by David Hakala
A memory card is essentially portable RAM, electronic memory that you can put in your pocket and plug into various devices to use as storage. A USB flash drive is a type of memory card. So are the wafer-thin cards you slide into digital cameras, game consoles, etc. There are different types of memory cards made for different purposes.
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by David Hakala
CD and DVD recording media are simple plastic things that should be easy to buy. But there is quite a bit to know about blank discs before you purchase.
First, there’s spelling. ‘Disk’ refers to magnetic media such as hard drives and floppies (if you remember floppies). “Disc” refers to optical media such as CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray.
Next, there are discs that can be recorded only once and discs that are “re-writable”, that can be erased and recorded again just like magnetic disks. A CD-R disc is record-once, a CD-RW is re-writable. A DVD-R or DVD+R is record-once, and a DVD-RW or DVD+RW is re-writable.
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by David Hakala
Adobe Flash is a multimedia format that presents movie-like animations. You may find Flash files embedded in TV news Web sites and other visually oriented sites. To view Flash presentations you need special software.
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by Tina Gasperson
When it comes to handling your digital music collection, things can start to sound a bit violent, what with all the ripping and burning going on. Many people know what burning a CD means, but what is “ripping” and how do you do it?
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by David Hakala
While every computer comes with sound capabilities built into its motherboard, they’re usually of mediocre quality. Discriminating users want more so they buy add-on sound cards. The features you need in a sound card depend on the type of listening that you do most.
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by David Hakala
DAEMON Tools is a Windows software suite that makes files that are exact images of CD and DVD discs. You can store these disc images on your hard drive and use them exactly as if they were physical discs in your CD/DVD drive. You can also burn disc images to CD or DVD discs as backups, or even transfer disc images over the Internet.
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by David Hakala
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a major bone of contention between consumers of music and video and the producers of such entertainment. Producers want to control their copyrights, dictating where, how, and even how long consumers can use their creations. Consumers – buyers or customers, to give them their rightful names – want to use their purchases, their property, as they see fit. After all, when you buy a book it doesn’t open only when you are sitting in a specific chair, and it does not burst into flames and vanish after a certain period of time. Why should digital entertainment be any different?
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by Tina Gasperson
With the advent of digital photos, creating special presentations has become a fairly easy task for the home user. Why just print your photos out on photo paper? Now you can make a captivating multimedia show that will entertain your family and friends much more than flipping through a paper photo album.
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by David Hakala
Q: I think I have trained my Dell Vostro/Vista to recognise my voice, but how do I actually put it into practice? I will shortly be having to type a quite lengthy report and it would be really useful to merely speak to my laptop since my typing speed is bit tortoise-like! – Nigel
Speech-to-text, or speech recognition, is a feature built into the Vista operating system. Like all the many components of a general-purpose operating system, Vista’s speech recognition is not the best of its breed. Third-party speech recognition software such as Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking are more reliable than Vista’s built-in stuff. For a “quite lengthy report” and regular use, I would highly recommend investing in top-quality speech recognition software.
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by Tina Gasperson
Q: How do you convert HTML and Flash files to PowerPoint? — Kevin
A few tiplets ago I showed you how to convert your PowerPoint slideshows to video files that you could upload to services such as Youtube.com. Now a reader wants to know how to convert Web pages (.htm) and Flash animated files (.swf) into PowerPoint. Kevin, you don’t convert these types of files, you import them as slides. And it’s very easy to do.
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by Nathaniel Poor
If you’re an iTunes junkie like I am, the thought of using some other online service to get music would never occur to you. It is sure to be in some strange format and probably won’t work with iTunes.
But no. Check out Amazon’s MP3 store. I was sucked in recently when I heard they had U2’s Boy for $5 for a limited time. Yes, $5. And even better, the songs are automatically added to iTunes.
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