USB File Transfer for Dummies

Not an ordinary USB cable

Sometimes we think that the only thing worse than a freelancer faking knowledge is someone who believes it. Be that as it may, we're here to remind you that just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's true. We know: big surprise, eh? Anyway, today's nominee is a perfect example of what we're talking about. It's a Techwalla.com article written by Suvro Banerji that allegedly tells you "How to Transfer Data From PC to PC Using USB Cable."

WordPad Columns for Dummies

WordPad Insert Object Menu

Perhaps one the of the most... irritating? traits of the eHow.com "contributor" (as their freelance writers were called) was that so many were desperate for the cash that they'd write any nonsense down and pretend it was the "answer" to whatever question they were pretending to answer. The site's 300-word minimum pretty much precluded ever saying, "Sorry, Charlie, you can't do that," which lead to such rubbish as Foye Robinson and her Techwalla.com post, "How to Make Columns in WordPad."

UNIX for Complete Dummies

UNIX

If there's any one "flavor" of DotD that chaps the collective hiney of the Antisocial Network staffers, it's gotta be freelancers who claim expertise and yet pound out utter dumbassery in their content. You wonder how someone who supposedly has the necessary background could get stuff so wrong. It happens, though. We aren't certain why Carlos Mano¹, who claims a masters in computer science, wasn't able to answer what should be a straightforward question: "Pros & Cons of the Unix Operating System" at Techwalla.com.

Adding Machines for Total Dummies

Mechanical adding machine

We'd like to think that if a child were to ask us a question about how something works, we'd either lay out the process and function (in child-sized words, of course) or be confident enough to admit that we didn't know. That has not always been the case with eHow.com's contributors (as they called their freelance writers). Some googled the term and performed a half-baked copy-reword-paste job on some reference, but the worst of them simply chose to answer the question in the easiest way: pretend that the question was something else. That's how Margo Dill approached "How Does an Adding Machine Work?" at Sciencing.com.

HDTV Antennas for Dummies

HDTV antennas

In a perfect world, when someone asks the question "How Do HDTV Antennas Work?" you had better believe that the answer should come from someone who has at least some grounding in the principles of the electromagnetic spectrum and current induction. At the opposite end of the information spectrum, we suspect, would be a liberal arts graduate – say, someone with a degree in "film"; someone like Techwalla.com "walla" Stephen Lilley...

GPS for Complete Dummies

basics of GPS

Content farms of the internet break down into two different families: in the sites such as HubPages.com, freelancers post about anything. At the other type of sites, such as the eHow.com niches, freelancers choose from a list of topics. We harvest most of our DotD nominees from the second group, which might lead one to think that freelancers at HubPages (or InfoBarrel, WritEdge, etc.) only write on topics about which they're knowledgeable. One would be wrong, as is ably demonstrated by M. Dee Dubroff (Marjorie Dorfman) from Catalogs.com in her post, "What Is GPS?"

Blocking GPS Signals for Dummies

GPS phone tracker

It's not unusual for one of our research staffers to look at online "tutorials" and mumble something about how this freelancer just plain missed the point. Most of the time it's because the writer wasn't familiar enough with the task, tool, or tech needed to answer the OQ's question. Other times, it's probably because of a lack of imagination. We're pretty certain that in writing "How to Block GPS Signals"¹ for Techwalla.com, Patrick Nelson proved that he doesn't have much of an imagination.

Excel Macros for Dummies

Recording an Excel macro

From time to time our research team members run across posts that are so transparently bogus that they don't even rate a second glance. Take, for instance – and by "take," we mean "take to the trash" – eHow.com's Stephanie Ellen (sometimes known as S. Deviant) and her post, "How to Automate an Excel Spreadsheet." This post, now at ItStillWorks.com, is so... so... we don't know what! that it should have been published at a website that doesn't have "editors¹"!

Secure Pen Drives, the Dummies Version

A couple of our staff (regardless of what "A Way With Words" might pretend, that means "two")  are amateur linguists. Both, as you might guess from the slight snark above, lean more to the prescriptivist than the descriptivist end of the linguistic spectrum. It will come as no surprise, then to find that one of them greenlighted returning DotD Colby Stream and his half-wit Techwalla..com answer to the question, "What is a PIN Drive?"

Adding Machine? Calculator? Dummy!

HP Scientific Calculator

We complain a lot about freelancers who pluck topics out of midair and "write" about them without proper background. Heck, that's what almost all our 1072 DotD awards to date have been for, when you come to it. But the internet is big, and people will always be greedy – so there are plenty more where those came from! Including, for what it's worth, "Difference Between Adding Machine & Calculator,"¹ which eHowian Keith Evans has up at Sciencing.com (shouldn't that be at Techwalla?).

Adding Machine Instructions for Dummy Office Drones

If you wanted instructions on how to, say, drive a car with a manual transmission, you probably wouldn't be satisfied with detailed instructions about how to drive a specific vehicle. Let's say a 1974 VW Super Beetle (4 on the floor) vs. a 1961 Mercury Comet (3 on the tree). For one thing, shifting those two manual trannies is pretty different and for another, whatever you want to drive is probably different still (like the AN's fifth-generation Toyota Tacoma 6-speed). You want general instructions, not chapter and verse. Incompetent freelancers like eHow's Lacy Enderson never seem to figure out the "general" bit, as she amply demonstrated in "Adding Machine Instructions" at BizFluent.com.

Dueling TV Antennas for Dummies

Two antennas, one output

The eHow business model was simple: pluck search terms including the word "how" from the internet (later, they also included "what" and other interrogative words) and let a contributing writer answer the question. The problem was that, too often, that contributor knew nothing about the answer and merely found what appeared to be a good answer somewhere on line, then reworded that text. In other words, a sort of online version of the game "telephone," in which the answer came out garbled – just like the answer Alexander Callos gave at niche site Techwalla.com to "How to Hook two Antennas to One Coaxial Input" (any violations of AP guidebook rules for capitalization are eHow's).

Customer Support by Dummies

Icon Fitness logo

Today's DotD nominee is a little different: normally, we find some greedy freelancer who makes a mess our of facts just to pick up a few pennies but today, however, we're going to talk about a company. That company is NordicTrack, a subsidiary of ICON Health & Fitness, Inc., of Logan, Utah. The following is an example of the sort of customer support that, unfortunately, has become the "standard" of our day.

Digital Television for Dummies

TV Digital television

About a million years ago – 2009, if you're really interested – the U. S. television broadcasting system went digital. Plenty of people found themselves confused by the switch, not least because the FCC kept talking about "digital," while people making money off the switch talked about "high-definition." Consequently, plenty of people had questions, and plenty had answers. Not all of those answers were good, though: some were like the post called "Can You Receive Digital Broadcasts on a Digital TV Without Box?" [sic] penned by George N. Root III and appearing at ItStillWorks.com.

Cassette Tapes for Millennial Dummies

Cassette tape

One hoary old adage says we should never send a boy to do a man's work. Yes, we know, sexist: the hoary old adage-makers were pretty bad that way. Whatever the case, we have a different adage here at the Antisocial Network: we say, "Never send someone who's never used a thing to explain how it works." Sadly, that still wouldn't have prevented the hoary old Ralph Heibutzki from making a complete mess out of "How Do Cassette Tapes Work?" for good old eHow.com, though it's recently been moved to niche site OurPastimes.com¹...

Aspect Ratio and Image Resizing for the Clueless

The one on the right is distorted, Joshua...

We've met an astonishing number of people over the years who claim to be "computer literate." Most of them meant, in reality, only that they could run Microsoft Office programs and find information with Google. Duh. As for everything else, many found themselves up information creek without a clue. Sadly, a lot of the clueless types somehow managed to convince themselves they could make beaucoup bucks freelancing, offering their services to the likes of eHow.com: that's how Joshua Laud managed to pick up a few £ by writing tripe like "How to Resize Images Without Distortion," which Leaf Group has proudly moved to Techwalla. Oops...

HDTV Antenna Direction for Dummies

Rabbit ears TV antenna with tin foil

If you were to let just about anyone "answer" questions posed by internet surfers, you'd leave yourself open to contributors who do little more than reword crap they don't understand in the first place. That was always eHow.com's (now a bunch of niche sites with stupid names like Techwalla, Sapling, and Hunker) greatest shortcoming: they were more interested in format than accuracy. Take the example of college film major Stephen Lilley, who tried to explain "How to Know Which Direction to Point Your HDTV Antenna" on Techwalla.com; along the way revealing that it was something that 1) he'd never done, and 2) was something he didn't know how to do. But he still wanted that fifteen bucks, so what the heck...

Pinterest unHELP, the Clueless Approach

Pinterest

We know; most days we've featured money-hungry halfwits who post misinformation, mangled instructions, or just plain stupidity to the internet solely for the purpose of lining their pockets. Yes, we occasionally snipe at a blithering idiot for living in a political bubble, but 99 times out of a hundred it's freelancing idiots. Well, today's a little different: see, we get tired of crappy "support" from websites, especially when the support crew are in some far-flung country but claim English-y names. Not long ago, a staffer tried to get help from Pinterest... and got stiffed.

Here's what happened:

Magellan GPS Initialization for Dummies

Typical GPS Initialization Screen

Among the most fascinating features of the old Demand Media website, eHow, is that you could often find almost identical topics addressed by different people. What makes it fascinating is that despite the sites' claims that the content was edited for accuracy, it is common to find that "answers" to very similar questions submitted by different "contributors" were themselves different. Ideally, two posts came at a question from different directions, but sometimes both of them were, to be blunt, utter bull. That was the case when Melissa King posted "Magellan GPS Won't Initialize," moved first to Leaf Group's niche site OurEverydayLife.com then to ItStillWorks.com, then deleted¹.

Initializing a GPS For Dummies (Techwalla Week 1)

Typical GPS initialization screen

Congratulations to the folks at Demand Media on their recent name change to Leaf Group (9 November, 2016), although we admit it makes us sad to see their DMS¹ brand going away. It is gone, though, but a lot of their crappy content remains. Their latest trick is to start parceling out all of their eHow junk into newly-created "niche" sites; so this week we'll feature legacy content that has been moved to a place they call Techwalla.com². Without further ado, let's get to one of those; a little piece of content by Techwallan (née eHowian) Kallie Johnson (aka Carrie Catalano) entitled, "Magellan GPS Won't Initialize."³ Presumably, the article should have been a how-to for troubleshooting a Magellan GPS, but Johnson had a problem.

Kallie's Bachelor of Arts in English apparently did not include a whole lot of instruction, if any at all, in how to use a GPS receiver; and, for that matter, probably didn't include anything more technical than how to turn on your Macintosh Airbook® when you get out of bed in the morning. That, we suspect, is why Kallie's understanding of the meaning of "initialization" of a GPS is that "the screen lights up," as one might infer from her introduction: