Summer changes

Given that school starts again in two odd weeks and that when that happens I will no longer be a compulsory secondary education student anymore, I've decided to finally close this blog, leave it as it is now, and open a new one where I won't only be ranting about Computing but about everything else too.
I thought this was a good idea since this blog was created for a reason and with a purpose, both of which have already been wholly fulfilled, and it wouldn't make much sense if I continued to use Computing 4ºESO after 4ºESO.
If anybody is interested, my new blog can be found here: The Life After ESO and like I said, it's going to verse on everything related to school that I find I can share.

End of school year

Nine months of hard work, struggle and stress have finally come to an end, and now I find myself at home, comfortably devoting all my free time (which is more than I could have ever bargained for) to those small pleasures that unfortunately are never available for me to enjoy during the school year, finally welcoming the new season and the deserved break I'd been waiting for. Given that this blog was mainly created with educational purposes rather than to rant about my private life, I don't think I will continue to post anything of interest, and I intend to close the blog as it is with this entry.

I am no enthusiast of the current education system, and yet I must say that in spite of the many difficulties presented since September, my last year in mandatory secondary school can well be considered the best of the four I have taken so far, not only because I have at long last been able to choose what to study but because I have come across some very nice people that have undoubtedly made this rather stressful and oppressing experience of a school year a lot better, and if I call the last nine months 'stressful' and 'oppressing' it is because my classmates and I have struggled endlessly through a constant pile of homework, assignments and exams that could knock anyone of our level down, and that, in fact, have derived in several anxiety attacks.

And yet, despite all of this, I have thoroughly enjoyed the company of my teachers and classmates, found new friends, loyal, trust-worthy and amazing friends, and lost those close friends I thought would never replace me but that in the end have done so. I have found satisfaction in my working hours, learned new things and encountered little things that have changed my perceptions and made me have faith. I have done all I could not to crumble and I am proud of how far I have come, and I am proud of those who have been there helping or suffering with me. 

To those who have taught me with passion and love and eagerness for what they teach, thank you, don't let this mean, ugly world let you believe you can't teach beautifully instead of teach heartlessly. 

To those who have tried to teach me that we youths are a (literal quote) 'worthless pile of swines who couldn't handle being in charge of a country even if we wanted to', thanks for the tip and you're entitled an opinion, but the difference between your opinion and pizza is that I did ask for pizza. Oh, and, as a matter of fact, we "youths" will run the country one day and will pay you for your years of service when you retire. Kindly remember that, please. We may not have lived a war, but we are smart enough not to start one like some of you did.

To those who have not only been my teachers but my friends, I admire you and I respect you more than I can say here. Keep on showing us mercy when we've wronged, keep on helping us get on our feet when we have fallen, for we are thankful. As thankful as one can be. Your doings will not be left to oblivion.

And finally, to those classmates who keep a warm and beautiful environment, who crack jokes and show affection despite them being somewhat contrary to that, I owe you more than one laugh and one or two chess games. Thank you, guys. 

To those who call themselves friends but won't be there when you need them, thank you anyways, one learns from both the people that bring us down and the people that pick us up. Nevertheless, I am still there for you if you shall need a shoulder.

To those who in few days have conquered me with their true personalities and with whom I have shared more than you could in a lifetime, I can't even begin to describe the pure admiration and affection and loyalty I feel, but it is possible I might have dropped you a line or two at some point. Thank you too. A million thank yous.

I will always remember all of you, friends and foes, because all of you have made this year unforgettable. Some of you I will see when summer is over, some of you will disappear forever from this town, but may this entry serve as remembrance that you all existed, that some of you failed to be there and that some of you will be in my heart forever, whether it be because of the reasons mentioned above, because of other reasons you will individually know of or because of reasons whose existence only I know of.

Thank you all, have a nice day and a wonderful summer vacation.

How to disappear from the Internet

Seldom does one go on the net without eventually coming across the usual "How to" posts about virtually anything. Well, if you're trying to disengage from the online life, one of these might be helpful. In particular, you're looking for this one: how to disappear from the Internet.

Of course, the first thing you must do is deactivate completely every single website you have ever logged in, including social sites, game sites, and forums, which are a little more complicated to delete posts from as you may have only used them once or twice and may not remember exactly when, making the process long and exhausting but still worth your while. Then, you should proceed to delete photographs you may have ever been tagged in, uploaded or posted. This is paramount.

Then, after you've made sure everything related to you has been successfully eliminated, you should search your own name in Google to double-check if there's any lost pictures or forums you have forgotten. If nothing comes up, you're good to go. If not, it would do to dig in a little more until you've finished deleting everything.

There are many, many sites that provide this information much more clearly than I could possibly ever manage to, so I'm going to attach some of them:

• This is the wikihow article
• This is a very specific article
• This is the article that I've read more thoroughly

They basically say the same in different words, but some of them are more specific on some issues, so it's important to give them a read. And if it's possible, it might be even better to read everything you can about the deletion before you actually do it.

Videopad

Videopad. The cause of many, many headaches during the past two months and since the first time I downloaded it on my laptop. For weeks I tried grappling with insufficient features and demo-versions that didn’t let me move on to the next actualization, all in vain. It’s slow, there’s not a proper downloadable version on the Internet, any version you download it’s temporary and will be obsolete in days, and even though I was about to fall for the usual lie they tell you about buying the actual software in order to get better features and decent outcomes, I simply was – am – unwilling to waste time and money on something that has already been proven to be utterly useless. Nevertheless, duty called and I couldn’t quit the project without it affecting my final grade on Computing, so I coped. Adding to my previous analysis of the programme, after having used up at least ten different demo-versions, I could not longer export any project at all from Videopad owing to the restrictions of these versions, and that has been my major problem for the past weeks. All my work, lost forever. My efforts, forgotten. I had to give everything up and go instead for a cheap, easy, quick project that I was only going to be able to work on at school. So here I am, angrily writing in my desk, completely aware of the damage Videopad has caused, and finally resigned to the fact that this time, in spite of the many hours I invested on my first projects that were likely to turn out perfect, everything I’ve done and spent time on will not be reflected on my grades. So, no, I am not content with this software. I have worked with it for months and the results were poor, slow, and not what I wanted them to be. Whenever I exported something, it came out much slower, with the different tracks and clips mixed up at times I had not programmed them to. After saving more than three times in a session, it closed up and warned me I had no more try-outs in the demo-version and had to buy the professional one if I wanted to continue working. Then, no, I do not want to. It may be useful if you find a good version, decent, at least, considerably inefficient, though, but it is something. If I had nothing else to go on, of course I would have to choose it. But given that my interest on video edition can be repressed for the moment, I’ll simply wait for a better, free, video software that responds correctly and doesn’t leave me hanging when I really need it to work at its best.

Net security

As you can probably see from my last three posts, the main issue to be discussed in Computing lessons today is internet security. Why? Well, because we live around the Internet and it lives thanks to us. Threats are out there, our computers aren't well-protected, and we know nothing about antivirus, passwords or bugs: it all screams "come and get me" as though it would if we shouted this at our neighbors right before going on holiday. Results? Your computer gets infected with virus, you don't safely surf the net, and you're constantly exposed to whatever awaits out there. The easy solution would be to simply ignore this all and ask somebody else to solve it for you, say, call a cousin to install a reliable antivirus, or ask a friend about how to disable cookies; but if you are really concerned about what you are dealing with and how to avoid it, then reading will help. Articles or wikipedia, blogs or books. It doesn't matter as long as you find a source that speaks honest truths. 

First of all, passwords. 

• Don't make them easy to remember, that's the first signal: if you can guess it, others can too. 
• Don't make them short in any way, mix capital letters with numbers and symbols.
• Don't use anything remotely personal as a password, since anybody close enough to you will be able to guess it.
• Don't let your computer save them in a file or in its memory.

This way, anyone wishing to fake your account will find a barrier shielding it, and if you have done this well, they won't get past it.

Another thing to be taken into account is the security around our computers. Antiviruses are paramount, of course, mostly if you use Windows, because it's the more used and most commonly attacked operating system. You can pay for them or download some simpler versions on the Internet that will protect your devices just fine. All in all, if you aren't working in anything too important, then you shouldn't have to pay for an antivirus if you don't want to. But if you're working on some designs for a Formula 1 car, or you're a well-known engineer, then go shopping and bring home the best antivirus you can find out there.

Unprotected computers are bait from the first minute. I had mine like that for some time and got myself infected with adware (advertisements) and God knows what else, so I don't recommend it. You also have available onine all kinds of PC cleaners that delete the information your computer stores that you don't really need, that is, cookies, historials, etc. Needless to say that you shouldn't download anything unless you're positive it's virus-free. But if you're really interested, you can ask around and find something that suits you.

If that's not the case, I can slip something in. For me, CCleaner's been working neatly and efficiently, so I don't see why you shouldn't try. And as to antivirus, my weapon of choice was Norton for a while, then I switched to Avira, and I just find no difference between them. My PC is clean and I'm happy, the result's the same.

Given that I already ranted about WiFi and privacy in previous posts, I'll be brief here. 

• Be careful to which WiFis you connect, specially if they're open. Never trust anything that's not official.
• WPA and WPA2 passwords are the best WiFi protection-codes you can find out there. Make sure you install them correctly, though.
• Don't be too explicit about anything in your social networks of choice (Twitter, Facebook, etc). You never know who's watching and reading.
• Public opinions shouldn't be shouted from the rooftops, specially when they're not precisely nice. The same applies to the media. Don't say anything you know can be used against you.
• Keep your profiles as private as possible.
• Don't contact people you don't know.
• Make a responsible, mature, and professional use of the technology we've been given the privilege to use and life will reward you.

"Better safe than sorry."

Open WiFi = alarms beeping

Apparently, yesterday I skipped this very important topic when focusing more on social networking and less on WiFI security - which is also worthy of mention and which slipped my mind. As well as the dangers of open profiles on social networks, open WiFi networks presents a threat as well. There are people very skilled out there in the vast world that can and will access your devices if you connect to an open WiFi, and the worst thing is that we think that it's just a myth, that nobody is capable of that and that no one in their right mind would ever do such a thing. Truth is, it happens. Whenever you connect to one of those so-called free WiFi, two things may happen: either it is a reliable one, or you're about to be tracked. If it's the first one, everything's okay and there's nothing to worry about. But if it's the latter, everything you own, everything you keep, every single word you have ever said on your open profiles of any social network, every single text, everything, will suddenly belong to someone else. Someone you don't know that now will know you. That's the main reason you should never connect to an open WiFi you aren't 100% sure it's safe. But this problem doesn't just apply to free connections. If we are not careful and don't use our resources to shield our home WiFi, it is perfectly hackable, and then it is the same loop again. It may seem stupid and impossible, but at the end of the day, someone could hack your WiFi to commit a cibernetic crime, and at the end of the day, when the police force accesses your computer to investigate, the main accused will be you .. not the ones that broke the law, just you. Because it will be your computer's IP that gives you away. And nobody is going to take the blame for it.

Net security

I'm not very knowledgeable in this particular topic, but I'm going to risk it.

Like I said on previous posts, the information we share on social networks is not always as private as we think, whether it be because of the lack of protections on our profile pages or because someone has hacked it secretly, which isn't very popular but can definitely happen.

Advices on this are everywhere, and they're usually ignored out of the boredom they cause by hearing them over and over again, but they are very correct, I must say.

They're not very difficult to follow if one tries to:

• DO NOT share any sort of personal data that may cause any trouble to you in the long term, aka, phone number, address, email accounts, passwords, and (this is not obligatory, just advisable) try not to let on more than you'd like strangers to remember you by.
• LEARN how to deactivate your account in case it's necessary (e.g.: abusive relationships, your being tracked ...)
• ALWAYS make your profiles private, if possible, so that only you can access to them and see them. Of course, you can also allow your closest friends and relatives to see it too, but make sure you don't click the very well-known button saying: "my friends' friends" 
• DO NOT share very personal opinions that may entitle others to accuse you of any sort of thing related to that. (e.g.: opinions on politics, offenses to others, public declarations, etc...), nor compromising photographs.
• PLEASE keep insults as far as you can from your profiles, if you want to insult someone, insult them in your mind, it's equally satisfying and no one gets hurt.
• REMEMBER that everything we post online is indelible, and therefore, it will be there whether we like it or not.

If we have these in mind, I think it's not hard to become responsible users that are less likely to suffer from unpleasant surprises related to the lack of net security.

Social Networks

What are they? What are they used for? Have we become dependent on those that spread communication among people? Do we truly know that whatever few secrets we let loose on them can be seen by others with not as good or innocent an intention as ours?

It is pretty clear, I think, that the term social network immediately brings to mind a very nitid image of one of those websites we're hooked to on which we exchange informations about ourselves and our private lives, and, in fact, that's what they are, it just isn't the only type of social network there is.

Twitter, Facebook, Tuenti, MySpace, etc ... they are all alike, with some characteristics that make them different and easier to identify, and the four of them serve a similar purpose, the unceasing, rapid, sometimes overwhelming flow of data. That's the constant that unites these networks: the data.

These last four I mentioned share personal data, things we normally don't say or make public outdoors but that we don't hesitate in publishing there because it's considered normal, because we would be considered to be weirdos if we didn't.

Nevertheless, there are kinds and kinds of social networks. The ones flowing around the writing-reading, author-fan topic. The ones circling around art and artists. The ones mainly about blogging platforms. The work-related ones. And the criminal ones. I could go on and go investigating to edit this post and add more, but as my will-power isn't that strong, I may as well drop the issue, keep the useful information I've learned about it and try to spread it by any means possible so everybody else can hear about it too. Just a little advice, though: use them well. (Harry Potter pun totally intended)

Prezi

First of all, I feel I must apologize for the long absence, but to be honest, there are not many reliable WiFi connections around when you're in the middle of a storm. Anyhow, here I am again, now to write about Prezi, the more advanced, non-linear alternative to Power Point and SlideShare that has undoubtedly rocked my "softwared" world.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit that at first I could not get the hang of it – so many different layouts, frames, typographies, so many uncommon ways to compose (so to speak) an interactive presentation that can change directions, colors, do some insight approaches, loops and a total amount of effects and things you'll be surprised. How was I supposed to master such a complex software in just one or two days? Was it impossible?

Yes, it was. Because, even though I tried my best to turn that mess into something halfway decent, Prezi isn't for amateurs with nearly no motivation and patience (definition of me, by the way). Once you delve into its many parts, you realize how professional it all looks and how hard it must be to learn to use everything.

So, lastly, here goes my slapdash Prezi about Social Networks, a topic I will very soon be writing about.

http://prezi.com/qqlaiqjljief/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

GIMP III

For the last gimp-related project of this term, the main task consisted of blending all the recently adquired skills together to form a new picture which was supposed to look enhancingly better than the previous ones. The desired outcome was to manage to insert successfully a face into the lemon's picture.

As always, we began with a basic photograph of a lemon. It was possible to choose among the immense varieties that the Internet provides, regardless of color, size or format. My choice, rather simple if you think about it, was to merge the lemon with John Lennon's face. At first, it began as a joke, because I intended to call the project "John Lemon", but then everything got a bit more serious when I started working on the photos and met my first and main obstacles: cutting and deleting completely parts of one layer without it looking too unrealistic. Of course, I am no professional, but I'm quite pleased with the final outcome of every layer.

To add a little extra interest, I duplicated one of the layers so that the whole face of the lemon looked better in contrast with the lemon skin, and by doing so I found myself knee-deep in mistakes. I had, then, to spend an awful lot of time adjusting John's skin to the double layer, manually blurring some parts.

When this came to an end, I thought about whether the project could be considered as finished or not. The final result was more or less splendid, except for the lack of a mane of hair, which I had deleted prior to merging the layers. So I searched for a fitting picture, then came to face the same problem again -- it's very difficult for an amateur to cut parts of the photograph and have it look mildly decent. Nevertheless, some sessions of hard work later, I finished pasting the hair into the lemon, and then proceeded to work a bit more with the layers' appearance.

And here is the result:

GIMP II

As a second project in our GIMP lessons, I was asked to produce an advertisement based on a photograph of my high-school about a play that will be represented as part of our extracurricular program so that my classmates and I could explore the tools GIMP provides and hone our recently acquired skills.

For me, it has not been an easy task because of the layers and the perspectives that I had to work with in order to make the picture look fitting. There were several layers to the photograph, one of them consisting of the background (that is, the original one), then some figures as the main characters of the play (which I decided to place in front of the high-school building), text to advertise the play and a framed picture of the author of this latter to make a bit more funny and pleasant at sight.

Nevertheless, I will most likely not be sharing the picture itself because of privacy reasons.



GIMP I

Photoshop is the main software people use when they wish to touch up a photograph, yet very few know of GIMP, which is incredibly similar as to its functions and luckily cheaper, because it is for free and you can download it from its web page: http://www.gimp.org/windows/

The very first project we started in our Computing lessons was about getting used to work with layers, and the main objective was to successfully insert a picture, not at all related with the one to be used as background, into another  and the result being somewhat decent. Of course, not many of us had used this software before, so it's taken more patience that we had expected, but the results are indeed satisfying.

Working with pictures is something very fashionable these days, making them look better or simply eliminating parts of it that we don't like very much. And whereas it could seem devastatingly impossible to do so without the experience it takes to master Photoshop, GIMP provides simpler, much handier tools to help you.

I am quite delighted with how my project has turned out, even though I'm well aware I could have done much better, but it's a first for me, so I'm really happy about the results.

Networks

Whereas last term I had near to no trouble memorizing and understanding the concepts of Computing, this month of January has proved a point: things get harder as you pursue your dream studies. The new topic started out fine, addressed to be a theoretical theme, then I learned that as easy a subject as it seemed, I was going to need further help to comprehend mildy what the lessons were about without getting lost.

Networks. Sets of computers that working together can share all kinds of information. Until then, no doubts at sight. But networks are complicated, above all if you have never heard about them before. They appear in varying, different forms, with strange, short names that are intended in fact to help you remember what they are. If you mean to clasify them by physical from and linking, you are to learn all the layouts; they come in bus form (all the computers are aligned), tree form (one of the messiest to remember), meshed form (idem)...

Nevertheless, they can also be grouped by components; that is, whether they need wire connections to work or can function wirelessly. Networks can be arranged as well referring to the type of linking they use, P2P and Client-server.

And the way they're organized is only the beginning, because we study how they connect to the Internet, what those connections mean, how to check if the network works properly, how to program your computer to show you their IP, which are given to each computer in the world so that it can be easily identified. Only there are ways and ways to assign an IP and ways and ways to get lost in the middle of the process.

As interesting and necessary as networks are for human life to continue evolving, it takes a greater brain than you'd think to figure them out and not feel like you really cannot understand what you're trying to learn about.

Selfies

A selfie is a self-portrait photograph, usually taken with a hand-held digital camera or cell-phone. They are often casual, taken either with a camera held at arm's length or in front of a mirror, including either just the photographer or as many people as can be in focus.

Nowadays, exploring selfie exposure in the UK there has been denoted a pathological condition triggered by this called selfieism.

The origin of these photos comes from the late 19th century, when people began to experiment with cameras and started taking pictures of themselves in mirrors.

In the present day, selfies are a way of presenting one's body to others, usually in social networks, in a flattering but casual way where the main features of the person are perfectly noticeable. Yet, being as popular as they are, they also have become a way to show off, specially when we talk about young women, who show their bodies on the Internet, exposing themselves to a high level of sexual harassment when specific parts can be seen, mostly when these pictures are in other people's possession, say, a boyfriend of girlfriend, who posts them once the relationship is over as a form of revenge against the person.

Selfies have also been taken beyond the earth. A space selfie is a selfie that is taken in space. This refers to selfies taken by astronauts.

Quick Response Codes (QR codes)

Quick Response Code, worldwide known as QR Codes is a two-dimensional barcodes, designed in Japan for the automotive industry, that encodes information which can be any type of data.

Lately, it's become popular owing to its fast readability and greater storage capacity in comparison with standard barcodes.

It consists of back modules in form of a square grid on a white back ground, which can usually be read by a camera and processed using a special application. Then, data is extracted from the components of the image.

No matter what the industrial design was for, these codes have grown common in consumer advertising, being normally scanned by smartphones, which convert it into something they can work with, such as an URL for a website, making it unnecessary to type it into a browser. Almost every type of smartphone has the software required to read QR codes.

The current uses of these codes have expanded wonderfully, being now used in different areas, from locating to marketing, or even printed on train tickets in China.