Computer Support Blog

Living in a city and owning a car can feel both frustrating and pointless sometimes. Most of the day your car sits in a parking space with no one using it. You have to have a car to get to work, get out of the city for vacation, or go across town to meet a friend, but while you are at work or staying home for the day, your car remains idle, doing nothing. What if your car could be making you money when you are not using it? What if the car could pay for its own monthly payments? Would you be willing to let strangers rent your car for a few hours when you do not need it?  If you answered “yes,” a car sharing service, like the ones offered by the Getaround, RelayRides and JustShareIt apps, might be for you. Read more »

Hasbro is planning a busy 2012. First, there is the partnership with Zynga, which emulates the Mattel-Angry Birds collaboration. The toy company will be able to bring online games to the real world as well as making toys and accessories based on popular Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. Now, Hasbro has announced that it is updating some of its classic board games. Read more »

Anyone who has visited a historical site or virtually any tourist destination has seen graffiti.  At many destinations, unsightly graffiti covers most available surface. Often, graffiti is just names and dates from former visitors, but it can be much more than that. Some people even write or carve poems or song lyrics into whatever space they find available. Usually there are several visible layers of the graffiti and more underneath. It can be very tempting to add your own mark to that wall, bench, or tree, but what if there was a better, legal, way to leave a piece of yourself behind? Read more »

There are billions of pages on the Internet and millions of things to do on those pages. Among other things, you can chat with people across the globe, learn about new computer support issues, write blogs about your favorite subjects, or watch streaming movies. So why would we ever run out of things to do online?  For those who face the overwhelming choices the Internet offers with a profound sense of indecision or who enjoy the thrill of discovery, there is StumbleUpon.

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Sometimes, an individual’s association with a company can make all the difference in establishing a business venture.  John F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to make a political magazine at a time when the market was pretty much strangled with political print magazines did not stop him from making George a success.  In a similar way, one of the new tech sector startups benefits greatly from the celebrity of one of the members of its management team.  Numecent is an emerging Cloudpaging company and it would be just another Internet startup if it was not for Hildy Shandell.

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Wikipedia is, it might not surprise you to learn, not considered a valid reference by the vast majority of those in academia.  Because just anyone can write or edit the articles on Wikipedia, they are often inaccurate or imprecise.  Fortunately, there are other resources that educators consider authoritative, even digital resources that are like Wikipedia.  One of the most comprehensive, authoritative sources students may use as a reference tool is the 2012 Britannica Ultimate Reference DVD!

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No matter how effecting the marketing departments for navigation apps for smartphones are, using your smartphone while driving is just dangerous.  No matter how reliable wireless providers insist their networks are, they are not infallible. There is little worse than being lost because you have driven out of your network coverage area and lose your navigation tool!  For those who plan ahead or travel with a laptop computer and can pull over for get directions from your computer while driving, there is no more reliable a navigation tool than Microsoft MapPoint 2011! Read more »

Every great idea in the tech sector requires good people to execute.  No matter how clever or constructive a concept is, without the right technical people to execute the plan, a business or ambitious idea will fail.  So when a number of influential individuals in finance, education and business began departing their lucrative careers to form the Khan Academy, some of their most important hiring choices involved staffing their technical support positions.  That made Marcia Lee an important hire for the Khan Academy.

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Anyone who works with digital photographs knows that having great photographic equipment is only half of what one needs to create amazing digital images.  In many ways, the quality of your digital camera is not as important as the quality of your photo manipulation software.  Adobe has long been the leader in digital photograph manipulation software, with its Photoshop software becoming synonymous with photo manipulation.  Once again, Adobe is raising the bar with its Lightroom 4 software.

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For those who might not have heard of it yet, there is a social network challenging Facebook for supremacy on the Internet.  It’s not Google+, either!  The social network is called Diaspora and it is an open-source alternative to Facebook that was founded on the belief that users ought to control their information and social network experience.  Diaspora is a good idea that has been plagued by problems, not the least of which are a lack of name recognition (outside the hacker community) and the suicide last November of one of the company’s four co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy.  Despite the setbacks, Diaspora is poised to break out into popular culture.  If it does, it will no doubt be in part because of Rosanna Yau.

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