GuruNews, Volume 10 Number 5

Fri Feb 26 19:33:38 PST 2010

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Vol. 10, No. 5                           

2-26-10

1 I’m over this snow 

2 Used to the weather

3 Mama mia Google, Wal-Mart levels up, Gmail add-ons, IE6 death   

4 Masked ball

5 Adding RAM

I don’t know about you but I’m ready for spring.  Every week it’s the same old thing, cold, snow, more cold and more snow.  The occasional couple of days in the 40s and 50s are just teasers, usually followed closely by another beatdown by even more frigid temperatures.

Every morning I drag out of bed to see how much work the car will need before I even start it to warm up.  Once done, I wonder if more snow is on the way, whether the road conditions are decent or insane and whether I’ll have to spend long minutes behind a school bus loading up.

I have a radio in the bathroom that I fire up during my morning ablutions but I don’t always catch all the news.  Running water, phone calls, you name it and it can happen to interrupt my rapt attention to all things weather.

Luckily, after I have made my first foray out to battle the flakes and start the old beast up I can come back in to the Internet.

Of course my first stop is always the local radio station and newspaper websites.  You’ll usually get up to date weather forecasts and school closings from at least one of those and likely most.  You may get road conditions but they may be limited to anecdotes and not contain anything from local law enforcement right away.

Your regional television station pages may give you a larger picture of the vicinity as well as current radar images so you can see the location of the current system and how large it is.

While the Louisville stations do a great job, I prefer the radar page from Channel 12 in Cincinnati.  From the main map you can zoom into different areas in a wide region to see your particular area of interest.  This is especially year round for moving storm front so you can get the locations of heavy weather on a more local scale.  Access it at:

http://www.local12.com/content/weather/pd12/default.aspx

As far as road conditions go it’s hard to beat the state transportation websites for updated information regardless of the season.  Kentucky has by far the most useful site in our local region, with a state map that allows you too zoom into the local level as close as state roads.  I check SR 36 between Carrollton and Milton every morning it snows as that is my route to work in Madison.  

Not only will you get weather effects, you’ll also see closures and construction zones so you’ll no what to watch for.  You can access this site at:

http://511.ky.gov/

Indiana’s site isn’t quite so helpful, but it does list the travel advisories from each county, updated by the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.  These advisories, in levels from 1 to 3, represent the travel restrictions in a given county.  These levels can apply to not only road conditions but gas leaks, chemical spills, other emergencies etc.  That site is:

http://www.in.gov/dhs/files/travel-advisory-map/

Spring is just a couple of weeks away and hopefully it will whisk away the bone-chilling cold and inches of white death.  Until then, I’ll be hitting the web for info and hitting the store for milk and bread ;)

Kevin Mefford, Editor

microdome at seidata.com

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

Google was attacked in an Italian court this week for hosting a video that was put up by a user of the Google Video service, even though Google took the video down upon review hours later:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/serious-threat-to-web-in-italy.html

Wal-Mart has purchased the online streaming service Vudu, presumably to take on Netflix and Amazon:

http://gizmodo.com/5477588/

GMail has moved some of their beta features found in the labs out into general use for all GMail members, find out more about them here:

http://tinyurl.com/yha3p8d

If you're still using Internet Explorer 6, YouTube will start ending support for the browser starting on March 13, as well as for many other Google services.  If you're on Internet Explorer 7 or 8 or any version of Chrome, Opera, Firefox or Safari you will be fine.  The videos will still play, but other features probably will not work.

http://tinyurl.com/ya2mm3p

Daniel A. Williams 

daniel at thepcgurus.com

Download of the Week

Here's a simple photo-editing tool.  InstantMask lets you rapidly select which portions of a photo to keep and which to discard, and gives you a perfectly trimmed image with just your subject in a plain white background. 

It's free here:

http://tinyurl.com/GURU-MASK 

NOTE: It is recommended to use the SoftPedia Secure Download link.  

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com

Email Question of the Week

Q:  Sorry to bother you on your personal email but you gave this as an alternative, so I am taking you up on your generosity.

I have a 5 year old Gateway with  256 MB Ram.  It is getting very slow and awkward.  I also use it for my small business and it has a great deal of information on it but does not use even half the memory.  It is cost effective to upgrade the ram and expect better operation?  I would like to add at least 2 GB if possible.  Or would I be better off just getting a new one with 4 or 6 GB of RAM?  You are my only source for intelligent non selling information.

THANK YOU

A:  You most definitely need RAM.  The "memory" you're describing is actually hard drive or storage space.  The two are often confused.

If you send me the model number I can tell you what kind you need and how much you can add.  The Bellsouth address is fine (I'm responding from the SEI address so the rest of the team knows what we're doing that's team related".  Odds are you can go to 1-2GB without a problem.  This will greatly speed up the PC as 256MB just isn't enough to run XP anymore.

I would also suggest a solid backup system for your data (in case you don't already have one) since a five year old hard drive is getting some age on it.

Keep me posted if I can help you more :)

Kevin Mefford

microdome at seidata.com

Contact info and legal stuff

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