Last night I saw a program on Network TV that may go down as a landmark program in the evolution in the convergence of all things media. The program was called iCaught and based on what I have just heard today from clients and acquaintances, it opened the eyes of many casual web users to the wonders that can be found on the Internet.
Tonight my brother and I talked again using what is becoming our regular medium…Skype. We both of have inexpensive web cams and a basic microphone and call and talk to each other for an unlimited amount of time for absolutely no cost. Video calls are fun because not only can we see each other, but we can show each other items that we might be talking about and also let other family members (including pets) get involved in the conversation.
I reached into the “way back” machine and found these clips of my interviews on TechTV’s “Call for Help” and “The Screen Savers” shows in May of 2001 when I was promoting my book. Enjoy or be frightened…leave a comment and tell me which.
“The Screen Savers”
“Call for Help”
The release of Microsoft Office 2007 introduced us to an entire new interface and file format (thanks Microsoft). If you upgraded to Office 2007, you are creating documents in Microsoft’s new XML formats. Word documents now have the .docx extension, Excel documents have a .xlsx extension, PowerPoint has the .pptx extension…well, you get the picture. This is all fine and dandy if everyone you know also use the 2007 version of Office, but unfortunately that is not the case. If you want to email documents back and forth, you need to save those documents in the more compatible formats.
Today’s video tip shows you how to do that.
If you are an Office 2003 version or earlier, you will need to download this massive 28 megabyte “Compatibility Pack” from Microsoft in order to be able to read documents created in 2007. Better yet, send this tip to those folks so they can make things easier on themselves and everyone else.
This is my first crack at a video recording via our new pod/video cast that we are starting tomorrow night. The video and audio aren’t in sync, and the sound is pretty distorted…but again it is my first attempt at this kind of recording. Our setup for the show is much cleaner. We had a cleaner run during our initial testing Monday night. We are excited to start this new venture and hope you are too.
All-in-one printers have dropped so low in price the last couple of years that it poses a dilemma when the machine goes on the fritz. Decent all-in-ones can be found for right at $100 and some as low as $79. When one starts to malfunction, you need to really evaluate how much time and money is too much to spend on an inexpensive piece of equipment.
My thought is that if your printer cost around $100-125 new, I wouldn’t spend more than 1/2 that amount to get it fixed. If you are under warranty, by all means push the manufacturer for a fix. But once it is out of warranty, think long and hard on how much time and money is too much for the printer.
Many thanks for everyone who attempted to tune in last night. It was a great trial run and we have most of the kinks worked out. We didn’t actually get the live video and chat up until around 10:45pm. Once everything was up and running it was pretty lively. By the time we got off at almost midnight we were getting computer questions right and left.
We are very excited to get this going. One thing we can promise is that the new show isn’t just going to be an Internet version of our radio show. Last night we had questions from all areas of technology. We discussed HDTV, wireless networks and Internet security with people who had never heard the show.
I can’t believe it has been two weeks already that I’ve used Ubuntu Linux exclusively. If I had to sum up the experience in one word, that word would be “satisfying.” And my regular readers/listeners know that I can’t sum anything up in one word, so I will use this format to provide a complete synopsis of my Ubuntu thoughts.
After spending the last three weeks searching for a solution to our newsletter woes, I decided to completely rework our old system. Friday’s newsletter is on its way tonight, and I hope you are all getting it soon. Please be patient as we work through this horrible problem. Turns out that if we want to move to something a little more reliable and flexible, it would cost us upwards of $200/month, and since we don’t have any email or web sponsors, we need to keep running the newsletter as is.
Again, thanks for your patience.
Haven’t used my computer at all today except to write this blog entry. I will answer some email later, but again, Ubuntu does that without any problems at all (except that I miss my Cloudmark spam filter). I have one more day before I return to my Windows machine and use it as my primary again. I did hook a regular mouse to this laptop and it makes it easier to run the machine than relying full time on the touch pad. Thankfully, this laptop has a button that can turn the touchpad off when I’m typing since my palms tend to rub on the touchpad and then throw me out of the box where I was typing.
Tomorrow night, I will give a longer summary of my 14 day Ubuntu report and how I feel it would work for other computer users.