AviDardik.com

In what’s now almost a reoccurring annual event, I managed to be a few days late in renewing the AviDardik.com domain again.
So the site was down for a few days, about a week and a half. I’ve finally renewed the domain and everything is up and running again. Even used the opportunity to upgrade to WordPress 2.9.

I was waiting for this for a long time, just an hour ago Google held a press conference and finally revealed the Google Chrome OS details.
To be honest I wasn’t blown away. It was pretty much what I expected.
It’s still interesting and cool. And for better or worse, that’s the direction technology seems to go.

So what it Chrome OS?
Check out this movie:

More info, details and links at the official Google Blog Post

Not much to say here really. We all waited for this, we all knew it’s coming, and now it’s reported all over the place.
But it’s huge news of course, there’s no way I’m not posting something about that.

Windows 7 – The best Windows version since Windows XP and its rightful successor – Has been released.

Microsoft Security Essentials, the FREE anti-malware client from Microsoft is globally released according to Microsoft’s Press Release.
So far it’s been in limited beta only. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and it’s pretty cool. Lightweight and easy on the system.

A free, downloadable, lightweight (and still-to-be-proven GOOD) anti-virus from Microsoft can seriously re-shuffle the consumer endpoint security market in the near future.

This is unbelievably simple. And I could have figured it out ages ago. But I guess it’s only when you really have a need you set out and find the solution.

We all know about this issue, you sit down and author a PowerPoint presentation. You copy/paste a few cool-looking pictures, and when you’re done, all of a sudden, the resulting PPT is a huge multi-megabyte file.
And we all know the reason right? It’s all those images you’ve pasted. While you shrink their dimensions to fit the slides, they’re really all still there at their original size.

I ran a quick search, and indeed, there’s a super easy solution, even built-in into Microsoft Office XP (2002) onwards:

1. Click on any picture in your presentation.
2. You should see the “Pictures Toolbar”. If you don’t, choose the View->Toolbars->Picture option from the menus. Click on the Compress Pictures icon.
3. You will see the “Compress Pictures Dialog” box. Select All pictures in document. If you are sending the file out for screen viewing and review only, then select the Web/Screen option and both checkboxes Compress pictures and Delete cropped areas of pictures.

Voila. As simple as that!
I ran this super simple procedure on a 10MB file, and the result was a 6MB presentation. What a life saver!
You can read a much longer version over at Microsoft’s Reduce the size of your PowerPoint files page…

Also, don’t forget before sending out any Office document on any file to also run the Microsoft Remove Hidden Data tool – So now your presentation is small, compact, safe and private!