Falcon1986-Online

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that my old Toshiba Satellite 1800-S204 crashed which left me in quite a tough situation. Fortunately, I was due for a new notebook, but I had not started working as yet to draw on savings. Thankfully, my parents stepped in and helped me with funding and I just recently got an on-campus job, so I will be able to give them something in return for their kindness. Now, to the notebook…

The notebook I chose was an HP Pavilion DV7-1034ca, which I purchased at a local FutureShop. Although I would have preferred to order online and possibly save a few dollars, I preferred to be there on-site to actually see what I was getting.

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It seems like it has been quite a long time since the horrible events of that day took place. On that day I was in high school when I heard about one of the attacks after a teacher relayed the news to us. It was only after I got home from school that I saw for myself what had happened.

Although we need not be reminded of what happened on 9-11-2001 we should remember those lives that were lost and continue to pray for the families around the world that lost their loved-ones. May their souls rest in peace…

I have not made a blog post in some time due to a lot of travelling, studies and… wait for it… my laptop finally coming to the end of its electronic life! Yes, during the week preceeding the start of a new academic year at university, my 7-year-old Toshiba Satellite 1800-S204 notebook was showing signs of hard disk failure. Just after doing some web surfing the Toshiba’s screen suddenly froze; I could not get any response from keyboard inputs so I had to perform a hard shutdown. Thankfully, I managed to boot to the disk again and retrieved most of my important data before the next crash occurred. The sound that the mechanical hard disk failure made gave me nightmares! How was I going to fix this situation before classes resumed and all the assignments started pouring in?

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When you hear “PDF”, the first thing you probably think about in terms of software is the ‘Adobe‘ brand (and perhaps more specifically the Adobe Reader). The Portable Document Format is a format that was created by Adobe. The Adobe Reader (free PDF viewer) and Adobe Acrobat (commercial PDF creator) are quite popular software when it comes to dealing with PDFs. However, it seems that with every new release of the free Adobe Reader, the size and resource demand of the application seem to grow (see Adobe Reader 9). Although upgrading is not always necessary, security and bug fixes are enough to force us to step up, but frequently that goes at the cost of overall PC performance. Why slow down your PC unnecessarily? Why should viewing a PDF cause your memory and CPU usage footprint to spike? Well, as good as Adobe products are, when it comes to PDFs, there are some good FREE alternative readers and creators. Here are a few that I have found that will not be taxing on your wallet nor your system.

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Ever since I discovered how to password protect individual pages on my WordPress blog a few things started to click in my brain. I thought that, if you could use a different template for each page on your WordPress blog, why not extend this to integrating other things as well. The main driving force for me wanting to do this was due me feeling that some features could probably be better integrated without the use of plugins, especially when site performance is an issue. As you may or may not know, a lot of WordPress plugins automatically insert call functions into your site’s header that can have a negative impact on site loading time for your viewers. Furthermore, why add extra call functions for features that your users may never utilize on a particular page if they never visit that page to begin with?

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I did not notice this piece of news until today, when it showed up on Slashdot. Actually, I am a member of the Revision3 forums and watch some of their shows occasionally, as I followed many of the personalities since the TechTV/G4 days. Up to yesterday I was visiting Tekzilla and did not notice anything until now. The Revision3 website does feel a bit slow-loading today, but this may be due to increased hits brought about by this piece of news. You know what happens when stuff gets on Digg!

Jim Louderback made a blog post telling of the Denial of Service (DoS) attack that crippled their servers over the Memorial Day weekend. It’s a long read, but he goes into a lot of detail and explains technical terms associated with the attack, which makes it very-easily understood. Apparently, the culprit was MediaDefender, who, if you ask me, seemed to have been engaging in some very shady activity for a company that is supposed to be big on anti-piracy.

I will not go into much more detail because the blog post does this better. Check it out for yourself.

Yesterday, as I was surfing the web, I stumbled upon this interesting piece of software. Yod’m 3D (freeware) now succeeded by DeskSpace (trialware) is a desktop manager that allows you to manage 4 desktops within a simple system tray application with some extra eye candy! Talk about desktop switching tansitions! Yod’m 3D allows you to do this with a rotating 3D cube effect, which is similar to the special effects experienced when using the OpenGL-accelerated Beryl or Compiz under Linux.

You would probably only be able to get this similar effect under Windows by paying for Stardock.com’s WindowFX software. However, Yod’m 3D is completely free and can run under Windows 2000, XP or Vista. I am running it under Windows XP Professional SP3 with no problems whatsoever! According to the Task Manager, Yod’m 3D only utilizes about 40MB of RAM and rarely deviates from this point even during desktop transitioning.

If you have been looking for this 3D cube effect within a desktop manager, try Yod’m 3D first. Activate hardware processing to offload some of the special effects onto your dedicated graphics card and customize away!