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| Photo by Stuart Miles |
If you go to http://www.google.com/chrome, you can download one of my favorite web browsers:
When you're using Remote Desktop, you can't use ctrl+alt+del to bring up the remote computer's task manager. Here's an easy solution: use ctrl+alt+end
Also, here's a video on the history of Ctrl+Alt+Del:
DownThemAll (or just dTa) is a powerful yet easy-to-use Mozilla Firefox extension that adds new advanced download capabilities to your browser.
DownThemAll lets you download all the links or images contained in a webpage and much more: you can refine your downloads by fully customizable criteria to get only what you really want.
DownThemAll is all you can desire from a download manager: it features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400%, it allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time and, last but not least, it's fully integrated into your favorite browser!
http://www.downthemall.net
Not sure what programs you might need to update? Tried of having to look them up the old fashioned way? Try FileHippo Update Checker! It scans your computer for the programs you have installed and it will let you know what updates are available. The updates are displayed on a customized page for you and you can download your updates from FileHippo.
CCleaner is a nice tool to clean up old temp files and clear out registry errors. When running this program, make sure you know what you're checking to get rid of. Here's a nice walk through guide on how to use the program (Click here!).
http://www.ccleaner.com
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/
There are other nice FREE cleaning programs out there. I also recommend checking out (1) Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware or (2) Spybot Search & Destroy and (3) AVG free
(1) http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
(2) http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html
(3) http://free.avg.com
I had this program a while back that would read text from my computer. I thought it was really cool but up until about 10 minutes ago... I forgot what that program was called!
"Sayz Me is a free text-to-speech reader for Windows. Text is typed in or copied from the clipboard and then read aloud. Words are highlighted as they are spoken. Select voice, adjust reading speed, voice pitch, font, font size and color. Hides in the system tray. Very simple and easy to use. Freeware. BSD style license."
Sayz Me has been tested on Windows 98, 2000 and XP.
Please ensure that the Microsoft Speech API 4.0 and the Microsoft synthetic voices are installed.
NOTE: the installation order is important!
Be sure to install "spchapi.exe" first, followed by "msttsl.exe". These files should only need to be installed for Windows 98 and XP. They are already included in the default setup for Windows 2000.
More information about the myriad of Speech setups can be found at the Microsoft Speech website.
Source: http://www.datafurnace.net.au/sayzme/html/documentation.html
This year's Fine Arts Festival @Orme was awesome! We had several artists running classroom workshops for the students. You can checkout the school's event flyer on the event here. I was involved with assisting Kevn Lambson who teaches the Computer Art class at Orme during Fine Arts Festival Week. Kids used several programs including NewTek Lightwave 3D, Pixologic Zbrush, Corel Painter, and Adobe Photoshop.
You can check out Kevn Lambson's website at http://www.idearstudios.com
Here are a few useful links to find the demo versions of the programs listed above:
Lightwave 3D
http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/lwtrial.php
Zbrush
http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/trial/
Corel Painter
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Content/1152796555406
Adobe Photoshop (and other Adobe products)
http://www.adobe.com/downloads/
Also, Kevn reccomended some open-source (free) programs out there you can take advantage of if you're working in Linux or don't like the price tags on the above programs:
Unreal Development Kit
UDK is Unreal Engine 3 – the complete professional development framework. All the tools you need to create great games, advanced visualizations and detailed 3D simulations. The best tools in the industry are in your hands.
http://www.udk.com/
Blender 3D
Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
http://www.Blender3D.org
The Gimp
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
http://www.Gimp.org
InkScape
An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
http://www.inkscape.org
We were having a problem with printing to our color Xerox machine in the Faculty Room. A 7MB PDF file would expand to over 300MB in the queue and literally take f-o-r-e-v-e-r to print. Not sure what was the problem at first but there were alot of factors to take into consideration. I found an article on http://www.petri.co.il/forums that explained a similar situation someone else had.
Here's the link to the post:
http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=23752
And here's what Moderator Sorinso had to say...
"There is a big difference between PCL and PS drivers... Especially PCL6, that has some advanced capabilities that might be problem-makers when printing PostScript files. I don't recall the whole theory, and my printers' guru is out of reach at the moment, so cannot give you the whole picture.
Anyway, a PDF file is a PostScript file, that you are printing with a non-PostScript driver.
I would suggest two things:
1) in the printer's Properties, on the Advanced page, uncheck the Enable Advanced Printing Features box (see the attached screenshot).
2) install the PS driver for the same printer on the server and map it to the users.
Test these two and see which of them is better.
Good luck and let us know the outcome.
Added: also, see these articles from Adobe's site:
- http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...ernalId=333091
- http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...ernalId=323299"
It turned out we had that printer installed using the PCL6 driver rather than the PS driver. The option to change the driver was grayed out so I had to add the printer locally via it's IP address. Followed the instructions in the forum post and sure enough it printed great!
With the PCL6 driver, it took about an hour to get that job to go through. Now with the PS driver installed it took only about 5 minutes! And the file only expanded to about 120MB instead of 300MB.
I found an awesome online file conversion website called Zamzar. You can upload files or send youtube links to their site and have them converted to other formats. Enter your email and they’ll send you a link to download your converted file.
This goes out to all of you who got a new computer back in December. You know that, shiny new laptop that has a copy of Office 2007 installed on it. If you didn't end up getting a license for that, it means your 60-day trial is either coming to an end or it has already expired. Good news for you, you can buy a license over at your local computer store or online at a site like Newegg.com - I highly recommend that you do not purchase a license unless it's from a well established retailer. You could get into trouble if you think you're getting a good deal by purchasing Office online through an auction site.
For those of you that either don't have the money for that yet or need a nice office suite to replace your expired Office suite, look no further!
OpenOffice is a nice office suite that'll get you where you need to go. Got a paper to write that's due but you can't use Office because your trial expired? Go to http://www.openoffice.org and download their FREE office suite that runs using Java. It's cross platform so for all you Linux users out there (I know you're out there) can take advantage of this too. 150MB download so be advised if you're on a slow connection, it might take a while to download.
And hey, are you borrowing a friend's computer and they don't want you installing anything on it? There's always OpenOffice Portable. You can get a copy and install it to a USB drive. Works like a charm! http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable
Note: Like the site says "99MB Download - 248MB installed" I'd advise installing to a least a 512MB USB drive so you can also have some space for your documents/presentations/spreadsheets if need be.
