ON COMPUTERS: Nixty.com offers free classes from top schools

— Nixty.com is a new site that makes it possible to take college courses online for free. You can take the courses for college credit and use them to transfer to a physical school.

The site has 200 courses from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Berkeley and other top schools. The courses cover many subject areas, and the site also has test-preparation exercises for the SAT and GMAT. The lectures come in as YouTube videos. For some of them there’s a transcript, so you can read the lecture as well as watch it. Look over the lectures before deciding whether to join the class.

Most courses are free, though you can also pay for tutorial services. We looked at an American Literature course from Yale and a chemical engineering course from Stanford. Both looked great, and we thought it was neat that they were captured on video, because, in the case of the engineering course, it was that teacher’s last year in the classroom. There are also some continuing-education classes for adults.

The site offers coursebuilding software for teachers, so they can easily add videos and lectures. It also lets you post your resume and letters of recommendation.

HOW FAST IS IT?

Ever wonder how fast your Internet connection really is? Many techies recommend going to speedtest.net to find out. It will check the connection and deliver the news. But there’s a better way, recommended by our favorite tech person at crossloop.com/ kennys.

Go to filehippo.com and get “FlashGet,” a free download manager. Next try downloading something big, like the Ubuntu operating system from ubuntu.com. You don’t have to really want it; it’s just for the test. As Flash-Get sees it come in, you’ll see your speed. Ours was about 75 KB, which is not much faster than dial-up, although we have a supposedly “high speed” DSL connection. The trouble is, our building uses shared DSL, so if other people in the building are downloading movies, our share slows to a crawl.

“Broadband” speed should be about 50 times the speed of a fast dial-up connection. A 4G connection should be five times faster than that, and under the right conditions it can be 25 times faster. Check your download speed and see what kind of service you’re getting. You can compare your speed to dial-up, Bluetooth, and fast Internet at tinyurl.com/not2fast.

WILL IT PLAY IN PEORIA?

When you upload a video to the Web, you might naturally wonder how many people watch it. “iPlay” from TubeMogul.com is a free service that tells you how many people are watching and for how long. If you want to find out how many people are visiting your website, try Google Analytics, also free.

INTERNUTS

GiveForward.org lets you create a personal fundraising page for any person, cause or nonprofit and solicit donations from all over the world. If you create a nonprofit organization in the U.S., you’ll need a federal tax identification number.

Tinypic.com lets you upload a picture that you can then share on Facebook, MySpace, eBay and other sites. It will have a unique Web address. It compresses the picture, which makes it much faster. They also have TwitGoo.com, for sharing photos on Twitter.

1000Memories.com is a free site that lets you create a memorial for someone by posting photos and letting others add comments and post their own.

FANCY GMAIL SIGNATURES

This is new and cute: Gmail now lets you add pictures and Web links to your e-mail signature. The signature can be set to appear automatically at the end of each e-mail you send. If you have more than one e-mail address, you can have more than onesignature. And that signature can get pretty jazzy.

Our Gmail signature has cartoon caricatures of ourselves that we ordered from myfaceicons.com. Then Joy added a list of the newspapers in which our column appears and a link to our website and our Twitter page. Once again, this is slugged in automatically at the end of each e-mail unless you turn it off.

To create a signature, click “Settings” from your Gmail home page. Scroll to the signature area. Type in the text you want, and click the “picture icon” if you want to add a picture. Click the “chain icon” to add a link.

The picture has to be pulled in from the Web, so you’ll have to upload it to some photo site or other location first. (There’s a link to photos within Gmail, if you click “more.”) If you don’t have a Gmail account, anyone can get one for free at gmail.com. A close friend of ours, who is a very cautious guy, was extremely reluctant to do this because he was afraid that would cut off his mail from other accounts. There’s no problem, actually; you canhave all your e-mail automatically forwarded. You can even make it appear that the e-mail you send is coming from your old address rather than the new Gmail account. We were reluctant at first, too, but we made the switch six years ago and have had no glitches.

ANDROID VS. APPLE

Fifty-seven percent of Android applications are free, compared with 28 percent of iPhone applications and 22 percent of Windows Mobile applications, according to the analytics firm Distimo. Of those that aren’t free, most are $2 or less. This is not true for Blackberry and Windows Mobile applications.

FREE SHIPPING

Anyone with an e-mail address ending in .edu can get free two-day shipping for a year by enrolling in Amazon Prime. Go to tinyurl.com/ primestudent to sign up.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at oncomp.com. Bob and Joy can be contacted by e-mail at bobschwab@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.

Business, Pages 22 on 07/26/2010

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