Archive for category Guide
Useful tool for anyone writing a document (or in my case blog posts)
Posted by Malcolm Micallef in Guide on March 6, 2010
Paper rater is a free online tool which analyzes your writing and offers feedback on your grammar, spelling and more. For anyone who knows me will understand how I found and how much I start using this tool.Paper rater is a free online tool which analyzes your writing and offers feedback on your grammar, spelling and more. For anyone who knows me will understand how I found and how much I start using this tool.
The tool is completely fool proof. Just paste the text you want analyzed into the text field and select what type of content it is (research paper, personal narrative, essay, book report, speech/presentation, short story, movie review, and other) and submit it for review. Within seconds, Paper rater generates a report that analyzes several aspects of your submission.
The tool looks at your grammar and spelling, but it also gives feedback on your writing style and choice of words. It can also suggest replacement word and phrases by just right clicking on the highlighted words in the generated reports. Paper rater also detects plagiarism by comparing the content you submit with the published online content to see if there are any similarities. This won’t be caused if you use the proper citations in your text.
Paper Rater is a solid tool for double-checking your work as you prepare your next speech or presentation. Also helps the would be blogger who’s English is quite up to scratch.
Putting off formatting your computer?
Posted by Malcolm Micallef in Guide, Technology on February 28, 2010
Let’s be honest a lot of computers need to be formatted but the people responsible for them wouldn’t feel like backing up all the critical data and also installing the software on the fresh computer would be a huge chore.
In a previous blog post I mentioned that an user should keep data backed up all the time and I mentioned tools to help the user to accomplish this regular back up. So the last part that needs to be addressed is the installing of software.
When formatting a computer the process is practically all automated. The user just has to start the process and then they can enjoy a nice cup of tea while the operating system formats and installs the new OS. Once complete the user needs to install the software they usually do. To accomplish this faster and easier there is a new service called Ninite.
This service allows you to select some software you wish to install. Once selected you download a small executable which will then download all the selected software and also install them for the user. During this process the computer is completely usable but feel free to get more tea.
The service contains software which I gurantee you would install on any system, such as Chrome, Firefox, Skype, Messenger, VLC, iTunes, Winamp, Adobe Reader, and many more.
For all you who have been putting off formatting your computer you now have one less excuse on why not to do it.
X’Buzz?
Posted by Malcolm Micallef in Guide, Technology on February 22, 2010
Google recently announced Google Buzz. So far all the people I am following seem to be confused what Buzz is really about. I shall now attempt to clear the confusion (or increase it).
Google Buzz brings social networking into Gmail and the rest of the Google applications. Whether or not you are into the whole social networking scene (twitter or facebook), Buzz offers a different approach to this scene.
Buzz’s key features are:
- Automatic friend lists (friends are added automatically who you have emailed on Gmail). This caused a lot of controversy since people were finding friends in their friend list which they did not want.
- “Rich fast sharing” combines sources like Picasa and Twitter into a single feed. It also includes a full sized photo browsing utility.
- Public and private Buzzs.
- Inbox integration (instead of emailing you with updates, like facebook does, Buzz features emails that update dynamically with all the Buzz threads).
- “Recommended Buzz” puts friend of friend content into your stream, even if you’re not acquainted. The system learns what you would be interested in overtime through user feedback.
Buzz lets you share photos, video, links to web sites, and other content from all over the web with your friends and your friends of friends.
The video below has been created by Google to better explain the purpose and the features of Buzz.
Downloading and Discovering TV shows Easier than Ever
Posted by Malcolm Micallef in Guide, Technology on February 15, 2010
Living on a small island, such as Malta, means that you are usually behind the trend in almost everything. The local television in Malta is quite appalling. Recently I saw a breakfast show called “Hadd Ghalik” and I almost had to rip my eyes out. I turn to foreign programming to entertain me during my morning rituals. Since Malta is so small and in Europe means that most programs shown are behind. However, recently I was surprised to see that a show I watch was being shown on a local network and it was only a couple of months old.
Being able to download movies and television programs is a must for the enthusiastic DVD night people. Being the president of this club I decided to show you the easiest way to obtain these episodes. All you have to worry about is preparing snacks and the ice cold beer.
There is a freeware program called “ted” (torrent episode downloader). Ted can find episodes of any TV show you like to watch. Just add your favourite shows to ted and it will search for the newest episodes and downloads them for you. Ted uses bit torrent and RSS technology to get you the newest episodes as fast as possible.
With ted you still need a bit torrent client to download the torrent files but this program will allow you to find the torrent files easily and quickly. Also it allows you to discover new shows to watch. Once you add a show to your list it will tell you when a new show comes out and gives you the torrent file for it.
My favourite bit torrent programs are Azureus and uTorrent.
Now people can stop coming to me and asking me for my files. You know who you are 
Malcolm X fought for human rights of Black Americans. Malcolm M (myself) is bringing entertainment to all.
Wordpress 500 Internal Server Error and GoDaddy
Posted by Malcolm Micallef in Errors, Guide, Technology on February 7, 2010
This weekend I didn’t have much time to write on this blog. One reason is because of parties and the other is the sheer amount of work I had to perform. Apart from electronics failing left, right and centre a site I am working on failed this week for no apparent reason.
The site uses wordpress where I was creating a theme and some custom widgets and applications. I wasn’t working on it when the Internal server error occurred. I immediately went onto Google for the solution, what any experienced trouble-shooter would do. My search immediately lead to a problem between wordpress and my webhost, GoDaddy Shared Windows hosting.
I started by removing all the plug-ins as some people did to fix the problem. This had no effect on the error. I changed the theme name to try force wordpress to use the default theme and Houston we still have a problem. I even resorted to emailing customer support of GoDaddy but they were as helpful as most customer support around the world. Completely useless.
After some thinking and debugging I noticed the web.config which in the subdirectory which I never created. I decided to rename it and presto the site was back up and running like nothing ever happened. Hopefully this little piece of information will find its way onto Google so that if someone has the same problem as I did would be able to notice and fix the problem quicker than I did. Since I wasted a few hours on this problem.
This problem occured on a site I am developing but I was worried that my site would crash too since I was using wordpress too. So it was very important I solved the problem just in case this site decided to bite the dust too. At least now I am more confident that I can fix the site quickly. I don’t want anyone not to be able to read my crazy thoughts for a day.
Leave your computer on overnight?
Posted by Malcolm Micallef in Guide, Technology on February 2, 2010
Technology, unlike its fleshy creators, does not require sleep. I often have left my PC on overnight to allow it to do some processing and other very important things (movies and TV episodes). If you are going to leave your PC on overnight below is a guide of how to utilize the computer completely. With electricity prices rising faster and faster this article might save you cash and heart break in the future.
This is also my first HOW-TO or GUIDE post I have ever done in my life so you going to have to bear with me.
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