Category — Computers

There are loads of very useful Web 2.0 pages available on the internet. Here are the sites I use regularly:

Jott - call Jott and it will transcribe your voicemail into an email. So don’t type to send a text message, just use Jott. If you want to send an entry to your blog, call Jott and it will do it for you.
Remember The Milk - a very handy online To Do manager. You can even send a Jott to RTM to add an item to your to do list.

Grand Central - give people your Grand Central phone number and your cell, house and office phone all ring simultaneously. When you sign up, ou are assigned a local phone number with the usual features like voice mail and caller ID. Right now its in beta and its free.

Page Once - from their site: “simply select your personal accounts from social networking, email and travel to entertainment, banking, credit cards and add them to your personal page.”

Mint - “the free, automatic online way to manage your money.”

Stuffsafe - online home inventory.

With my Tivo, I’ve always been able to stream music and photos from my computer to the TV. Now with the help of a Macintosh program called VisualHub, I can stream movies and video from my Mac to our Tivo-connected televisions. VisualHub unlocks a hidden feature of Tivo’s desktop manager which adds an additional tab to include not only music and photos but video also.

With my wireless-N configuration, I can start watching the video immediately after selecting it and the quality is pretty good. So now I don’t have to buy an Apple TV or Slingbox and can save the money for some other gadget that comes along.

iPhone Owners Manual

Table of Contents
I. Turning on the iPhone
II. Making a call using the iPhone
III. Using the iPhone to send email
IV. Accessing the internet with your iPhone
V. Using the iPhone camera
VI. Listen to music with your iPhone
VII. Using the iPhone to humiliate the bad driver who cuts you off on the road
VIII. Using your iPhone to make a margarita
IX. Using your iPhone to wash your car
X. Using your iPhone to design a Boeing Dreamliner
XI. Using your iPhone to help Harry Potter defeat Valdemort
XII. Using your iPhone to reverse global warming and the ozone layer damage
XIII. Replacing the battery in your iPhone
XIV. Appendix

People around the office often ask me to recommend a computer system they can purchase. Usually my answer is “Get a Dell, you can’t go wrong.” But lately I’ve been getting feedback from many people saying they had bad experience with Dell. They report problems with their order, problems with their ever-changing promotions and about parts that are on backorder. Another problem is calling for technical support and the call be routed out of the country. It’s often hard to understand the person and it gets very frustrating for people trying to get help.

Dell and other computer companies are also becoming very annoying with the “crapware” they are pre-loading on their systems. They put limited version of antivirus software, picture editing programs and other crap that bogs down your system and uses up hard drive space. When I get a new system I wipe it clean and reload just the OS minus all the crap.

With a Macintosh you get none of this. You start up the computer with everything ready to go with no cleanup necessary. The customer service and technical support are wonderful and you can even go to a Apple store to get one of their “geniuses” to assist you. Of course this service does cost extra, just like the rest of the computer manufacturers, but it is well worth the money.

So with that, I’ve decided to only recommend a Macintosh system to anyone asking my opinion for a home computer. Sure they are priced higher but you really get an excellent value for your money. Now I’ll say “get a Mac, you can’t go wrong.”

The holidays are over and I have time to start updating my blog again. Well they’ve been over for several months so I don’t have any excuses. I don’t update too often because I really don’t have much to talk about. But Mark reminds me I don’t really have to talk about anything, my usual whining is entertaining enough.

So I’m back and today I’d like to talk about how much I like my iMac. I use it to listen to music, watch movies, organize my pictures and of course, surf the internet. I know I could do all of this with any Windows machine but it’s so much nicer on the Mac.

With my recent acquisition of Photoshop CS3, the migration away from Windows is complete. I have no reason to use a Windows machine except at work.

I used to keep my old Windows systems running to use as data storage but I don’t bother with them any longer. I place the hard drives into a USB enclosure and that’s all I need to access my archived stuff.

Check out the picture of Lucy and Strawberry on the Flickr site.

Andy, congratulations on your second retirement.

I have accounts with three of the major web-based email providers. Gmail is by far the best one for me. It has huge storage quotas and is loaded with great features like labels, chat and rich text formatting. The advertisements in Gmail are tucked away on the side to be less annoying than the other email providers.

I also use Yahoo mail but mainly for shopping and web site registrations. It does a fairly good job of spam filtering but the site is very slow to load and it’s surrounded by advertisements. But what should I expect since it’s free? Well, something like Gmail.

The third one I use is Hotmail. It’s inundated with spam and lacks many of the features of Gmail. Hotmail also has a new ajax-ified version but its incompatible with Safari so I dumped it.

I don’t like the way both Yahoo and Hotmail go to some advertisement-laden homepage instead of directly to my inbox.

At work I use Lotus Notes and their web-based Domino. It’s OK at work but accessing it from home via Safari is terrible. Thankfully I have a Blackberry for work email so it helps.

My brother Jeffery has a new project for the year. It’s his plan to take one picture for every day of the year. By doing this he hopes to become a better photographer by sharpening his skills with each day’s photo. I also enjoy the captions he creates for these photos. Check it out, the site promises to be very entertaining.

www.dfwjeff690.photoblog.com

Suppose you have a trash can that gets filled up. What do you do? That’s right, you empty it.

So why is it so hard for people to do that with their email? Here at work we have 125 MB limit on the size of your mail file. When you pass the limit, you can’t send mail. I constantly get calls from people in a panic saying they can’t send any email.

My answer is always “then start deleting.” It’s an extremely simple thing that very few people seem to understand. Delete, delete, delete.

Here’s what I wrote 4 years ago today in my weblog:

“My new system arrived yesterday. I got a Dell 4550 2.53 GHz Pentium 4 with all the accessories. So far I’m very impressed. Pam got my “old” Dell 1.7 GHz system and she’s extremely happy with it. Her last computer was a Dell 500 MHz so this new one for her is a vast improvement.”

The specs of my current computer isn’t much different than they were 4 years ago. I still have that 2.53 GHz sytem and it’s working great.

The parts for my new computer should arrive tomorrow. I’ll have it up and running in no time. This unit will be used to replace the mp3/backup/file server I use on the home network.

We’re moving to Active Directory at work so I decided to use Windows Server 2003 to run the operation at home. I’m more of a Novell guy and it will be good to learn all I can about AD at work and soon, while I am at home.

Here are the specs of the new system:

Raidmax Mustang ATX 420W case
received good ratings, plenty of power and 3 fans to keep it cool.
Asus K8V-X motherboard
Uses the 734 chipset for Athlon processors. Not top-of-the-line but perfect for what I need.
AMD Sempron 3000+ processor
My first Athlon chip, wish me luck.
512MB Kingston PC 3200 RAM
got the cheapest I could find.

I’ll reuse the CD/DVD player, two hard drives (300GB total) and monitor from the old computer in the new one. This kept the costs down considerably so it was easy to clear the expense with the boss.

Now I’ll have an old Dell 8100 desktop that will probably get stuck in a corner in the basement. Computers are pretty much disposable nowadays and if you get 4-5 years out of them, I think you’re doing well. I should just recycle and get rid of it. But that’s hard, they’re like my children and hard to give up.

Yes, I do need to get out more.