Digital Media and Design » Information Technology

Lego Digital Designer

admin — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:26:29 +0000

I got up this morning and caught my son on the Lego Digital Designer program. He was making the house shown above. This is really cool software program for kids to use. They can build their own Lego pieces and upload them to the Lego site and get the piece priced and built for them. Way cool!

Open Source CMS

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 16:21:38 +0000

I have been looking for an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) to replace WordPress. WordPress is great for blogging and it can be used as a CMS, but I really wanted something a little more robust. Here are a few of the ones I have found:

Drupal An advanced portal with collaborative book, search engines friendly URLs, online help, roles, full content search, site watching, threaded comments, version control, blogging, news aggregator.

Geeklog A portal system with a wide range of modules.

Joomla Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.

Mambo Open Source A professional level yet easy to use Content Management System featuring inline WYSIWYG content editors, newsfeeds, syndicated news, banners, mailing users, links manager, statistics, content archiving, date based content, 20 languages, modules and components.

PHP-Nuke One of the most popular community-based portals with a big choice of modules and languages.

phpWCMS phpWCMS is perfect for professional, public and private users. It is very easy to learn and gives you the flexibility to separate layout and content. Lots of powerful but simple implemented features assists publishers and web developers too.

phpWebSite Very powerful Content Management System with document manager, announcements, menu manager, photo album, block maker, FAQ, web pages maker, polls, information categorizer, calendar, link manager, form generator.

Post-Nuke A Content Management System with focus on flexibility and security. A big variety of modules and blocks makes this CMS an allround tool.

Siteframe A straightforward content-management system designed for rapid deployment of community-based websites. Nice-looking templates, oriented toward document-sharing, clean interface.

TYPO3 TYPO3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. It offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules.

Xoops A very popular advanced portal system.

Also EasyCMS
MySource Matrix
WebGUI
Plone

Also found a good reference for all Open Source Content Management Systems.

George Willcox in the Wood Shop

admin — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 04:22:06 +0000

Our good friend and long time supporter of TSA, George Willcox is working in the Wood Shop at Deep Run High School in Glen Allen, Virginia.

Five Common Problems that Slow a Computer Down

admin — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:43:06 +0000

A Cluttered Registry - The longer you use Windows, the more cluttered your registry can grow, especially if you regularly install and uninstall software. Some applications, known as “orphan” registry entries, don’t remove all traces of themselves when uninstalled, causing problems such as sluggish performance, system lockups, or a bloated registry that takes longer to load. The easiest way to clean your registry is to use a registry cleaner. But be careful, your registry is a complex program and very important to the workings of your system.
Full Hard Drive – It’s possible that your hard drive could be too full of data to function efficiently. You should have at least 2 – 3MB of free space for programs to run smoothly. If you don’t have this much free space, you can delete unused programs on the C: drive. Check your C: drive to see how much space you have on your computer. You can do this by going to Start > My Computer > C: drive. Click on the C: drive and it will tell you how much free space you have under ‘Details’ on the left bar.
Not Enough Memory - It’s important to have enough memory on your computer to keep programs running smoothly, especially if you have large programs, or play a lot of PC games. It is recommended that you have at least 512MB on your PC, although at this point, 1GB seems to be the sweet spot. The amount of RAM your PC has can be checked by right-clicking ‘My Computer’ and choosing ‘Properties’. If you need to upgrade your RAM, be sure to check your local retail ads for sales. You can usually get a RAM upgrade at a great price.
Too Many Start-Up Programs - When you boot your computer, there are several programs that automatically start behind the scenes. These programs eat up your computer’s available processing capacity and slow it down dramatically. Most likely, you don’t need all of these programs to automatically start when you boot your computer. Some programs, such as PC Tune-Up include Start-Up Wizards that scan your computer for all of the start-up programs and allow you to simply select the ones that you don’t want to start automatically.
Spyware and Malicious Programs - If you have ever experienced annoyances such as a new toolbar in your Internet browser, or a new startup page that you did not set, you are likely plagued with spyware.

TSA Electronic Research and Experimentation

admin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 13:30:26 +0000

A couple of ideas that I have had on Electronic Experimentation.

LED Flashlight
Wind Generator – Small Scale – power a home
Home Alarm System
Computer Modification – build a new box
Boost your Wireless Signal

Anti-Virus

admin — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:59:39 +0000

Many people ask me “What Anti-Virus should I be using?”

My opinion is that you can get a good free anti-virus, and I am not alone. First most of the anti-virus programs that you pay for or get free with a computer will cost you every year. In addition, they are very large and tend to slow down your computer’s operation.

I would suggest you consider the following:

Uninstall your current anti-virus program through the add/remove programs in the Control Panel
Download and install AVG (free) or avast!.
I would not recommend you install both. Both are good solid programs.

I have used both programs, but have used AVG the most and prefer it over avast!.

Veteran’s Day Program at LHS

admin — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:43:02 +0000

The following is the Veteran’s Day program at LHS.

TSA Website

admin — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:32:59 +0000

I am starting a new website, www.lhstsa.com, for our high school TSA program. I have decided to use WordPress as the Content Management System. I also hope to add video’s, photographs and other media there also. It will be a real challenge, but hopefully one that is beneficial to TSA.

Lifehack.org 10 Reason why

admin — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 03:42:25 +0000

I really enjoy Lifehack.org and Lifehacker.com, they both are what the web is all about. Those sites are also what kinda inspired me to give blogging software a real try. And I must say I like it. That is a little off the point, here is the really good article at lifehack.org about 10 Reasons You Aren’t Achieving Success.

It is certainly worth the read.