There are hundreds of suggestions online telling students just how to manage their money. While most of these suggestions are valid, tips on how to handle your credit are potentially the most important. You may think that a credit card will help solve all of your problems, but the truth is that many young adults get into financial trouble fast when they don’t know how to manage their money productively.

Avoid Aggressive Credit Card Companies

Some colleges and universities allow credit card companies to set up booths and promote their low introductory interest rates to students on campus. They try to draw in these unsuspecting students with free gear like shirts and backpacks when they apply for a credit card. Many students fall into this trap and end up with a bunch of credit cards that they simply don’t need. Using all of these credit cards could result in the student drowning in debt that will take years to pay off.

Manage Your Credit Card Wisely

If you have thought through all of your options, and you decide you will need a credit card, make sure you manage it wisely. Get only one, and make sure you will be able to pay off the balance at the end of each month. Keeping a zero balance on your account from month to month will improve your credit rating, which could help you in the future with your financial aspirations.

Research different credit card companies and try to find a card with no annual fees, the lowest interest rate, and a grace period of 20 to 30 days before the company will charge you interest on your balance. Cards with one-time processing fees and low introductory interest rates that will rise after a few months are probably not the best for you. Also, look into credit cards that are secured by a bank deposit. With this type of card, you will use money from a savings account instead of using money you don’t have now, and the use of this card will still help you improve your credit score.

Once you have your credit card, don’t use it to buy anything you won’t be able to pay for right away. If you have an emergency, make sure you will still be able to make your monthly payments before using your credit card to solve the problem. Try to make payments larger than the minimum amount whenever possible so your interest rate will stay low. Finally, make your payments online or mail payments to the company several days before they are due to avoid late fees.

Build good credit

In order to build good credit, you will have to pay your bills on time and repay all of your debts as promised. As I have said, a good credit record will help you achieve your financial goals in the future, like buying a car or starting a business. Your future employer could also check your credit report before hiring you, so a bad credit score could keep you from getting a job.

To avoid financial trouble and improve your credit, you should follow these steps.

1)      Pay all of your expenses on time.

2)      Make all of your credit card payments on time.

3)      Pay off your loans before you make other large purchases.

4)      Only apply for the credit cards you need. Applying often could tip off lenders that you are in financial trouble, even if you are not.

5)      Don’t let your checks bounce.

If You Get Into Financial Trouble, Seek Help

If you don’t know how much money you owe, use credit cards to pay other bills, or will have to miss payments or pay your bills late, then look for someone who can help. Dorm resident advisors, financial aid officers, or even a psychologist can help you figure out your financial dilemma. Your parents or guardians will most likely be your biggest supporters when trying to get out of debt, but you should also try to show them your determination to not make this mistake again.

Kristin Mullen is an author who writes guest posts on the topics of business, marketing, credit cards, and personal finance. Additionally, she works for a website that focuses on educating readers about online debt consolidation.

A webmaster has many things to think about from choosing the right host to making sure everything is running smoothly on the backend servers. Fortunately, different tools, applications and developments exist that can help us simplify the process of running a website. Subtext skins can help designers more effectively and efficiently create the styles used for personal blogs on their website.

While you can always decrease your workload by choosing options like managed hosting, if you are responsible for web design then you should look into the many advantages of Subtext skins for blogging.

What is a Subtext skin?
Subtext is a blogging platform offered as open source software under the BSD license. The whole concept behind Subtext was to create a very simplified blogging engine that allows bloggers to concentrate on creating actual blog content rather than trying to figure out how to use the blogging software.

Almost all websites these days have their own blogs. In addition, many sites offer blogging as a service to their users who can sign up to create their own personal blogs. You can use Subtext both for the site’s own blog and to offer blogs to site members.

A Subtext skin refers to the styling and layout of the blog page. Skins are versatile as they allow you to create page formats and designs without coding from scratch. A Subtext skin is actually made up of five separate style sheets that can be used to format different elements on the page like divs, spans, boxes, headers, footers, sidebars and forms.

The five style sheets used for each Subtext skin are:

• style.css – the default style sheet that determines the basic underlying skin layout.
• secondary style sheet – this file handles the specific Stylesheet attribute of the skin. The secondary style sheet is generally used to create styling contrasts over the style.css file. For example, the web designer may choose to give the header a different border than the sidebars where in the style.css file they use the same border.
• custom.css – this style sheet is used for custom design features set by the blog author. Primarily used to set styles and layout for personal badges or for the actual post content.
• non-attribute css files – generally used for CSS frameworks or for system styles.
• css files with limited attributes – these stylesheets have a title and media attribute, and cannot be merged with other css files. The attributes specify IE version compatibility and that they are applicable only in screen mode or in printing mode.

Packaged and custom Subtext skins
Web designers can choose from a large library of pre-designed skins or they can create their own custom skins. Creating a custom Subtext skin requires some basic knowledge of CSS scripting and also learning the basic Subtext parsing rules.

Fortunately, Subtext is highly simplified to allow users to quickly master the underlying script.

Skin templates are folders that can be used to render different Subtext skins. Each folder actually contains a number of skins that are related in certain attributes and themes. The folders or templates have their own series of controls that are used to render a skin in that template along with associated style sheets.

Once you have a library of packaged and/or custom skins, you will be able to style blogs quickly after learning how to tweak the skins and templates.

Instead of racking your brain each time you need to come up with a new design, you can simply browse through your selection of Subtext skins. Each skin can be modified according to the primary and secondary CSS files associated with the skin. You can easily find the types of skins you are looking for because they will be arranged in skin templates or families according to related attributes. For example, you can have a Rainbow template. a Geometric template and an Origami template – each having multiple skins that express the same theme. The number of templates is only limited by your imagination and willingness to create custom skins.

When using the Subtext blogging software, the skin templates are arranged in folders in an easy to manage directory system. The setup makes it simple to find the skin you are looking for and simply click on the selection to implement it on the Subtext blog.

By using Subtext skins, you can save time and energy creating page designs and layouts for multiple blogs. No need to code style sheets from scratch when you can access an easy-to-use Subtext skin library and quickly find what you need.

Each skin will handle the styling and layout of all page elements including headers, footers, sidebars, text format, boxes and forms.

You can find out more about Subtext and skins at the Subtext Project Site: http://www.subtextproject.com/.

In 2009, I came up with the first version of my light control system.  This consisted of a clapper, a set of cheap computer speakers, and an audio recording of my clapping.  My original system used a web interface to have the speakers (connected to the web server / site) clap when I wanted the lights to come on.  This quickly became unmanageable since I couldn’t monitor the states of the lights without a webcam monitoring my room (and I wasn’t thrilled about securing a webcam in my room that could be hacked into).  This lead into X10 which has done wonders for me over the course of the past two years.

Its funny remembering back to when I first got an x10 system, because the x10 website doesn’t look like your average store, it looks more like an adult site with lots of flashy banners (ha ha).  I do have to admit, with x10, the initial impression was very deceiving for me, since their products are really good!  Anyways, moving on, My x10 system consists of a USB transceiver module (CM15A located here) which connects to my windows server that runs a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP).  In addition, I have several lamp modules, appliance modules, and remote control wall switches (which wirelessly communicate to the CM15A).

As for the software, I installed the ActiveHome software onto my server (that came with the CM15A).  This software installs a few application libraries (dlls) which enabled programmatic access to the CM15A to send and receive x10 commands over the power lines ran in my apartment.  Using this api, I wrote a quick program that makes a command line based program that can run certain commands.  I have to note that ActiveHome includes a default command line executable, but this didn’t have all the functionality that I wanted, most notably output in HTML for my web interface.  With the executable I wrote, I simply have the apache web server run the command as a local user which sends the x10 signals over the power lines ran in my apartment.  I should note that I considered using ASP.net which could interface with the API directly, but at the time I wasn’t very familiar with ASP.net and I wanted to use PHP.  I didn’t use IIS because I didn’t have the time to go permissions hunting to figure out why PHP wasn’t allowed to run programs as a local user on the web server through IIS.  Luckily a standard WAMP install that included Apache and PHP worked out of the box with little configuration.  The WAMP that I used was Vertrigo.

For the IR receiver that controls my projector, I use a USB-UIRT that I found on Ebay (I didn’t feel like waiting the estimated 6 weeks at the time for a new one).  Fortunately, the executable program that was included could send and receive signals from the USB-UIRT that I required, so I wrote some PHP that invokes it for the commands I used.

In 2009, I mentioned that voice control would make its way into my system.  I have to admit that it did!  Unfortunately, it didn’t last long because of all the bugs that I ran into.  I used the Microsoft speech libraries with a program called SmartButler, which could listen for speech commands and run commands on my server.  I initially used a cheap computer microphone, but quickly found that the interference in the audio made commands very inaccurate, and furthermore, if I held a conversation in the room, my lights would act up!  I figured that a USB professional Condenser Microphone would fix the problem, so I quickly ordered one and integrated it into my system.  This did significantly improve the quality of my system, but normal conversations would still occasionally trigger some of my web control panel controls inaccurately.  The final straw that broke the camel’s back (and caused this system to get removed) was when my RA (resident advisor), Stephanie came into the room, said hello to me and my lights went out of control (since I didn’t train it for a higher pitched, female voice, I’d assume).  I’d like to approach this problem in the future when I get the time to do it properly, but until then, I’ve been satisfied with web control panels that both my smartphone and computer can access.

Finally, at the very end of my video, I took a moment to show my Linksys PAP Adapter (VoIP, Voice over IP).  This works through a service from voip.ms.  Voip.ms is a prepaid service for VoIP adapters that allows you to buy a phone number for a very reasonable price (even 800 numbers).  They also have really reasonable rates and really good control for those phone numbers.  I thought I’d provide a plug for them since they are really good.

I would like to add that the Linksys adapter required an unfirewalled IP address to work properly (for incoming calls) in my experience.  It does have a NAT mode for this situation, but the university firewall constantly crushed this mode.  To get around this problem (and allow my web server for x10 to work properly), I implemented OpenVPN on my network and pulled in several public IP addresses and left them unfirewalled.  This solution worked well for me at UB, and I documented it fairly well in my OpenVPN post.

With nothing more to mention on the topic, here is the video that details my light control system and some other stuff.

Of course, I made many bloopers in this video (I improvised a lot!), so I thought the bloopers video would be appropriate.  Warning, there is a little language in it and the audio isn’t exactly balanced.

Disclaimer: I was not paid to endorse any of the products above (and I’m never paid to do that!).  I like to think that when I make a recommendation, it carries a lot of weight with it, which it should!

As a preview:

The full gallery is at: http://famousphil.com/photos/university-at-buffalo-may-2011/

NOTE: Updated 6/19/11 due to new gallery links.

This video covers a lot of demos including how to make a crude content management system work on your site, as well as an introduction to wordpress as a content management system.

Background: I was asked by the IEEE student club at UB (http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/ieee) to redo my lecture series on developing websites.  I know that my website isn’t the best visually designed website in the world (and I’m actively looking for talent that can help me fix this in exchange for my programming skills), but I do know a lot about how to code websites well.  Anyways, here are the videos from Lecture 4.  There will be a fourth and final lecture next week.  As always, thanks for reading!

Background: I was asked by the IEEE student club at UB (http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/ieee) to redo my lecture series on developing websites.  I know that my website isn’t the best visually designed website in the world (and I’m actively looking for talent that can help me fix this in exchange for my programming skills), but I do know a lot about how to code websites well.  Anyways, here are the videos from Lecture 3.  There will be a fourth and final lecture next week.  As always, thanks for reading!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Background: I was asked by the IEEE student club at UB (http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/ieee) to redo my lecture series on developing websites.  I know that my website isn’t the best visually designed website in the world (and I’m actively looking for talent that can help me fix this in exchange for my programming skills), but I do know a lot about how to code websites well.  Anyways, here are the videos from Lecture 2.  As always, thanks for reading!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Now onto the topic of this blog.  This is a video blog (go figure, right?).  Actually, I was asked by the IEEE student club at UB (http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/ieee) to redo my lecture series on developing websites.  I know that my website isn’t the best visually designed website in the world (and I’m actively looking for talent that can help me fix this in exchange for my programming skills), but I do know a lot about how to code websites well.

Being the kind of person who likes to share knowledge, I agreed to give the lecture series with updated information.  John suggested that I video tape the lectures and post them to my blog, which I thought was a great suggestion.  So in the next 5 to 6 weeks, I will be posting youtube 720p HD recordings of the lecture series to here.  Feel free to watch it and make comments about my presentation skills.  I know that I’m not perfect, so I’m always open to suggestions!

As always, thanks for reading!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Last summer, I was looking for a new computer to replace a 12” HP tablet PC that I owned.  I wanted the new computer to be mobile, have suitable graphics; processing power and much better battery life (the hour I got out of the tablet was worthless).  I settled on a netbook from Dell.  It did exactly what I needed although it lacked a big enough screen for any real usability.  I typically use my mobile laptop as a dummy terminal that connects to remote systems via Remote Desktop or SSH.  I used the netbook for a few months and told myself that I need something that better fits my requirements.  After a long search, typical PCs turned up nothing particularly interesting, although I typically require Windows 7 since a majority of my licensed software requires Windows.

I remember meeting up with some friends who are “mac boys” as I like to nickname them last October.  They showed me how great the Mac OS is, and I have to admit that some of the features they showed were nice.  This along with the fact that I wasn’t really knowledgeable about Apple convinced me to look into an Apple brand computer.  I’d like to bring to mind that up until this point, I had very little experience with Macs so I felt that to help aid my extensive administration knowledge, a Mac wouldn’t be a bad investment.  The final push that got me over the hill was the fact that the cheapest MacBook pro had really good specs for the price and I didn’t find any PCs that could compare to the specs of the MacBook pro with a similar size.

So around Thanksgiving of 2010, I got a MacBook pro 13” model.  Honestly, my first words when it arrived were “this machine needs windows now!”, and I proceeded to configure bootcamp (a way to run Windows natively on the Mac hardware).  Bootcamp was an interesting experience because it was so simple that I overthought the problem and ended up having to reinstall the Mac OS.  I’m still not entirely sure how I managed that, but command line utilities definitely aided the problems.  It is at this point when I realized why people really like Macs.

After I got Windows up and running (it didn’t take too long to start thinking at the level that I needed to), the first problems I noticed were related to driver problems (mostly right click on the mouse, graphics not working properly, etc).  So I proceeded to install bootcamp in Windows and most everything fixed itself with a few minor exceptions.  The first exception was the nvidia graphics driver had a problem and caused Windows to crash, so I ended up installing the latest driver via their website.  The other exception I noticed was poor battery life (2 hours on a 10 hour laptop).  After playing around with nvidia settings, I turned off the dedicated graphics card and this bumped the battery life to 6 hours.  Still fairly crappy of course but I figured that Apple hates Microsoft and this is intentional to encourage users to try the Mac side.

Needless to say, I decided that I’d give the Mac side a try for a few days after being disappointed by the performance of Windows.  I quickly got Chrome and Microsoft Office installed and I must say that the effort required to accomplish this was little if any.  It was a pleasant surprise to find that Office installed a remote desktop client automatically.  As an aside, for the Safari / Firefox fans out there, I no longer like either browser since when I compare them to chrome, they’re really slow, and adblock plus is now available for Chrome!  I’ve also noticed that Chrome uses little to no resources.

After the first couple of days (and enabling several tweaks), I began finding Mac to be a somewhat superior operating system when viewed from Windows.  The first huge plus was that my battery life would often reach 14-15 hours while using Chrome, remote desktop, and the terminal.  This kind of battery life alone exceeded the 8 hours that I’d get from my old netbook and the screen space is actually large enough for me!  If you’re looking into battery life of 14 hours though, don’t be disappointed, much of my work is remote and doesn’t require a lot of power to run locally on the mac.  I found that if I went to YouTube (Flash powered), or opened any significant application like Microsoft Word, Firefox, etc, I’d easily trim the battery life down to a more realistic 8-10 hours as suggested by Apple.  Overall, I’m really impressed at how well the Mac saves power and I’m even more impressed by how few resources Google Chrome uses!

Coming from a Linux background, I found that the terminal was the easiest option to configure the operating system with since I’m already very familiar with the commands (and Mac is based on a BSD kernel, which is very similar to the Linux kernel).    I quickly installed MacPorts (and the supporting applications like XCode) to make my mac more usable for me, the programmer / system administrator.  With MacPorts, I enabled apache, mysql, wine, and several other applications that I found useful when on a Linux based system.  Other than adjusting to the change of /opt/local for the software installations by MacPorts, configuration was fairly simple and painless.  After everything was up, I even installed Eclipse (a programming environment primarily for Java, but extendable to C, PHP, Python, Lisp, etc).  I now find that it is easier to develop websites and applications on my mac locally than it is to develop on remote systems.  The one exception is C# and .NET applications of course due to their dependence on Windows.

There were a few pet peeves that I initially had with the MacBook pro and its OS.  I will start with my software problems and move to the hardware related problems.

First, mac doesn’t believe that the maximize button should maximize to the screen, so instead, it maximizes to the required window size.  This is very annoying on websites since some websites use fluid layouts (meaning they dynamically size to the browser window size), and mac doesn’t size properly.  To solve this issue, I found RightZoom which is an application that solves that issue.

Another problem I encountered was the startup sound always came on regardless of the sound settings.  In addition, there was no intuitive place where I could disable the sound.  Thankfully, an app called startupsound made fixing this problem very easy.

Up next is probably my biggest pet peeve, which is standards compliance.  Mac really impresses me design wise, but I find that some functionality that I would expect is missing.  If you remember back to my OpenVPN blog… my internal network has special routes programmed to ensure that some traffic will circumvent the VPN connection (like YouTube, local college bound traffic so that I’m within the firewall, and Netflix).  These rules that allow circumvention save a lot of bandwidth, and therefore cash (internet connectivity is charged by the GB for providers such as myself).  For those of you who understand DHCP, Option 121 (254 on some Windows versions) is reserved for Classless Static Routes.  This means that a DHCP server can push these routes to a computer automatically while assigning addresses and the computer knows that certain internet traffic (e.g. YouTube) will pass through a proper router (or gateway).  Fortunately, both Windows and Ubuntu look for this option and appropriately adapt to the rules… mac on the other hand completely ignores these options.  Although this is the first case I found that Mac doesn’t adhere to standards, I’m sure that this isn’t the only case.  Of course, most people won’t ever need this, but still, it is in the RFC #4562!  So as a work around, I have to manually add routes to my mac via command line… it isn’t the best option but it does work.

Finally, I’d like to talk a little bit about the Apple keyboard and track pad.  If you’re like me, you will find yourself wondering where the home, end and delete keys are.  The truth is that they don’t exist on the Mac keyboard layout (at least on my new MacBook Pro).  I ended up mapping F10, F11, and F12 to these functions respectively using KeyRemap4MacBook.  For the Windows side, I used an application called SharpKeys.  I also found that mapping F9 to print key saved me a little time in Windows.  I also made sure to have the keyboard function keys enabled without the fn key required.  With the track pad, I made sure that double finger scrolling and right click were enabled features.

They keyboard itself is very uniform on Mac so many protective covers have been made for the Mac keyboard.  I got two covers, a cheap one ($8) from Amazon and a fairly pricy ($30) model from KBCovers.  If you’re going to protect your keyboard (I highly recommend it), definitely go for the KBCovers version since it feels a lot more secure and real than a cheap imitation.

Overall, this keyboard/mouse solution made me so content that I ended up buying a wireless keyboard and magic mouse for my windows desktop (both Bluetooth wireless).  Although I installed bootcamp (not entirely necessary), the magic mouse doesn’t have the full functionality as it would in Mac (Apple hates Windows, I get it), it is still a great keyboard / mouse combo.  Maybe someday when I get the time, I might write an application that enables the full functionality of the magic mouse on Windows, but don’t get your hopes up.

Back to boot camp, on every Windows machine that I’ve ever owned, I’ve always kept restore images of the hard drive incase Windows got a virus or I messed Windows up somehow.  I am a fan of both Acronis TrueImage and Symantec Ghost, but neither solution looked appealing on the mac.  So I found a free program called WinClone.  Unfortunately, its development has been discontinued but it still works well on my mac (version 10.6.6).

In addition, I discovered that VMWare Fusion is a way to virtualize the bootcamp partition, so theoretically Windows can boot natively or via a virtual machine.  I really like this feature since I often only need Windows for very minor tasks, but the initial setup wasn’t all that great.  After Windows booted, it required me to reactivate it, and as per Microsoft’s crappy licensing policies, you have to call them and tell them what is happening.  After a bunch of problems, I finally figured out that before activating, VMWare tools needs to get installed.  After that is installed, activate Windows and Office in the virtual machine via Phone.  Then reboot into the native Windows and reactivate using an internet connection.  If all goes well, VMWare tools will help solve the problem, at least it did for me.  I’m guessing that it stores both activations and switches them on Windows and Office automatically so both the VM and native modes think that they are properly activated with Microsoft on the proper hardware.

Overall, I don’t think I’d go back on my decision to buy a Mac.  It’s definitely a really nice computer and I have to admit that the design is outstanding.  Who would have ever thought that an aluminum body would dissipate enough heat to remove the need for a blatantly visible fan (like many PC laptops have).  Anyways, there are a few things that Mac could definitely improve on, but for now I’m happy with it and would find it difficult to move to something else for the needs that acquainted me with this computer.  Finally, contrary to popular belief, I do not believe that Mac is an overpriced fashion accessory, at least for the model that I bought.