Steve Dotto here and this is Ask DottoTech Episode 2. Last week, I asked you if you liked
this format. I posted the first Ask DottoTech video, said “Do you like it? Comment below
if you do” and well we’re about five days into it and there are 3,200 of you that have
watched it and 180 comments, which is an overwhelming number of comments, all positive saying you
love this format, you want more Ask DottoTech. So you asked, I’m listening, here is episode
2 of Ask DottoTech. Today, we’re going to take a look at previewing email in Gmail.
We’re going to talk about how I create my screencasts. We’re going to talk about using
Google Photos and backing up your photos and encrypting your valuable data on removable
drives and hard drives. That’s all today on Ask DottoTech.
In YouTube, Kaye Nortin said, “Love your videos, recently joined Patreon.” Thank
you so much, Kaye. I appreciate you supporting us in Patreon. “At the moment, I’m trying
to figure how to click on Gmail links without being taken to a new tab and having to wait
for the page to load. I’d like to open it all at once, then view and process so later
I can focus in doing my initial inbox triage.” Well, there are two ways that you can go about
this. The first way and probably the easiest way for you to open multiple emails and then
go through them is you are going to have to open them all in tabs, but if you hold down
the Option key as you click, it will open each of them in a brand new tab as you do
that. So you can just go through and open each of the emails that you have and as you
can see what they’ve done is they’ve now open all into new tabs for us
so that you can just go through and you could deal with them. That might be the easiest
for you working in the system that you built. However, there might be another way that you
can do the initial triage more effectively. Now when we use Gmail in the browser like
this, it basically gives us a view where we can see the email, who it’s from, the title
and then the first few words of the email. In other email applications, we have something
called the preview pane where we can see more of the email and actually even sometimes edit
the email in a preview pane. Outlook, for example, is famous for that.
We don’t have that built into Gmail right out of the box. Having said that, if you go
under the Gear menu in your browser and you go into the Settings, there you have access
to the Google Labs, which is here under kind of the main menu headings here. If I click
on Labs, what these are, these are extensions for Gmail that will give us some additional
functionality. Now the one that you want to look for is you want to go in here and you
want to scroll down until you find Preview Pane and enable that. If you enable that,
what will happen is your inbox will re-launch—if you’re going to enable, you have to remember
to go Save at the bottom; that’s the thing I always forget - Save changes at the bottom—and
when you click back out into the inbox and refresh the browser, you will get this new
tool here in your browser, which will allow you to either switch to a split view this
way so now we can see the email in here and you can actually click to reply. This creates
a preview pane which allows you to view all of the email. If you decide that you don’t
like the side-by-side split, you can choose a horizontal split in which case the preview
is in the bottom. But this might work better than opening multiple tabs as far as doing
your initial email triage. Kaye, I hope that helped. Thanks so much for the question.
Without a doubt one of the most popular questions in the channel is how do you create your screencast?
People constantly ask me what camera I’m using, what microphone I’m using and how
I create these screencasts with me in the front and the computer behind and that sort
of stuff. Well if I tell you, I won’t be special anymore. So I’m really torn. What
the heck? I actually have created a couple of videos that walk through the entire process
and we will link to them down below in the show notes. There were two videos that I created
just a few months ago. One is called How to create a Screencast - The Basics. It’s a
little bit longer. I think it’s about 17 minutes. Yeah, it’s 17 and ½ minutes long
and I walk through the entire screencasting process there. It’s a great place to start.
Another good place is Screencasting, How I Create My Videos, which I created a few months
earlier than that or a month earlier than that. It also walks through the basic production
process. But even better, if you want the full meal
deal, if you want to know everything that I know about screencasting, I created a webinar
which is available as a replay to you. Just click on the YouTube card here and go and
register to see my Screencasting Secrets. Once you enter that and register, you will
be brought to a one-hour webinar where I walk through chapter and verse exactly what happens
in the creation of one of my screencasts. I go through the tools, I go through the software,
and I even show you the process that I do as far as producing each of these videos.
That is the best place to learn how I do my screencasting. Click on the YouTube card and
you can gain access to Screencasting Secrets. Regardless of which of those different resources
you choose to take a look at, all of them will walk through the entire process that
I use for creating these screencasts. For all of you who’ve asked, thanks so much
for the question. As I mentioned, we have had tremendous response
to the very first Ask DottoTech. I asked you to comment whether or not you like the idea
and we’ve had a couple hundred now replies saying it’s a good idea, Ask DottoTech,
feed me more, thank you, enjoy the new format, more please. That’s what we’re doing right
now. Some of you also while encouraging me to do it, have also asked me a few questions.
For example, Wendy is asking, “Could you please address the best way to encrypt and
password-protect USB sticks, flash drives, and my laptop? There are lots of people offering
free software to download onto my computer but can I trust them? Maybe not.”
You don’t have to worry about trusting all of these different tools. Built into your
operating system in both Windows and Mac is the ability to encrypt your drive. Now I’m
going to add this article that I found here which is from HowToGeek. It’s a great article
that goes through all of the different settings in both Windows and Mac.
Now in the Windows world, BitLocker encryption is built-in and they walk you through chapter
and verse here how to use BitLocker in order to protect your system. They also include
a description here in Linux and on the Mac OS, we also have the ability to do built-in
encryption. Let me show you how easy it is to access. It’s pretty much standard now
across all operating systems. I’ve just brought up here in Finder my different drives
for my system here. If I say I wanted to take this disk here and I wanted to encrypt it,
all I have to do is right-click on the mouse and I’ve got the ability here to start the
encryption process. Of course, it will take some time for it to encrypt all the data,
to set all your passwords in place etc., but you can set it all up through this interface
built into the operating system so you can do this for any drive on your system, including
flash drives and removable drives. Of course, you have to remember to remember what your
password is or you could have a heck of a time getting your data unencrypted. I hope
that answers the question, Wendy. Thanks so much for asking.
And finally, a note from Mr. Ray, who shouts, “Hey Steve, loved your videos on Google
Drive. I have a dilemma. How can I move photos from my Google Photos cloud to my external
Seagate hard drive? I can’t find anything on this. Keep up the great work #TEAMSTEVE.”
Yes, I haven’t been able to find a great solution for this either. There doesn’t
seem to be any automatic way of downloading all of your photos at a time. However, I have
discovered that if you move your mouse over top of any one photo, you can get a check
box which allows you to multi-select multiple photos. You can go through and you can select
all the photos in a group and then use this download icon, this download tool that we
have here in the upper right-hand corner to download your photos.
Having said that, there is another way to download collections of photos or albums.
I’m going to take you deep inside the life of Steve. Last year, I did a musical. My Google
Photos is a fairly new collection but here’s a collection of photos that I have of me performing
and a funny thing happened on the way to the forum last year. So there’s Steve singing
and dancing his way to stardom. Look at this. I’m looking at his feet. I don’t know
what foot to move next. Thank goodness, Ray knows what he’s doing.
If you got a whole collection of photos like this, you could also download the entire collection
here just by clicking here to download and that will allow you to download the entire
collection of photos as well. But so far I haven’t found an automatic syncing service
that will allow you to take all of your Google Photos and back them up onto a hard drive.
It’s a bit of a manual process, a bit of a kludged at this point. If anybody has better
way of doing it, please comment below, share with us and let us know the better way of
doing things. That is all the time that we have for our
second installment of Ask DottoTech. I wanted to point out once again that Ask Dotto Tech
is brought to you through the generous support of our patrons at Patreon. If you want to
find out what it’s all about supporting the DottoTech site and what perks are included,
I encourage you to drop by our Patreon page. Also remember, please subscribe to this channel
and subscribe to our newsletter so you can hear about all of our upcoming live webinars
and events. Until next time, I am Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle.