MOMETEK's Guide: Free Stuff

Showing posts with label Free Stuff. Show all posts

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Windows 10 - Pros

My last post onWindows was about the installation. I'm sure that everyone would like to know the pros and cons of Windows 10. This blog covers the Pros. I'll be doing the Cons in my next post.

Windows 10 - Installation

By Microsoft Corporation [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

So, I'm back, and what better way to start off again, than to do a few posts on Windows 10. There's a lot to cover, so there will be several posts, including installation.

About a month ago, I reserved my free copy of Windows 10. Since I already had Windows 8.1, I figured there was no harm, well other than a few bugs here and there.

I'm normally not an "early adopter". Somewhere between Windows 95 and XP I had decided to just get the latest when I purchase a new computer. Since I had kids, I found that I was more inclined to spend money on food for them, rather than on software to replace what already worked just fine.

Not to mention the time involved on devising work-a-rounds for the inevitable bugs that happen with new software.

It was just easier to wait a year when all of the early adopters have called attention to the bugs, where Microsoft would then finally send a service pack or update that took care of the problems.

Granted, I would get the new computer pre-slowed with the new patches, but at least it was stable.

So getting the upgrade so soon, for all intents and purposes, is something new to me. I figured that since I already have Windows 8.1 pre-installed, why not?

It was easy... Maybe a little too easy.

If you've seen me complain on Facebook, it is usually about the flaky internet, which is why I was attempting to schedule the update for a time that I can be at the Library. The library's internet was a bit slower, but much more stable. I hadn't backed up my files and I knew that if the internet flaked out, I would be in serious trouble.

So, while I was waiting on clothes to dry at the Laundry room by the clubhouse, I went through the scheduling steps. So far, so good, and self-explanatory.

As soon as I was ready to click on schedule, which was right next to the "update now" button, Michala walked in to ask me for something. I don't recall what happened but as I turned, I must have bumped the wireless mouse as I clicked on the laptop mouse to continue.

No ~~idiot~~ confirmation dialogue box.

Let's face it, we've all (at least once) installed or deleted something that we shouldn't have. We all have had our idiot moments, and I had mine when I installed Windows 10.

Things started to shut down and I realized what I did. I immediately moved my laptop closer to the window to make sure it had a better connection and prayed that it would not crash.

It didn't crash fortunately and the install was pretty straightforward. Some things did have to be reinstalled, but my files were not effected.

If you choose to install Windows 10, make sure you back up your files, just in case AND make sure you have a stable internet connection. I "lucked out".

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Making a Website for Profit? Part One.

Linkware Freebie Image use it however you like all I ask is a credit link to : thegoldguys.blogspot.com/ or www.lumaxart.com/ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Found another freebie. It's another free web hosting site, but this one is quite simple. So I decided to create a mock website that might make money, and post it step by step here.

First things first: How to make your own website in minutes.

This link goes to Strikingly, a very simple website editor. I did sign up to their affiliate program but only after I messed with it.

If you don't see the link above, then you probably have adblock on. You can use the site link below, then click on "Create Your own Site With Strikingly" at the bottom. This would be a bummer, because ads like this do support this blog.

This site is quite simple. You sign up free (or you can pay for a better choice in templates and tools), then you pick a template, then you add or remove sections, modify them, then publish. It's so easy, you don't even need any knowledge of web design as the templates pretty much do that for you too.

Since this was a mock site, I went onto a random name generator. "Redonex" sounded cool, so I went with it. I'm not sure what it means, hopefully nothing offensive because that's now the name of the site:

http://redonex.strikingly.com/

The bulk of the video that's on the page was created in Flixpress (no affiliation there) , then I mashed it together in Windows Movie Maker (WMM). Then added a few of the built in (and cheesy) titles.

I don't really like the newer WMM. Perhaps it's because I like the ability to edit each track separately. The older XP version allowed me to edit the video without touching the audio. I ended up buy Magix as the open source software was too complicated for what I needed. I'll have to make another video editing software blog soon.

The sunset photo is a picture I took outside my house when I lived in Brandon. It's in one of the free download links below "Images".

The team photos of me, myself, and I were taken by my built in laptop camera. Not the best lighting, but I am surprised that they did come out okay. Use a white sheet and some lamps, and the photos will come out better.

Then of course you have to have comments. Facebook is already available in the "apps" section. So I used that.

Then I added a donate button so you can beg for money. That said, in my next blog, I'll replace it with something a little more tangible, like links to a few books I find interesting or even a book that I made myself...

Oh, did I just type that? Well, that's all you know at the moment.

Last but not least, I bought a domain name from www.GoDaddy.com, since I already have an account with them. I bought it at the time of this post, so it's not quite ready yet.

Strikingly also has a domain service that is included in the premium account.

On to Part Two

Monday, January 27, 2014

Free Publishing Software

I typically use Microsoft Publishing ever since my husband was able to acquire Microsoft Office for only $10 from his old job, but it won't be long when it's so out of date that the latest Windows won't run it.

I'm not quite sure if Office 2010 will work with Windows 8 and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. So lately, I had been checking out some alternatives. LibreOffice is similar to OpenOffice, except it runs much faster and it's a pretty decent substitute as it's much easier to install both in Linux and Windows.

Neither have a decent publishing app.

A few weeks ago, I had been setting up my new memory stick with portableaaps and I came across the portable version of Scribus.

Typically, I have a bias towards free software, but Scribus is a distant substitute for MS publishing. I decided to try to make myself a basic business card, and I still haven't been able to change the text color. Granted, it may be there, staring me in the face, but would it have killed them to put a color option in the right-click menu? You know, right click > color then a dialog appears with the color wheel.

I don't expect Scribus to be exactly like Microsoft office, but there's a lot of people who need software like this who don't have the time to read an entire manual just to change the text color. And I don't need a complete college course on typography just to design a simple business card.

That said, it does seem to have a lot of potential. When I get the chance, I can learn it and it's probably a very useful program.

If you are interested, you can check it out here at scribus.net

I've added the link to my Free Software page.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

An Impressive Free HTML WYSIWYG editor

English: M in blue square (similar to seen on ) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Microsoft surprises me again. Since I do web design as a hobby (at the moment), I am constantly on the lookout for legitimate freebies (as in, not “pirated” software). Enter Microsoft Expression Web 4 and Microsoft Expression design 4.

Expression Design 4 is a basic vector graphics editor. I typically use SWiSHmax as it does export to PNG but ED4 does have some interesting features. Because I haven’t use it much except to make a logo for my husband’s website, I don’t have much to say about it, except that it’s free and seems easy to use. Maybe I’ll be able to get into more depth in another post.

I wouldn’t exactly say that it’s comparable to Dreamweaver, but it is the best free WYSIWYG out there so far and unlike FrontPage or Word (both from Microsoft that can do webpages) it doesn’t add useless code.
It’s also not that difficult to learn as I figured it out pretty quickly without looking anything up or checking the help files. I did have get a little confused when adding styles to objects. The odd thing is, you right click on the CSS properties box on the left-hand side, and create a style, but then, the right-click no longer works and you have to click on “New style” on the right to create a new style.

It wouldn’t hurt to brush up on your HTML and CSS as there were a few times I gave up on using the design mode and switched to code, but it does have an instant code feature. Just start typing and the list of tags, objects, or properties show up.

Overall, it’s an impressive freebie and I would recommend it for the not-so-beginner web designer. If you want to learn HTML and/or CSS, you might want to check out W3Schools.com.
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Friday, February 1, 2013

Amazon Kindle for PC Issues

Kindle App (Photo credit: PiAir (Old Skool))

There are a lot of people who are having problems with the Kindle for PC app, in particularly that the Kindle app for PC will not start. For a while, I did too and was stuck using the cloud server with the browser. The problem is that I don't always want to load my browser, as I have a few tabs "pinned". So every time I load my browser, it tries to call up those pages - even when I'm offline.

This can be a problem when I’ve already have several other programs open as I use kindle books mostly for reference. The browser starts to stall as it tries to load plugins that aren’t there with limited resources.

I have had an idea for a website percolating for a little while and I finally seem to have some time to get it started. So I figured I would use some of that time to get the Kindle app up and running again.

Unfortunately, it was harder than I thought. I started a few days ago, and I did my best to be good Christian, and made sure that I didn't break any laws – including Murphy’s.

We do have a Western Digital 1 TB book drive, so I was able to back up all of my files before creating another admin account and deleting the old one. This is as close to a reinstall as you can get. Yeah, I did that much damage.

While all of the other problems were solved in doing this, Kindle still wouldn’t load. In the task manager, it would show up, and then disappear. Sometimes, it would show up, and stall. I couldn’t “stop process” through the task manager or “Kill process” in the Process explorer (sysinternalssuite). The only way I could have stop it was to log off, then log back on.

I did a lot of research online. Some suggestions were reinstall (didn’t work), install an older version (didn’t work), something that has to do with DEP (windows *yelled* at me with error messages, probably when my other problems started), and cleaning the registry with ccleaner (also may have triggered some problems).

Seeing several threads on Kindle and possible firewall conflicts, I had stopped ZoneAlarm and found that was ineffective, but for some reason, I felt like I was headed in the right direction. I tried to uninstall Kindle, only for the uninstaller to also not work.

This was the point where I started to notice other problems. It was enough problems to consider doing a recovery, but thought that I would try something different. After backing up my user files, I created another admin account and deleted my old one.

While this solved the other problems, kindle still wouldn’t start. On a whim, I finally decided to uninstall Avast. Lo and behold, Kindle loaded. Before I could break out the Champaign and celebrate, I reminded myself that I was pregnant and tried to register the app. Kindle would not connect to the internet.

Now what?

I used Kindle has a debug feature in its help menu and for some reason it thought that there was no internet connection – even though I was browsing the internet at the same time to find a solution to find out why I couldn’t register the app.

After a few failed attempts, it was getting late and I was falling asleep in my chair. This morning, while eating breakfast (not recommended, it’s a bad habit), I used TCPview (also sysinternals) to see what IP address pops up. I couldn’t get a “whois” via the context menu (right click on the ip, click on “whois”). TCPview gave an error stating that the server took too long to respond. So I tried pinging the IP using the command prompt. It came back with no packets loss.

For those who had no idea what I just said, I pretty much asked if the server was there and it responded with “Yes, of course I’m here and doing just fine, thank you very much”. This led me to believe that the problem was on my end: Windows Firewall.

I didn’t want to go without some sort of firewall as I already had uninstalled my antivirus. So, I tried to get windows firewall to allow Kindle, and kindle still couldn’t find a connection.

I had one last solution and I would have to give up. I restarted ZoneAlarm and shut Windows Firewall down. Then I made sure that in the “Secured Programs” list, the Kindle was listed as Trusted. Then I took a deep breath, and ran Kindle again.

Bingo! It’s now running just fine. Two days of racking my brains to try to find out what the problem was, only to be solve with a 15 minute fix. Computers… Can’t live with them, can’t smash them into thousands of tiny pieces without being fined for environmental pollution or littering.

For now, I will be using Clamwin as an antivirus until I figure out how to fix the Avast/kindle problem. Why can all programs just get along?