netTrekker Blog

Play Time

Can you imagine your life without a decorative box to put your paperclips in, without rubber bands, without being able to purchase a variety of shoes at an inexpensive cost, windows in your home, shoelaces, motion pictures, the use of paper money, cotton clothes, a suitcase with a collapsible handle or how about a telephone? These are just some of the items patented in March that have made our lives more comfortable, more organized, and definitely kept us more entertained.
March is also the time of year for the science fair projects, and through these projects our teachers will cultivate young inventors of the future. What neat gadget will they create to improve our comfort, organization, or entertainment?
If you do a search in netTrekker d.i. for inventions and then refine your search by “Video” (under the multimedia selection) you will find my favorite inventions resource, the Lemelson Center. Here students can either play games that sharpen the mind and prepare them for creating inventions or teachers can watch video on how creativity, play, and science all work together.
Oh, okay – teachers can play the games too. I know I have!

Tags: inventions, netTrekker, projects, science fair, video

Join me in the Village

Dealing with Pop-up Ads

netTrekker’s Content Editors, while searching for new resources, not only aim to provide users with the best online references, tools, lesson plans, learning exercises, etc., but also work hard to make sure these resources aren’t accompanied by excessive and annoying ads. You’ve probably noticed over the last few years that an ad-free website is harder and harder to find, and that sites offering quality information usually also contain ads, like those served via Google’s Adsense.

In the past, the most annoying type of ads — pop-up ads — were most closely linked with sites offering adult content, shareware/freeware, illegal downloads and warez, and online gambling. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case anymore. Even sites with useful and quality information can contain these ads. Pop-up (and pop-under) ads are everywhere, and aren’t going away anytime soon.

While reviewing online material, nT’s Content Editors make a rule of not including sites that contain excessive pop-up ads. However, there are many quality sites that, since their inclusion in nT, have started displaying pop-ups. Unfortunately, there is nothing Content Editors currently can do to prevent users from viewing these ads, other than removing the resources that generate these ads altogether. While we will review and remove sites that serve excessive and inappropriate ads (click here to read about reporting a link problem), there are many things you can do as a conscientious Internet user to prevent your online experience from being littered by pop-ups.

nT’s Help section offers a detailed guide to things you can do to prevent pop-ups as well as to clean your computer of adware that might have downloaded from the Web without your knowledge. The easiest thing you can do is make sure you have an updated browser with a built-in pop-up blocker. The most popular Web browsers — Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari — all offer options for blocking (or not blocking) pop-ups.

Both Internet Explorer and Firefox offer a customizable pop-up blocker tool.

In IE, click “Tools” and mouse over “Pop-Up Blocker” in the drop-down menu. From there you an enable, disable, or customize the built-in blocker. Open the Pop-up Blocker Settings in order to permit pop-ups from specific sites, customize how you are notified of blocked pop-ups, and set a filter level.

With Firefox, from “Tools” scroll down to and open “Options”. Under “Content”, you can block pop-ups and supply exceptions, much like you can do with IE.

Safari, which is new to Windows users but has been trusted for years by Mac fans, also offers pop-up ad protection. However, users are limited to blocking the ads without the opportunity to create exceptions.

In addition to using browser settings to block ads, you’ll find that there are countless software options (free and for fee) that can help you manage pop-up settings as well as clean your computer of malicious code or adware that you might encounter while browsing the Internet. (Go to nT’s Help section to read more about this.) However, we’d like to help prevent these types of downloads in the first place, so, please, if you find a site through nT that is accompanied by excessive ads, please let us know! Thanks!

Tags: pop-up ads, pop-up blocker