Nice range of free media and pc tools

Ashampoo, maybe not renowned for their choice of brand name, are offering a nice range of free tools.

Just go to this link and use the coupon code ASH-444LW1. Take your choice from a Screen Capture app, impressive image editor, home designer a Blu-ray/DVD/CD burning studio or their Windows optimizer.


All appear to be full versions and with no time limits. I guess they hope you'll like one of them a lot and eventually buy something like and upgrade. But you don't have to.

Ashampoo^® Burning Studio 2010 Advanced
The complete suite for burning projects on CD, DVD and Blu-ray Disc!

Ashampoo^® Home Designer
Plan or renovate your home in 3D

Ashampoo^® Snap 3
Capture anything on your screen – including videos

Ashampoo^® WinOptimizer 6
Built with 12 years of Windows optimization experience

Ashampoo^® Photo Commander 7
3D Acceleration, Panoramas and Virtual Albums

Reserve your name at about.me

A bunch of clever people bought the domain about.me which is probably about the only .me worth bothering about. They've now come up with a nice idea that they propose will combine multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. You register your name and get the page about.me/yourname which will feature all that's happening across your sites and profile pages.
As they say: "... and one problem we face is pulling all of this information together to build a single on-line identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional on-line profile. Our focus is simple, enable you to:

• create a personal, dynamic profile page (think splash page) that points users to your content around the web (versus depending on Google search); and
• understand how many people see your profile, where they're coming from, and what they do on your page."

Their investors include True Ventures, Radar Partners, Freestyle Capital, Scott Kurnit, AOL Ventures, David Mahoney, Founder Collective & Ron Conway.

It may or may not develop but it won't cost anything to register your name. Remember how you wished you'd got on Facebook, Twitter etc. earlier before someone else had grabbed the name you wanted and left you thinking up something that hadn't already gone? OK. Don't say I didn't warn you! I've got mine.

Office 2010beta beware!

I liked Office 2010 and the free beta version seemed to last for ages. But all good things must end, someone said, and one day I realised I was back in Office 2007. That was OK as I hadn't got a spare £100 and wouldn't be able to get a free copy from College for a while.

A little while ago I was trying to print the final version of my huge great MA paper and the air had already turned blue just drafting it all. It became a purple haze Jimi Hendrix would've been proud of, though, when I tried printing it. Pages of nothing flew out of the printer. Now I know some people might say I write a load of poppycock but at least you can see poppycock. And anyway, that's for Middlesex University to decide.

Now, I admit that I did run the cartridges down to their last droplets and the level indicator showed just a thin line along the bottom and that was my first thought as to what was wrong. Replaced them. Same problem. Next I wondered whether the printer's drivers had got either corrupted in a strange way or one of my children had plugged and uplugged the thing and it had had some sort of coronary or brain damage. Installed new drivers. The old ones were 2004 vintage and the new were dated at around the time Office 2007 with its nice new Cambria, Calibri et al arrived. That must be it, I thought to myself and hit print once more. Still nothing.

Strangely, I could print PDFs fine so I did that to get the work off in time. I look for some answers on Google and the excellent Woody's Lounge. No-one else seemed to have had the problem. I even used one of those Just Answer type sites and some nice guy from the States had a go but gave up.

I did notice on my travels through the US Microsoft site that there was a trial version of Office 2010 available. No money to pay, no credit card, just download and away I go. That seemed a good idea anyway and maybe that would solve the problem. It did! For a while anyway.

On the way through installation it instructed me to uninstall 2010beta manually. I did that and now all the fonts print just fine.

What I don't know is whether all I need to have done was uninstall 2010beta. It would be pretty strange if I had to uninstall 2010 to get 2007 fonts back but it was, in fact, a suggestion from one of the leading Office guys on the planet who did reply on Woody's Lounge. Even he wasn't sure, though.

So, for the odd few people who had 2010beta but couldn't afford the upgrade and who now have the same problem, do give the uninstall thing a go and let me know.

Incidentally, I didn't see an equivalent free trial on the UK site.

My laptop hibernates more often than my tortoise

 

Nice free defragging tool from the people that brought us the excellent CCleaner. It's a task that I don't do as often as I should but this should encourage me to have a look at the state of my hard drive a bit more frequently and actually do something about all the bits that have been dumped randomly across the place by various users, including myself, not always closing things as carefully as I should, especially on the laptop which gets carted around fom room to room and hibernates more often than my tortoise.

Click here to download this.

How does Google work?

I suppose this is the second most frequently asked question and I'm delighted to be able to link to the remarkable graphic produced by PPCblog. I have no idea who they are or what PPC stands for. Readers who know me well may think it's something to do with the Paddock Party Committee whose Minutes are amusingly published on another of my blogs. It isn't. But well done to the other PPC, whoever they may be.

Memories of old computers

Nice article by the TechRepublic team althoulgh they don't have pictures of a Digital Dual Display with 8" floppy drives, of which I have really fond memories.

Arial Black italic problem

Arial Black or Arial Black?


Arial Black is a useful font. Big and bold and, importantly, installed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996 and has been one of their Core web fonts since March that year That means most people using Windows will see text using that font in your document or web page as you intended rather than having it substituted with something else which may or may not look right.


A few years ago I was perplexed when I looked at instances where I used it and found the text had become italic. Putting it down to something wrong with my computer, or the way it was being rendered, I've been nervous about using it ever since as it seems to be fine on some computers and not on others, thinking that I would investigate one day. I finally had a spare moment today and did a quick search for the problem and wish I'd done that ages ago as it's nothing like as complicated to fix as I'd thought it might be!


What happened was that in 2008 Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for Windows XP and the update included a new version 2.40 of the font file ariblk.ttf. This was a mistake by someone at Microsoft who named an italicised version of Arial Black with that filename. Luckily, Service Pack updates retain uninstalled files so the problem can be solved by deleting version 2.40 and copying version 2.35 from the retained folder. This does mean diving into areas of your system that many of you may have never realised were there but it's pretty simple:


Go to C:\WINDOWS\Fonts folder and delete the Arial Black file. (ariblk.ttf ver. 2.40)

Now go to C:\WINDOWS\$NtServicePackUninstall$ and find ariblk.ttf (ver 2.35) copy it and paste it into the C:\WINDOWS\Fonts folder.

You should now have a normal Arial Black, and the italicised button will also work when you want it to!


Particular thanks to the good people at icrontic for the advice which I reproduce here for anyone still wondering what happened. Now I can get back to including it in designs again.