Foot operated computer mouse

It's very common that we see mouse on the desk. Yeah, that's where a mouse should be. But have you ever imagine that you can hold a mouse like a pen? Well, You can use tablet to replace it. Then there's also a kind of mouse that you wear like a ring on your finger. These are still new products (eventhough I've seen them long before). There are actually many kinds of unusual mouse. Have you ever seen a mouse with the shape of a hamburger?

But have you ever though that there's a way to turn your mouse into a pointing device that's not operated with your hand? But with your foot. Call it "foot operated computer mouse". I found this funny thing when browsing the instructables website. Such commercial mice are also available. But if you are interested in making one, why not try to learn how to make it. Click here to see the tutorial.

Disassemble and Assemble Acer Laptop

How to fix and maintenance your laptop? It's not an easy thing compared to desktop PC. Laptop construction is more complex than desktop PC. They have almost the same hardware parts, but the main difference lies on the size and maybe the shape.

These are two videos I found at Youtube on how to disassemble and assemble Acer Laptop. The videos take about almost 10 minutes but it does tells you how to do the disassembling and assembling. Not so easy to understand but at least it gives you a brief understand. When you do it yourself, it's better you take photos of all the process or take the video during disassembling. This is because when you want to assemble it back, you have already had the pre-recorded video that guide you. Ok, let's watch how he does it with the Acer laptop.

Disassembling Laptop



Assembling Laptop - Part 1



Assembling Laptop - Part 2

Laptop battery dead

How to solve laptop battery dead problem? The best way to solve it is of course have the battery changed at the service centre. But this usually cost a lot of money. It may cost more than US $100. So, what to do? While I was browsing the internet, I opened Youtube website. And I found a video on how to hack the laptop battery. This video tells you what you need to know before hacking the battery and what to do about it. It's a very short video, but it tells about technical stuff about changing the battery by yourself. So it's a DIY laptop hacking video. Be careful when doing it.

Create Magazine Cover easily by uploading photo

Have you ever thought that you can create a magazine for yourself or for your friend as his/her birthday gift? Well, it's not really difficult.

There's a website where you can create magazine cover easily. Just click here to start. Start from uploading your photo and then filling in your data from Magazine Title, Tag line, Publication date, Price and other data in the line text box. After that, make some customization like color, font effect. It will also create bar code automatically for you. It seems like a real magazine cover.

Then for the contents you can use programs such as Microsoft Words or Microsoft Publisher. If you think that it's rather hard to do this, you can just put a picture in Microsoft Word and set it as watermark. Create the header and footer. You can use your greetings. Then bind the cover and the contents paper together. It will look like a new-style writing book or a diary.

Technorati Profile

Bruce Jeet Kun Do - Computer Animation

Bruce Lee is one of the world's most famous martial art master. Do you know him? Well, I think you do know him. His fame also spreads wide until people created digital animation for his great and fast kungfu skill, Jeet Kun Do.

The following video is a computer animation on his self-created martial art, Jeet Kun Do. It's really great and look quite real. It's created using two famous 3D computer animation software called, Alias Power Animator 8.0 and Maya 1.0.

If you are a Bruce Lee fan, you should collect this 3D animation clip.

What to do when computer hangs?

When you run a few programs at the same time, your computer will probably hang. Computer hang is a common problem to every computer user.

When I was a beginner, I didn't know much about how to handle this problem. All I knew that time was that every time when it stopped working, mouse and keyboard couldn't do anything about it, I just pressed the reset button of my casing. This will of course restart the PC and do nothing else.

But you will certainly lose all your data if you haven't saved them yet. Actually, you don't really have to do that like I did when I was a beginner. You can just press CTRL + ALT + DEL to open Task Manager. Then try looking at the process or programs running. If there are programs you know not important to run at that "hang moment", you can just click End Process or End Task to remove it from memory. Doing so on some process or programs on the list would probably solve the problem. Remember to do this "end process or end task" by priority.

When you run a program, it takes an amount of memory. When your computer free memory becomes lesser and lesser, the more programs you run at that time, the higher the possibility of computer being hang. So when you end the process or end the task, you free up the memory. It probably brings it back to normal. Remember to save your work.

Another kind of hang is actually what we call crash. I have ever met this kind of problem many times when I was working with a few programs and just about to start a printing process. At the time I realize it starts to have this crash or hang condition, I would quickly close the program that starts the printing. This usually happens when you print a large file or a file with many copies with limited computer memory and also printing from a program that takes up a large amount of memory like CorelDraw.

Well, this is just a simple tip about how to avoid pressing Reset button and how to solve this hang problem using Task Manager.

Add or embed Youtube videos in blogger post

Do you know how to embed a video in your post like the one you see in my previous post? Well, that's very simple. You just need to have the skill of Copy and Paste in doing this.

Step 1: Write your blogger post as usual.
Step 2: Open the Youtube video you want to embed.
Step 3: Locate the Embed text box where the the codes are.
Step 4: Double click the code to highlight it. Right click and select Copy.
Step 5: Back to your post and paste it inside.
Step 6: Publish your post and you're done.

You can also customize your video size, border and movie control bar color by clicking the Customize button next to your embed code at Youtube.

You may also embed online games.

Fake wallpaper and fake taskbar

Would you like to do something funny with your wallpaper? Well, actually you can just change your desktop wallpaper to something else. What is it? Follow these steps and see what I mean.

• Press PrtScr key on your keyboard and then open Microsoft Paint.
• Click Edit and then Paste the captured screen.
• After that, save the captured screen picture into a file by clicking File - Save.
• Then, click File and select Set As Background (Centered).
• You'll have a wallpaper with icons and all the items (just like the real one).
• Then hide the taskbar by right clicking on the taskbar and select Auto Hide.
• After that, right click on the desktop and select Arrange icon by.
• Then, uncheck the menu Show Desktop Icons.
• You'll see that your real desktop icons are hidden.
• Drag your taskbar to the top of the screen.

Do you understand what I mean now? Well, if you don't, you may see this video telling you a similar thing about my explanation. It's a prank video I found at Youtube.

Widget for Disney Fan

One of the page elements that we can add to decorate our blog is widget. When I am bored, I also like to visit widgetbox.com to see if there are new widgets. When browsing, I found disney fine art gallery widget. So, I quickly get the code and add it in my blog eventhough it's not closely related to computer things, but anyway it's still computer blog widget. What do you think?  Click here to open disney fine-art gallery widget.

Show Your Love widget

Have you ever thought of putting a widget on your blog that shows "your love to your partner"? Well, by using this widget, you can do that easily. Simply click here. Then you can customize the names on the right text boxes by typing your name and your partner's name. After that, type the width and height to get the right size for your blog. Click Get Widget and paste the code in your blog as a new gadget.

How to add "Recent posts" gadget

Bloggers sometimes will put "Recent Posts" in their blogs if they have quite a lot of posts or update their blogs very often. This "Recent Posts" gadget is quite useful when you want to attract your reader to stay longer on your blog. In blogspot you can add up to 5 recent posts using your feed url.

Here's how:
First, click Layout on your blogger menu. Then click Add a gadget and choose Feed.
Next, type your blog url. Click Continue.
After that, type "Recent Posts" in the title box. And click Save. You're done.

When you have finished adding the gadget, you should place this gadget in a noticable location on your blog, so that your reader will be able to see and click the recent post easily.

Note that your reader may come from Search Engine. If they reached your blog in this way, they won't notice your recent posts because they will be brought to the post where it contains the keyword they type. But if they visit your blog by typing the url on address bar on their browsers, of course they'll be able to see your recent post eventhough you don't have this gadget on the blog.

2D Online and Downloadable Games

2D Games are still quite popular eventhough there are 3D games everywhere on the internet. Nowadays, 2D games have come in the form of Flash games. You can search and play many 2D games online, but most site don't provide download of the online flash game (unless you use flash downloader to download the game). 

Last night, when I was searching for free games, I found a site called 2Dplay. This site provides very nice games to play online. But we can also download the games. There are more than 50 kinds of games to download. Click here to go to the free downloadable games page.

Free Download Manager

Free Download Manager is a free open-source download program. This download manager also comes with a lite version. It's also suitable for downloading flash movie. You can also install the following plugins: video conversion plugin, bittorrent plugin, uploads plugin and language pack for your lite version. This is to save the space you need for the installation. For example: if you don't need to use upload feature, then don't install it. This program also comes with a scheduler that means you can manage when to start the download. If you need to convert your downloaded media file, you can also click Convert Media file from the Downloads menu. Click here to download.

Free flash games for download

Want to play some free flash games? Click here to download a zip file which contain some free flash games. There are frogger, minipool2, miniputt3, tabletennis, tanks and virtualcop. These are 2D games. After downloading, you need to use Zip program such as Winzip or Peazip to open it. Extract the files in a folder, then open the swf files with your swf player or use firefox to play. Enjoy it. 

Photo Scape - "Make a box" filter

One of my favorite photo editor is PhotoScape. It's a free photo editing program. Yes, it's free and very useful. It's so easy to use cause it has very user-friendly interface. I like this program just because it doesn't take me a lot of time to learn to use it. I just took a few minutes for learning it. If you have ever use photo editing programs, I believe you will like this one for doing simple jobs. But this doesn't mean that it can't do much. It's really rich in features.

When I first ran this program, I thought there would be a lot of things to share and tell in this blog if I write about this little great program. But, I think I will write about this new effect, "Make a box

 effect". This is a filter which I have never seen in other photo editing programs.

Well, let me tell you a bit about this filter. 

• First, click Editor on the circular interface menu. 
• Then you'll be able to see a folder list on the left side and the thumbnails of your image files. 
  
• Click on a file to view it on the editor window.
  
• Then click Filter and select Make a box, after that select your desired box type.
  
• And you're done. Just click Save button on the right corner to save the box image.

Click here to download PhotoScape.

FastStone Photo Resizer

FastStone Photo Resizer is a simple freeware that can be used to resize large image of many formats. The most advantage of this small program is that it support batch process which means that you can process many files at one time. What can you do? Well, you basically you can convert and rename your image files. But it has more options, like: resize, flip/rotate, crop, change canvas size, change color depth, adjust colors, change dpi, add text, add watermark and even apply border effects.

ClockLink - clock widget for website and blog

ClockLink.com is a special website that provides many different kinds of online clocks which you can put on your blog or website. Just select the clock you like and then get the html code. After that paste the code onto your blog or website.

There are various categories of clocks for you to choose, like: analog, animal, animation, count down & up, dark background, digital, holiday, season, sports, transparent and even wallpaper.

This is probably one of the most important website/blog widget you need to keep your time. And most important is that it's free.