Office solutions minus the pinch. Thinking outside the box.

I'm sure many folks out there are in businesses where they outsource for their IT needs for whatever reason. This can be all well and good instead of keeping some designated IT guys on salary. But what happens when people need silly things like software for a store bought PC and your off-site IT guy has all the disks? You going to pay the guy his 75.00 an hour and wait the upwards of a week it's going to take for him to get there? Raising another question... Why even pay for what you can get for free? Here's what I mean:



Say you are in a bind, are sick of the MS Office Trial, or just need some good office software.. Well instead of shelling out what could be $100 why not just download Open Office instead? It's almost exactly the same as MS Office with many cool features. One being you can even save your documents as file formats that MS Office recognizes. Best of all, it is completely FREE and LEGAL. Interested in checking it out? If so, here's the linkage.

What if you want to punch up some assets for something like a presentation? You really going to use that dinky little paint program that comes with the PC? What else is there you say? Well you could either pay big bucks for something like Adobe Photoshop, or you could go with something like this! G.I.M.P is a very good (and somewhat easy) program to use and nothing beats the price. Up until somewhat recently it was pretty much on par with things like Photoshop too. It'll do the job and then some when it comes to layered graphic editors that handle transparency. Short and simply, you'll be able to make your fancy pants pictures look all spiffy all free and legal.

Want to find a way to cut some corners? What if your company is like mine and needs to send pictures back and forth from lawyers, technicians, adjusters, offices, etc.. How much does that cost you in shipping if your pictures are so huge and numerous you need to mail disks everywhere? My solution for that was oddly enough Photobucket. It works very well, and you can just link people pictures instead of having to put them in 30 emails or sending out a dvd. Privacy isn't much of an issue either, you can password things. I'd give it a go, being free, what's to lose right?

My personal favorite... Ever have that moment where you are finally home.. unwinding.. and suddenly realized you don't have some kind of document you needed? Be it a call list.. Excel document.. Presentation you want to work on... Now what if the office is closed and you're on a deadline? No no it's not time to grab your ankles, cause you thought ahead right? GOOGLE actually offers a document sharing feature that can be kept exclusively private. Just create a Google account if you don't already have one, and click on the "more" link once you're all logged in to access the goods. What really makes this shine is you can couple this with Google "sites" and link these documents to a private site that only people you designate can see. You can even go so far as to set permissions to the linked documents individually. This pretty much means you can give employees website access but they can't get into things you don't allow them to see. What's even better is you ,or anyone else you designate, can edit these files once they are uploaded. You can easily collaborate with other employees anywhere. There is even a nifty chat window thrown in the document window for good measure! What makes this so damn awesome is it's all free free free!!!

Well it's about that time for me to do the jet.

Take care,
-HD Shock

A Heads Up Palm Pre Accessory Review

Ever since I had gotten the Palm Pre I was craving some kind of accessory. At the time all I could get was some generic "cut it yourself" screen protector. But now there are quite a few more and I'm here to talk about a few!



First on the list is the mirrored screen protectors:

Honestly there are a few things I wish I knew when I got mine. For one, be careful which site you get it from. There are a lot of sites out there trying to rip people off with these things. Mine personally looked nothing like the picture above from the site. It unbeknown-st to me was just a square that was roughly the size the video and gesture area. (Misleading? Nah...) Secondly it somewhat distorts the colors on the screen, so if you find yourself watching a lot of video on that little bugger you might want to think twice. And if you are outside in the daylight or just around bright lights in general the screen gets really hard to see. BUT if you could get past all of that, it does make the Pre look pretty damn cool. For me, it lasted all of a week till I couldn't take it anymore.

Moving right along to Hard case covers:
I was a little skeptical about these at first. I didn't really see how this case would even stay on without breaking my phone, but to my surprise it fit like a glove and stayed on rather well. There are a few things you need to know though. Some of the cooler designed ones actually cut down the functionality of the phone. There a surprising number of ones where it covers the gesture area and proximity sensor. (which not so surprisingly won't work through hard plastic) As long as you are careful and buy one of the ones where you can see the full screen uncovered you'll be fine...

Except if you couple it with my next accessory...


This little monster, the universal car mount, you can find in places like here. I had figured i would pick one of these up to better test the GPS on the pre and I'm pretty happy with it. It fits the Pre rather snugly, though if you close even just a little bit too much you risk cracking a hard cover if you have one. The only real bad points to this and other similar models are you can't charge the phone while it's mounted, and one side rests right on the volume buttons... I'm sure you can guess where I'm going with that one... But for a car mount that was not designed for our little river stones, it works pretty well.

And onto our last "accessory" for today:


The extended battery put out by ,you guessed it, Seidio. I have yet to try one personally, but they boast a 17% increase in power for roughly 50 bucks and no special back cover is required. I've heard it really equates to roughly 10% extra juice, but hey who's counting. If you are the type who likes to squeeze out every ounce of power before having to recharge then this may be worth it to you. If you don't mind the added bulk, rumor has it there is also a bigger one floating around the web somewhere which comes with it's own custom back cover. If I find it again, I'll make sure to add it to the site.

Well that's it for this blog session! If you have any comments or questions either leave some love here, or feel free to E-Mail me at HDShock@theshockblock.com

Some fun things to do with a $350.00 Computer.

Alright, so lets dive right in...

A lot of the time people end up with these stock lower end machines where they feel trapped into just web browsing, face-booking, listening to music, e-mail, etc.. They think (or have some sales person tell them) they have to upgrade to some $1,300.00 monstrosity to be able to play games, movies, or really anything that's just plain cool. Well, I'm happy to say if that's you, you are very mistaken.

Lets base this off a cheap PC you can find just about anywhere. This little guy should do the trick! During some weeks you can find this little puppy with a free 17in or 18in lcd monitor. So needless to say people tend to grab them up rather quickly. (Hell, I even got a few of these for my office!)

So keeping in the spirit of spending less money, lets have some fun with this "for the cheap".

Now say you've got an extra monitor lying around, and don't know what to do with it.. Why not jack it into your PC for some dual monitor goodness? For roughly 46 bucks, and about 10 minutes of install time you easily can!

Go out and feed your little PCs PCI Express slot with something like this! It'll cost you about 46 bucks minus shipping. You will most likely need 2 of these also if you have lesser quality monitors. You can check via the back on the monitor.. DVI is typically white and VGA blue. Better yet have a HD TV nearby? Well substitute one of those VGA adapters for a HDMI to DVI cable and you'll now be able to play those games or movies on the big screen. (Takes a little tweaking to make it look just right via HDMI) There is nothing special required for dual monitors other than an installed and updated graphics card with 2 video outputs! Just go to your display settings, click on the second monitor, and click the "extend my desktop to this monitor" box. It's that's quick and simple, and allows you to get some serious game on.

If you are sick of how it just looks like a somewhat curved gray box, add some bling. You can honestly go all nutty with this and it surprisingly doesn't cost much either. You'd have choices for everything from full case stick on art, to light strips, to led power supplies/fans, to full blown cases. I could list so many cool things, but I'll save that for another day. Below is an example of a cheap case I found for roughly 30 bucks for one of my old projects. (I got this one on newegg) Transferring over parts is a breeze too just make sure to stay grounded!








So instead of buying a new PC, you spend roughly 100 bucks and end up with some bad-ass looking gaming rig. Granted it's not going to run Mass Effect on max settings, but it'll get the job done rather well. Oh and for those ppl out there that are not so computer savvy don't fret. I've found that a good number of PC places will install things like the graphics card for a reasonable price. I wouldn't go to a Best Buy with that request though... They have crazy high prices for that kind of thing in my opinion... ( Especially considering it takes a normal technician all of 10 minutes)

The First of Many

So here it is, my first blog...

For a long time now I've imagined myself behind a keyboard typing away about some kind of tech or babbling on about something amazingly geek-tastic. You know know what I'm talking about...

Things like fully controlling a PC (from the couch) via a jailbroken Ipod Touch, while it's streaming blue ray quality movies to a rather large LCD t.v.. Or how one day I'll further that extreme and control the fridge, washer, and toaster with my Palm Pre while I'm out fishing with my girl.

Well before I get too carried away... I hope you enjoy what you find here as I babble on about gizmos, games, and gadgetry. I look forward to hearing your comments, questions, and requests.

Take care,
HD Shock