Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

Tag: Technology (page 2 of 2)

Tapes, LPs to CD

August 17, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Last fall I was looking for some good options on transferring some of my old tapes and LPs to CD. I found a few sites that explaining what I needed to buy to do it, but I wanted something simple. SciFi may have shown me the solution. It comes with the software I need, looks like it is easy to hookup. Let me know if anyone has an better ideas.

 Simply hook up an old turntable or cassette deck to the InstantMusic and plug it in into an available USB port on your PC. The included software allows you to convert your music to MP3 files, or burn directly to CD. It even smartly detects the gaps between songs to divide that old Journey LP into individual MP3 files perfect for transfer to your newfangled iPod.

instant_music_import.jpg

Social Site in Flash

August 16, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Here’s a family safe social networking site called Famster. The whole thing is in flash. I think the interface actually looks pretty cool.

Online Software Update

July 19, 2006 / / 4 Comments

After I posted info on the various applications available online, Jeremy posted another downloadable suite called Open Office. So, I had to try it as well. Interesting, when you register the product, they ask if the reason you are using it is because you hate Microsoft. Then Boing Boing ran piece today about OpenOffice advertising on buses that go to Microsoft. That’s funny!

Anyway, I’ve tested the various apps and here’s my opinion. Open Office is pretty robust and a great downloadable option. I opened one of my Access databases in it and everything worked great. So it stays on the hard drive for when I don’t have WiFi access. But I also like the online apps because it makes it easy switching between computers.

I mainly tested the word processing and of all the apps, I liked ThinkFree. It has editing options I use like zoom, header/footer editing, etc. It runs on Java, which is a problem for some folks, and that means it runs a little slower, but the features are worth it to me. It also has a quick edit and power edit option, so for fasting editing, you can avoid the longer loading java window.

ZohoWriter and the Ajaxwriter were similar and I like them for quick edits. They run fast. I may prefer Zoho simply because it opens in another tab whereas Ajax opens a pop-up window for the document.

gOffice has a nice site but it is still a little too limited in editing options. I couldn’t figure how to change fonts.

If you haven’t tried any of these yet, you should. Open source is changing the rules and hopefully making the web what it was supposed to be. Not a place to make a few guys rich, but a place where us blokes could share our thoughts, ideas and solutions without always commodifying everything.

Online office software

July 14, 2006 / / 2 Comments

If you haven’t been keeping up with the developments in online software, there are multiple options now available for writing documents, creating spreadsheets and even developing presentations that rival PowerPoint. I’ve played with some of these and find them pretty cool and nice alternatives to spending an enormous chunk of cash of productivity tools that come with a bunch of bells and whistles most of us don’t even need.

Here are some of the ones I came across from a simple search and checking folks like TechCrunch.
Zoho offers a whole suite of productivity tools from word processing to spreadsheets to presentation tools and more. Most are free; some have a nominal cost. I played around with the word processing and may start using it myself. It exports as a .doc and other files and has the features I use most.

gOffice offers word processing, desktop publishing, presentations, and spreadsheets.

Writely was recently purchased by Google. They’re not offering new accounts yet, so I haven’t tried it. But you can sign up for an invitation.

ThinkFree comes with a gig of free online space and offers word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. ThinkFree takes a little longer to load but appears to have a bunch of editing tools. Both the icons and toolbar emulate MS Office.

Ajaxlaunch is offering a variety of web world tools including word processing, a sketch program, a video editing program, a soon to come ajax operating system, and more. Plus it has an online forum, so it appears to be creating a little community around these developments. Looks very interesting.

Google Labs is always introducing interesting applications including spreadsheets. One tool that I’ve added to my toolbar that could be helpful for those doing research on the Internet is the Google Notebook. This allows you to capture clips of web pages with links to the page and store them in a folder that is always accessible from your toolbar.

Thumbstacks is an easy tool for building online presentations.

Empressr is also an interesting presentation tool.

If anybody has found other online office tools they like, I’d love to hear about them. Moving between several computers at different locations, I find the online apps makes it very easy for me to work on projects.

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