Students: Get Windows 7 for $30

A quick post from Channel 10, here is a link you’ll want to share with any college students (or parents of college students) that you know. Window 7 is only $29.99 for those enrolled in a U.S.-based educational institution. To qualify, the student must be taking at least 0.5 course credits and have either an @EDU.com email address or attend one of the institutions listed here. If so, the deal available here, will let them grab the Windows 7 Professional Upgrade edition for digital download. Backup media can be optionally added to the order, too, if desired.

The deal is currently being featured on www.microsoft.com/student, which is a valuable resource for finding great deals on Microsoft software, with links to Office 2010 for $79.95, all the student deals on the Microsoft Store site, all the free downloads fromDreamspark (professional development tools), and more. This almost makes me want to go back to school myself. Well, almost.

Calibre Provides a Formatted Presentation of News Feeds

A one stop solution to all your eBook needs. Calibre is meant to be a complete e-library solution and thus includes library management, format conversion, news feeds to eBook conversion, as well as eBook reader sync features and an integrated eBook viewer. I am using this product to capture information for several news feeds and have them aggregated into a ePub format that is then pushed to my iPhone.

Originally I looked at this to give me the ability to convert PDF’s to either ePUb or Mobi format so that I can access and use them on both my iPad and on my Kindle. This is a really convenient function but as I looked more closely at the product it has some really good additional functions that I could use as well.This is really worth a look if you are interested in grabbing content and have it available when and where you want it.

Microsoft Cloud Storage Strategy begins to merge

Microsoft’s Windows Live Sync product is changing its name to Windows Live Mesh.

In our beta release, we brought the best of Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh together. With the addition of remote access and cloud storage, we understand that the new program does more than sync files.  So following the beta period, we’ll be using the name Windows Live Mesh going forward, which we feel best reflects our broader goal of allowing you to access your stuff across your devices.

A number of our customers noted the inability to sync hidden files, so we added this support. Another point of feedback was that customers wanted a list of which files were missing in a synced folder. Now when Windows Live Mesh detects missing files, you can easily see the file name and when and where it was last modified.

When syncing files to the cloud, beta participants get 2 GB of synced cloud storage. Only 2% of these participants are using more than 1.5 GB. However, Live Mesh offers 5 GB, and while only a small number of Live Mesh customers use all their space, we want to ease migration and increase the online storage limit from 2 GB to 5 GB.

We’ve made several performance updates to Windows Live Mesh in response to your requests that will provide noticeable improvements to your experience. We worked on cutting the application load time in half and made syncing large numbers of folders and adding multiple devices to a sync folder faster. We’ve optimized both memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as decreased CPU consumption by as much as 30% when Windows Live Mesh is idle.

So it sounds like we are going to see a merging of the Live Mesh Product with the Live Sync Product. You will have 5GB’s of space to work with hopefully we won’t lose anything from Live Mesh that we have currently (I work out of this product with all of my systems.) So when Microsoft releases the new Live Essentials Products I will be looking closely at what is being provided in these packages.

TWiT Live Specials 32: The Future of the Web

It was really amazing to listen to these teenagers and their thoughts about being an entrepreneur and their vision of the future. This is really worth the time spent to listen to their thoughts and view and of course what these kids have are planning to accomplish. It is refreshing to hear from kids that are looking at what they can do to fulfill their hopes and dreams, of their projects and thoughts about what they are going to a have to do make their dreams come to fruition.

If you need a little lift these kids will definitely provide one for you. Jump to Twit Live Specials…

Adobe’s Online Photoshop provides some nice Photo Editing Tools but is its photo storage worth it?

Photoshop.com is an online complement to Adobe’s Photoshop software according to Adobe. But if you need some simple editing functions and a place to share your photographs then here is another place that you can do so.

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Is ePub Format the Default Standard now for eBooks?

With the new update for the Pages App that now allows you to save your documents in ePub format which Apple uses for iBooks. It is also the native format for Stanza (which is the Open eBook standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum http://www.idpf.org). ePub is supported in Stanza Desktop, iPhone, iPod Touch, Adobe Digital Editions and some Sony Readers.

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ASUS Intros Eee PC 1015PEM, Powered by Atom N550

Another product is being announced that will be using the new Intel Atom Dual Core N550 Processor. Asus joins others in announcing a product that will make use of the Intel Atom N555 processor after it is release by Intel later this year. What has drawn my attention to this particular entry into the Netbook arena? Memory and Screen Resolution.

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Netflix in the News Again

Be sure to update your iPhone so you can now watch your Netflix on your phone as well. For around $9/month you have the ability to stream content from Netflix to not only your computers but also to your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. When you think about the size of our phone it having the ability to stream beautifully formatted movies and TV shows to you phone and other media devices. The Application is simple and easy to use and renders well to the screen size that it is played on. Access to mobile media is expanding for sure. Enjoy your movies while you are on the go!

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Intuit and Morphie have introduced a product for accepting payments using your iPhone

For those of you that are working the event tent themes you have probably been looking for more ways to be able to collect funds from potential customers. If you are like me, I hardly ever carry cash, I have embraced plastic money. More and more of us are getting into that position and if you are a retailer then you need to be more concerned about losing a sale because you don’t have a way of processing a credit card transaction.

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Garmin Nuvi Recall Affects 1.25 Million Devices

From Mashable, we have the following news report where Garmin is recalling 1.25 Million of its Nuvi personal navigation devices because of battery issues, go figure! THe models affected are 200W, 250W, 260W and 7XX. Read on to get more information.

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New Version of Jing to download

Press Release I am a big fan of TechSmith’s products but I especially am fond of their free Jing application. Of course I have gone the extra step and upgraded to Jing Pro to get some of the extra capabilities that it brings to the table but the free version is pretty useful on its own. Be sure to download install this new update to be able to take advantage of these new features.

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NATURE | Behind the Scenes of "Hummingbirds" | PBS

I love when I fall into things like this video from the YouTube Nature PBS Channel. Not only is the technology and tenacity of the the documentary team in collecting the images that they did. The following embedded video is a short describing the making of the documentary

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Security Breach in iTunes Store could empty your Bank Account

There are people reporting that their bank and PayPal accounts have been emptied by hackers through the Apple iTunes store. This is another blow to Apple’s reputation of being a secure, safe place.

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Camera Captures Thief!

Right up my alley. I like the thought of unexpected incidents having a happy outcome though in this case the thief doesn’t get one because he gets caught. The scene: outside the Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin. The Myers family had setup to take a family picture in front of the capitol building and Mr. Meyers had setup his camera to take a timed exposure while he ran to get into the picture with his family. He had placed his camera bag behind where they had setup to take the picture.

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Buffalo Refreshes its DriveStation Family of Storage Solutions

We use Buffalo Drive products a lot in our installations. It is always good news to hear that a company whose products you work with continue to grow and refresh their product lines. Buffalo’s popular DriveStation Duo and DriveStation Quad are getting the focus today. Combining performance and reliability, these new multi-drive external hard drives, equipped with NovaBACKUP Business Essentials, are ideal for small servers, creative professionals, offices and consumers requiring redundant and high performance external storage.

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Lenovo Announces their first Netbook to use Intel's Atom N550 Processor

Following Intel's announcement of the new Atom N550 dual-core processor, Lenovo is one of the first to be out with an IdeaPad netbook model that makes use of it. The 1.50 GHz clocked Atom N550 is based on the second-generation Atom architecture.

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Enjoying the beginning of Football Season

Opinion: Last year I had a little extra wiring done around the house which included some extra power and cabling, both networking and simple cable for TV. I know this is just a little indulgent but I do love my technology and how easy it is to make it work for you!

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Fall is going to be an exciting time for us hardware geeks

Two things will be be going on this fall and Christmas season, first Intel is releasing its new dual-core Atom processor for Netbooks and we are about to see Netbook Manufacturers like Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Toshiba and others releasing new models with this processor installed. This will begin to take the Netbook for internet browsing status to a system with a little more clout. The dual core will help manufacturer’s provide more energy efficient models for us to play with and hopefully we will see a whole slew of these products with full size keyboards and 11.6-inch screens. This will be a great boon for someone that wants a reasonably priced Netbook that will allow them to do more functions more easily…

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