My Favorite Places for Tutorials and Instruction
VitaminCM.com’s goal is to help people get more from their technology. I want to help and inspire people to do more fun and useful things with computers, the internet, and gadgets. This help is provided via detailed written and video tutorials along with News, Reviews, and Surveys.
I would like to share several invaluable resources that I use for information, instruction, inspiration, and tips of my own. This is my list, I would love to hear where you go to learn new things. Please include any relevant places in the Comments below.
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Productivity, Tutorials, Web Surfing
how-to, reference, resources, tutorial
The Best of VitaminCM
Here are some of my favorite, most useful tutorials that have appeared on VitaminCM.com.
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Tutorials
computer instructions, how-to, software tutorials, Tutorials
Basic Workflow for Quickly Creating PowerPoint Slide Presentations
My wife’s family was over the house for dinner the other day and her grandfather (Grandpa Eugene) who is a computer enthusiast in his 90s. He’s always working on family histories and other interesting projects. God bless him, I hope I have that energy when I’m 40, let alone 90. Well, he wants to put his latest project together as a multi-media presentation for the family. He wanted to how to make a PowerPoint presentation.
It just so happens that I do them all of the time at my day job. I promised to send him some tips on using PowerPoint and the workflow that I use to expedite the process.
Creating an effective PowerPoint presentation tends to be difficult and take a long time for many people. However, if you follow a basic workflow, you can make the entire process much quicker and easier that you may think.
Here is the process that I use to build professional presentations in a short amount of time.
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Gadgets, Movies, Software, Tutorials
diy, how-to, powerpoint, presentation, Productivity, Software, tutorial, workflow
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
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Software, Tutorials
Adobe Acrobat, converter, diy, Foxit, how-to, PDF, Tutorials, word
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.
The tags on an MP3 file identify things like the Song Title, Recording Artist, Album Name, Genre, Track Number, etc. When you buy songs from places like the iTunes Music Store or MP3.com these tags are complete.
Some of the songs in your iTunes library may have incomplete tags. This typically happens when you get your songs from peer-to-peer networks sources that are “slightly less than legal”. Now, I know none of you would do that, but maybe a “friend” might.
The songs below have the Song Name, Artist, and Album tags, but are missing the Genre, Year, Track Number, and Album Art.
Here’s how we fix this problem.
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Music, Software, Tutorials
FixTunes, how-to, iTunes, mp3, Music, tags, Tutorials, Video
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
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Software, Tutorials
how-to, network, server, Software, Tutorials
Using TubeMogul.com to Manage Multiple Video Services
If you have any video files that you publish to the web, you probably want to have them seen
by as many people as possible. This is a “Good News – Bad News” situation.
Good News: There are many services out there that will publish and host your videos for free. These are great, because they give you the opportunity to be seen by tons of people.
Bad News: Different people use different services depending on their preferences.
There is a service called TubeMogul.com that will allow you to upload and describe your video, then automatically and simultaneously post it to all of your favorite video hosting sites.
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Software, Tutorials, Video
how-to, Software, Tutorials, Video, youtube
Make Smart Playlists Continuously Give You Interesting Music Selections
Do you ever get sick of listening to the same old albums or playlists on your iPod? I know I do. Well, you can use the Smart Playlist feature in iTunes to constantly generate a dynamic mix-tape of fresh music selection.
Smart Playlists are like little queries that pull anything and everything out of your iTunes library. Queries, you say? Yes, Queries.
You build a query that selects and excludes songs based on your criteria. For instance you may want to hear any Jazz music in your library, as long as it is not newer than the 60s. Well then you build a Smart playlist with those two conditions: Genre = Jazz and Year is less than 1970. Now, if you add any old Jazz songs, they will automatically be pulled into this playlist.
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Music, Software, Tutorials
Add new tag, Arts, Credit card, Hardware, how-to, iPod, iTunes, Music, playlist, Smart card, smart playlist, Smartcards, Software, Solution Providers, Tutorials, UICC
Quick Painless Install and Set Up for FREE
If you have a website or do any type of web development you have probably needed a server at some point. Not everybody has a full blown commercial web server at their disposal for development, experimenting, and testing their site. You may think that it is both expensive and complicated to have your own local web server.
You may think that it is both expensive and complicated to have your own local web server. Nothing Could be further from the truth!
Nothing could be further from the truth. True, you do need a few pieces of specialized software that can be complicated to install and configure. However, there is a wonder application bundle that has all of the key components of a web hosting server bundled up and configured in a simple wizard driven installer.
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Software, Tutorials
apache, diy, how-to, mysql, php, server, Software, Technology, Tutorials, xampp
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