11.17.06 – All these friggin’ acronyms just drive people batty. Once you’ve had a good laugh explaining that B.F.D. means ‘big deal,’ to someone, to which they naturally ask, “What’s the ‘F’ for,” it’s all pretty much downhill from there. The best acronym maker in the land of computers is by far, Microsoft, or MSFT if you’re cheeky.

Since it’s impossible to accumulate and maintain every new and old acronym out there, here are some links to check out. Why? When attempting to determine what to turn off and leave on in Windows and what to remove from the Control Panel’s Add/Remove Programs screen, you’ll be well advised to know that the old days method of picking out strange acronyms doesn’t work any longer. Some of those mystery letters aren’t viruses or third party software; they’re strange letters directly from the Mothership, or MS (again) if you’re cheeky.

.NET acromyns specifically.

Friendly glossary from 2graphic.co.uk pertaining to the Internet.

A terribly large list from the creators themselves, Microsoft.

Microsoft certification acronyms since “Microsoft Certified” doesn’t mean anything on its own.

Movie site packing a lexicon of ‘Microspeak.’ Words, not acronyms found here in three volumes.

Development tools and technology acronyms concerning developers.

If all else fails to clarify, AcronymFinder.com can receive your mystery letters, but will toss out EVERYTHING at you. AVI means not only a type of video you can view online, but also the Army Veterinary Inspector (typically, a military food inspector).

READ IT IN DANSKE

9.13 – Anyone who has worked on a laptop before knows that there’s not a lot of room for error within the machines and that forces parts within reach after tons of screws have been removed. In the case of my new -ish HP Pavilion zv6000, a RAM memory upgrade that I expected to be simple provided quite a challenge! Click the image below for a HUGE version.

RadioShack and BrandSmart along with some other retail stores offered a deal that was too good to pass up. A laptop, printer and digital camera were bundled together for about $1,200.00. After recommending this a few times, I finally went for it. Best twelve hundred I ever spent (I’m typing that on the machine this very moment). Under powered, however with only 512MB RAM (maximum of 2GB).

“No problem to just go in through a few access hatches and install more RAM,” I thought. Two hours, twenty-seven screws and several bad words later, I discovered nothing but dead ends. Incredible. Internet research revealed a half-dozen other folks stumbling over the same confusion. The zv6000 takes two sticks of RAM but in two different spots. It’s the second spot that gets you!

As a public service to everyone else enjoying the baby workhorse that is HP’s Pavilion zv6000 models, we present an enhanced diagram right out of HP’s Manual. Keyboard removals beg cleanliness and organization of you.

Find the hard-to-find HP Pavilion zv6000 manual here in PDF.
If the link isn’t working one day, we’ve copied the manual here
One free PDF reader we love over Adobe’s Acrobat is Foxit which we have Setup v2.2 of here as an Executable – save it then run it.

UPDATE 30OCT07 – The zv6000 shipped with AMD Turion 64 Mobile MT-34 processors – the wrong RAM may result in sluggish performace due to mismatched speeds. So, even more helpful than ever, here’s what you need to know:

PC133 memory is used with Intel Pentium III processors.

Rambus memory, also called RDRAM, is used new Intel Pentium 4 processor with a 133 MHz external clock speed.

DDR (Double Data Rate ) SDRAM is used with AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz systems.

So, speifically, we can max out at 2GB of memory best of all if it’s PC2700 DDR-SDRAM Dual In-line Memory Module or DIMM. Proper prices for different MB of this memory type are $20 for 256 MB (why bother?), $40 for 512 MB and $80 for 1,024 MB or a Gig. These are not retail prices and don’t include shipping when ordered online. Your HP Pavilion zv6000 memory type would be twice as much retail and about 30 to 40% higher if you order through your friendly computer tech. 28NOV07 SOLVED!

EDIT It’s a year later and here I am revamping the entire site once again. I’m using a blogging software called Textpattern which has a very shallow learning curve and is easy for anyone already familiar with HTML code.

The funny thing is that I find myself revamping the site in 2007 trying very hard to approach a design I made up in the beginning of 2006. The icons below were actually designed for a blog-like Dinarius.com at the beginning of 2006 when the first CSS-like design turned out to be too tough for me to keep up in HTML.

So whatever the outcome (this is the first transferred article) the info may still pertain to what you’re searching for and if you too are a graphic designer turned webmaster, I feel your pain. All “Articles About This Site” may interest you; so check that category! – BryanA.

8.31 – In a new attempt to not type too much and conserve some energy for fixing computers and getting stuck in traffic, brevity is paramount. “Favicon” That’s the little thing that appears when a page is, “Added To Favorites.” With the arrival of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) many file types will be valid. Currently, the file extension is .ico

In refurbishing our own icons, we got a surprise. DIGG.com is the foremost authority on popular recommendations. A search in ‘All Digg’ for ‘favicon’ revealed one tiny result. Ironically, searching for icons revealed a DIGG competitor still in BETA. Oddly, BlinkList acts a lot like your Favorites list. You can save sites you’ve seen in the blink of an eye but have no time for.

Searching favicons at Google turned up Joe’s BlinkList. Go figure. More popular gets more blinks: An HTML kit gets top rank – we saw it, but didn’t bite; No.2 is HTMLbasix delivering generic information and mean-spirited popups hence, no link; No.3 actually just refers to FavIcon.co.UK which turns out to add another goodie.

Favicons can be 16×16 pixels and 32×32 pixels depending on their use. The Header Tag will contain two “link ref” elements as follows:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

(Sorry if that shows up strangely.) WIKI has a bunch to say about it all.

Drum roll… Best icon maker at the push of a button. Could it be that easy? Sure; Dynamic Drive even allows you to put the maker on your site. Good idea, eh? ;) Thanks for reading while we revamped our catagories.

DINARIUS Bryan's old Digital Interest blog