Catherine Conner
Posts tagged technology
How Do I Find and Download Podcasts?
Oct 6th
I wrote about podcasts recently in an article I did for a local club magazine here in Hamburg. Since then many friends have asked for more information on the technical aspects of using podcasts and podcatcher software. I decided to post those answers here. (If you don’t know what a podcast is, you might first want to have a look at this.)
You may already be familiar with searching for and downloading music and/or video from the Internet to your computer. This is essentially what happens when you identify a podcast you want to listen to — you download it and then either listen to it directly on your computer, or copy it onto an iPod or other MP3 player to listen to on the go. But what makes podcasts special is that you can subscribe to them, just like you would a print magazine or email newsletter, and have your computer automatically download new episodes of your podcasts as soon as they become available. The tricky bit is, how do you do that? That’s what this article is all about.
Thoughts from a Mac-Hater
Sep 29th
People who know me have often heard my anti-Microsoft rants. But I don’t think I’m an Apple Evangelist. In the interest of equal time, here’s a great little article from someone who hates BOTH. A LOT. And for very good reasons 
“I don’t care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home.”
“Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible. Trying to get it to do anything was like issuing instructions to a depressed employee over a sluggish satellite feed.”
Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/28/charlie-brooker-microsoft-mac-windows
Be Your Own Tech Support
Sep 21st
Everyone has at least one friend who knows “everything” about computers. Any problem that you have with any piece of software or hardware, they seem to know the answer. But I’m about to let out a big secret that my technological colleagues won’t thank me for — they don’t know everything! What they do know is how to start looking for the right answers.
It’s almost guaranteed that any problem or question you’re having with your computer has happened to someone at least once before. And hopefully they (or the product companies themselves) have documented it somewhere on the internet.
An easy and quick method to begin your search is to use Google. Go tohttp://www.google.com (or www.google.de if you prefer to search in German — can be helpful if you have a German operating system and you get errors in German!) and enter your problem or question into the search field. Here are some suggestions for getting the best (i.e. most relevant) results.
Ye Olde Keyboard Layout
Sep 14th
This link has everything I could want, all in one place: technology, history, and language. Tired of struggling to find the characters you need while you’re typing your Old English/Old Norse texts? Help is at hand:
http://megse.unm.edu/research/internal/keyboards.html
Or maybe I’m just jealous that there are people out there whose jobs require them to write large amounts of Old English
Using Images from the Web Under the Creative Commons License
Sep 5th
Many images can be found on the internet that are published under the so called “Creative Commons” license. This means that as long as you credit the original image as specified by the image author, you can alter and use it without paying any royalties.
Wikipedia maintains a full collection of images published under this license, which is a great go-to place to find pictures of just about anything. And most of the pictures on any topic in wikipedia itself are covered under this license. So I’d recommend two methods for searching for these images:
