Computer Spot

There are families that for many reasons do not have a computer at home, or may have an older computer that is not able to access the internet.

They may feel that it does not matter, and that it does not negatively impact their lives, but if there are children in the family then the truth may be somewhat different.

The problem is quite simply that education institutions are coming to increasingly rely upon computers in order to get school work done. This may be as little as requiring that it is typed up for submission, or may be set assignments on particular software.

For instance the child may be required to use a word processing program in order to fix a section of text, or may have to make a spread sheet.

A great deal of research for school is also done via computer today, thanks to the internet. Research can take time-and between the research time and time taken to write up a document, this can often be too much time to do it in a library. Because of this, grades can suffer when there is no computer at home.

There is another problem-that of familiarity with computers. A child who is exposed to computers from an early age will find them easy to use. They will not be afraid of them, or nervous about breaking them.

Instead they will be willing to play around with a computer until they manage to get done what they need, and will be familiar enough that they should be able to find what programs and functions they need. Read the rest of this entry →

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Are you tired of shelling out money again and again for software applications? I bet many people are, since software can be expensive. So, never doubt the idea that the Internet has it all, because it does. The Internet even has free software programs you can download.

However, the real problem is looking for them. Here are some tips to get the free software you need.

Think open-source

Many computer experts and techie communities are developing open source programs for the benefit of all without spending a single dime on them. Open-source programs were made as a response to the sky-rocketing prices of most software programs.

Read the rest of this entry →

Don’t know how about you guys who will read this post, but personally I was always irritated by the fact that I couldn’t download videos from YouTube and other video sites.

I just couldn’t understand why these brainy guys sitting in their software developing offices didn’t even think that some people would like to have their favorite videos on their machines, but not on the Internet!

All right, it’s okay when I’m connected to the net and can download the video and watch it (thought waiting is not comfy as well).

But when you can’t access the Internet for some reasons but still want to watch the video? As for me I often have such problems with my provider (I know I’d better change it) and do appreciate video saved on my PC. That’s why saving video from such sources as YouTube would be just great thing to have.

Recently, I was surfing the net and was again stunned by what Google answered to ‘save youtube video’ search phrase.

Oodles of sites like ‘enter the link and download’ and only one site that satisfied me. All these sites were all the same: you watch the video, then add a new window, enter their address and enter the video’s link.

Too much to do, yep? But one of the Google search results really was the highlight of the day. That was http://savetubevideo.com/, with a free program called Save Tube Video.

I decided to download this free program and install it. After the installation has been completed (it took about 2-3 minutes), I relaunched the browser and saw two new buttons: ‘Save Video’ and ‘Show Status’.

After that I went to YouTube and clicked on the first video I saw. When the browser began playing the video I just clicked on the ‘Save Video’ button and the program asked me to specify the path to video download folder and video format (two most popular formats are available: avi and flv, I used flv).

After that the video in browser has been played as usual, and its ‘hard copy’ was being saved to the chosen folder.

When I clicked on the ‘Show Status’ button I saw the video download status. After the installation had been completed, there appeared three options: ‘Play’, ‘Delete’ and ‘Open’.

Clicking on the ‘Play’ button started video playback. ‘Delete’ button allows you to delete file, and the ‘Open’ one – to open a folder with the video file.

It’s also worth saying that the software works well with Internet Explorer, it didn’t even slow it down and the site says that Save Tube Video will work with Mozilla Firefox as well.

As for other options: if your connection with the Internet has been lost and the download broken up, you may resume your download at any time (which is especially important to me).

Oh, and the program allows you to download two or more videos at the same time which is very convenient. I would recommend this program to everyone who likes videos and wants to watch them offline and just to any web surfer as it doesn’t take much place and may come in handy one day?.

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The Open Source community is celebrating another major achievement with the recent release of the final version of OpenOffice 3. OpenOffice has been very successful since its introduction.

The hype surrounding OpenOffice is understandable because it is long touted as the software which could potentially challenge the dominance of one of the most profitable business softwares ever produced – Microsoft Office.

OpenOffice has several major advantages over Microsoft Office.

• It is a free software and can be used for any purposes without licensing fee obligations.
• It is available for various platforms such as Windows, Linux, Solaris and even Apple Mac.
• Due to its open source nature, anyone can participate in its development and improvement, making it easier to eliminate bugs and request new features.

OpenOffice 3 is a suite consisting of 6 applications: word proccessor Writer, spreadsheet Calc, presentations program Impress, database program Base, equation editor Math and graphics program Draw. Read the rest of this entry →

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In my previous post, I talked about the introduction of open source software. In this post I am going to give a review of one of the open source software programs: Open Office Software. Open office is an alternative to the other commercial Office Suite software programs.

Open Office is an office suite that was developed for Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems. It comes with similar packages as the commercial brands, such as a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), and presentation maker (Impress).

Also, Open office also comes with a database and drawing tool. Besides all this, Open Office is compatible with Microsoft-based office files which would allow for a mixed-suite environment. Read the rest of this entry →