It’s not just videos I’ve made too, as Excel 2010 Step by Step has also been released for free.  In all there’s around 15 hours of video available.  This is made up up of 5.5 hours of Windows 7 tutorials split into 12 lessons, 4.5 hours of Word 2010 tutorials in 16 lessons and 4.5 hours of Excel 2010 tutorials in 15 lessons.

I have to say that personally I’m incredibly proud of these videos and I’m utterly delighted that they’ve been made available free to everybody who wants to get more out of these products.

In their press release the company said…

We’re pretty excited to unveil nearly fifteen hours of free video instruction, based on three of our most popular recent Microsoft Press Step by Step title releases. The videos are based on, but not exact copies of, each book; there’s material in the videos that you won’t find in the books, and vice versa.

Why free? We’d like to know what you think of these and if you find them helpful. We all learn in different ways, and if there’s enough demand for video editions or companions to existing Microsoft Press books, we’ll certainly consider making the commitment to produce more. We’re even open to the possibility of creating learning resources exclusively in video.

There are more videos waiting to be released for free, and I can see my HTML5 Step by Step tutorials being popular in the long term.  Microsoft Press is wanting your feedback on these videos though so please leave comments for them and tell them that you want more and what you’d like to see in the future.  You can watch the videos online, sadly they’re not available for download, on these links.

Mike Halsey: Microsoft® Windows® 7 Step by Step
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE70E63A6B2DFD196
12 video lessons, totaling 5 hours, avg 30 minutes each
Book authors: Joan Lambert and Joyce Cox
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780735626676/

Mike Halsey: Microsoft® Word 2010 Step by Step
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEC59ED056A5F1C58
16 video lessons, totaling 4 hours 24 minutes, avg 18 minutes each
Book authors: Joan Lambert and Joyce Cox
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780735626935/

Curt Frye: Microsoft® Excel® 2010 Step by Step
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBB8F203F33525925
15 video lessons, totaling 4 hours 35 minutes, avg 20 minutes each
Book author: Curtis D. Frye
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780735626942

This feature is Inkscape’s vectorization tool, made possible by the integration of potrace.

“Vecto-what? What for?” OK: first, a quick Computer Graphics 101, as part of our No Geek Left Behind program:

• Raster graphics are described by pixels and are nothing more than a big matrix filled with colors. As such, they look bad when zoomed at high levels.
  Example tools used to produce them: Paint, Photoshop, Paint.NET, GIMP
  Example extensions: .jpg, .png, .psd, .xcf
• Vector graphics are described by mathematical elements and other properties. As such, they look sharp regardless of the zoom level.
  Example tools used to produce them: Illustrator, Inkscape, Xara Xtreme
  Example extensions: .svg, .ai

Use cases where one would want to vectorize a raster file? Sure. What if you want a correct paper print of a drawing you found on the web? What if you need a crisp partner’s logo for a brochure and the best he provides you is a sloppy GIF? What if your company lost the source vector files for its logo? In such cases, this article will help.

Disclaimer: Ghacks does not encourage anybody to use these tools to murder your cat, refine plutonium, or rework copyrighted material to commercial ends. Use it when you cannot buy a print of the real thing, know your fair use limits, be a good citizen. OK? Let’s vectorize the Ghacks logo.

1. First, open the file you want to vectorize in Inkscape
   
2. Select the image by left-clicking it, and click Path > Trace Bitmap (or hit Shift+Alt+B)
   
3. Tune the settings with the preview. In this case, it is a good idea to increase the threshold (use the “Update” button to see the results of your changes). Then click ok to render the trace:
   
4. Finally, the hardest awaits you: declare layers, group stuff together, do/correct the coloring/gradients, manually refine the trace, add effects, etc.
   

Comments:

• potrace does not makes miracles. While it works wonders on simple compositions or logos, don’t expect it to vectorize a complicated photo
• Did I say it? potrace does not makes miracles. If the original raster quality is small and of poor quality, you’ll end up with speckles and artifacts here and there. Well, Inkscape selection tools and paths operators are here to help you manually improve the vector result
• The tracing window has lots of modes and options. Play with them. Learn how one will work great here, while the other will be preferable to extract the best from another image

Despite all this, with some imagination and experience through trial and error, you can quickly achieve surprisingly good results (I especially like to play with the colors). And though this is technically more remix than creation (but who said remix is a bad thing?), you’ll learn Inkscape tools in the process, bringing you one step closer from creating your very own vector masterpieces.

Inkscape is free software licensed under the GPLv2, available for all the major platforms.

Ronan is a geek and musician living in Montreal. He likes living in places full of weird home-made colorful posters and writes about software, music and life at flying molehill.

Users who double-click on the msi file directly will also install the application but with the possibility that it will not run properly on the computer system. Take a computer program that requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 for example. If the user has an older version of the framework installed setup.exe will download the files needed and launch the installation of the compatible framework and launch the installation using the msi file afterwards.

If the user installs using the msi file the installation will go through without problems but might experience an application crash or warning message while starting the application. It is therefor recommend on end user systems to always install applications using the setup.exe file if both a setup.exe and xyz.msi are available after unpacking the software program.

There are even some msi setup files out there that will not perform the installation upon execution but request an installation using the setup.exe file instead to ensure that all necessary components are installed.

I am not a big tutorial-fan, cause I always can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m doing something here I have no particular knowledge of. And depending on what I do, this bothers me. A lot. Take sewing for instance (yes, I do indeed enjoy the fun of sewing, at least as long as it is fun); in the beginning I only did pre-set tutorials. I got to see some achievements, pretty fast as well, and was happy. But the clothings didn’t fit that well, more often than not I had to make corrections to be at least a bit satisfied with my work.

By now, I do most of my sewing patterns myself by taking bits from tutorials and knowledge and putting them together, and it works just fine for me. My point is, tutorials are often brief, giving appealing results in a short time, but often lack some of the necessary theory. Ever happened to you that you did something with a tutorial that just would not work? And after going through the complete text again, looking at all pictures, you realize there’s a small mistake in it, or something you wouldn’t have thought of, which the author took as given?

I guess that’s the reason I don’t want to write tutorials, the danger of missing something (or to cut off too much or something like that) or to have people sitting in front of it thinking “Screw this guy, this just doesn’t work!”. Plus, there are plenty of tutorials out there regarding nearly any topic. Or are there?

But – as the headline suspects – I’m gonna break with this habit for now, and give you a few shots and explanations regarding my former post. No tutorial in a classical sense, but one like I try to write my stuff as well: just concepts and ideas, but this time with pictures.

So let’s get started. Since I’m keeping my connection open most of the time, I’m using PuTTyTray instead of the regular PuTTy or its portable cousin, so some functions described here are not available in other versions.

Here we got the starting screen. Use “Settings from file” (at the bottom of the screen) to save sessions to a file in the PuTTy-directory instead of the windows-registry. An absolute must for all portable users. The first ellipse is where you type your target server’s (or router’s, in our case) IP in. If you can’t remember your IP at any time or get dynamic IPs, make an dyndns-account to save you trouble. Most Routers come with built-in dyndns-support anyway nowadays, sparing you the effort of an update tool. Of course, we want to have “SSH” as a connection type, but it’s per default enabled, so there shouldn’t be any problems.

Ah, that one took me awhile to figure out. Or to be more precise: I was swearing and cursing about the problem I encountered and by accident managed to find a solution in the settings for my terminal, which struck me to be very odd. So I wanna share my insights. The option I circled changes the character send to the server by pressing the backspace-key. Since the routers I mentioned all use some sort of linux, you might wanna change the option to the right one, “Control+? (127)”. Without that enabled, my fritzbox would only type “[^” or something like that instead of deleting the last character. Very annoying.

That one is one of the PuTTyTray-only functions I mentioned that I don’t wanna miss ever again, regardless how more convenient PuTTyPortable sometimes might be for my purposes. Leave the option on “normal” to start it in normal terminal mode. I prefer that one, since I want to use password-authentication. No use minimizing the window to tray on start, only to have to bring it back up, type the password in and minimize it again. “Always” and “Never” produced funny behaviors that I couldn’t get a hold of, but, if you wanna guess and like riddles, go and give it a try.

And oh, the “Accept single-click…”-option is nice as well, if you use this kind of restoring in all of your programs. Mixing double-click and single-click is definitely not a good idea, at least not for me.

Oh, yeah. Not that important, I gotta admit. But it would allow you to pick a username that’s hard to remember (please don’t say anything about the “root” I typed in there.. it is for demonstration purposes only!), and even harder to guess. When using password authentication, I only have to type in my password and not my username. spares me ~1.2 seconds. yay!

Painting Frenzy!! Okay, now here we go. This tab is the mekka for all your needs, the holy grail of port forwarding.
The first option I circled is recommended to use, but it is not without risks (security, mostly). Some protocols may need this option to function properly though. When you look at the entries 1, 2 and 3 they all have a source port (the first column) and a destination (the second one), like my arrows – done extremely skilled, if I may say so – try to show you.

1.) This is a standard port forwarding like used by any program. I specified my source port, which is 5700 (always select “local” as a type if unsure for the others and their doings), and a destination that is usually an IP plus a port. As you can see or at least guess, it’s for VNC (port 5900), and it’s for a fictional desktop in my home network.

2.) That one I use for the emulation of a vpn. Remember the virtual network adapter I had to create? I gave it the very innovative IP 10.0.0.1, Windows File Sharing services use port 139, so its 10.0.0.1:139 for source. The destination is my main network-hard drive with the very same port. If you specify an IP for the source port, the port is only forwarded if the accordant network adapter is used. In case of the file sharing, I had to do this, since I wanted to work both ways at the same time – local file sharing and file sharing over SSH. If you need only one of both, feel free to just forward the port without a source IP.

3.) This one is pretty much like the first, but it points to a virtual network card I created on my Router. I did so because it is forbidden to map any ports directly to the routers own IP, but mapping to the virtual NIC is allowed. Here, I’m forwarding localhost’s port 80 (do NOT do this when running a webserver or any software using port 80) to the virtual NIC’s port 80, so I can display my router’s status page in my browser here at work, taking a look at phone lists and the like. I also could’ve made a port forwarding like “6666 192.168.178.253:80″, to view my routers page then, I would have to connect to “localhost:6666″ in my browser, as well as for connecting my VNC, I have to connect to “<dyndns-address>:5700″ instead of just “<dyndns-address>”.

Be careful with the Connection -> Proxy-Tab though. You don’t have to specify anything here for PuTTy to provide the SOCKS-proxy I mentioned. This is only necessary if PuTTy is forced (or wanted) to use a proxy to connect to the target net (usually, the internet) itself, like when using PuTTy over TOR for instance, which is by the way in my opinion the most comfortable way of using TOR there is.

Oh my, I almost forgot that one.. this is crucial when keeping your connection up and running for a long time. If the connection gets broken there is a chance that your server-component remains active and running on the router, and if your reconnect, you got a second one running, and a third one if that happens again.. you catch my drift. I chose a value of 60 seconds, and it works for me. It was a more or less random choice though, other values might do equally fine.

Okay. I admit, that didn’t hurt that much at all. Maybe I will just… keep posting funny daubed pictures about programs I use…

cya all soon! :)

I know that you would like some examples of videos that you can find at ShowMeDo, here we go. I pick three random ones: Getting Started with WordPress, Basic Car Maintenance and The Perfect Cup of Coffee, As you can see they offer tech related video tutorials and “real-life” tutorials as well. Playing a video works the same way as in youtube, just click the link, the video loads and you press play in the video to start it. If youtube works for you ShowMeDo will as well.

As I said earlier it is a relatively new website which means that they do not have millions of videos. It also takes a longer time for the users to create tutorial videos as you can imagine. The ShowMeDo wiki has a (written) tutorial that explains in detail how to create videos that can be uploaded to ShowMeDo, why not share your knowledge if you are good at something ?

You may request tutorials about a certain subject. Users can vote which request is of interest to them. This is a nice feature, really nice. You still need someone to pick up your request so don’t start with something like theory of relativity. I suppose basic stuff works best here.

If ShowMeDo manages to gain some momentum and exposure on the internet they surely will make they way as a great niche movie website that is able to survive amongst the big players.

found at donationcoder

I´am babbling, forgive me. I found a comprehensive Linux guide which gives you a good understanding of the linux operating system. The guide visualizes everything with screenshots and code tags to assist new users even more. If you ever thought of switching this guide might be just what you´ve been waiting for.

Learning the shell starts with explaining the shell concept: “What is the shell ?”. After that it goes straight into navigating, looking around and a guided tour which explains the default directory structure. After that it´s manipulating files, I/O redirection, permissions and job controll. The tutorial uses lots of screenshots to visualise the paragraphs, great way for beginners I think.

The article Build a better Password gives a short introduction to password formats. A password can either be something you know, something you have or something you are.

The author recomments that users follow three simple guidelines to make their passwords more secure: Increase the lenght of the password by adding more information, Eliminate spaces and add special characters to make dictionary attacks worthless.

Those are simple measures that can tremendously boost your security. Of course, no password is 100% secure.

The article gives a 14 pages tutorial on how to create bootable windows operating system on a 256 MB usb stick. You can of course use a bigger one and add more utilities that you need (like true crypt for example). Everything is well explained, you should not encounter lots of problems.