Tech Tip Thursday

Oops…almost forgot the crazy tech tips o’ the week.

A couple of years ago we picked up a FREE Xerox color printer for the office.  It prints not with a laser but with a wax.  Quality is as good as a color laser…for free.  The only catch is that you have to buy ink directly from them.  It seems to be a pretty good deal…the ink is cheaper than our HP Color LaserJet and it seems to cost less to operate (our HP seems to always need another $300 "consumable parts" (i.e., drums, transfer kits, etc.).  For our little 4 man office…its a pretty good deal.  Here’s the link:  http://www.freecolorprinters.com  [I mentioned my free Xerox printer to a friend who works at HP here in Boise…she replied "oh, now they have to give them away."  Great line!]

I used to love Netscape radio…until they decided to start charging you to listen.  My response was "uninstall."  THEN, I found iTunes.  I don’t own an iPod…and you don’t have to to use iTunes.  Consider it Apple’s answer to Windows Media Player (WMP).  You can actually play  hundreds of free radio stations through the iTunes program.  Unlike, WMP, you don’t have to go to some web page and jump through a bunch of hoops to listen to the stream.  iTunes is worth downloading just for the radio.  You can run iTunes on both your Windows PC and your Mac.

Finally, Skype.  I’ve really come to enjoy using the free VOIP program called Skype.  Using Skype you can talk to another Skype user in better than cell phone quality for free.  If you want to call a land line…you can do that too (using "SkypeOut") for ~$0.02 a minute.  It also has an integral chat program.  It is not uncommon for me to have short chats with 3-4 of my fellow bloggers a week.  If you try it out…send me a message (username:  jurisnipper).  You can run Skype on both your Windows PC and your Mac.

Until next week…

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Tech Tip Thursday

I come across a handful of interesting tech tidbits every week…why not jump on Heller’s "Belly up to the Bar" bandwagon with my own pile o’ links?  [a second purpose is so I can find these links again…]

Well…here’s this week’s Tech Tips.

1. Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 loads considerably faster than 6.0.  Know why?  Adobe loads 30+MB of its files in the background everytime you reboot.  This blog post explains how to smack Reader 7.0 back into submission.
   http://blogs.msdn.com/jonathanh/archive/2004/12/22/330288.aspx
2. That above post mentions http://www.acropdf.com who has a PDF Tweak Utility that allows you to:  Enable or disable the plug-ins as needed, Turn off all Updates features, Disable the splash screen during program startup, Remove the My eBooks folder created in My Documents, Turn off the advertisements for Adobe products in the upper-right corner of the toolbar, Remove PrintMe and Adobe Reader icons, Disable Browser Integration, Disable confirmation dialog when closing Adobe Reader, Better speed for LAN and Cable connection, Clear Adobe Reader Recent Files History, and Restore to original settings at any time.  Sweet!
3. Favicon?  What’s a favicon?  It is the little icon that resides in your browser’s address bar.  See mine?  Sometimes you have to create a bookmark in your favorites to see it.  Matt at http://www.promotetheprogress.com has one too.  Want one?  See:  http://www.html-kit.com/e/favicon.cgi
4. The Bloglines et al. dispute.  I specifically use a BlogLet (http://www.bloglet.com) "subscribe by e-mail" option on this blog.  I’ve never been too thrilled with BlogLet’s performance, but haven’t had another option…until now.  I have been testing an e-mail mailing list program called Arrow.  http://www.jadebox.com/arrow/download.html.  The idea being that you’d set up an announcement e-mail mailing list (not a discussion group) and then send your posts to the mailing list for distribution to your readers (along with your contact details).
5. Matt Homann’s "vote for Homann" button (http://thenonbillablehour.typepad.com/nonbillable_hour/2004/12/vote_for_me_as_.html)  was created via this website: http://kalsey.com/tools/buttonmaker/.  Now I just need to make some buttons to reduce the clutter on my website.
6. Want to have on-line sticky notes that other people can edit AND and which have a RSS feed?  See:  http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/.  I created a note for readers to play with…leave a note, would you?  http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/TIB
7. Need help snagging a picture for your IP blog (i.e., snag part of a figure from a patent)?  Try the freeware program HoverSnap.  http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm

Well…that’s my initial "Tech Tip Thursday."  Hope you found something useful therein.  Feedback is always appreciated…and might encourage me to do this again (I can’t guarantee I’ll do it every week, nor that they will have this many entries…but I’ll try).

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