These days you can’t buy any kind of cleaner that doesn’t include some kind of anti-bacterial added. Some would say that the reason that more people are getting sick is because bacteria and germs are building up resistance due to all anti-bacterial everything out there. Then we have the studies that look at the places with the most germs. Would you believe that your office keyboard and mouse have more germs than some bathrooms? Now a company named Unotron has the solution.They make a keyboard and mouse that is waterproof.

 Meaning you can take it over to the sink and give it a good washing. When was the last time you washed down your keyboard? How many lunches have you eaten at your desk over the past year?

It is rather simple to create Podcasts. You simply record a conversation. That conversation could be in person, over the phone, or in many cases over Skype.

Where it becomes difficult is processing the recording. As anyone who has tried to post a podcast in its raw state, it can be very difficult to follow due to the varying volumes of voices. There are 2 tools out there that can help with this process.

One of of the most popular open source products is Audacity. This is a complete recording studio for Windows, Mac or Linux. It is available for download here.

A new product is out in Beta called the Levelator from Gigavox Media. It is simpler, yet more complex. Audacity will level the volumes, but does it in real time as it is playing the track. Levelator creates a map of the full track first, then applies some algorithms  to level the volumes.

Tags: podcast, netcast, Audacity, Levelator, skype

A few months ago my company brought in a consultant to teach speed reading. Our CEO is a big believer in it. Now I had heard about people reading a book in a couple of hours. I had seen people passing their finger over pages and saying they were reading a page every 10 seconds. I had always been skeptical, or passed it off as they were savants who had a special trait for speed reading.

But now I am a believer. The trainer took us through a number of exercises to show us that we read slow, basically because we were taught to read slow. No one is ever taught to speed read. It is fascinating to see how both your reading speed and comprehension can increase. The course lasted about 6 hours. In the last 2 hours of the course, I read the Old Man and the Sea from cover to cover and got about half way through the biography of Lance Armstrong.

There are a couple of tools that you can use to help increase your reading speed.

Spreeder

Zap Reader

Tags: speed reading, reading, spreeder, zap reader

About a month ago Release Candidate 1 (RC1) came out. Then about a week ago RC2 was out and available for a short time to the general public. This post will review Vista and talk about some of the new features.

Unfortunately if you want to try Windows Vista, you will have to settle for RC1 which is available to download here. The first thing you should do, before you install Windows Vista is run the compatibility program to see if you have enough computing power. You can download the program from here. Read more »