CyberCoyote — September 1, 2009

TECH TOPICS
On second thought...

"While a netbook might be fine for futzing around on the net and sending emails, it's not the right tool for regular and varied computing." That's the conclusion of Katherine Stevenson writing in MaximumPC.

She evaluated ultra-portable notebooks as an alternative to netbooks. If you want to do things like photo editing, slide-show creation, CD/DVD burning, and multitasking (opening more than two or three programs at the same time), and you also need real portability, they're probably the answer, but they're not cheap.

If you don't need the portability, an ordinary notebook will cost much less for the same performance as an ultra-portable. Competition from netbooks has pushed some current notebooks to very attractive prices, and new models for Windows 7 are likely to offer even more value.

Shifting from Microsoft Money to Quicken

Microsoft has discontinued sales of Money. You'll probably want an alternative sooner or later. Smart Computing has a new online article detailing your options.

Send big files

It's easy to send small files by email, but many services have a limit of 10 MB or so on size. There are plenty of ways to send bigger ones though. Computer Power User (a Smart Computing publication, has reviewed a bunch of them.

Movie making magic

Microsoft just released Windows Live Movie Maker. It's a new incarnation of Movie Maker for their collection of downloads called Windows Live Essentials. Here's a bit of what they have to say about Movie Maker:

Movie Maker can create great looking movies in under a minute. Just add your photos and videos to Movie Maker, and select your music, then click the Auto Movie button. Auto Movie will knit those photos and videos together with striking effects and transitions, and even fit them to a soundtrack of your choosing. Basic movie — done. If you want to spend more time editing your video clips, adding animation, or visual effects you can, but the heavy lifting is done for you in less than a minute.

You can learn more about Movie Maker at the preview site. Windows Live Movie Maker works only on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Windows XP is not supported. Windows XP users can download the earlier Windows Movie Maker.

Fix a vexing Firefox problem

I often want to open a webpage in Firefox from a link in another program. The problem is, Windows tries to open a new Firefox window instead of just opening the link in a new tab in the window I already have open.

Firefox generates the error message, "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system." This may be a result of my use of multiple personalities profiles for Firefox, but I want to be able to use them too. [go to the full article]

Barney vs Bing

Compare the two competing search engines side-by-side. [Barney Google]

ODDS and ENDS
This ain't your grandkid's slippery slide

Video via Oddly Together.

Mt. Baker

I had my first real opportunity to try a panoramic photo while visiting friends recently. I used the (free) Microsoft Image Composite Editor that I wrote about last December. All together, it took about 3 minutes to download the program, install it, and create the panorama image. I wish I'd had a digital camera and this program when I was a serious backpacker.

Flight to the edge of the Universe

Actually, only to the edge of what we can see from our galaxy. The flight video was generated from actual images captured by the Hubble telescope. The last minute of the video is the best.

The images themselves are unprecedented, and there are centuries of accumulated understanding behind making the movie. The combination makes visible an all time peak in human achievement.

The Universe does not have a physical edge. There is a visible limit though. The Universe has been expanding for about 13 billion years. Light from the galaxies that are further away than 13 billion light years — a distance that light travels in that amount of time — simply has not had time to reach us. [details]

That's all, folks.