Custom T-shirts by VistaPrint

I’ve previously blogged about VistaPrint offering business cards, and you might also know them for their various other services and products (such as personalized PostIt notes, letterhead printing, and so on).

But did you know that VistaPrint (which also caters to Canadians specifically) also does T-shirts and custom T-shirts?

A custom, pre-shrunk (100% cotton) T-shirt can be yours for as low as $9.49, or even lower if you order in bulk. It’s excellent for businesses that need to promote their brand or non-profit organizations (even school clubs) that want to fundraise.

You can choose from white, gray, or black colours (some fees apply), small, medium, large, or extra-large, and even choose a design or logo to be printed on the backside (for a fee). For instance, a Student Council might place their logo or graphic design on the front, and some text on the back to the effect of “Student Council”. VistaPrint is a reputable company that lets you choose all the fine details.

If you go to VistaPrint now to get your custom T-shirt (or T-shirts), you can get 25% off the price of the T-shirts using the code “TShirts25″.

Save now on your T-shirt printing needs with a company that has been trusted by more than 13 million customers worldwide!

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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Top 15 Open Source Items (For Windows)

I decided to let you know what my top 15 open source items are for Windows computers. All of the items below are free, both in the monetary sense and the intellectual property sense.

Only programs that I use or have used are in this list. I’m sure there are plenty of great programs not in this list, but I believe this list will suit the various needs of most Windows users. (I have excluded PuTTY, as it is a program intended for use by a small group of users — those with Linux/Unix servers.)

15. Handbrake

This is an excellent program for backing up (a.k.a. “ripping”) DVD’s, converting them to formats like H.264 MPEG4 for playback on computers. Leo Laporte has recommended this program to many callers on The Lab With Leo Laporte, but it may not be legal much longer if the proposed copyright reform in Canada is passed. From what I can tell, it is a powerful program.

This program is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

14. PDFCreator

I used to use this for converting any printable document to PDF, but now I have Office 2007 which has built-in PDF capabilities. I no longer have a need for this open source solution. Mac users, of course, can convert to PDF in a simple fashion when printing. With PDFCreator, it leverages other GPL/LGPL things like ghostscript in order to convert whatever you’re printing to PDF. There are commercial and non-open source solutions, but this is by far the best of them — aside from Adobe Acrobat.

13. Pidgin

This is a good instant messenger that consolidates multiple IM accounts from Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo! and more. It doesn’t look as intuitive as a free (but closed source) product like Windows Live Messenger or Google Talk, but it is a powerful application. I used to use this before I found out how to install Windows Live Messenger on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Other notable IM clients for Windows include Miranda IM.

12. DVD Flick

DVD Flick is a really good program that creates DVD’s that can be played in most modern DVD players. It doesn’t match up to iDVD on the Mac — it only converts the video/audio to the DVD standard format and creates titles & chapters — but it is an easy-to-use solution for average Windows users that don’t need a menu. There is another open source solution for menu authoring, though.

11. Notepad++

Notepad++ is an interesting program that is so much more than a Notepad replacement. It can even replace some coding programs, given the plugins available for it and code highlighting, even though I think Dreamweaver still beats it in terms of usability and user-friendliness for Web designers and developers.

I would appreciate the authors of Notepad++ more if they didn’t have a large, ugly, and ineffective banner at the top of their site advocating the boycott of the Beijing Games. Guess what? Not a single country decided to boycott the Games! But that’s a matter for another time and another blog…

10 more programs after the jump, including (in no particular order here) Firefox, 7-zip, VLC Media Player, Audacity, MediaCoder, and more!

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(3 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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Getting a new computer

Well, we (my family and I) are getting a new computer. Not a new PC in the sense of Dell or HP (which are now the better PC brands), but rather in the sense of a self-assembly kit.

The kit includes:

• A corporate steel ATX Mid-Tower case with 7 expansion slots and 600 watt power supply
• A powerful motherboard with:

NVIDIA nForce and NVIDIA GeForce chipset

A 1333 MHz front side bus

4 SATA ports (3.0 Gbps) and on-board RAID

Gigabit LAN interface

HDMI — great for my 24″ widescreen monitor which supports 1920×1200

8-channel high definition audio

PCIExpress

• An amazing Intel Core 2 Quad (Q6600) processor

Each core: 2.4 GHz

A 1066 MHz front side bus

An 8 MB cache

Support for EM64T (x64)

Support for Intel Virtualization (perfect for running virtual machines)

Stuff like Smart Memory Access, Advanced Smart Cache, Advanced Digital Media Boost, etc.

• 2 GB of DDR2 memory  at 667 MHz — not amazing or great, but good for our needs; besides, DDR2 is insanely cheap to add.

No monitor, hard drive, optical drive, or operating system. That’s okay, because we have all of the above. It also doesn’t come with a fan/heatsink, so we had to buy one with the kit.

This computer is going to be an excellent improvement over the current Intel Pentium D (2.66 GHz) that I use everyday. Do you know how hard it is to do all of the things I do on 512 MB of shared memory (DDR1, no less — expensive to upgrade) and bad integrated graphics that won’t let me make full use of the 1920×1200 monitor? Memory is the most crippling limitation of my current computer; I can’t multitask very well, and running Firefox and Word side-by-side is sluggish.

Yes, I know. At some point in the past, people lived on 286’s and 4 MB of RAM.

With this new machine, the video compression that I do will be blazing fast — on 4 cores. And I do believe that setting up virtual machines on the computer (perhaps a Linux server and a virtual 32-bit XP installation) will be the best way to suit all of our needs — my father’s compute-intensive scientific research, my own Web development and multimedia work, as well as for running all of the miscellaneous items that won’t run well on 64-bit Windows. (Yes, I’m going to be installing Windows XP Professional x64 Edition; I’m not quite ready for Vista yet.)

As of right now, the barebones kit isn’t yet sold out, so take a look. It’s only $299.99 after instant rebate and mail-in rebates.

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Sorry for downtime

Sorry for the long unresolved downtime. However, we’re back up, and I’ve moved some of the FreddyWare sites.

For instance, FreddyWare.net has been relocated to the PersonalLog server and has a new and simpler design!

The next post will be tomorrow!

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