Typer Tappers

Today my red 4″ cathod lights turned up, I brought these to replace my white 12″ ones as I thought they where too bright.

So I switched them over so I now have some really nice red lights on my desk allowing me to see the keys I press really easily and the best thing about it is when you want to read a book its brilliant if you have a white light and want to see what its light just buy some thin red paper a cheap way to check it out I really couldn’t go back to my white lights after this but another plus side is having desk lights allows you to save a lot of power my room lights are 4 x 50w now these under the desk are just running of my computers molex connectors.

So what happened to my 12″ ones?

simple answer is i put them in my case, I do a lot of work inside my case as I’m studying something to do with fixing computers, so this has been a massive help as the brightness allows me to see anything inside the case , but only when its on which isn’t a problem very low voltage goes through the computer.

Don’t you think this is a good idea to save some money on your energy bill as you wont be using your room lights as much too see the keyboard so check out your local shops these cost me around £2-4 from ebuyer.com

Jason Bradbury.com – tells us how we can make our own portable WiFi for anyone to use, using a 3G simcard brilliant idea allows anyone to use it and a good idea for advertising your site.

Essential Keystrokes.com - Char tells us about a really good tool for web designing, called color schemer brilliant idea their is alot around but it is a very usefull tool and brilliant to use.

Blog Republic – Darren tells us the good ways to maintain your blog by keeping up your posting what you should post on and the best part if your stuck go on a cruise .

I don’t follow blogs much but these are my favourite posts for this week check them out.

As you might have noticed I made a new design, moved some things around a little bit.

I thought as I was updating the version I should design a new layout, hopefully it isn’t looking as scruffy as before I am still working on it so please any feedback would be great.

As with many IT-related industries DVD burning software has increased dramatically in its use, affordability and usability within the last few years. Whether for backing up your essential information such as pictures to free up hard drive space, creating home movies or copies of your favourite films to watch on your stand alone player.

With so many functions it’s not surprising how popular it has become but it’s easy to get confused about where to start so I thought I would try and pass on some basic knowledge to get you started.

Software

My personal favourites are:

Nero: They aren’t the biggest name in the business for nothing, they offer an amazing all round program that gives all the DVD and CD capabilities you need, however, with all these features comes a bigger price tag and a lot of settings and lessons to be learnt; it can sometimes be hard to use. You can find more information at www.nero.com, but I suggest trying a site such as www.amazon.co.uk or your local high street for a more competitive price.

DVD Shrink: If you just want the basics and are unsure of your ability to use more complicated programs like Nero this is a cheaper and more reliable way to back up and burn DVDs easily. Try it free from www.download.com

DVD Santa: A big disadvantage is that this program doesn’t work for everyone but did for me and I found it to be incredibly cheap, easy to use and effective; it puts your DVD, avi files, photos or home movies straight on to a DVD with chapters already included in a few simple clicks. The encoding of video files can take a while, three to four hours, but is the same for most encoders I have used. To see if it works for you give the trial a go from www.download.com

Now all you need is a burning drive, simply go to My Computer and see if your drive(s) are RW, if not www.ebuyer.com or somewhere similar can supply you with good and affordable burners, they will most likely sell the blank DVDs too, now you’re ready to go. Happy burning!

I have to say in some cases I would agree with the use of it and some I would agree now over the news in England we have seen Norwich go WiFi all over I feel sorry for their bandwidth, I think their speed is something like 256kb/s which Isn’t that bad considering how many people will be using it.

But why don’t I like it, basically I can’t stop thinking about war driving (hackers) how dangerous can this be if people are checking their bank account on this WiFi, I for one never check bank details online even if its on a wired stand alone computer it opens up so many possibilities, we already have enough trouble as it is with fraud now we will be getting even more with WiFi.

I’ve recently noticed all the free WiFi around the place for example the FON site they give you a free access point and allow you to use all their other access points which are dotted around the map now to me this is silly letting anyone on your network its a different thing having the government control it but having your home security put at risk because of this is stupid, I would never recommend anyone to purchase a free FON WiFi box so DON’T leave this business to the government to sort out then don’t even use theirs who wants them watching over your traffic its just another way to keep tabs on everyone.

So if your in Norwich or going to go their do not do anything sensitive on their network it could end up with you looking accounts passwords the whole lot, now you might of noticed I did support the Gadget Show free WiFi campaign because WiFi has its uses mainly for people on the move but Norwich are allowing residence to use their WiFi which they will give in to doing a little bit of online shopping which equals bad but good for the war drivers which we don’t want so please stay away from using anything to do with money on their free WiFi please.

It opens other things up like carrying your laptop around which can then lead to it being stolen or stupid little things like that which as most people know you cant get rid of information on your computers very easily unless you format your computers hard drive 5 times.

Overall in the end it all comes down to how security conscious you are, I would never recommend wireless unless your using SSH tunnelling with WEP encryption it just has too many security flaws. So please stick to wires.

Well for me at least its getting time to clean out my PC a full clean meaning from physically leaning hardware to the desk and cleaning files up in the PC.

So to start off I would clean up what i don’t need starting in add and remove programs, now if your security conscious you will find that you haven’t really installed much this year but if you have do what you need to to get rid of them.

Next onto files I start off on the Desktop where all the crap I store is so i make a couple of new folders in My Documents label things like “PDF Files”, “txt files” and “Misc” then I can just start sorting it out hopefully having a empty desktop will also help your performance.

Well now you’ve done that I get started in setting up my boot options using “msconfig” hopefully you all know what it is (its a system configurations utility) as usual with things like this be careful but what I do is go into startup and deselect what I don’t want.

Now the fun stuff opening the computer now what I like to have is a can of air now I’ve recently found that you don’t want to go for the cheap stuff it really is crap, really messed up my computer using it so I like to start of with stripping the computer down, then using the canned air to get off as much dust as possible now if it hasn’t got everything off get a cloth and wipe it lightly, I like to use the cloth to also clean the heatsink by putting it in between the metal and pulling it side to side works very well so after you’ve done it all put it back together and your all done inside the PC.

Next is your desk easy peasy get a bin slide everything into it .

Global warming is making this world a mess and if we don’t do something we are screwed, now it has been said before that computers are using up a lot of power which can be coming from coal meaning loads of C02 is being pumped out now people keep saying they want to do something but don’t we have the power to.

No I don’t mean putting a windmill in your backyard well it would be brilliant if you did even better of what I’m thinking of but I’m looking closer too you now what’s staring you in the face?
Your monitor, I am still using the old CRT monitors because i can’t afford a new LCD one but I’m thinking more of the computer the monitor does use up power but your PC is a energy hog. So how can we prevent this well I have talked to a couple of customers I’ve had and they all say that they have and sometimes do leave their computer on all day without using it which yeah is stupid now but what can you do to save some power, well I take it you’ve all heard of hibernate and standby and all this stuff well it isn’t always default.
Here is what I recommend get rid of your screen saver is that is set to show up after 5 mins of idle time change your standby to some on after 5 mins.
Basically what standby does is save everything in your RAM i think of it this way if you use firefox 2 or opera, you close the browser and if you’ve set it up you can open it up with the same session so standby is like closing your computer but having everything saved and at the move of a mouse it will show up again, I’m not sure if thats 100% accurate but its good enough.
Now to set up your hibernate after 1 hour of inactivity my hibernate will turn on which saves a lot of power, its like standby but the extreme it will save your information to the hard disk like standby saves it to your RAM but it will turn off the hard disk and any other things you don’t really need this is a brilliant way to save more power.

But the ultimate way to save power is turn off everything you don’t use, your going out for 30 mins turn your computers off the TV’s everything, does it matter if you take 5 mins to start things up again and get back to where you where, it really isn’t that bad is it when you get into the habit of it and you wont feel very guilty any more you could be thanked for saving your power.

Please can you tell me if you liked my comments on this subject or if you have taken action after reading my article global warming is really knocking on our doors and we need to do something, if possible please blog about this do something do everything you can we have the answers we’re just not taking action.
We can do so much for example don’t take bathes have showers brushing your teeth don’t leave the tap on washing the dishes don’t use the dish washer, now I have taken action and done these things and it is a small chip in getting the world back on track but at least I’m doing something, people around me aren’t taking this seriously!