Computing for the Bewildered. 
By Bill Hayles

Hello again.

It's been a quiet month for mail in my in box  - with the warm weather, you've probably got better things to do than to stay indoors at your computer.  So I thought I'd take the opportunity to mention some of the (to me) more interesting corners of the Internet that you may not have heard of.

WEB CAMS

A web cam is a simple digital camera which (usually) is aimed at a specific point and takes a picture at intervals of, typically, every fifteen minutes.  Those images are then posted to a web page, and are available to view by anyone with Internet access.

Many hobbyists now have web cams, as they're not expensive.  I'm even thinking of setting one up myself, pointed at Montgó.  Searching for, and finding these, can be quite an adventure - the best place to start, as is so often the case when it comes to the Internet, is Google at

http://www.google.com

Do an advanced search for the words "web cam" or webcam coupled with your particular interest - trains, beaches, churches, Spain etc.  You'll be amazed at how many there now are.

In addition to the hobbyists, commercial organisations and Town Halls often find a web cam useful to promote their particular product or town. A good place to look for these is at

http://www.comfm.com/webcam/

If you want a list of web cams in the Comunidad Valenciana, your starting place is

http://www.comunidad-valenciana.com/

Click on the "web cams"link in the top right hand corner. A hint: if you want your language to be English rather than Castellano, once you have the Red de Webcams page, edit the URL to read idioma=IN rather than idioma=CA at the end.
You'll find displayed a map with many web cams locations indicated, including, of course, Javea.

Good hunting!

TELEVISION OVER THE INTERNET

Last time I said this:

 For television the Internet cannot, as yet help.
Since I wrote that, I have discovered that a limited number of television broadcasts are made on the Internet.  Don't get your hopes up, though.  What I said last month is still true for any sort of reasonable quality, and the days when BBC1 is on The Internet are still long off, even discounting any copyright difficulties.
However, if you go to 

http://wwitv.com/

You will find a list of Internet broadcasts of TV material, claimed to be 707 broadcasts from 100+ countries.  Many of these are short recorded snippets from news broadcasts,  including BBC News24, and  BBC World. For both of these you ideally need an ADSL connection, and the picture quality can be best described as blurred and indistinct. But a few real time broadcasts (from obscure stations) are available if you want to be a trail-blazing pioneer.

FREE SOFTWARE

There is astonishing amount of free software available for download from the Internet.   As well as Linux, the completely free alternative operating system to Windows, there are a great many applications, both large and small, available for the Windows platform.  I've mentioned this in previous columns, but it's worth repeating the locations of the larger archives.
The two main (and best known) archives for all sorts of downloadable software are

http://www.download.com
http://www.tucows.com

For both the above, you need to specifically specify "free".  Other sites are devoted exclusively to free software, such as


http://www.completelyfreesoftware.com
http://www.jumbo.com
http://www.freewarefiles.com

If you look for it, you can find free software to do almost anything that paid-for software can do.

That's it for this month, but if you have a question you'd like me to
answer in the column,or maybe an idea for a topic, please e-mail it to
questions@billnot.com, If you don't have e-mail, you can always leave
your question at the CopiShop.  However, I can't guarantee to answer
questions personally.

My websites are as follows:
http://billnot.com is my personal site, with links to all my other sites.
http://cftb.net is the Computing for the Bewildered web site, with everything I produce for my classes, these columns and other material available for download.
http://costablancaexpats.net is my busiest site, with much information both for those already living and those thinking of coming to live in this part of Spain.

If you have been, thanks for reading this.