Thursday, August 23, 2012

Kindle software for PC

This is the place to get it.

Kindle for PC - CNET Download.com
download.cnet.com/Kindle-for-PC/3000-20412_4-75185974.html - 144k - Similar pages

You cannot get this from Amazon unless you are within their authorised zones. This means if you are living in Asia or SE Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore) you cannot get this from the Amazon site.

I installed this from the cnet site it worked. Came with three free books.


Thursday, August 16, 2012

Free Music for Personal Presentations slideshows etc


freeplaymusic.com
live.freeplaymusic.com

This is a great site for free music to accompany presentations and slideshows that you may have created. If you are in an educational institution or if you have a wedding and want to create a slideshow with accompanying music but you are fearful about contravening copyright laws by using copyright music, you can access this site and download free music for these slideshows. You need to acknowledge artists if freeplaymusic has this information and if not, just acknowledge the source live.freeplaymusic.com. To download the music you must first register and this will not cost you a cent.

You cannot publish or broadcast on the internet nor can you sell cds or dvds with this music because it is for non-commercial purposes -- you cannot profit monetarily from the free downloads. The site also contains music that you can pay for and use with less restrictions. Please read the conditions for use before proceeding.

Using the site is simple. The main site is freeplaymusic.com and you can read the terms and conditions here. The newer live.freeplaymusic.com is easier to use because it is better organised and you can start from here.

The best way to begin if you are interested in totally free music is to click on the "freeplay music" option in the left-hand column. This will give you a list free music organised by style - bossanova, jazz, classical, etc. There is no charge for the music listed here.

If you want to pay for music for less restrictive use, click on "styles" in the left-hand column and again a list will pop up. Select the style of music you want and you should get a list of free as well as music you have to pay for.

To download any tract, click on the "add to download" and select the tracks that you want. This step will not start the downloads but place all your selections in a download section. When your selection is completed, click the "download" option at the left-hand column and all the titles you selected earlier will be listed. You can now begin to download the titles you want.

Have fun.




Installing PC-BSD USB boot

If you want an alternative to Windows operating system, you can try PC-BSD. It is a unix-like OS and is compatible with some linux software.

Why would you want to try this? Well, if you have an old computer that does not have the RAM to run the newer versions of Windows or if you have assembled a computer and don't want to pay for Windows 7 or Windows 8, this is an OS you can try. It is easy to install and it is free. I am not sure how useful it will be if  you have printers and scanners that are Windows compatible but I am told that if you want to surf the web, email, listen to and organise music and store and edit photographs, this OS can do it.

While I haven't tried this OS extensively, I did manage it install it into my computer that had Vista originally but which became corrupted after time. A reinstall  of Vista did not work and I decided to try this OS. I share my experience with you here.

Since Vista was not working on the old computer, I worked on my netbook to get the installation and other necessary files.

You begin by downloading the software from http://www.pcbsd.org/en/download.html.The page confused me at first because the download button at the top right of the screen led nowhere. Scroll down and on the left hand side will be a list of software to select from.

I selected the USB version as the DVD drive on the old computer was not working. This meant that I would be installing the OS from a thumbdrive plugged into a usb port.  The file I downloaded was PCBSD9.0-x86-USBFULL.img.bz2   This is a zipped file. I unzipped it using Peazip (http://peazip.sourceforge.net/). The extracted file was a .img file a little over 3 GB.

I copied the extracted .img file to a newly reformatted 4 GB thumbdrive and tried an installation but it did not work.

I consulted the pc-bsd wiki http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/PC-BSD_Users_Handbook and realised that the .img file had to be written to the usb thumbdrive using a program like Win32DiskImager. This I downloaded from http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-Burning/Win32-Disk-Imager.shtml
The download was a zipped file and had to be unzipped. Using Win32DiskImager to write to the thumbdrive was easy. However to check if the file was written was difficult because I kept getting a zero byte reading. It seemed as if nothing had been written to the thumbdrive. Despite being unable to see what was on the thumbdrive, I was certain that the file had been written since Win32DiskImager did not report any errors.

I then changed the computer setup to make the usb drive the boot drive, put the thumbdrive in the usb port and restarted the computer. After  lots file checks and status reports, the installation page finally came up.

The interface was graphic so there was no commands to enter.

So now I have PC-BSD installed.