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Saturday, January 30, 2010

A Funny Thing...

...happened on the way to the woodpile... Yeah, it looks bad, but it's healing up quite nicely. Enjoy.




All written text and audio podcasts from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.


Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


Thanks for visiting!

Friday, January 29, 2010

Random Hints and Tips

Use turmeric extract and curcurmin for health and taste. It turns out that turmeric is being touted as a healthy spice. It is claimed to have a whole laundry list of health benefits:

1. It is a natural antiseptic and antibacterial agent, useful in disinfecting cuts and burns.
2. When combined with cauliflower, it has shown to prevent prostate cancer and stop the growth of existing prostate cancer.
3. Prevented breast cancer from spreading to the lungs in mice.
4. May prevent melanoma and cause existing melanoma cells to commit suicide.
5. Reduces the risk of childhood leukemia.
6. Is a natural liver detoxifier.
7. May prevent and slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease by removing amyloyd plaque buildup in the brain.
8. May prevent metastases from occurring in many different forms of cancer.
9. It is a potent natural anti-inflammatory that works as well as many anti-inflammatory drugs but without the side effects.
10. Has shown promise in slowing the progression of multiple sclerosis in mice.
11. Is a natural painkiller and cox-2 inhibitor.
12. May aid in fat metabolism and help in weight management.
13. Has long been used in Chinese medicine as a treatment for depression.
14. Because of its anti-inflammatory properties, it is a natural treatment for arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
15. Boosts the effects of chemo drug paclitaxel and reduces its side effects.
16. Promising studies are underway on the effects of turmeric on pancreatic cancer.
17. Studies are ongoing in the positive effects of turmeric on multiple myeloma.
18. Has been shown to stop the growth of new blood vessels in tumors.
19. Speeds up wound healing and assists in remodeling of damaged skin.
20. May help in the treatment of psoriasis and other inflammatory skin conditions.
Turmeric can be taken in powder or pill form. It is available in pill form in most health food stores, usually in 250-500mg capsules.
http://www.healthdiaries.com/eatthis/20-health-benefits-of-turmeric.html

The active (medicinal) ingredient in turmeric is curcumin, this is what gives it the yellow color, and it has the medicinal properties listed above. You will not get much curcumin in the bottle of turmeric you get from the spice section of the store, in order to get medicinal quantities you will need to get the concentrated forms also known as an extract found in pill form, these usually come in 250 to 500 mg per pill, you need to read the label to make sure you are getting 95% curcumin. If you wanted to get that much curcumin from your spice jar, you would need to consume a full ounce (28 grams) of turmeric each day, there is approximately 2% curcumin in un-concentrated turmeric. What I do is I use turmeric as a spice in as much food as I can each day, and take a turmeric supplement each day.

Here is a great source for bulk quantity of turmeric extract (curcumin) in powder form,
http://purebulk.com/curcumin-turmeric-extract-powder
It is not recommended for pregnant women, it can cause uterine contractions, I wonder if any midwives have used this to help encourage contractions during a birth? Just a thought.
Also, don't use it if you are allergic to this or ginger, they are a related.


Recycle spray bottles - use for:
Bleach water - you can use this even if you have a septic system without worry of damaging your system, spray sinks to disinfect, spray surfaces to disinfect, spray on white clothing to spot treat stains, spray on dish rack to disinfect, spray on ceramic bowls and plates if you have used turmeric to remove yellow staining (especially if there is any cracking or crazing in the ceramic surface). I make a fairly weak solution, mostly water, with just a splash of bleach, if you can smell the bleach when you spray it, it's strong enough. You still need to be careful what you spray, if you get this on colored fabric, it will make bleached out spots. Don't use a microfiber cloth or material to wipe this bleach water, you should never use bleach on a microfiber cloth, it will destroy the fabric. One potential problem you will find as you use your spray bottle, it clogs a tiny bit as the bleach water dries on the nozzle, you can either rinse the nozzle after each use, (I never remember to do that), or you can put your finger over the nozzle hole and spray a few times, I don't know exactly why that works, but it does, once the bleach water solution starts coming through the nozzle, it should spray freely after that.

Pour H2O2, otherwise known as hydrogen peroxide in a spray bottle, use full strength, do not add water.
Every time you open the bottle of peroxide, it loses some of its strength, it becomes weaker. It starts out as H2O2, each time you expose it to the air, it loses some of its oxygen molecules, essentially becoming H2O which is water. It starts out at 3%, that's pretty weak to begin with, by the time you get halfway through the bottle, it has lost a great deal of its effectiveness, especially if you accidentally left the lid off for any amount of time. By placing your peroxide in a spray bottle, you isolate it from the air (or at least being exposed to any new air) each time you want to use it, so your peroxide will stay closer to full strength all the way through.

You can also spray your peroxide anywhere you want, directly on a wound, (no more dabbing with cotton balls and the resulting drips and pain), and this protects the unused peroxide, you aren't contaminating your peroxide by using cotton balls, or dipping anything into your bottle. You can spray your toothbrush before you brush your teeth, I use it to wet my toothbrush, I use tooth powder instead of toothpaste, this gets my toothbrush wet with something that will do more good for my teeth and mouth than straight water, then I pour the tooth powder onto the toothbrush. After I rinse my toothbrush and tongue scraper, I spray each with more peroxide to disinfect before putting away. You can also spot treat clothing or cloth that has (fresh) blood stains, it will bubble up and help "bleach" out the stain before it has a chance to set.

You can put isopropyl alcohol in a spray bottle too, do not dilute with water, use full strength.
This makes using alcohol easier, you can spray it directly on a wound, or use on hard surfaces to disinfect, just spray and wipe. I was a hairdresser for 11 years, that's how we cleaned up between customers, we put it in a spray bottle, we sprayed it on the chair, on the floor, on the counter tops and shampoo bowls between customers, we sprayed, let it sit for a bit, then wipe. It tends to evaporate quickly so using it in a spray bottle means you get to use more of the product you purchased and you do not have to worry about spilling or contaminating your alcohol.

Let me know your tips & tricks to make your life easier and inexpensive.
Are you taking turmeric supplements? If so, what do you think?



I am not a doctor or health professional, nothing said here is meant to be used to diagnose or treat any potential health issues, if you have any concerns about anything written here, be sure to ask your health professional. I am not responsible for the use or misuse of any information you glean from this blog.

All written text and audio podcasts from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.


Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


Thanks for visiting!

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Contest-Ends Soon

Hey everyone, quickly go over to Patriots Against The NWO, he is giving away a great book and a great Slinky Jr shortwave antenna, all you have to do is post a comment with an answer to the question he is asking, it's very easy to do, last time he did this, I won the Slinky Jr shortwave antenna, I don't have a shortwave radio, but I put it on my AM/FM radio and it did help with the static and helped bring in more stations.

Get over there quick, this ends in 24 to 48 hours, get there, read the post, make a comment and you might win!








All written text and audio podcasts from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.


Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


Thanks for visiting!

Monday, January 25, 2010

Dollar Store Crafts

In these financially trying times, it's nice to have some inexpensive (aka cheap!) hobbies. Often times things made with cheap craft materials look, well, let's just say it, cheap, tacky, sometimes downright ugly. I found a website that shows you how to make nice, sophisticated looking items, crafts that don't look cheap, it's called Dollar Store Crafts. It's about stuff made with things you can find at a dollar store, most everyone has at least one of those within driving distance, I even have one in the next town over, two now that I think of it.


I found this site a couple of days ago, it's pretty well laid out, nicely categorized, the projects are many and they are easy to find. I am still strolling through their stuff. The thing I really like about their crafts, they look good! These don't look like the cheap components they started out as in life. For example, the latest (to date) craft they show, it's how to make realistic roses made of, ready for this? Coffee filters. This is one of their more time consuming projects, but the process looks pretty simple and the finished roses look fabulous. It reminds me of the tissue paper roses I learned to make as a kid, only better.

Don't you think these look lovely? And pretty realistic too.

I'll make this a short post to make up for yesterday's novel. Visit Dollar Store Crafts site, you will be happy that you did. :)

Oh, I found even more fun things on this site, here are some of my favorites, for now...

Budget laptop case for $2,


Soda bottle coin purse, you have to see this to believe it! Kinda reminds me of Pacman,




Make a doggie yurt for under $10,

Make a perpetual calendar and pencil holder,

Make a reusable Swiffer cover and duster.

What are your favorites? I really want to know.



All written text and audio podcasts from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission.


Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


Thanks for visiting!

Deleted My Account On Facebook

If you found this page because you are looking for a way to delete your Facebook account, scroll to the bottom of this message for the link to permanently delete your Facebook account.

Warning, this is going to be a long post, as usual it didn't start out to be so long, but once I started writing, I found more and more to include in this message.

Facebook, MySpace, and a myriad of other social networking sites... many of you use them, I was a reluctant Facebook user for a while myself. The only reason I signed up, and it was against my better judgment, was because Primitive Bob's son, who had joined the Marines was using it. We thought it would be a good way to keep in contact and see the pictures he uploaded to it, not to worry, we don't blame him, I'm sure he had no idea how insidious Facebook seems to be.

For a long time, I had him as my only "friend" on there, I would ignore or reject others who requested friendship. Not because I didn't want to be "friends" with everyone, I just wanted it to be Bob's son and myself on there. Well, eventually I agreed to be friends with a couple of other people, that was where I messed up, as soon as I agreed to do this, my account information was spread exponentially to dozens then hundreds, maybe even thousands of other people, most of whom I don't know, have never communicated with, and had no reason to do so. How does this happen?

It's simple, at least with Facebook, (henceforth referred to as FB), once you hook up with a friend on FB, let's call that person Sally, anyone who is Sally's friend on FB suddenly sees you on their FB page as a possible friend, perhaps you might know this person because you both have a "friend" in common. Now this friend of Sally can click on your FB link and see a lot more than someone who was not potentially connected with you at all, it's surprising how much of your info is shared with these "potential friends".

Some people on FB have hundreds of friends, it's almost a badge of honor to have lots and lots of "friends". I think I had fewer than 15, probably fewer than 10 to be honest. The problem is once that happened, I was getting a couple of "friend" requests a week, sometimes more, these were people I didn't know, but since we seemed to have a FB friend in common, it was assumed, by FB that we might either know each other, or have enough in common that we might be interested in becoming FB friends. All of these people had access to some of my supposedly private FB info, I had no idea. Seems kinda innocent, nice in fact.

On occasion I would glance at the sidebar on FB and read the widget that suggested possible connections for me, people who were friends of my FB friends. Sometimes I would click on one just to see what it said, I was amazed time and time again at how much private information was being shared by these people, they innocently put this information in their profile thinking that only their FB friends would see it, no one else. That is very far from the truth. There are levels of privacy on FB, if you do not have a FB account, or you are not logged in, that is one level, another level (and consequently more info is shared) is if you are a friend of a friend, you might not know this person from Adam, but if you have a FB friend in common, then more information is shared.

FB makes it possible to send a note to someone who sent a request to be your FB friend, but if you do that, it makes your full FB page available to them for a period of time, even if you decline the friendship! That is a fact! There were several times when someone requested a friendship, I knew them from the internet but didn't want to do the FB thing with them, I wanted to send them a note explaining why, I was doing this strictly for a couple of people, not for everyone, but if I had done that, it would have opened up my FB page to them for a period of time, I had no options to prevent that, at least none that were obvious. So I would just decline and hope they weren't offended by it.

A few weeks ago, I was looking at the potential friends suggestions and I did recognize a name, it was my sister's best friend, someone she knew from her childhood. I clicked on her name and it took me to her FB page, though it didn't show me her whole FB page, it did show me more information than I knew about her previously, things that should be private from the world at large. Things like her birth date, age, her children, her work history complete with company names, dates worked and duties, it didn't say where she lived, but based on the work history and the city names listed on the work history, and all the other information, it wouldn't have been hard for even the most incompetent idiot to figure out how to find her, and it wouldn't have been hard at all to steal her identity.

Of course, all of this information, she typed in, she voluntarily gave this info to FB thinking it would be visible only to those she was FB friends with. I emailed my sister and let her know about this so that she could alert her friend to remove this information, or at least make it not visible to someone who wasn't a direct FB friend.

FB assumes that I would have been delighted to "find" this person, and they assume that this person would be delighted that I found them, but what if I had been not on good terms with this person in the past, what if neither of us wanted contact with the other, or worse, what if one wanted contact and the other didn't?

This was a major wake up call for me. Signing up with FB is so easy, they make it seem attractive to write in more and more information, things like your full name, birth date, work history, have children? Great, how many, their ages, sex. Your relationship status, your location, hobbies, interests and please post lots of pictures. If you have a blog, they make it easy to connect your blog to your account so that every time you post something on your blog, it is posted to your FB page, something I didn't realize was happening at first, it took me forever to figure out how to disconnect my blog from my FB account. They make it incredibly easy to sign up, but nearly impossible to remove these connections. I finally figured out, purely by accident, how to disconnect my blog from my FB account. Do you really want all of this private information visible to everyone who are friends of your FB friends, all these people you don't know?

Another problem that became painfully obvious to me, one of my FB friends was friends with someone from my past life, no I'm not talking New Age stuff, just someone from many, many years ago, someone who has the potential to cause serious problems for me, though it's not probable that anything would happen, the fact that the potential connection was there and I had no way to opt out of this process if I remained a FB user, this is unacceptable to me and was the nail in the coffin for FB. I can only hope that she isn't reading my blog now, this would be very uncomfortable at the least, potentially disastrous at the worst. Yeah, I know that this person could have found me anyhow, just punch in my name in any search engine and my blog shows up, but I would like to think that this person has moved on with her life and hasn't thought about me in years, but now, there is my name popping up on their FB page as a potential friend just because we have a FB friend in common, now I have to be worried about this person showing back up. Just to be clear, this was a legal issue, not a personal issue.

That being said, I started looking on FB for a way to delete my account. It turns out that there isn't an obvious way to do it, oh they will let you deactivate your account, but your information remains intact, just inaccessible, (they say), and at any time you can reactivate your account with everything intact, you can pick up where you left off. I wanted to completely delete my account. I had already deleted all of my pictures, links and such, did that weeks ago, but I still wanted my account gone, not just inactive. I found a way to do it, the link will be provided at the end of this message.

I posted one final message to my page stating that I was deleting my account, I went to a couple of my FB friends and let them know as well. The main thing is the people who already know me, know how to contact me and how to follow me without using FB. I went to the FB page that lets you delete your account and pressed the button. It was quick and fairly painless. It does warn you not to try to log back into your account for the next 14 days. That's how long they wait before completely deleting your account, I suppose that's to give someone the chance to change their mind. If you log in before the 2 weeks is up, it cancels your cancellation. It's tempting though, just to check to see if your account is really gone, but wait the full 14 days, I'll wait an extra day or two, just to make sure, then I'll check.

I had a bad feeling about FB before I joined, I generally listen to that little voice, it has never lead me wrong. I wasn't comfortable with it and I was right to be concerned. Privacy has been a major issue with FB, just do a search for privacy and Facebook, you will find loads of fodder that would turn your stomach.

I know that my life is pretty public here, but at least here, I have the option to allow as much or as little information about myself to be public, my personal information isn't being populated on people's browser window just because we might know someone in common. FB is supposed to have some privacy, you can't just browse people's FB page unless you know them and they allow you in. The problem is, being a social network, they, FB, go out of their way to connect people, it's what they do, they try to get you to agree to let them into your email account to harvest all of your email contacts, I never let them in, I suppose the reason is to try to hook me up with more FB friends, allowing even more people access to what is supposed to be private. FB doesn't make it very easy to know what information is being shared at what levels, if you have a FB account, do you know what information is visible to non-FB users, friends of friends as well as your FB friends?

Look at it like this, let's say you work in a company, you know a certain number of people in this company on various levels, some you work closely with, some you are on "nodding terms" with, now you probably don't mind these people knowing certain things about you, heck you see them every day. Now all these people you know from work, have friends and family outside of the company, outside of your circle, now suddenly all of these people, people you don't know or have any interest in knowing, all of these people know about you, have access to some of your information, private information that you aren't even aware is visible. You start getting emails and text messages from some of them, stating that they know someone you know, therefore you might have something else in common with them, they want to be your friend. Sure you can ignore these requests, if you reply directly to them, even to say sorry, not interested, now they have even more access to your personal life, even if it's only for a short time, see where I am going here? This behaves like a virus.

All of this because you wanted to keep in contact with a few friends and/or family. It's possible to dig deep on FB, go in and set who and on what levels people can see your information, it's not easy, their site is complicated to navigate, the menus are not intuitive, it's easy to miss something, and nearly impossible to remove access to some parts. They absolutely do not allow you to stop other people from seeing you all together, so anyone who is friends with one of your FB friends has the ability to see and contact you, period.

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but seeing that one person from my past on FB rattled me, because if I could see them, they could see me. How many of you have someone from your past that you'd rather not have contact with? How likely is it that this person or persons would know someone that you know? Not likely? I would have said that too, until a few days ago. How many potential stalkers, how many potential identity thieves are out there, trolling through their FB account, looking for likely targets? Think you're safe? Think your information is only visible to those who are your FB friends? Think again. I'm not saying to run out and delete your account, though I wouldn't be disappointed if you did, I would suggest that you go back through your FB account and see just what is visible and on what level. I'll bet my sister's friend wasn't aware of just how much private info she was sharing with strangers. It's not like your information is just "out there", available to someone who might trip across it, your FB information is being purposely populated, inserted on potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of other FB users page, simply because you have a FB friend in common.

The other annoying thing about FB, at least for me, is all the games and apps on the site, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, silly little games and apps with no redeeming qualities, the only reason they exist is to get FB users to log in more often. I would log in to my account and would have to scroll through page after page of messages about whatever game my FB friends were playing, so and so earned a thousand hugs, got another barnyard animal or signed up for some giveaway... I don't care about any of that, I didn't sign up to read about what games my FB friends were using, I certainly didn't want to play them myself. FB at least had enough sense to make it possible to block these game and app messages, but you have to do it for each and every one, you can't just block all of them across the board. Gads, it seems that some of my FB friends did nothing but play these games all day, their whole FB page was nothing but these games, oh well, whatever floats your virtual boat. LOL!

I didn't mind reading updates and such from my FB friends, but I didn't want to receive a boot, or a heart, or a virtual barnyard animal or any of the other little games they played, many of these games are like sim games, something I am not the least bit interested in, nothing personal against the people who enjoyed doing this, I am just not interested in participating in it. Darn, why couldn't FB just make it possible to block all of these types of messages, it would have made it less annoying for me to log in and look at my FB page.

Well, enough FB bashing, I just wanted to let everyone know why I deleted my account, and alert anyone who uses FB about the potential privacy issues, or breaches, so that you can do something about it.

Now, go out and do the right thing. A big smiley to anyone who knows where I got that quote.


Go here to learn how to delete your Facebook account, you must be logged in to Facebook to delete your account.
Just in case that link doesn't work or is taken down, here is the short version of what it says,
HOW TO DELETE, (short version),
Go here:
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account
Click "Submit" and follow the instructions.


All written text and audio podcasts from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.



Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


Thanks for visiting!

keywords: delete facebook account, delete my facebook account, delete your facebook account, facebook face book, remove facebook account, cancel facebook account, facebook privacy issues, 

Sunday, January 17, 2010

I'm In Love

This will be a quickie, what I am in love with is the smaller version of a pressure cooker. A couple of days ago, I was at a friend's house, she had a brand new pressure cooker, it appears to be either a 4 or 6 quart, this is not a big, canner sized unit. We had been talking about learning how to use one, I looked at the booklet that came with it and saw that it cooks most things in minutes, yes in minutes! I was blown away, I knew that pressure cookers cooked much quicker, but I had no idea just how fast these work.

I found the page for pinto beans, it says to cook pinto beans for 3 to 6 minutes. I had to try it, so I found a bag of pintos, I picked the whole bag, but only used half the bag. I placed the beans in a bowl of water with a pinch of baking soda and covered it. The next day when I went over to my friend's house, I brought the fixens for making tortillas. I poured out the bean water, rinsed the beans, placed them in the pressure cooker, added a chopped onion and some chili powder. I poured water up to the half way mark, put on the lid, locked it down and put it on the fire. It takes 5 to 10 minutes to come up to pressure. Once up to pressure I turned down the flame, just enough to keep the rocker rocking. I timed it for 6 minutes, then remembered that at high altitude you have to add more cooking time so I added 2 more minutes.

I had serious doubts that it would be cooked completely through in that little time, but I followed the directions. I made a double batch of flour tortillas while the beans were cooking. Once the timer went off, I turned off the fire and allowed the pressure cooker to come down by itself. That took about 15 minutes, of course the beans are still cooking during that time. Once the tortillas were done, the beans were ready to come out, I was not sure that the cooker was fully de-pressurized so I put it in the sink and ran cold water over it. I didn't have to do that, but I felt better about opening it afterward.

Once opened, the beans were perfectly cooked, all were soft but not falling apart. I then seasoned it with salt and I minced a pickled serrano chili pepper, that went into the pot. Then we tasted it. It was delish! We ate a bowl of beans each, with a couple of rolled up tortillas to go with it. Man was it good! My friend has been eating these beans for the last two days, she tells me every day how good they are. Now I need to find our small pressure cooker, I have a canner, but I also have a smaller pressure cooker that will be perfect. We can't afford the propane or electricity to cook a pot of pintos in the traditional manner, cooking for hours and hours. With the pressure cooker, I can afford to run the propane for the amount of time it would take to cook a pot of beans. I'll post more about this soon, stay tuned!

OK, so this isn't as much as a quickie as I thought... I tried. LOL!



All written text and audio podcasts from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission.


Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


Thanks for visiting!

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Download YouTube Videos

I enjoy the internet very much, I sometimes forget that I generally have more time to figure out how to do some more fun and sometimes obscure things on the internet. No, not that, get your mind out of the gutter! LOL! This time, I'm talking about YouTube videos, ever watch something on YouTube and wish you had it on your computer? There isn't a way, through YouTube to download a video, but there is a way, a couple of ways in fact, to download YouTube videos to have and save on your very own computer.

I like doing this for the instructional videos I watch, right now I'm hooked on loom knitting, there are a lot of talented people out there doing DIY YouTube videos, sure you can bookmark them, but on occasion, videos disappear from YouTube for whatever reason, it's nice to have a backup, I have folders for all of my DIY stuff, I place the videos that I download in these folders so I will always have them, I don't have to wait for them to buffer, I don't have to be on line to watch them, and I don't have to worry about the videos going poof for any reason. Everything I listed below (as downloads) are free, that's one of the things I love about Firefox, thousands of add-ons, and they are free. I'll post another message sometime with all of the add-ons I currently use, you just might find something helpful in there. But for now, back to downloading embedded videos and audios, here is how to do it:

First of all, you need to be using Firefox for your browser, I highly recommend it, I use it myself.

Download Firefox here.

Next you need an add-on called Download Helper, it's free, you get it here:

Download Download Helper here.

You can also install a toolbar called Freecorder, this allows you to record anything that comes through your speakers on your computer, it also has an add-on for downloading YouTube videos.

Download Freecorder here.

With the Download helper, you will see a set of balls (or balloons as I prefer to think of them), red, blue and yellow somewhere on your toolbar (on Firefox), most of the time the colors will be grayed out, but when you are on a YouTube page, or other site with an embedded video, the balloons will have color and will be animated, you can't miss it. You click on the balloons and you will see some options as to how you want to download the video.

With Freecorder, you will see the YouTube icon in the toolbar, when you are on a YouTube page or other page with a embedded video, you click on the YouTube icon, it will open a mini window and give you options as to how and where you wish to download the video.

Either way works fine, I prefer having the option to use either method. The video format will be a .FLV, you may not have seen this format before, it's a good format, it has good compression, this means the video will not take up as much space on your computer. You should be able to play this with Windows Media Player, or you can download this program, VLC Media Player will play just about any video (and audio) format that is out there.

Download the player here.

Well, that's about it, now you can snag just about any embedded video out there, oh and Download Helper can also snag embedded audio files too, if you are listening to a podcast or embedded audio on a webpage, you should be able to snag it, sometimes the little balloons do not activate, I just reload the page and then it works right. Enjoy!


All written text and audio podcasts from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission.


Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


Thanks for visiting!

Monday, January 11, 2010

Thank You, Each And Every One!

I want to say a great big thank you to everyone who has visited this blog, from the first time reader, to my long time loyal followers, without you, this blog would not be what it is today. I truly have the best readers (and commentators) in the entire world! IMHO.

I also want to say a great big thank you to all of those who visited my sponsors on this blog (and any of my other blogs), and an even bigger thank you to all those who made purchases through the links (Amazon, Clickbank...), with Amazon, even if you don't purchase what you clicked on (from my site), anything you purchase after that goes toward supporting this blog as long as you haven't clicked on another Amazon link from another site.

I know that no one really likes commercials, but this really is part of my income, it's not a huge amount by any means, no one is getting rich here. For us, we don't require big "paychecks", we live pretty small money wise, back in the city, this would have never been enough to survive on, heck it wouldn't have even bought lunch for the week, but living off grid, with few bills, the money earned from my sponsors goes a lot farther (or is it further?).

I try my best to make the ads here something that you would be interested in, relevant to the subject matter on the blog. I try to make the ads as non-obnoxious and non-in-your-face as possible, I don't want this to become an ad-fest. For those who really dislike the ads, let me remind you that I don't charge anything to access this site, I offer loads of free information, my (off grid) life and experiences, which is why, I assume, you are here.

Last but not least, I want to give out a huge thank you for those of you who pushed the donate button, you know who you are. :) Again, I tried to make that a subtle thing, I have it pretty far down the page, it's not the top item on my page, it's not jumping and blinking, it's just there, politely waiting. I have received everything from a few dollars to more than I ever expected from one person, if you are considering donating, don't think you have to donate a large quantity (though I wouldn't turn it down, LOL), even a dollar or two helps, if even half the people who visit me on a daily basis donated a few dollars, even once a month, that would add up to a lot of support.

All moneys earned through this and my other blogs goes toward purchasing things needed for survival and living, from warm winter clothes, to plumbing parts, building materials, car parts, internet access, paying taxes and such. It's not going toward frivolous items, we aren't going out to eat (unless you count McD's every few months, and at that I only buy from the dollar menu!), we are very frugal, you might be shocked at how little we live on, oh I'm not complaining, I'm quite proud of how we live and how we get by, it's all good. :)

Again, thank you and blessings to each and every one of you, you make this all possible. :)


All written text and audio podcasts from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission.


Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


Thanks for visiting!

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Loom Knitting Video

Here's something fun and off the cuff, I wanted to make a knitting loom video so I did, with the help of Primitive Bob, watch and enjoy.



My Newest Hobby- click here for Loom Knitting Patterns


All written text and audio podcasts from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission.


Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


Thanks for visiting!