Home Computer Talk

If you are anything like me, one of the big uses of your home computer is storing all your music. I currently have 892 songs in iTunes and that is likely to only grow.

Ever since I started working with computers, I have resisted Windows Media Player. I’m not quite sure why – there are plenty of good things about it – but WMP always seemed too much trouble to deal with when I wanted to organize and listen to my music. I tried plenty of players, but they mostly didn’t last long.

That is, until I (more…)

Some time back there was a flurry of activity about a movie called The Secret. It claims to contain information used by sages and successful people down through the ages and to be informative of a way of thought that those ‘in control’ don’t want us to know. It is available now to download from such sites as www.torrentz.com as a movie, an audio book and even as a hemisync track.

The hemisync track uses binaural beats to get your brain into alpha mode while the message of The Secret is talked about. The idea is to have it almost like hypnosis so the message gets in.

Powaqqatsi and Koyaanisqatsi are movies by Godrey Reggio which tend to defy categorization. They stand, I guess, as works of Art rather than Hollywood style movies. Koyaanisqatsi is a movie with (more…)

There are a variety of ways in which computers improve our multimedia experience. Those with the cash to spare can buy a Multimedia PC, using the functions built in to connect to a home entertainment system that rivals those which, until recently, (relatively) were only available in cinemas.

Surround sound, large screens, High Definition quality – all these contribute to an experience that leaves a simple TV night in the dirt. A few years back you could spend $5,000 on a fairly basic system and you’d be lucky if you knew anyone with a good system. Now you can upgrade your screen and use your computer to boost performance for an engrossing evening deep in the multimedia experience.

But you can also do it fairly simply with your computer. Systems these days come with more than enough memory, video performance, DVD players and hard disk space to let you spend some quality multimedia time in front of your machine.

It can also, properly configured, provide an enveloping experience with computer games.

Once good speakers were a necessary part of the quality time, but now there are cheap headphones that can easily match the performance of expensive speakers. And it means you can enjoy yourself in a room with people watching TV or doing other things.

Just try not to be vocal about things happening on the screen – it gets extraordinarily annoying to others to have odd unexplained noises coming from the corner of the room. Keeping the noise down can be thought of as divorce avoidance.

So it’s late, I’m at home after a busy day and, after a phone call to Mr JM, he’s going to be late.

Why is it so?

Well, he’s busy with a computer (more…)

One of the pleasures in owning a computer is the variety of things you can do with it. Or rather the pleasures of owning a computer and the Internet. Or maybe it should be the pleasures of owning a computer and the Internet and high speed access.

You don’t really know how much pleasure high speed access is until it is suddenly not there. It isn’t so frustrating to use dial-up for internet access - until you have had the use of ADSL (Broadband) that runs at 10 or more times the speed of dial-up.

We have a Broadband plan that runs at ADSL2+ speeds. This means, particularly at the off peak times, speeds that allow downloads of 200MB’s in just a few minutes. It’s not unusual to start a download of sixty or seventy MB’s & have it finish so quickly you think something went wrong with the download.

So, what do you do with all that speed and bandwidth? Well, Mr JM regularly downloads TV shows that I haven’t seen. He downloaded a couple of seasons of Charmed for me – I hadn’t been able to watch them before I came to Australia – and we’ve caught up on all the new Doctor Who and Torchwood episodes.

But one of the most addictive things to do is Google Earth.
Google Earth lets you strap on a satellite (more…)

Or… He should have read my last post!!!
It hasn’t happened for a long time but Mr JM got his computer infected yesterday. Given we use Symantec Antivirus, Spybot – Search & Destroy and Adaware as protection, I was curious as to how it happened.

As explained in Save Money on Movies there are Torrent sites that provide access to software and movies. Given the prices of both as well as the (more…)

Spyware can be hard to spot and the effects are many and varied. Spyware sounds like all it does is spy on us, but it can do much more.

It doesn’t restrict itself to watching what we do, although that is a big part of why it gets installed. Spyware watches what is done and tracks website visits, but it goes further.
Spyware can install other software, can (more…)

Windows comes with a built-in Time Machine function. It’s called System Restore and it offers a way to roll back changes and let Windows work as it did before the change messed it up.

Many people wind up with a computer that either stops working, does strange things or begins to run really slow for no apparent reason. Some of the strange things (more…)

You’ve seen some of this before in how to freshen your PC… see http://www.homecomputertalk.com/old-age-or-just-clogged-arteries-part-2/

From Mr JM
Way to fix Windows problems so you can get back in and (more…)

I write on a number of blogs sites, mostly for 451Press but also at Web TV Hub about YouTube videos. Recently I’ve noted a problem with the YouTube videos I write about. A number of times that videos I want to view or to reference in my posts aren’t playing.

I thought it was a problem with the YouTube site and mostly just looked for other versions of the videos to use.

There was one I wanted to show to Mr JM. We’ve been watching the Planet Earth series by David Attenborough and there’s a number of bird mating dances that are quite funny. It’s truly amazing what some creatures do when there’s a possibility of sex.

Yes, that’s a bird making that big mouth face.

But the video (more…)

One site that has become a major force in the Internetting world is YouTube. For the three people on the planet who haven’t heard of it, it’s a site (obviously backed by large storage capacity and lots of servers) that allows people to upload their videos.

Careers have been kick started by YouTube; musicians have posted their compositions online and found fame enough to give them a mainstream life. Others have become famous and boot-strapped their lives from that fame. Some have become rich by using their YouTube presence as a stepping stone.

Now to get to YouTube, you need a connection to the Internet and a browser. There are a number of browsers but by far the two most popular are Internet Explorer (IE) from Microsoft and Firefox from Mozilla.

IE is installed with Windows – it is VERY difficult to have Windows without it, in spite of a court case some time back about such practice from Microsoft. Firefox is a free download from Mozilla and made most of it’s gains by being firstly, small and secondly, more useful than IE.

Firefox introduced an in-built popup stopper, password saving, and most popular, tabbed browsing. In IE, if you wished to open a new site (more…)

Without fully developed AI (Artificial Intelligence) being perfected, which may be difficult because we don’t really even have a definition for real Intelligence yet, and the numbers of those displaying the characteristics of it seem to be decreasing daily, our computers aren’t going to be carrying on witty repartee any time soon.

So what can we do with our computers and Voice technology?

Another level of computers using Voice technology is being able to use spoken commands to operate the computer. Programs like Dragon Naturally Speaking come at a price but allow many kinds of voice interaction with your computer.

From Windows XP, Microsoft included support for Voice technology, meaning that we can actually use voice commands to control things like Microsoft Office programs as well as parts of Windows. It is possible, once Windows has started, to use words to (more…)

So, the Max Headroom style of talking computer isn’t really something that is available for now. The text version of AI (Artificial Intelligence) doesn’t really fill the slot either. What we want is for our personal Computer to talk to us and hopefully, understand what we mean when we talk to it.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, we met the HAL 9000 computer, one which certainly fit the description of a computer that could talk to, and understand humans.

Text to Voice is one step along (more…)

Before I came to Australia to be with Mr JM, I’d never heard of Doctor Who. Now, after seeing three seasons of it, it’s one of my favorite shows ever.

It’s quirky, funny, thought provoking and English. Mr JM tells me the original Doctor Who, while definitely a must-see program in his early years, was very cheaply made and had non-existent production values. But these modern episodes are well made and very well written.

And that’s important to me – in my other incarnations (more…)

I asked Mr JM about his work – he does Helpdesk for an Aged Care company. He says he helps people to use their computers; they call him a Desktop Support Engineer. Specifically I wanted to know what is the best thing for people to do before they call for help.

His response? ‘If the computer is not responding, NOTHING!’

What he means is that, quite often, things are recoverable if help is called before anything changes. But mostly computer users will fiddle and try to fix things they know little about and in the process spoil the chances of getting back the document or data.

Of course, if your computer has given the much talked of BSOD, (Blue Screen of Death) there isn’t likely much you could have done.

He also thinks that not enough people (more…)