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"

Extracting multiple independent rar files did take some time in the past until I found out how to do this with just a few clicks of the mouse. The rar files should be in the same directory for this method. Just mark all rar files, right-click the marked area and select to uninstall all files in this location.

The name of the command is different depending on the application that you use to unrar files normally. My packer IZArc has its own entry in the right-click menu and I can select Extract Here from the personal menu to extract all rar files that I have selected.

It took a while until I stumbled upon this method. Before that I really extracted every rar file on its own which takes a while if you have dozens of independent rar files on your computer. I thought I share this method even though I might be the last person on earth that found it.

continue reading "How to extract multiple independent rar files"