Sunday, September 30, 2007

Linkfest 09-30-07

I don't know if it has been a slow week in the areas that interest me, or maybe I have been too busy to really notice all the gems.

So, I just have a handful of links and notes to toss out this week:

Microsoft Phone and Fax

I've been caught several times where I have had to join an extended conference call with just a cellular or cordless phone  The whole time I groan and hope my battery survives.

I even realized that we don't have a "wired" phone at out house, for emergencies if the cordless ones go out.  I've got to remedy that soon.

I did figure out that if I have access to an "analog" line and one of my laptops I can make calls through it, made even easier with a USB headset.

Microsoft Windows XP - Phone Dialer overview

John Barnett's Windows Vista Support: Launch Phone Dialer

XP does come with a fax service as well.  Since I have an analog line for my laptop at work, along side my digital phone, I've been using the XP fax service to test remote fax machines as well as do "emergency" scanning of documents by sending them through our traditional fax machine to the analog number associated with my laptop dock station.

I was surprised to find that Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium do not come with any Microsoft fax service like can be found in XP.  That's a real shame.  It does ship with Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions.

Faxing in Windows XP

Windows Vista: Features Explained: Windows Fax and Scan

Free Foreign Language Lessons

Mango Beta Launched!

Sign up with a valid email address.  There are eleven languages currently including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese.  Each language has 100 lessons.

They are beneficial as the audio allows you to get a good feel for the pace of the spoken language.

JCB Song Video

Need a lift? 

Check out Nizlopi's animated video of the JCB Song.

There is something cute and precious about it.  Ahh to be young again....

JCBSONG by Nizlopi: Monkeehub

--spotted via Drawn!

Software of Note

CDBurnerXP Version 4 - (freeware) - This fantastic CD burning media has just received a major release update.  Features include, burn all kinds of discs, audio-CDs with or without gaps between tracks, burn and create ISO files, create bootable discs, bin/nrg → ISO converter, dual-layer DVD support, disc-to-disc copy, and program size reduced from over 10 MB to around 2 MB. 

It can even run off a USB stick if .NET 2.0 or higher is on the "host" machine.

Supports Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista.

For other removable media management tools look into these three freeware offerings:

Need to make a copy of a disk? Use LC ISO Creator.

Need to turn a set of folders into an ISO? Use Folder2Iso.

Need to burn an ISO to CD/DVD media? Use TeraByteUnlimited's BurnCDCC.

Need a bit more substance? Look into these freeware utilities. ImgBurn for advanced disk burning and IsoBuster for advanced CD/DVD file recovery, ISO creation, disk/ISO structure review, and file extractions.

Minimal Yahtzee - (freeware) - Teeny-tiny and portable.  This single-player Yahtzee game is great.  My memories are filled with playing this game with my maternal grandparents in their Airstream trailer over the long summers I got to spend with them.  It remains a fun game at our home, even today.

Engcom Virtual Slide-Rule Program - (web) - Dating myself, I am old enough to know what a slide-rule is and what it is used for, but young enough to never have used one myself in school.

From what I understand, they were the power-calculators of their time and no good engineer would be caught without one.  Today we have digital hand-held calculators and computers to run circles about them.  But they have always seemed a mysterious thing to me.

Engcom's site lets you play with a virtual version of the slide rule to see just how it functions.

--Spotted via OgasaWalrus.com

Slide rule - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

Eric's Slide Rule Site

International Slide Rule Museum

A-to-Z of slide rules

--Claus

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