Techno Babes

You’ve all heard of the nifty little software for creating tutorials, right?  Camtasia?  The thing is, you need to buy it.  Well, this little program was just too good to be true.  Sooooo…… someone created an open source version.  Meaning, it’s free!  Oh, NOW I have your attention.  Okay, here’s the details:

CamStudio
http://camstudio.org/

It records both video and audio on your computer and compresses the files to .swf files (meaning you can upload them to YouTube!!!).  Hurray open source!

Okay, while you are looking at the web site, I’m going to play with my CamStudio.  See you in YouTube!!

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In an effort to refresh my memory about ‘this->’ pointers, I came across a wonderful blog site chock full of stuff about PHP and MySQL. They also cover Javascript, CSS, and lots of other stuff as well.

Learning Computer Programming

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O.M.G. - I get these emails from BOXX Technologies all the time and today I actually took a moment to read the most recent.

3DBOXX 7550 Series Workstation:

• Dual Quad-Core AMD Opteron
• NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 graphic card
• 4 GB DDR2-667 Memory

Only for a measly $3,515.00.  *choke* *gasp*  Oh wait….ONLY $116.70/month!  I’m in trouble.  Do I really need all that processing power to run Second Life? Well…

I have been considering how to speed up my processor. I know, I know, upgrade memory. Did that. Got the highest video card I could get without upping my power supply. However, my poor motherboard can only handle 4 of the 8 pipelines that my graphics card has. And lately, Secondlife has been crashing or freezing in busy areas. Yes, I could get a new motherboard…

But still….the 3DBOXX looks so enticing. I could use it for graphics and video editing, too. But would I use it enough to justify the costs?

While I’m deciding, all of you computer geeks can check it out for yourself at this link.

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Ever wonder how they get all those pretty colors to go together on their web site?? Check this out. It will give you the hex-code for coordinating colors. You’ll notice there is a pattern to the code.

http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html

They also have a download version for a fee, but you can use their online version for free. Now let me see your pretty colors.

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Yes, there IS hope!  Found this great web site to answer your computer-related questions.

http://www.computerhope.com/

Someone asks me something I don’t know?  I run to this web site, find the answer, and come back with the information looking like I really know what I’m talking about.  Shhhhhh…don’t tell anyone. 

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Boxes with rounded corners!!!

There are lots and lots of CSS code out there for creating boxes with rounded corners, but many I tried didn’t work (perhaps I was missing something?). The ones that did work for me seemed to be the ones that use a single image or parts of a single image. The boxes can “grow” vertically, but usually are set in width. One such site that creates the image for you and gives you the HTML and CSS code is:  http://www.spiffybox.com/index.php?

Note that the width and height are set in pixels, not percentages. The height needs to be set at max of whatever you’ll need as the resulting box can always be smaller, but not larger. The width is fixed. So if you want, create more than one width and save them as .png files. You will need to adjust the width in your CSS to accommodate the width of your box. Please note:  They have two “width” settings, one for IE WIN, and one for Mozilla/others. To get the IE WIN version to work, put an underscore in front of “width.”  So “width” becomes “_width.” Also note, the IE WIN “width” needs to be 15 pixels larger than the image width.

So yes, you do need to be familiar with CSS. If you’re playing with creating rounded boxes, you need to know it anyway.  Go to the site, play with the numbers. Try it out. Worked for me!

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For anyone who has upgraded to the Leopard OS and iLife08, you may have noticed, the latest is NOT the greatest. Those of us who use iMovie for simple but precise edits and easy conversion to DVD, iMovie08 has gone through drastic changes and is a nightmare.

No longer do you have a timeline and the ability to “split at the playhead” (at least from what I could find). I also could not find anywhere to capture a frame, and converting to a DVD? OMG. There is no direct process anymore. iMovie08 was going to take 239 minutes to convert one hour of video BEFORE I could take it into iDVD08. And no chapter marker ability either. *sigh*

So let’s just remove iLife08 and go back to iLife06, right? Wrong. Even though iMovie06 is compatible with the Leopard OS, iDVD06 is not. Sooooo, let’s do iMovie06 and iDVD08!!  Hmmmmm, that didn’t work either. Apparently iMovie06 and iDVD08 are not completely compatible with each other.

Looking through forums on the web, I see I’m not the only one that has run into these problems and no doubt Apple has heard the complaints. So Apple came out with an “update” to retro your iMovie08 back to a “revised” version of iMovie06 that is compatible with iDVD08. So far it seems to be working (fingers crossed).

Wanna try it for yourself?  Go to this link to get the download: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovieHD6.html

And always keep in mind, the latest is NOT the greatest. IT people know, upgrades break things more often than not. So if it’s working, leave it alone! At least until they work out all the bugs and problems.

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Teach me to not post for a long time!  I come back to find our nifty little look with the moon gone and we were back to the default template. And our “moon” template is not available anymore. (*sigh*)

So hence the new look.

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Hmmmm. You mean I need graphics software, too? Nope. Not now. You can do simple edits to prepare your images for the web. There are many online websites to do this, but here’s one that is very easy to use:

http://www.pixer.us

Simply upload your image via their online tools, edit, and download the result. That simple.  The Toto in all of us is thankful we’re not in Kansas anymore.

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