Author Archive for Owen Jones

Different Kinds Of Auto Navigation Systems

Posted by º July 5, 2011 º Automobiles º 0 comments

It is a strange fact that many buyers of new cars are willing to pay several times the real value of a satellite navigation system in order to have it installed by the maker. It is true that the car’s manufacturer usually does an excellent job of fitting the device, but then you are paying a premium for it.

If you purchased the sat nav unit independently and had it installed by a third party, you would get it for a third or a quarter of the rate. Still, it is part of the image of having a new vehicle to have all the latest apparatus built in to it. Satellite navigation, commonly called sat nav, is a real boon, if you buy a system that is up-to-date and that is frequently updated.

It is not necessary to have the sat nav fitted in the car factory in order to have it installed well. Many third party installers are quite capable of making a good job of it too without having to have your radio/CD player removed.

Many auto navigation systems are fitted to the instrument panel by means of rubber suction cups anyway. Buying a sat nav unit that does not have to have holes cut for it will also keep the cost to a minimum without having to sacrifice quality or safety.

An important point to remember is that there are many types of GPS systems, each with rather specific uses. GPS for an ocean-going yacht does not need road maps, whereas GPS for a bicycle may not give enough advanced warning for the speed of a car.

Even if you purchase a GPS sat nav device for a road vehicle, there are different varieties. The three basic kinds are: stand-alone, such as you see fitted at the car factory; hand-held and systems that are meant to be used with a laptop computer or similar device.

The stand-alone systems are the most popular, because they have certain advantages: they are made for the job of getting you from A to B via C, D and E, if required; they hold a database of landmarks which will help you know that you are on the right road; a voice will give you directions so that yo do not have to keep referring to the screen and it will memorize and integrate previous routes.

Hand-held sat nav systems work, but require more thought and sometimes additional software to be provided by the user. The screen is typically too small to be of much use and some only provide voice directions. Others only provide pictorial directions. However, they are better than nothing if you are walking or cycling in unknown terrain.

Laptops and PDA’s provide an excellent service, particularly if you already had the device for other purposes such as office work.

So, it is not just a question of getting hold of a cheap sat nav system and thinking that they are all the same, you have to see it working so that you can weigh up whether it is going to be of any use to you in your situation.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on various subjects, but is currently concerned with the Snooper sat nav system. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Escort 8500.

RFID Tags In Clothing

Posted by º July 4, 2011 º Computer Tips º 0 comments

You have heard of RFID tags, right? It is technology that is in most ID cards so that administration or security knows whether staff are in the building or not? Well they are being put in much more than ID cards these days.

They are going into the clothing of a lot of retail stores and even behind the labels on some tin cans. The situation is certain to mushroom.

They are the new generation of bar codes, but unlike bar codes, they can talk back and they can be so minute that you do not even know that you are wearing one. I say ‘wearing one’ because at the moment they are mostly being put into garments, but the day is not far away when they will be under every label of every can of food that you buy.

Some stores have even gone that far already. Look next time you visit the supermarket. Is the check-out clerk scanning a bar code or just scanning ‘something’? If there is no bar code to scan, they are searching for the RFID tag.

However, if you had a bar code on your new top, you would remove it before wearing it, but an RFID tag is so small and so well hidden, that you may never find it.

Why would that matter, you may be wondering? Well, we are told that it does not matter; that people who do worry are just being unreasonable, but others perceive it as the thin edge of the wedge.

You see, in a city, you are never that far from an RFID reader, so really, if you walk past one, your shirt could be crying out: ‘He bought me from Wal-Mart’. It could also be saying: ‘I only cost 4.99′.

If you do not see that as a problem, all well and good, but what if you are walking down the high street and a loud speaker from a shop shouts at you: ‘People who buy their shirts from Wal-Mart normally love Wimpey Burgers!’.

You might think that that is a coincidence or you may have forgotten that you bought that shirt from Wal-Mart, but the tag sewn into your shirt will never forget and it will tell every RFID reader that asks it. Is that fair? You have now become a walking advertisement.

Of course, RFID tags were not introduced for this purpose. They are used ostensibly to help trace merchandise from manufacturer to consumer – point out. They are very useful for tracking stock in a warehouse, but the fact is that these live beacons of their provenance are not turned off at the point of sale. If they were, perhaps there would not be such a problem being raised about them.

Is there a reason to be worried about these tags? Probably not, but then that does not mean that there never will be. What if you were on vacation somewhere and there was a smart bomb linked to an RFID scanner hidden waiting for an American and your shirt was screaming out: ‘I am a shirt. I was bought for 4.99 at Wal-Mart, store ID 0001, New York, USA’?

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is currently involved with the best RFID printer. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

Gas Furnace Repairs You Can Do Yourself

Posted by º June 26, 2011 º Automobiles º 0 comments

There is not actually a lot to go wrong with contemporary gas furnaces, but each mechanical device can fail and the central heating system is one of them. The problem is though, that hundreds of millions of households all over the world have come to rely on their central heating unit.

In general, people are not advised to tamper with things that they know nothing about, especially when it refers to something that could become a fire hazard, but this article is about safe gas furnace repairs, that you can undertake yourself.

Some of these tips might stand you in good stead if the gas furnace in your home central heating system gives up the ghost. These pointers could save you cold nights and high call-out fees.

The more that you become intimate with your central heating system, the more easily you will identify problems that arise, because in general, home heating units have intermittent issues and recurring problems.

Does your heating system keep switching itself on and off at inappropriate times? This almost certainly has something to do with the thermostat. The old fashioned of dealing with thermostats was to tinker with them, but no one does that anymore, they just replace them. You might as well do the same.

Purchase a replacement thermostat and fit it, but if you want to learn more, play about with the metal disk in the old one and refit it after a modification. If you carry on going like this, you may find out what works one day. Some thermostats are quite easy devices and you can suss them out.

If your central heating system keeps shutting down, this is also almost certainly a difficulty with the thermostat, as long as there is fuel in the tank. The tactic is the same. Look at the disk inside the thermostat and read any writing on it. Usually, if you bias it one way or the other, it will fix the problem.

A really easy one is the pilot light. If your system is not working, simply check that the pilot light is burning. The pilot light serves as the ignition for a heat cycle, so if there is not one there, there will be no heat cycle or heating.

The pilot light can be blown out or merely go out because of a temporary shortage of fuel, after which it will have to get re-ignited.

If your entire heating system appears to be working as usual, but there is no heat coming through the vents, it is almost certainly the blower. Check the fan belt and either tighten the tension or replace it. This is an easy job, which, having done once, you can do in your sleep.

The main thing concerning any home appliance is not to automatically reach for the phone book if items go wrong. That is precisely what the want you to do. They want you to think that things are too difficult unless you have studied them, whereas in fact, the majority of engineers just replace parts – very little gets fixed or taken apart any more.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on a number of subjects, but is at present concerned with emergecy air conditioning repairs. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, just go to our website at Home Air Conditioning Systems.

RFID Tags: Passive, Active And Hybrid

Posted by º June 25, 2011 º Computer Tips º 0 comments

All RFID tags are used to store and ultimately send data. They can best be thought of as the replacement for the bar code. However, they have significant advantages over bar codes. For instance: RFID tags can hold much more data than bar codes; they can be scanned from further away and they can in point of fact send data, not only store data.

There are three kinds of RFID tags: passive, active and hybrid. Passive RFID tags are the least expensive, because they are less complex. They have to be induced to disclose their data by borrowing power from an RFID reader. When the reader’s radio waves hit them, they reflect back their information. This is the sort of tag used in clothing in a retail outlet or on crates in a warehouse.

On the other hand, active RFID tags have a battery, a transmitter and an aerial so that they are always sending. These units are obviously a lot more expensive and so are used only on more expensive items such as a container, a battle tank, an airplane, on criminals ankle bands or on an animal of an endangered species.

The hybrid RFID tag is capable of transmitting, but it needs to be told to transmit; it has to be turned on by a signal. This signal could be a satellite passing over head. These hybrid RFID tags are also costly, but the battery lasts longer because they are not ‘always on’. These tags have the same applications as the active tags, but are appropriate for use where it is not critical to know where something is every minute of the day: for instance cattle in a field or goats on a mountain.

Passive tags can be affixed permanently by sewing them into hems or placing them under skin because they do not have their own electricity source and do not wear out. This is a cause of concern to some people who agonize about an invasion of their privacy or the erosion of their human rights.

Active and hybrid tags are most often clearly visible so that the batteries can be changed as and when necessary. If this is going to be not likely to take place, as in the case of wild animals, the tag can have a biodegradable fastener which will break sometime after the expected expiry of the battery.

Some uses for RFID tags are on season tickets so that the holder can pass through the style more quickly than a customer paying by cash. It has applications in security; most of the ID badges you see pinned to shirts have RFID built into them so that security guards do not have to stop and question everybody.

They can be put into wagons that repeatedly cross frontiers so that they do not have to stop for identification. They can be put on windscreens so that, as you pass through a motorway toll post, either your credit card is billed or the charge is added to your company’s monthly statement.

Hospitals utilize them on patients so that they do not misplace anyone or misidentify them. RFID tags are useful in our daily lives but people are concerned about criminals being able to read all this information too easily as well.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on several topics, but is currently concerned with the RFID asset tracking. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

Recovery Planning For Computer Data

Posted by º June 18, 2011 º Computer Tips º 0 comments

If you make your money by using a computer, you ought to protect yourself against all computer disasters. If you were a taxi driver, you would take out car and public liability insurance. If you were an employer, you might take out plant and tools insurance. If you were a landlord you would take out property insurance and loss of earnings insurance.

But what do you do if you work on line? Well, if you work with computers, data is your most valuable resource, but you cannot insure against losing it because you cannot prove that you ever had it. So, what can you do? The solution is that you need to have reliable backups and several of them.

The problem is that computers do not frequently break down so we are lulled into the false feeling of security that we can make backups tomorrow instead of right now. However, the longer that you work with IT, the more you comprehend that there are no warning signs when you are about to lose all your data, which may be your entire income stream.

For instance, say you make websites for a living and update them frequently so that the search engines find them interesting. What would occur if your hard drive crashed or if they were destroyed by a virus? You might say that you would download them from your Net host and begin again, but that is not feasible, because most HTML editors will not decompile a completed website.

That would mean that you could never refresh those web sites again, so they would get less and less interesting to the search engines, so your ranking would fall and your earnings would plummet. And why? Because you failed to insure your business by taking sufficient backups. You failed to make proviso for data recovery in the event of data loss.

However, no matter how often you backup your data on physical media, you will always be running a danger because anything physical, any device is prone to failure and deterioration. CD’s do not last as long as we were promised. I have lost loads of data that I considered was secure on CD’s and hard drives are apt to fail with no notice whatsoever.

Even if you do conquer these problems of storage, what occurs if there is a fire or a thief really steals all your disks and computers? Your hardware would be insured but your source of revenue, your data would be gone forever. All that hard work. Your source of income. Gone. Forever.

There is another alternative and that is not to store your data on your computer, in your office or anywhere within a thousand miles of yourself. This is called cloud storage or cloud data storage. Microsoft calls it Sky Drive and offers 25 GB of free, password-protected, storage available from anywhere in the world. This kind of storage is the ultimate in safe storage offering the best value recovery planning for computer data.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with researching the best virus protection software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software

SEO Pointers For Blogs

Posted by º Computer Tips º 0 comments

Blogs, originally known as web logs, were developed for web masters to document changes they made to web sites. However, blogs have evolved into entities, specialized web sites in their own right. Blogs can be used as an on line diary or they can be used for SEO (search engine optimization) reasons to bolster up a web site.

Blogs can either be written by just its owner or members might be able to post entries as well. These external posts can be posted automatically or they can be kept to be scrutinized by an administrator first before being posted. Blogs are popular by search engines because they tend to be ‘current’, that is, updated frequently, whereas web sites frequently lay unchanged for months. In other words they are ‘static’.

However, there are a few ways that you can give your blog a helping hand to rise in the search engines’ rankings. Let us take a look at some of these SEO tips below:

A blog ought to be themed. That is it should focus on a target audience, a niche, and not wander off that topic. You want to build up a focused readership of surfers who are interested in one small topic, like flying petrol-powered model aircraft.

A themed blog will have a high density of keywords that the search engines consider to be related or on-topic. This will help your blog rise in the rankings – it is an organic, that is, not forced, form of SEO.

In common with web site SEO, the blog ought to have a name that reflects what it is about. Resist the temptation to call a blog on cooking cakes after yourself or ‘fat and fruity’ or something daft like that. A blog on cooking cakes should have the words ‘cooking cakes’ in the title or URL.

In order to do this properly, you will require to pay for the blog’s domain name and host it yourself. If you go the cheap option and use a free blogging site like Google’s Blogger, choose your blog’s name carefully and strive to have it categorized exactly.

The titles of your posts should also be chosen carefully to mirror the content of that article because each piece will almost certainly be a page in the blog, so its title becomes part of its URL

Be certain that your blog pings (that is ‘tells’) the blog registers after every post. This builds links back to your blog and search engines rank blogs and web sites by the number of links pointing back to it.

Getting these links or backlinks should become your foremost priority after posting an piece a day. Getting backlinks is a enormous topic all on its own, but two simple methods are to make a signature file (sigfile) with a link to your blog.

Add this sigfile to the foot of every email you send out and join forums and blogs which are on the same subject as your blog. Post to those places and make sure that your sigfile is appended to each post.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with whether sitemaps give websites a boost. If you want to know more, please visit our web site at PLR Articles

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