David Baldaro – 2009

Help, my Dell Precision is melting!!!

Sure, I had noticed it before but not really noticed just how hot the underside of my Dell Precision M65 was getting during use. This evening after recieving near 3rd degree burns on my legs after a relatively short session I thought enough was enough. Surely this cannot be normal?

A quick monitor of the CPU Core temperature reported it running at 89C – ouch, no wonder the top of my thighs felt cooked and sore to the touch!

After a quick dig around I came upon http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html and a tool entitled, I8kfanGUI.
I8kfanGUI is a graphical Windows application to show the internal temperatures and to control the fan operation on the Dell Inspiron/Latitude/Precision notebook series. It’s running under Windows 2000 and above operating system versions (Windows 2000/XP/Server2003/Vista).
After a very quick install, I am now running at just under 50C and seem to have a much happier laptop as well. I have no idea just what was occurring, but things seem to have settled down now. Cool!

By David Baldaro|January 31st, 2009|General|0 Comments

Understanding Direct Mail Impact and ROI Whitepaper

I recently was pointed towards some very useful whitepaper hosted by one of our customer in Auston, Texas. QuantumDigital.

One whitepaper that caught my attention was one entitled, “Understanding Direct Mail Impact and ROI” and contains some interesting facts and figures as well as some common sense approach to implementing successful direct mail and integrated campaigns.
Marketers can expect a return of $43.52, $22.75 and $19.97 respectively, for every dollar spent on email marketing, direct mail and internet marketing.
It’s certainly worth a read and acts as a good reference to those still debating whether or not to take the drive into using direct mail in more effective ways; as well as providing compelling evidence to service providers about the potential from embracing this technology as soon as possible.

Other whitepapers available at the same location

Best Practices for Effective Email Design
The Bond Between Email & Direct Mail for Lead Generation
The Power of Web-to-print Portals

By David Baldaro|January 29th, 2009|Personalised Communications, XMPie|1 Comment

Does no-one want my money!

In today’s economic climate when we are being urged to go out and spend – and highstreet big-names are closing everyday; you would think that if you walked into a shop with a handful of cash then you would be greeted with a “hello”, “why of course”, “thanks” and “pleasure doing business with you” …. but alas it seems that’s too much like hard work.

Let me explain … my wife needs a new washing machine, she’s done her research (she’s good like that!) and knows the exact make and model required. She finds a price online however decides to go into the highstreet retailer to she if one is there that she can take away on the day. One is sat there in the store, however costing £50 more. Upon quizzing the staff they’re not prepared to negotiate on cost – so she walks out cash in hand, comes home and buys the same model online; for less!

We had a similar story when we went to MFI for a kitchen – knew what we wanted, but we couldn’t get someone to just draw up the plans! So we left and did it with another smaller company. It’s no wonder some of these companies are going bust through a lack of cash in the bank if that is their attitude to business!

By David Baldaro|January 28th, 2009|General|2 Comments

MythTV.org gets a facelift … is it just that though?

I noticed today that MythTV.org has had a new facelift which is great, but it seems like it is just that though. A new face on old content.

Now I’m a great fan of MythTV; and I think that it is a fantastic media frontend providing LiveTV functionality as well as media sharing and many other great things.

But dissapointment comes from the fact that after years this Open Source project is still sat at 0.21. Version 0.21 is a great and stable release; but there are many things that MythTV still needs to do. I wish; selfishly that more people would put more time into developing for MythTV!

If only I had developled my programming skills I would help. However I didn’t; therefore I cannot!

By David Baldaro|January 27th, 2009|MythTV|0 Comments

Great examples of geo-mapping with personalised mail pieces

I am, and will continue to be far a very long time a huge fan of what the folks at Trekk Media do with XMPie and surrounding technologies. Whilst pushing the boundaries of many things that XMPie can do it seems like they are having great success with the correct inclusion of geo mapping within DM pieces.

For more information check out www.trekkmaps.com or www.trekk.com

By David Baldaro|January 27th, 2009|XMPie|0 Comments

Welcome to my new abode!

I figured that after getting stressed about how iBlogger was handling my edits and some of the confusion and lack of control that I had, it was time that I tried to do things properly. So I created my own space on the net so here we go. Please feel free to leave any comments or to chip in at any point.

By David Baldaro|January 27th, 2009|General|0 Comments

Be warned!

This is what can potentially happen when you leave a 3 year old daughter in a particularly bad mood in a room with your laptop for just 1 minute!!!
The joys of eBay some google searches and a screwdriver later everything is well again!

By David Baldaro|January 14th, 2009|General|0 Comments

The History of the Internet

I stumbled upon this today – which was quite interesting, certainly when you take for granted the Internet as it is today – and where is all started from. Whatever, there is no getting away from all those acronyms whichever way you try….History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

By David Baldaro|January 9th, 2009|General|0 Comments

Amazon final launches a management console for AWS.

Ever since Amazon launched their AWS services to the public I have been a great supporter – understanding that this will be one of those technologies that reshapes the way that many individuals and business conduct business online.

However getting things to work in the ‘cloud’ is not a trival task for the uninitiated – but once you have it working; it works.

The introductioin of the AWS Console now makes this process so much easier. A point and click interface which makes it easy to find, launch and management instances within the cloud.

Well done Amazon – keep it coming.AWS Management Console is provided free of charge at https://console.aws.amazon.com.

By David Baldaro|January 9th, 2009|General|0 Comments