Mr. Brownfield's Blog

I recently found a link that will allow you to download and use the beta version of Office 2010 directly from Microsoft.

Microsoft Office 2010

*Click on “Get It Now”  in the top right corner.

Google is the most widely used search engine in the world but there are times that we are not using it to its fullest capacity.  The search process can be refined by using some slight modifications to your normal searches.

Quotes – placing quotes around your search terms creates a search for the exact words inside the quotes in the exact order they are written.  “Dolphins Sleep” will only return results that deal with dolphins and their sleep habits when the words dolphin and sleep appear next to one another.

Search within a specific site or type of site – by placing dolphin’s site:.edu in the search field you will only search for dolphins within sites that end in .edu.  You can also search within a specific site about dolphins by typing dolphins site:nationalgeographic.com you will only search for articles relating to dolphins on the National Geographic website.

Excluding – by placing a minus sign before a term you can exclude it from your searches. By placing dolphins –NFL in the search field you will search for dolphins but exclude any results that contain the NFL.  If you were to just type dolphins in the search field the second result is for the NFL franchise the Miami Dolphins.

Other Google Uses

Reverse phone number lookup – by typing a phone number into the Google search you can perform a reverse lookup on that number.  For example 607-547-0312 comes back as the phone number for the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Unit Conversions – Google can perform unit conversions.  An example would be to type 47.23 cm in inches and hit enter.  The answer at the top of the results page comes back as 47.23 centimeters = 18.5944882 inches

A while back I came across a site that looked kind of like Google but it wasn’t Google so I played with it a little bit and have come to really like it.  The site is called Musgle and it uses some advanced Google search options to locate audio files on the Internet.

Anti-Virus software can be expensive to renew each year but it does not have to be. There are several free anti-virus programs that are totally free and protect you. My personal favorite is AVG.

So far so good.  I installed it yesterday on my laptop at home and it seems to run quite a bit smoother that Vista did.

FYI – If you bought a computer after 6/26/09 most manufacturers are offering a free upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista.

Free Upgrade Link

How often do we bad-mouth Microsoft for being a money hungry cash cow?  Today is our lucky day.  Microsoft is offering their new Security Essentials Product for FREE.  This is their new anti-malware product.

Check it out

Recently I have been playing with some of the photos of my 1 year old daughter and have come across two pretty cool sites.

Check them out

PhotoFunia

Be Funky

I came across a pretty cool FREE tool that allows you to take screen shots (I know you can use the print screen button to do this) and you can record video of onscreen action.  It is available for both PC’s and Macs

Get Jing

I’m sure many students in my classes will want to download GIMP for use at home.  Below is the link

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gimp-win/gimp-2.6.7-i686-setup.exe