Teach Parents Tech is a free website that you can use to send your parents or other users tech tutorial videos. The site is maintained by Google which may come as a surprise to some.

All you need to do is to fill out a form on the frontpage of the service. Here you select the recipient, a short introductory sentence, the tech tutorials that you want included and some closing lines.

Tech videos are sorted into categories such as The Basics, Media or World Wide Web. Each category lists about ten videos that you can check to be included in the letter.

The category The Basics for instance teaches how to copy and paste, take a screenshot or make text bigger or smaller. Finding Information, another category lists tutorials for getting driving instructions online, converting currency or checking the weather.

You can select one or multiple videos to send to a selected person. Once you have made the selection you get to preview the message and videos. You can actually preview each video before with a click on the small play icon to see if it teaches a concept that you want the person to learn more about.

You can go back and edit the message or enter your and the recipients email address to send it to them. The videos are included as links to YouTube in the email.

Here are two example videos from the selection:

The videos often recommend Google products but not all the time.The Change your default homepage video for instance demonstrates how it is done in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. You can check out all videos and create your own message that you want to send to your parents or other people who need some tech lessons here.

I got it in the form of the Illustrated Dual Boot site. As the name suggests, the site is packed with tutorials to assist people with dual-booting their computer to run both Windows and Ubuntu. The tutorials help install Ubuntu versions right from Gutsy Gibbon to Karmic Koala (the upcoming release). For Windows versions, there are installation tutorials for everything from Windows 98 to Windows7.

What makes the Illustrated Dual Boot site so good? It’s the fact that the tutorials are really well written. Any tutorial you choose has exactly what you need to get a dual-boot system up and running, right from beginning to end. Within the tutorial is some information on the tools required for the dual-boot as well as some basic checks before you begin.

Every step within a tutorial is illustrated. This is extremely important because often a step might not make much sense but if you can actually see how it takes place, it becomes easier to do it yourself. Some steps are also accompanied by possible errors you might encounter and how to solve them, another necessity for an installation.

I used the Jaunty Jackalope / Windows7 Graphical Installation ‘C’ tutorial to successfully dual-boot Jaunty and Windows XP. The clear instructions in simple language were easy to understand and implement with no problems whatsoever.

Tech experts probably don’t need someone to tell them how to set up a dual-boot on a machine. However, the vast majority of people using computers are not tech-savvy and having a resource like the Illustrated Dual Boot site reduces their dependence on others to do things for them. This site is also perfect for people who want to take the plunge into Linux but are being held back by the fear of having to install their own OS.

Have you used the Illustrated Dual Boot site anytime? Do you know of any similar resources? What do you think of computer novices using online tutorials to install an OS? Let me know in the comments.

If you’re looking for Photoshop tutorials, Vunky Search is the place to go to. This site labels itself as the ‘Fast and Furious Photoshop Tutorial Browser’ or in other words, a Photoshop search engine. Both in looks and function, Vunky Search resembles one of the many multi-torrent search engines out there.

When you look at the homepage, you notice the links to popular searches. Below that are some of the featured tutorials for the day. If you’re searching for something specific, type in a search term. If you’re browsing around, just ‘randomize’ or click on a link that interests you. The selected tutorial opens in its original site with no hassles.

Vunky Search currently indexes 88 tutorials but I expect this number to increase over time. Some of the tutorials are simply superb. One more thing I’d like to see is tutorials for more software like Paint and the GIMP. After all, not everyone uses Photoshop.

What do you think of Vunky Search? How do you think the site can be improved? What’s your favorite image tutorials site? Let me know in the comments.

The service that I’m using to create custom RSS News Feeds is called Dapper. Dapper can do much more than merely creating a RSS News Feed but that is what I want to concentrate on.

The example that I’m going to use is a RSS News Feed for software updates at Nirsoft, one of the most popular software programmers out there who is not offering an RSS News Feed. We start by loading the Dapper website.

Enter a term that is describing the project, for example Nirsoft and click on the button Create a New Dapp. You could also try a search first to see if anyone has already created what you are looking for.

Enter the URL of the Nirsoft website (http://www.nirsoft.net/) and select RSS Feed as the format. A click on Next loads a preview of the Nirsoft main homepage. If you scroll down you see the What’s new section. That’s the section that we want for our RSS Feed.

That section is only visible on the page we are on. We add that page to the basket. The basket is used for analyzing page contents. Adding additional pages helps the application to determine the contents of the pages which is only possible if a website contains pages that look similar but offer different content, for instance a Google search for two different search terms.

We only have on page that gets added to the basket. A click on Next Step and OK loads the page where we make the selection of the contents that we want to show up in our RSS News Feed. If you move the cursor around in that preview window you notice the rectangle that encloses elements on that page. This is being used to select the contents we need.

Scroll down and pick the Date in the What’s new section. A click on one date should mark all dates yellow. This shows you that the application has identified the dates correctly. You need to make sure that only the dates are marked on that page. If you scroll up you see that the main menu was also selected. A click on one entry there removes it again.

If you scroll down again you see that most dates have also been unmarked. To change that click on the second date which should again mark all dates and nothing else. You can check the Preview Selected Content section at the bottom to check if only the dates have been selected.

A click on Save Field will save those information, select Date as the name and the Date Published checkbox. We got the date but we need additional information because we also want to know what got updated. Each entry contains a link and a name of the application that got updated. That will be our second field.

Just click on the first application and notice that this time everything gets marked correctly. A click on Save Field will let us save that field again, select Name and pick Title from the checkbox.

You should see two fields in the lower right section. A click on Next Step will load a preview of the RSS Feed that we have created. If everything looks ok click on Next Step which will load the final step. You need an account at this point before you can save the newly created RSS News Feed. It’s free and seamlessly integrated in the process.

Now select a name, description and tags for your dapper and save it. A profile page will be loaded in the end that contains the link to the newly created RSS News Feed. It will be previewed on that page as well.

As I mentioned earlier Dapper can do much more. It can provide XML data which can be used in applications. It’s pretty amazing and offers lots of possibilities.

Update: I have removed the link to the created Dapper application as it has been removed from the official website.

Let me introduce several tutorial indexing sources whose purpose is to organize and categorize the best of tutorials available online.

Tutorial Center

This one is indeed a center with pretty broad scale of issues dealt with in the wide selection of collected links to tutorials. It’s no use giving examples of categories since you can hardly think of any application that would be left out (at least of the best known ones). Submitted tutorials are examined to make sure only the high quality ones make it to the list.

Tutorial Vault

Tutorialvault’s focused on graphic and coding tutorials which are hand-picked and split into just several main categories, basically those most often sought after like Photoshop, Flash, PHP, CSS ones and a few others. Although Adobe apps apparently lead the chart here, the other categories are nicely filled as well. So far over 2300 pieces and counting.

Tech Screencast

This collection of screencasts only deals with issues related to web development in its heavier form and contains videos providing useful hints about different technologies and programming/scripting languages used to propel websites – RoR, ASP, PHP and more. The number of published screencasts is not that high but their quality seems pretty good to me.

Bonus: Inkscaper’s Dreamland

I couldn’t resist adding this one at the end, although this resource is purely aimed at the OS vector graphics editor Inkscape and graphics made in it. I must admit I haven’t used Inkscape much so far but after seeing what these guys can do in it, I knew I had to give it more attention, perhaps as much as GIMP deserves. Should you be a designer or just someone who deals with graphics in their free time, you definitely don’t wanna pass this valuable screencast.

All three classes contain categories like Draw with lines, Perspective and Faces & Figures that contain a number of lessons that fit into that category. You find for example Leg & Foot and Facial Aging in the Faces & Figure category which is an advanced class. Selecting a lesson brings you to the lessons main page where you find in depth illustrations that explain the concept.

I was looking for some tutorials on how to setup email servers on linux and the site lists lots of them. Really useful. Here is what the creator of the website has to say about his website.

A list of freely available documents (i.e. tutorials, books, guides, reference manuals, etc.) for learning how to program in various languages as well as about various Linux and UNIX related topics.

The simple computer described consists mainly of a processor and main memory. Relays, which are explained, are used in the circuitry instead of transistors for simplicity. This book does not cover peripherals like modems, mice, disk drives, or monitors.

It´s aimed at beginners and does not take a look at todays modern computers like a special intel, amd or apple system but at the theoretical background that all of those computers share.

[tags]computer, book, processor, memory, tutorial[/tags]

The three biggest subcategories are php, flash and Photoshop but you also found exotic categories like Blender 3D. Its a nice site if you are creating your own homepages or want to start doing so.