June 12, 2008

• Some helpful (I hope) tech stuff

  Here are some links to things I’ve recently discovered that were helpful. Maybe they’ll help someone else.

  1. If you have a Sandisk Cruzer flash drive, you may have noticed that when you plug it in, it actually loads two drives: one that is the actual data drive and one that is an unchangeable, undeletable partition. It also autoloads a utility with a bunch of other programs. You can remove that partition with the utility found here. You need to have the drive plugged in and the U3 Launchpad running. After running this utility, your flash drive will behave like a regular flash drive. Be sure you’ve backed your data up first!
  2. If you’ve ever wanted to edit your mp3 files, WavePad is a great utility. It’s free to try and easy  to use. You can do some cool things with your files. It will install other programs to do some other stuff if you want. It also easily uninstalls and doesn’t load a bunch of spyware and junk. I use this to edit our church’s mp3 sermon files before putting them on the website.
  3. One of the best applications out there is OpenOffice. This is a free office suite that is very similar to Microsoft Office. It doesn’t cost any money at all. You can open MS Office files and save in Office formats. It can do most of what MS Office does, and a lot of things that Office can’t. If you didn’t know better, you’d think you were using Word or Excel. It doesn’t really have an equivalent application to Publisher (but I don’t like Publisher much anyway). Here is the link. Did I mention that it’s completely free?
  4. Speaking of Publisher, I’ve used a desktop publishing package from Serif called PagePlus. Nice program. Serif offers free versions of most of their software here. These are previous versions of their software, but they aren’t timebombed (where they stop working after a certain time), nor are they missing any of the features. Serif offers these with the hope that you’ll like them enough to buy the current version. I’ve bought stuff from Serif for years, and they’re a good company.
  5. If you would like some free Bible study software, try the Online Bible. It’s a great Bible study package in which you can do searches, word studies, look up definitions and almost anything else you need to do to study the Scriptures. Again, I’ve used this for years and it is free! I haven’t really seen anything that you can buy that’s better.

  Ok, those will do for now. Let me know if you check any of those out. Hope they help someone!

  • 11:20 pm
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