Digital Bits Technology Column

Tom asks: “What’s the best method to get the info from an old laptop (A) to a new laptop (B), where laptop (B) has no floppy drive, only a CD drive. How do I connect the one PC to another and direct transfer the files?” There are two ways to approach this question. If you […]

Recovering data from corrupted files in OpenOffice documents

So you’ve been using OpenOffice.org and you have a corrupted file in programs like Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math or Writer. You might see scary error messages like these: Read-Error. Format Error discovered in the file in sub-document styles.xml at 2,2568(row,col) The file ‘file.odt’ is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened. Should OpenOffice.org repair the file? […]

Print On Demand (POD): What is it? What are the problems and benefits?

POD is a printing technology where you pay a company, give them a document, and that company prints and binds the document into a book. There are advantages and disadvantages to this process. Due to the amount of money you’ll be spending and the affect it may have on your future writing career, pay close […]

Who wants a longer-lasting battery? How much would you pay?

When keeping an eye out for scams, it’s easy to scoff at the blatant lies and ignore anything that sounds fishy. But what about products that support their claims with well-respected organizations? What if the product must be used in such a way that testing standards are extremely difficult or time-consuming to perform? Sneaky companies […]

How to make your own screen saver

Screen savers used to be more functional. They prevented “burn-in”, or ghostly-looking afterimages that haunted your monitor, indicating you’ve left it displaying the same image too long. A “screen saver” was named literally, a way to keep your monitor constantly changing and moving to prevent monitor burn-in. Monitors today are very resistant to burn-in, but […]

Direct your Web experience with Mozilla Firefox

Morgan Freeman should be in every movie. And I don’t mean in a Hitchcockian way, where you glimpse his face for a few seconds as he saunters through the background. No, I mean Morgan should star in every movie. He’s better than any other actor, he’s versatile, can ground the movie in reality, and has […]

Review of Brain Age for the Nintendo DS

Something odd just happened with a video game. It’s never happened before. I’ve been a gamer for as far back as my memory goes, and have played a huge variety of video games. I’ve hunted and ran from aliens, raced futuristic-yet-non-aerodynamic cars and, yes, fought bad guys as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. But nothing […]

Interview with Chris Danford, creator of StepMania

StepMania is a game modeled after “Dance Dance Revolution”, one of those fancy exercise-while-you-play video games (read more about StepMania). The difference is that StepMania is Open Source Software (OSS). That is, it’s free. Chris Danford is the lead designer and creator of StepMania, and took some time to give his thoughts about OSS and […]

Panasonic DMR-E75VS review: Convert VHS to DVD

You’ve got VHS tapes of your favorite TV shows, little Billy’s first steps or that grade school football game where a linebacker accidentally plowed into the group of cheerleaders. These are videos you’d like to have for a long time, but degradation from viewing or from sitting on the shelf is unpreventable. A VHS tape […]

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