The Continuing Nightmare of Microsoft Vista

I've been without sound on my PC for over a week now. Just as I solved my longterm problem inability to open the Control Panel (uninstall Divx) I lost my sound. Well today being in an awkward mood I decided to hunt down the problem. I went into the newly rediscovered control panel and wandered up and down. In Control-Panel-Sound-Playback-Sounds I tried to get it to play the sample sounds eg Default Beep nowt.

Anyway wandering around in Control-Panel-Sound-Default-Playback-Device-Levels I eventually noticed a TINY icon indicating sound switched off, clicked it and Bob's Your Auntie I've got my sound back!

My complaint is that I'm supposed to be a computer expert using Windows since Windows 3.1 (& Dos before that) so if it took me a week!

The new Vista Sound Control Panel applet seems alien to me, why did they change it I never had trouble with the old on XP????

Best Online Thesaurus Ever
Sometimes the web just blows me away, this graphical neural network of words is both beautiful and amazingly useful

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary - Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

* It's a dictionary! It's a thesaurus!
* Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists.
* The online dictionary is available wherever there’s an internet connection.
Try it here at http://www.visuwords.com/

Mobile Internet Use Greatest Growth Area

Mobile internet use is growing while the number of people going online via a PC is slowing, analyst firm Nielsen Online has found.

Some 7.3m people accessed the net via their mobile phones, during the second and third quarters of 2008.

This is an increase of 25% compared to a growth of just 3% for the PC-based net audience - now more than 35m.

It also found that the mobile net audience was younger and searched for different things.

Download "Invisible" .htaccess and .htpasswd dot files from your server

For some reason (security?) some FTP servers don't allow you to see dot files such as .htaccess and .htpasswd , this prevents you downloading them as well. Which is somewhat of a nuisance if you are trying to back them up or debug them.

Here is a zsh script I wrote to get round this, note you still need to enter your ftp login details, so this is not a hack.

#!/bin/zsh
# download "invisible" .htaccess .htpasswd files
autoload -U zfinit
zfinit
zfparams www.website.co.uk userid password # enter your own details here
zfopen
zfls -ad
zfget .htaccess
zfget .htpasswd

Convert Files online to any Format

Converts files up to 100MB.

FAQ : What different file formats do you support ?
We have split our file formats into five distinct categories - Document, Image, Music, Video and Other Formats

www.zamzar.com

Great when your PC is playing up, or you on someone else's PC.

Jerry Yang Pioneer to Stand down as CEO of Yahoo

Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, is to stand down as chief executive officer following failed takeover talks of the internet giant which have led to its share price dropping to around $10.

Jerry is one of the founders of the Web so very sad to see him go. Before Yahoo you just had to know a web address there were no search engines.

http://www.tek-tips.com

Tek-tips is a forum for programmers to get help problems there have forii (forums) for a very wide range of languages.

Got a couple of problems solved in www.tek-tips.com some php & Coldfusion problems. What I liked about them was how quick I got knowledgeable replies. They are free and it's easy to register with them.

Hot Water Bottles for Xmas

Backup Over The Internet

Only daily automatic backing up over the Internet in my experience is truly safe as it avoids the inherent problem of backing up to media which remains in your office, what happens if that is say stolen at the same time as your PCs?

Unbelievably it's free at mozy.com it's really easy to setup, I mean minutes!

Have You Considered Buying a Computer Franchise?

Having had very painful experiences starting several businesses I realise that there are a lot of attractions to buying a franchise, no burning up your enthusiasm and your capital just getting your business and market setup. No with a franchise you get a ready-made proven business model, a business plan laid out to the finest detail, you cannot go wrong. Well that's true at least if you choose the right franchise and that's obviously the trickiest and most important part.

Well there are Franchise Exhibitions but now there is a special website called www.franchisegator.co.uk which has hundreds of franchise opportunities . To make the search easier these are devided into many categories including computers, cars, fitness, women's opportunities, health, sports and many more. You can also search for a franchise in the UK by Town or City, Capital available, and industry or sector.

The site is aimed at people looking for a franchise UK. The site also has lots of information about finance, the legal side, and general advice on franchising.

I wish this site had been around when I started my first business 12 years ago, so take your time, choose wisely and you could find a successful credit-crunch proor business.

Franchise Gator is a subsidiary of Microsoft so is a really solid organisation.

1 Terabyte Hard Drives are Here

The first time I ever heard of a hard drive it was called a Winchester and was 10MB, which seemed an infinite amount to us. Now Terabyte Drives have arrived as internal and external. In fact the example below is 2TB I wonder how long we will think in Terabytes



A terabyte (commonly abbreviated TB) is a measurement term for data storage capacity. The value of a terabyte is defined as one trillion bytes, or 1000 gigabytes.