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The 2011 Guide to Choosing a College Laptop
A year ago, I wrote a blog post about choosing a computer for college. Technology changes fast, and things are different now. Read my series on choosing a college computer on the Super User Blog:
Windows 7 Login Packs
One of the new features introduced in Windows 7 is the easy ability to change the background image on the login screen. I have created several login image packs using photographs I have taken. These images are already resized and optimized for common resolutions. All you have to do is run an install script, and everything is set up for you. To download them, go to the Windows 7 Login Packs section under Photographs.
HP Pavillion dm4t Review
I've been using an HP Pavillion dm4t laptop since fall, and have come to really like this computer. I would recommend it for people looking for a portable but powerful laptop.
New Website: OSU SEI
I recently finished designing a new website for the Oregon State University Sustainable Energy Initiative. We will be using this site for group news, pictures of events we participate in, and information about projects we are working on. This was my first time using Wordpress for a site I've developed. OSU Marketing provides a Wordpress template for use on University websites, but it was not designed for a Wordpress installation not being used primarily as a blog. I heavily modified the template, and using other OSU branding resources, developed a unique custom theme for SEI.
Transit Text: ODOT Road Conditions from your Cell Phone
Traffic on Mt. Hood can be terrible sometimes, especially when you're driving back from skiing right when everybody else is getting off the mountain. There's a particular bend on US-26, a few miles from the OR-35 interchange, where traffic almost always slows to a standstill. Every time, we wonder - is the road closed from a crash, or is it just slow traffic as usual?
Results from College Survey and Research Project
I recently finished my first term of college. My honors writing for engineers course was culminated with a group research project on a topic of our choice. Lane Porth and I wrote a paper analyzing whether the additional cost of private higher education is worthwhile compared to the (usually) cheaper cost of public higher education. As part of our research, we conducted an online survey, and promised to put the results of the survey online once our project was completed. You can now download a spreadsheet with the results of the survey, and participants' comments (disassociated from their answers). All answers in the survey are anonymous. We do not officially endorse or support any of the opinions represented in the contents of this survey. These data are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. If you wish to use our data for any purposes not covered by this license, or have any other questions, please contact us.
Automatic Post-Backup Sleep
Keeping regular backups is important - even famous computer bloggers sometimes lose their data. Backing up my computer used to be an unfriendly experience. The built-in software in older versions of Windows was terrible, and third party software was expensive, bad, or both. Apple got it right with Time Machine (a rare OS X feature of which I am actually jealous), but Microsoft has finally gotten their act together, too. Windows 7 introduced a very effective, user-friendly backup system, and it's already saved me once when I had a catastrophic hard drive failure. It backs up all user data, and lets you go back and find previous version, and most importantly, keeps a system image to let you restore everything to exactly how it was, even if you get a completely new HDD.
Enable Synaptics Multitouch Gestures in Google Chrome
To download the files necessary to enable multitouch gestures in Google Chrome on your Synaptics touchpad, head straight to the downloads page.
Dissecting Google's September 7th Logo
There's been a lot of buzz in the short few hours since Google's latest Doodle showed up on their home page on September 7th, 2010. One key buzzword which has been mentioned a lot is "HTML5", the internet's favorite New Thing™. While Google has yet to release an official statement regarding what the significance of this doodle is, one thing seems evident: it's not about HTML5.
Computer Advice for College-Bound Students
I wrote this as a facebook note for some friends of mine, but people of the internet may find it handy, so here you go: