I've been online for 30 years now. Three decades of sending and receiving email has made me very confident about my abilities to function in cyberspace. But there are some disadvantages: As I've been out there for so long, I have habits and favorite programs that I'm loathe to abandon, even when something better comes along.
I have never taken to web-based email solutions like Gmail (oh, I have an account because I need one to use other Google services. But I don't check it as often as I should).
I've been an Outlook user for something like 15 years. I am used to it. I like the fact that it's so easy to sync my Blackberry to its address book and calendar.
I mentioned in a previous post that I am slowly transitioning from my aging Sony VAIO to a little Dell netbook. The new computer is so light that I can carry it around with me in a large purse or totebag and it has the same capacity hard drive as the four-year-old Sony. Best of all, I can work off the battery for a few hours (which I couldn't do with the Sony, even when it was new).
But the netbook doesn't have a disk drive and only 2 GB of RAM. It wasn't designed to be someone's sole computer. I won't be using it for any video editing (this will have to be done on my husband's big desktop). And I'm increasingly using the cloud for programs that I used to store locally on my own hard drive.
Outlook is a memory hog, but I am not ready to give it up. But it has its quirks.
One of those is an incompatibility with photo attachments sent by friends who use Macs. For some reason, whenever a Mac user sends me a photo, it ends up as an embedded bitmap file... and there's no easily apparent way to save it. Right-clicking on the photo does not bring up a save as function. Viewing the source code doesn't get you to a link that will allow you to save the photo, either.
In the past, I've had to sheepishly ask my Mac-using friends and colleagues to re-send photos to me as attachments. This is something I did last Friday, when a press representative from Chevy sent me some screenshots from the Volt (which I needed to complete a post I was writing).
I don't know if she ever received my request to re-send the photos, because I did not hear back from her - and by Tuesday, I was frantic because I was already past my deadline.
So I went back to her email and looked at Outlook's options again... and realized that I'd never tried viewing the email in my browser.
Voila! I may not be able to save a photo embedded in an email while I'm in Outlook, but once I viewed it in Explorer, it worked like a dream.
The only problem now was that the photo I saved was a bitmap - and I needed to convert it to a JPEG for the web.
For years, I've used Adobe Photoshop Elements for editing and converting graphics - but since obtaining the netbook, I've switched to Picnik, which allows you to do all the simple tasks (cropping, resizing, etc) online - and for free. But would it allow me to convert a BMP to a JPG?
It did. And now, I'm a happy camper.
Which I suppose means I need to go and finish that automotive post.
Recent Comments