Saturday, December 20, 2008

Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Office

Do you use Microsoft Office in your daily life at work or school but don't have it installed on your home computer because it is too expensive? Well like most other things there is a free alternative to this and it is called OpenOffice.org. This office suite has everything that you will need from writing papers to creating data bases and everything in between that you would need in a office suite. You can download your free copy from here: http://www.openoffice.org. OpenOffice.org has a very nice interface so that if you have used any of the Microsoft Office programs before everything should look very similar or even close to the same. You can also save your files to all of the same formats that a ton of the other office programs use. So you can still send your files to whom ever and they will be able to read them just fine with the programs that they have installed. So if you need an office suite OpenOffice.org is a very good alternative to the Microsoft Office suite if you want to go open source and not have to pay any money.



OpenOffice.org Writer


OpenOffice.org Impress


OpenOffice.org Draw


OpenOffice.org Calc


OpenOffice.org Base

Friday, December 19, 2008

Find New Websites Using Stumble Upon

Have you ever found yourself bored or just having some extra time on your hands? There is a Firefox Add-On to suit your needs and it is called Stumble Upon. It can be downloaded from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/138. Also if you do not have Firefox installed you can download it from here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/. To add this to Firefox all you will need to do is just click on the Add to Firefox Button on the Stumble Upon download page. All you will need to do after it is installed in Firefox make an account. Then from there choose the kinds of content that you would like to see then just start stumbling around the web. By clicking on the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons in the toolbar Stumble Upon will be able to show you more sites that will like better and also know what you don't like as well. I can assure you that you will have hours of fun browsing the web and finding a ton of new sites along the way.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Back-up Songs From Your Ipod To Your Computer In Windows

Have you ever wanted to take the songs from your Ipod and put them onto your computer? You may need to do this some time if your hard drive crashes and you lose all of your data and do not want to have to spend all of the hours recopying your whole cd collection back to your computer. There is a free tool that can make this task very easy and it is called iDump this can be downloaded from here: http://www.softpedia.com/get/IPOD-TOOLS/Multimedia-IPOD-tools/iDump.shtml. Now all you will need to do is just download and install the program and then start it up. After you have that completed you can get started with this tutorial.

First you want to make sure that you have your Ipod plugged in to your computer. Other wise you will not get anywhere and the program will not open either. Once it is started up it will load all of your songs. After it is done loading the songs you have there are a couple options that you can select from the drop down menu. You can select from the different playlists that that you have created on your ipod and select songs from there or you can just leave it on the all songs selection. Now you can select the songs to be copied by selecting them one by one or you can right click and choose select all if you just want to get all of the songs from your Ipod.

Selecting songs to be copied

Now that you have all of the songs selected that you would like to copy to your computer you can now select where you would like the songs to be copied to on your computer. To do this you will need to click on the Output Options tab toward the top of the window. From here you can just browse to the directory that you would like to copy to. I have just set mine to a music folder on my desktop but you can copy them to where ever you choose. You can also change how the folders will be laid out in the directory that you choose by changing the File Output Format. I have just left mine on the default option because that is just the way that I like my folders to be sorted but you can choose to change yours as you choose. You can also select the Unattended transfer so then you will not have to monitor the whole process of your songs being copied.



Output Options window

Now to copy the songs to your computer all you will have to do is go back to the Ipod tab and then just click on the Start Copy button. Now all you will have to do is just wait for all of the songs to be copied and then you can transfer them to your Itunes or what ever other music player that you have installed. Now you will not have to worry about loosing all of the songs on your ipod and not being able to get them back onto your computer without spending hours.

Songs being copied to computer