Carry A Computer in your Pocket

Bring Your Favorite Software, Files, and Settings with You

GOAL: Provide a list of Portable Applications that you can run on any PC and feel like you never left home.

Do you use multiple computers on a regular basis? Do you go from home, to work, to friends, and relative’s houses where you can never guarantee that the applications that you need are available? Well, you need a USB flash drive loaded with Portable Applications.

You can load numerous free and useful applications onto a USB drive and take a solid computing environment that can be used on any PC on the road. I used to get frustrated when I visited my parents or in-laws houses, because their computers were not set up with what I needed to waste time get things done. Now, I just pull out my portable computing environment get to work.

Awesome Adobe Acrobat Alternatives that Will Make Love to your Computer

Keep the PDFs, Lose the AcroCrap

Goal: Provide a list of FREE applications that will allow you to do everything you want with PDFs while avoiding the annoying, expensive problems of Adobe Acrobat.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is great for a number of reasons however; Adobe Acrobat (the de facto standard application) is a horrendous piece of garbage.  The Acrobat Reader (Free) is painfully slow to open, has more bugs than a porch light, and love to crash browsers. The Acrobat Writer (Standard $299 or Professional $449) applications are ridiculously expensive.

Here is a list of applications that will let you get the most out of the PDF format with none of the issues:

You can use this combination of free applications to do just about everything that you would ever want from Adobe Acrobat.

• Open and Read PDF files
• Create PDF files from any document or application on your computer
• Edit PDFs by converting them into Microsoft Word documents
• Merge Multiple PFDs into a single file
• Stop PDFs from crashing your browser
• Not spend hundreds of dollars

Fix the Missing Tags in your MP3 Files

Automagically Find, and Correct the Tags Missing from your MP3 Collection

Goal: Show you how to easily fix the missing tags in your MP3 collection using free software.

Some of the songs in your iTunes library may have incomplete tags. Here’s how we fix this problem.

What I’m Reading

Must See I.P.

These are the latest pages that I have found interesting on Digg.com, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and Google Reader. If you have any interesting stuff, add me as a friend on any of these services.

Tech Geek’s Guide to a Super Romantic Valentine’s Day Gift

How to Take Gadget Gifts and Make them Romantic
There is a common stereotype that techie types are not romantic, especially in the gift department. While this is rooted in a lot of truth, it doesn’t have to be so.

Follow these simple recommendations and you are Guaranteed to Get You Some High-Tech Lovin’.

What I’m Reading

Here are the 10 latest items that I thought were interesting in Google Reader. I subscribe to about 200 Feeds and read a ton of articles every day. I’ve been trying to come up with an effective way of posting links to articles that I think might interest people. I’m also trying to get something like this for my Del.ici.ous favorites. I think that ulimately would be better, since I enter notes on all of my bookmarked items. If anyone knows how to easily do this, contact me via email.

Reusing an Old PC as a Server (Part 2)

Putting Your New Server to Work

Goal: Use the server that you set up in the previous article to perform helpful tasks such as backing up computers on your network, storing media files in a central location, share one printer with every computers computer in the house.

In the previous article you learned you to set up the VNC software to remote control your server from another computer. Now that you have your basic server up and running, here are some of the fun things that we’re going to learn how to do:

• Share files between computers
• Run backups of the computers on your network
• Function as a print server so that all of your computers can share one computer
• Operate as a dedicated BitTorrent server to download and upload files
• Configure a Professional Testing Server for Web Development
• And a few other ideas