I recently had a bunch of trouble with a computer that would not update via windows update.  No matter how hard I tried it would just download the update and poof die.  There was no message outside of the sad sad failure.  From the Windows update site OR from the Automatic updates.  There was no love.

Continue Reading Windows Update Not! but a fix

I used to use outlook years ago.  I switched to thunderbird and now use Gmail as my email client for everything.  However I recently became aware of something that might convince me to move back if I didn’t need my email at multiple sites. Continue Reading Email organization for Outlook

I use I want Sandy and Google calendar to do my scheduling.  It’s pretty sweet.   I can schedule things via Twitter, SMS, Google Calendar and it all kinda stays on the web until now.  What I wanted to do is to sync these calendars with my iPod.  But the only option before today that I knew about was to use outlook and do the sync that way.   Now I can sync any web accessable ICS calendar to my iPod automatically.  Continue Reading Ipod Calendar on Windows Tied to Outlook NO MORE!

I’m not sure because I can’t get to it.  Is it ME?  I get these questions often by phone in a panic.  The first thing I do is open a browser to the site.  More often than not the site is up.  To prevent some of the support calls you might make try a couple of things first.  A good thing to try is pressing Ctrl-F5.  While clicking reload/refresh or pressing F5 will refresh a page, pressing Ctrl-F5 goes a bit farther and skips some of the local caches.  This may be all you need to do but if not you may have to dig a bit deeper.

Continue Reading Is the server down or is it just me?

I’m working on a new blog that is tracking my family’s move from energy hogs to savers.  While we are not the saying the sky is falling we do notice our electric bill is growing.  This is because of a recent 10% rate increase.  However we are not doing all we can to conserve energy.

I’ll be writing about meter reading, changes in behavior, repairs and replacements that any family can do to reduce your electric bill.  So check out Global Energy City.

I often ask clients to go to a command prompt.  Over half of them respond ‘Huh?’

The windows command prompt is often described as going to DOS.  But in reality it’s a way of interacting with Windows that isn’t a GUI(Graphical User Interface) as DOS isn’t a part of Windows anymore.

The GOOD thing about using a command prompt is that you don’t have to move your and from the keyboard to the mouse and back and you don’t have to wait for Windows to update a complex display when you do with some tasks.  Also there are just somethings that you HAVE to do on the command line (or are infinitely easier).

The downside is that you have to memorize commands (help is sketchy at times), you many not get the visual feedback (progress bars) you want, and you can do a LOT of damage with some commands.

Continue Reading Windows Command Prompt

No it’s not a pervert or a weatherproofing site but rather it allows you to build flash widgets in your browser. With these widgets you can put them on ANY web page. It takes minutes to do and small learning curve if you’re able to use a simple graphics program. While not a full blown flash editor it DOES have a LOT of potential for the quick widget creation for the common man (and even some of the uncommon ones). Continue Reading Great Flashing Site