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…

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…

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…

Being the computer nerd that I am and having written a book, created this website, and taught courses about better computer use like I have, you can imagine that I fill the role of personal tech support to many friends and family members.  I usually welcome the opportunity to help the people that I care about, though sometimes I definitely face challenges when helping them out.  This post describes the work I did on a notebook that belonged to my wife’s friend and colleague Bobbie.  Her problems consisted of serious infections, poor system performance, instability, and an excess of unneeded programs.  Click to read more…

A little while ago I participated in an IT Solutions Journal open call article about my experience with the Rockbox open source project.  I am a big fan of open source projects because they are built on voluntary effort by communities of people who want to see some product reach its full potential (which is not provided by the original manufacturer).  My first, and current, mp3 player is an iRiver H120.  This thing is 4-5 years old and still working great.  I got this over an iPod because of its hardware capabilities and because of the custom software that was available from the Rockbox project.  The article describes more about Rockbox software and open source projects (like those in the Useful Programs section) in general.  It’s posted here at the ITSJ website, but I also included it below. Click to read more…