That’s right, soon, FunkyTower WILL BE GONE! We will be replacing it with a new website: davidcrandall.com

That’s all! Be watching out as the change will happen within the next couple of months!

David

We’ve all seen those “Free This” and “Free That” ads.  You know the ones, where you give your info, they say “almost done” then you have to sign up for 20 billion offers, get tons and tons of spam, and ultimately go crazy.  Well, one site is changing the way things go down. (more…)

Many websites are developed with a CMS built in; many of those websites use blogging systems like Wordpress. FunkyTower.Com uses Wordpress.

Many of us bloggers have a comment system where readers can leave comments, but have you ever noticed that some comments seem to have the writer’s custom avatar while others do not? How do they do that? Well, it’s quite simple, really.

It’s called Gravatar (www.gravatar.com)

Gravatar is a free online avatar generator. Simply sign up with your e-mail address, upload an avatar, and you’re done. Now whenever you leave comments on a blog that has avatars enabled (with Gravatar support, which most do) your avatar will show up automatically. The way it works is Gravatar uses the e-mail address you enter when you leave a comment in conjunction to the e-mail you used to make the Gravatar account; when it finds your e-mail address in a comment post, it replaces the default avatar chosen by the blog owner with your avatar! Pretty neat, huh?

This will generally work. The few times it won’t are when the blog owner disables the support for “Gravatars” or just doesn’t have any sort of avatar system for comments. Other than that, when you leave comments here at FunkyTower.Com, or at other blogs like chris.pirillo.com (an amazing geek), you will have your very own, custom avatar.

When it comes to computers, I’m somewhat of a power user.  I’m also a big fan of certain TV shows and sometimes, I just want to watch TV in the comfort of my office; I’m in front of the computer half the time anyway.  Or say you’ve been spending hours upon hours in your home office working on that document and you need a break right around the same time that new episode of Family Guy comes on.  Maybe the only way to get a little privacey is to lock your self in the office, but you don’t want to just spend time on your computer – you’d rather be playing games on your Xbox, or watching a movie or watching TV.  Whatever your case, I have stumbled upon a VERY nice product.

I recently obtained a Samsung Touch of Color T260HD 26-Inch LCD HDTV Monitor.  That’s right, a 26″ LCD monitor with a TV tuner…and for less than $500.  “Well, David, that can’t be!  If such a product exists the quality and features must be poor and limited.”  Ah, ye of little faith…Believe it or not, this thing is a monster!

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Answer to question #1 and #2: A lot.   Answer to #3:  A LOT better.

One may look at Windows 7 via a Youtube video and think “It’s exactly the same as Vista!  It’s got a similar look, the file structure is similar to Vista’s, how could it possibly be any different?”  All I have to say is don’t knock it until you try it.

Firstly, I haven’t had any problems with Windows 7 thus far, and I’ve had it almost a month.  It runs so much quicker than you may think.  In fact, once explorer has loaded, you’re pretty much free to do whatever you’d like without losing speed – and that’s how it should be.

The taskbar in Windows 7 is fantastic.  By default, it is bigger and more spacious.  It automatically groups multiple windows together based on the program running, and allows you to preview each window before selecting it – which is really nice.  Some users, however, may find this to be a difficult adjustment, so you can always right click the taskbar, click properties, and choose never to group your windows.

Next to the clock on the far right side of the taskbar is a thin, rectangular button; hover over this button and preview the desktop – click the button and it will take you to the desk top.  Click it again, and it will pull whatever windows you had opened originally.

Window management is improved amazingly.  Again, the grouping of windows on the taskbar and the ability to preview them is a fantastic feature for power users.  You may now stack windows side by side or on top of each other as well.  This way, if you’re dealing with transferring files and folders, browsing several websites at once, or using multiple programs at once, you can do so at ease.

They’ve added a new feature called “Aero Shake.”  Now, we all know “Aero” is the name of the Windows Style/Theme; well, Aero Shake is a really neat feature that can be extremely useful, or just fun to use when you’re bored.  Say you have a myriad of windows open and you need to focus on just one; simple grab the top of the window bar and move it back and forth a couple of times.  Suddenly, all other windows have been minimized.  What’s that you say?  You want your windows pulled up again?  Well that’s an easy one – shake the window one more time and vualah!  All your windows have been pulled up as before!

Connecting to the internet via Wi-fi was a pain with Vista.  Even now on my Vista machine, I have to wait for it to boot up and wait for at least 2 or 3 minutes for it to find the default connection.  Pretty ridiculous, right?  Well, with Windows 7, connecting to the internet via your wifi card has never been more simple.  Simply install your drivers for your wireless card as you would in any other OS (operating system), then you will see a little signal icon on your taskbar next to the clock on the far right; it will look like signal bars on a cell phone.  Simply click it and a list of wireless connections will automatically appear – click yours, enter WEP info if needed, and you’re connected immediately.

Another improvement is User Account Control (UAC.)  For us tweakers, web designers, and and various other types of geeks, the UAC feature was annoying and extremely difficult to adjust to our liking.  NOW, in Windows 7 you can adjust it to your liking or even turn it off.  That’s right, no more fighting the UAC to test your programs or customize your computer.

The Resource Monitor in Windows 7 has also been redone and made more efficient and easier to monitor your cpu, ram, etc.

Windows Explorer has been completely REWRITTEN!  FINALLY!  It runs so much smoother.  The search has even improved!  It finds what you need within a couple of seconds based several aspects of what you’ve entered as your search term.  It even searches through meta data!  Nice!

Speaking of searches, you can now search the web through Windows Explorer.  I will show you how to do this in a soon coming article.

Next cool feature in Windows 7 is rotating desktop backgrounds.  Now, I don’t mean physical rotation, but I mean order rotation.  That’s right, you may choose from an unlimited amount of photos for your desktop background, and it will display a slide show of the photos you select, fading in and out of each photo; each photo only stays displayed as long as you choose – that’s right, you can choose how long each photo is displayed as your desktop background.  You may also change the photo at any given moment.  There’s a lot to this feature, so I will continue raving about this feature in a soon coming post.

Other improvements in Windows 7 are the Magnifier and the new Internet Explorer.  The new Internet explorer still needs a good amount of work, but it has improved none the less.

What do you think?
Do you have Windows 7?  What do you think of it?  Do you think it will be a good upgrade from XP and Vista?

Or, have you found any new features in Windows 7?  Whatever you have to share, share it with me!  I’d love to know what you have to say.  Leave a comment below, or shoot me an e-mail at david@funkytower.com

Take it easy,
David

I have to say I was quite excited to finally finished downloading Windows 7 beta 7000 for the first time.  I waited those long hours for the download to finish, I burned my DVD, put the DVD in the drive, Windows 7 beta setup popped up, I chose my parititian, and let the set up utility do its thing.  It got to the “Expanding Files” step in the installation process.  It completed about 92% of this process, then suddenly….ERROR 0×80070241.  This error told me that some files might be missing or corrupt and to restart the installation.  BUMMER!!!!

I went online and Googled for help, and found some interesting solutions like “Burn your disk at a slower speed” or “Burn your disk with THIS software and not THIS software.”  I went through about 4 lightscribe DVD’s following these suggestions and found myself with the same problem.

I was honestly disappointed.  I waited a long time for that download to finish, used up my new lightscribe dvd’s, and created a new partition for what?  Nothing?!  I was just about ready to give up when I remembered…the download manager.

Windows 7 downloads using an online download manager so that you can pause your download, shut off your computer, and continue your download at another time.  It was quite late when I started downloading, and I decided to pause my download and continue the next morning.  I thought to myself…”The error is telling me that some of the files may be missing or corrupt…could it be that pausing my download caused me to loose data or caused some data to become corrupt?”

So, I downloaded Windows 7 beta 7000 a SECOND time WITHOUT pausing it.  Then, I burned it to a DVD in RAW format at the slowest speed possible.  I ran through the installation and 20 minutes later, Windows 7 was installed and working beautifully.

So in case you didn’t catch my solution: download Windows 7 Beta 7000 without ever pausing it – let it run straight through, and burn your DVD at the slowest speed in RAW format.  Take these extra measures, and you should have Windows 7 beta running smoothly.

What Do You Think?

What were some problems that you discovered when installing Windows 7?  What was your solution to this problem?  What do you think of Windows 7?  I’d love to hear from you!  Leave a comment or e-mail me at david@funkytower.com

Take it easy,
David

CSS is such a useful tool in designing your website and adding some functionality to it.  One of the things that turns most “beginner web designers” on to CSS is the ability to customize the color of links.  This is great to avoid having unwanted underlines and the ugly blue default link color.  Well did you know you can create a very versitile navigation bar using CSS?  It’s really quite easy: instead of applying effects to a piece of text – apply effects to a table cell!  In this tutorial you will learn effects regaurding: hovering cell background effects, text effects, button effects, and more!

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