Some FREE training. The price is right at least.

I thought it a worthwhile exercise to look around for some free training.
I need more freedom and training will certainly help.

Honestly, I found a great deal in a very short time.

It is quite difficult to  determine the quality of the information
provided in each of these places, but there is no shortage of
sources to investigate.


Here are  five of the places I've encountered :

 1. Keeps Granny up to date

     Lots of straightforward introductions to MS Office,
     Twitter, MacOs.

              Free basic training.

2.    More technical. More useful :

• Mondays: IT certification and exam information
• Tuesday: IT news and important announcements
• Wednesdays: Tips, tricks, tutorials and how-to articles
• Thursdays: Free training videos
• Fridays: IT career help and job information
• Weekends: TrainSignal company news and updates
  
  More Serious training. Still free.

 3.    Even more ! And we do mean MORE :

        TechTutorials offers a directory containing thousands of free tutorials for IT 
        professionals, hobbyists, and home users. Registration recommended.

Applications (345) Miscellaneous (56) Basic Computing (23) Mobile Devices (45) BSD (2) Networking (688) Cisco (138) Programming (272) Computer Hardware (249) Servers (1434) Databases (50) UNIX (65) Linux (153) Virtualization (292) MacOS (32) Webmaster (327) Microsoft Windows (1329)

Tech Tutorials


4.            You want study whaaaat ???

Well you can find courses on a whole raft of things here :

Free Ed

Free-Ed.Net is committed to providing an online "school" where users from around the world can study, take courses, and participate in online community learning activities at no cost. This enterprise requires us to build a new kinds of learning models that take into account the technological strengths of the Internet, recent innovations in information and computer technologies, and the educational needs of our users.

Probably no worse than some community colleges ...

5.                 The MS Virtual Academy

Improve your IT skill set and help advance your career with a free, easy to access training portal. Learn at your own pace, focusing on Microsoft technologies, gain points and get recognition.

Free and Microsoft so rarely appear in the same sentence that this becomes irresistable :


Free Microsoft Training

Imaginative Uses For Elder Computers

Many of us have an old box or two laying around doing
nothing. Remember when that dual cpu Pentium III seemed
like the slickest thing west of the Rio Grande ?

Well, that was 11 years ago at least.

Here are some ideas for making use of ye olde beast.

Some are flat out inspiring.

Uses for the old machines in the garage.

What Will They Think Of Next ? OsX trojan !

Stealing bitcoins with DevilRobber that's what.

A newly identified Mac OS X Trojan bundles a component that leverages the processing power of video cards (GPUs) to generate Bitcoins, a
popular type of virtual currency.

So, what's a bitcoin ? 

One Bitcoin is currently valued at around US$3.20, and it is a good
source of profit for both Bitcoin miners, who legitimately use their computer resources to generate them, and cybercriminals who steal them.

................Glad you asked  : Go buy some !


Meet the Devil

Facebook may like you too much !

It seems that our well very connected social networking portal
has a bit of a dark side to be considered. That like button can
pile up quite a bit of information about what you are up to. Like,
up to 1200 pages worth of information. See the following articles
for details. While they address ongoing controversies in Europe,
I doubt that there's much difference here.

Facebook and Gov 2.0
Facebook collects data ? Really ?

OPA, The Next Cool Thang : Dr. Dobbs Language Of The Month

Opa is a new generation of web development platform that lets you write distributed web applications using a single technology. Throughout the pages of this free online book, you will be introduced to the many features of Opa.

To quote but a few, Opa is concise, simple, concurrent, dynamically distributed, and secure.

The support provided includes numerous tutorials, api references and a good
deal more.

It's well worth a look.

Amazon Cloudware : Just about free ?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.
Amazon EC2 enables our partners and customers to build and customize Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with software based on your needs. Amazon has hundreds of free and paid AMIs available for you to use.

The Free Tier*

As part of AWS’s Free Usage Tier, new AWS customers can get started with Amazon EC2 for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive the following EC2 services each month for one year:

• 750 hours of EC2 running Linux/Unix Micro instance usage
• 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing plus 15 GB data processing
• 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) plus 1 million IOs and 1 GB snapshot storage
• 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services
• 1 GB of Regional Data Transfer

For even more information see the following :

Amazon Web hosting