| 10/08/04 How to make a free website. Don't be suckered into the trap of most so called "free web-hosting services." There's really only a couple legitimate services that let you make and keep a free website. First of all I recommend Geocities. This is the service that I use for this website. It's pretty easy to use. They do make you use an online java applet called PageBuilder to design the page though, so you are kind of constrained there. And incase you are wondering how they can afford to give people free webspace, they use advertisements on the side of each window, but if those are in the way you can always just close them. Rating **** Another very similar service is Tripod. Rating ** _____________________________________________________________ 10/07/04 As if you didn't already have enough reasons to use Firefox Today I found the coolest extension for Firefox ever! Suppose you were visting my site and you liked all of the pics in the Pictures page. If you wanted to save them you would have to click on each thumbnail wait for it to load then right-click and click Save-As. Then you hit Ok. Oh but wait 1.jpg is already taken in your My Documents folder. So you have to type another name to save it as, FOR EVERY SINGLE PICTURE!!!......Well I have a much much easier way. There is a Firefox extension called DownThemAll which let's you do all of that in a couple very simple, easy steps. All you have to do is right-click on the first thumb hit DownThemAll, A window pops up and you can select names of the images you want to download. And then you can select a location/default location you want to d/l them to, then just hit Download button and it's as easy as that. Another great thing about that is you can d/l all types of media files not just thumbnails, and you can select them all at the same time with an easy-to-use filter. Another good thing about this program is if 1.jpg is already taken it will automatically rename the one you are trying to d/l to something like 1-01.jpg without even asking you! Just to give you an idea of how fast this is. I downloaded all of the fullsize images in my Picture page in 5 seconds. Rating ***** ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 10/03/04 Easy-to-use power tool There are a lot of things I don't like about the general default setting in windows. This tool lets you modify a lot of those settings and you don't even need to use regedit. It's called TweakUI. Rating**** ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 9/26/04 The day I started to hate windows... It started out as a typical day of PC usage, after staring at the screen for about 2 hours it struck me how stupid Windows looks. I mean, really, a big blue start menu and a big green button that says start..how stupid is that? So I stated playing around with some windows themes and appearances. Btw it is not as easy as one might think to d/l themes and use them. Most themes out there are designed by amateur using some amateur 3rd party software and often times there are many glitches in the code. It did not take me long to realize that what I really wanted was for my PC to look like a mac (a little hypocritical, I know). Not that I like macs all that much, but I do kind of like their general sleek, aqua, grown-up appearance minus the icons at the bottom that are each roughly the size of a bloated hampster. Here are some finds: 1) Windows Blinds is basically a program that makes it easier to manage your themes and provides a few extra options to make them even more customizable. It is also Shareware which has those annoying "Buy now/later" pop-ups Rating ** 2) Tiger (by kol) is a one of my favorite themes, however it only works with Windows Blinds. If it was a free stand-alone theme I would be using it right now. It emulates the apple desktop very nicely. My only complaint is that for some odd reason I was not able to get the aqua scroll bars to work; they were grey. My guess is that that feature is only available with the full version of Windows Blinds. Also there were a couple of minor software glitches that I could not tolerate. Rating *** So for now I'm back on the old Fisher Price theme that is the default for Win XP "Professional" _____________________________________________________________ 9/25/04 A wise man once told me that a Fox on Fire is better than an Internet Explorer any day. Ok, for all of you who don't know Firefox is, no doubt, the best internet browser out there right now. Not only is it free, it's open-source. It has an automatic pop-up blocker built in that catches almost everything. It also has a faster loading time than IE and it is more compatible and costumizable. Basically it is a lite, stripped down version of Mozilla. In my opinion this is a must have for every PC user who is sick and tired of malicious code pounding on the unlocked door that is Microsoft Internet Explorer. Rating ***** ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 09/24/04 RealPlayer is crap and it used to be the only way to view streaming media files... If you have ever used real player, you might have noticed some ads, buy now/later,upgrade and buy windows, and spyware attached to the program. Well, now there is an sleek alternative appropriately called Real Alternative This program has been out for a while, yet I still see people using the old RP. I guess some people like staring at ads. Rating ***** Also there is a similar program called Quicktime Alternative This program is nice too, but I'll admit that I have had some trouble with the beta playing movies in the browser. However, that might be fixed with this newer release. Rating **** ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 9/23/04 Zipadee do da Not that I have a huge problem with winzip. It just that you never know when that old expiration will run out and it always seems that I'm in Classic mode when I want to be in the New mode. Well, I've found a freeware program called ZipGenius that I like better. It supports the following extensions: zip, cbz, dfsz, cab, arc, arj, zoo, lzh, lha, jar, ear, war, fwp, sqx, tar, taz, tgz, pk3, 7z Rating ***** ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 9/22/04 It's the truth, it's actual, there is probably spyware on your computer right now Fear not, I have exactly what you need SpyBot Search and Destroy. This free software will find practically anything that resembles spyware or adware and let you know. I have been very pleased with this program. Rating ***** |
| Maverick's Tech Advice |
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