LANcom Technology Blog

Looking for the just the right template for a PowerPoint presentation? TemplateWise have heaps of professional looking PowerPoint templates available for free on their website.

You can browse the TemplateWise site by category, tags, or just check out the most popular templates. They also have a number of music loops you can apply to your presentation for background noise.

To visit TemplateWise click here.

Hat tip to Makeuseof.com for the idea for this post

Gmail has recently released a new feature which allows you to automatically translate emails into the language of your choice. When you enable message translation, and you receive a message in another language, all you have to do is go to the top of the message and click Translate message.

Google automatically knows what language the message is in and what your default language is, but you can change these setting if you want to.

To Enable message translation in Gmail:

1. Go to Settings (top right), and go to the Labs tab
2. Go to Message translation and select Enable
3. Now scroll to the bottom and click Save Changes
   

To learn more about Message translation from the Gmail Blog click here.

GoToMeeting is a web conferencing service that a number of our customers have found very useful. It allows you to hold meetings online, saving you the time and expense of getting everyone in the same place at the same time. It’s also easy to use, cost effective, and secure.

Here’s a quick look at GoToMeeting’s main features:

1. All You Can Meet – The GoToMeeting service allows you to have as many online meetings as you want, each meeting can have up to 15 attendees.
2. Share your screen, your mouse, and your keyboard – As the presenter of the meeting you have the option to not only share the screen of your computer, but also allow attendees to take control of your mouse and keyboard. So if one attendee wants to make a change to a document you are viewing you can easily pass control of your computer over to them.
3. Switch presenters - You can easy give the role of presenter to an attendee so that they can share their screen with the group as well.
4. Choose between phone conferencing or VOIP– GoToMeeting offers you and your attendees the option of calling a phone conferencing number or of using your computer’s speakers and microphone.
5. Encryption - GoToMeeting offers end to end 128 bit AES encryption, so you know all your meetings are secure.
6. No signup for attendees – Those you want to attend your meetings don’t need to sign up. When you invite someone to a meeting they will receive an email with a link and a meeting ID, which they enter online to access your meeting.
7. Record your meetings – Meetings can be recorded for you to review later or for anyone that is unable to attend.
   
8. Reliability – GoToMeeting has fault-tolerant architecture, ensuring everything works every time.

GoToMeeting currently has a free 30 day trial available on their website, click here to learn more. If you would like to see a video demonstration of this service click here.

Ever wanted to just quickly print a 2 page article from the web, but ended up with 9 pages including all the ads and menu items? PrintFriendly is an online tool which can quickly and easily create a print-friendly version for you.

All you have to do is copy and paste the link to the page you want to print into the box on the PrintFriendly website and click Print preview.

PrintFriendly will then display a Print preview of your print-friendly webpage and you can either click print or save it as a PDF. There is also a remove images box you can tick if you would like to print the page without the images.

To visit the PrintFriendly website and try it out for yourself click here.

Hat tip to MakeUseOf.com for the idea for this post.

In a post on the Microsoft blog Steven Sinofsky, the senior vice president of the Windows engineering group, has announced that Microsoft is aiming to have Windows 7 available for this holiday season (the US holiday season starts November 27).

Windows 7 was originally scheduled for release early next year, but analysts have been suggesting for some time that it would likely be released sooner.

Microsoft is aiming to release Windows 7 to computer makers sometime in August and has already released the Release Candidate version to the public.

To read more about this from ComputerWorld click here. To read about the new features coming in Windows 7 click here.

This month Waruna Kirimetiyawa, LANcom’s Chief Technical Officer, is participating in Shave 09 for the Leukaemia & Blood Foundation. The Leukaemia & Blood Foundation (LBF) provides essential support for those with leukaemia and lymphoma and their families.

Did you know that every day 6 New Zealand children and adults are diagnosed with blood cancers like leukaemia and lymphoma?

You can help support this great cause by sponsoring Waruna on the Shave 09 website (click here to sponsor Waruna).

Waruna will be shaving his head on the 1st of June and if he reaches his online fundraising target of $500 we will post the pictures of the shave on this blog.

Last year on this blog we covered the Voltaic Generator, a laptop bag which can charge your laptop using only the power of the sun (Click here to see original post). Well now a year after it’s release the Voltaic Generator is finally available in New Zealand.

The Voltaic Generator, available through SolarHabit, uses high efficiency solar cells to charge a battery pack within the bag. Your laptop can then be plugged into this to be charged.

Here are some other quick facts about the Voltaic Generator:

1. It takes about 5 hours of sunlight to fully charge the Voltaic battery
2. The shell is made from 100% recycle soda bottles
3. The bag can also be used to charge your cell phone and other handheld devices such as IPods, GPSs, and Cameras

To find out more about the Voltaic Generator click here.

According to Microsoft Windows 7 will offer a great improvement in boot time, but since Windows 7 isn’t here yet here are a couple of tips for speeding up your XP or Vista computer’s startup.

1. Get rid of the programs your never use
The easiest way to speed up your computer’s startup is to remove any unnecessary programs you have on your computer. Not only will this speed up your boot time but will improve the performance of your computer in general. You can remove programs you no longer use in Vista by going to Start, Control Panel, Programs, and then Programs and Features. To remove a program, select it and then click Uninstall.

To remove programs in XP you can go to Start, Control Panel, and then Add or Remove Programs. If you see a program you no longer use you can remove it by clicking on it and then selecting Remove.

2. Stop programs from starting on their own
The more programs that your computer has to start when it is first turned on the longer it will take. Some programs you will want to start up as soon as you turn on your computer such as your antivirus or programs you use all the time, but there are often other programs that will start up that you don’t need. To see a list of startup applications in XP or Vista:

1. Go to Start, Run, and then type in “msconfig” and click OK
2. Now go to the Startup tab. From here you can un-tick the items that you do not want to start automatically, but be careful not to un-tick anything unless you are sure you know what it is. In the example below you can see we have un-ticked the box for Windows Messenger.
3. You can then click Apply and Restart your computer.

If you would like more tips on how to speed up your computer’s start up click here to read an article from MSN Tech.

Wolfram Alfa is a soon to be released computational knowledge engine, and what it can do is understand and respond to questions the same way a person does. In a demonstration the creator, Dr Stephen Wolfram, asked ‘What is the GDP of France divided by Italy?” and the engine gave the correct answer along with supporting graphs and other statistics.

According to Dr Wolfram using Wolfram Alpha will be “Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you’re talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results.”

Experts have said that this technology could be as important to the web as Google.

This search engine will be free to use and will be released to the public later this month. To learn more about it from Computerworld click here.