Computer Tips -Tech Info

First off, you should now that I like to study languages. I have studied Spanish for a good amount of time (and have a site related to learning spanish for beginners). I’ve also studied French and German and a smattering of other languages. In fact, you might even say that my interest in shortwave radio […]

This is one of the questions that I deal with at least weekly. Here’s where I usually start answering… First you have to ask yourself what you want to do with a computer. If your goal is email and internet access, most ANYTHING sold new today is much more than sufficient to the task. It […]

Update – you can follow more about my experiences with Meniere’s Disease at my Meniere’s diagnosis blog. Well… after several doctors visits, I have been diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease. Let me back up a bit…. several years ago I started getting a stuffy feeling in my right ear on occasion. I had allergies and it […]

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 […]

I really don’t know if I want to do this or not… but I found several sites talking about how to salvage the laser from a dvd burner and use it as a VERY high powered handheld laser. (i.e. “light that candle” kind of power….) Don’t get me wrong, I would like to be able […]

A while ago I wrote about various ways to have an offline copy of the wikipedia. Yes, I know there are credibility issues with wikipedia, but taken with a few grains of salt and objective thinking it is one of the single most useful references online. (I don’t count search engines here – they link […]

There are lot’s of ways to get a file from one place to another, emailing is the first that many think of. (For larger files I’ll usually just upload to a directory on the website and then email a link…) The problem with email is multiple…. 1)viruses exploit email as a delivery vehicle and so […]

You had to know it would be a matter of time. Not long after I wrote about the limitations of Vista’s upgrade version I found this. First let me reset. Previous versions of Windows upgrade versions would allow you to do a “clean” install (format the drive) if you had the previous versions install media […]

One of the slickest video editing tools I’ve used in linux is kino. The only problem is that it’s geared towards dv files which comes straight from a camcorder (using the dv format.) Most of my video clips are in mpg format…. so there are ways to get it converted… here’s one such suggestion…. ffmpeg […]

One of the utilities under Linux I’ve made use of in the last few months is Dvdstyler. It essentially will take your dvd ready video and make the DVD filesystem (as well as menus). Simple menus are very straightforward as is setting bookmarks (chapters) within a file imported into a dvd project. However… for the […]