A Custom Laptop Cooler for Docked Laptop

December 21, 2011 By 2 Comments
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If you use a laptop very often then you are fully aware of how hot they can become on the bottom. As a result, the stores are full of devices popularly referred to as  “Laptop Cooling Pads” or “Chill Mats”. They are USB powered fans in a portable mat that you place between you and your laptop or on a desktop. They protect your lap from the warm, bottom surface of a laptop and also keep the laptop cool which is important to prevent overheating. This becomes especially important when you are using one of the more high-end models with powerful CPUs and graphics capabilities. Just … [Read more...]

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Tips on Downloading Perimeter Church Sermons as MP3

November 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Perimeter Church is a large Presbyterian PCA church in north Atlanta. They make their sermons available from their web site and via pod-casting using iTunes. The sermons are some of the best, scriptural based teachings you will find. Most are from lead teacher Randy Pope who founded the church over 25 years ago. This article explains how to access the online sermons both in streaming format from the church's site and via downloading MP3s directly to your computer using your browser, Outlook 2007 or any RSS reader. Podcasting means the you can listen to the sermons online using a computer or … [Read more...]

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Hike to Panther Creek Falls

August 27, 2011 By 4 Comments
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  Liz chose to spend her birthday hiking and so after some research, we chose to hike to Panther Creek Falls. The falls are located in Habersham County, GA and the trail follows the creek in for over 5 miles. We parked at the Panther Creek Recreation area lot just off of Old Historic Hwy 441 and from there it was about 3.7 miles to the falls heading south east from the parking area. The trail takes you under the 441 overpass and follows the creek into a beautiful and quiet area of the forest. The scenery changes significantly along the entire hike so you are treated to new surprises. … [Read more...]

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Bike Riding over the July Fourth Holiday for Fun and Exercise

July 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Liz and I enjoyed this year’s July 4th holiday by riding our bicycles across a couple of Atlanta’s best outdoor trails. Even amid very hot and humid weather, the majority of our ride was under a canopy of thick trees providing a beautiful and very comfortable place to enjoy the outdoors. Our rides were only a couple of hours each but provided excellent aerobic exercise. We were among many others who were walking, jogging, skating and riding these beautiful trails. Alpharetta’s Big Creek Greenway On Friday,  we rode the entire length of the Alpharetta Big Creek Greenway starting at … [Read more...]

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Possible Clue to Getting Long Battery Life with HTC Thunderbolt Android Phone

May 31, 2011 By 4 Comments

Poor Battery Life defined: Could not go through a normal workday without having to plug into AC! I have had the new HTC Thunderbolt Phone from Verizon for several months now and have had to live with horrible battery life like everyone else until recently. I had read all the blogs and tried all of the tips including task killers (which can actually use more power than they save), cutting back on sync schedules and more. Nothing had really helped and I tried them all. Coming from the Palm and then Blackberry’s I was used to going several days on a single charge. At one point the battery … [Read more...]

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Verizon 4G LTE Mobile Broadband is Fast…very Fast!

March 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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I was an early adopter of wireless broadband for laptops starting several years back with an offering from T-Mobile that was only as fast a dial-up connection.  Later I upgraded to Verizon EVDO 1x (3G) and achieved on average about 1.5 MB down and 0.5 up. This was much better than dial-up but still slower than most cable or DSL connections to homes or businesses in the U.S. In the beginning this 3G was limited to major metropolitan areas but now is available just about everywhere. Just a few weeks back, Verizon released its new 4G LTE wireless broadband capability, initially limited to … [Read more...]

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Easily Save and Retrieve Application and User Settings in VB.NET or C# Apps

January 28, 2011 By 14 Comments
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  We used to save our application or user settings in an INI file (dark ages) or more recently in XML files using our own code or classes borrowed from other developers. But applications built with the .NET framework using Visual Studio can take advantage of built-in tools to simplify or speed up access and saving of runtime values. Once common example is saving database connection string information in a configuration file so that it may be changed without need to recompile the application. Here are some simple examples in VB.NET. C# code uses a slightly different syntax the concepts … [Read more...]

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500 – Internal server error from IIS 7.5 on Windows 2008 R2

January 21, 2011 By 8 Comments
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You are running an ASP or ASP.NET web application on IIS on Windows 2008 R2 from a remote web browser and you constantly see following error message. While this is the proper results for a production server (you never want to show remote users the details of an error), it is not helpful while testing a new installation…as a developer you need to see the error messages on the remote browser. There is an obscure setting that controls this for both ASP and ASP.NET. I hope the following will help anyone needing to see error details on a remote connected browser. For Classic ASP … [Read more...]

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Snow Day 2011–Johns Creek, GA

January 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Those of us in the deep South may not know how to drive in snowy, icy conditions but we do know how to enjoy a really good Snow Day!. Our street probably looked like many other streets across the North Georgia as the winter storm brought a nice, white blanket of snow. Our area received  somewhere between 5 and 7 inches. Since we live on a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a short but steep hill, the conditions are ripe for a day of winter sports. Our neighbors across the street began the winter Olympic competition by setting up a snow ramp at the end of their steep driveway. Can you say … [Read more...]

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Has the Demise of RIM’s Blackberry Already Begun?

December 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

UPDATE: 12/23/2010 – Cannot update the applications on my Blackberry Tour even after using the latest available version 6.0.1.18. The updates just hangs and never completes. It did this with the previous version of the Desktop Manager but hung at a different place.  My wife has the same phone and syncs with a different laptop. Both of us cannot update or inline or using the Desktop Manager. RIM – With all of your resources… you should be able to make this work. The more frustrated I get the the Blackberry the more attractive the new Android phones look! UPDATE: Leaked copies of … [Read more...]

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