Occasionally you may wish to record your screen, such as if you are demonstrating an application and wish to save it for later (or include the demonstration within a presentation). Previously it has been quite difficult to complete such “screencasts”, as they generally required software to be downloaded. There is now a free web-based utility which allows you to create screencasts, called Screenr (www.screenr.com). This excellent utility is very easy to use and allows you to easily create screencasts to share.

Somehow my Windows Vista computer has been infected with a Google redirection virus or malware. Frequently when clicking on a Google search result I am redirected to a different website, although this does not always happen. Interestingly, the redirections are generally to a list of other websites (which look like the results of another search engine) and occur when using either Firefox or Internet Explorer. The cause of the problem is not detected by Norton Internet Security, Ad-Aware or Spybot Search & Destroy which are all fully up-to-date. Looking at the HOSTS file I see quite a few different entries – could you explain their purpose, as I don’t know whether they are legitimate?
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
# Start of entries inserted by Spybot - Search & Destroy
127.0.0.1 www.007guard.com
127.0.0.1 007guard.com
127.0.0.1 008i.com
…plus many more…
If we could remove this problem from the computer without the need for a full reinstallation of Windows that would be perfect. (more…)

When I use Microsoft Word 2007 and try to send the document to a contact they say they cannot open the file. I am running Windows 7. (more…)

Many websites have quite long addresses to various pages. This is particularly the case if linking across to a blog (or like) since the addresses for such blog posts generally have the title included (to assist with identification of the site by search engines). While this is good from the perspective of previewing the content of the page before actually visiting the page, it makes it quite difficult to share the website with other people, particularly if you need to read the website address to someone over the phone (or need to retype the address, with the potential for errors). To help alleviate this issue there are many services which provide URL shortening. This will provide you with a new (much shorter) URL which redirects to the original website, making it much easier to share that shorter URL rather than the original (long) URL. Services which provide this functionality include bit.ly and tinyurl.com .

Recently I purchased an iPod Touch as a replacement MP3 player. With my previous MP3 player I had become accustomed to downloading specific podcasts, such as the Radio National podcasts, to the computer and then connecting the MP3 player to download the podcasts. This has proven to be a good method, as I can take a good link at the Radio National story that goes with the podcast before downloading it, not to mention that the Radio National website provides plenty of information on each podcast to inform this decision. However, I am finding that the iPod Touch does not allow this method of operation. For podcasts I need to use iTunes and accept push technology to download a whole set of programs in the general area of interest. Then, in order to play a particular podcast, I need to scroll through a series of dated programs in that general area of interest and have no way to judge whether a podcast is of sufficient interest before playing (as the iPod screen does not seem to provide much information about particular podcasts). How can I get the iPod Touch to do what we want - individual podcasts, rather than what it wants to give us, which is a suite of poorly described push jumble podcasts. (more…)