Internet Nut

The time of the radio is slowly fading away. Radio has given us some brilliant times, and while still very large in the industry today, people are starting to customize and listen to the music they want to listen to when they want to.

The radio is great, as proved in one of Queen’s smash hits, yet if you want to play the music you listen to most, you are better off using something like an iPod with docking station. This boosts the sound of your iPod to the outside world. By simply putting your iPod in the designated holder, your music can be blasted through it’s speaker system.

Another good way of having music on the go is a walkman phone. Sony Ericsson is renowned for phones with elite musical capabilities, as I will explain in a review of my phone in a later post. By getting a cheap 1GB or 2GB memory stick for the phone in the walkman range you can store your pictures, music, videos and applications, and either play it through the built in speaker, or through earphones. Of course if your phone has the capability to play and store music, or accept a memory card, you can do this with other phones.

You can consider buying a personal iPod, iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano or iPod touch to carry your music round where ever you go. I have to admit I love the iPod touch, and I suggest you get a one with a lot of storage, although the price can go up dramatically.

Tell me your experinces with music on the go, leave a comment to this post, or send me an e-mail; dcrone@{nospam}.com (remove {nospam})

Click here to view comments and this post on Lockegnome

In an earlier post (Don’t unlock your iPhone!) that I made on September 26 about how owners of iPhone’s may cause irreparable damage to their iPhone if they have unlocked it to use it with different mobile networks, has been proven to be true.

The iPhone, a touch screen mobile phone, which was released in the United States in June, has been complained about as hundreds of hacked iPhone users install the update, when Apple warned people to not to install it.

In order to have an iPhone, Apple made you take up a contract with AT&T, however many have unlocked/hacked there iPhone over the internet and on their computer.

One of the updates features was to allow iPhone owners to buy music from the iTunes store directly from their mobile. But now many are left with unrepairable damage to their phone.

I think that by Apple only allowing the iPhone with AT&T, they may loose sales, as other people would like to go elsewhere. But Apple have always owned all their products, and have been the only maker of them, but since they don’t have a mobile network, there doing the next best thing. Making you stay with a specific network.

Many would agree and many would disagree that social networking is a great idea. To be honest, I’m not a person that is very involved in social networking. I don’t have a MySpace, I don’t have a Bebo, I don’t have a Facebook and I don’t have a 43things. I don’t have anything to do with social networking really. I just write, as you read my blog right now, and I have an account on some forums I moderate that I am not going to disclose in this post.

Social Networking isn’t something that appeals to me. To get in contact with friends I use IM and E-mail. But one of the main reasons that I do not use social networking sites is because they give you the opportunity, and sometimes force you to type in and reveal some of your details or personal information that you don’t really want to reveal to the public. Okay, it’s possible to set your profile to private (on some sites) but I would not give out the URL to friends. I prefer to have my own blog, my own website and so on.

For instance, the person that you are talking to does not necessarily need to be who they say they are. You could be talking to someone who says they are a young sweet sixteen girl, but is really a 45 year old bloke living with his parents in their basement. They could be a pervert, they could be a sexual predator, they could be anybody or anything (a bot sent to retrieve information about people).

To be continued…

A handy, open source tool I have seen over the years is something called EssentialPIM. If you are a kind of person who just doesn’t know where they are meant to be and when, or you have just no way of keeping a schedule, and you hate using paper, then EssentialPIM, to you is well, essential.

At first I was suprised that this was a fully free tool and there was no restrictions whatsoever for it being totally free. There is however, a pro version, which costs a small amount of money. It does a bit more, but for most people EssentialPIM Free should be OK.

With PIM meaning Personal Information, it’s like this calendar is the database of your personal information. Indeed it is, and to your arrangments/inputs will not be sent or recorded by any website, but only to your computer.

First head over to www.essentialPIM.com in which you will find more information. If you really want to after reading you can purchase the EssentialPIM Pro version, but I suggest to stick will the open source software.

The good thing about EssentialPIM is that you can stick it on a memory pen/stick and take your calendar with you whereever you go.

If you just want to skip straight to the download you can download EssentialPIM Free and EssentialPIM Portable from here: http://www.essentialpim.com/?r=download

Once it’s installed you can play around with it and organise your life. Give it a go. It’s free, and you have got nothing to loose!

If you are a power user like me, your laptop is one of the most important essentials for you. Whether it’s connected to the internet or not you seem to always need your laptop for one or more reasons.

Of course, if yoiu are a power user, an especailly depending on the make/brand of your laptop, and depending on what you are doing your battery life can be drained rather quickly.

There are ways to tweak your batter life in your laptop, not by changing the battery, or indeed changing your laptop, but changing some risk free easy settings inside either Windows XP or Windows Vista.

For the example I will be explaining how to do this in Windows XP, although it is very similar for Windows Vista.

In Windows XP go to Start, and click on Control Panel. Then click on Performance and Maintenance. Under ‘or pick a Control Panel icon’ select Power Options. You can change these settings from time to time depending on what you are doing or where you are going and how long you will need to use your laptop for.

If you are doing a presentation under ‘Power Schemes’ change it to presentation. Click apply and OK. You can also select Laptop/Portable. The best choice I feel however, is if you select Max Battery. These will change the settings to something convinient for long laptop use without charge.

If you do not want to follow any of the schemes then create your own settings. You can select when to turn off the monitor, when to turn off the hard disk(s) and when to go into standby.

If you have any questions about this or comments let me know at dcrone@inbox.com, which is the usual e-mail address.

Due to an outburst of public demand, Windows XP, which was to stopped being sold on January, 30 2008, is possible having to have it’s selling life extended to June, 30 2008.

Microsoft has said the move comes after they think that customers of XP machines need more time to think and to upgrade to Windows Vista.

Windows Vista was released on January, 31 2007, and since then millions have installed the latest operating system on their computer. The first beta service pack for Windows Vista has just been released.

There is already thoughts of how another operating system, codenamed Blackcomb, then Vienna, is to be released as early at 2010. Many are having mixed feelings about this, since Vista would then be out of date, money would be wasted, and the shelf life of Vista would be cutt to just 3 years, while Windows XP is now into it’s 6th year.

Some newbie computer users normally ask me exactly what a motherboard is. It’s quite a simple question, but when you are new to computing get the full low down on what a motherboard is, what it does and how it works can be quite difficult to take in.

In this post I will briefly explain what a motherboard is.

Firstly, think of a mothership. This may be being very geeky but also think of sci-fi films. Think of Star Trek. Think of Star Wars. What is a mothership? Well a mothership is the biggest ship, which controls every other smaller ship, and is in control of everything.

Well that is what a motherboard does. Remember the word mother before both board and ship. Motherboard and Mothership mean kind of the same thing, only a motherboard is in charge of computer parts, and a mothership is in control of all the smaller spaceships.

That is exactly what a motherboard is. All of the parts of a computer link to the motherboard. The motherboard connects to all of the parts of the computer, and controls them. It tells them what to do and everything that you do with your computer it registers through the motherboard.

So go on. If you forget what a motherboard is and what it does. Be really geeky, and think of Star Trek!

In late July we purchased a 50 inch plasma television for our living room, and I am hoping to get either 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound for both that television, and my home office (the computer I am typing at now).

As I stood waiting for a wheelchair accesiable taxi arrived (because we had no way of getting it home) I saw a man coming towards the till with a television that could have been no bigger than 17″. I stood there and tried to distract his attention to my direction, so he could see the massive box I had just purchased with a beautiful television inside.

Although I could see the same thing I can see on that television as I could on a portable television, the quality is so much nicer, it’s a lot brighter, and the feeling of it is just alot better, and will be even more better when I purchase two of these sound systems.

This blog post is to think about the quality of televisions and how to program them.

Plasma televisions have a gas in the back and must be kept upright, which is one of the reasons I needed to hire a taxi to get it home. This is a downside to plasma televisions.

Plasma televisions are also prone to get something called ghosts when they are not programmed correctly. Ghosts are slightly blurred areas around text on screen, and to get the ultimate smoothness then you must be able to setup a plasma television correctly. To this day I am yet to find out how to do this.

I was really suprised how easy it was to setup the television, and the television tunned it’s self in instantly. I eventually got used to the 50 inch so it doesn’t look as big as it did when I first got it. But I couldn’t now imagine myself going back to the now tiny 32 inch screen I used to have. It was be like the ultimate demotion.

Do you have a plasma television? What do you think of the quality? Drop me an e-mail and you might get your thoughts posted or shared in my live stream. I may record the screen one day and show you. The e-mail address as usual is dcrone@inbox.com, or just can just leave a comment to this post!

Well, it’s official . On September 27 1997 Google came online, and the world said hello to the next biggest search engine. Yes, today, in 2007, Google’s ninth birthday has emerged, and I would personally like to wish it a very happy birthday!

Google has slowly but surely over it’s existance became the most popular search engine in the world, with 43% of people who used search tools using it in 2006. I use Google all the time, not just because of it’s amazing features, additions, widgets and of course Google Earth, but because of it’s easy, fast, and small URL to type in. I mean I can type www.google.co.uk into a address bar in about .9 of a second. Plus www.gooogle.co.uk will also work.

Google has made tools such as Google Earth emerge, where every some time, pictures via satiliete are taken and beamed down to Earth. Then it’s put all together and the world is free to view them. It would be really cool if we could have a free live video, where you could follow a friend to their trip to work or something, but this might also attract stalkers. That’s the downside.

Google has also experimented more than other search engines, see if the users like this or the users like that. Although I think the biggest downfall for Google is Google Video, of course since they bough YouTube.com it doesn’t really matter.

Well I say Happy Birthday to Google! Wish you happy birthday wishes to Google, or let me know what you think and what your favourite thing about Google is by e-mailing me at dcrone@inbox.com or leaving a comment.

Unless you are popular on the internet, or a businessman, or something like that where people can find you quickly by keying in your name on Google or Yahoo! you probably haven’t though about googling your name and haven’t seen the results.

I have googled my names a few times out of interest, and it turns out that somebody who shares my name is a famous artist who was born in Belfast and lives in Northern Ireland. Many people have googled their name and have been curious of the results.

Some people ask but why, well, why not? It’s a fun little thing you can do when your bored and you can get in contact with people with the same name. You can normally see this at family history sites and stuff like that, to see if you are related to something with the last name, but googling your name or hitting it in on Yahoo! you may find the results funny. Or you could try typing in your name into Google Images or Flickr. Some of the results can come up quite interesting, or weird if you prefer to put it that way.

So just have a go and see what it’s like. You might have fun.