The Flying Nerd

If I buy some shares in Goldmark Industries, will I stop receiving the spam?

I’ve never had so many spams on the one subject. And this is the slightly-cleverer-spam, where the message is a graphic (that the spam filters can’t read) rather than text, so quite a lot isn’t getting caught.

Anybody else seeing a huge spam spike at present? What are you doing about it?

I’ve tried a few different photo papers in my ink-jet printer. The best I’ve found is the top of the range Kodak paper: Ultima.

To secure a great price, I’ve ordered a carton of the stuff (10 packs, each containing 60 sheets of 6″ x 4″ paper). When it gets here (in a few days), I’ll be happy to share the love by on-selling a few packs. This paper normally retails for around $A30 per pack. If I know you and you’re interested in some of this paper at less than half that price, post a comment or drop me an email for details.

Here.

Die, CRT, die!

At Macquarie Anglican Churches we support a number of missionaries in various parts of the world.

One of the challenges of supporting missionaries is the maintenance of interest amongst the congregations: it’s easy to lose contact with people half a world away. We’ve tried (with varying degrees of success) to use multimedia in church to build and maintain interest in our missionary partners and their work.
Continue Reading »

UPDATE 15 June 06: I tried the updated version of this utility. It still produces screen corruptions in PowerPoint. Tried on home PC and laptop. Same problem on both. Recommendation now fully withdrawn. Shame.

UPDATE 5 June 06: There’s an updated version of the software available from the link below. I haven’t tried it (yet). If you have or do, please post a comment below.

UPDATE 31 May 06: Well, I’m sad to say that this otherwise terrific utility is definitely causing problems with Microsoft Powerpoint and Microsoft Word (running under WinXP SP2). In Powerpoint, it causes part of the screen to be duplicated with a slight offset. In Word, it has been seen to double up a line of text in a document. Until I see these things fixed, I’m withdrawing my recommendation.

UPDATE 19 May 06: I’ve disabled this utility. It may have been causing some weird PowerPoint behaviour. I have been having problems with slide backgrounds coming to the top layer of a slide while editing. I’ll post again to advise as to whether this behaviour is linked to Visual Task Tips. FN.

********

Here’s another useful utility for your Windows PC.

Apple people: you’ve probably already got something like this. [There: that's saved you writing to tell me how good Macs are.]

Visual Task Tips is a free, quick-to-install utility that pops up little pictures of the various ‘windows’ on your PC when you hover your mouse over the taskbar buttons. The bottom line is: you see a small preview of whatever the particular taskbar button represents. This makes it very easy to switch from one app to another!

Apparently this function (or something similar) is coming with Windows Vista, which will be available Real Soon Now.

You can download here.

And here’s what it looks like on my PC! The picture shows a Visual Task Tip for Outlook, which is floating above the WordPress window I’m using to write this post!

What do you think?

Fuji Xerox has a $200 ‘cash back’ promotion on their popular Docuprint C525A colour laser printer. Details here. If you are looking for a colour laser printer, this could be quite a good deal.
Continue Reading »

Here‘s a good article containing links to sites that have free or low price stock photos (for use in PowerPoint presentations, for example).

The host that powers the Flying Nerd has just increased the storage and bandwidth allowances that apply to the $US7.95 per month plan that I use.

I am now entitled to 20GB of storage and 1TB (yes, 1,000GB give or take a bit) of data transfers monthly.

And both of these increase every week. The storage entitlement increases by 160MB every week I stay on the plan. And the data transfer allowance increases by 8GB every week I stay on the plan.

The price has not gone up.

At first glance, it all seems to be too good to be true.

But since I am not even vaguely close to the old limits (and I suspect that MOST DreamHost customers aren’t close either), these fabulously high limits have no real meaning in my world.

Pity no Australian hosts have plans that are even remotely as cost effective as this.

If you’d like to signuup with DreamHost, click here and the Flying Nerd gets a little gift from DreamHost.

Surely one of the most useful and cost-effective PC add-ins these days is the DVD burner. Not only can you make video DVDs for playing on your favourite set-top DVD player, but you can store HUGE tracts of data on discs that cost way less that $A1 each.

If you don’t have a DVD burner, surely there is no longer any excuse. The Computer Nazi (it’s a Seinfeld reference) has burners for as low as $A53 (Samsung). Even Pioneer burners are under $A70.

How low can they go?

Norton Internet Security: you have stuffed up my home PC for the last time. You’re outta here.
Continue Reading »

I am constantly cutting text from one place and pasting it into another. I’m fussy about how my documents appear, so I very frequently use ‘paste special / unformated text’ so that whatever I’m pasting takes on the formatting of the document I’m preparing.

Here’s a super-useful utility (PureText) that allows me to use CTRL-c to copy text and WINDOWS-v to paste unformatted text. It’s a little thing, but it is beaut.