Digital Cribs Competition

Cisco are running a competition called Digital Cribs: Heaven or Hell? To enter you have to submit a video that either demonstrates your technological heaven or your consumer electronic hell. There are grand prizes of $10,000 for both categories, as well as ten $500 gift cards for the other finalists (five for the 'heaven' videos and five for 'hell').

The competition closes on November 26, 2008. Those videos that are most viewed and highest rated will be more likely to win, as these two criteria will make up 66% of the submitted video's final score. So even if you don't want to submit a video yourself, you can see other people's digital experiences, both good and bad, and rate them accordingly. Good luck.

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Five free file conversion sites

There is already a bewildering selection of different files types and this will only get more confusing as more innovative file formats become available. You may be able to install conversion utilities for some applications such as Microsoft Word and you can download various freeware file conversion tools, but there is a third option: web-based file conversion services.


Media Convert - I have mentioned this site before on this blog. It can cope with a greater variety of file types than the other sites listed here, but the amount of advertising makes the interface rather ugly and far from intuitive. The maximum file size is 150Mb, although, the larger the file the more likely that there will be a conversion error. You can download the converted file directly from the website.

YouConvertIt - This site supports nearly as many file formats as Media Convert, but it is till in Beta testing. It has a clean and intuitive interface and - like most of the other pages in this list - it enables you to download video files from sites like YouTube. File conversions are received by email, so check the maximum email size that you can receive.

Media Converter - This service also has an easy-to-use interface and it supports many popular file types and on-line video sources. It also offers a Firefox add-on to simplify the process of downloading and converting videos from sites like YouTube, MetaCafe, etc. For the free service the maximum file size is 100Mb and each user is limited to ten conversions per day.

Zamzar - Zamzar is probably the most well known of the file conversion sites. Again it supports the most popular file types and video sites, but the maximum file size that can be converted for free is 100Mb. File conversions are received by email, so check the maximum email size you can receive.


Primo Online - This is a specialist file conversion site that offers a pdf creation service. It enables you to create a pdf document from over 300 different file types as long as they are no bigger than 5Mb. You receive the converted pdf file via email.


All-in-all the variety of supported file types and the convenience of being able to download the converted file mean that my file conversion site of choice is still Media Convert.

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The 10th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the tenth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice. Another collection of blog articles to help you avoid problems and get the most out of your PCs.

We start this month's carnival with Michael guide to Whats inside a computer? from Too Easy Tech.

Next up is, Money 2000 to Money Plus: Will It Convert? posted at About.com Financial Software. The author of the article, Shelley Elmblad, says, "This post answers a question about running older versions of Microsoft Money on Windows Vista, and tells you how to get older MS Money data to convert for use with Microsoft Money Plus."

Four more posts about software: Jules of PCauthorities.com explains How to Uninstall IE8 Beta 2; the writers at ErrorSmart present instructions for Fixing Rundll32.exe; Satbir Singh lists 10 Essential Portable Applications for your USB Drive at Technotraits.com; bobby instructs us hwo to Login with multiple Ids at the same time in yahoo messenger with a Registry hack at Wonderful tech. stuff.

This carnival would not be complete without a post from Andrew Edgington. This month he presents 20 Photoshop on-line Video Tutorials at Learn Photoshop Smart, and his Quick Fix Tips at Learn Adobe Elements.

Thanks to everyone who contributed this month. As ever limits in space mean that not all submissions appear in the final carnival.

If you have an IT themed blog and would like to host the next carnival leave a comment on this post or use the contact form over at our Blog Carnival page where you can also submit your blog posts for inclusion. If don't wish to have the responsibility for selecting articles or writing the carnival post, don't worry I can do that for you.

More in the November edition.

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How to run a program every time Windows starts

In a previous post I explained how to stop programs running when Windows starts up, but in this post I will explain how to make one run every time you boot up. There are a variety of ways of telling Windows to run a program when it starts, but using the 'Startup' folder on the Start menu is probably the simplest. For the purposes of this tutorial we will set Windows to run Firefox automatically.

Click on the Start menu and browse to the appropriate sub-menu. Right-click on the icon for the program you want to start automatically, and click 'Copy'.

Now find the 'Startup' folder on the Start menu, right-click on it and click 'Open'.

This will open a new window showing some of the programs that run whenever you start Windows.

Right-click on some empty space in that window and click paste.

If you cannot find the icon for the program you want in the Start menu, but you have it on your desktop then you can copy that one into the 'Startup' folder. You can repeat this process for all the programs you wish to start automatically; however, be warned that the more programs you have running the slower Windows will work.

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Jargon Busting: Anatomy of a window (Part 1)

All the various controls on a Windows program have names that are not always intuitive. In this post I will identify the most common controls and list the various names that they are known by. I will not bother with buttons or menus as everyone should know what they are. All the controls on this post are interactive, rather than just being images.

Text box, Text field, Text Entry, Input Box A control into which you can type text. It can be a single line as above, or multiple lines as below.	This element is also called a text-area
Radio button, Option button This control enables you to select one of a number of choices.	Male Female
Check box, Tick box These either appear singly offering an on/off or yes/no choice, or they offer a chance to select a multitude of options.	What do you own? Desktop PC: Laptop PDA
List box This control enables you to select one or more items from a list. To select more than one item hold down the Ctrl key while clicking.	PopRockR&BDanceC&W
Drop-down list This element allows you to select an item from a list	AustraliaCanadaNew ZealandPhilippinesUnited KingdomUnited StatesOther

In the next post in this series I will look at other program controls, such as sliders, spinners, trees and grids.

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The 9th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the ninth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice - a digest of recent blog articles about making interaction with computers safer and easier.

Starting this month, the Carnival will now include hints and tips for bloggers. The article explains how to Auto Create Navigation Tabs for New WordPress Pages. The author WordPress Hacker says: "In this article I explain how you can setup your blog to automatically create main navigation links/tabs when new pages are published by using custom fields to mark those pages you want to appear in the navigation menu."

In a post on Burogu Blog, Hera passes on a number of tips to Speed up your Computer and Internet. Speaking of the Intenet, regular contributor Paul Wilcox gives advice on How You Can Protect Kids From Online Dangers at his Security Manor blog. Finally on the subject of all things Internet, Iain Adams of Iain's TechWorld presents his an "initial look at beta browsers from Google and Microsoft" in Beta Beta! The Browser Wars cont'd.

For those of you who look after a large network is a "step by step pictorial guide to make your own network cables" - How To Crimp UTP cable to RJ45 Connector by Andhika Krishananda of Networking Newbie - Learn Networking and Cisco.

As our next contributor, Sonny Felker, says - "Hopefully you will never need the services of hard drive data recovery experts. However, many computer users do at some point." See his Hard Drive Recovery post at Data Recovery to learn more.

We have a couple of image editing posts to end this month's carnival. Rodney Smith tells us How to resize images using GIMP (a free image editor) on the Hippo Web Solutions page, and no Carnival of Computer Help and Advice would be complete without a contribution from our Photoshop expert, Andrew Edgington. This month he explains Masking on his Learn Photoshop Now blog.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed. If you would like to host the next carnival leave a comment on this post or use the contact form over at our Blog Carnival page where you can also submit your blog posts for inclusion. If you do wish to host the carnival but don't wish to have the responsibility for selecting articles or writing the carnival post, don't worry I can do that for you.

If you wish to help promote the Carnival, you can add a widget to your blog - click here for the code.

See you in October.

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Keyboard shortcut of the week: Alternative windows hopping

In a previous post I mentioned that you can hop between open windows by holding down the Alt key and pressing the Tab key repeatedly. A little dialog box will open that in Windows XP or 2000 looks like this:


And in Windows Vista looks like this:


There is an alternate way of hopping between windows that does not show this box. Simply hold down the Alt key and press the Escape key (marked Esc) to hop between windows in the order that you opened them. If you hop using this method Windows will leave any minimised windows in that state, it will not restore them like the Alt+Tab method does.

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