As I read my feeds each day I see a whole lot of great little tech tips coming through, and often I want to share them, but that would mean either stretching a whole post out for just one little tip and that’s pretty lame.

So I decided something along the lines of what Martin does each week with his Software Updates, a compilation of the best tips I see around the blogosphere and some links to the original sources.

Make SP1 Permanent

I never knew of this till I found out on Life Rocks! 2.0 that there’s a file which you can use to make the Vista Service Pack 1 permanent. It’s useful once you’re confident everything it working fine as it cleans up the installation folders and files.

Restore ‘Search’ to Folder Context Menus

Thanks to some badgering from Google Microsoft removed the direct access to Search from the start menu and context menus. If you used these then the How-to Geek provides a registry hack to get it back.

continue reading "A Host of Tips – Week 1"

I got a call from a friend sometime back, frantically asking me if I knew anyone who could create a movie trailer for her. It was part of an assignment that was due in a couple of days. I figured the average video store MIGHT do it but they would probably charge a bomb.

I thought over it for a while and then came up with a solution my friend could use herself. The answer is the free MediaCoder, an all-in-one transcoder application. It’s like the Swiss army knife of media programs. With me giving directions over the phone, my friend was able to create the movie trailer with no hassles.

continue reading "Make Your Own Movie Trailers"

All of us have had to take drawing classes at some point in our lives. At school, you would have had to deal with messy paints and a teacher who shook her head in dismay at your artwork. And that’s not counting the sniggers from fellow classmates. Yes, I am speaking from personal experience. It’s not that I cannot draw, I just draw very badly.

You may ask what’s all this got to do with today’s post? Well, I’ve come across a site that’s guaranteed to get you into the spirit of drawing. Lisandro Pena has a site called OnlyPencil, to display artwork. Nothing unique about that except that that Lisandro produces fantastic artwork using only pencils.

continue reading "Draw Amazing Pictures with Only a Pencil"

I never liked taking my original CDs, or any CDs at all for that matter, with me on a roadtrip or on holidays. CDs are fragile and tend to break pretty quickly, especially if kids are around. If they don’t break them they usually scratch the CDs into oblivion. I began to create backups of my CDs and take them with me on those trips which solved one problem. I still did not like carrying around dozens of CDs and decided to convert them into digital media and put them on my mp3 player instead.

The problem that I was facing now was that my mp3 player has a limited storage capacity of four Gigabytes. With audiobooks growing in size all the time it is not that unusual to encounter some that would use up to 500 Megabytes and more of space on that mp3 player.

I therefor came to the conclusion that the best way to prepare my audiobooks was to reduce their quality. While it naturally reduces the quality of the recording it does not reduce it that much in my opinion that you would stop enjoying the audiobook. The benefit of course is a reduced file size.

continue reading "Prepare your Audiobooks for a Roadtrip"

Almost everyone has used PowerPoint for presentations at some time or the other. Even if you’ve moved on to apps at GoogleDocs or the Zoho suite, PowerPoint is still a handy tool to use.

Most of the time, you’re limited to basic slides with bullet points and a couple of images or tables thrown in. At least those were the standards of all the presentations I’ve witnessed. At times, someone would throw in a sound clip of two to spice it up. But I’ve rarely seen presentations with video clips in them. It’s a shame because a picture really is worth a thousand words.

A simple reason for the lack of video is that unless you had the clip on your computer, you could not really do anything. Nowadays though, all you need to do is hunt around in any online video-sharing site and 9 times out of 10 you will find a clip that meets your requirements. I’ll use Youtube as an example since it’s one of the most popular sites.

continue reading "Add a Youtube Video to Your PowerPoint Presentation"