats are supported.

By Jon Kenton

Dear Tech Master:
I have had my iPod for about six months now. I have finished loading all my old CDs into my library and have bought lots of music online. I am totally hooked on digital media. I would now like to stop using CDs in my car, and wonder what my options are to be able to use my iPod instead.

Dear Cybermusic Lover:
There are three primary ways to listen to your iPod through your car stereo.

1. FM Transmitters These units contain a radio transmitter that you can program to an unused local frequency. You then play your iPod as usual, tune in your radio, and listen—it’s as simple as that. This solution works fine, but the quality is sometimes not that great. Furthermore, in most major metropolitan cities, it can be hard to find a free frequency slot so there can be interference from overlapping stations.
2. Phono Jacks Many new cars now come ready fitted with stereos that can accept an MP3 player connection via a phono jack/socket (similar to the headphone jack). You may see the socket on the head unit, in the dash, in the glove box, or on the center armrest. If you have an older car, most good after-market units have this feature. Simply connect a cable from the iPod’s headphone socket to the one in the car, set the radio to “aux,” and that’s it! The quality will be much better with this connection.
3. Direct Connect The base connector of an iPod has multiple functions: synchronizing, power, audio out, and control. If your car stereo has an aux function, you can buy an after-market kit that will directly connect into the rear of the stereo. A cable that will plug into your iPod’s base connector will be routed to a convenient location, e.g. dash cubby or center console. The operation is similar to Option 2, but has the advantage of also charging your iPod. Depending on the type of head unit you have, you may also be able to view tracks on the display and be able to control the iPod from the main and steering column controls.

Dear Techno Wizard:
I have recently started using Microsoft Office much more heavily and find myself working on multiple Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. I do a lot of combining elements from all three document types and am forever copying and pasting. Is there a way to keep the copied items so that I can reuse them over and over without having to go back to the original?

Dear Copy-Cat:
There most certainly is! It’s called the Office Clipboard. Every time you copy something from within an MS Office application, it is stored in the clipboard. From within any of the applications, click Edit and you will find it. Click this menu item, and the clipboard will open in its own task pane. Once items are on the clipboard, you may paste them either singly or all together into your new document.

Q. We have recently had a new baby girl. Our parents live on the other side of the country and we want to e-mail regular photos. We have had lots of problems with e-mails not sending or not getting through. If they are received, our parents complain that they take forever to download. They only have dial-up. Why are we having so much trouble, and how can we improve things?

A. First, let me congratulate you on your beautiful daughter. I am sure you are taking lots of pictures and capturing priceless memories. Your problem is very common and is a by-product of the modern digital camera. Most new cameras are now capable of outstanding quality as a result of their large image sensors (8–10 megapixels are not unusual). The downside, from an e-mail perspective, is that each photo becomes a very large file—in this example, approximately 2MB. If you attach multiple photos to an e-mail, the size of each e-mail will be 2MB times the number of photos. Here is where you run into your first problem: most e-mail systems have a built-in e-mail size limit (aimed to prevent congestion), usually a maximum of 10MB, sometimes less. If you try to send an e-mail this big, it may be rejected by the network. If they do get through, receiving such a large e-mail on a dial-up line could take nearly thirty minutes. If you are sending multiples, I can see why your parents are frustrated.

Basically, you need to make smaller files for e-mail purposes—640×480 or smaller would be ideal. You want the file size less than 100K, which is one-twentieth of your large photo. There are a few simple solutions:

1. Many cameras have an option to create a smaller (e-mail size) photo along with the large one. Set this option and just e-mail the small version.
2. All image-editing software can create smaller files. Some have automated functions to do this. If not, look for features called resize and compress. Resize to 640×480 or smaller and set compression to medium or below. Check the file size this creates until you hit the value you want. Don’t forget to make a copy of the original, as you don’t want to lose the high-resolution file.
3. Another option would be to subscribe to a photo-sharing site such as flickr.com or something similar. This way, you can download all the photos you want to share and then everybody can view them online. If they want copies, you can e-mail individual files or they can order prints directly from the sharing site.

Q. I have three different e-mails. I access them all over the Web, and it becomes a pain logging on and checking each of them multiple times a day. Is there an easy way to consolidate and automate my e-mail access?

A. Most certainly. I have four accounts and access them all through the same interface. I use Microsoft Outlook. This is a purchasable product but also comes with some of the Microsoft Office bundles. It is also possible to configure with Microsoft Outlook Express. There are fewer options and not as much functionality, but OE is installed free with all Microsoft operating systems.

You will need to know some technical details about your various e-mail accounts and need to come to grips with some jargon such as POP3, IMAP, and SMTP. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or e-mail provider will usually have some help files online that will provide you with the necessary information. The Microsoft support site has detailed instructions for configuring both products. Check out these links:

• How to configure Internet e-mail accounts in Outlook: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287532/en-us

• How to configure Outlook Express 6.0 for Internet mail: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B171163

If you have a different version of Outlook Express, search the support site for specific instructions. You will also find specific details for configuring popular online e-mail accounts such as AOL and Hotmail. With some reading and a little effort, you will be able to access all your e-mails from the same place.

By Jon Kenton

Q. I have a PC that has served me well for the past three years. but recently it has started to run slower and slower. I use it primarily for general office-type applications, letters, e-mails, etc. I also store music and connect to my MP3 player. I recently bought a new digital camera and download my photos on to the PC. Why is it now going so slowly? Is it broken?

A. Your PC is probably not physically broken, as a hardware problem is usually pretty black and white—it either works 100 percent, or it doesn’t. Performance problems are more likely to be software-related. There are two main reasons for a slow PC. First, you may now be overtaxing it and running out of resources. Second, you may have become infected with a virus, Trojan, or other malware.

First, you need to assess whether it runs slowly all the time or only when you are using certain applications. If you have installed and begun using new applications such as photo-editing software (you mentioned a new camera) and it’s when you run these that everything slows down, you are probably low on system resources—most likely memory. A three-year-old system might be a low configuration, with only 256MB of memory. This would be OK for word processing and e-mail, but even a simple photo-editing program would begin to exhibit speed issues with this limited amount of memory. These days, 512MB should be the bare minimum, and I would recommend 1GB or more if you want to do advanced photo work. Check your system properties, and if it shows less than 512MB, consider a memory upgrade.

If your system runs slowly all the time, even directly after it’s turned on, then you may have picked up a virus. No PC should run without virus protection, so if you don’t have any, run out to your local big-box PC store and buy any of the popular products like Norton or MacAfee. Install the software, run a full-system scan, and let it deal with anything it finds.

If things don’t improve, you may need to use tools to check for Trojans or malware. There are a few freeware products available that do a good job. Check out Spybot Search and Destroy (www.safer-networking.org) and Ad-Aware SE Personal from Lavasoft (www.lavasoftusa.com). Download, install, and run one or both of these, and fix whatever they find. I’d say that 98 percent of the problems I see can be fixed by this stage. If you still have problems, then it’s time to call in a professional.

Q. I use Windows XP and have been hearing about Windows Vista. Should I upgrade to this new version?

A. Vista is much more than just a new version of XP. It has a radically different look and feel, and changes many things XP users will be familiar with. In my humble opinion, I would not upgrade a perfectly good working system just for the sake of having Microsoft’s newest offering. The track record of initial releases of Windows products has not been stellar; XP needed to get to SP2 to fix many issues. Unless you have a burning desire to be an early adopter, I would wait until Vista SP1 appears, and only then if there are features that Vista has that you cannot live without.

Vista does have many new features; unfortunately, there is not enough room in this issue to cover them all (look out for a future article). The most obvious one, however, is the desktop, which has had a total revamp with new gadget tools and transparent windows. Security is vastly improved, and if this is a big concern to you, is probably one of the only reasons for considering an upgrade now. If you buy nearly any new PC, it will have Vista installed, but the bottom line for existing systems is hold off for awhile—at least until SP1.