Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
A lot of the time, when people but a new PC/laptop, they just don’t know what software to install on it. There are a few key bits of software that everyone should have, that tend to make life a lot easier – in fact, many seasoned PC users won’t have even come across these, but I’m going to share some of the best bits and pieces with you today. I’d say that a decent amount of the best desktop applications available today are ‘open source’, meaning that instead of being developed entirely by one self-contained company, the software is open and available for anyone to work on and contribute to. It’s both a cool philosophy, and conducive to the production of very user-friendly and user-orientated software. So here are a few of my favourites:
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Tags: CCleaner, chrome, firefox, free, Google, IZArc, Open Office, open-source, opera, Software, VLC
Posted in Reviews, Software, Tutorials | 5 Comments »
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
My memory is horrendous, no worse than that… Put it like this, I’m one step away from writing whatever I wish to remember in permanent ink on my forehead. Now, what was I talking about again?
All jokes aside, if I find anything that can aid me in my quest to be able to actually remember something, I’m certainly going to check it out. The other day I found out about a website called Remember The Milk which promised to do just that with a web based to-do list.
First things first – it looks nice and friendly. Who wouldn’t want to use a website with a cool logo like that?! The whole interface, right from the sign up page, makes you want to use it. All you need to do to get started is go through a standard “enter your email here” etc. and you’re set.
Right, so you’ve signed up and logged in, now what? Well that obviously depends on what you want to use the site for. I think there’re two main ways to use it; as an out and out to-do list, or as a replacement for your main calender. I already use Microsoft Exchange to sync my Google Calender to my phone and so am only really interested in the to-do list part. It works fairly well as a full calender, but Google tend to take some beating.
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Tags: organize, remember the milk, to-do list, web application, website
Posted in Internet, Reviews, Tutorials | No Comments »
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Hello interweb, my old friend… I’ve come to speak to you again. So it’s been a while, huh? My apologies! Cyber-slapping in retribution aside, today I’ll be talking about one of the more useful iPhone apps – Facebook – and more specifically an interesting update it has recently had.
So as I mentioned, the Facebook app had a major update, around a month ago (I know, I’m behind the times…. shocking effort…) which included the ability to receive ‘push‘ updates & synchronisation of the important bits of your Facebook contacts with your iPhone. In case you don’t already know, a ‘Push’ update is one that doesn’t require you to connect to anything to get it, i.e you can have your iPhone in your pocket and as soon as you get a wall post/ comment etc, it will instantly notify your iPhone and pop up a little notification – not unlike a text, for example. I wrote an article a little while back explaining push and so-forth for GMail on your iPhone, you can find it here.
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Tags: app, contacts, Facebook, iPhone, push, Sync
Posted in Internet, Reviews, Software, Tutorials | 2 Comments »
Monday, February 8th, 2010
An operating system that’s able to be run from a pen drive? Yes, please! Ok, so right out of the gate it already sounds like I’m trying to ’sell’ the idea of Linux to you. Scratch that. I do, however, think it is a very interesting concept, and the Operating Systems that are developed using the open-source Linux kernel are in themselves very intriguing, and altogether worthwhile.
Now then, to give you a brief overview, we have to go back to the 80’s. Its not been long since the founders of Apple Inc. and Microsoft went their separate ways, and home computing is still in its infancy. In 1983, Richard Stallman creates the GNU Project, with the vision of creating a free, open-source, UNIX-like operating system. However, even after years of development and an almost-complete operating system, the GNU kernel failed to get the required attention from developers to be completed. Enter Linus Torvalds (c1991). Linus took what was previously done under the GNU Project and created another project, that eventually became the Linux kernel. It’s that kernel that is still under development and iteration today, and that all Linux ‘flavours‘ must build upon.
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Tags: Linux, open-source, Operating System, Unix
Posted in Reviews, Software, Tech, Tutorials | 2 Comments »
Saturday, February 6th, 2010
As many of you will already know , the Xbox360 is the best games console on the market. Alright, alright – calm down! I jest. It is, of course, entirely opinion whether you prefer the Xbox360 or the PS3 (or even the Wii!). But one thing is certain – the media streaming experience on the Xbox360 is fantastic.
If you’re like me, you’d much rather experience your pictures, music and most importantly, videos on your TV and decent sound system than on your PC/laptop – but you’re probably not a fan of having to move your machine over to the TV and fiddle around with cables and such. The easiest way for most people to get their content onto their TV/sound system (and by most people, I of course mean most people likely to read this kind of blog, ie. Xbox owners!), is to stream your digital content to your existing system (TV, 5.1, etc) – via the Xbox. This is handy, because it’s already in place, supports 5.1 audio and, of course, High Definition.
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Tags: media streaming, windows media centre, xbox360
Posted in Games, Software, Tech, Tutorials | No Comments »
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Nowadays, most people will have heard the term ‘cloud computing‘ being bandied around like some generic technological buzzword, and won’t give it a second thought. What they don’t realise, is the potential that the concept of ‘cloud computing’ actually has. Today, I’ll be talking about one relatively simple (but important) extrusion of this concept into our everyday lives, and how we organise them. It’s called Google Sync.
So Google Sync is a very handy service, provided for free by everyone’s favourite world-dominating company, Google. It basically involves a simple, singular, online place to store and interact with your contacts, calendars and email – and then have any combination of these sync with whatever devices you see fit. If you have a Google Account already, great – you can go start using these services right now! If not, you can sign up for one here.
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Tags: calender, contacts, email, Google, iPhone, Sync
Posted in Internet, Software, Tech, Tutorials | 3 Comments »
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Anyone who’s interested in music by definition has a huge collection of CD’s, and when I started university I had to think of a better solution than lugging my entire collection around with me. Unbeknownst to me, when I first did it my solution was to archive my music onto my computer in .flac (free lossless audio codec) format, luck points to me! There’re many ways of doing this, some of which are better than others… here’s how:
Everyone in the world (well at least in the parts of it which I’m interested in) have heard of MP3’s, but not everyone in the world knows that these files are ‘lossy‘. This basically means when you rip your CD to the computer it removes some data that it deems inaudible (as well as some other fancy jiggerypokery to optimise the file size). The thing is, that the loss of information does have quite a noticeable impact on the quality, which is no problem at all when you’re listening to some music on the bus – but say you scratch your CD, it’s not going to sound as good through your Hi-Fi as the CD did. Enter [Stage Right]: (Wow I’ve written less than 5 articles and I’m already repeating myself, this doesn’t bode well!) the flac file which has the advantage of not losing all the nice detail from your music files.
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Tags: archive music, EAC, Eact Audio Copy, Flac, high quality music
Posted in General, Internet, Reviews, Software, Tutorials | 4 Comments »
Saturday, January 30th, 2010
If you’re watching a film and the director wants to show that the, admittedly not too cool, almost certainly fat, pizza eating, greasy haired bloke is a geek – they tend to make sure the guy is using at least 2 screens (preferably about 10 but there’s been a recession …). This has caused a stigma of sorts about using multiple monitors, labelling doing so as an extremely nerdy and not particularly useful thing to do. In my opinion those people couldn’t be more wrong. Nothing can come close to the productivity increase a relatively heavy computer user can experience when adding a second screen, anybody that does more than just browse the web stands to benefit.
Monitors aren’t as expensive as they used to be either, when I first started Uni I bought an Acer screen from Amazon ( similiar to this one ) as a second monitor for my laptop. It’s not fantastic, but the extra size compared to my laptop screen is really nice. It’s now reached that stage where I struggle to use a computer without the extra screen real estate, especially when I’m coding (I love to have the code up on one screen and the current build or reference site on the other so I know what I’m doing). A lot of households even have a spare monitor from an old computer kicking around the house, even if the oldest CRT in the world it could still be fantastic to try out a secondary monitor and see whether it works for you.
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Tags: Dual monitors, external monitor, second screen
Posted in Tech, Tutorials | No Comments »
Friday, January 29th, 2010
People have many reasons why they don’t want an iPod, from not liking iTunes to wanting to be a bit different to the rest of the world. If you live in America, one of the great alternatives would be the Zune HD – but unfortunately for us UK based folk, Microsoft (in their infinite wisdom) have decided against bringing the Zune here, at least for the moment. About a month before Christmas I started hankering after one, so started researching its pros and cons, especially those related to use in an ‘unsupported’ country. Having subsequently bought one, I thought I’d share what I experienced.
Lets start with the good news… getting one is easy! I advise a UK based Ebay powerseller (I used a guy called thecheetahexpress). Make sure their reputation etc is good, I find powersellers to be very professional. You could also buy one off Zunethings.co.uk if you’d rather not use Ebay but it will almost certainly cost you a reasonable amount more.
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Tags: iPod alternative, Zune, Zune Hd, Zune in the Uk
Posted in Reviews, Tech, Tutorials | 7 Comments »
