AllScoop Technology

A computer in the Kitchen? Lets face it…for many of us the internet is now one of the basic food groups. We need some each and every day to stay healthy.

Finally made the plunge and put a PC in the kitchen. I liked the idea, but I don’t want it to look cluttered. Look at all the cords on the average desktop, stunning really.

A refurbished Dell came up with everything I wanted on it.

• 4 GB Ram
• TV Tuner Card
• Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
• 64 bit Vista

I figured I saved about $200 by going refurbished, and with the 1 year warranty, I didn’t really have any worried about the refurbished status. Downside is you don’t get to pick exactly what you want on it, but I thought it was a fair trade off. Total shipped price for it was $571.33

Picked up a separate Dell 19″ wide screen for $100, and added a wireless keyboard and mouse and I was ready to roll.

So far I am happy with it, I find we are watching TV on it a lot, even though on the other side of the room  is a 42″ screen…but its more convenient to flip it on in the morning while in the kitchen. The media center features are very nice to have, we’ve never had any kind of DVR before, so it is quite fun to pause and record things. My kids think its amazing!

Please leave a comment if you have a PC in the kitchen, and how you use it and how you might keep your cords to a minimum.

Here is an easy tip to spruce up your end of day windows shut down. Have it perform some simple tasks before shutting down your system for the day. I’ve made a simple batch file to run a system defrag, then make a registry backup before shutting down the system.

Here is what the batch file looks like:

defrag C:
regedit /e c:\regbackup.reg
shutdown -s

Save the file as myshutdown.cmd (or anything you want), save it somewhere on your drive, then you can make a shortcut to the file on the desktop.

Then right click on the new shortcut on your desktop and change the icon to look like the shutdown icon.

So now at the end of the day, activate your new shutdown command and it will  defrag your drive, create a registry backup and shutdown your computer.

If you can think of any other maintenance tasks to add to the shutdown script, leave a comment and maybe it can be added in to make the ultimate shutdown command.

I recently removed Adobe Acrobat reader from my computer. In it’s place I installed the free Foxit Reader for Windows. So far no problems at all reading any PDF file. Also loads quicker and doesn’t bug me like the Adobe Reader did all the time. Also the Foxit reader does not sit and hog resources the same way that Adobe does. Give it a try, I think you will like it too…

Another reason to get rid of you Acrobat Reader… SECURITY!

The Foxit Reader can be downloaded for free from Foxit Software

Also, in case you are wondering. Foxit reader will look similar to your old friend Adobe Reader, see the screen shot below.

This morning I hit the Google home page and I see this…

I think I even said out loud…wow Google is hacked! I had to look closer for a second, then I realized it was their Valentines day logo, but it looks a bit menancing to me…

network setup before

I’ve been meaning to move around my basement “network” setup for sometime. All my equipment has just been sitting on a table in the back room. I used to actually sit at the table and work at the server, but I rarely ever need to be “on” the server. (love remote desktop!)

So finally changed it up. I think the new setup creates more space, makes for easier access, and probably a little better cooling too.

Setup: Cable comes into the house, and into the Linksys cable modem (a very old cable modem, running software 1.1.5 r2) . From there it goes into my Linksys N router. The router goes to a network printer (Brother HL-2070), and into my 2004 “Server”, which is a Dell Dimension 2400 Celeron 2.4 Ghz  (I just upgraded the RAM to 1GB from 512!). There is also a Fantom external USB drive connected to the server.

Another network cable goes up to the Kitchen PC. And the rest of the home feeds from the wireless signal, this includes 3 laptops, a Wii, and a Dell Axim.

network setup after

Now most infomercials are amusing at best, but sometimes they just go way to far with their “offers”.

You’ll get the Amish mantel for just $298, and the heater is FREE

Say again? Yes over and over during the infomercial they mention the free heaters. They say the offer is SO good, they are limiting it to 2 orders per family. Do people actually fall for this?

I love the video showing the Amish making the cabinets.

screen shot of video showing Amish hard at work

“…The wood is made from solid pieces including solid wood, plywood and poplar as well as solid trim components…”

Yes, it is a nice looking heater, but please don’t say over and over on the TV ad (which is different from the YouTube version above) that you are giving away free heaters!

I have created an export for Cube Cart, which imports into Paypal’s multiorder shipping module. This will enable you to import your order information into Paypal for printing shipping labels. Avoid re-typing the information into Paypal, saving time and preventing data entry errors. This will not make any changes to your database.

There are 2 options, export all orders with the status of “processing”, or export all orders for a certain date.

I am looking for a few people to test before I release, please contact me if this is something you would be interested in trying.

I hate to use the cliche, but this is the video converter swiss army knife. I am truely amazed at how often I find myself opening up this program.  Any video converter has been able to convert everything I have thrown at it. Here are the conversions that it supports. Ten different types of media! Very impressive.

• DVD Video NTSC (mpg)
• DVD Video PAL (mpg)
• MPEG-I (mpg)
• MPED-II (mpg)
• Flash Video Movie (flv)
• Mobile Phone MPEG-4 (mp4)
• AVI Movie (avi)
• Windows Media WMV (wmv)
• MP4 Movie (mp4)
• Wave Audio (wav)

The most important one to me is the FLV conversion. Just about any video you wish to put on the web works great in FLV.  Or if you have an FLV and want to edit the file in Windows Movie Maker, just convert it to AVI, or WMV, bingo.

Look at the screen shot below to see all the options you have when converting. (this is the flash file options)

There is a free version and a paid version of the Any Video Converter software. So far the free version has been able to do everything I need without any problems. I would highly recommend this program for your video conversion needs.

Also did I mention that you can pull out video directly from You Tube? Yes, it will do that as well.

This hard to find free utility is an awesome little tool. It seems to work with all Outlook versions, from 97 up to 2003 (have not tried it on versions beyond that).  You download and install the utility and it creates a small little “ListServ” button up on your Outlook toolbar.

Click on that and you will bring up the simple window. Here you can choose your address group, and it will extract them all into a nice format that can be copied to the clipboard, and used for whatever you wish. Perfect for exporting into an external email list tool, or newsletter software.

You can get the free Outlookemail extractor/exporter utility here.

Every web marketer will tell you one of the keystones to website success is using email newsletters. For an e-commerce site, it should be mandatory. You are already collecting an email address when you are making a web sale, so there is a good chance your customer will want to sign up for your email list.

Your e-commerce shopping cart may come with a newsletter module, but chances it might get the job done. So what do you do if you want a little more out of it?

There are plenty of pay for email newsletters services out there, one of the better ones being Aweber. But of course this comes at a price. In the case of Aweber, it will cost you $19 a month for the service for up to 500 customers.

Many of us fall in between, not yet ready to commit to the monthly charge, but still wanting an easy, and reliable way to get out a newsletter.

In comes phplist to save the day. This free script is loaded with features. It was very easy to install, it took me about 30 minutes of playing around with the program. I set up a few small test lists with a handful of personal email addresses (yahoo, gmail, etc…), and soon I had a good feel for the program.

I would certainly recommend you make sure that you fully understand the program, because sending out a newsletter to hundreds of customers in NOT something to be taken lightly. While it won’t make your business, it could break your business. Again, I would not import you live list until you are pretty sure you know what you are doing in the program.

phplist is a very flexible program. You can create your own questions associated with a newsletter signup, and it can all be done from the web-based interface. (this part took me the longest to figure out, but I was glad I could remove the “sample” questions).

Once I was ready I imported my emails from my shopping cart, (during the import be sure you mark your users as confirmed, as you may end up having a confirmation email go out to all your already confirmed users.), you can also mark all your imported users as “html” users. Meaning they prefer to receive HTML based newsletters.

Once all my users were imported, you simply go to “send a message”, enter your message, set a few options and off it goes.

Now, since I am using the list just to import, setup and send. I will be flushing and reloading my user list each time. There isn’t an obvious way to do this in the program, but it can be easily done following these steps I found in the forum.

Go to your lists and ‘view members’
At the bottom of the page it says:
‘What to do with all users
This will process all users on this list
Delete (from this list)’
Do that.
Do that for all your lists.
Now all the users in the database are not connected to any list.

Now go to:
Manage users
Reconcile Users
‘delete all users who are not subscribed to any list’
and they will all be removed.

from http://forums.phplist.com/viewtopic.php?p=43905#43905

I will admit it took me a little while to fully understand the program, but don’t give up, after just a little while you will find that it is a pretty simple, yet flexible program to use. phplist has many more features than those I’ve touched here, that is only because I already had my list, and I only need to import emails. phplist can be a beginning to end email marketing solution, and will actually manage your list for you.  phplist also has fantastic online documentation.

Not bad for a free program!

Simple. Elementary, and not involved or complicated windows calendar application.

Sometimes, you just want to see a calendar, and clicking on the time in the tray can be cumbersome, and there is the possibility you may accidentally change your system date and time. So here is a free windows calendar app that could not be more simple and easy. A 16k file, that just opens up a calendar.

2008 year calendar and download.

Download Windows Calendar

You have 2 network cards, and are connected to 2 networks.

You want to specify which one is used to surf the internet.

Here is how you do it on Windows.

It’s comes down to an “Interface Metric”.

First, right click on the network card/item that you wish to use for the internet. In this case it is the “wireless network connection 2″

Here I left click once on the connection to select it, then right click to get the dialog box below. Choose properties.

Then scroll down until you see Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), select it (make it blue), then click on the Properties button.

Then you will see the screen below, click on the Advanced button.

On the bottom of the next screen as shown below, you will uncheck the Automatic Metric check box and place a 1 in the metric box.

Now your first Network Card is setup with a Metric of 1. Repeat the exact same process with your other network card, except give it an Interface Metric of 2.

That should do it, now when you surf the internet you should see the IP of the network card with a interface metric of 1. (visit here to see your IP). And all your other network activities should work as normal.