You’ve hopefully heard of the Palm Pre by now.  It’s been out for just a couple of weeks, but it is making a pretty big splash in the smartphone world.  In fact, the anticipation of its arrival was comparable to that of the iPhone in many ways.  But is it living up to the hype in the face of new Apple offerings?  Click to read more…

The markets are still crazy during this recession, but it seems like home prices are finally nearing a stabilization point.  If you are one of the many people looking to secure a new property during this great time for buyers, then you should be using all of the tools available to you for maximizing your search span and gains.  Since my wife and I have been looking for homes for the past year, I felt I should impart some of the tools I used to help us determine the homes wanted to consider for your new residence.  Click to read more…

Today is the day that the third iteration of the iPhone was released to the masses and so far the reception appears to be positive.  This version of the iPhone doesn’t stand out much from its predecessor, the 3G, in looks.  In fact, the external appearance of the 3G S is identical to that of the 3G.  So what is the big fuss over?  Well, obviously it’s what’s on the inside that counts.  Click to read more…

I work for a large defense corporation and we are relatively technological despite our populous.  However, we still have fax machines around and they are still the only means for transmitting documents in certain situations.  I.e. when filing for a corporate credit card we have to print out a form, sign it, and then fax it to the proper office.  The thing is, faxes have been completely replaced by this AMAZING NEW technology called “email.”  Click to read more…

I recently upgraded my wife Heather’s notebook computer.  It’s a two-year-old Dell Inspiron E1505 running Vista Home Premium.  When I bought it, it was about the time that the first Core 2 Duos were being released, so I got her the best I could for less than $1K.  For two years, the machine ran pretty well with tolerable lag (and terrible battery life), but then it started to get unreasonable.  As a result, I took it upon myself to upgrade the machine in the most cost effective ways possible.  Click to read more…

I have been teaching extension courses locally at West LA College for around two years now (I  will soon start teaching at El Camino College as well), and I can easily say that it has been a wonderful experience.  Teaching has allowed me to connect one-on-one with the target audience for my book Computer Zen: A Journey to Better Computing and see how well the information comes across to real people.  So far, the response has been very positive and I have branched out into teaching other classes.  Click to read more…

I was reading one of the SANS OUCH! newsletters today (which I have discussed in this post) and saw a nice little article with some telltale signs of a computer infection.  Initially, I thought to myself “How could anyone not know?”  But after reading the article and thinking about it for a little bit, I realized that most people probably just assume it’s the computer’s fault.  Whether it’s age, the slowness of Vista, running many programs at once, or a shortage of hard drive space, something else gets to be the scapegoat while the infection continues to worsen the machine’s condition.  Included below is the article from the newsletter (which can be found here).  Click to read more…

Your hard drive.  That magical magnetic thing (unless you have an SSD) that stores all of your data, programs, and other important stuff.  It’s amazing how much you can fit on a hard drive, but every drive has its limit.  Once it gets maxed out you’ll probably notice some performance degradation.  The computer takes longer to start up, programs take longer to start, etc. because of all that excess data.  This article will discuss some of the techniques you can use to help clean out the unneeded stuff from your hard drive to get it back to that zippy speed you had before.  Click to read more…

One of the great things about this time and age is the variety of products available to us as consumers.  From the perspective of Operating Systems, or OS’s, the spolight has been pointed at Microsoft and Windows for the longest time.  Though the majority of computer users still use some form of Windows, the evolution of the competition has allowed for two powerful competitors to get some major attention: OSX and Ubuntu Linux.  Click to read more…

If you’re looking for a post with my first WinMo app, don’t bother.  It didn’t work out too well 🙂  But it did allow me to learn a lot about developing on the .NET platform in C# for Windows Mobile 6 and I was even able to reuse a lot of my code for this app.  I named the program GParkS.  Click to read more…