Its my age. Some of you may have been under the mistaken belief that I’m some old, middle aged fogey. But no. I’m not. I’m a second-semester senior. And I’ve got 10 days till graduation, and believe me I’m counting the days. Several of my classes have stopped teaching and I’ve been looking for ways to fill the time. My current time-waster is four-square, but many times we’re not allowed out of the classroom. Thus, I whip out my trust laptop and work on convincing schools to take me off their wait-list, work on this site, or - and this is my guilty pleasure - I play arcade games. That link is to a site discovered just today - DiggyGames.
Diggygames appears to be more than just a carbon-copy turnkey site that many arcade sites are, it actually has some games I’ve never seen before. One of them, which I’ve been playing quite obsessively is Roller Coaster Rush. You race a roller coaster along at track, and try to do tricks (a la Tony Hawk), and not wipe out. If you do well enough, you unlock the next track. Its a simple concept, but quite entertaining. Another is Doodle Defender - a kind of free motion Defenders/Asteroids cross, which is also a bit addictive.
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I’d like to take a look at a website thats similar in scope to mine today, the Frustrated Computer User blog. The site looks at a variety of issues facing computer users and how to deal with them. Recent articles include how to make a secure computer password (hint: random letters and symbols/no dates) and a brief history of the word ‘hacker’, protecting your computer from power surges, recycling your computer, registry cleaning, and determining the security of data. A fairly wide range of subjects, but most articles are at least somewhat informative.
While the website is somewhat new (oldest article is from April), its got some good subject material. Check the computers section for stuff specific to computers, or just hit the homepage and look for articles related to computer help. While obviously not nearly as good as this site (I mean, seriously, who is?), its got quite a bit going for it, and shows some potential.
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One of the coders for this website lives in India, another in Chicago. A marketer lives in Berkeley. But I live in Houston. Despite this, we have no realy issues with communication. We use instant messaging, VoIP, phone calls, and more recently Webinars. What is a Webinar? a webinar is essentially an online conference (web+seminar, clever, eh?). It allows you to meet via audio or video chat with multiple people at once, allowing productive discussions without meeting them in person. As phone calls to India are, eh, I believe the scientific term is F***ing expensive, its easy to see how this can be useful. I’ve gotten far more done in a 10 minute webinar vs an hour long instant message conversation.
There are various Webinar Providers, and this site does a pretty good job of Webinar Software Comparisons, dealing with the pros and cons of each.
If your interested in looking more, check out the Webinar FAQ. I heartily recommend it.
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(BUILD-A-DAY DISCLAIMER: None of the Build-A-Day computers come with an operating system, as many people have copies of Windows around their home, or prefer to use a Free operating system such as Ubuntu or Debian. This is intentional. In addition, no computer builds will contain monitors, keyboard, or other peripherals unless otherwise specified.)
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A while back, when I was looking to get video’s for my ipod, I found 100s of sites that made huge claims, 1,000,000 movies - or a billion songs. Clearly, these claims are kind of outrageous. But now, unfortunately much to late for me to take advantage of it, I found a site that actually appears to deliver on those claims. It’s a media download site called FilePie. And unlike most of the sites I’d looked at in the past, this one is completely free.
Despite the price, it has an extensive list of features. All downloads are SSL encrypted to prevent snooping, as are all webpages. It has 700,000 songs (music downloads) and 2500 movies. It’s not a P2p network, and thus you don’t have to worry about the person your getting the movie from going offline and leaving you with a 650MB file thats completely worthless.
Sound to good to be true? Its not. Head on over and Download Movies - I realize I might sound like a shill, but its really got some amazing features.
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One of the primary reasons for the lack of recent updates on this site is our movement in a new direction. PennyWisePCs is going to stop focusing on providing computer configurations for people and start focusing on providing computers. If you would like to continue to view custom configurations and hard ware bargains, please head on over to our sister site,BYOPC.com here.
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(BUILD-A-DAY DISCLAIMER: None of the Build-A-Day computers come with an operating system, as many people have copies of Windows around their home, or prefer to use a Free operating system such as Ubuntu or Debian. This is intentional. In addition, no computer builds will contain monitors, keyboard, or other peripherals unless otherwise specified.)
Relatively incremental changes - but they’ll provide a large boost in performance. The only substantial change is the switch to an 8800GT, the best video card available for the money
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(BUILD-A-DAY DISCLAIMER: None of the Build-A-Day computers come with an operating system, as many people have copies of Windows around their home, or prefer to use a Free operating system such as Ubuntu or Debian. This is intentional. In addition, no computer builds will contain monitors, keyboard, or other peripherals unless otherwise specified.)
Lots of changes and improvements in this one
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(BUILD-A-DAY DISCLAIMER: None of the Build-A-Day computers come with an operating system, as many people have copies of Windows around their home, or prefer to use a Free operating system such as Ubuntu or Debian. This is intentional. In addition, no computer builds will contain monitors, keyboard, or other peripherals unless otherwise specified.)
This is again quite an improvement over yesterdays model, it offers the following changes:
- A faster processor - 2.4ghz dual core AMD vs 2.2ghz dual core AMD
- Better ram - 2GB of Kingston ram, of a faster clock speed, than the no name PQI used yesterday.
- Twice the hard drive space - a 160GB hard drive instead of an 80GB hard drive
- A dedicated video card, a Radeon 2600pro with dedicated video ram - this is a huge improvement over onboard video.
- A power supply that comes separately from the computer case - these are generally considered to be of higher quality
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(BUILD-A-DAY DISCLAIMER: None of the Build-A-Day computers come with an operating system, as many people have copies of Windows around their home, or prefer to use a Free operating system such as Ubuntu or Debian. This is intentional. In addition, no computer builds will contain monitors, keyboard, or other peripherals unless otherwise specified.)
This is quite an improvement of the $150 dollar build, and is a suitable computer for most casual users. It still lacks dedicated video, but with 2 gigs of RAM, a dual core processor, DVD burner, and an 80GB hard drive it can easily handle word processing, and most basic multimedia tasks.
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