The advice to back up your data is something that is probably said at least once every 5 seconds by some random person on the internet.

Every person who says this is 100% correct. You should back up your data often.

However what isn’t ordinarily covered is how to back up your data that you have out there on the internet, i.e. external or cloud data. Examples of this are blogs, photos, e-mail and anything else you specifically store online-only.

Here are two glaring examples of the worst possible scenario:

Continued

In the days of old people would keep computers as long as 5 years or longer. However these days a new computer barely gets past 3 years before needing replacement - or so it seems.

You can easily get 5 years out of a computer if you buy it correctly the first time.

In fact, you most likely already own a computer that you can get a few more years out of.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

In the days of old people would keep computers as long as 5 years or longer. However these days a new computer barely gets past 3 years before needing replacement - or so it seems.

You can easily get 5 years out of a computer if you buy it correctly the first time.

In fact, you most likely already own a computer that you can get a few more years out of.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

In the days of old people would keep computers as long as 5 years or longer. However these days a new computer barely gets past 3 years before needing replacement - or so it seems.

You can easily get 5 years out of a computer if you buy it correctly the first time.

In fact, you most likely already own a computer that you can get a few more years out of.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

In the days of old people would keep computers as long as 5 years or longer. However these days a new computer barely gets past 3 years before needing replacement - or so it seems.

You can easily get 5 years out of a computer if you buy it correctly the first time.

In fact, you most likely already own a computer that you can get a few more years out of.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

In the days of old people would keep computers as long as 5 years or longer. However these days a new computer barely gets past 3 years before needing replacement - or so it seems.

You can easily get 5 years out of a computer if you buy it correctly the first time.

In fact, you most likely already own a computer that you can get a few more years out of.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

If you’re like most computer users, you’re using an LCD monitor as your primary computer display. And you’ve probably adjusted your monitor settings as best you could, but it still doesn’t “look right”. Some hues appear too blue while others appear too red, or maybe the black looks like a dark gray at best. Continued

In this series I’m going to covers the ins and outs of using Linux as your primary home computer operating system. It will cover in a realistic sense what you can and moreover cannot do with it.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Audacity is a freeware application that will run on Windows, Mac or Linux. It may not be the best looking app in the world but it is a true multitrack audio recorder and has pro-style filters in it to "clean up" audio effectively.

If you plan on doing spoken-word recordings (such as for a podcast) and don’t have the cash for fancy microphones or the like, Audacity can fix your audio easily.

In the following example I purposely had a fan running in the background to create noise, and spoke the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."

Here’s what it looked like when I originally recorded the spoken phrase in Audacity:

The original recording (MP3 download)

There’s obviously a lot of noise in there. You can hear the hissssss noise in the background from the fan I had running.

What I need to do first is get rid of that hiss, so I press CTRL+A to select all the audio in the track, then click Effect then Noise Removal.

Looks like this:

From the next small window that appears I modify the sound to my liking:

I moved the slider to the "less" because that seemed to work best.

Now I have this:

The modified recording with noise removed (MP3 download)

However the audio is still a bit on the quiet side. I could use the Amplify filter but I’m going to use Compressor instead.

Looks like this:

After experimenting with the compressor I ended up with this:

Modified (final) recording with noise removal and compression added (MP3 download)

This is right around where I want to be. The hiss has been removed and the compression (which also has the option of auto-normalizing) brought out some more definition in the voice and added volume to boot - so I was happy with that.

This can be applied to any voice recording you do in Audacity.

Although my method here appears to be as simple as 1-2-3, it isn’t. My recording was short and very easy to work with. For longer recordings it takes a bit of practice to get the right noise removal and compression settings for your voice.

All of this is trial-and-error style - but don’t be afraid to experiment because that’s what it’s all about. Audacity is decent software, has the goods and delivers once you get familiarized with what it can do for you.

On a final note: Bear in mind that modifying the audio of recorded instruments is much different than voice because the waves are totally different. What works for voice doesn’t necessarily follow suit for guitars, drums, etc.

However this isn’t to say you shouldn’t try.

In this series I’m going to covers the ins and outs of using Linux as your primary home computer operating system. It will cover in a realistic sense what you can and moreover cannot do with it.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

EXIF is the EXchangeable Image File format and is used by digital cameras to store information about the photos you take. Everything and the kitchen sink (figuratively speaking of course) is stored every time you take a photo.

Here are two examples of EXIF data using the Flickr service:

 View EXIF "meta" data

 View EXIF "meta" data

You’ll notice that the two photos differ significantly as far as the EXIF data is concerned. In addition to the time and date, the make/model of digital camera is given along with all available photo information as well. In 2005 (the first photo), I had an Olympus D-535 camera. The second was taken recently with my Fujifilm Finepix A820. Two different cameras, two totally different sets of settings based on environment and what my point-and-shoot digital cam "thought" was best for each shot.

Both photos are also geotagged, meaning they both contain GPS coordinates stating exactly (more or less) where each photo was taken.

To note: No, I don’t have one of those super-duper-pooper expensive digital cameras that records GPS positional information. Rather I manually enter in positional information using Flickr’s map function using point-and-click or entering manual coordinates.

Concerning your privacy

With online photo services like Flickr and Picasa, you can opt whether or not to have this information shown.

Maybe you have a super-secret way of taking photos and don’t want people to know how you took specific shots. Maybe you simply don’t want people to know when you took specific photos.

Hiding the EXIF data is the way to do that.

Concerning the geotagged locations, the vast majority of digital cams are not GPS-enabled (and if yours is, trust me, you would know).

Flickr does have privacy options to only let specific people (i.e. your "friends" list) know where shots were taken if you geotag. Or you can simply not geotag photos at all.

I’m not familiar with Picasa’s way of geotagging privacy but if anyone has info on that, feel free to chime in with a comment on their options.

Also remember: If you e-mail a photo to someone direct from your digital cam, all the EXIF data is present within the file(s). This information can be seen even in the standard Windows Explorer as a column. If you don’t want this information shown for whatever reason, you need to bring the file into an image editor and re-save it to remove the EXIF data.

In this series I’m going to covers the ins and outs of using Linux as your primary home computer operating system. It will cover in a realistic sense what you can and moreover cannot do with it.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Some people have noted that the voice quality in the videos I produce for PCMech and in personal music recordings I make that have sought-after "FM sound" to them, which loosely translates to "sounds like the dee jay I hear on FM radio".

If you’re the type that records audio and are looking for that particular sound, it’s actually much easier to achieve than most people realize.

It takes three steps.

First is how you model the sound of your own voice when you speak when recording it.

Do you use verbal fillers such as "um..", "ah…", "er…" or the like? Try not to use those. Don’t worry, a lot of people do and it’s a tough habit to break. You can kill most of the fillers by having a "cheat sheet" next to you when speaking. No, it doesn’t contain every word you’re going to say but just a topic list. When you have this list, verbal fillers will usually decrease noticeably.

There are other tricks you can use, such as saying more with each breath, purposely slowing down how fast you speak (but not by much) and trying find a nice happy medium between speaking and announcing.

Modeling your voice just in the way you speak will make a dramatic improvement in the overall recorded sound.

Second on the list is noise reduction.

On most voice recordings people get hiss (a.k.a. "white noise") and background noise they want out of there.

The easiest way to eliminate the unwanted noise is to use a mild noise reduction filter.

Audacity, a free audio recording program, has a such a filter as do most other programs that record audio. Even Camtasia Studio has one.

The reason you want to use a mild filter is because if you filter it too much it will literally cut out parts of your voice - and you don’t want that.

It takes a bit of experimentation to get the proper sound you want from a noise reduction filter.

Third on the list is compression.

Compression above all else is what most people think an "FM Radio" sound sounds like. And for those most part it’s true.

To note: Do not confuse this with file compression because that’s something totally different. What we’re talking about is using a compressor as an audio filter.

Audacity by the way also has compression filters in it.

In FM radio, music and voice are compressed with a live filter so that everything comes out at an even audio level thru your car speakers when you listen to it. Nothing is too loud or too soft. This is why a recorded piece of music sounds different on a home stereo played via CD (or computer) compared to a radio broadcast. It is the compression you’re hearing that makes it sound different.

When you examine an audio wave in an audio editor like Audacity, the original recording has peaks and valleys. When compressed, most of those peaks/valleys are "scrunched" so that it’s all evened out. Volume levels are even across the wave after the filter is applied for the most part.

Another example of compressed audio is a camcorder’s recording. All audio recorded with a camcorder is highly compressed with a live filter which is why it seemingly can "pick up everything". In reality it can’t. What it’s doing when recording is filtering on the fly so it can "hear" whatever is in range, near or far, and even it out appropriately.

If you’ve never experimented with noise reduction filters and compression, you ordinarily won’t get it right the first time. It takes practice to get the sound you want. But once you do you can repeat the process every time you make an audio recording for podcasting or music recording or whatever you do with recorded audio.

To note: I may do more detailed how-to’s on this later but would prefer if you would comment and say whether you would be interested or not. Any/all comments appreciated. I can get seriously detailed on this stuff.

In this series I’m going to covers the ins and outs of using Linux as your primary home computer operating system. It will cover in a realistic sense what you can and moreover cannot do with it.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

It’s easy enough to forward one e-mail address to another. However it’s a different story when it comes to migrating a domain-based e-mail address.

• You have a domain, www.example.com.
• You have a hosted e-mail address, you@example.com.
• You want to keep your domain host where it is, but host your e-mail elsewhere (such as Google Apps or Windows Live Admin Center).

The biggest problem when doing this is that you don’t want to lose any mail after the migration has taken place. During the transition some mail will be delivered to your old mail host and some to the new.

There is a way to do this so you don’t lose any mail. Read on to find out how.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

You heard all the wonderful things I said about cloud computing in the last article, and I mentioned that the transition process - while easy - takes a bit to explain how it’s done.

This article explains how it’s done in easy-to-understand terms.

We’ll be using Outlook Express 6 as our example. There are many who use this program as it comes free with Windows XP and feel that they’re stuck with it. No, you’re not. You can migrate all your mail over to Gmail or Hotmail easily. All it takes is a minimal amount of setup and a small amount of your time.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Situation: You use an app that requires Adobe AIR but decide you don’t want it anymore and uninstall it. The app was easily removed by going to Add/Remove Programs, but AIR is still installed and there appears to be no way to uninstall it.

Update: The latest version of AIR does have an Add/Remove entry after installation but older versions do not. If you’re running an older version, read below for how to uninstall AIR.

Can you uninstall Adobe AIR completely?

Yes.

Perform the following steps.

1. Uninstall all AIR apps first.

Being that you’re not going to use AIR anymore, uninstall any app that uses it. You most likely know which apps these are, and they can all be uninstalled via Add/Remove.

2. Download the AIR intstaller executable file.

Available here: http://get.adobe.com/air/

The file downloaded will be AdobeAIRInstaller.exe. Download this direct to the desktop. You’ll understand why in a moment.

Note: If you run this file by double-clicking it, all it will do is update your existing AIR installation but not uninstall it.

3. Launch a Command Prompt.

Click Start, then Run, type cmd and click OK.

You get something that will look similar to this.

4. Type cd Desktop and press Enter.

It looks like this:

5. Type the following command exactly as shown:

AdobeAirInstaller.exe -uninstall

It looks like this:

You must type it exactly as shown, then press Enter.

Adobe AIR will then be uninstalled from your computer.

This series is dedicated to specific e-mail providers on the internet. In this installment, the service provider concentrated on will be Google’s Gmail.

Gmail, launched in March 2004, has grown to be one of the most-used free e-mail services on the internet. While it doesn’t have a large of a userbase as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, it’s still a force to be reckoned with.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

This series is dedicated to specific e-mail providers on the internet. In this installment, the service provider concentrated on will be Google’s Gmail.

Gmail, launched in March 2004, has grown to be one of the most-used free e-mail services on the internet. While it doesn’t have a large of a userbase as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, it’s still a force to be reckoned with.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

This series is dedicated to specific e-mail providers on the internet. In this installment, the service provider concentrated on will be Google’s Gmail.

Gmail, launched in March 2004, has grown to be one of the most-used free e-mail services on the internet. While it doesn’t have a large of a userbase as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, it’s still a force to be reckoned with.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

This series is dedicated to specific e-mail providers on the internet. In this installment, the service provider concentrated on will be Google’s Gmail.

Gmail, launched in March 2004, has grown to be one of the most-used free e-mail services on the internet. While it doesn’t have a large of a userbase as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, it’s still a force to be reckoned with.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

This series is dedicated to specific e-mail providers on the internet. In this installment, the service provider concentrated on will be Google’s Gmail.

Gmail, launched in March 2004, has grown to be one of the most-used free e-mail services on the internet. While it doesn’t have a large of a userbase as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, it’s still a force to be reckoned with.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

In previous articles and videos I’ve discussed how to get a "Live" mode (i.e. as if your computer were booting from CD) of Linux on a USB stick. Some people think this is cool but would rather have a full CD-sized distribution installation instead. And when I said "CD-sized" I’m referring to distributions that take up the entire contents of a CD (such as Ubuntu) and not "biz card" distros like Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux.

To do this it isn’t dependent on the distribution you’re using (you can use any you like) but more so on your USB stick itself.

Consider it this way: You want to use your USB stick as a "hard drive", so to speak. Being that’s the case, you need a stick that exceeds the minimum requirements for the OS to work.

Using Ubuntu as an example, the minimum requirement according to its native installer is a drive that has at least 2048MB free. A 2GB USB stick isn’t enough because it doesn’t have enough minimum space - so you need a 4GB USB stick.

Side note: Think a 4GB USB stick is expensive? It’s isn’t. It’s 8 bucks. And I remember not more than 3 to 4 months ago they were $22. These things are getting so unbelievably cheap it’s ridiculous - and they all work.

My recommended method for installing a full Linux distro on a 4GB USB stick

Before continuing, yes the way I do it is complete overkill - but I like to have absolute 100% confirmation that the Linux install absolutely positively will not touch the internal hard drive of my system. You’ll understand what I mean by that in a moment.

1. Head into the BIOS of your computer and from the boot device order set the first to be CDROM and the second to be USB-FDD, USB-HDD or USB-CDROM.

If USB-FDD doesn’t work for a boot device, try USB-HDD. If USB-HDD doesn’t work, try USB-CDROM. One of them will eventually work. And if not, try plugging the USB stick directly into the back of the computer (as in use the USB ports that are directly off the motherboard and not the ones wired to the front of the case).

2. Power off your computer, open the case and physically disconnect the hard drive from the motherboard.

This is the overkill part. Not entirely necessary, but I don’t want GRUB to even know the internal hard drive exists - because even if you set the hard drive "not to exist" in your BIOS, the Linux installation will still "see" your internal hard drive on most motherboards. I go the extra mile by cracking open the case and unplugging the SATA connector from the motherboard physically.

Before rebooting the computer:

Pop in your Linux distro CD-ROM into the tray because you’ll need to boot from it to install the OS to the USB stick.

Insert the USB stick you want to install the OS to into one of your open USB ports.

3. Reboot and proceed with a normal Linux distro installation.

If all goes well, your computer will boot up, spin up the CD-ROM and launch Linux in a Live mode. From there you proceed with a normal installation. Being your hard drive is physically disconnected the OS will be forced to pick the USB stick as its only means of media to install the OS to.

When done, the OS will prompt you to eject the disc (which you do), then restart the computer.

4. Reboot and test the Linux OS off the USB stick to make sure everything works okay.

On reboot you should have a full Linux OS ready-to-rock. If so, you’re all done with that.

5. Shut down, power off the computer and reconnect the internal hard drive to the motherboard.

Once the USB stick has a full Linux OS on it you’re safe to reconnect your hard drive back to the motherboard.

6. Do a test boot with the USB stick inserted to see if it loads first before the internal hard drive does.

Your boot order should be CDROM, USB-FDD (or HDD or CDROM) then HDD. So what your computer should do is try to boot from the optical drive first, then the USB stick and then the internal hard drive.

If all goes well, whenever the USB stick is plugged into the computer and booted from a "cold start", it will always boot from the USB stick first whenever you want to go into Linux. When done you log out of Linux, shut down, power off, unplug the stick and reboot again to go back to the internal hard drive’s OS.

Final notes

You should bear in mind that by installing a Linux OS on a USB fashion it will not be portable. What this means is that the OS will set itself to use the computer it is first booted from and configure itself as such.

If you take the USB stick after a full install and boot, then bring it to another computer with different hardware and boot from that, chances are high that the internal settings of the OS on that stick will get all messed up because it’s "expecting" a different the computer it was first booted from. Sure, you can simply reconfigure everything and get it working again relatively quickly for anything messed up, but that’s a bit of a hassle.

For each computer you want to boot a full-install-on-USB-stick distro from, it’s recommended you get a separate USB stick dedicated to each computer. The sticks are cheap enough anyway so it’s not a big deal.

This series is dedicated to specific e-mail providers on the internet. In this installment, the service provider concentrated on will be Yahoo! Mail.

Yahoo! Mail is one of the oldest free e-mail providers on the internet. It was originally launched on October 8 1997, and to date has one of the largest userbases in the world.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

This series is dedicated to specific e-mail providers on the internet. In this installment, the service provider concentrated on will be Yahoo! Mail.

Yahoo! Mail is one of the oldest free e-mail providers on the internet. It was originally launched on October 8 1997, and to date has one of the largest userbases in the world.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Upon recent acquisition of a Garmin nüvi 270 I found that I had the ability to manually enter in longitude and latitude coordinates for locations. This is a very convenient feature because you can enter in coordinates directly without having to connect the GPS to the computer at all.

For those that would ask “Why can’t I just enter in a street address instead?” You could do that, but this is useful when you’re browsing the map in Google Earth and don’t know what the street address is (but do know the coordinates).

See video below for details.

My favorite mapping product on the internet is Google Maps. I use if often and said honestly, nobody else comes close in speed and ease of use. Live Maps comes close but still doesn’t cut the mustard, so to speak. Yahoo! Maps puts very annoying animated advertisements in their mapping product and MapQuest is simply old and clunky to use - not to mention it is also chock full of annoying animated advertisements. Continued

This article covers the following:

1. Setting up a workgroup in Windows XP.
2. Setting up a workgroup in Ubuntu 8.10.
3. How to share out files from your Windows XP computer on your home network so you can access them with Ubuntu 8.10.
4. How to access files shared by your Windows XP computer on your home network in Ubuntu 8.10.
5. How to share files out from Ubuntu 8.10 to a Windows XP computer on your home network.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

At the present time I’m trying to upgrade my Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 but the servers holding the files are getting slammed right now (first day of release - it’s expected).

You can upgrade your Ubuntu 100% from the internet just by clicking a few options and letting the update manager do its thing. See video below for details - it’s super-easy (but takes forever at present because everybody is trying to download it right now). Continued

Using the freely available Terminal Server Client in Ubuntu Linux it’s easy to connect to your Windows XP computer(s) on your local network. See video below for details.