computers

Get Away From Windows

...and try out Linux. What's Linux? It's a free operating system, kind of like Windows but without the Blue Screen of Death. If you're stuck with an old version of Windows (95 or 98, for example) and are thinking about upgrading, don't go with Windows. Go with Linux. Specifically, go with a version that's user-friendly. I'm thinking PCLinux. It's got a GUI that's a lot like Windows, and it's pretty easy to install. Best of all, you can try it out before you commit to installing it on your hard drive. Just download the .iso file from their web site and burn it to a CD-ROM, then stick it in your CD-ROM player and reboot. Viola. Your computer will boot up with Knoppix and you can play with it to see if you like it. If you do, you can install it right from the same CD. (I don't want to scare you off, but be sure to read up on the install process so you don't lose any of your existing files when you switch.)

Download Some Free Computer Games

Yes, you really can download computer games legally, safely, and for free from the Internet. You just have to know where to go. I suggest GameHippo. Their site features hundreds of free games. Most are rated, many have screenshots, and the site is reputable. You won't find commercial games masquerading as free, and you won't download a virus that will damage your computer.

Start a Blog

An online journal (like this one) is called a weblog or "blog" for short. There are several sites that will set you up with a free blog. Blogger is the original and still one of the best for beginners. Share your writing with the world!

Create Your Own Web Site

It's fun to pretend this is hard, just to impress people, but actually creating a web site is pretty easy anymore. You need a place to host it, but if you have an internet account (and you do if you're reading this!) your ISP (Internet Service Provider) probably has already reserved some space on their web server for you. My site is hosted by Mediacom, which gives me 10MB of space as part of my account. To get your site online, you'll have to contact your ISP and find out how to upload the web pages you create.
To create those pages, you need a good web page editor. To begin with, you'll want a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor llke ~~Amaya, which is free for the downloading. Best of all, it comes from the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the official standards body behind the entire web, so you know it's good.~~
Update: I've changed my mind. Try Nvu instead. It's much cooler looking and tons more user-friendly than Amaya. I've been using Nvu for a couple of days now and I've got to say it's the first WYSIWYG editor I've used that is likely to make me give up hand-coding HTML. Nvu doesn't add a bunch of crap to the HTML it outputs, which is my major gripe with all of the other editors I've used.

Share Your Pictures

You can share your pictures with family and friends like I do online at Flickr. Their free account lets you upload up to 100 photos at a time, or you can pay them $50/year to let you post an unlimited number of pictures. You can look at all the photos other people in the world are uploading, and can even search them by keyword. Flickr is rapidly becoming one of the most popular sites on the web. It is simply too cool.

Get a Free Office Suite

Almost everyone uses Microsoft Office, but why? It costs a fortune, it takes up a lot of room on your hard drive and in memory, it crashes all the time, and it uses a proprietary file format that almost nothing else can read. A better alternative is the absolutely free OpenOffice suite. OpenOffice includes wordprocessor, spreadsheet, and presentation programs that are 99%^*compatible with Office documents. That means you can choose to read and write Office-format files when you want to share them with others. If you already use Word, you'll find that the OpenOffice wordprocessor works almost exactly like it. Likewise with Excel and Powerpoint. Go to OpenOffice.org, download it, and try it out. There are versions for both Windows and Linux.
^*They're supposed to be 100% compatible, but I've found a few little quirks. Most documents I load into OpenOffice require that I tweak one or two things to get them to look exactly like they did in Word. But the quirks are really minor and very easy to work around.

Get a Less Annoying Web Browser and Email Client

Microsoft Internet Explorer comes free with Windows, so why would you want to replace it? Just about every site you visit anymore pushes a dozen popup windows in your face before it allows you to read the page. Wouldn't it be better to use a web browser that blocks popups? And if you're using Microsoft Outlook for email, why would you want to replace it? Because little script kiddies in Germany and Russia write new email viruses every day that attack Microsoft Outlook through its many known vulnerabilities. Fortunately, there are free, open-source alternatives. The ones I use are the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client. Being the evolutionary descendents of Netscape, they have a reassuringly long history. Hey, millions of users can't be wrong—It's so popular that users recently contributed enough money to buy a two-page ad for Firefox in the New York Times. Now that's love! :) Both can be downloaded from Mozilla.org.

Buy & Sell on eBay

eBay is cool. It really is America's Garage Sale. Heck, I know a couple of people who make a living buying and selling stuff on eBay. But how do you do it? Won't you get ripped off? Good news: you can safely and easily ease into buying and selling on eBay by first visiting the eBay Help pages. They've got info on how to get registered, how to set up payments, how to make sure your seller is reputable, etc. eBay really is a lot of fun, and it's a great place to find unusual stuff (like the airship junk I'm interested in).