Ebook Organization! Who wouldn't want that?

As the title states, I found a great free and open source product called Calibre (pronounced "caliber") created by a man named Kovid Goyal. Mr. Goyal created this product because he wanted his Sony PRS-500 to work on Linux and during this process he created the software to convert the most popular ebook formats to the LRF format (Sony's ebook format). The product grew from there to encompass a wide range of formats and does much more. You can find some of the great features this product has to offer below:

• Centralized management of ebook collection which includes books, magazines, comics and newspapers
• Can convert ebooks to a wide range of desired formats
• Numerous ebook devices supported for default outputing and converting such as e-readers from Amazon, Apple, Sony, Endless Ideas, Google/HTC and Hanlin
• Edit metadata of collection individually or download metadata and covers from the web
• Download a wide variety of news from supported news sites to your device

You can find a great demo of Calibre here which shows you all the capabilities discussed above and more. Hope you enjoy it like I did!

Power outages...

Hey folks! Been a long time, my apologies as the holiday season is always unpredictable so it's impossible for me to ever tell where I will be at any given time. However, now that the holidays are over, I have a couple quick thoughts to put down.

The first being power outages...sadly power outages are not your friend when it comes to electronics. Though it might be nice to get them because it "makes" you forget technology for a period of time (assuming you don't have a smart phone of course), it can cause havoc to your computer and any electronics you may have. The minimum preventive measure you should take is to use a surge protector and in my opinion, the best protection is to have a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). There are some great ones out there but my recommendation is CyberPower; a great power supply without forking over a ton of money for "other" brand name power supplies. Also, be sure to "size" your power requirements properly so that your UPS can handle the load of your electronics. If you have one computer or more, you can check out how much power you are using here. Other electronics will tell you their usage and I would choose the MAX the manual says you would use. Add it all up and you will be good to go with the right sized UPS.

The reason I even brought up power outages on this post is because I had a client recently who suffered from a power outage and when their computer was powered back up, the machine was stuck at boot stating it had a hard drive read error. Just so you folks know, this can mean several things.

During the power outage you could have run into...

1. A hard drive crash caused your hard drive to die which is possible
2. A Windows file was corrupted (assuming you have windows)
   
3. Your BIOS settings were reset and your boot order was changed

Usually, the last point is what happens the most and this is what I ran into last week. This is easy enough to resolve by checking your boot priority order in your BIOS settings by accessing the setup screen during boot (I have seen computers accessed by either pressing the "DEL" or "F12" keys but you will have to check your computer manual to be sure what your motherboard requires. Make sure the boot order has the local hard drive with the Operating System setup to boot first unless you want to boot a cd or floppy in the future in which case add those in the order accordingly. That's it for now!

What software do I need to clean up my pc?

As I have been working on MBM Techy consulting (IT/Computer Consulting), I have noticed many people with similar issues regarding virus/adware/spyware/malware ridden computers. I have always found several programs to be of great use to clean up systems and some of those programs I have listed below:

• Malwarebytes - A great program to remove malware on your computer and the great news is it's free (although they have a paid for version to "shield" your computer of any possible threat). Have you suddenly been disconnected from the internet or have an unwanted wallpaper on your dekstop? Chances are you have malware and I recommend Malwarebytes to remove it.
  
• AVG (Free Version) - Need protection from day-to-day virus'? I always found that a smaller footprint is better and I am partial to AVG for the real simple need of virus protection. Find it at http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage
• Spybot Search & Destroy - Although there is no catch all for spyware/adware, this is a good utility to keep on your computer to clean your system and to protect you from future attacks. I have found the Tea Timer tool to be a little too memory intensive but use the rest of the application for its intended use of finding all those nasty little spyware and adware on your system...and hey, it's free :)
  
• CCleaner - Oh yes, registry bloat...at one point or another, we have all been there and know that the Windows operating system does collect tons of "extra information" that is no longer needed or supposedly has been uninstalled. In comes a free application called CCleaner, to do the "dirty" business of cleanup. It is truly the only application I trust to go in and remove the bloating from a system.
• Belarc Advisor - Ever wonder what exactly is in your computer? or need to know what is in there to do an upgrade? Well look no further! Short of opening your computer and taking a look at what's inside, Belarc Advisor is the easy way to find out what your system is really made up. You will find information from Software packages to specific hardware specifications. Great to use when you want to buy those memory upgrades and it's free!
• Smart Defrag - Have tons of laptops in your household? How about always having to try and remember to run defragmentation when you most need it? Myself, I could never remember so here is a nice free handy program that does all the scheduling for you and automatically at that. People always neglect their hard drives and don't realize the benefits of having your data always defragmented for the best possible access and write times. Smart Defrag (v1.30 released recently), automatically runs defragmention when needed and does so unobstrusivley by running only when the processor usage is set to below your prescribed threshold. This is great for laptops since they are always turned on and off and you never know if your scheduled defragmentation is ever run. Keep your data organized!

That's it for now...more blurbs to come in the future! If anyone has more software to add to the list above, feel free to comment! I would love to hear from you.