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Carry A Computer in your Pocket

Bring Your Favorite Software, Files, and Settings with You

GOAL: Provide a list of Portable Applications that you can run on any PC and feel like you never left home.

Do you use multiple computers on a regular basis? Do you go from home, to work, to friends, and relative’s houses where you can never guarantee that the applications that you need are available? Well, you need a USB flash drive loaded with Portable Applications.

You can load numerous free and useful applications onto a USB drive and take a solid computing environment that can be used on any PC on the road. I used to get frustrated when I visited my parents or in-laws houses, because their computers were not set up with what I needed to waste time get things done. Now, I just pull out my portable computing environment get to work.

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Awesome Adobe Acrobat Alternatives that Will Make Love to your Computer

Keep the PDFs, Lose the AcroCrap

Goal: Provide a list of FREE applications that will allow you to do everything you want with PDFs while avoiding the annoying, expensive problems of Adobe Acrobat.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is great for a number of reasons however; Adobe Acrobat (the de facto standard application) is a horrendous piece of garbage.  The Acrobat Reader (Free) is painfully slow to open, has more bugs than a porch light, and love to crash browsers. The Acrobat Writer (Standard $299 or Professional $449) applications are ridiculously expensive.

Here is a list of applications that will let you get the most out of the PDF format with none of the issues:

You can use this combination of free applications to do just about everything that you would ever want from Adobe Acrobat.

• Open and Read PDF files
• Create PDF files from any document or application on your computer
• Edit PDFs by converting them into Microsoft Word documents
• Merge Multiple PFDs into a single file
• Stop PDFs from crashing your browser
• Not spend hundreds of dollars

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Fix the Missing Tags in your MP3 Files

Automagically Find, and Correct the Tags Missing from your MP3 Collection

Goal: Show you how to easily fix the missing tags in your MP3 collection using free software.

Some of the songs in your iTunes library may have incomplete tags. Here’s how we fix this problem.

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Reusing an Old PC as a Server (Part 2)

Putting Your New Server to Work

Goal: Use the server that you set up in the previous article to perform helpful tasks such as backing up computers on your network, storing media files in a central location, share one printer with every computers computer in the house.

In the previous article you learned you to set up the VNC software to remote control your server from another computer. Now that you have your basic server up and running, here are some of the fun things that we’re going to learn how to do:

• Share files between computers
• Run backups of the computers on your network
• Function as a print server so that all of your computers can share one computer
• Operate as a dedicated BitTorrent server to download and upload files
• Configure a Professional Testing Server for Web Development
• And a few other ideas

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Reusing an Old PC as a Server Part 1

Using Free Software and Equipment that you Already Own

Goal: Provide instructions to turn an old computer into a server that you can control remotely and use for various handy purposes.

Assumptions: You have, or can an old computer that is no longer used and a basic router for your home network.

So let’s say you hit the technology jackpot and score yourself a shiny new super computer. (OK, maybe just a plain old new computer.) Congratulations! Now, after you get over the initial euphoria of setting up your new workhorse, you might start wondering what to do with your faithful old friend. (OK, annoying old dinosaur.)

Should you…..

• Throw it out? – NO
• Give it away? – Come on
• Donate it to charity? – Even poor kids don’t want that thing
• Take it out to a field and give it an Office Space style beatdown like Peter, Michael Bolton, and Samir did to that printer. (Fun, but we can do better.)

Let’s take that doddering old codger and breathe some new life into it.