Brain Candy #14 - New Capabilities

The biggest change in our new environment is Windows 98. I avoided upgrading the old machine to Windows 95, mostly for resource reasons. A 486 PC isn't especially suited for running Windows 95, even though technically it can. The new machine, however, is plastered with "Designed for Microsoft Windows 98" stickers. I really would have had to struggle to avoid using it. I plan on running other operating systems eventually, but for now, Windows 98 is it. The first two sites I focus on concern Windows 98 and related software. These sites also cover Windows 95, so don't feel left out if you don't have a brand new machine yourself.

The first site is Woody's Office Watch at http://www.wopr.com/ ; a site devoted to those of us who are users of Microsoft Office products. You might think of this as a guerilla site; the authors are unabashedly fond of Microsoft Office, but they also realize how troublesome the warts of the product can be. This site is a mixture of free advice and news, links and plugs for books and software that the authors sell. The books are good -- I own several, with titles like "The Underground Guide to Word for Windows", "Hacker's Guide to Word for Windows", "Excel 97 Annoyances", and "Word 97 Annoyances". (Note the last two titles; they link us to our next featured site.) But even if you aren't interested in buying anything, Woody's Office Watch has a lot to offer. In particular, they feature a free weekly newsletter with tips on things of interest to Office users, including bugs in the software you won't hear about elsewhere, some quite serious. It's not a somber site, however, there is a lot of humor mixed in with the advice. It's worth a look if you're an Office user.

The Annoyances books are part of a series, with different authors for each. The previous site has a connection with several past Annoyances books; the second site deals with present and future Annoyance books. You can find it at http://www.annoyances.org/ . The author of this site, David A. Karp, wrote "Windows Annoyances", based on Windows 95 and plans to have "Windows 98 Annoyances" in the bookstores sometime after September. He has decided to share the raw information he's been gathering on his Web page. Here you can find out how real users have been faring with Windows 98. My experiences with Windows 98 have been quite positive overall, but my machine was 'born' with Windows 98. Those who converted from earlier versions of Windows have had their complaints. This site is a definite must if you are pondering an upgrade to Windows 98. This site also contains information on Windows 95 annoyances for those who are interested.

Our old PC didn't have a working sound card for quite some time. I didn't have much luck trying to make a new one work, but now that I have a new computer, I have sound again. I've started exploring the delights of the audio Web. I used the Net, via the RealAudio plug-in, to monitor Mark McGuire's at bats on the night that he hit #62. I didn't have to tie myself down to what was otherwise a boring, meaningless game; I just walked to the family room each time he came to bat and saw him hit #62. All sorts of sites offer links to get the RealAudio player, so I won't bother with that, but if you want a program to play digital sound files (called .wav files), check out http://www.goldwave.com . This site exists to promote the shareware program "Gold Wave". It lets you listen to, record, edit and process .wav files. You can downoad a trial version which is fully functional, except for a (generous) limit on the number of operations that can be performed at one invocation. I've made a number of interesting .wav files and have a lot of fun with this kind of software.

The last site is also a sound-oriented site. It's the Classical MIDI Archive site at http://www.prs.net/midi.html . There are almost 6,000 .mid files from almost 400 classical composers here. Even with this many files, there are some gaps in coverage. In particular, modern composers are very sparsely represented. This is because the author of the site is very adamant about not violating copyright. Still there is a lot of great music here, done very well. You can also download a shareware MIDI player here if you need one. To explore other genres of music, just use a search engine to do a search on "MIDI"; you'll get lots of hits.