A blog about technology, cars, and other non-girlie stuff
Suzanne
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Posts by Suzanne
How a TV (or a monitor) works in slow motion
06 months
by Suzanne in Technology
Years ago, my husband tried to explained what the difference was between interlace and progressive and he explained how TV basically draw lines across the screen. This video is a a great explanation of how it works in slow motion.
How to create a link to add .ics file to Google Calendar
0Use the following line if you want to create a link to add a .ics file to the users’ Google Calendar:
https://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=<link to ics fle>
Summers – All work and no vacations for IT
1 year
by Suzanne in Uncategorized
Summers are the best and only time for our IT department at the Smith School to do projects. It’s the time where the building have the least amount of people due to summer classes so we can do upgrades to rooms and systems. Plus July 1st is the start of the fiscal year so we have money to buy stuff to work on projects. So while everyone is on vacation, we at IT are busy at work to make a better place for everyone else.
Edublogs vs WordPress
1 year
by Suzanne in Uncategorized
I started this blog because I wanted to see what was the difference between what campus offers and what the Smith School offers. Smith School has their own WordPress server. It’s OK as it is limited with what plugins and themes that are offered to a user. Of course if there is a plugin or theme you want to you, you can submit a request to have it installed. One thing that has been bothering me with WordPress is the caching. I know it suppose to help with reducing the load on the server, but alot of the changes I made in WordPress isn’t showing up. I even tried clearing the cache.
Edublog on the other hand has a wide variety of themes you can choose from along with some plugins. So far so good. No complaints yet.
Hello world!
1 year
by Suzanne in Uncategorized
Starting a brand new blog is hard. It’s like starting a brand new video game. With video games, you spend a lot time at the start of the game customizing your character because this will be the character you will be spending hours and hours with. I feel like starting a blog is the same. I need to pick the correct theme for my blog and how decide how I want to make this site look. I really don’t know what to talk about either.
Anyways, hello world! My name is Suzanne and I like technology and video games.
Why are you getting a Mac?
4 years
OK I have to post this because this pertains to the Business school.
An incident happened last week where I overheard someone getting a new Macbook Pro and she does not know how to use a Mac. When asked if she would like Windows on it, she replied “Of course!”
WHY ARE YOU GETTING A MAC IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO USE A MAC?!?! Yes granted it is a nice piece of expensive hardware that can run Windows and everyone has one, but that should not be the reason to get it. In my opinion, you should get a Mac because you like using Mac OS X more than you like using Windows.
I got one for several reasons. The first reason I ever got a Mac is that I was tasked to be the person to support Macs so I had to have one if the department wanted me to support it. Now I’m not in charge of supporting Macs, but I still use it because I actually like using Mac OS X better than Windows. It has better built-in tools to do networking troubleshooting than Windows. Right now, I do Windows desktop support and I still use a Mac because I know how to have both Mac OS X AND Windows install on my Macbook.
Which brings me to the second thing I want to gripe about. If the software you need to mainly use is only available for Windows, why would you get a Mac? Granted for me, I have video games that is available for PC only so I have one computer dedicated for gaming and then I have my Mac for everyday use. But even with the games that I play, there is a Mac version available, but I still prefer playing on my PC because I can upgrade the parts on the PC more than I can on a Mac.
I can go on and on about this, but I think I should stop. So if you are thinking about getting a Mac, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t get one because everyone else is getting it. Try one out for a week or two to see if you like it. Smith IT has loaners you can borrow to make sure you don’t put $1800/$2600 down the drain. (Prices are the high-end BASE model of MacBook Pros that people tend to want because it has the fastest processor that people think they need to run Office)
Freeing up space on iPhone
5 years
[warning]The following is not supported by the R.H. Smith School of Business, Office of Smith IT, nor Division of Information Technology. Use at your own risk![/warning]
Ever since my little girl was born, I’ve been struggling with space on my iPhone. It’s because I take so many videos and pictures of her and I don’t delete them off my iPhone! I refuse to take them off my phone because I want to show them off to people. I do back them up onto iPhoto now and then, but I don’t remove them from my phone after it is backed up. Granted I can just remove the pictures and have iTunes sync albums from iPhoto back onto the iPhone, but I don’t.
Anyways, the first time I got a warning about my storage space on the iPhone, the first thing I did was remove all the music and videos off my iPhone since I never listen to music nor watch non-YouTube videos on my iPhone. I used to listen music and watch the videos when I was traveling to California to visit relatives, but since I don’t travel much anymore and JetBlue has free DirectTV, there’s no need for the media on my iPhone. That freed up alot of space.
Now the next part may be shocking and I’m pretty sure it will pertain to almost everyone since almost everyone has a Facebook account and is on it.
If you go to Settings > General > Usage, you can see the top applications that takes up space on your iPhone. One thing I asked myself – why is Facebook taking up 112 MB? If you click on Facebook, you can see that the App itself is only 39.4 MB but it somehow has 73.4 MB of “Documents & Data”. Why would Facebook have Documents & Data if everything is stored in “the cloud” and not on the phone? The answer is cache.
What Facebook does is it caches all the pictures you see in your Facebook feed onto your phone so that the next time you go thru your feed that has a picture you’ve already seen, it can load it faster by reading it from that cache instead of trying to download it from the internet again. Many apps that has pictures/images/photos do that and the problem is that the cache will get bigger and bigger and most apps don’t have a way for you to get rid of the cache unless you uninstall the app. Sometimes it is annoying because I don’t want to uninstall and reinstall an app over and over because of this.
Well, I found a solution that will help me get rid of all the unnecessary cache – it’s a software called PhoneClean. Taken from their site:
PhoneClean is uniquely designed to reclaim more free space on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and make all iOS devices running faster. Working on both PC and Mac, this free-yet-magic tool will safely remove all kinds of useless files on iOS system in order to clean up and speed up your iDevices.
I gave it a try and it seems simple enough. The application is pretty straight-forward. Connect your iPhone to the computer and click Next so it can scan to see what files aren’t needed. It will give you an estimate of how much space it can free up. In the picture below, PhoneClean goes thru your phone find any unnecessary temp, cache, and off-line files that is not needed.
When it is done cleaning, it will tell you how much space you got back. Disconnect your phone from the computer and you are ready to go.
You can see how Facebook is no longer the top app that is taking up space because it should be only using 39.4 MB (according to image above) so it is not even on the list in the image below. I went from 264 MB free to 772 MB free. It wasn’t just Facebook that had cache files, but I had other apps that did as well. The amount freed will vary from user to user based on how they use their iPhone.
In closing, I think PhoneClean is very useful, but please remember:
[warning]The following is not supported by the R.H. Smith School of Business, Office of Smith IT, nor Division of Information Technology. Use at your own risk![/warning]
My opinion about photos from iPhones/iPads
5 years
I haven’t posted in a while but I had a good reason – I’ve been too busy with my new little girl. That’s right. I’m finally a mom. While I was home with my newborn, I took alot of photos of my daughter, but mostly with my iPhone. I told myself that I need to take pictures of my daughter with my DSLR, but it was hard because I didn’t like carrying that camera along with the baby around the house. The iPhone was much more convenient because it was nice and small, plus I used my iPhone to track her feedings and diaper changes.
The problem with taking photos with the iPhone (or even iPad) is that you don’t get the same quality of photo that you would from a camera, especially when the lighting is dim. There are times where you might be able to get the same quality from both cameras.
Alexis – Bear Suit (Nikon D3100)
Alexis – Bear Suit (iPhone)
Now if you try to take a picture of a active moving kid, then you can see a big difference in quality. The DSLR will be a much better choice for taking those pics. Unfortunately, I don’t have a comparison picture of a moving kid because it’s so hard to take a same picture of a moving kid with 2 different cameras.
If you do decide to take photos of your little one with your iPhone, make sure you take several because you’ll never know if it turns out perfect or blurry.
