Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: General Web/Tech

  • Netbook Comparison Listing

    If you don’t know what a netbook is, it’s this recent class of laptops that’s very small and portable, many with solid state drives and can be a nice small portable computing platform. These are not desktop replacements, but can certainly be used for some serious work (which puts them a step above a PDA or phone.)

    Anyway, this site has a great comparator of the various models currently out from makers such as Acer,Dell, etc. It gives a breakdown of the features, pricing, etc. Very nice if you’re in the market for one of these great small portables.

    Many of these ultra small portables run a variant of linux or they will use Windows on them for a windows xp laptop, vista though hasn’t been used on many of these due to it’s resource requirements.

  • Free Nationwide Wireless?

    According to the Wall Street Journal, the FCC in it’s December meeting will be looking at the possibility of requiring the winner of the upcoming spectrum auction to use a portion of it’s spectrum to provide free internet access. They would require filtering although the idea is that adults could get unfiltered access with verification. Large wireless networks (as you can imagine) are against the idea, but I wonder if it REALLY is the threat to them that they think.

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  • Linux Market Share Growing Faster than Apple! | Linux adoption rate beats iPhone

    I had to find a twist like that headline above reading this article. Net Applications does a monthly survey across sites that receive 160 million visitors to gauge the “market share” of operating systems and web browsers. According to the November numbers, Microsoft Windows has no fallen below 90% market share, Mac is up to 8.87% and linux is around 0.83%. The growth rate for Mac is 7.43%, Linux growth rate is at 15.49% The iPhone is “only” growing at 12.12%

    Of course, looking at numbers from one month to the next you can see variations caused by a number of factors that may or may not accurately reflect the situation. Are people surfing more from work this month for some reason? Maybe there is a weather related reason that causes more web traffic than last month/less/etc…. Still the trends are that Windows is shrinking and NON windows use is growing…

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  • Black Friday Deals at BlackFriday.info

    When I was browsing through Google trends the other day I ran across the phrase BlackFriday.info as a hot search term and my first thought was related to the stock market (historic drops in stock prices have been given the names “Black Tuesday” etc….) So, I was wondering if there were forecasts of YET another plummet of the markets. But as I started looking into it more it dawned on me they were talking about the OTHER Black Friday – the one the day after Thanksgiving. In the United States we celebrate Thanksgiving on the 4th Thursday of November and it creates a relatively long weekend. This long weekend has been seen as the start of the Christmas shopping season and they say that many retailers started considering the day after Thanksgiving as “black Friday” because it put their businesses in the black for the year.

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  • Asus Eee PC | EeePC | Ultra Portable Laptop

    I can’t tell you how glad I am to see the ultra portable laptops coming back into favor. I’ve got a couple of old used sony vaio’s that are great little portable machines – lightweight/go anywhere…. The old Dell laptop that I have is the opposite it is a big desktop replacement – two optical drives/etc. Bulky and somewhat annoying to take with anywhere. Well, first HP has launched a ~8 inch portable and now asus. The Asus Eee PC looks like a great small portable. It’s about the size of a small book, uses a 4GB flash hard drive.

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  • Google Reader cache-ing feed behavior

    In the last couple months I’ve been “farming out” several domains from the averyjparker.com site. I previously hosted my South Carolina Genealogy, North Carolina Genealogy and Online Radio TV sites all in the same virtual server as averyjparker.com. Well, I’ve noticed some strange behavior from Google Reader as a result…. read on.

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  • Voiceshot – Easy Way to Get a Message Out – Automated Message Calling

    We’ve all received them…. “robocalls”. Usually they fall into a couple categories…. 1) doctors appointment reminders and 2) political campaign ads and 3) telemarketers. Items 2 and three annoy me to no end. In hotly contested elections we have easily received several robocalls a day from each side for a decent stretch. These types of things do have their use though. Recently I had a bit of a dilemma, I needed to cancel about 20 appointments in a short period of time with short notice. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could send out one phone message and not have to call each one individually (in some cases at multiple numbers…)

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  • Qassia Invite – new social networking site

    Qassia is an interesting social bookmarking/tagging site. What they’re trying to do is have their members tag and organize websites, in return you get unlimited backlinks to YOUR websites. A very interesting way to be in a participating in a social networking site, promoting your website and perhaps getting traffic back from it. Currently they’re in a closed beta. New signups by invitation only, consider yourself invited!

  • Custom livecd’s, virtualbox, seamlessrdp and sata dvd burners…

    I thought this writeup was interesting on the idea of using a web interface to customize a livecd. I’ve built a couple livecd’s (that I still use) for tech support, but I’m always thinking of one more tool that I’d like to have. After looking through their wizard it seems a bit limited in the granularity of what can be chosen (at least for what I’m thinking of.) But… it might introduce a new interest in the use of livecds.

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  • lulu.com

    I’ve mentioned lulu.com before (I have several products up there – a couple cds – music downloads – pictures – calendars – etc.) They’ve recently had a nice revision that ups the possibilities nicely. If you have anything you want to get published and don’t want to go in and buy a large amount of stuff upfront, or want to do pay per download stuff – it might be worth looking into lulu.com – you can get going with no upfront cost – they just take a commision out of things you sell. I know I’ve mentioned them before but I still get overwhelmed thinking about the projects I want to do through lulu.com…. I have a few books in progress…. I’ve got 2 cds done and a couple more audio related ideas going… etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. not enough hours in the day.