Billions for Bill

Lifehacker offers a test drive of Office 2007 and you can download Internet Explorer 7 here.

Category: Utilities_

Look Out for Incoming Bells & Whistles

For those of you who use Microsoft Outlook for your main e-mail and contact manager, there is an add-in called Bells & Whistles that looks pretty cool.

Category: Other Cool Stuff_

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Here's a handy link to wi-fi in the wild, so to speak. But really, if you are in a park, must you be connected? I notice that Iowa also has free wi-fi at every rest stop, a nice benefit.

Category: Web_

Becoming a Flockstar

Experimenting this weekend with Flock, a new browser interface that smoothly integrates Flickr, Blogging, De.licio.us tagging, and other social features I haven't even discovered yet. Read a more detailed critique here from Ed-Tech Insider. Very impressed so far!

Category: Web_

Explore, Dream, Discover...

The 2006 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) will take place July 5-7 in San Diego. Registration closes June 21. It's a great time if you can make it!

Powerpoint: Compress and Optimize Presentations (ppt) to Decrease Size

One of my biggest beefs with MS products is the enormous size of the files saved in thier formats, particularly presentations. Because of the size, I must e-mail my presentations to my gmail account (we can't e-mail them to our school accounts because of the file size), and then download them back to my laptop. Here's a nice reminder from Tech-Recipes about how to compress Powerpoint presentations.

Presentations_

Imagery - An interface to Google Image Search

Currently available only for Firefox/Mozilla browsers (although others are coming shortly), Imagery Search will display the results of a google image search with a mouse-over feature that provides the URL, the image size, and the format.

Images_

Toodledo: A to-do list to organize your tasks

Web 2.0 seems to be flourishing, and Toodledo is yet another way to store your information on the net for easy access. Not having tried it, I'm not sure whether Toodledo is able to link to information with online calendars such as Google calendar, a capability that just might get me to move myself completely to a web-based environment.

Wi-Fi Finders

Rather than wander along the street with your laptop on, looking for a connection, Lifehacker suggests the following tools for locating free wireless hotspots:
ILoveFreeWifi, a community-contributed site
WiFi Free Spot, listings by state and city
Wi-Fi Hotspot List, another search engine with pay and free listings
Jiwire, a wifi search engine by zip code that returned results for Slippery Rock!
Google Maps also lets you search by simply adding the word "wifi" to your location

or you can spend $30.00 for this gadget...

Category: Other Cool Stuff_

It Oughta Run

It's always seemed to me that ALL CDs ought to run automatically. While I know how to autorun many types of programs, I've had difficulty with CDs that I want to run an html file. Since my students create electronic portfolios in html, I've been trying different methods to make the CDs autorun. I finally found the easiest method for them to follow. The instructions for creating an autorun html CD can be found online and require very little technical "know how." All you do is add two little files to the CD. You can download them from Softwarepatch.com or create them yourself using Notepad. Now those html CDs oughta run!

Category: Utilities_, Other Cool Stuff_

Snap, Crackle, Krunch

Krunch is a tool for the online compression (and decompression) of files, especially useful when working in a locked-down network environment where you can't install anything. If you can install, similar programs include the well known WinZip, 7zip (free) and WinRar. Thanks again to Lifehacker for another useful tool!

Category: Utilities_