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 4/1/2011-Drivers,ThinkingFountain,NanoGen,Systray

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T O P I C    R E V I E W
1029usr078198 Posted - April 02 2011 : 09:26:56
Listen now. or Download the archive.

Question: A listener asks, "My printer does crazy stuff and I want to get a new driver. Where should I get that from?"

Answer: Good question. When it comes to drivers, you can really wind up finding a Trojan Horse program if you're not careful. In most cases, I recommend getting any drivers you need from the website of the manufacturer of whatever printer you have. You can sometimes get device drivers from Windows Update, but I don't recommend it unless you can't find the driver on the manufacturer's website. Use Google or Bing to find out the manufacturer's true official website. Then, when you get there, look for a link on the page that says something like support or support and downloads. You then usually have to identify the model of printer you have and which Windows you use. Once you do that, you should be able to find the driver. When it's a printer, I usually get the largest download I can find because it's usually the one I need. It's usually got all the drivers, extra software, and whatever.

Cool Site: Thinking Fountain: We've got a great website this week for homeschoolers, or anyone who just wants to see some neat ideas around science. The Science Museum of Minnesota has a site at www.thinkingfountain.org, that has dozens of ideas that help kids learn to think. We like watching Cake Boss and they are forever using something called fondant. Well, this site has an article that's about fondant. You get a recipe that's structured into an activity, and then there are questions at the end that give you things to think about. These questions encourage further involvement with whatever topic the article is about. That's probably the reason they call it the Thinking Fountain. The site has a search box, an A to Z index of ideas, and theme clusters where ideas have been gathered by topic. There are galleries of photos where you can show what you've done, activities and ideas, like how to recycle clear plastic lids as shrinking art like the Shrinky Dinks we had as kids, book summaries, and surprises.

Cool Gadget: Nanogenerators: From the SyFy channel's DVICE website, we have a gadget that may represent the future power source of our gadgets. It’s called a nanogenerator, and it relies on a property of zinc oxide nanowires that when flexed, create electricity. This is nanotechnology, so it's extremely small. You stack five generators on top of one another and you get the energy of a couple of AA batteries. The article doesn't say how many nanowires are in a single generator, but it does say that 500 of the nanowires can fit on a single strand of human hair, so it can’t be too big, and it's thought that at some point in the future, all our gadgets will be able to be recharged just by using them. Like for instance recharging a laptop by typing on it. Recharge your iPod by taking it on a jog. This is cool technology. It just needs to be mass-produced.

It's All "Geek" To Me: Systray: Our term this week represents something that's on your Windows desktop right now. It's Systray, which is short for System Tray. The system tray is the name of the place where the clock shows up on your screen. You'll notice that down in the system tray, Microsoft calls it the notification area, different icons appear. When you click most of these, a program of some kind will open Windows 7 and Vista make that area smaller than in XP, where it can get pretty big. By the way, it's shortened to systray because that's the filename of the program that makes it show up.

Links


Tech Tip Friday's Show Notes RSS Feed:
http://www.daconsult.com/downloads/rss.xml

HP Printer Drivers:
http://www.hp.com

ThinkingFountain:
http://www.thinkingfountain.org/

Plastic Lid Recycling as Shrinking Art:
http://www.thinkingfountain.org/r/reducereuserecycle/reducereuserecycle.html

Nanogenerators at Dvice:
http://dvice.com/archives/2011/03/new-nanogenerat.php

Systray at TechTerms:
http://www.techterms.com/definition/systray

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