I have been a HUGE fan of notetab text editor for many years now. Buying it was the single best purchase I have ever made in computer software — I use it hourly in so many ways I cannot even try to explain them, but they include:

• manipulate data – I use it to sort, move, make delimited files, examine, replace and repair text
• code html, javascript, perl, php — one of it’s greatest shortcomings is that it doesn’t have custom or language syntax highlighting except for html, but get over that shortcoming (there is a way to see syntax highlighting if it is really important), but it isn’t really if you know the language involved
• read simple stuff simply — formatting of documents makes them big files
• control other programs, for example I have it auto-fill form fields in certain web pages using data out of an excel spread sheet

One of the most difficult tasks is getting a new user going. Writing clips is hardly intuitive. I have decided to try some video tutorials to show the most basic of functionality. As I get going, I might try to write a clip to do more tasks. In fact, have something repetitive that you need done on your computer with data? Write a comment and let’s see if we can fix it with a clip.

Here are the first few tutorials:
How to create a new clip library
How to create your very first clip – hello world

I wanted to use JingProject (http://techsmith.com) to create a small tutorial for one of my favorite programs. I could not get my microphone to work. Help under start>control panel>speech suggested that I do this:
“Open Speech in Control Panel, and then click the Speech Recognition tab.” Only problem is I didn’t have such a tab!

I found a post on-line where numerous Dell owners were complaining that Dell laptops don’t support external microphones. I was getting worried, when I came across a post that solve the issue. It said:
1) unplug your external mic
2) open volume control
3) switch it to recording control (menu options/properties/recording)
I then ticked microphone, plugged my microphone and tried Jinging it — woo hoo, it worked and my tutorials now have sound.

Google is always my friend! If you are having trouble getting an external microphone working with a Dell laptop, try the above procedure.

Has Twitter peaked?

According to eMarketer, three different digital actuaries declared that Twitter traffic has performed a slight plummet.

While comScore suggested a drop of 8.1 percent in October and Compete estimated 2.1 percent, while Nielsen, that apogee of accuracy, declared a 27.8 percent decline between September and October.

Cite

I don’t get twitter really, and probably never will. Too much information — and way too much noise to content. I really expect it to be a dying fad with time. Will some still use it? Sure. Aim, all the rage? Not any more. Nextel walkie-talkie? Not any more. People eventually use more efficient means of communication — and twitter is in my opinion not efficient.

Yes I realize I am missing a market segment … but I think it’s worth it. Time will tell.

Firefox has a CPU usage issue and, consequently, can cause overheating problems in some laptops, particularly ultraportables. That’s what I’ve found over the last couple of years.But don’t take my word for it. This is documented on a Mozilla support page entitled “Firefox consumes a lot of CPU resources.” The page states: “At times, Firefox may require significant CPU [central processing unit] resources in order to download, process, and display Web content.” And forum postings like this one about a Dell Netbook are not uncommon: “Mini9 would get way too hot.”

Cite

I’ve noticed my laptop a tad warm of late, and this may just explain it as I have a lot of FF resource in use at many times. Anybody have a solution that doesn’t involve:

• less tabs
• giving up on firefox — which I happen to love
• buying a new notebook … not ready to pay for it yet

Thanks for your suggestions …

For many people updating an existing version of WordPress is daunting. Especially if they have not upgraded in quite some time it can be scary. I have teamed up with another person who specializes in professional blog migration and updating of WordPress installs to form a new entity called BlogWranglers.com

Blog Wranglers has also seen a significant drive by people on Moveable Type as their content management system to migrate or move to WordPress. Why? Easier to use, better SEO results in many cases, hundreds of free themes to choose from. We often help people take a standard theme and update that to a custom theme.

We are this week concluding a transition from Moveable Type to WordPress of a long standing blog that has over 100 different authors and tens of thousands of posts and comments. We will achieve the migration from Moveable Type to WP without dropping a single post or comment. We also moved all bio information for all users.

If we can be of service to you, please let us know.

Did you know that more of the top 100 blogs in the world use WordPress as their platform, more than any other software?

Did you know that we have driven HTMLFixIt with WordPress for about four years now? We started with a static site and then evolved and now have been through many renditions of WordPress on the backend of this site. Franki is a nut about staying current, so we always adopt early when a newer version of WP rolls around.

Not that I plan to be going anywhere around here, it’s just something else where there seems to be a need, just like there was a need to help with basic HTML when we started this site.

Sadly, the majority of Australians are sheep I think. (which is probably why Kiwi’s love it here).

When the Port Author massacre happened in Australia, our politicos took the public outrage as a good excuse to ban nearly all defensive or offensive weapons in Australia. People still get shot, only now the criminals are the only ones with guns and other weapons, and the police get to investigate our murders rather than justify our self defense. We’re not even allowed pepper spray for crying out loud! Retires getting beaten up in their own houses are becoming almost weekly news stories simply because there is no danger anymore to the criminals.

Now, in another show of rampant zealotry, Our current Labor government is not only planning on making ISP’s filter all of their traffic to restrict us to looking at only that which they deem suitable, but now it seems they plan to force all ISP’s to inspect all their traffic looking for possible copyright infringement so they can do the movie and music industry’s jobs for them.

Will someone please sack that idiot Stephen Conroy before we end up living in the Labor governments version of Taliban Afghanistan? I’m starting to wonder if this guy is actually being subsidised by movie and music companies. Just about every time he opens his mouth, it seems to cost us another right or freedom. Perhaps it’s time we got ourselves a constitution so the personal preferences of our transitory politions have less chance of becoming laws. More

Another example of Australian Stupidity is asking our government to push ahead with the emissions laws that just got knocked back. People, it’s sad but true that the cleanest large scale viable power generation we could have at this time is Nuclear, and Australia has backed away from that in fear. So telling our politicians to clean up our atmosphere is going to have only one real result. Low income people will suffer. Why? Well because the government doesn’t really have any new tech to roll out, they don’t have any new power generation methods or anything that could actually help the root of the problem. All they can do, is make it more expensive to process power and manufacture products.

Now what do companies do when their costs go up? Why they up their prices to consumers of course. So, your power bill goes up a thousand or so dollars a year, the power company pays the government the extra money they took from you, and business goes on as usual. Power usage won’t change much, and the government gets to look “green”, just for rooking the moronic sheep we call a populace.

People… The only net effect of these emission trading schemes is to make your life harder and take your money. There is no new technology or cheaper power options, it’s all about making it too expensive for you to use the power you do now (regardless if you already use the minimum you can already). That’s it! That’s all they government can do. Of course they can’t tell you that or you’d reject outright it so it’s shrouded in vaguarities and catch phrases to make it seem green. But wake up people, get a clue! This isn’t going to hurt the companies in question much, they will either get subsidised, or pass on the cost to us, or both. This is going to hurt our pockets and if you don’t believe that, your a fool.

So next time the government tells you how wonderful they are for pushing emission trading schemes, remember that what that actually means, is to make your life harder and much more expensive in the hope that you won’t be able to afford your current lifestyle and will therefor use less power.

Microsoft, who have been known to patent tiny and sometimes seemingly obvious things (timed mouse clicks for example) while riding on the shoulders of giants who often gave their truly revolutionary discoveries unencumbered by patents, has been bitten by the spurious software patent issue themselves. Microsoft Word it’s been ruled, is in breach of somebody else’s software patent (related to XML tagging). Better yet, an injunction forcing them to stop the sale of such infringing products has been granted also (Word and Vista). This has led to speculation that there may be something to the theory of Karma after all and that what goes around really might come around.

Sadly Microsoft has way too much money for this to make much of an impact on them. They’ll most likely pay the fine (290m), perhaps create a workaround and carry on business as usual. But still, the more money they have to hand out in the US, the EU and anywhere else that dislikes their practices, the more likely that at some point in the future, the board will realize that their version of business as usual isn’t really all that profitable anymore. Read more at Reuters.