You may recall me mentioning the Elonex One PC back in February, a pocket PC that would sell for the astonishingly low price of £99. Well, at that time no samples were available but I was intrigued enough to send off my £10 deposit, on the promise that it would be delivered in July. Needless to say it never arrived and not only did the delivery date slip, in the meantime Elonex produced an upgraded design, called One t+ (almost certainly a rebadged CNM Minibook), which they offered to those who placed orders, at no extra cost. – the One T+ now costs £120 online. (The original One, with its quirky ‘upside down’ design always looked a bit suspect…) To cut a long story short, involving several unanswered emails and even more delayed delivery dates, mine has just been delivered. Read the rest of this entry »
If you do a lot of typing then you can be pretty sure you constantly repeat yourself, especially when writing letters or replying to emails. Here’s a way to save yourself a few seconds each day, so you don’t have to keep typing things like Dear Mr…, it was a pleasure to meet you…, thank you for the… , and anything else you can think of. Phrase Express integrates seamlessly with your word processor, text editor and email programs, inserting common phrases at the click of a mouse or simple shortcut, it expands abbreviations, auto completes phrases with predictive text, enters dates and times, even a quote of the date if you so wish and as an added bonus it checks your spelling. It’s easy to use, highly customisable and yes, before you ask, it is free for personal use.
Windows Live Hotmail has joined Windows Live Messenger in order to extend the support of the “i’m” initiative. Microsoft debuted “i’m” back in 2007 as a way to enable Windows Live Messenger users to have a say as to where would a portion of the Redmond company’s advertising revenue from its instant messaging client would go. A year after the initiative was launched, no less than ten social cause organizations around the world received a total of over $1 million because of the users who started Windows Live Messenger conversations with “i’m.” As of May 5, the “i’m” initiative is no longer restricted to Windows Live Messenger, having migrated from the instant messaging client to Windows Live Hotmail. Read the rest of this entry »
If it moves and it appears on your PC screen then you can capture it with this freeware application, called Debut. Now don’t get too excited, it can record streamed video (and audio), like You Tube and iPlayer, but the unless you have a blisteringly fast PC the frame rate will probably be quite slow if you don’t want to sacrifice too much picture quality, but it’s definitely worth experimenting and its certainly good enough for a quick and dirty archive. It’s just the job for making tutorial videos, showing someone how to do something on a PC, by recording everything that happens on the screen. It also has a built in timer and it can be set to email or upload your movie by FTP. You can even get it to burn directly to DVD with an optional add-on and there’s a facility to record from external sources like web-cams and USB capture devices.
Over the years I must have written tens of thousands of words on how to copy, transfer and backup email messages. With Outlook Express backing up the Message Store folder is not too difficult but it’s all the other bits and pieces – account settings, signatures, rules, blocked senders and so on – that make life difficult because they’re all over the place. Now it looks as though I won’t have to go through the rigmarole again.
Presenting Amic Email Backup. It’s a small freeware application that backs up all of the vital files and info in most popular email clients, including OE, Outlook, Eudora, Pegasus, Incredimail, The Bat, Poco, Netscape, to name just a few. Read the rest of this entry »