Smart Tech Tips

Whether you’re on your laptop at the beach or at your house with a printer that is out of paper, haven’t you ever wished you can turn what you’re doing in pdf format to print later? Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on Adobe (not the reader which is free), you too can print to pdf with this great program. It installs in a flash and you’re off making pdfs. This is great for the enviroment and keeps your existance clutter free. Here’s how.

Now when you’re ready to print to pdf, click on the pulldown menu to select a printer and choose the new pdf printer. You will be greeted with another dialog box asking where to put the file. That’s it! You’re now on your way to a paperless existance. (Please make good backups with this new power or your virtual filing system can vanish into data oblivion)

If you have an old machine that has at least 2gb of ram and a fairly decent video card, why not give windows 7 a try? If you are adventuresome and do not mind an occasional crash or freeze, install windows 7 beta will allow you to see what is coming down the pipe at Microsoft. I can tell you from using it for a few months now that THIS is the OS they should have released instead of Vista. Therefore I think of Vista now as the Windows ME of today. Both should have been in the oven longer and neither should have been made available for the public to buy and beta test for Microsoft.

You can go HERE to sign on and get a CD key for the beta program.

Please don’t use this windows 7 on your mission critical machine.

*UPDATE* The beta program is closed but not to worry, I hear on May 2nd Microsoft will open the doors once again. This time it’s for a Release Candidate of the software. See you there!

What would happen if your house got washed away by Hurricane Katrina II? The nice backups you made of your data would probably be gone from the fire safe along with the computer near your desk. This is why offsite backup is important in our digital age. In the not so distant pass, such services were expensive for a few megabytes of storage.  Today, Google’s gmail and sites such as box.net will give you gigabytes for free to store your data on their machine. Brushing aside your paranoia of having your data somewhere else, this is great opportunity to sigh up and create a habit of uploading your data to a different location. To be safe, encrypt your data with WinRAR or Winzip BEFORE you transfer it. Here are some steps to creating a folder on your local machine that accesses box.net’s computer. If executed correctly, this folder looks as though it resides on your computer and give you the ability to drag and drop files as such.

1. Open a box.net account
2. in explorer folder view, right click on ‘my network places’
3. choose ‘map network drive…’
4. click on link ‘sign up for online storage…’
5. follow the wizard and put in ‘https://www.box.net/dav‘
   in the ‘internet address:’ field
6. you will be prompted for user name and password
7. finish up the rest of the wizard and you’re done

Copy your newly created ‘network’ icon to your desktop and just double click to open and use as any folder that’s on your computer. If you reboot, or from time to time, it may ask you for your username and password. This method is also a great way to share files between work and home machines or laptops!

I have been ordering more PDAs for my clients lately. While most will spend hundreds of dollars on the device themselves; protecting the actual devices seems less important. Unlike a desktop computer, all mobile devices are subjected to much harsher environment each day. I recommend a good case that does not add bulk or reduce functionality. Also a screen protector will keep your device working for years to come.
http://www.senacases.com/

If everyone drove a Volvo, wouldn’t the world be a boring place? Just imagine how many cars you would see on the road if there was a massive recall. The same applies with your browser. After all, it is the true window from which you view the Internet. While Microsoft may lead you to think their built-in Internet Explorer is the only way; there are quite a few browsers out there worth looking into. Here are a few of my current favorites.

Firefox is currently the one I use. I’ve used it since version 0.4, long before it started showing up in universities and on the news. While it has enjoyed many features not found in IE (Internet Explorer), the competition has started taking notice and will be incorporating many of these features in their upcoming version.

Another browser to recently attract a massive following is Opera. A few months ago, they have decided to follow Netscape’s tactics and started to give away their browser without charge or annoying banner pages. One of the features I like about Opera is the zoom feature for viewing sites.

As of this writing, yet another is poised to be a big hit. Flock is based on some leading edge technology in web trends including RSS, blog editor, and web based Favorites/Bookmarks. The later is a favorite of mine since how many times do you ever wish you had a favorite link from your home computer when you’re traveling or on someone else’s machine? This one is still in beta so please use with caution.

The battle between IE and Netscape is over but the war is far from being won.