So yesterday, I noticed my backup of my files (I use a synchronization) to Backup EHD didn’t work.  I didn’t have time to look into yesterday.  Today, the backup fails again.   Two failed backups in a row is not a good sign.   During the backup today, I started getting I/O errors.  I can browse my Backup EHD but it still looks okay.  So far so good.  So I use Western Digital diagnostic to do a quick check.  It has a big red failure on it.   Hmm, that’s not good.  I tried to run Western Digital’s repair tool and it hung.  Uh oh.  Ran ChkDsk and it reported bad sectors (bad spots on the disk) and tried to fix them and hung.  Definitely looking bad.  In the meantime, I start shopping to see the latest deals.  I am now in the process of reformatting the EHD and hoping to salvage the drive itself  (during a reformat it can detect the errors and stop using them)  that’s assuming that more bad sectors aren’t created.   We’ll see.  I am not very optimistic.

Did I lose anything?  Nope.  The EHD that is failing is my Backup EHD.   Which means it only contains the copies of everything from the my main EHD and my laptop.  What it does mean is right now I am not currently backed up.  Now that scares me!  If the format fails, I will be being a new EHD tomorrow. 

Because of this, I do want to share a few things. 

Pay attention to your computer errors.  I noticed one failure and then a few I/O errors.  If this was a hard drive that had important things on it, I would be busy copying files off of it.  In this case, I actually could browse the drive and could have gotten all my files off if I wished.  I am guessing that complete utter failure wouldn’t have happened for a few days.  (By formatting I am pushing it to work or fail.)  Of the hard drives that have failed in our household, most have been a slow death (start getting more and more errors) and I was able to get files off that I wasn’t sure were backed up. Only one drive failure was a spectacular crash of it just not working that day or ever.  So pay attention to those errors and you might just have a chance to salvage something.

Backup, Backup, Backup!  If this was my main EHD drive or my laptop drive, I wouldn’t be quite as calm but at least I know I would have backups and it would just take some time to resort things out. 

Shopping

Oh and I just had to share, check out these colors from Western Digital:

They must know that there are digital scrappers that love EHD’s.

All my EHD’s have been Western Digital with 2 of them failing now.  So I think I am going to branch out and try a different brand.  I saw a 500 GB Seagate EHD for sale for $99 at Office Max and I have in store coupon for $15.  That’s a nice deal! 

I haven’t checked out the rest of the sales, so I gotta go do that. 

As for how that formatting is going??  Well, let’s just say, it sure looks like I am going shopping tomorrow for a new Backup EHD.

How many times have you went looking for something on your computer & didn’t really know where to begin?

• an email that you know you received or sent? with the person’s name or topic?  but you have 5+ accounts)
• a document & you can’t remember if it’s an email attachment or on your hard drive?

I just don’t have the patience or time to spend looking for those types of things anymore.

So, copernic has become one of my ESSENTIAL desktop app’s. And it’s free as most are that I bring you!

What it is:

It’s a desktop application that you download, install, and then it catalogs your hard drive. My sister was suspect of this, but she’s heard me rave about it enough that I think she may be using it. (She reads more email accounts into Thunderbird than I do).

How to use it:

Copernic installs a little search bar in the bottom right of your window

Type in your search term. In this case I’m going to look for email from Robin (from Rakscraps).

A pop up window comes up when you start typing.

The search results for Robin show 65 emails, 32 files & 3 contacts.

From here click on the “Open Main Window” & a full window opens with a bottom pane showing the details of the email or file that you choose.

The choice to Reply or Forward email from Copernic doesn’t work.

But you can open files from it, which is very handy!  This handy little app saves me a LOT of time!

The power of blogging is so amazing to me. Heidi & I are enjoying our blog’s ability to teach & share information. The feedback from our readers is fabulous & motivates us to provide more! So I’m really excited to share some news that I received today. The significance is that as blog readers you can make a difference!

Remember when I blogged about Windows Live Writer & everyone agreed it was THE BEST blogging tool?!! Well, some people asked me for help with troubleshooting & some of you provided your comments. I posted a culmination of that information, which was noticed by Sean O’Driscoll, GM of Marketing from Microsoft. He forwarded it to the development team.

Today I received a personal note at Facebook from Joe Cheng, a Microsoft software developer on the Live Writer team saying:

Hi Connie, I wanted to let you know that Beta 3 of Windows Live Writer was released yesterday. Two things I want to make sure you’re aware of. 1) Images can now be automatically uploaded with Blogger blogs, via Google’s Picasa service. I know a lot of scrapbookers are on Blogger and have been waiting for this. 2) Beta 2 and earlier made screenshots pretty blurry; I noticed you have a lot of screenshots on your blog lately.
As always, let me know if you have any questions/comments! Thanks!

Isn’t it nice that Microsoft is worried about scrapbookers and takes the time to send a personal note to us?!! especially scrapbookers using Blogger?!!! like my techie friend Hummie! And I can’t wait to see the improvement on the screenshots. Heidi & I enjoy throwing up tutorials here quickly in Live Writer. It’s a great tool. I also compose our newsletters in Live Writer and copy/paste into the software because Word kind of mungles it. So a big thanks to Joe & your team!

What are you waiting for? go get the 3rd beta of Window Live Writer! Here are the new features:

So dear readers, give it a whirl & let us know how it goes! Microsoft is paying attention & looking forward to your feedback. That’s pretty exciting, don’t you agree?

I’m so excited about this that I wanted to show you some screenshots! None of these are hosted by the way. They’re embedded. I’m using SnagIt. Can someone try it out & see if it will embed screenshots by other ways? And I just added a photo (because I wanted to try it) - MAN! this is the easiest way to add images to a blog post!

You can manage multiple blogs!

And put text wrapping on the left or right of the image.

There is a pane on the right that offers all the options (much like ACDSee Photo Manager). And it changes depending on what you’re doing. Pasting in an image gives other options. This is the main one.

These are the image properties to choose from:

Text wrapping

• Inline (the only option I had in Wordpress)
• Left (great to be able to text & not just have wasted space!)
• Right (good for certain situations like now maybe?)

Under borders - there’s an option for photo paper. I put it on the photo below. Kind of cool, eh? (I was playing with the macro on my camera - it’s a hydrangea if you’re wondering.)

This is the Open screen. It allows access to all drafts and online blog posts for editing. Slick, eh?

The FUNKIEST thing is that you can preview the post in Live Writer without publishing it. And it looks like the real thing! but it’s not published yet. Check it out! See the little blue shapes in the corners? That must indicate that it’s not live yet.

So give it a try, I think you’ll MORE than really like it!

Edited - So I just adjusted a couple of the images because our blog is fluid & I see that each image has a URL with a Wordpress address… hmmm, I always like know why! I wonder how they’re doing this? Maybe they’re hosting the image on Wordpress somehow? Does anyone know? Heidi - do you have any ideas?

Where do you write your blog posts? One day Wordpress “ate” one of mine & since then I started composing in Word because it seemed more friendly. I add links & format it there, then just do one big copy & paste in to Wordpress.

Auntie Pea was raving about Windows Live Writer, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. And I must say that I’m quite impressed! After playing with it today, there is so much to share!

Here are the features:

• Very easy to install & set up with your blog (uses blog URL, username & password)
• Write posts offline
• Drafts can sit on your computer
• Software learns the blog’s format, so the preview appears just as it would online
• Synchronizes with your blog & allows you to have up to the last 500 posts on your computer
• Overall allows easy management of drafts & publishing
• The coolest thing is that you can manage multiple blogs!

Extra touches of interest:

• More text options like text sizes, various fonts, font colors, etc!
• Plug-ins are available & more will be coming that are specific to blogging platforms
  • yep, I added the smileys (both msn & Yahoo)
  • as I add more I will blog about any that are particularly useful (like the must have smileys!). There are presently 3 pages & I’m sure that will grow.

This is going to be one very useful & powerful tool! I’ll blog about it again after I’ve used it for awhile. If you try it, let me know what you think & what features you find helpful?

If you know me, you know that I like my chatting. (My sister is nodding her head!) I’m very much a people person & I enjoy chatting real time in contrast to email.

Now you’re maybe thinking, why is she talking about options for chatting? Well, I quickly found that my friends preferred various chat clients. I tried to convince all of them that Hello was the best, but that didn’t work. Some are on Yahoo messenger & other’s prefer MSN messenger. There is also AIM & Google Talk.

So what’s a girl to do? Well, there’s something like a blog reader, but it’s for chatting. It’s called Meebo.com Here’s how it works:

• create an account
• enter your log in information for each chat account you have (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Google Talk) & you don’t need to have all 4 - I use two of them
• To log in to chat is easy:
  • Open this page & use one log in
  • All of your friends will be in one box (yes, they can coexist)
  • And you can ‘undock’ the friends box outside the browser so that it can be minimized.
• Downside - you need to keep that browser open
• Upside - MSN was giving me headaches by logging out all the time & that doesn’t happen anymore. I’m also thinking that I can uninstall MSN from my computer (which is famous for spyware) & just chat thru Meeb. Meebo remembers your last session with a person when you open the chat box with them - I like that!

Finally there is Hello.com that we all know & love! Hello is ideal because you can transfer images so fast. And the chat logs are easily accessible & they contain the images. Files can also be transferred thru Hello. Unfortunately Hello isn’t a part of Meebo, but logging into only 2 is quite workable.

I have seen people asking if a review of digiscrapping software exists. This is the best one that I’ve seen for those seriously interested in digital scrapbooking.

This review of Scrapbooking Software was published in the July 2007 issue of BHG Scrapbooks Etc.

For ACDSee Photo Editor, the price is now $49.99.  It makes layers easy & can do text on a curve. It also makes layer masks straightforward. I have tutorials for using them. (Photoshop Elements can’t do those things.) The best thing about it is how user friendly it is!

You can find links to our tutorials for ACDSee Photo Editor here.

At our site we have links to resources for all digital scrapbooking software & realize that many of you are using Photoshop Elements or Photoshop. And periodically I will come across things that look like good resources that I want to share.

This is a list of shortcuts for Photoshop that looked handy.

101 Hidden Tips & Secrets For Photoshop

and if you look at their top articles on the right, I saw this one -

How to create a transparent favicon in Photoshop

So you can make it in Photoshop & then use my instructions for getting it in your address bar.

This is the list of tutorials on our site for other programs.

In my last post I had a layout using an Out of Bounds Frame. I bought mine because it’s just easier. But if you’re interested in making your own, my friend ‘Quirky’, shared some great tutorials with me. They are made for Photoshop but I was able to translate them over to ACDSee Photo Editor, so they are very well done.

The Wonderful World of Out of Bounds, an Intro. and Frame Warping

Also the girls over at Scrapbookgraphics put out a tutorial recently too on Out of Bounds.

We also have information on disabling Organizer & minimizing slow down in PSE & PS.

Ok here it is…My opinion on their easy to use, neat,
almost the same as PSP, photo editor!!

A couple of weeks ago I had installed some brushes in
my PSP X and after that I didn´t work anymore…
well it does, but it takes like forever to load them and
then all of the sudden, it´s gone!

Then I remembered I still had a download for ACDSee
photo editor and decided to use it right away! With
the little help from a couple of tuts from digiscrapinfo,
I figured it out pretty fast! It was so easy!! It does
the same things my psp does only so much faster!!
Since it doesn´t take a lot of working space! Now
with ACDSee photo manager & photo editor it
really saves me more then half the time!
And I love it!!!!

Things I like about it:
- it makes layers easy
- assigning things in groups; as exsample with
alpha´s, you can all resize/move them at once. This
also works when you have a couple of photos that
you all want in the same sizes!
- text on paths; is has a awsome feature that after
you´ve put your text in there, you can easily put them
on a path/curve. And it only took me like 1 minute!!
- It´s very simple to make vignettes
- And best of all is that it doesn’t require a huge
amount of RAM

Well, I know there are a lot more, but since I´m only
using it for a two weeks, I still have to figure it out!!
But already loving this editor!!

Here are two of my pages, using ACDSee´s photo
editor…

Here´s my Fiancé and his new & first glasses. He
needed them or a while now and finally got a pair last
month. I think he looks great with them! As you can
see I used the text on a path feature and it was a
piece of cake! Credits can be found here

This is my colleague’s little boy Ruben…he goes
to my group at daycare and he’s such an cutie and
always an happy little boy! Credits can be found here

This program is really easy to use for beginners or
advanced scrappers. And one thing I also like is that
Connie & Heidi have made some great tutorials to
help you out!! Like for using a template, photo
extractions, basic scrapbook functions and I know
there are more in the making!
You can check those out over here

If you have some more questions about it, please
ask!! Thanks for reading, Petra

I don’t feel good today - so I’m here to entertain you!

My sister had requested that I make a favicon for our site… (Can’t sisters just be demanding?!) So my first question was WHAT! is a favicon? I didn’t ask her because as a librarian, I Google all the time (or let’s say - pretend to know things but rely on the net heavily? maybe!).

Wikipedia says - A favicon (short for “favorites icon”), also known as a page icon or an urlicon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon, and many recent web browsers can then make use of them. Browsers that support favicons may display them in the browser’s URL bar, next to the site’s name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page’s title in a tabbed document interface.

And for those of us that use Firefox & LOVE our colored tabbed browsing, we see favicons all the time - we just didn’t know what they were called! I use that icon all the time when I bookmark by dragging it into the toolbar just below the address bar. Here’s a screenshot of my browser for those of you that like visuals:

Making a flavicon is VERY easy!! Now everyone has to realize that I do NOT have PS. I scrap in ACDSee Photo Editor and am quite happy with being able to get things done. And on a side note, on the weekend I made my first blinkie, but I had to have a friend animate it because I am PS challenged. I digress, sorry… (we’ll save the blinkie making instr’s for another time).

So the first thing you need to do is decide what flavor of icon you want? (I love plays on words - and doesn’t favicon just look like flavor?) It’s not very big - so it has to be simple and specific. We decided on a question mark. Then there was the color … because it needed to match with our website. So once I knew that I wanted a red question mark with a blue circle & red border it was easy. In ACDSee Photo Editor I made a 2″ square and filled that space with the circle & question mark and saved it as a png.

Now for the fun part! There’s a site that makes favicons from your image. (I saw a site where you could pay to have them made, but… we’re on low ‘no’ budget). So once you have your image, go here to FavIcon from Pics

• browse to your image
• click on ‘Generate Favicon’ It will show you a preview & you can test it in the browser.
• Then if you like it, you can download it as a zip. When you unzip it there will be a Read Me file giving instructions on how to place the code in your webpages. (My sister did this. As I’ve said before, she’s the brains of this operation.)

So, if you make one, add a comment & link us to it! I want to see what flavor you choose for your favicon & how it personalizes your site!

I just found this:
Adding Custom Favicon to Your Blogger Blog

http://how2make.blogspot.com/2007/02/adding-custom-favicon-to-your-blog

My sister, the techie, adds this suggestion –
As you starting installing favicons, they might not show up right way.

In firefox, Tools | Options | Advanced Tab | Network Tab | Cache Clear Now Button.