Jing - Wonderful New Support Tool

 

OK, you're now seeing me using voice to text recognition and it is being recorded by the Jing.

So we will insert the URL at the bottom of this message and you'll see it appear at the bottom of this message.

Tutorial on the Jing Program

This is really a neat application.  You have to be very careful on how you use it but if you understand what is going on in the screen sizes that you have to deal with you can get a good feel for what the other person will see you when you produce what you are creating for them.  You will see what I ran into when trying to record and use voice recognition at the same time.  I am looking forward to putting together a lot of quick training videos they can be shared on the fly both internally in our company as well as with our customers.

This program is offered by TechSmith who also makes Camtasia a program that I use for capturing screen displays for training purposes.  This is a beta program that you can take advantage of the share information quickly with customers and friends and family.  To get more information on this product please visit http://www.jingproject.com/.

The Crash! continued...

As catastrophic as losing all the information on your hard drive can be, if you have performed consistent backups you should come out better in the long run.  Luckily, three weeks ago I began testing a new offsite backup product called Carbonite to back up my critical data on my notebook.  The backups took a little while to complete, about four days for 25 GB of data, but it made it very easy for me to get download my OneNote project files to another computer while I had the service department replace the drive and bring it up with a fresh load of Vista Ultimate.

It took about a week to reload the different applications that I run but I now have a system that is consistently faster, and doesn't have the garbage on it from loading and unloading test applications.  Refreshing your computer by doing a fresh load every 3 to 6 months does wonders for your productivity.  The downside is the time lost during the reconstruction.

During the down time, I was using my desktop from home at the office. I didn't want it to be joined to our network so I started using the terminal server client to access most of our applications that I run on a daily basis.  What struck me was how painless it was to be able to jump between the live windows session and the terminal session as I was doing different projects.  The one drawback I did find was that because I did not join this machine to the network was a little hard to move files between two sessions.  But it could be done without too much trouble. 

Now that I have the laptop up and loaded, I am running most of our legacy applications, we have some Access 97 databases, our accounting system, and our CRM program that are rather dated, on a terminal server. And I am running all my research with Internet Explorer, OneNote, and Office Applications in the notebooks operating system.  Because I'm using their RAM from the terminal server I have found that I'm running much faster than before when I have ten to twelve applications running at the same time.  It makes sense now that I think about it and I am glad that have taken advantage of this ability.

If you have any questions about the process I went through or if you want to know more about remote access and terminal services feel free to let me know and we can discuss this further.  Happy Easter!

So you want to Recycle your computer equipment responsibly? Here's How...

We all want to act as responsibly as possible when it comes to disposal of hazardous materials that can be found in a lot of computer components.  Goodwill Industries of Pittsburgh is accepting your computer equipment to be recycled. They have two locations in the Pittsburgh area, one and Banksville and the other in Belle Vernon. The addresses are listed below:

BANKSVILLE
2866 Banksville Road
Pittsburgh, PA 15216
[get a map]

BELLE VERNON
140 Finley Road
Belle Vernon, PA 15012
[get a map]

Here is a short blurb from their site: "Goodwill will consolidate and sort equipment for shipment to a Dell product recovery partner for reuse or recycling. Equipment that meets minimum standards will be refurbished and resold and all proceeds will support its non-profit job training and community programs. Equipment that cannot be refurbished will be responsibly recycled. Donors will be responsible for removing data from hard drives and other storage media before donating to Goodwill."

Nuance PDF Convertor - Legal Office Demo

 

I converted the video from QuickTime to Flash so you can easily view it.

Great little alternative program to Adobe Acrobat Writer for doing PDF Conversion and Document Management.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Upgrading to Office 2007 on a Windows XP Machine…

When I first install Office 2007 on my home XP machine was my inability to search in my outlook and OneNote programs. Microsoft every move the search functions from within office and require that you install Windows Desktop Search utility. Even though this utility was free it was a surprise when I tried my first search in my mail folder and nothing showed up. After I installed the search utility could well for it to index everything that was on my system. However, once everything was installed I was very impressed with its speed and accuracy. Not only was everything indexed and crossed index by application type, I was able to choose under which I wanted to search and limit the results for. Very nice! For more information visit:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/choose/windowsdesktopsearch.mspx

Even if you don't upgrade to Office 2007 and are still using an earlier version, having a full text search function in your system is a great help. Here's where you can download your free copy of WDS 3.01:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/b/d/9bd9c91f-7a74-4084-9198-49d2cfab7947/WindowsDesktopSearch-KB917013-V301-XP-x86-ENU.MSI

Making the Most of Your Time

Any one who knows me, knows that I am so in love with using my time as effectively as possible. Time is the one commodity that once it is used is definitely lost. I love to fill this time with things that either entertain or educate me. There are many ways to get, view and distribute all the information that is available both on the Internet and other sources.

If some of the information that you are looking for is available through the Internet it has probably been made available through either a RSS feed and/or through podcasts indication sources (which is a fancy way of saying iTunes). I subscribe to many podcasts using the Zune Marketplace. This is a free alternative to iTunes that works well whether or not you own a Zune Media Player or not. Several of us at the store recently picked up the new Zune 80 GB media player. I am currently running Vista Ultimate on both my work machine as well as my best of the home that I'm using as a media center system. This in works especially well on the desktops system because it is capable of importing TV shows that are recorded from the media center system. Takes about 20 minutes to upload a show but it comes across very well. I've also taking some of the home movies that I have created and uploaded them to the media player as well.

With podcasts, choose which ones you are interested and subscribe to them, and then mark them to the synced with the Zune. From that point on every time you connect your Zune to that computer it will check for updates from the market place download the new episodes in automatically upload them to your media player. It's that easy!

If you are interested in joining the Zune Social, as it is called, go to www.zune.net/setup to install the application on your machine that will allow you to connect to the Microsoft Zune Marketplace.  Enjoy!

Using Microsoft Outlook 2007 as your RSS Agregator

RSS stands for really simple syndication, and when you step back and really has a very simple way to gather information that you are interested and without having to search to search for all the new publications that are published daily by literally millions of different individuals add a new companies onto the Internet. Here is Microsoft's explanation of RSS feeds in Outlook:

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way for content publishers to make news, blogs, and other content available to subscribers. You can view RSS content in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Using RSS, publishers can make content and updates available for download by subscribers automatically. The content on all Web sites is not available as an RSS Feed, but the list is growing daily.

How does RSS work in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007? - RSS readers, such as the one built into Office Outlook 2007, allow you to subscribe to RSS Feeds and then read content or follow links for additional information. Whenever you see a link to a feed, or an RSS icon such as the one at the top of this page, just click. Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 will automatically subscribe you to that RSS Feed.

Get started - Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to subscribe to an RSS Feed is quick and easy and does not involve a registration process or fee. After you subscribe to an RSS Feed, headlines will appear in your RSS folders. RSS items appear similar to mail messages. When you see a headline that interests you, just click or open the item. For more information, read how to add an RSS feed to Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and how to read your subscribed RSS feeds. Below is a sample of the many feeds you can subscribe to from around the world. Click on the links that interest you and Outlook will subscribe to them.

To take advantage of capability all you need to do is add a new News Source to your RSS Feed List. Right click on the RSS feeds folder and choose add a new RSS feed. The dialog box will appear on screen that you need to enter the address of the RSS feed that you want to subscribe to. The easy way to get this information is to browse to the hosting site that has the information that you are interested in and click on the subscribe to RSS feed hyperlink that will be located on that page is there it is and RSS feed subscriptions option available.

When you press this choice and new page will appear in your browser. Copy the URL to the clipboard and jump back to your open outlook dialog that is requesting the URL of your RSS feed. Paste it into the field and then press the add button to add it to your list. The next time outlook downloads new mail it will also download any new RSS feeds as well.

Microsoft Windows® SteadyState™.(for XP)

 

For a long time, we have been supporting several packages that allows schools and libraries Computer Equipment to run applications that lock down the computer so that they can be managed and protected from abusive users.  These products and set-ups have been hard to use, expensive, or both.  Microsoft has come out with a free software download that allows you to manage computers in a school computer lab or Internet cafe, a library or even in your home with a program called Windows® SteadyState™.

Here is a brief description: Windows® SteadyState™ is now available. (Windows SteadyState was formerly known as Microsoft® Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.) Whether you manage computers in a school computer lab or an Internet café, a library, or even in your home, Windows SteadyState helps make it easy for you to keep your computers running the way you want them to, no matter who uses them. Windows SteadyState is easier to download, set up, use, and maintain than Shared Computer Toolkit.

Windows SteadyState runs on genuine copies of Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Home Edition, and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. And, Windows SteadyState is offered at no charge to Windows Genuine Advantage customers!

Here's a link to download it from Microsoft's site: DOWNLOAD

One of the podcasts that I enjoy listening to the provides many hours of tech tips for securing your PC to Security Now.  Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte discuss any issues surrounding PC Security and is worth listening to when you can.  In their January 31 episode 129, they devote the entire podcasts to Microsoft Windows SteadyState.  If you have the time and inclination I would suggest a quick listen. LISTEN HERE

A transcript of the episode can be found here...

Creating a Blog Entry using Microsoft Word

By clicking on the office toolbar icon, and then choosing publish and then blog, you'll be given a toolbar look:

Notice the manage accounts toolbar button. This allows you to add new managed blog accounts to Microsoft Word. Once you follow the setup procedure because extremely easy to publish and any time new entries to your blog list. Now one of the reasons I like Vista is the ability to use the incorporated voice to text mechanism in the operating system. It makes it very simple for me to sit and dictate into Word and push my article right to my blog list. If you need more help on setting up your live spaces account follow this link. http://home.live.com/?mkt=en-us

Have fun!