Greetings from Missouri. All you've been hearing on the news is about flooding in Missouri but all we've seen is the beautiful hills of the Ozarks with gorgeous weather. We had a great rally at RV-Dreams, check out the video and you can see what a great time it was. Right now we're relaxing for a couple weeks and gettting ready for the next rallies. We'll be in Iowa at the Safari rally from July 1-5; the Country Coach rally from July 8-11 and then on to St. Paul for the FMCA rally. We've been working hard at updating all our seminars and making some more tutorial videos. As always, you can keep track of us by watching our blog at: www.geeksontour.blogspot.com.

In this newsletter

• Weekly articles in RV.net
• What's happening to AVG's anti-virus program
• Using Picasa to prepare photos for other programs

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.

Weekly articles in RV.net

In case you don't know RV.net, you need to check it out. There's lots of stuff there, but I think that every RVer needs to be aware of the forums and the Blog. The forums are a place where you can ask anything about RVing and get dozens of answers within minutes. It's a very active forum.

The Blog is something they just started this year. They started with the concept of a group blog, and I think it was brilliant. They put out feelers for people who wanted to write on different topics related to RVing, signed them all up as authors for the blog. Within a few short months, the blog accumulated more RVing information than can be found in any other single place. Everything from photography in Alaska, to cooking local dishes, to boondocking on public lands, to parking in Casinos, to using computers on the road. I especially enjoy the videos by 'The Long Long Honeymoon' And, guess who writes the computer articles?

That's right, every Thursday I write an article about something related to using computers while RVing. I often include a short tutorial video. Sometimes I take the subject from something I've written before, but most of the time it is new content. As subscribers to this newsletter, I want to make sure you know about these articles in case I cover something there and not here. Here are my articles from the past month:

I Love my Satellite Internet
Of Mice and Laptops (how to customize your touchpad)
Internet on the Road, Bandwidth Limits
Emailing Photos with Picasa
Windows Vista and Wi-Fi

And, you can always go to Blog.RV.net and use the search feature to see all the articles by 'Geeks on Tour.' Or you can use this link: RV.net articles by Geeks on Tour .

AVG's Free Anti-Virus program

If you have followed our advice over the last few years, you very likely are using the free anti-virus software from AVG. And, you probably have recently seen this notice about AVG 7.5 no longer being supported.

If you're not careful when following AVG's directions, you may end up purchasing their software rather than getting the free version. There *is* still a free version. I found that if I used the link down in the small print, it took me directly to the download page for the free version.

So, is 8.0 better or worse than 7.5? We don't really know yet. AVG Free 7.5 was just anti-virus. AVG Free 8.0 is both anti-virus and anti-spyware. Although that may be good, we kind of liked that it did only one thing and did it very well.

I have upgraded to the 8.0 version and it seems fine. We have heard some grumbling about it being slow or having problems. With millions of people using it, there's bound to be some problems. CNET gave it a good review. I've trusted CNET for years as the consumer reports of the computer world, so that's good enough for me.

Using Picasa to prepare photos for other programs ● Watch the Video

Picasa is such a nice program for managing all the photos on your computer. And, since it is integrated with Picasa Web Albums, and most email programs, it's single-click easy to upload your photos to the web or send them in an email. Picasa automatically resizes them and applies all your edits.

But, what if you want to use your photos in some other program? One that isn't integrated with Picasa? For example, let's say you took a picture of a group of buffalo .. err I mean Bison (we learned that you're supposed to call them bison, but they still look like buffalo to me.) Anyway, this picture is on your computer as C:\pictures\NDakota\bison.jpg. In Picasa, you decide to crop it down to zoom in on the one big buffalo (oops, there I go again) in the middle.

OK, that looks good. And, if you email this, or upload it to a Web Album, you'll get the zoomed in version. But, if you want to put it into a Word document and you use the Word command to insert C:\pictures\NDakota\bison.jpg you might be surprised to see the whole herd! That's because Picasa does not alter your original photo, it keeps your edits in an overlay file called picasa.ini. See the Picasa video on 'How Picasa Handles edits for more info.

When you use Picasa to email or upload to Web Album, it applies those edits. But, if you look at the original photo, it is unchanged. It will also be the full size of the original which is probably much to big for your document.

What you need to do is use the Export command. When you Export, you are creating a new original. All your edits will be applied, and you can specify what size to make it. Size is measured in pixels. The original photo of the bison is 2048 pixels wide. The images in this article are 300 pixels wide. I used the Export command to create the images I used in this article.

To Export, what you do is select the photo or photos to be exported, click the Export button at the bottom, and specify the location and the size for the resulting files. You will find a video about this on the Picasa Video page and it's called "Preparing photos for other programs with Export."

That's all for now. Thanks for reading. 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.

Chris Guld
www.GeeksOnTour.com