Shopping deals

When shopping, especially for tech stuff, I typically check out edealinfo. That web site collects on-line coupons, promotions, and sales. They post these as applied to products, sometimes showing neat combinations for super deals. While I encourage you to just click over and look around, here are a few of the page I particularly like:

• This page collects deals for Dell computers. Even if I am not getting a Dell (dude), I use this page to provide a nice baseline
  
• A page collecting credit cards deals can be useful, although I have not really used this one all that much
  
• My favorite page is probably the one with free stuff. Who doesn't like free stuff? There normally ends up being a shipping cost or something, but normally they are still a good deal
  
• If you like edealinfo, you might consider subscribing to one or more of their RSS feeds in order to keep on top of their many deals
  

Feel free to share any other deal sites or specific deals. There are tons of good deals out there to be had, it is just a matter of finding them at the right time.

BAE Systems Career Fair Events

BAE Systems is hiring with positions in both Engineering and Operations. I am not a recruiter for BAE, but wanted to spread the word anyway. Please check out the web site for an upcoming career fair in Nashua, New Hampshire. If you are interested in these opportunities but are not in the New England area then you should check out the virtual career fair. If you feel I know you well enough to refer you for work BAE Systems, then please let me know and I would be happy to submit a referral internally. Good luck!

Windows software

Over the years I have collected lists of useful, cool, and free software for Microsoft Windows. Although I may not always have all of these tools installed, I have most of the tools installed most of the time. I share them here in case you have not heard of some of them before. Please share any you might think I am missing. Remember, they have to be free and for windows

• I heard from Dvorak about AVG Free, a free anti-virus program that should be adequate for home use.
  
• Microsoft offers a collection of Power Toys for Windows XP. Although their usefulness varies, I like the more intelligent task switcher and the desktop manager.
  
• Crap Cleaner lives up to its name. During regular use, stuff collects in Windows like plaque on teeth. Crap Cleaner quickly, easily, and simply gets rid of all the build-up.
  
• My daughter loves using Skype to talk to her great grandparents across the country. The setup is easy, it works for both PCs and Macs, and even my old computer can handle it.
  
• Handbrake rips DVDs and encodes them into other formats. It is useful for getting movies onto your iPod.
  
• Speaking of an iPod, you probably want to have iTunes installed. Other services are catching up and/or passing Apple's, but they are still the biggest kid on the block for now.
  
• For web browsing I use Google's Chrome. This is mostly because I am a small Google fanboy. Firefox is probably still the better browser, although Chrome has some nice features and a simplistic elegance that is fun.
  
• Flickr provides an uploader tool that makes uploading photos to their site very easy.
  
• Google pack has a good collection of software, although I must admit that the ones I use the most are imports not made by Google (Skype and Adobe Reader).
  
• The Open Disc aims to put a good collection of high quality open source software on a CD. You can see what they put on their disc and download interesting programs individually. I would recommend a few especially.
  
  • The Gimp is an excellent image editing program aiming to replace Adobe Photoshop.
    
  • Firefox is the best web browser out there as of writing this entry.
    
  • Pidgin puts together a bunch of IM clients into one interface making it very convenient to IM using AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and Google all at once.
    
  • I really like the Thunderbird email client.
    
  • WinSCP is useful for securely copying files, but I must admit that non-techies probably won't get excited about it.
    
  • Open Office continues to steadily improve as a free and compatible (for the most part) alternative to Microsoft Office.
    
  • Since I have not had a working printer for a few years, I rely a lot on PDF Creator. I can "print" to the pdf creator and then move the pdf to where I want to print it.
    
  • Although it is not the best anti-virus software, Clamwin is free.
  
  
• The Software for Starving Students used to make a good collection of free (not necessarily open source) software. They even had a collection of free software for Apple's OS X. Most of the Windows software shows up somewhere else on my list, which is probably why the project was discontinued and the list is only available on the internet archive.

That seems to pretty much sum it up. Anything I missed? I hope you try these tools out. Some of them may be a bit different than what you are used to, but you can't beat the price. Some of the free software is actually better than their costly counterparts.

Victory

Or how I got my DVD burner to work. You might recall from a previous post that I was having some trouble burning DVDs. At the time I achieved the desired functionality (burning a watchable DVD) by upgrading the firmware (from Liteon SOHW-1633S to 1653). However, I still could not burn data DVDs, a necessary feature for a family history project on which my wife is working.

This morning I decided that my iomega SuperDVD drive was not going to work with my computer, so I started trying to fix my wife's Mac Mini. It had also failed to burn the discs. I thought this strange, since "it just works" is one of Apple's selling points. Turns out it is also a lie. My wife's Superdrive is a Matshita DVD-R UJ-845C. After reading various help forums, I determined that an update on the Mini had broken DVD burning for a lot of people with this drive and that Apple and Matshita were both not doing anything about it. A simple firmware update would fix it, but none of the updates released by Apple seemed to do the job (1.0, 2.0, or the risky and recalled 2.1). So, I gave up on the Superdrive as well.

Now, just to be silly, I pulled the iomega SuperDVD off of my desk and plugged it into my wife's Mac Mini. Nothing appeared to happen. I inserted a blank DVD. It opened the DVD, I dragged files to burn from the computer, clicked burn, and waited for it to finish. Everything went fine. We are now on burn number five of our media of which we need ten copies. The Superdrive may not have "just worked," but the iomega external drive sure did.

Google Reader

Whether you know it or not, you probably read RSS (real simple syndication) feeds. You also probably share the items on these feeds with your friends. My favorite tool for both reading and sharing is Google Reader.

Here is a video overview of the service, including how to get started (the voice is kind of loud, so watch your volume):


Here are some other sites for getting started:

Google's tour of Reader

Another video intro to Reader

cnet's newbie guide to Reader

None of those guides is perfect, but they should all give you an idea. Here is my one paragraph guide for the super lazy and/or busy: Go to Google Reader and sign in using your Google account. If you are the last person in the world to have a Google account, now would be a good time to sign up. Now that you are in Reader, you want to add subscriptions. In separate tabs (if you are still using IE6, just give up and go home. Seriously) open up some of your favorite news sites and look for the RSS icon () or something that says RSS. Click on it to open a nasty looking text page (the feed). Highlight the URL and then go back to the Reader tab. Click on add a subscription and then paste the copied URL. Click "add" and then hope for the best.

Eventually you will get the hang of things and realize that there are different ways to do things, but that should get you going. One cool part of Reader is sharing. You can check your sharing settings under "Sharing settings." When you are reading an article or summary in Reader, at the bottom is a link that says "Share" and has a gray version of the RSS logo to the left of it. When you click on it, the logo turns orange and you have shared that article. The article then shows up in your public feed ("Shared items") and it gets shared with your friends. Here's a link to my shared items. That's it!

Alright, maybe the other guides are better. Oh well. Here are a couple of links for even more information:

Wikipedia entry on Google Reader

The official Google Reader blog