Top Tech Tidbits - Volume 252
The Week's News in Access Technology

Distributed by Flying Blind, LLC
http://www.flying-blind.com/

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Greetings,

1) You can hear 27 interviews from the recent CSUN conference from Serotek.
http://serotalk.com/2010/03/28/csun2010/

2) The second Serotek source for CSUN discussion was SeroTalk Podcast 38 where they play their favorite interviews.
http://serotalk.com/2010/03/29/serotalk-podcast-38-csun-2010-highlights/

3) Serotek's final use of this programming will come on GMT Friday, 2 April at 01:00, when they will have a panel discussion about the most exciting discoveries from CSUN. Perhaps more interesting, they will discuss Windows XP mode, a free Microsoft feature allowing users of many versions of Windows 7 to run Windows XP on their systems.
http://serotalk.com/2010/03/31/tech-chat-56-csun-highlights-and-xp-mode-under-windows-7/

4) One of the CSUN interviews, and a forthcoming reading option for the blind, is Blio, the accessible commercial bookstore that is said to allow people to buy any of hundreds of thousands of commercially-available electronic books. Blio will be the subject of Tek Talk on GMT Tuesday,6 April at 00:00.
http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rsc9613dc89eb2

5) Another CSUN interview subject was the two new products released by IRTI, an entertainment center software with talking remote control, and a new student-teacher editin of their Eclipse-Writer program. .
http://www.irti.net/clearance/index.html

6) J.J. of BlindBargains conducted his own set of CSUN interviews, and many of the guests are different than those you'll hear in the Serotek set:
http://www.blindbargains.com/audio/

7) Do you ever wish you could translate a big number into a meaningful real life example for your listeners? Well, Steve Duncan apparently had a bit too much free time, so he gives us the site NumberQuotes - Get a quote, make a point, where you can input a number and get a lot of examples of what that number would mean.
http://numberquotes.com/?s=200

8) Gizmo directs us to a potentially valuable tool: a free bootable CD (or USB stick) with the AVG anti-virus scanner and a number of repair tools built in. It's Linux based
so it will run without Windows and could get your system going in case of virus or software failure.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmosbest/~3/yncaMbRm96c/avg-rescue-cd-90.htm

9) This Fred's Head post tells you how to uninstall Windows Live Messenger.
http://www.fredshead.info/2010/03/windows-live-messenger-including.html

10) Some programs add options to the right-click menus of Windows Explorer, and perhaps you'll never use some of those options. Fred's Head directs us to Menumaid, a free program for cleaning up those menus.
http://www.sdsoftware.org/default.asp?id=11403

11) Salman Khan is creating a free site with over a thousand free science, math and finance viewos on many levels. You can read some articles about his endeavor and see the list of videos here:
http://www.khanacademy.org/

12) Jamal Mazrui is experimenting with the notion of screen OCR, where you can have a program take a picture of the screen of most any window and recognize the text contained there. The result is GrabText, which might work but which needs some money if it is to be viable.
http://EmpowermentZone.com/gtsetup.exe

13) Some people have determined to ask Freedom Scientific to implement a lease-to-own scheme so that individuals can buy JAWS without having to pay so much money up front, as they can do when buying Window-Eyes. Whether Freedom Scientific morally need or need not act on this petition, nothing requires them to, and nothing suggests that they will, but here it is in case you want to sign it:
http://www.petitiononline.com/FSl2o

For questions and comments regarding Tidbits, please e-mail Dean Martineau at dean@topdotenterprises.com. Dean Martineau provides adaptive technology training by phone, online, and in person, with flexible arrangements, and at affordable prices.

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