Computers

Windows Live Writer

Microsoft has expanded on their Live idea by developing various applications that connect with the Web in some way or another. One of their best ones is, in my opinion, the Windows Live Writer application, which lets you post to your blog from your desktop.

Upon the first launch of the program, you will be asked to configure Writer (which is currently in Beta) for you blog. Just enter you blog’s address, and your username and password, and the wizard will get to work figuring out all the specifics of your blog (type of blogging system, template formatting, and more). The whole process took only a few minutes to complete over my relatively slow (meaning 95 Kbps tops for downloads) DSL line.

Once it’s all set up, you are presented with the post editing screen, where you type the content of your posts. You can also view the post as it would appear on your blog, or edit the raw HTML of the post. In addition, the latest versions allow you to add tags from a variety of blog search and social networking sites (Technorati, del.icio.us, and few others).

I haven’t yet experimented with pictures, maps or third party plugins, but the potential of Writer’s feature set looks positive. Just for your info, I wrote this post in Writer, illustrating it’s usefulness.

More information at Live ideas

Holiday Tech Gifts: Which One?!?!

I’ve been asked what I wanted for Hanukah this year. One of my relatives asked which store I wanted a gift card to, and I picked Best Buy. I’ve had it with Circuit City, due to its high prices and mediocre seletion, and CompUSA is starting to lose my patronage, for mostly the same reasons. So this year I’m going to give Best Buy a shot at my aunt’s wallet .

On my list of wanted items:

• New In-ear headphones
• More RAM for my computer (expensive)
• A bigger SD card for my camera
• Accessory kit for my iriver u10 MP3 player (which I never really posted about over here for some reason)

Hopefully I’ll get the earphones, because right now, I have no good pair to use, and can’t really make good use of the iriver without good earphones. The accessory kit is also pretty useful, considering it has a belt clip attatched to the silicon case. Only four days left untill Hanukah, which I’ll just have to live through.

Switch Windows Via Keyboard and Taskbar Buttons

Today I discovered that you can switch windows in a slightly different way. Normally, many people use the popular Alt + Tab keystroke, which brings up a small dialog with the icons of currently running programs. However, pressing Windows + Tab will highlight the taskbar button of the app that will open when the Windows key is released. I don’t know how neat of a feature this is, but I’m just here to share my discoveries.

My Laptop Experiment

My aunt gave me her old laptop a a present. She told me that I can’t connect to the net with the wireless card she gave me until I wipe it clean, and redo Windows from the beginning. So yeterday, I sat down with the Dell Inpirion 8000 laptop he gave me, and set about installing first Windows ME, and then XP.

One problem I had to solve was getting in to the BIOS setup program to change the boot order of the DVD-ROM drive, so that I could boot into the Windows ME CD. I called Dell, they asked me the typical account stuff, then gave me some garbage about change of ownership, and then finally told me that there a no way Continue reading »

Upgrade to WordPress 2.0 Completed

Sure it’s a little late, but I got the upgrade to WordPress 2.0 done without any problems. I just downloaded a complete site backup in cPanel, as well as a database backup just in case a problem wasn’t really bad. I spent about 10 minutes uploading the WP 2.0 files, went to the upgrade.php file, and Bam! I was done. That was really easy, and I enjoy (most of) the new WP 2.0 features (including the Split Post with More tag in the writing page, but not the layered post options on the right of the same area). Overall satisfaction (ease of upgrade, usefulness of new features): 4 of 5 stars.

First Hit at Linux

It took two hours to install SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional, but the wait was worth it. Even from boot up, things are different. After POST (power on self test), I see the boot loader Grub (not sure of what it stands for), where I am presented with options for booting into Linux, from a floppy or my Windows partition; but after 7 seconds, it boots into Linux by default. Once Linux starts, the boot screen is way different from Windows. It has a blue background Continue reading »

Windows XP Royale Theme

Hey all you folks, I found this new theme (or skin or whatever you want to call it) for Windows XP called Royale, which I read was pulled out from Windows XP Media Center Edition. I don’t know how or who got it out, but you can download it from Softpedia.

Extremely valuable tip for Windows XP

In some PC World issue (forgot which), I found an invaluable tip for Windows Explorer (or any folder window), but it’s only in XP. The tip: Show in Groups. This groups together files by type, size, first letter of name (or what ever you sorted the files by), in a pretty nice way. To enable this, open a folder window (My Computer for example), Click View, go to Arrange Icons By, and click Show in Groups. To make this permanent, you may have to go to Tools -> Folder Options, click the View tab, and click Apply to All Folders. I can’t believe that I didn’t know of it earlier.