As you may have noticed over the past two months, I have been adding some sponsored posts here and there. The “static” ads in the sidebars just don’t generate enough revenue at this point, so I decided I needed to monetize the site in other ways, and sponsored posts have been the most fruitful way of doing so.

One of the best Blog Advertising and income generating sites is PayU2Blog. They pass out assignments on a weekly basis, and they have a lot of reviews where you get an item free to review.

My wife got a great set of blinds for my office window last month, which are totally awesome.

If you’re interested in making money on your blog, let me know and I will fill you in on which companies I recommend!

Last year, I worked up the nerve to turn off the water to the house and cut our water lines in the basement. I figured, it wasn’t rocket science, and if I needed any help I had the Internet at my disposal.

The house we moved into four years ago has a full sized unfinished basement and it was stubbed for a bathroom. With the kids’ classroom and playroom, as well as my wife’s sewing room being in the basement now, it only made sense that we run the plumbing for the bathroom down there.

We called around and every plumber we talked too wanted an outlandish fee to do the work, so, having done small plumbing jobs around our old house, I thought, “How hard can it be”? and we bought the materials we would need to bring the water down to the toilet and sink. That was a scary day. I got the work done, without the aid of the Internet, and we now have a toilet and sink in the basement, but the finer finishings have not been completed.

All we have left is purchasing the bathroom fixtures and the Taps. I told my wife she could pick whatever she wanted for that bathroom, and she’s been looking ever since. Who knew deciding on bathroom fixtures could be so difficult?

Taps4Less.com has a great assortment of bathroom taps and shower enclosures. My wife loves those super shower things with a thousand jets and all that jazz, but I may have to hire a plumber to put something like that in, if she decides she needs one of those.

How many words are thousands of pictures worth?

I am one of those creatures who learns by seeing. I usually don’t have to read a manual or ask too many questions. In fact, if I can see how something is done, I tend to never forget. It’s almost as if I have a photographic memory when it comes to remembering the order of things.

If I could put my brain into a 10 inch system with a video screen, it would resemble a digital photo frame. All of my thoughts and memories would pop to the surface for a moment, like a digital photo, reminding me the order of things, and then slip away just in time for another image to emerge.

Digital frames are so cool they blow me away. While the technology inside may be difficult for most people to grasp, they are surprisingly simple to operate for the end user. You don’t need a big instruction manual or hours of training to load your pictures onto them. You simply place a photo memory card into the slot and your pictures begin showing.

When you have a collection of photos from an important event, you no longer have to choose which photo to display. You can set your digital picture frame to slowly remind you of every moment, all day long.

The internet can be a very dangerous place for children. With the proliferation of websites that contain adult content, violent undertones and religious fanaticism, you must take precautions to keep your children safe as they surf the world wide web.

Having three kids myself, I think filtering software and parental involvement make a great combination for making sure your children are never exposed to those elements which might negatively affect them for the rest of their lives.

Parental control software, such as ChildWebGuardian, works by filtering the websites your children visit. The program checks the content of the website they want to view and automatically blocks those sites you find inappropriate, whether they are obscene, promoting drugs, advertising gambling, or contain violent undertones.

ChildWebGuardian allows you to be in control of your child’s internet experience and protects them from the dangers found on the internet. It does not rely solely on urls and databases containing illicit sites, it actually analizes the pages your child visits, in real time, and blocks those sites your child should not have access to. The program is compatible with all Windows operating systems and can be downloaded directly from the company website.

You can download a demo today, but at $29.95, it’s price is more than reasonable for the peace of mind you will have knowing it’s working to protect your children.

As a programmer I work with a number of different file types. Each one has it’s own rules and structure. Whether I am writing a desktop application or just a script that makes my life easier, I love working with csv files.

Using CSV, or comma separated values, files makes it easy to program an application to interact with Microsoft Excel and many other ‘mainstream’ applications.

A few years back I wrote an application for a trucking company my wife was working for. They needed to grab a monstrous file from a government website and parse the data to be used by their CSR’s first thing every morning.

I tried numerous different ways to work with the data, but the easiest, and most efficient way, was to feed the parsed data into csv files. Using csv files allowed me transport huge amounts of data between the two websites and the CSR’s were free to use the same csv files in the application of their choice.

While working with CSV files, I tend to get my single and double quotes mixed up from time to time. I think it may have something to do with me being set in my ways as a Delphi programmer, and I forget that when using fields that contain quotes I have to escape the double quote.

Either way, I love working with csv files, as I have yet to find a different format that works so easily with so many different applications.

When I sit down at the computer, I am always doing several things at once. I always have. Multi-tasking is my life.

But tonight, as I was working on a couple of projects and surfing the web, I noticed my system wasn’t running “normal”. It seemed sluggish, which is highly unusual on this machine, so I thought I would check things out.

I have used several different products in the past, but I was never happy with any of them. So tonight, I downloaded ProCleaner, because I heard it was good at allowing the user to disable programs from the startup menu, clean the computers history, and view DLL dependencies. ProCleaner even showed me all of the programs installed on my system and remove broken entries.

ProCleaner worked great! I was able to nail down the application that was causing my system to run slow, and I was able to clear some things out and fix my broken uninstaller entries as well.

One thing I noticed however, is that ProCleaner does not have a registry scanner, but after a quick check of their website I see they have it in the works.

Like many of the applications I write, ProCleaner is free, so grab it today and see what’s hiding on your system.

I saw this on Christopher Null’s site, and thought I would take a look at it.

One of the most common inconviences of running Windows is searching for drivers when (notice I did not say if) you re-install. Driver Collector makes it simple to backup your drivers to a folder, so you can burn it to a cd, or store it on a usb, etc.

Driver Collector is a tool designed to find and collect installed windows drivers for the hardware you select on your PC. Once you tell it which type of drivers you want to collect, it will copy them to a specific folder. This can be very handy when preparing for a format and reinstall of Windows, especially when you or a client have since lost the computers driver disks.

I normally keep a copy of the latest drivers in a backup folder anyway, but this sure takes the “what if I forgot one” factor out of the picture.

Virtual desktops. A necessity for those of us who have 10-12 applications open at any given time. Dexpot makes it possible (and convenient) within Microsoft Windows.

You’ve seen it before: a desktop totally cluttered with too many open windows. No overview, the workflow is affected. Dexpot offers up to 19 additional work spaces to spread out your work. Finally, a tidy desktop again.

Dexpot includes a Desktop Manager, Window Catalogue Desktop Windows, Full-screen Preview, and much, much more.

Virtual desktops and the ability to view all open applications with a simple keystroke is something I was accustomed to when using Ubuntu, so it’s nice to have that functionality within Windows.

The best part about it? It’s free for private use. The commercial licensing isn’t that bad either. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and life is good again.

Can’t afford Photoshop? Slow computer got you so bogged down that your snail mail arrives faster than your email? No more room on your hard drive? Maybe you just want to play with a kewl new web app.

Check out pixoh. It’s still in development, but I found it quite handy for doing those simple tasks.

[tags]pixoh, photo editing[/tags]

I have been waiting to do this review for a few weeks now, but thought I would wait until Nick released the final version.

If you are looking for a Windows based RSS reader, you should take a look at FeedDemon 2.0.

FeedDemon leaves it’s competition in the dust. It’s user friendly interface and the ability to sync with Newsgator Online and other Newsgator products makes it the #1 RSS reader, IMHO.

With FeedDemon 2.0, Nick Bradbury takes us to a whole new level. Organizing feeds is much, much, easier with the single-level tree view as opposed to the old style dropdown lists. The choice of newspaper styles lets you change things up a bit. The watches make sure I never miss what I am looking for, and the news bins make sure I never forget to blog about the things I didn’t want to miss in the first place.

There is so much more I could mention, but honestly, I would rather spend my evening catching up on some feeds in FeedDemon, so why don’t you take a look at the release notes to see what has changed. Some would condense this down to one word, “everything”.

As a user of FeedDemon since the beginning, I believe this latest version (which is the most powerful, yet easy-to-use product I have seen) is Nick Bradbury’s finest achievement.

Technorati Tags: FeedDemon, Newsgator, Nick Bradbury, RSS