If, like me, you're a bit of a web media junkie, your hard drive is likely to be bursting at the seams with cherished digitized entertainment. This leaves you with a tricky dilemma; do you engage in a cavalier deleting spree to make room for new arrivals, buy an expensive second hard drive, or glaze over in dreamy reminiscence for the days when 10mb of storage was thought to be all you'd ever need?...
Saturday, 29 December 2001
Saturday, 22 December 2001
I've set up Flash FXP to transfer data between two FTP sites, but the transfer won't start. What am I doing wrong?
You cannot FXP from one NT server to another NT server. Instead make sure one of the FTP sites is either running on a UNIX server or is a private F...
Wednesday, 12 December 2001
Cloning conundrums
I've used Clone CD to make a backup of one of my original CDs and been left with three files with the extensions .ccd, .img and .sub. What am I supposed to do with them?
The .ccd file works in a similar fashion to the cue sheets you are probably more familiar with. A .ccd file contains information regarding the logical structure of the disk - it is the file you would open in Clone CD in order to...
Thursday, 15 November 2001
Honing your search engine technique
Be more specific when using web search engines. First of all make sure you're using Google as it's undoubtedly the most comprehensive search engine ever to have existed, and what's more, the hits it returns are actually relevant to your search queries - surprisingly a feature which all too many search engines lack!
Now that Google is set as your home page remember to use Boolean queries whenever...
Saturday, 3 November 2001
How do I close full screen pop-ups that do not have menu bars?
A quick way to do this would be to use your Task Manager. This displays a list of all the programs/windows you currently have open. To summon the Windows Task Manager you can press control, alt and delete simultaneously and then select the 'applications' tab. Alternatively, you could open the Task Manager by selecting the run option from your start button and typing in 'taskman'.
When the applications...
Sunday, 14 October 2001
A software uninstaller that uninstalls software... properly.
When considering the uninstallers which come bundled with most applications I like to use the shopping centre escalator analogy. Have you ever noticed that if it's necessary to go upstairs to enter a shop, or get to the next level of a shop, there will be an escalator to transport you upstairs whereas you have to use ordinary stairs on your descent? Personally this doesn't bother me because I was...
Wednesday, 19 September 2001
English soil never looked so good
Phew! I'm glad to be safely back home. Flying back from the US was a complete shambles following Tuesday's tragic events. Still, what's a bit of inconvenience at a time like this? When so many innocent people lose their lives in such senseless attacks everything else pales into insignificance. I'd like to offer my deepest sympathies to all those affected by the recent disaster in America and urge...
Wednesday, 5 September 2001
MP3: music for the digital age
No internet harvesting training course would be complete without a bit of information on finding and downloading free music, so here's my attempt at guiding you to do just that. First a little bit of background information to give you a rough idea of what I'm talking about. When people use the phrase "free music on the internet" they are referring to MP3 files. MP3 is a fairly recent development in...
Saturday, 11 August 2001
A home from home for your favourites
All those web shortcuts can soon mount up and get out of control, and since your browser has to process them every time you open a new window, this can dramatically slow it down. If you remove them from your favourites folder altogether and place them elsewhere, you will find that since far less processing power is required to run your browser it will suddenly become much more nimble. Once your favourites...
Monday, 30 July 2001
Houston, we have a (file transfer) problem
Common wisdom and research conducted by the Bureau of Made-up Statistics suggests that the best way to introduce a web tutorial is to impart a well-meaning, but overly patronizing metaphor. Let's give it a whirl then shall we. How's this? The internet can be thought of as a giant, digital take-away. It's brimming with tasty dishes for you to consume, but sampling them isn't quite as straightforward...
Wednesday, 27 June 2001
What's the deal with all those pay as your surf programs?
Well, for those of you who have been living on the planet Zog for the last few years, pay as you surf companies offer you the opportunity to earn money simply for viewing adverts displayed in an 'adbar'. The premise is that these banner ads will captivate your attention to such an extent that you will feel compelled to visit various web sites and buy whatever unmissable offer is available at the time....
Tuesday, 12 June 2001
Why do some sites hide the URLs of their files or pages?
If you hover your mouse pointer over one of the text links on this page you will notice that the name of the page or file linked to and its location will be displayed in the bottom left corner of your browser. Some webmasters choose to insert javascript code into their pages in order to mask this information. This may be done to display important information or for misguided aesthetic reasons, but...
Tuesday, 5 June 2001
Common movie/audio encoding formats defined
ASF is yet another video format to receive the MPEG4 codec treatment. It stands for Advanced Streaming Format because it was designed to be watched while being transferred from the internet (or to be 'streamed' if you want to use the correct lingo). The quality is nowhere near as good as MPG, DivX or VCD, but is still acceptable for most purposes while maintaining a comparatively favourable size to...
Saturday, 26 May 2001
What is a PM?
PM stands for private message. These are used whenever you want to communicate with another board member without anyone else being able to see your message. The PM system is much like email in that no-one can gain access to your messages unless they know your password. The method used to send a PM to another member is very similar no matter which type of bulletin board you are using. You can either...
Friday, 25 May 2001
A tip for those of you with memory impairments. A tip for those of you with memory impairments ;)
One of the major faults of pre-XP versions of Windows is that when you close down an application, the memory which was allocated to that application is not automatically freed up for re-use. This means that the more programs you use, the slower your PC gets - eventually it will crawl along at such a pathetic pace that it will require a reboot before you can get anything done. However, by installing...
Saturday, 19 May 2001
How can I stop all that irritating web site music from playing?
Just wait for the page to finish loading and press your browser's stop button (the red circle with the x in the middle). It is also possible to prevent web site music from initiating to begin with - at least it is if you happen to be using Internet Explorer.
The procedure is as follows: click on 'tools' and then select 'internet options' from the drop down menu. Now click on the 'advanced' tab and...
Monday, 16 April 2001
Is there a quick way to decompress lots of zip files at once without clicking on each one individually?
Yes - if you're an 'old skooler' (sic) you can use the DOS executable pkunzip.exe, available from www.pkware.com. If you run the command 'pkunzip *.zip' from the DOS prompt in the same directory as your zip files they will all be extracted sequentially without any further intervention from you.
On the contrary, if you can't bear to leave the more user-friendly Windows interface (hmmf, amateurs! :p)...
Friday, 6 April 2001
(Not so) Hotline
Back in September 1997 before Napster was even a twinkle in its mother's eye and Gnutella was nothing more than a chocolate spread an application known as Hotline emerged opening the flood gates to a world of file sharing opportunities. Sadly while Hotline's radical approach to internet communication created quite a stir in its infancy, the program is now little more than a fancy FTP client with a...
Tuesday, 27 March 2001
Why does my browser crash when I use the right-click button several times in a row?
Not content with preventing you from using the right mouse button, some webmasters also code their pages in a such a way so as to cause your browser to freeze by creating a stack overflow error. Sometimes you will be warned to stop right-clicking, and at other times your browser will just lock up with no such admoniti...
Thursday, 8 March 2001
Why when I download a file is it only several kilobytes in size?
This can happen when files are linked to using scripts rather than direct web addresses. Files hosted on some virtual drive file storage servers are well notorious for this problem. Usually the files have not been deleted, the download is just being mismanaged because the real location of the file is not evident in its URL.
To sidestep this quandary you can temporarily disable any download manager...
Sunday, 4 February 2001
What are emulators and ROMs?
An emulator is an application that simulates another computer system or console using your PC. If you wanted to play Mario 64, for instance, without having to dig out your Nintendo 64 console from the dim, dank recesses of your loft you could use an emulator instead (incidentally the best N64 emulator is UltraHLE) and download the game from the internet. Games which are designed for other platforms,...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)