The Student Nerds Blog

One of the best parts of the Blackberry user experience is its simplicity.  Sure there are tons of 3rd party apps out there that do everything from update your Twitter to integrate your Flickr account.  But at its core, the blackberry is a email messaging device.  That has always been it’s core function, and hopefully always will, although the Storm gives me reason to doubt. Embracing your Core, and never losing sight of it is critical for a device in a market oversaturated with a increasingly varied array of Smartphone devices. On the flip side of the same coin, the ability to upgrade your performance and turn your device from a simple tool into a powerful one is equally critical to differentiating yourself. Despite the lack of an integrated app store like Apple provides the iPhone with via iTunes, Blackberry devices have a remarkable number of add on apps and internal hacks that can really ramp up your devices power. One of my favorite is to turn off hom...

Have you ever changed the strings on your guitar?  You know how it sounds a million times better – even though the guitar sounded great anyways?  That’s what a clean reformat does to your computer. I have a friend.  He claimed (at some point) to be tech savvy.  He built the desktop he’s using at the same time that I built the one I’m typing on now.  He knew more than I did then.  I know that he’s not very tech savvy by modern standards because we’ve had the following argument for about 2 years: Me: “Dave, reformat your computer” Dave: “No.  It is running Windows XP just as well as it was when i installed it back in 2002.” Me: “Dave, XP doesn’t work that way.  reformat your XP.  it will be night and day” Dave: “No. Things open just as fast as ever and everything’s OK.” This is a person in denial.  a Windows box cannot last 7 years without massive slowdown.  about 2 years after i built my first computer (in 2002) i first refor...

Creating slideshows of your pictures can be a fun way to share a trip or experience with your family and friends. The only problem is that it can be such a time consuming process to make a cool slideshow with music. Well, today I’m going to show you a product that makes it very easy to make a picture slideshow with music in a matter of minutes. Animoto is a website that allows you to create slideshows automatically. All you have to do is select the pictures you want and the song that you want. Animoto will create a unique (they say no two videos are the same) video that has transitions based on the music. You can make as many 30 second videos as you like, but to get more out of the service, you need to pay. It’s $3 to make a full length video or $30 a year to have unlimited access. You can even download a DVD quality video to burn for $5 a video. It is a very impressive product and they really do live up to their slogan: “the end of slideshows".” Check out the vi...

So you get a virus or some clear malware thing and you have no idea how to get rid of it.  It’s slowing your computer down and messing up your internet browsing. I’ve helped a lot of friends in this exact situation and the steps are almost always the same.  (This is assuming you are running a Windows machine). Here are the steps you need to take to rid your computer of any malware or virus: 1. Ctrl-Alt-Del and close any processes that you’ve never heard of (if you’re not super computer-literate, this might be a step to skip) 2. Press Windows key & R and type “msconfig” (without the quotes) and then hit enter.  Click the startup tab and turn off everything except the maybe 2 or 3 you know.  Restart the computer and see if the problem comes back. (if you’re not super computer-literate, this also might be a step to skip) 3. Open the start menu, go to settings—>controlpanel—>add or remove programs.  any item called “Xango toolbar” or...

According to CNN, Obama is not willing to give up his blackberry.  The fact that there may be a possibility of people trying to hack into it and use the GPS to track Obama.  I think the issue is more that they don’t understand it.  I think its great that he is fighting for his Blackberry, and for the first time the White House might have someone who connects with our generation.  Clinton only sent 2 emails during his entire term.  I send roughly 100 emails a day.  This is clearly one of the biggest issues I can see other than national debt.  We have lost our technology foothold in the world.  How quickly we forgot about the rush to be the most technologically advanced country between Russia and the US?  Below is the new NSA safe “BarakBerry” it costs $3,350.00 named Sectera Edge and its not available to the public currently.  He can switch between “safe” mode (secure email/conversations) and normal mode(browsing the web)....

I don’t use Netflix anymore, I use Redbox .  (Disclosure: I currently have an intimate financial relationship with Redbox) When I did use Netflix, I was frequently made fun of for having a massive queue of movies that I wanted to watch (not a bad thing if you ask me) but I also suffered from a pretty common vice of not returning my movies fast enough to really justify the value of their unlimited subscription model. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.  Coming to our rescue is a new service, Feedflix .  Feedflix works by utilizing the Netflix API to analyze your usage.  It provides a relative cost per movie you rent (as a baseline keep in mind that Redbox charges only $1/day for new release movies) It also gives data on recent rentals, how long you hold your rentals for and various other types of data.  This kind of information can be very  helpful in determining what plan you should be on, if any at all.   Hopefully this can help ...

Did you miss the season premiere of Lost last night?  What if your DVR fails to record it? What if you don’t have a DVR? What are you supposed to do?  I’m going to show you three free websites to catch up on missed TV shows (and it’s even free and legal!) So, you couldn’t watch Jack Bauer save the world again.  Well, I think that’s a shame. Here are 3 ways to catch up on your favorite TV shows: Hulu – This is my favorite site and one we have talked about before here on Student Nerds.  It is very well designed and doesn’t really bug you too bad with ads.  It was started as a joint collaboration with NBC and FOX, so you won’t find any ABC shows on here. Fancast – This is a website started by Comcast.  Fancast is an aggregator that pulls in shows from many networks.  Joost – Joost started out as a standalone application, but now has dumped that idea to focus solely on it’s web interface.  It is very well des...

If you are considering an HD camera, please read this post.  It can be the best toy you have ever purchased or a nightmare trying to deal with it.  For Christmas this year I was blessed with an Canon HG20 HD video camera and I thought it was going to be as simple as point and shoot. Drag the video from the hard drive on the camera and bam, open up any old free video software and you can do simple editing tasks.  Then you can email your friends or relatives and enjoy the beauty of HD video.  Well this was the worst assumption I have ever made.  First, the point and shoot was straight forward and easy, but selecting what quality to shoot in was the hard part.  Do I shoot in Standard basic HD, or MXP (The maximum setting on this camera)?  Well of course, if you buy a fancy HD camera, you want to shoot the max right away.  There are two problems with the highest setting.  First, it will record maybe 5hrs of video (not the advertised 22)...

Four years ago, the biggest difference I would make in peoples’ computing experience was switching them from AIM to gAIM.  The latter is an open-source alternative to the bloatware that is known as AIM. Before we go any further, we have to draw a distinction between the software and the server.  The server is stuff like AOL, yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Google, and Skype.  They host your screen name, and all of those people you talk to.  The software is the *interface* with which you talk to them.  This distinction is one that continues to confound the computer-illiterate.  See my future post to help figure out whether you’re computer-literate or not… Three years ago, I told people to use their AIM screen names but switch to gAIM.  It’s open source, it’s extensible, and it’s got no bloat-ware like the AIM version 5+ shit.  aim: gaim :: internet explorer : firefox. But things have changed. I still use Pidgin (gAIM changed it’s name due to some ...

It’s not news to suggest that Google has become pretty ubiquitous. For an ever increasing segment of the population, the internet starts on the Google homepage every time they fire up a browser. I would be very surprised if almost every web user in North America or Europe didn’t use Google for at least something. But everyone uses Google differently. My homepage on both my work laptop and my home network is iGoogle. Where front and center is the pretty cool Google Twitter Gadget. On my work computer I also have a tab for Traffic and Maps on my iGoogle to help me plan the drive home. So I hit 3 features of Google, Search, Maps and a Gadget from Labs, every time I hit the internet. I also have a Gmail tab on my iGoogle, but I rarely use it. If I’m browsing for fun, almost inevitably, the next thing I do is to pull up my RSS aggregator, Google Reader. I’ve tried a number of different aggregators and readers in the past, but Google Reader is the only one that I have st...

As you all know because of last Friday’s poll, I have had quite the catastrophe with the technology that surrounds me.  It made me think. Are we a slave to the technology around us, or do we really control and utilize the resources.  I realized that when my technology (work laptop, Blackberry roller ball, personal computer hard drive, an HD video camcorder, and a gift card!)  went down so did my life.  I would like to think that I can function normally without these “luxuries” but in reality it was a scramble. It put everything else on hold to get them fixed. I would like to hear if anyone truly believes that we are in control of the technology that surrounds our every day life, or we are bound to it by society/work/fun.  I got a call from my father yesterday during my lunch in the cafeteria at the McCormick convention hall, and it puzzled me.  He asked me how to get the text from a document onto a website site forum.  It was a simple task for ...

People always are asking me where I get my music.  Well, I just found a great website that literally launched days ago.  Coda.fm is a BitTorrent website (here’s a review if you want to learn how to use BitTorrent ) that is all about the music.  It is very well organized and even recommends other albums that you may like based on your current selection.  The website is very clean and includes a review of each album and a track listing.  A very helpful site indeed if you are searching for music.  Check out Coda.fm and hopefully this site will be able to stay around for awhile.

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy/learn from Robert Reich’s posts. And he has another good one out, expressing concern that the benefits of the proposed stimulus might falls disproportionately to current highly-paid and desired professionals and to the vastly white and male construction industry.  In his words: “But if there aren't enough skilled professionals to do the jobs involving new technologies, the stimulus will just increase the wages of the professionals who already have the right skills rather than generate many new jobs in these fields. And if construction jobs go mainly to white males who already dominate the construction trades, many people who need jobs the most -- women, minorities, and the poor and long-term unemployed -- will be shut out.” Reich has his own answers and solutions to the problem, and they are good.  But in my opinion his concerns might be over-stated.  One of the reasons for a stimulus, is the economic mu...

Last Friday, Microsoft released officially released Beta 1 of the Windows 7 operating system (it’s been available on Bittorent for a few weeks now). After reading a few reviews of the beta, I decided to take the plunge. I have to say that it has probably been the best experience I’ve had with a Windows operating system yet. I’ve only had about 3 days with the system, but I’m already very comfortable with the changes that Microsoft has made from Vista. The most noticeable change is the new Taskbar. It combines a quick launch bar with open windows and jump stacks. I know that sounds very confusing, but once you use it, it is a very useful change to the aging taskbar The other thing I noticed was how well Windows 7 handled my drivers. It was able to get all of my drivers except for the proprietary drivers for my laptop’s buttons and also for the card reader. Compared to Windows XP, it’s night and day. Another great change is how the system tray is handled. Your ...

“Comment is Free It’s not just a quote, or the motto of the Guardian’s influential blog , but it’s also an important tenet of journalism.  But when Scott wrote those influential words, journalism and publishing was a very different business today. The cost of putting words to paper, and exposing that paper to the world for review was much higher.  The internet is changing that every day,  While I can report the exact cost of running www.studentnerds.com/blog , I can assure you that it is much much cheaper than an industrial printing press and national distribution network.  Many blogs and website (and hopefully this one) actually make money (how does $40K per month sound?).  The internet hasn’t reduced the importance of facts, they are still sacred, maybe even more so.  But I do believe that it has increased the value of comment.  The world has become a big coffee shop, a university, a newspaper and a library.  We are all, or at lea...

I know we really harp on backing up on Student Nerds, but it’s really important and someday you may really thank us.  One of the Student Nerds (Klear) actually just had a scare and made me think to ask this question.  Click through to take the poll: What would you do if your computer was stolen? ( polls )

Just a quick little tip for today.  If you would like to get a better view of your finances or if you even are already using Quicken, you should check out Mint .  Mint offers a free and very user-friendly interface to money management.  A few months ago, Mint offered the ability to track investment accounts and 401ks.  They even offer an iPhone application for those of you lucky enough to have one.  I would include some more screenshots, but I don’t feel like blurring out all of my accounts. 

There have been many occasions where I have needed to help a friend or family member from a remote location.  Maybe it was Grandma who could not figure out the Family Tree Maker or it was Mom who was still getting used to Gmail .  There are countless reasons why you may need to help someone out and today I’m going to show you how to do it.  Sorry Mac owners, this is Windows only. First, you and the person you are going to help need to download the file from here (tell the person you are helping to download the program to their desktop). Once both of you have downloaded the file, both of you should run the file.  You’ll see this screen: Tell the person you’re helping to click the Start button and have them tell you what it says in the “Your ID” box.  Now that they have clicked on the Start button, you should click the Operator button and enter the ID that they gave you and click Connect: The person you are helping should no...

I recently finished reading Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded , his follow up to The World is Flat . In this new work however, Friedman focuses much less on 'Flat' as a phenomena, and much more on it as a solution to the problems of the world being 'Hot' and 'Crowded.' Friedman's basic thesis takes the pretty much universally accepted notion that the “American” (applying also to Western Europe and parts of Asia) style of living is environmentally and economically unsustainable. Friedman however takes his 'Flat' thesis, that techonolgy and communication are increasing exposing the previously undeveloped nations, in particular the BRIC nations, to the knowledge and means to obtain this American way of life. Friedman argues that based upon this flattening of the world, projections about how fast the impact of this lifestyle is wrecking havoc on the Earth are vast underestimates. The 1 st part of his book is dedicated to explaining h...