Category Archives: Tech!

Don’t retype that PDF!

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Has anyone ever sent you a PDF document that you need to get back into Word format to edit? But nobody has the original Word document to make changes in? Don’t waste time retyping the whole thing! Just let any of these websites convert a PDF file to a Word document for you… free!

The best one in my experience has been Convert PDF To Word. The website and conversion process are both really fast. Just click the BROWSE button to locate your PDF file and press OK. In a few moments, a link will appear for you to immediately download the converted file! It’s been easy and blisteringly fast for every PDF I have thrown at it, and recreates the original PDF file in Word perfectly. The only problem is that is recreates the original PDF file in Word perfectly. If the PDF is complex, with a lot of tables and drawings, the word version will have a lot of tables and sub-tables all over the place. Things won’t be congruently selectable, but you can edit everything as much as you like. Everything I tested came back looking just like the original PDF it came from. If you’re looking for a direct copy of a PDF file that just needs a tweak here and there, this site is the one to use.

My second favorite is PDF ONLINE. This site is fast, with a simple BROWSE button to upload your PDF file from your local computer. In a few moments, you can download the converted word document. This site doesn’t do so well with a heavily detailed PDF in my tests, though. But it does great with grabbing the core content of a PDF and making everything selectable at once. Website PDFs consistently came back with the article as the main conversion. Books would convert in one big flowing document. However, this site converted everything into RTF format. You can go to Word and go to FILE and OPEN to pull the data in for this kind of conversion. If you don’t need the sidebars on a website, or your PDF document is pretty much text and no graphics, this site is the one you should choose.

3rd on my list is PDF TO WORD. This site is similar to the other two in its’ ease of use, but the main difference is that this site will email you the converted file. It’s kind of a mixed blessing. The results were somewhere between the two sites above, and it was nice to know the converted files would be waiting for me in my inbox and not have to be downloaded to the PC I was at. But some complex PDF conversions were so slow, they didn’t show up in my inbox for hours. An overall nice compliment to the two above.

Microsoft Office Accounting : DOA

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If you are a user of Microsoft Office Accounting, you should probably sit down before reading any further.

Microsoft just announced that they are canning their whole Office Accounting package as of November 16th.

On the FAQ site, the official reason from Microsoft is that “…we have determined that existing free templates within Office used with Excel was a better option for small businesses, and the Microsoft Dynamics ERP products were appropriate for mid-range organizations.”

In addition, they’re yanking the Ebay and Equifax rug out, saying “Online sales from eBay and credit profile from Equifax will no longer be available after December 15, 2009. However, your customers will still be able to pay emailed invoices directly through PayPal.”

Paypal instead of Equifax? Yeesh.

Someone at Microsoft probably woke up this weekend and said “Hey, this product is so easy and stable and cheap, why the hell are we supporting it? Make the low end people buy the whole Office suite! And make the high end people buy the juggernaut called Dynamics! Mu ha ha ha ha!”

Ifya’ want to grab this one before it’s nuked forever, here’s a link to Micosoft’s download page or you can grab the express version directly here.

Here’s the direct link to the Microsoft PR announcement about the product.

Facebook attack

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If you are a user of Facebook and get an email saying “your password has been reset” with a attachment to open, just delete the email. A new scam/trojan attack is making the rounds, and this one is specifically targeting users of Facebook.

According to the tech site Neowin, Facebook users may get an email saying… “their password has been reset, and that the attached zip archive contains their new password. Instead of a new password, users will find a trojan downloader.”

Once the trojan is opened, it will go out over the internet and grab more viruses and malware to download to the infected PC. The article says there are “around 735,000 of the phony Facebook messages since Monday”, so this thing is only getting bigger.

Make sure to update your antivirus definitions this weekend, and it would be a good idea to set your antivirus application to run a full scan while you are out for Halloween.

Free Quickbooks Simple Start Edition

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In a recent set of HP ink I got for a company printer, a small flier was enclosed that advertised a link to a free and legal copy of Quickbooks.

The promotional special with HP is for a free copy of Quickbooks Simple Start Free Edition 2010. While not as full featured as the “Pro” version, it does “keep track of money coming in and going out, track income and expenses (for up to 20 customers), track sales, expenses & sales taxes, [generate] professional-looking invoices & estimates and [also has] 14 Financial, sales & tax reports.”

That’s not too bad. Especially for free. It might be worth it to keep on a memory stick and use to set up someone new to paperless accounting. Or even for use as a very basic home accounting system.

You can download your free and legal copy at http://www.quickbooks.com/hpink4

Your Google voicemails may searchable on the web

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In a ginormous “WHAT!!” moment today, it looks like the up and coming Google Voice has a little security issue it needs to mention.

A tech-security blog broke the news that “after entering “site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/* ” into [the search bar on] Google, our reader was shocked and discouraged to be greeted by 31 voice mail messages belonging to random Google Voice accounts. Clicking on each revealed not only the audio file and transcript of the call, but it also listed the callers name and phone number as it would if you were checking your own Google Voice voice mail.”

Uh… yikes.

Google came out on their official forum and said these voicemails were posted on purpose, so it’s OK that they were found. And as a matter of fact… “Since the initial idea behind posting a voicemail, was precisely to share it with others, we did not restrict crawling of those messages that users post on the web, but we can certainly understand that users would want to make them public on their sites but not necessarily searchable directly outside of their own website. We made a change to prevent those to be crawled so only the site owner can decide to index them.”

Uh… yikes.

No matter what else comes of it this week, this little peek behind the curtain clearly shows that everything you say in Google Voice will definitely be saved, immediately transcribed, and will be searchable.

Searchable by whom is now the only question that matters.

What exactly is a Waitting?

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One of the more obscure things I can do is program readerboards. Those LED kind of displays you see under a big business sign that scroll images, show what’s on sale, display the time and temperature, and so on.

Problem is, most readerboard software I’ve had to use is complete junk. They’re horribly unstable, crash often, and are not put together in any form of English I’m aware of.

Waitting in progress

Waitting in progress

The thing is I don’t know anybody else who does this. Most of the bigger companies have someone specifically fly out from corporate relations to change their readerboards, and they don’t like to talk about what they use. If they’re a franchise, they just stick a memory card the corporate office sends them into the feeder computer to update the screen.

Bourgeois music placement

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So by now I think everybody has seen the new ad for the Ipod nano with video. It’s a catchy little jingle called “Bourgeois Shangri-La” by Miss Li.

I’m guessing nobody at Apple bothered to check the lyrics to Bourgeois Shangri-La.

“Keep you locked in a shopping cart
A Bourgeois Shangri-La”

and

“House, and a boat and a great shiny car
Things just to prove you go far
So’s the streamer watching TV cute little dog
Perfect in your shallow Bourgeois”

And to top it off, Bourgeois is defined as “(1.) A person belonging to the middle class. (2.) A person whose attitudes and behavior are marked by conformity to the standards and conventions of the middle class. (3.) In Marxist theory, a member of the property-owning class; a capitalist.”

So either Apple was intentionally poking fun at itself and its’ rabid fans, or they just went with this song because it sounded pretty. Either way, it’s hilarious.

But the all time winner for missing the point has to be Mercedes-Benz for having the unmitigated balls to use Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” in one of their commercials. According to Wikipedia,
“Joplin wrote “Mercedes Benz” together with the poet Michael McClure and Bob Neuwirth, as a critical social commentary on how people relate happiness to money and material possessions. The song was originally written as something of a negative commentary about materialistic individuals who place too much value on items like a Mercedes-Benz.”

And what does Mercedez-Benz do with it?

Blasphemy. Blasphemy of the highest order. (Lyrics to Mercedes Benz.)

The full “World of Goo” game – this week only for any amount!

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This week only you can get the World of Goo game for PC and MAC and Linux for any amount you want to pay. $1. $5. $20. Anything works!

Just go to the 2dboy game’s website and click on the “Happy Birthday Sale Time” link midway down. From there you can buy the game with any amount you want to put in.

After you complete checkout, in a few minutes a secret link to the game will appear in your inbox to download the full version from their servers. It’s that easy.

The World of Goo game has no copy protection whatsoever. For a game developer in this day and age, that’s unheard of. And pretty spectacular.

You can try the World of Goo demo first at the 2dboy main page for Windows, Mac or Linux if you want. But the reviews for the game are all four and five star, with a 9.0 “devious, intelligent puzzler” review on Gamespot and an “absolutely phenomenal” review from IGN. And for an entry price of $1, you really can’t go wrong here.

Staples goof

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I was at Staples some time ago and noticed this little setup in the software department.

Staples - Doh!

Staples - D'oh!

Pick a version! Any version! It’s the same price!

That was easy.

RipIt preference for Mac users

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Just a quick observation. If you use RipIt for the mac to backup your movie DVDs, you might want to go to RIPIT in the top menu and PREFERENCES and choose NETWORK.

RipIt preference

RipIt preference

From there, unselect REPORT SUCCESSFUL RIPS (ANONYMOUSLY).

This option is checked by default. I’m not a fan of any logfiles like this, and am quite surprised this is on by default.