Reviews

Microsoft Office 2010 Beta

So I am going through my email yesterday and I come across an email from TechNet announcing the beta of Microsoft 2010.

Must Have Application for Thumb Drives

It’s a sign of the time, you can buy a thumb drive almost anywhere.  I have even seen them in Gas Stations in the Omaha area.

Forget Park Place, I want to buy the Red Square

In case you have not hear about it, Monopoly is going global.  According to Daily Mail UK, Google has been in contact with Hasbro to make a new Monopoly game that utilizes Google Maps.

Free Online Games

Orisinal - Gorgeous Flash animation, perfect for kids

Child Safe Searches

In the ever expanding integration of the Internet and kids lives, filtering out non age appropriate information from searches is often overlooked by parents.

Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

1. Drag and drop
   • Drag the favicon of any site to your home icon to set it as the home page.
   • Drag a hyperlink (or image) to the new tab icon to open the link in a new tab.
   • Drag a highlighted word to the search bar (beside the address bar) will bring you to the Google search result page for that word. If you drag the highlighted word to the address bar (and press enter), Firefox will perform a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search

There are many things that you can drag and drop in Firefox.

Find your Microsoft Product Key

It is that time again.  Time to reimage your Windows PC.  You have gone through the checklist: Backup data, found all of the drivers you will need, have your programs ready for reinstall, Windows install CD, Product key for CD.  Ok, except for that last one.  That blasted key.  Now you are thinking "How will I install my OS without that?"

Panda Cloud Antivirus

How does an antivirus program that you never have to update sound?  To me it sounds like a winner.  That is what Panda is trying with it's new Cloud Antivirus.

Install like there is no tomorrow

With so much free software out there, it is hard to not to want to install and take it for a spin.  Well, after a while, you end up with all of these left over bits and pieces of the software clogging up your registry and taking up hard drive space.

Task Manager Replacement

As many Computer users know, the Task Manager is an essential piece of software.  It is great for a quick glance to see how your system is performing, if there is a hung application, a memory leak, or a program is just eating up your system.

Flip 3D your Firefox Tabs

Looking at all the evidence presented to me, Firefox is making major strides in browser preference among web surfers.  I know it is my browser of choice.

Exploit the power of Amazon S3 with CloudBerry Explorer freeware.

This post is courtesy of Nadya

Exploit the power of Amazon S3 with CloudBerry Explorer freeware.

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is a web service that allows reliable and secure storage of your data in the multiple data centers with unlimited capacity and scalability. It allows you to easily scale up your data storage to meet growing needs of your business. What’s more you pay only for what you actually use and you don’t have to provision servers to match anticipate growth far in advance of this growth start hitting you. You don’t have to invest in the hardware infrastructure and you don’t have to pay for ongoing operations of those servers.  You just pay low fee for data stored on Amazon servers.
However Amazon S3 is primarily designed for software engineers who would integrate the S3 with their web platform using so called S3 API which is based on REST and SOAP.  This makes it difficult for less sophisticated users to employ Amazon S3 who would otherwise benefit from the scalable web storage as well. But at the same time it opens an opportunity to 3rd party vendors such CloudBerry lab and many others to unleash the power of Amazon S3 for consumers.

Is there anything the Wii won’t be used for?

I won't lie, I love the Wii.  I am hooked on MLB Power Pro's.  I haven't played anything that lets you feel more into the games than this.  I know the graphics aren't as high quality as the big boys, but the motion controllers more then make up for it.

Free PDF Writer

By now, most everyone has noticed that PDF files have become the prevailing format for secure and reliable distribution of electronic documents.

I Love this utility

One of my favorite websites to look at daily (ok many times a day) is Life Hacker.  Today as I was going through some of their archived postings I found this.

Great use for an old tool

I admit, I am a Stumbler.  I like to see what is out there.  Every now and then you come across a great gem like this one.  I found this here.

Find drivers for unknown devices

Have you ever been given a com­pu­ter, or bought an old fixer upper PC that didn’t have all the discs or infor­ma­tion for the components?

I know this is frus­tra­ting since I too have had this pro­blem.  Espe­cially when it invol­ves key equip­ment (Net­work card).  There is nothing more irri­ta­ting then loo­king at your device list and seeing the yellow ques­tion mark.  Well tech­ni­cians, as with almost everything com­pu­ter rela­ted, there is a site setup to help with this.  PCIDatabase.com

So how does this work?

You will want to go to the ques­tion mark in the device mana­ger and right click on the entry (there maybe more then one on a rei­mage or a cus­tom built machine).  For those that may not be fami­liar on how to get to the device mana­ger here are some sim­ple steps.  Find the My Com­pu­ter icon on your desk­top (upper left by default).  You will want to Right click on the icon and you will get a menu like this:

After you left click on the pro­per­ties entry a new win­dow will pop up:
If you do not have the tab shown, you will want to click on the Hard­ware tab.  Once here, click on the device mana­ger and you will see a list of ins­ta­lled devi­ces.  You will scroll down for the yellow ques­tion mark.  In my exam­ple there are none, but I am sure you will find them rather quickly.

Read more…

Office 2007 Ribbon Bar

As we rolled out Office 2007 in my office, one of the things that came up quite a bit was the new Ribbon bar.  Personally, I think the groupings of the options are well thought out and very intuitive.  But, even with all the guides in the world, some users wanted the classic toolbar back.

Great Tutorials

So in my daily stumbles today I came across this website: In Pictures: Online Computer Tutorials.

How Fast is your Internet Connection

I have compiled a few links for you to use to test your broadband speed.  I do this once or twice a week.

How hot is your Laptop?

How many readers have a laptop? I would say alot, they are much cheaper and much more functional then the laptops of the old days.  Some are almost as cheap as a desktop.  That coupled with how easy a wireless network is to set up and how many public area offer free WiFi for on the road, makes a laptop a good investment now a days.

Access your passwords anywhere

I am not sure about everyone here, but I follow the recommendation of not using the same passwords on multiple sites.  Particularly the very confidential information: Banking information, Insurance information and email.

Automating Amazon S3 Backup on Windows with CloudBerry S3 Backup

This post is courtesy of Nadya

Thank God for Hulu

I admit I am a couch potato.  So much so, that I tend to work on the computer while watching TV.  Have a game on the TV and watch the stats for that game or others that interest me streaming on the laptop.  All I can say is thank goodness for broadband.

Online Backup

A few days ago, I discussed a backup tool named Cobian and I promised to look into online space for offsite storage.

Windows PC Device Manager–Use This Good Utility

Author: John Mowatt

Cobian Backup Utility

A few posts ago I made a tongue in cheek comment to backing up.  It did get me thinking a little bit about good FREE, and you will notice I like free, backup utilities that offered a good variety of backup options (location, spanning, archiving, and so on).

Safely type email on your iPhone

I do not personally own an iPhone, but I do keep my eye out on some of the interesting applications from time to time, and this is one that I would love to see on my beloved blackberry.  Email n’ Walk.

Kidzui

When you think of trus­ted names in pro­ducts for kids, some of that come to the top of the list inc­lude: Bar­bie, Mat­tel, and Hot Wheels.  Now ima­gine the three of them com­bi­ning to create a safe way for kids to access the inter­net and parents to check and con­trol that access.  What you would be left with is Kid­Zui.

What is Kid­zui?  Well let me try and help with that.  Kid­zui is a brow­ser that has parents in mind.  With a cen­trally mana­ged list of web­si­tes that are allo­wed, not allo­wed, abi­lity to be noti­fied when your child adds a new friend, as well as many other cus­to­mi­za­ble secu­rity fea­tu­res, Kid­zui is all about allo­wing super­vi­sed independence.

With two ins­tall options (Fire­fox Add-in or Stan­da­lone down­load) the setup is inc­re­dibly easy.  Follo­wing the setup you will be then promp­ted to do the ini­tial regis­tra­tion of your parent account.  During this phase, you will be set­ting up your first “Zui” or child account.  You can create an account for all mem­bers of your family.  Please note, keep your pass­word and email address you set this up with away from the child so they can not login and undo wha­te­ver set­tings you choose.

Some of the paren­tal options in the brow­ser itself are: full screen (kiosk) only mode and require a pass­word to exit.  This would be a great fea­ture to keep anyone from being able to close Kid­zui and just launch IE or Firefox.

Read more…

Smart Installer

Many PC users as well as the technogeeks out there find themselves from time to time having to reformat. I know that since we are all good and conscientious people, we always have good and complete backups, so I won't get into that.

Keep that Software up to date

If you are like I am, you have a lot of software installed on your computers.  So much in fact it seems impossible to keep them all up to date.  I know a lot of people think, if it ain't broke, why fix it?

KidRex — Kid Safe Search

As many parents know, kids are getting using the internet at a much younger age now.  They are using it for research, for games, even Nickeloden channel advertises for kid friendly games.

OpenDNS — Review and Recommendation

For those of you that have children and want to block out specific types of sites, OpenDNS is for you.