My Tech Blog

Don't Drive-Dial-Text-Post Drunk!

2012-02-02T14:02:00.000-05:00

You've heard of drunk dialing, right? That's the unfortunately not-so-uncommon phenomenon of calling someone, typically an ex, when you've had one (or seven) too many, and either a) professing undying love; b) ranting; c) starting an argument, d) hitting redial one-to-one-hundred times, or (possibly worst of all) d) leaving an incoherent and horribly embarrassing voice message. This has become all the more dangerous with cell phones, since we have such easy access to them, and redial is so easy.

Wouldn't you know, somebody has thought of that, and taken care of it. Actually, more than one somebody.

DON'T DIAL (for both Android and iPhone, just $.99) "lets you lock out those dangerous numbers for up to 24 hours. Don't worry: As soon as you're sober, they'll re-appear in your phonebook.

You can also opt to make a friend into your "designated dialer," and let them set a password for the evening.
Hangovers are hard. Don't Dial is easy:

Pick all of your usual suspects from your contact list.
Choose a block: use the timer, or have a friend enter a password.
Go out, knowing you're safe from embarrassing drunk dial incidents!
The next morning, run the app again to unlock everyone."

BAD DECISION BLOCKER works in a similar way, and also protects you from texting while intoxicated, as does NIMBY (No Intoxicated Messaging By You). "This app strives to prevent you from sending a regretful email or tweet. Once you write you message, the app prompts you to complete one of three tests within 30 seconds. The brain busters consist of a word search, completing basic algebra or navigating a mouse through a maze. If you can't finish in time, you can't send the message." (http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/the-scene/shopping/Save-Yourself-From-Tech-Regret.html)

And in the final category of "protect-me-from-my-drunken-self," there are social media applications.

"Chrome/Firefox: Social Media Sobriety Test is a simple extension for Google Chrome and Firefox that administers a set of sobriety tests to keep you from drunkenly leaving a post on your boss's wall or sharing your margarita-fueled musings via Twitter.

"Similar to the "Mail Goggles" feature in Google Labs—which require you to solve math problems to deter late night drunken emails—Social Media Sobriety Test locks down your social networks including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Tumblr, as well as a custom URL.

"When you visit those sites between the hours specified in your settings you'll have to take a "field" sobriety test like following a finger drifting around the screen with your mouse or indicating which side of the screen is blinking in a "Simon Says" like puzzle. Fail to pass the test and you can't log in to the social network."(http://lifehacker.com/5685388/social-media-sobriety-test-saves-you-from-drunken-status-updates?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+lifehacker%2Ffull+%28Lifehacker%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher)

So spare yourself humiliation the morning after the night before, and lock your keys in a combination box, and lock your social phone and computer access until you've had a chance to sleep it off!

Smart Idea for a Smart Phone

2012-01-20T09:36:00.000-05:00

I went to a conference in San Jose about 2 years ago. The conference wasn't all that large, but did have several venues going on at once in various locations around a large hotel. In addition, there were many people there I wanted to make contact with, or join for dinner or a meeting.

As is the usual procedure, the conference organizers handed out nifty little printed lists of what presentation or dialog session was going on in which room when - and that was about it.

Needless to say, I wanted more, and I started to think about an app that would amount to a "virtual concierge" for meetings, conferences, even huge events like SXSW (South by Southwest for the uninitiated, a huge event held in Austin, TX each year; one week is devoted to geekitude, the next to music. A strange but workable conbmination.

Anyway, my app would allow conference attendees to register online, and choose the sessions they wanted to attend, and the "friends" they wanted to keep track of at the event. Local establishments and businesses could offer service and specials, like discounts on dinner or drinks, or entrance to local attractions. More, businesses and booth owners could broadcast specials to registered attendees who happened to be within a certain proximity of their location (geo-fencing). "Stop at our booth now for a 25% discount on your next order."

When a session was about to begin (a really smart app could even warn an attendee when he needed to started heading toward a session if he was going to make it on time), the user would be pinged and reminded to get over there, perhaps even be told that certain of his friends would be there as they had registered for that session, too - maybe even allowing them to set up a meeting location.

A friend pointed out that this could be used at malls, or fairs, or other places where people want and need to keep track of each other, and would welcome special offers and sales just for users of the virtual concierge app.

The one big roadblock to all this, is, of course, the capacity of WiFi to handle the traffic in a limited space. As it happens, the company sponsoring this particular event in San Jose was boasting that it could support streaming video to fifty different devices in 500 square feet of space - no mean feat. Streaming video is the biggest bandwidth hog there is, and having that many devices all demanding huge amounts of data streamed live at one time, and delivered, is remarkable.

And, as with all good ideas, this one was already under development. Of course, there had been apps like FourSquare around for quite a while - an app that you could log on to and announce your location (whereupon, vendors and businesses who were also subscribed could offer specials, and where friends could say, hey, I'm in that area too, let's meet at this bar in ten minutes). FourSquare is, in my opinion, a little silly in that it was half app half game - you visited Joey's Bar more times than anyone else in a certain period of time and you became "Mayor of Joey's Bar." Whee. Still, it has its value as a networking tool.

More than that, though, new releases of smart phones already come equipped with the geo-fencing capability, enabling users to create a "fence" around a particular location - say, your house. Then you can assign tasks or reminders to that location, and when you get within a certain proximity of that location, the tasks or reminders you've assigned yourself will pop up on your phone.

As with any technology, there are always limitations, and as I've pointed out, traffic on WiFi would be one of the limiters of this app. But I have confidence that as more and more of us rely on our smart phones for more and more of our lives, this, too shall be overcome!

Movin' Your Mail

2012-01-12T14:11:00.000-05:00

I think I shared with you a few posts ago a friend's horror story: computer crashed, and she lost all her emails (contacts, etc.). It was a sad day in Mudville. I've always liked the idea of webmail, but assuming you're on a local client (like Outlook, for example), the prospect of moving everything, and notifying everybody, can be daunting.

And we've all had one of those email accounts that turned into a spam collection device: you made the mistake of buying a product online, and after your email address was sold a few hundred times, you found yourself clearing spam out of your inbox for up to an hour a day in a worst case situation.

Or maybe you've built a new website, and you'd like to use your new domain for email, to further promote your site.

This is where TrueSwitch (www.trueswitch.com) comes in. Basically, for $19.95 (or free if you're migrating to one of their partner services) they'll do it all for you: copy your personal data (all your past emails and folders); notify all your contacts of your new email address; forward any emails that come in to the old address.

The copy feature includes copying not just your contacts and emails, but your calendar and favorites as well.

The notify feature will send a polite notification that you've switched email services, or you can customize this message if you choose.

Finally, the forward feature (one that is very important to anyone doing business via email) will watch for 30 days and forward any mail that arrives. Now, one caveat here: it applies to Internet email only, and you must maintain your account for the full 30 days.

And while the normal fee is, as mentioned, a modest $19.95, it's free if you're switching to/from one of TrueSwitch's partners, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Comcast, and a handful of others. (Check the website for a complete list.)

So, basically, what's your time worth? If you reckon it's more than about $20 or so for the hour (or more) it will take you to copy your contacts, write an email and send it to your contact list. (While studies have shown that most users have between 30 - 50 contacts, I have literally hundreds! So for me, the service would be invaluable!) So if you're not happy with your current email service, or you simply want to move to a web-based email service (with all the backup benefits), but you're been reluctant to take on the task, here's an easy out: let someone else do it for you! There's a solution I can feel good about.

Suprize, Suprize

2012-01-03T15:50:00.000-05:00

Readers of this column know I love it - serendipity. The word is so good I'd love it all by itself, but it's also one of life's little pleasures. (In case you don't know, serendipity is a "happy accident," or "pleasant surprise." I most often think of it in terms of a chance series of discoveries.) On a rather more boring than usual early January day, I was lucky enough to stumble on a little serendipity.

Most often, there isn't really any reason why these things are fun and interesting, but there's no doubt that the Internet has made them far more accessible. Yes, I admit it, I was one of those people who'd go to a library and simply stroll around, looking for the odd book spine that would attract my attention - or thumbing through magazines I'd rarely see to "discover." Later, of course, Barnes & Nobel would do just fine and a cup of coffee, too. But better yet, of course, is simply sitting at your computer and happening on things. This was how I first fell in love with the Internet.

There's even a site dedicated to just that - we've covered that here before. It's called "StumbleUpon," and it's a free-but-subscription-based service that allows users to define subjects that interest them, then "stumble." Content is randomly served up, which users can then rate to "teach" the system their preferences - what amuses or amazes.

Today, I was actually reading through some of the many email newsletters I get (and typically delete). This one happened to be discussing QR codes - again, a subject we've covered in this column. These are the pattern codes associated with products or services that can be scanned by your smart phone, and then that scan used to access more information, such as price comparisons, about that product or service.

The article (from Mobile Insider) was touting the potential of in-store use of QR codes, but acknowledging that unreliable wireless reception was the biggest stumbling block to customers' relying on QR codes to gather information, and next was that old reliable: attention span! While marketers love-love-love the idea of consumers standing in the aisles looking at all the rich content they make available that explains why their product is better-than-great, consumers are not so apt to be easily transfixed. (Actually, have you ever watched customers in a mall or big box store? They're transfixed, alright, but they just keep moving. It's apparently some sort of herd instinct, but I digress.)

What writer Steve Smith finds is that now that (especially tech) store associates understand how to use them, QR codes can be useful sales tools, particularly when they don't understand the product very well.

So where does the serendipity come in? Well naturally, I had to find out a bit more about QR codes, and code-reading in general, and came across this site: http://www.evoretail.com/. Here is a company devoted to retail robotics - and their latest-and-greatest product is something called LaneHawk. LaneHawk is a bar-code-reader that stores can build into the lower part of a checkout counter, and it will read "BOB" items - bottom of basket. So if the customer forgets, or "forgets" to bring the item up and scan it, LaneHawk will read the item's barcode - compare it to the customer's itemized order - and let the store know if the item hasn't been paid for yet.

Who'd have ever guessed?

More Music!

2011-12-16T12:31:00.000-05:00

Many (frighteningly many) years ago, one of my favorite radio shows was the New Music program in the mid-afternoon on the then-student-run WAER (the SU radio station). What I loved about it was the discovery of music that didn't get air time on the commercial stations. You remember those bad old days: we got to listen (over and over and over) to the rotating "top 40" or whatever was the formula for programming music at that moment, and you had a single genre - the station was pop, country, easy listening, or whatever.

How things have changed! One of my favorite music gurus FB posted that we music lovers should keep an eye on two new services, Grooveshark and Deezer. So naturally I had to try them out and see how they compare to services I've written about before, Blip.fm, Pandora Radio, and Spotify.

Most of the services do something essentially similar: you enter a song name or an artist, and you'll be provided music that somehow relates. Grooveshark (www.grooveshark.com) adds the neat feature of throwing just about everything an artists has created up when you enter the name of that group. You can then select a particular song, and you'll be shown all the other cuts on that album. You have an option to create a playlist based on genre or artist (or whatever other criteria you might have - like Spotify's "mood," for example); you can link to your social media accounts (if you favorite a song); you'll get album cover art; you can "pin" a song to your profile; and you can see videos created to accompany the music by other fans. Of course there is a "community" where you can meet up with like-minded listeners. The service will supply you similar artists, and offers you the opportunity to buy a song or album. All nice, and while I love Pandora Radio for discovering similar artists and songs to things that I already enjoy, and while I use Blip.fm for both discovery and creating a saved song playlist, I much prefer the idea of being able to program a playlist that I can return to again and again. One of Blip's failures (for me) is that even if I save a song, it's often lost if/when a particular link or version is moved or lost. I'll have to see how long my playlists persist on Grooveshark. The basic account is free (with ads), or you can opt for $5 a month (no ads, online) or the mobile version (again, no ads, $9/month). I may even consider this, as I'd be able to listen via my iPhone while traveling.

In addition to searching for music, you can use the Explore option, which provides artists by type, "tastemakers" playlists, or look for a genre. One small gripe: the play/pause controls are, for me, and on the browser Firefox 9, hidden at the bottom of the screen. But otherwise, you're right, Kevin, this is a service to watch!

His other recommendation, Deezer, isn't new - it was launched in 2007, in Paris, but unaccountably has not yet made it to the U.S.! I'm going to guess this has something to do with DRM (digital rights management). As Wikipedia explains it, "Deezer has negotiated rights to make 165,000 songs available for streaming legally via an agreement with Sony, as well as some of Universal's catalog. After its launch, there were legal issues relating to the uploading and sharing of music on Deezer, but this was resolved when Deezer updated its site on 9 February 2009.

"Deezer was the first music site based in France to sign an agreement with a publisher rights' organisation to reimburse artists through advertising revenue.

"There are four million registered Deezer users according to the home page of the website.In September 2011, Deezer stated that there were 13 million songs available on their service."

Deezer evidently allows users to download playlists to their smart phones, and listen when away from their computers. Other features include "the ability to create blind tests, in which one or more songs is played and questions asked about them, and send them to friends on the site. Users can also create a blog page where they can present themselves, copy or share playlists with other members or add other members to their friend list. Also, a mail feature is available to members, allowing them to talk with other members and a music news feature, also available to non-members, which displays recent music news."

Decisions, decisions. I guess my choice of music service will depend on what most intrigues me on a given day: discovery, sharing, playlist playback, and naturally, what music is in the collection. All in all, though, I can't help but wonder what all this is telling us about the future of radio, particularly as these services go mobile - and our ability to connect our portable devices to our car's and home's sound systems.

Musing

2011-11-29T14:00:00.000-05:00

File this one under speculative non-fiction.

I'm listening to David Brook's book, The Social Animal. It's about human cognitive development, decision-making, and mental process.

A lot of it is based on some research done in the 60s and 70s, collectively known as "heuristics," or "experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery." This term has become associated with the evaluation of human-computer interface models - how you expect a website to behave, for example, and what cues you get to do what you do with it, the so-called "intuitive" design of said site.

Some of these heuristics include: priming, anchoring, expectation, framing, inertia, and arousal. Put simply, priming gives people a set of cues they may or may not even be aware of. Their behavior will incorporate these cues (talk to them using words like "tired," "old," "ancient," "weary," and "lame," and they will walk more slowly than if you talk to them using words like "fit," "active," "quick," and "athletic").

Anchoring hands people a value - a number, or a grade, or some other evaluative idea (unrelated to the subject at hand), and then when they are asked to assign a value to something, they'll most likely reflect that "anchor" value back.

Expectation is "you're really going to like this," versus, "don't be too disappointed with," and the predictable likelihood that people will react as you've instructed them to.

Framing sets something up in a context that gives its absolute value relative meaning. For example, if you put a $30 bottle of wine in amongst $6 bottles, the $30 bottle seems very expensive. But if you "frame" it with $120 bottles, it suddenly seems quite cheap.

Inertia is simply that tendency to leave well enough alone. If your television is set to certain color values, for example, most of us won't tinker with them, unless they are so far off it's impossible to ignore.

Arousal predicts that we are more likely to act - and act impulsively - when we are aroused. So, blaring music at your local Abercrombie store results in more impulse purchases than soothing or no music.

None of this is new, of course. Marketers have been using this kind of information for decades to push, prod, and urge us into doing what they want us to do. In one famous study, a group of so-called "creatives" were driven to a test site, where they were asked to come up with an original campaign for some product. They were all driven past a billboard that contained a very specific image. Every single one of the "creatives" included some variation of that image in their "original" campaigns. So much for "out of the box" thinking.

What's of greater interest to me these days is something that has again, been known about for a while, but has been relatively difficult to exploit until recently: flocking behavior.

The Internet has opened a door to not only influence behavior using all the methods shown above, but moreover, to influence behavior simply by the behavior itself. I Tweet because: I Tweet. I watch a viral video because everybody else is watching the viral video. I have a Facebook page because everybody has a Facebook page! I once found a video on an obscure little site I visited from time to time, and found it funny. I noted that it had had a few hundred views. I passed it along to most of my friends. The next time I visited the site, it had several hundred thousand views.

I suppose in a way it's like a yawn - if I am around someone yawning, I'm much more likely to yawn myself.

A yawn, of course, if fairly innocuous. An opinion, or worse a "fact" that spreads like wildfire around the Internet, and that gains credibility simply by virtue of the fact that it is passed from computer to computer, has far broader - and more alarming - implications.

We *think* we think for ourselves. Studies like the ones referenced above make it pretty clear that what we think can be relatively easily manipulated, given enough time and, as advertisers call it, impressions. Now that we add to it the weight of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people sharing our experience - within a very short time frame (hours? minutes?) - what will that mean for our freedom of choice, opinion, separating fact from fiction? It must be true - I read it on the Internet!

SOPA?

2011-11-17T11:13:00.000-05:00

If you've not already heard of it, you owe it to yourself as a netizen to get up to speed on SOPA, the "Stop Internet Piracy Act." Like many well-intentioned bills, this one has a reasonable purpose, but executes it in what one reviewer called a "draconian" fashion.

The issue isn't simple. As we all know, there are many, many websites, particularly foreign sites, that offer pirated copies of music and movies that can be downloaded via "torrents," or little packages of data that take a movie, for example, break it into little bits, disperse it, and reassemble the bits and pieces once they're downloaded to your computer. This technique makes it very difficult to "find" the perpetrator, and hold anyone accountable for piracy.

According to money.cnn.com, however, "Opponents say SOPA -- and a similar bill called the Protect IP Act that is making its way through the Senate -- effectively promotes censorship.If SOPA passes, copyright holders would be able to complain to law enforcement officials and get websites shut down. The law would also force intermediaries like search engines and payment processors to withhold their services from targeted websites."

Interestingly, the bills don't just apply to movies and music, but to other things like auto parts, drugs, and infant formula.

The bit that has people concerned isn't the idea that a website offering stolen property, or counterfeit goods, shouldn't be targeted and shut down - to the extent that the U.S. has jurisdiction to do so - it's the notion that any site offering links to such sites can be censored, and that domains can be, in essence, blocked. So, as in China, Google can't return a full set of results when I do a search; Facebook can't post my link to a funny video because there is - or might be - something on that site that Miramax doesn't like.

In one sense, particularly the entertainment providers may be shooting themselves in the foot. When I listen to a song posted on blip.fm, and "blip" it to my Facebook friends, and they like it - they just might buy it, or certainly might discover talent they didn't know existed before. On the other hand, as a writer, I fully appreciate the need to protect intellectual property, and to be sure that artists are compensated for the work that they do.

The problem with the acts as written is the broad brush approach: if Wikileaks publishes copyright material, demanding that that material be removed is a first remedy. Shutting down Wikileaks is a difficult, but appropriate second step. What these bills propose, however, is that the U.S. government would have the right to block any site linking to the infringing site. You can imagine where that could lead. Sites like Twitter, Google, Reddit, Kickstarter, Tumblr, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, eBay, Zynga, Facebook, and several other sites have spoken out in opposition of SOPA. In other words, those sites whose purpose is social networking - sharing info and ideas - feel the most threatened.

As one friend of mine is fond of saying, "I don't have any answers," because I do think the piracy issue isn't small and it isn't going to go away. So my free speech side and my protect the artist side are in full cognitive dissonance mode. I'm not convinced that either of these bills is the right way to solve the problem, as censorship has never served "we the people" very well.

Security 101

2011-11-16T15:43:00.000-05:00

It's been a long time since I wrote an article about ordinary computer precautions, but a couple of things recently came to my attention that reminded me that it's never a mistake to take care of your precious data.

First, my sister let me know her computer had crashed irrecoverably, and thus all her email addresses and so on were lost. (She was using Outlook as her email client.)

While I use Gmail for most of my work, which means my contact data is stored offline, that did serve as a reminder that backing up data is something we all should continue to do. The fact is, at some point, hard drives do fail. And while I do think that the future of data storage - well, most data storage - is in "the cloud," there is still some data that you're going to want to back up.

Personally, I have three, yep, three off-board hard drives to which I back up my most important data: music, photos, contacts, and writing/resume material. This is the stuff that it would be incredibly difficult to reproduce, if not impossible. Music, photos and written material speak for themselves. Most email clients will accept .csv format files for contact data - that includes online email. For example, if you want to back up your Gmail data:

Sign in to Gmail.
Click Contacts along the side of any Gmail page.
From the More actions drop-down menu, select Export....
Choose whether to export all contacts or only one group.
Select the format in which you'd like to export your contacts' information. Please note, some of these formats can lose some contact information.
- To transfer contacts between Google accounts, use the Google CSV format. This is the recommended way to back up your Google Contacts.
- To transfer contacts to Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, or various other apps, use the Outlook CSV format.
- To transfer contacts to Apple Address Book, use the vCard format.
Click Export.
Choose Save to Disk then click OK.
Select a location to save your file, and click OK.

Pretty simple, and takes all of about 5 minutes. Most likely you can also copy this file to a larger thumb drive, so you can carry your contacts with you in the unlikely event Gmail (or Yahoo, or Hotmail, etc.) should fail and lose your contacts. My sister was left in the unfortunate position of having to hunt down all her contacts (via Facebook and the like) and have them share their contact info plus anyone else they could think of that she might need. Not fun.

Then there is the issue of passwords. Another friend has been battling passwords for as long as I can remember, and he's recently given me his suggestion du jour. I have tried all manner of combinations, but there are two recommendations I would offer:

The first comes from a very experienced geek friend. He suggests creating a formula, and then sticking to that formula no matter what application you're signing onto. For example, it might be your mom's birthday, followed by your dad's middle initial and ending with the first three letters of the application you're signing onto. Even if you didn't change it up with the trailing data from the instant application, it's still not a a bad idea to have a formula that would be impossible (or nearly so) for anyone to stumble onto. In other words, don't use your birthday, or your dog's name.

The other option is to use a reliable third party password storage system, like Lastpass. Free features include password storage of all your various passwords (though I wouldn't use it for anything to do with money, like Paypal or a bank account); synchronization across browsers; automatic form filling; and storage of other important notes and information (like, say, your locker combination). For $1/month, Lastpass can also be used on your smartphone, thumb and flashdrives.

My final absolute requirement for anybody these days is a hardware firewall. While I still think it's a good idea to use virus protection and malware protection software (though I have mixed feelings about which ones these days), a simple router with a hardware firewall will do the trick. Windows now comes with a serviceable software firewall, and AVG is still available as a free virus protection package, but nothing quite compares to the security of a hardware firewall.

Ye Olde Bar and Video

2011-11-09T08:32:00.003-05:00

I frequently drive to work past the site of the video store - no longer there of course - I used to frequent.

And I realized with a pang that I missed it.

Not the videos themselves, of course. That function, the supplying of video (movies) has been replaced by much more efficient and comprehensive sources - Netflix, for example, that first sent the movies direct to you, now is streaming more and more content to you on demand. Or you can use the On Demand services of your local cable company, which are again becoming more and more robust, featuring newer releases at at reasonable prices - even free for some - both for feature films and tv series you don't want to miss (like Terra Nova, anybody?).

And I can't quibble with any of this. In fact, I love it. As anybody knows who reads this column, I have some undeniable geek tendencies that are thrilled with each new innovation that makes my life simpler, easier, and more under my control from my laptop or iPad or even smart phone.

What I miss is the face-to-face interaction of the neighborhood video store. It had a lot in common with the neighborhood bar, but without the downside of alcohol consumption. You'd go in on a Friday night, and odds are you'd meet at least one person you knew, and of course you'd catch up or start talking movies. You'd browse slowly through the titles, seeing what caught your fancy, what was in the new release section (always crowded), and listen to the quarrels over whether to get a chick flick or a cop film.

And then there were the "bartenders," the cinephile clerks who knew not only you, but your tastes and preferences. Like any good bartender, they knew what you'd had the last time you were in, and able to recommend something like it, or guess at something different that you might like. They had ready opinions about movies you were taking out ore returning, and always had time for a little conversation. "Where everybody knows your name," was certainly the case.

Now watching a movie is more of a solitary pleasure. I recently sat with a friend in his living room, each of us plugged into our own iPads, each of us watching our own movie selection on Netflix. Yeah, we were "together," but we certainly weren't experiencing the same evening. (Remember the really old days of HBO, when we'd excitedly ask one another, "What's on HBO tonight?")

You can still rent videos, but mostly they're an afterthought at the grocery store, or you borrow them at the library. There isn't the buzz of shared passion (film), the sense of knowing and being known, the recognizable faces and chance encounters with a friend that you found at your local video rental store.

And I've got to admit, I miss it. Sometimes, it's true, you don't know what you've got til it's gone.

Text Fun

2011-11-01T11:02:00.002-04:00

This being my favorite holiday season (Halloween), I got a text from a friend the other day with a bunch of Halloweeny icons in it. Not really emoticons, they were little ghosties and ghoulies. I was immediately both jealous and intrigued. I know he's got a Blackberry rather than an iPhone (my smart phone choice), but I nevertheless had to have something similar.

It hadn't occurred to me that of course people would be developing apps that allowed you to add images to your texts, but I wasn't sure exactly how it would work.

I went to the app store and searched for icons, and came up with a sizable list of choices. I generally try the apps with the highest ratings first, though that's not a guarantee that you're going to like it. The one I bought ($.99) is called Animoticons, and it offers both animated and still emoticons.

Once downloaded, the process of adding them to your texts is relatively easy (oh, by the way, you can also add them to your emails). Open the app and search through the list for the icons/animoticon you want, and select it. A menu will pop up asking if you want to add it to a text, email, etc. So you select where you'd like it to go, and it's copied to a clipboard.

Now return to your text, and hold your finger on the location in your text where you'd like the icon to go. The magnifier will appear, and when you take your finger off, you'll have the option of pasting - so select "paste," and the image will be placed in your text where you indicated. It's that easy!

Now if they can just come up with one where you don't have to leave your text and open another app...

So, my friends whom I text, be prepared for lots of silliness to come!

What's a Yammer?

2011-10-26T12:13:00.000-04:00

Our company has tried dozens of approaches to real-time communication, file sharing, knowledge-base creation, in short, one-stop-shopping for team collaboration that must include clients, but on a limited scale.

Tall order.

It just may be that a new product called Yammer could be the best possibility to date.

What is Yammer? It's a blog; it's a file sharing platform; it's a private messaging tool (IM); it's an external network (for sharing with people not part of your corporate team); it's a knowledge base archive; it's way more than that and it's secure.

It's all hinged on your company's email address. Anyone with an active email address at your company is eligible to take part. And no, it's not free beyond a very basic plan. So if you and a very limited team wanted to test it out on a specific project, feel free.

If your company up to 100 users wants a more robust version, you pay $5 per month per user. For an enterprise version (fully loaded, and ready to integrate with third party apps like Salesforce.com), you call for a price. (Which option always scares me, but every organization has to decide if the features are worth the price.)

Inter-office, inter-team communications are always an issue. We all move at such a pace these days that it's difficult to make sure that everyone who needs to know, knows in a timely fashion; and that anyone and everyone who should get his/her hands on a file can - and that that file is the latest and greatest. Having a go-to application that will organize all that communication for you, and include your clients to the extent that they need to be included, is worth the investment, simply in missed communications and repetitive communications alone.

Yammer just might be the social platform of the future for your company. Check it out at www.yammer.com.

Zite!

2011-10-20T21:30:00.002-04:00

What goes around comes around. It's just that sometimes on the go-around, we're not quite ready, til it comes back around.

That may just be the case with Zite, a personalized "magazine" app for your iPad.

The "goes-around" version of this would have been "push" technology, a now-long-ago attempt to use your desktop as a place where you could collect via "push" technology, all the latest and greatest information on the subjects that interested you. You simply signed up for various topics, and information was pushed to you, rather than you going out and searching for it via search engines. (It amazes me how quickly some people can see how to twist our behaviors and stand them on their ends to create a new paradigm, but how slow we seem to often be at picking up on the possiblities.)

Nevertheless, with applications like Zite, "push" information has arrived. "Zite," says its makers, "is a free, personalized iPad magazine that understands what you like and gets smarter every time you use it. Zite helps you discover what you've been missing."

Now, I have to tell you that for years I've been using iGoogle to more or less do just what Zite claims to do, minus the "gets smarter" part. I have several pages of my iGoogle "site" devoted to feeds from some of my favorite sites and news sources. So I get entertainment, politics, book reviews, The Oatmeal and other funnies, fed to me on a daily basis. I just cruise through the way I would the morning paper, getting my news and information from the sources I trust and about the subjects that interest
The big difference with Zite, as near as I can tell, is that it "learns" about you over time. Let's say I put a news feed on my iGoogle home page - but never go and read anything it serves up to me. Where iGoogle just faithfully keeps feeding me that source, Zite would figure out that I'm never reading anything that that newsfeed offers me, and would take action.4.How is Zite different?

"Zite is the first iPad news reader to go beyond manual customization and make use of more powerful technology to provide an individually personalized experience. Your days of wasting time sifting through bad information are over." (From the Zite site.)

Another difference between my manual iGoogle "magazine" and Zite is that Zite serves up most of its content based on both you and "buzz," or popularity. What topics are being discussed on twitter, blogs, and other popular social media outlets? Well, you'll get those subjects served to you via Zite, most likely (if avaialable) from your preferred sources. If, however, your sources aren't "buzzing" the latest hot topic, they're less likely to turn up on your Zite magazine.

Zite is a little Big Brothery in that it pays attention to your Twitter and other social media posts - what are yuou talking about? What are others talking about? This data is aggregated (and yeah, some of that aggregated, though they swear NEVER individual data is sold or shared with "third parties," i.e., marketing firms) and helps determine what makes up your Zite Magazine.
To personalize Zite effectively, "The single most important thing you can do is thumb up or down the articles you read — the more you do it, the better your personalized experience will be. Zite also keeps track of the links you and your friends share on Twitter and the articles you choose to read while using the app."

Like newsfeeds, Zite will refres your content frequently - roughly every hour or so. As topics trend, you'll see changes in what's reflected on your personal magazine.
The more you interact with Zite, the more relevent your content will be - at least in theory. Do you use StumbleOn, or Pandora? You'll know from these systems that if you like what you read or hear, you give it a thumbs up. This teaches the system what you like (based on certain characteristics the song, story, or site is supposed to have, again based on user opinions or tagging), or conversely, dislike, if you give it a thumbs down. So by reading stories, and rating them thumbs up or down, you will ostensibly get content that is more and more tailored to your tastes and preferences. "Over time," promises Zite, "you'll see more of what you want and less of what you don't."

You can share content on your social sites like Twitter and Facebook, or even by email, by simply opening the article and tapping the appropriate button on the bottom right controls. And of course, doing so makes that content even more relevant to you as a user, and gives Zite greater insight into your preferences.
One of my questions is one that shows up in Zite's FAQ section: What's the difference between Zite and my iGoogle page, or Google Reader or any other newsreader? Zite explains, "Zite is different from an RSS reader or Twitter client. Instead, Zite taps into your Google Reader and Twitter feeds to learn about your interests and deliver you content it thinks you'll like." So the difference is, you tell Google Reader what you want served to you and from what sources. Zite learns what you like, and surprises you with things you didn't necessarily expect, but are very likely to enjoy.
I finally got around to this question in the FAQs, which kind of brought me to a bit of a dead stop: "What will happen now that Zite has received a cease-and-desist letter from media companies?

"Above all, we care about you, our user, but publishers' concerns are also incredibly important to us. We're responding to issues and questions raised by publishers because we want them to be happy. Our goal is to work closely with them to give you the best app we possible can. We'll keep working hard to achieve it."

Well, we can only hope so! Though it does seem a little short-sighted on the part of media companies, since it's been demonstrated over and over that moving your content in front of more and more people - who probably otherwise would never have seen it - only serves to get you on that user's radar. And that's a good thing for everyone.

A tip of the hat for this topic to my old friend and techno-mentor, Al Fasoldt, who always knows about the coolest new stuff!

Netflix Turns and Runs

2011-10-10T10:38:00.004-04:00

About three weeks ago I wrote a post about Netflix decision to move to a two-site business model: one site for DVD rental, and one for streaming content (movies and tv shows that come direct to you via your broadband connection). The reaction was the equivalent of the Wall Street Live-in (or whatever they're calling the tent city that has grown in the vicinity of Wall Street to protest it's evil money-making ways).

I have to say, the notion of going from one convenient site that allowed you to keep a single, coherent list of movies and shows that you wanted to see to two separate sites, doubling your effort an oh-by-the-way, increasing your cost, seemed like a bit of a shell game and certainly wasn't very customer-friendly.

Netflix was already moving in the direction of more streaming content and less rental. Streaming content is cheaper for them, and certainly more convenient for any customer that has decent, reliable broadband.

However, content providers were dragging their heels about providing this content, so that viewers couldn't get the latest and greatest movies streamed.

But it turns out that if you let it, the market will behave the way it should: customers protested and cancelled their accounts. Netflix heard them, as most companies do whose revenues suddenly plummet due to a bad decision. So today in my in-box was this announcement from a chastened Netflix:

"Dear Nancy,
It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.

This means no change: one website, one account, one password…in other words, no Qwikster.

While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.

We're constantly improving our streaming selection. We've recently added hundreds of movies from Paramount, Sony, Universal, Fox, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, MGM and Miramax. Plus, in the last couple of weeks alone, we've added over 3,500 TV episodes from ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, USA, E!, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC Family, Discovery Channel, TLC, SyFy, A&E, History, and PBS."

Let this be a lesson to all suppliers, not just suppliers of Internet content: users will put up with cost increases, as long as they appear to be warranted and are within reason. But don't make it more difficult for me. Once you've given me a certain level of comfort and I've learned how to maneuver your interface, taking that away from me is going to result in a fight to the finish - and it's not likely to be mine!

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T10:20:00.001-04:00

I somehow feel it would be wrong to write a weekly tech column and not acknowledge the passing of Grand Master Steve Jobs. Not that I can add anything to the many things said about, and by, him. He was a profound and clever speaker, along with all his other remarkable gifts.

Being busy yesterday, I somehow missed the news until late in the day I finally got on my computer and discovered the news - and I have never seen such an outpouring of sentiment from so many sources.

Whether you agreed with his approach to technology or not - and I admit to having a foot in both camps - he was an innovator par excellance - and original thinker, a person who "got it" on a deep level.

I've argued for a long time that many of us who were PC people actually liked the fact that they could be difficult, crabby, and argumentative. Yeah, Macs just "worked," but that wasn't nearly as much fun as solving a problem with a missing dll file, and being victorious. Macs... well, you could edit video and audio, and at least in the old days Photoshop ran so much more easily on a Mac. They were definitely cool looking, if you cared about such things. And I know this is going to sound crazy, but even the keyboard click had a better sound, and you better believe that Steve Jobs knew that and aimed for it. It had a rewarding, delicate little click to it that just made you feel you were being creative.

And let's not forget that iconic 1984 Superbowl commercial. A brightly clad young woman, swinging a hammer, run through a crowd of all-the-same drones, staring at a Big Brother type screen. She tosses the hammer, shattering his image. Buh-bye IBM.

Well, of course it didn't quite happen that way, but it did open windows (no pun intended), doors, and poke holes through walls, and that's what Steve Jobs was all about. Opening the doors of perception. Pixar? iPhone. iPad. Who knows what might have followed?

The man was a 21st century da Vinci. And that's saying a lot.

As so many around the Internet are saying, RIP, Steve Jobs. And thanks.

Winning Hearts and Minds

2011-09-29T16:32:00.000-04:00

I set out to write a little article about the Big Story on the Internet right now: the "new" face of Facebook.

What I found out was not-so-simply simple: nobody really gets it, and a lot of it had already been going on long before founder Mark Zuckerberg's Big a la Steve Jobs Announcement at Facebook's annual F8 (F eight... Fate, get it?) conference.

One friend of mine claims that Google is The Evil Empire. Another insists that "Facebook is Evil." In either case, it seems evident that there is an underlying desire on the part of both companies to rule the Internet, and probably for the same reason: money. But where Google takes the No People Required path - that is, its interest seems to be mainly in the cataloging and accessing of information qua information, Facebook is all about the social aspect of information sharing.

Both yield a wealth of data about you, what you do, who you are, where you go, how you do things, and most importantly, what you buy.

But what exactly each empire is doing to get you to do what it wants and needs, that's another story - and evidently one that's not so easily gathered. If I read one, I read 30 articles about what's happened and why and how it's all going to shake out, and I still am having trouble making heads or tails out of it. One thing that was clear, though, was the immediate and gut-level reaction to Facebook's changes and its announcement: "Get a life, it's just Facebook!" screamed the Adopters. "Facebook is my life!" wailed the Avoiders.

I do have to admit that where Google+ (Google's foray into social networking) left me cold, Facebook has always been a warm environment, all about your friends, and sharing, and photos, and telling stories and jokes; I've personally enjoyed sharing some of my favorite music and music discoveries with friends.

The big question, once people get used to what Facebook has done - and will be doing in the months to come - is whether they will abandon the platform and take up Google+, or whether they'll, er, warm up to the new Facebook.

Not too long ago, you couldn't help but notice that list of friends who were online at any given moment that suddenly showed up on the right hand side of your page - some with a green dot next to them, signifying that they were open for chat - IF you had your chat access set to open, as well. Ok, I finally figured that (and its control) out, after wondering how the heck I could both be on Facebook and not on Facebook if I didn't feel like chatting. Not too long after that, the more observant among us realized that our news was being fed to us differently.

I posted a "fix" to the new way Facebook was sharing your friends posts a while back: while you've never seen every post of every friend, you were at least getting a reasonably sampling of them. Now, however, if you hadn't interacted with a particular friend in a while, you'd see nothing from him or her. You had to go into the settings to change this to allow all your friends' posts to appear without being vetted against some minimal "reaction" gauge. (The idea behind this, the cynics among us decided, was that Facebook wanted you to act in some way, best of all worlds to endorse a product or service by liking it, or responding to a friend's like, thus gaining market intelligence and ideally, selling ads! So FB was sort of "forcing" you to be active, or lose contact with your friends.)

Then came what is called The Ticker. This is also a right column feature in which you are fed a steady stream of your friends comments, posts, likes (and btw, soon likes will not be "likes," but will be a whole range of things like "playing," "watching," "researching," and so on), and activities.

Facebook has also created a whole raft of partnerships with services like Netflix (Spotify, Hulu, Yahoo News, and so on) which will not only tell you what your friends are doing, but allow you to join in the fun.With The Ticker, Zuckerberg claims FB has opened a whole new world of "sharing" the Internet and Information. So, let's say a friend is watching Godzilla versus Mothra on Netflix. You can click into his activity, and join him as he watches, so you are "virtually" at the movies together. Any number of your friends, their friends, their friends' friends and so on and so on can join the party, bring your own popcorn. (A possible unintended consequence is a whole new level of dating: we have regular dates, Saturday night dates [versus "other" nights for second-tier interests], the after-date date, the infamous "booty call," and now a "virtual date:" "Hey, let's tune in to Office Space on Netflix Tuesday at nine, your place and mine?"

Coming to a Facebook near you: a change that has some people troubled, others canceling their subscription. Soon, Facebook apps will only need to ask permission once in order to share stories about your activity on that app. Right now, each time the app wants to post your results of its "what movie star would you most likely phone obsessively" quiz, it had to ask your permission. Now, if it asks you one time, that's all it will ever have to do.

But possibly one of the most hard to swallow of the new FB features: The Timeline. What is it? As one reviewer put it (Facebook Changes Again: Everything You Need to Know): "In a complete overhaul of its ever-evolving profile page, Facebook is introducing Timeline. This is a stream of information about you - the photos you've posted, all your status updates, the apps you've used, even the places you've visited on a world map - that scrolls all the way back to your birth. It encourages you to post more stuff about your past, such as baby pictures, using Facebook as a scrapbook.

"The further back in Timeline you go, the more Facebook will compress the information so that you're only seeing the most interesting parts of your h8istory. You can customize this by clicking on a start next to a status, say, or enlarging a picture.

"Timeline is in Beta now, and will be opt-in to start. In the long run, it will become the new default profile page."

All I can say is, "interesting according to whom?" That is to say, if FB is going to make, as it evidently plans to, editorial decisions (which they assure us can be overridden) about what's interesting about my life, who's to say it might not be that drunken post about an amazing party I attended seven years ago as a freshman in college? While it is still in Beta, which means users are testing it and will ostensibly be able to make recommendations about how it functions, right now Timeline can select from literally anything you post, like, link to, or click on within the FB platform. Nothing, as the saying goes, is sacred (or hidable, or deletable).

Some FB users quietly revolted several years ago by moving to Better Facebook (betterfacebook.net), a free browser extension that "improves the Facebook site by adding lots of great enhancements and functionality. It runs in most browsers (except for IE!? of course) and installs in just a minute."

Others are packing up their Likes and Status Updates and exiting FB in modest but potentially massive droves for the less intrusive Google+. Just as Facebook's mousetrap was a better version than the mind-bendingly confused and confusing MySpace, so Google+ may be a better way to slice bread, assuming users remain as hostile to the changes to their beloved interface as they have been so far. Early polling indicates that a significant number of users are actively unhappy about the new Facebook, and only likely to become more so as the changes continue to roll out.

At stake: Facebook's 750 million users worldwide, and its status as the world's #1 ranked social networking service. Now if someone could just *explain* Google+ to me, I'd have a valid opinion of which service I think is best. All I can really be sure of at this point: it is a battle for world domination, and we all have front row seats.

QuickNetSter.com

2011-09-20T21:01:00.001-04:00

I got the strangest email the other day - it was a very "personalized" email from the president of Netflix. Huh? Needless to say, I had to read on. The gist of it was this: Netflix had changed the terms of its deal without giving its customers a lot of heads up.

Well, so what, thinks I? Companies do that all the time. (Truth be told, I'm still not exactly sure why people reacted so vehemently to the new arrangement.) But here's the essence of the deal:

Once upon a time, there were small operators who rented video tapes of movies. For an exorbitant price, you got the privilege of having a not-so-new movie in your hands for a few days. (Remember Friday nights at Mom and Pop video, waiting in line to grab the latest release VHS? And you had to have it back in ON TIME or you'd be charged late fees?)

The only competition in those days was HBO or other "premium" movie channels on cable. Generally, it was a toss-up who'd get the video first, though usually it was the rental centers - more income to the producers.

Then Blockbuster and its ilk moved in, renting videos (eventually DVDs) for much less and having far less stringent return demands - their inventory was significantly higher since they bought in bulk, and Mom and Pop Movies couldn't compete.

Cable, which of course always had the capacity (fiberoptics) to send/receive huge amounts of data, was bit by bit moving this capacity from road to house to set-top, and eventually, it was practical to deliver movies "On Demand" to customers. What's the point of driving to a store, trying to locate a movie, checking it out, hoping it's not scratched or otherwise unplayable, and then having to return it, when all you really have to do is "demand" it from your cable provider?

And then there was Netflix, which offered content through the mails. Why visit Blockbuster when you could "queue up" movies in a personalized list, and be sent the latest three available for a flat rate per month, keeping the movie as long as it pleased you, with no need to visit the store, and the convenience of shopping for titles online?

Soon, however, even the mail to you - mail back convenience seemed like a chore when you could simply "stream" the content! Now all you have to do is sign up, list the movies you want to see, then the view them at your convenience via your computer? The only drawback was that content providers - ultimately, the studios - would hold back the DVD rental release of a movie until it had grabbed and squeezed every nickle it possibly could from every other source. That meant that a movie could be purchased before it could be rented before it could be streamed.

Netflix provided both hard copy rental (DVD) and streamed content to subscribers.

Subscribers were allowed to sign up for a variety of plans but the basic idea was that you were able to have in your possession a certain number of DVDs (for basically an unlimited period of time) at a given time, and you were able to stream (usually older content) content at will at the same time.

At some point, Netfilix decided to go to a two tier system - essentially, making people do business with two entirely different providers, paying a fee to each, and negotiating that fee separately - without really sharing this new business model with subscribers.

So where I had had the arrangement that I could have three movies on hard copy (DVD) at any given time, and stream whatever content was available for streaming during that same time period at will, I now had to make separate arrangements, and pay separate charges to separate companies.

Needless to say, people reacted - shall we say, negatively?

A basic rule of marketing is: you can add services and charge more; you can charge more to new customers; you can ever-so-slightly reduce the service for the fee paid, but never, never, never can you give the customer less than he or she has signed up for without a darn good reason.

All in all, Netflix broke the rules.

Netflix is now Netflix and Quickster. Quickster is the DVD rental center; Netflix is the streaming service. They are not connected, and when you pay for one, you are not paying for the other.

Is it the end of the world? Of course not. But it is a breach of marketing etiquette, and given the options for content delivery that are constantly popping up on the Internet, not the smartest move an Internet-based content provider has made in recent years.

And it still remains one of the stranger email apologies I've received, and one I'll probably hang onto as an example of...something... down the road!

A Facebook Fix

2011-09-07T14:06:00.000-04:00

Recently a Facebook friend posted a complaint about the "wankers" (the Brits have such expressive words!) at that noble organization who feed us status reports based on the frequency of our interaction with our friends. Needless to say, this can be a real annoyance if you want to be updated about a friend who isn't a regular poster, or who simply reads your posts but doesn't necessarily react to them in some way (like, or comment).

He posted a workaround, but as it happens, it was a little off. You could change your preferences (in your Account settings) to All Friends for News Feeds, but it wouldn't "stick."

So I decided to look into the matter, and here is what our friends at Social Brio explained (which, for me, at least for now, is working):

"If you scroll down to the bottom of your News Feed- it will take you a few scrolls, since as you probably know it auto-loads more content as you read through updates- you'll see this option at the bottom:"

When you click on Edit Options, a screen and dropdown with these checkbox options will come up:

Friends and pages you interact with the most

All your friends and pages

Select "All your friends and pages," and save.

For now, this seems to have solved the problem, and I am seeing posts from many more of my friends!

Musicovery.com

2011-09-02T13:37:00.001-04:00

As you probably know, I'm a big fan of Blip.fm and Pandora, both ways of discovering and sharing music, from slightly different approaches.

Blip.fm shows a constantly streaming list of songs that are being "blipped" by DJ's around the world. You can tune in to anything that sounds interesting, and if you like it, reblip it to your listening audience. (You can share via Twitter and Facebook, as well.) I have found tons of music this way that I would never have discovered otherwise.

Pandora, on the other hand, lets you choose an artist or song that you like, and then, based on "tags," or qualities of the music assigned by listeners, serves up other artists with supposedly similar qualities. So if you're in the mood for, say, The National, you'll hear some of them and some other groups that folks think are like them.

Now try something called Musicovery.com, a music discovery site that's all based on mood. There are four basic moods: Energetic>Calm, Positive>Dark. You can mouse over whatever reflects your mood at the time. A particular song is assigned to that location. Like it? Suits your mood? Keep listening. Other music will come along that has a similar feel. Or maybe you feel like changing your attitude - in the mood for a brood? Try dark and energetic.

Music ranges from oldies (I mean, real oldies, like Doris Day), to current artists and songs. And of course, you can link something you like to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. Let the world know the music mood you're in!

WinMerge

2011-08-19T11:23:00.000-04:00

It's not often I devote a column to an application, but this is one that's worth sharing.

The application is called WinMerge, and as the name suggests, it's a PC (Windows platform) app, and isn't available for Mac. It works, it's useful, and it's free (open source). What more can you ask?

What's it for? Well, it was most likely developed for programmers to compare files or versions of code (it is technically a text file comparison tool), but it will compare binaries, so you can apply it to almost anything you work with. Let's say there are multiple versions of a text file on your hard drive, or perhaps in a shared drive, and you want to know which is the latest and greatest, and what changes have been made.

Running WinMerge is very simple. You open a project, then select the location and file name (or folder name) of the data you want to compare. Then let WinMerge do its thing. When it has quickly run its comparison, it will present you with data differences and dates so that you can decide how you want to handle differences, or if you simply want to keep (and propagate) one of the versions.

I use WinMerge most often when comparing music folders, and for general data backup. From bitter experience, I've learned that for certain files, backup is vital. I used to back up by burning CDs (or DVDs) of my data. Needless to say, this is time consuming, and open to all sorts of problems (like losing the disk, a bad burn, having to span disks to keep data together, and so on).

With WinMerge, you avoid the nuisance of automatic backup. YOU decide what data you want backed up, how, and most importantly, when.

As a general rule, it's a great idea to have at least one external hard drive to which you back up your computer's data (particularly for such precious things as music, pictures, that novel you're writing, etc.). You can purchase terabytes of storage for very little money these days, and many do come with automatic backup software, if you choose to go that route.

Once the comparison has been made, and you're shown your results, you can opt to copy a file or folder from one drive to the other. I keep two backup drives, and keep them in synch for all my vital data. That way, if my hard drive crashes (and it has), I'll be able to recover my data from one of the external drives.

No, this will not help you with the problem of lost software - for that, you'll need to reload from the original disk. But, if you've downloaded the software (as we do more and more these days) you will still have the installer copied to your backup, and be able to run it again on your new computer or hard drive.

It's handy, it's fast, and it's free. And while I wouldn't recommend it for the total newbie (are there any left?) it's easy enough to use that even a novice will get the hang of it quickly.

Of Note

2011-08-16T10:36:00.000-04:00

A little iPhone update: Keynote for iPhone??

Keynote, for those of you who are not yet Apple converts, is the Mac equivalent of PowerPoint. Though I haven't had a lot of experience with it, I'm told that it is smoother and more graphically powerful than PowerPoint, though it certainly shares that famed PPT drawback: it can be deadly dull in the hands of the wrong presenter!

A quick aside: when preparing a PPT, the words and graphics should enhance your presentation, not be there to be read word for word by the presenter. If you do this, don't be surprised to see your audience nod off! End of aside.

Now Keynote is available for the iPhone. What's so great about that? In one word: portability. You can create your Keynote presentation literally on your iPhone, or simply add one via iTunes. With a solid library of themes and animated effects, you can prepare a sales presentation en route to your client's office (just make sure someone else is driving!), and with an appropriate connection, display it full screen, while reading from your (visible only to you) notes on your iPhone. You can also print your presentation for a leave-behind (though you will need a fairly recent printer equipped with WiFi reception). And you can email your presentation if you choose.

Competitors among iPhone apps are Documents to Go and QuickOffice, but some reviewer's money is on Keynote. I will be trying this out in the near future, and I'll let you know what I think! ($9.99)

Getting the Drop

2011-08-12T15:15:00.000-04:00

More from the Internet Tools I Can't Live Without front:

Dropbox.

This awesome online app allows you to really, truly, easily share even humongous files with friends and colleagues - and when I say share I mean just that. Not just download and mess around with them and upload, but truly work on the same file.

Here's how it work (and it works for both Mac and PC platforms): you download the free application and install it on your desktop. You create a username and password, and the application will install a dropbox folder on your computer where you specify. Any file that you wish to share you drop into that folder, perhaps in a subfolder. To share, you "browse" dropbox on a web browser (it locates your local file), and indicate which folder you wish to share with others; it will ask you to enter names and email addresses for these individuals.

In turn, anyone you plan to share files with will also download the app and install it. The one caveat is be sure to know which email address they plan to associate with the application.

When you've shared a file, you'll get notification, and you simply browse to the appropriate folder in your local folder, and voila - there's the file for you to view, edit, etc.

This is especially useful when I want to share video files with clients, as they are large and therefore, outside of an ftp site, can be difficult to move around easily at full resolution for review. Dropbox has virtually eliminated that problem. Designer friends tell me that they find it equally useful for sharing Photoshop or Illustrator files, and I know that I will use it as a repository for my voice over work.

The service is free up to 2 GB; if you plan to use it a lot you'll want a yearly subscription for a modest fee.

Even if all you plan to share is photos with friends and family, it's a great way to move files from here to there without them getting garbled (as I have to say Gmail sometimes does!), lost, or broken up into annoying chunks because of file size limits.

Drop on!

Plus or Minus?

2011-07-25T14:30:00.000-04:00

I got an invitation to Google+.

Thus far, I am underwhelmed. I don't even really "get" it yet.

It's based on circles - my family, my friends, my acquaintances. And then I can create my own circles, so perhaps church groups, theater "family," clubs, etc. You can also choose to follow these people or not. (I'm not exactly sure why adding them to your circles doesn't mean you are following them automatically?)

Google explains my puzzlement this way, "Then, you can share relevant content with the right people, and follow content posted by people you find interesting. For example, you might post an announcement about your engagement and show it only to people in your friends and family circles, or maybe you see a post from the circle you created for your book club that there's a recent article on your favorite author."

Ok, that does make sense. The same person might be included in several circles, so, for example, I might have my sister in both my family and friends circles, so that she gets notifications I post to both.

You might want to include more people in your circles. To do this:

"On the side of the stream and on the Find and Invite tab, you may see suggestions for people Google+ thinks you might know. Suggestions could be generated by:

Your mutual connections with people on Google products such as Gmail.
Interaction you’ve had with others on Google products.
The links you've added to your profile.
The connected accounts you've linked on your Google Account.
The people who are in your extended circles.

While viewing your suggestions beside the stream, you can add suggested people to your circles by clicking Add to circles next to their name. If you don’t know a suggested person or if you don’t want to add them to a circle, mouse over the person's name and click the X.

You can view all of your suggestions at once by clicking Show all. This will take you to the Find and Invite tab where you can edit your circles."

You can also invite people to join Google+. Each member automatically gets eight invitations (you'll see a little envelope at the bottom of your screen). Invite people who aren't already members with whom you'd like to stay in touch.

Googl+'s "like" equivalent is something called "+1," and it behaves the same way as "like." (I'm talking Facebook here, of course.) Because, indeed, Google+ is Google's challenge to Facebook and its phenomenal success.

The only problem is, thus far, I just don't see how Google+ is any better than Facebook. It does try to be, I'll give it that. For example, Google+ offers something called "Sparks," which is an area dedicated to interests. You can search among existing interests, or add one of your own. Then you can recommend this info to your circles. So let's say you have a bunch of friends in a political circle - now you can share provocative articles with them and get a discussion going. Or maybe you're a foodie, and want to share recipes.

"Hangouts" is Google+'s chat room:

"Hangouts are the best way for you to say, “I’m online and want to hangout!” Hangouts lets you:

Chill with friends that are scrolling through the web, just like you!
Use live video chat that puts you in the same room together!
Coordinate plans, whether it's working on a project or meeting up for coffee.
Maybe you’re bored. Start a hangout, invite your circles, see who’s around!"

Call me crazy, but doesn't Google already offer this opportunity with Google Talk? All my family, friends, and acquaintances are already in my Google Contacts, and if they're online, I know it and can start a chat with them. The only benefit of Hangouts, I suppose, is that it opens the conversation up to many more people.

Then, of course, you have your profile option (for your flattering picture and over-the-top self description); a place to share photos; and then there's something called "The Stream."

"The stream is the place to have meaningful conversations with the people you care about. It centralizes all the content people have shared with you, as well as the people who are trying to share with you, but who aren't yet in your circles. You might see text posts, pictures, videos, links, or location markers. When you share with people either individually or through a circle, your content will appear in their stream."

It kind of goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, there is a mobile version, so you can get a native app for your recent version of the Android or iPhone; you can also use Google+ in your phone's browser while you're on the go.

The jury, as they say, is still out on this one. I've just started to use it, and I will let you know whether it becomes an indispensable part of my day. (I do have one friend who has quit FB in favor of Google+, so you never know!)

Mac Attack

2011-07-05T10:54:00.000-04:00

No, I do not condone hacking when it's done with mal-intent.

On the other hand, I recently brought my Mac PowerBook to work to transfer some video files to it that I will be working on later.

I haven't used it in a while, and I didn't do the original setup. Nevertheless, I was pretty sure I knew the password - and I'd clearly entered it many times before, so it had to be one of my "regulars." It wasn't.

Apple has a nice, easy fix. Get your installation CD, and boot from that. Ok, but how many of us carry our disks around with us? Or can even quickly put our hands on them? In my case, my Mac was refurbished, so I don't even have the install disk.

Now what??

Well, there is a workaround (that's the polite term; the less polite term is hack). It's surprisingly simple:

Reboot your Mac holding down the Apple (or Command on a newer machine) and S keys (after you hear the chime). You will boot into the terminal. (This is the interface where you are talking directly to the Mac's inner workings.)

You will get a prompt which on a Mac involves "root." Don't be afraid - this is just like the command prompt on a PC. Now, follow these instructions hitting "enter" after each line:

mount -uw /
rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
shutdown -h now

Be sure to use the spaces as indicated (the first time I tried it I did not leave a space after the rm and before the /var and the sequence failed.

That's all there is to it - you can now set up your Mac as if it were a new machine. Installed software will still be there.

2011-06-20T14:03:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago I posted some information about Gazelle, an online application that matches donors/sellers of older electronics to takers/buyers.

Now here's an opportunity to gather up your recyclable electronics and bring them all to a single location nearby:

Cxtec's Lifecycle express will be hosting the first of many Community-Wide Collection events at its recyclying center on Saturday, June 25 from 8-noon. This will replace OCRRA's annual electronic collection event that's taken place over the last few years.

What to bring?
Cabling
Calculators
Cameras
CRTs
DVD players
Flat screen monitors
Fax Machines
Hubs
Keyboards
Laptops
MP3 Players
Modems
Mouse Devices
Personal Computers (PC’s)
Phones (Corded and Wireless)
Printers
Routers
Servers
Stereos
Speakers
Switches
TVs
Video Cameras

Directions:

From the South

Take Interstate 81 North and take Exit 16A (I-481 North) to Exit 1 (Rock Cut Rd). Take a right and travel a short distance to the light and turn Right onto Brighton Ave. Go to the next light and turn Right onto Ainsley Drive, we're on the Right.

From the North

Take Interstate 81 South and take Exit 17 (Brighton Ave). Stay in the far left lane and at the light turn Left onto State St. Stay in the far left lane and at the next light turn Left onto Brighton Ave. At the second light turn Left on Ainsley Dr. The CXtec TCDC is on the Right.

From the East

Take NYS Thruway West to Interstate 481 South and take Exit 1 (Brighton Avenue). Turn Right and travel a short distance to the light and turn Right onto Ainsley Drive, we're on the Right.

From the West

Take NYS Thruway East to Interstate 81 South. Follow directions from the NORTH.

Pass it along, and take this opportunity to properly recycle/dispose of those unused and/or unworking electronics!

Something Old, Something New

2011-06-15T09:28:00.001-04:00

As many of you know, I write a regular column for TimeWarner's local News10Now website. Recently, I wrote one about how many technologies are becoming, or have already become, obsolete, thanks to technology - largely computer technology. I had so much fun, I decided to expand on it here. I'm sure that once you start thinking about the possibilities, you're imagination will start to fire up, as well.

I was thinking about the many companies that, like the famous buggy whip manufacturers of yore, simply won't be around in years to come - or at least, their numbers will be severely reduced. All thanks to technological advances, largely computers and smart phones.

Watches: fewer and fewer people wear them these days. Once I got my iPhone, I realized that when I wanted to know what time it was, nine times out of ten I consulted my phone, not my watch.

How about stationery manufacturers, or greeting card companies? I tried to find a Mother's Day card recently, and all they had were those musical cards with a little chip inserted in them so that they play music when opened.

For that matter, I watched a postman making his appointed rounds today and got to thinking about how little mail that's delivered to my house is anything I even bother with. Letters - who writes letters?? Occasionally I get a bill, though almost all my bill payment is done online. Even flyers and advertising is moving more and more to the online space.

While I doubt that books will be replaced altogether - there is still a tactile pleasure involved in opening a book, and not all situations are ideally suited (at least, not yet) for the e-readers on the market (bright outdoor light, for example), I'm guessing that as generations grow up with less contact with physical books, they will be less desirable. Our children's children probably won't "get" that pleasure of opening a new book, the feel of the pages and the smell of the ink.

Newspapers are certainly in a fight for their lives, and I have little hope that they'll win. As WiFi access become more ubiquitous, we'll be able to do even our commuting newspaper reading online.

Maps, while they will always be necessary as a concept, will be delivered via computer an GPS rather than the old Rand-McNally atlas I used to buy every year and keep in my car.

Desk and home phones will eventually fade away as our phones become personal devices we simply have with us everywhere and at all times. I hate to admit remembering not only a single phone line for the whole family - imagine that! - but a party line. (For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, this was a system in which you shared the phone line with several homes nearby. If you wanted to make a call, you politely interrupted the person already on the line - whose call you could eavesdrop on, by the way - to ask them to please release the line so you could use it!)

We've talked before about computers themselves, and my expectation that one day in the not too distant future, all you're really going to need is a relatively small display and input mechanism (think, iPad), and all your applications and data will reside in "the cloud." This will take a while, as security is and will remain a concern for all of us. But data encryption keeps improving, and except for highly secure requirements, most of us can feel ok about photos and blogs and other data living somewhere offsite. Yes, we'll probably continue to do high processing demand applications like video editing from a resident processor, but even that seems to be improving steadily as a remote possibility. Certainly the world of photo editing is becoming more and more feasible done on a remote server.

It's been a long time since futurists predicted that we'd be managing our homes from wherever we happened to be - but that possibility has become a reality. We've seen the commercials where a car can be started by someone three states away; we know that with OnStar, for example, a crash is immediately reported by the car to a hub, where help is dispatched to the scene. Keys-locked-in-cars are, again, no problem for cars equipped with OnStar. Call the service, and they'll unlock your car for you.

Now we're being offered services like adjusting the temperature of your home while you're at work; record a program on your tv when you're at the grocery store; why not start the roast that's waiting in the oven while you're getting your hair done? It's all possible, and will become more and more the norm, particularly in newly built homes where these features can be piped right in rather than retrofitted.

There are so many possibilities there it only takes a little imagination to realize that the wild future of sci-fi is truly within reach. Don't like curtains but do want privacy? Why not just have programmable windows that will darken for privacy or shade? Or for that matter, why not holograms for curtains that you can change at will? (They really are working on fabric that displays imagery, and can even "bend" light so as to make the wearer invisible.)

One futurist predicts that our bathrooms will become medical testing centers as stool and urine samples are collected and tested for various incipient diseases every time we use them. And then there are the cars that drive themselves that are already in the testing phase...

So while one system fades, another appears. The challenge, as always, is just keeping up with it!

Seeing Data

2011-06-10T12:11:00.000-04:00

Here's a site you might enjoy - http://infosthetics.com/. The whole idea behind it is the visualization of data.

Naturally, we've done this - visualized data - for a long time. I can remember tests in school that asked for an interpretation of a graph. What did the correlation of the X-Y data tell us?

Now, with the combination of the computer (able to compute huge quantities of data in the blink of an eye, including 3-dimensional data), plus the Internet (massive amounts of data procured from actual behavior, making it even more reliable than the old "sampling" of information we used to rely on), plus ever more inventive ways to "see" this data (like, heat maps, that tell us by varying colors or three-d peaks and valleys) how data is distributed, the visualization of data has become a true blending of art and science.

Think of the old topographical map, for example. It showed, via the distance between lines, or shapes drawn on a map, the relative height of the land formations. The closer the lines are together, the higher (and steeper) the elevation. Or, if you look at a thermographic representation of brain activity - higher activity registers as red on a brain scan, lower activity tends towards the blues.

This website uses data of all kinds and then artists (I can think of no better word for them!) invent stunning ways of representing this data in any number of startling and informative ways. A recent example is using music to create "audio flowers." " Audio Flowers [last.fm] is the result of extensive research conducted at Last.fm into new techniques to measure structural change (or "complexity") in rhythm, harmony and timbre directly from MP3 files.

"The aim of these little summary visualizations is to allow people to get a better overview of the complexity of individual music tracks. Currently, the audio of about 17,000 tracks have been analyzed and visualized in this way. However, to assure they are on the right track, the developers are requesting volunteers to compare pairs of music tracks to check the accuracy of these flower depictions with the actual human perception."

My only gripe with this one is that the songs - the flowers - are not labeled! At least, not on the sample shown on the site.

Still, the art/science is in its infancy, and I can only imagine how we will eventually be able to convey data as more an more analysts try their hand at creative expressions of information.

Through Nancy Colored Glasses

2011-05-24T12:57:00.000-04:00

A friend sent a link to a TED presentation recently. TED, for those who don't know about it, is a kind of information sharing "experience." In its own words, "TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences -- the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh UK each summer -- TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize."

One of the ideas recently presented was about Internet filtering of search results.

I had written previously about how Facebook delivers friends posts to you based on the things you tend to click on or respond to. You are not seeing all your friends posts and updates. While at first I was surprised to learn this, after considering it, I realized that of course you couldn't possibly be getting everything that's posted by, say, 200 friends! What you can't do, however, is instruct Facebook to always show you posts from particular people - in fact, you can't control its filtering algorithm in any way whatsoever. Really the only thing you can do is click on a lot of links provided by people you want to stay in closer touch with.

The TED presentation informs us that this practice is even more widespread - search engines are doing it, too! We've all noticed the ads that are served up by Google on say, Gmail, are related to the content of your emails. I actually don't mind this. If I'm going to have to suffer ads, it might as well be ads related to something I'm interested in. At first it felt a little creepy to realize that Google was "reading" my emails (they actually just parse it for words they use to match you to ads).

But at the TED presentation shown here (http://www.wimp.com/filterbubbles/), we are told that when we perform simple searches, we are getting results that are significantly different from person to person. The "world" we are shown is filtered by the choices that we make.

As the speaker says, I like to be ecumenical in my reading and inquiries. I want to see all sides of an issue, not just the one I might be inclined to agree with. I don't like the idea that I might not even know that another viewpoint exists, because I'm not seeing it when I search on a subject, again, based upon my previous choices and interests.

Knowing that Google (and other engines) are doing this, I will make an effort to actively include a wide variety of sources of information. But there are some subjects where I simply may not know where to go looking for these sources - I may not know who they are!

But in any event, it's worth knowing that the "world" as delivered to you by Google isn't the same one your next door neighbor is seeing, and evaluate the information you receive accordingly.

Future Watch

2011-05-18T11:14:00.000-04:00

I know I've written this anecdote before, but bear with me - it still has merit.

Several years ago, I worked for public television. At that time, there were broadcast channels only, though there was this pesky little thing called "cable" that had been introduced in some areas where broadcast tv was difficult to get.

We, of course, were asking people to make contributions to PBS to keep it functioning, and keep the programs on air in our locality that people most liked. The idea of "paying" for television had to be defended, since most tv was free. Well, free in the sense that advertisers paid for the privilege of being able to interrupt your programming with commercial messages every so often. You endured the messages, but in return you got "free" tv.

Along came cable, and people were convinced this would never fly because who in their right mind was going to pay for a service that had previously been free?

Well, cable didn't necessarily come with commercials, for one thing! Just like PBS, shows ran without interruption, creating a whole new approach to watching television. HBO was probably the most powerful entree into our homes, uninterrupted movies, right at home.

A man I worked with at PBS used to make a speech about how one day, in the not-too-distant future, we would be paying $100 a month to have television in our homes, and we'd think nothing of it. People thought this was amusing, but unlikely.

Fast foward to 2011, and not only do we pay for cable, but we pay for internet service, and we have integrated the two in ways that even that prescient man could not have foreseen.

For example, I have Apple TV in my home. What's that? A simple little device that ties your wireless router (your internet access) to your television set. Now, you can watch - on your HD TV - pretty much anything that you can watch via the Internet. Hence, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, the various networks, and even the iTunes store for really recent releases. It sets up in seconds, and you can access it quite easily. The quality of the streaming is fairly reliable - every so often you get a little glitch in a Netflix movie, but in general, I have no complaints.

Prior to getting this, I had hooked an old laptop up to one of my tvs. The laptop was tied into my wireless router, and thus to the Internet. However, what I could see what limited by the quality of the laptop itself. Not so with Apple TV. The upper limit is the download speed of your ISP, and the quality of your wireless router.

And while you do have to pay for iTunes movies, and subscribe (for a very nominal fee) for Netflix movies (especially if you opt for the streaming only), once you've purchased your Apple TV, that's it.

There have been many scenarios proposed for how we will view our at-home entertainment: media servers (where we store the content we "own"), tuners we add to our computers (to pick up television via computer), obviously the in-store rental of movies and shows (replaced rather quickly with the mail-to-you version).

I'm guessing that the more likely scenario will be on-demand subscription based, home-broadcast programming that's accessed via our computers, broadcast via our wireless home networks, and paid for by fees based on usage.

What's your idea?

Planking a Dangerous Prank?

2011-05-17T11:22:00.000-04:00

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about something called "Parkour," a kind of athletic endeavor in which the participant runs through a series of obstacles, usually in a city, performing tricks like handstands, flips, running up the side of a building, or jumping from balcony to balcony. What made this even more interesting was that the participants were taped while performing, and the show was then uploaded to YouTube and other Internet venues.

The latest craze along these lines is something called "Planking," no doubt a play on "prank" along with "plank," as in a piece of wood.

In this particular game, the participant(s) lay stiffly (like a plank) in/on/under something unusual - on top of a woodburning stove, between the up-and-down rails of an escalator (in effect spinning the planker), or suspended above two camels. The goofier and (unfortunately) more dangerous the stunt, the more attention it's likely to generate.

The bad news is that a 20-year-old from Brisbane, Australia, recently fell to his death while planking on a 7th story balcony.

The notion of doing something silly, slightly difficult and slightly dangerous is nothing new - at the beginning of the 20th century, people thought it was fun to sit on a pole on a tiny platform for as long as the pole-sitter could stand it. The major difference, of course, is that between cell phones with cameras and the internet, such fads catch on more quickly, and are participated in more avidly, than ever before.

We can only wonder what's next?

Gazelle

2011-05-12T12:18:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder what to do with all those electronics and small appliances you have at home but just can't bear to throw away? (Or perhaps feel too ecologically responsible to!)

A website called Gazelle can help you out. The brainchild of two young entrepreneurs who both wondered, "How come I have to PAY to get rid of my unwanted/unneeded stuff?" "Gazelle has grown to be the nation’s largest electronics reCommerce company, saving more than 100,000 gadgets each year. But this isn’t just about preventing e-Waste. This is about changing the way we all think about buying, owning, selling, and recycling. We are working, together with you, to bring about smarter consumption."

The basics are simple. You find out what stuff you have - get the model and serial number. Access Gazelle. Enter the products you have.

They'll hook you up with a buyer, if one is available. If nobody wants to buy it, someone may take it off your hands - and depending on what the item is, Gazelle might even help you with the shipping cost.

There are basically 22 categories of "stuff" that Gazelle will help you recycle:

Blu-Ray Players
External Hard Drives
PDAs
Calculators
GPS Devices
Projectors
Camcorders
Gaming Consoles
Satellite Radios
Camera Lenses
Home Audio
Streaming Media
Cell Phones
LCD Monitors
Tablets
Desktops
Laptops
Video Games
Digital Cameras
MP3 Players
E-Readers
Movies

It's sort of like selling your stuff on eBay or CraigsList, but facilitated. Just making it easier for you to do the right thing - and maybe earn a little cash while you're at it!

Pinterested?

2011-05-05T15:58:00.000-04:00

Artists often use something that you might call a "pinboard." Or, an "inspiration board." It's just a collection of things that they like that make them think, get them in the creative mode, get their wheels spinning.

Now some enterprising people have come up with the idea of what amounts to virtual pinboards that you can share with friends/followers. It's called Pinterest.

Here's how they describe it:
"What is Pinterest?
Think of Pinterest as a virtual pinboard — a place where you can create collections of things you love and "follow" collections created by people with great taste.

People use Pinterest to collect and share all sorts of things -- wedding inspiration, favorite T-shirts, DJ equipment. You name it, people are pinning it.

We know you have great taste in something. Our mission is to make Pinterest the best place for you to share your taste with the world."

Once signed up, you can add the PinIt icon to your bookmarks or favorites tool bar - which for ease of use, you should probably have showing on your browser. Now, when you find something you like, you simply select it and "pin" it, using your Pin It tool. It's really that easy.

Friends can sign on to follow your pins, so they can see what's new and interesting for you - people, places, things, jokes, products, movie reviews - even wish lists on sites like Amazon. What to get your sister for her birthday? If she's pinned products or a wish list to her pinboard, it's pretty easy to find out what would make her happy.

Want to know where to go for vacation? Check out the pinboard of a friend who loves to travel.

And what's really nice about it is that you don't have to do anything special - if you just happen across something you like, you click Pin It, and you're done.

Pretty easy. Could be fun.

Tracking Big Game

2011-04-21T15:47:00.000-04:00

In the news lately is a heated discussion of cell phone tracking.

On the one hand, it is a handy tool to help you locate where you are, where a nearby restaurant is, to get directions, and so on.

But for most of these applications, there is a requirement on the part of the user to accept the tracing. But then there is the more questionable tracking. Read this from the Daily Beast's Cheat Sheet:

"Big Brother may not be watching you, but your cellphone carrier is. Mark Spitz, a German Green Party politician and privacy advocate, was curious about exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts, so he took them to court. The results were eye-opening: During a six-month period, from August 31, 2009, to February 28, 2010, the company had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates a whopping 35,000 times, tracing his every move. Experts say Spitz has provided an unprecedented look into how cellphone companies track their users. About every seven seconds, your cellphone company will determine the nearest cell tower to efficiently route calls, and then, for billing purposes, track your location and how long the call lasted. In the U.S., telecommunications companies don’t have to report the material they collect, and both the FBI and DEA often use cellphone records to pinpoint suspects. “I want to show the political message that this kind of data retention is really, really big and you can really look into the life of people for six months and see what they are doing where they are,” said Spitz."

The issue, of course, isn't that the technology exists, indeed it does. The issue is whether there is an invasion of privacy implicit in the use of the technology.

I was an early adopter of EZPass, that neat little gadget that allows you to speed through the booths on the Thruway. Of course, I also realized that it would make it so easy for the Thruway Authority to know that you're, er, exceeding the speed limit? Of course, the old ticket and payment method also makes this possible, but not with out a lot more work - probably not worth the effort. But the EZPass system records your car as it enters and exits the Thruway and the whole thing is on a database.

And of course, people are now becoming concerned, for both righteous and not-so-righteous reasons, that wherever they go with their cell phone - somebody knows it, and can use that information.

I'm not sure what my opinion is of this yet, but I will be paying attention.

There's an App for Training, Too!

2011-04-05T10:57:00.000-04:00

A friend and I walk almost every day. We recently discovered a great little app (available for most smart phones) that, using GPS, and your weight, tracks the distance (and your path) and evaluates the caloric expenditure. It's called Walkmeter, and it's free. You can tie it to a calendar, and actually keep track of the days that you walk and how far you went.

Since we found that useful, I wondered what else was out there that would help encourage and track exercise habits.

Nike Training, another free app, will run you through a workout using music and coaching, tracking how often you workout and helping you reach goals along the way. You can select the type of workout, and whether you are a beginning, intermediate, or advanced trainee.

For $9.99 you can opt for iPump and Fitness Builder, which lets you select your location (home, gym, hotel, etc.) and then whether you have equipment to use or not.

Another free app for the iPad it FitnessClass for iPad. Using well-known coaches/trainers, you can select (for a fee) a variety of workouts to follow using your iPad - and of course you can do them wherever you are.

Another free app for a variety of platforms is M-Train (you get one free workout, and each new one you buy is $.99), and it will lead you through a range of exercises that include agility, power, strength and endurance.

Needless to say, there are dozens more - a simple Google search will turn up plenty of options and reviews so you can choose the one(s) that work best for your style, time available, and preferred challenges.

So - get moving!!

Words and Partial Words

2011-03-23T13:19:00.000-04:00

One of the funniest websites I've found to date is based on the iPhone's "autocorrect" feature. This is the phone's ability (or, inability) to predict what a person typing text into the phone actually means when he or she types something incomprehensible.

The website is called Damn You Autocorrect, (http://damnyouautocorrect.com) and it's a collection of some of the funniest and most mind-boggling attempts by the phone's algorithms to complete a wrongly-spelled word.

I leave it to your imagination what some of them might be, but better yet, stop over at the website and be prepared to laugh uncontrollably.

Along those lines, texting shorthand continues to evolve. Even though I text all the time, and consider myself to be reasonably conversant in the lingo, I find myself stumbling over new entries. (And I continue to wonder how on earth kids raised today are ever going to learn to speak and write properly, but I digress.)

Once just confined to texts, shorthand expressions are cropping up on Facebook posts and in emails - in short, in any form of electronic communication, and new ones are entering the lingua franca every day. (Interestingly, many of these terms have meanings that go beyond the mere acronym - similar to ASL (or Ameslan, American Sign Language, or the hand language employed by the deaf). There are words that have no "literal" translation.)

And, there is a large and growing collection of terms that while not directly tied to texting, are definitely in the category of "meme," or an idea that catches fire and passes from person to person rapidly. For example, the use of the word "Really?" said with heavy, ironic emphasis, that conveys dismay, disbelief, incredulity, cynicism, and put-down.

Here are just a few of them, some old, some new.

TIL: today I learned

RAWR: roar, I own you, I won, yay, and I love you (in dinosaur).

WTF: just what you imagine it means

ROLF: rolling on the floor laughing

STFU: a more direct way of saying, please be quiet

Work mouth: speaking in a pc way, as if at work, or somewhere you need to be careful not to be offensive

Mansplain: to explain in a condescending manner

Just sayin': I know it sounded offensive, but it's got to be said

Wall and HB: wish somebody a happy birthday on their Facebook wall

haha: the preferable way to now say LOL. If you say LOL you are... probably over 50.

PHOBAR: Photoshopped beyond all recognition

@TEOTD: an expression I hate when spoken, too - "At the end of the day," that is to say, when a final analysis is done...

AFAIK: as far as I know

IMHO: in my humble opinion

and the never to be forgotten, K: OK!

Cable App

2011-03-18T11:57:00.000-04:00

Well we all know I have an iPad, and I've admitted that it's mostly for play.

And now I have a great new way to play with it - tv wherever I am, thanks to TimeWarner Cable's iPad app. Now, that does mean - where ever I am in my house. But that means I can be cooking, doing laundry, sitting on the patio, or even offer a guest the convenience of a tv in a spare bedroom by simply signing up.

What's required? Well, an iPad, of course. Beyond that:

Time Warner Cable video package at the Standard (Expanded Basic) level or higher
WiFi connection to Time Warner Cable Internet Service (Road Runner Standard or higher recommended for best experience; Earthlink High Speed or Earthlink Cable Max is supported)
Time Warner Cable username and password

Signing up couldn't have been more simple; download the app, and you'll be prompted to create, or access, an account. And that's that.

While there were a few glitches due to excessive demand upon launch, TimeWarner has 32 channels offered with this service, including Bravo and Discovery, among others.

Some people have said, so what's the big deal? I already have three tv's in my house. But I like the ability to move around my house without interrupting my program, as well as sit with my family (and a headset) while they watch one thing and I watch another. Based on initial demand for the app, I'm not alone in my thinking!

What's in a Domain

2011-03-01T13:19:00.000-05:00

A company here in Syracuse named its website in a commercial, and needless to say, it wasn't the name of the company in question. You may remember the "great landgrab" of the 1990s, when some forward-thinking folks realized that there was gold in them thar domain names, and promptly grabbed, and squatted on, such properties as "coke.com." The courts eventually ruled that a trademarked name had to be given up, but that left an awful lot of companies out in the cold.

Naturally, there are any number of companies called "Shear Madness," or "Best Properties," but they reside in different cities. They might even reside in different countries! Until recently, a ".com" designation with a popular name could be traded for a lot of cash. This is still the case, but ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has proposed even more top-level domains that should help with this, especially where the international market is concerned, but even, to an extent, here in the U.S.

You're probably already familiar with the top-level domains ".org," (usually used for not-for-profits, or other social or charitable organizations); ".biz," (an attempt to give businesses a chance to use their real name, but it never took off); ".mobi," (for mobile-specific sites, it never caught on in the U.S., but is popular in Europe); and things like ".ca," for Canada, or ".fr" for France, etc.

Now ICANN wants to add a wide variety of location-specific designations, as well as organization or content type; for example, ".paris" and ".nyc" would refer to the cities; ".kids" would specify a site aimed at children, and ".med" would mean its a site about medicine and medical organizations. Others include:
.eco – environmental causes
.post – postal organizations
.shop – electronic commerce sites
.sport – sport sites
.wine – Reserved for wine sites
.xxx – adult entertainment; as of June 2010, approved but not yet implemented

One of the things that is most fascinating about this is that with the advent of the internet, not only were businesses able to do business around the world, but they were also suddenly in competition with businesses around the world.

New domain names won't change that entirely, but will help us all narrow our searches to relevant results.

Notes and Lists and To Dos, Oh My!

2011-02-22T11:28:00.000-05:00

I have always kept notebook/calendars. From the time I was in high school, way back when we were using a hammer and chisel. I kept assignments and due dates, as well as notes and things to remember and even a work log, so that I could retrace my steps on work completed.

And I am also a list maker: grocery lists, to do lists, packing lists, birthday lists, lists of lists. There is nothing like the satisfaction of crossing an item off a list.

Along came the computer, and certain lists transferred easily: birthday and anniversary lists, for example, or Christmas gift lists. But day to day to do lists, or work logs, or grocery lists, didn't translate so well. These need to be portable and spontaneous.

Well, Smart Phones and the iPad (and its relatives) have put new meaning in the term "notepad." You really can make use of these tools to "jot down" ideas or items to be done, purchased, or remembered.

The grocery list, for example, is now, for me, definitely an iPhone item. I have a little app called "apptly" Shopping List, that is easy to use and tailor to my specific needs. It starts with a base list of items, such as milk, bread, and eggs, to which you can add items that are specific to your shopping habits, like "cat litter," or "dry soup mix." Once added, these items can be added to a specific day's shopping lists with ease. Then, at the store, you call up your list, and as items are dropped in your cart, you put a check mark by them. When all your items are in your cart, you clear the list to ready it for the next list, which you can construct wherever you are and whenever you think of something to add.

Notes, however, have not made the transition quite so easily. For one thing, there is something satisfying about the act of writing it down. It's very spur-of-the-moment, and has a strong psychological impact of getting it off your mind. There is a neat little default iPhone app called Notes, which looks like a little yellow pad. You can create an keep notes - like, for example, directions to someone's house, or a keycode - or you can make specific notes that can be deleted once you've attended to them. I do use this, but not for just quickly scribbling down an article idea, or a conversation with a client.

Now that I'm using the iPad, however, I will probably be more likely to get in the habit of note-taking via that device, given that it goes everywhere with me, and its interface is slightly easier to use than the iPhone when it comes to note taking. I am testing an app called Evernote right now, and assuming it works well (it will synch with all your "i" devices, so if you've got an iPhone and an iPad, your notes will follow you), it will become part of my staple electronics. I'll take notes, and keep you posted!

2011-02-17T13:07:00.000-05:00

A writer recently posed the question vis a vis social media: how can you spark a revolution and make money at the same time?

This is the dilemma for Facebook, and to an extent, Twitter and other social networking applications.

One of the biggest news items associated with the recent uproar in Egypt was the protesters visibly thanking Facebook for helping get the revolution going.

Says the website SFGate, "One protest leader, Wael Ghonim, said he wanted to meet Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and thank him.

"This revolution started online," he said in an interview Friday on CNN. "This revolution started on Facebook."

"But as a company, Facebook Inc. - and to a similar extent Twitter Inc. - has taken great pains to appear neutral about the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East because taking too much credit could leave the Palo Alto company open to blame or being shut off from other countries."

Because citizens of the U.S., and for the most part, Europe, have wide-open access to the Internet, we assume - incorrectly - that everyone else does, too. China, for example, blocks both Facebook and Twitter, as well as a number of other websites.

Just as marketers were quick to figure out the immense opportunity represented by a platform that was all about reporting on our own lifestyles, so too have activists recognized the potential to engineer social change, and activate simmering passions.

Because of its role in exciting the recent protest in Cairo, Facebook was temporarily blocked in Egypt. At the time, Facebook issued this carefully worded statement: "A world without the Internet is unimaginable. Although the turmoil in Egypt is a matter for the Egyptian people and their government to resolve, limiting Internet access for millions of people is a matter of concern for the global community."

This past summer we experienced the effects of an earthquake here in Syracuse. I was sitting at my desk at work when the shaking started, and within seconds, Twitter had reports of not only the quake, but its intensity. Faster, more complete, and, it turns out, more accurate than any news or scientific source I could find. Now, granted, these sources are "official," and, as such, have a responsibility to report events after carefully vetting them for the facts. Twitter and Facebook have no such responsibility.

Still, I think you get the point: information, excitement, energy, plans - all this can be passed from person to person literally around the world and in the blink of an eye using social media.

I am still amazed at how quickly a viral video or joke will flash across the Internet. And of course, a story can be handed around that is simply untrue, but as any lawyer will tell you, once a statement has been made in a courtroom, a jury will have a hard time forgetting it, even if it is false.

One thing we know for certain: this particular genie isn't going back in the bottle. Social media are here to stay, and as pirate sites have proven over and over again, they can be policed and shut down, and they simply move and appear again - and pretty soon, everyone knows about it. It's not like a counterfeiting ring that has to pack up huge printing presses and find another abandoned warehouse, or hunt for another group of willing criminals to see the fake bills into circulation. Moving a website is simply pushing a few buttons, and can be done relatively anonymously.

Granted, blocking a site like Facebook, or Twitter, can be a bit easier to manage. But there are always other avenues, and as long as people both inside and outside a particular community are motivated, messages can, and will, be spread.

Data Displayed

2011-02-17T12:19:00.000-05:00

Want to know who's tweeting? If you live in the U.S., you probably think that most people under 35 spend the day publishing inane messages to anyone foolish enough to read them.

Social media is all the rage (does anybody say that any more? "All the rage?"), and with our 20/20 chauvinist myopia, we are inclined to think that whatever is being done by the hip and young in the U.S. is being done everywhere.

There's a wonderful website that gathers up statistical analyses and presents them as visual explorations. It's called "Information Aesthetics" and in one particularly fun post, it uses dots and a globe to represent the passing of a "Good morning" message from person to person via tweets (Twitter messages, for the astoundingly uninformed).

Watch as dawn breaks over America, and a massive concentration of dots springs up on the east coast, spreads thinly through the midwest, and intensifies again over the west coast. The rest of the world is predictably dark, with some concentrations in Japan and Hong Kong, and a bit in Europe. As the next day dawns in the far east, we see some activity there, and soon Europe lights up a little, though with nowhere near the enthusiasm of the U.S., or even the far east.

It's an interesting shorthand for the "twitterverse" as a whole. And watch this site for more visual takes on those piles of data we now have the power to assemble. Who said there wasn't anything new under the sun?

Advertising : We Don't Need to Fear it Any More!

2011-02-08T13:03:00.000-05:00

This morning I got a newsletter confirming what I've been saying for a while now: we consumers now control advertising.

I write that, and of course we're all going to say: "But that's obvious!"

Well, it took a while.

In the old days of electronic advertising (radio and tv), the ads were the price of admission. Prior to that, advertising was in magazines (but the consumer had to buy, open, and read the magazine, and skipping ads was easy); on billboards (again, easy to avoid); live hawkers (very limited scope); in-store and other printed material that was hit-or-miss as far as its reach was concerned.

Along came radio, and because people were transfixed by the medium and enjoyed the programming, they'd sit still for the ads. This was even more true for television, and eventually, the ads took on an art form of their own, some of them even reaching the exalted rank of "entertaining." But this was when radio and television ruled our free-time hours.

This is no longer the case, as online activities have far outstripped television (and certainly radio) consumption, and non-broadcast alternatives (like satellite radio, cable, and DVR time-shifting) have changed the way we consume these media.

And, according to this newsletter, marketers and their evil twins, advertisers, are finally getting this, and trying to figure out what to do about it.

Interestingly, my take is that they are in a better position than ever before to reach an interested public. I say this because the methods now at their disposal mean they can talk directly to someone who has already, in marketing parlance, "raise their hand" to indicate interest in a given product or service.

As an example, take Facebook advertising. Facebook is a place where you declare your interests, either in your profile, or by clicking on something a friend posts. Facebook takes note of that, and then when something is available that might strike your fancy - based on your self-declared interests - it provides a nice little ad for you. So, if I say I like Mark Knopfler, and it just so happens that he will be playing a concert near Syracuse this summer, Facebook posts an ad for me letting me know that. Think I'm not going to click on that ad??

Not only that, but I don't feel as if that ad is intruding on me. While I will tend to skip over commercials on tv that try to, but don't always successfully, target me based on the nature of the programming, and while I will most definitely avoid ads on the Internet, I have begun to learn that social media in particular - and Internet advertising in general - has begun to be more relevant to me.

There are so many ways for advertisers to take advantage of the power of interest, from targeting keywords to matching profile information to offering discounts and specials to "fans," it's a whole new, exciting, interesting world of advertising.

Stop Me!

2011-02-02T12:35:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while I think about the fact that only 20 years ago, the Internet was in its infancy. It's hard to believe, given how much of our lives now center around online activities. Shopping, chatting, news, reading books, listening to music, chasing down a subject, getting directions, blogging, uploading videos... you get the idea. And now, with our computers - both at home and at work - plus our smart phones and iPads, we have more ways than ever to be "interacting" wherever we are, whatever else we might be doing.

And if you're under 18, your entire life is centered on online activity. Says a recent study, quoted in the New York Times:

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones. And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.

So, if you think you're spending too much time online, here are a handful of applications (as shown on the site, makeuseof.com) that can help you track - and halt - the hours you waste in meaningless or productivity-sapping detours. These are all extensions for Firefox, but similar ones can be found for IE, Chrome, and Safari.

1. LeechBlock can be set to block websites from loading in Firefox. You can create up to six ‘block sets’ – each set can contain a number of sites that should be blocked only during a specific time interval.
2. Time Tracker: Simple yet effective tool that tracks the amount of time you’ve been browsing around. The display on the status bar indicates the amount of time you’ve been surfing around inside Firefox.
3. 8aWeek is similar to LeechBlock. You can set it to limit the time you spend on useless sites. For example, you could set it to make Facebook available to you for no more than 10 minutes per day. And it will display in horrifying chart format the amount of time you've spent at various types of activities online.
4. MeeTimer tracks the amount of time you spend on various sites, and then groups them according to a pre-set schedule of categories: procrastination, communication, etc. You get to see just how much of each day, each week, you've spent numbing your brain.
5.RescueTime is a desktop-resident app that tracks not only your online, but your offline activities. So you can see how much time you've spent at work (PhotoShop, Premiere, etc.) as well as how much on Facebook or Gmail.

Google Search Tips

2011-01-26T10:34:00.000-05:00

I read an article today that reminded me of how to search Google to come closer to just the results you're looking for.

There are a small handful of tips that you can employ that are easy to remember, and easy to execute.

1. Use quotes around your search string. This tells Google to look for only this string, exactly as written.
2. Use a minus sign before terms you want to exclude. Very often, savvy website owners will use a popular term or terms to get you to their site - but the real content of the site is something other than what the key words imply. To avoid those sites in your search results, tell Google to exclude words at the same time it's including the words you're interested in.
3. Search a particular website for the term or terms you're interested in. Say you want to search a news site for anything they've written about a subject. Type "subject terms" site:www.nameofsite.com
4. Want a quick calculation? Google will do it for you. Type 1234*2 in the search box, and you'll get your answer!
5. And finally, here's one I used constantly - word definition. Type define:word in the search box to get the meaning of a word.

My First iPad Report

2011-01-17T13:55:00.000-05:00

I did it. I got an iPad.

And while I can see the applications for work (you can use Google Docs, for example, to create documents and spreadsheets), I have to admit that the fun applications are by far the greater incentive!

You can check your emails, of course, but if you want to text you're going to have to have 3G, or download an app like TextPlus (which I am testing out now, with mixed results), which runs over WiFi.

One of the things I have used my iPad for most, other than emails on the go (assuming I find a WiFi connection!) is movies. Yep, movies. With Netflix and a WiFi connection, you can stream movies to your iPad, thus creating your own private movie theater wherever you are. And of course there are games galore (you do have to try Angry Birds HD!), Pandora, weather and traffic reports - pretty much whatever you could do with your iPhone, you can do with the iPad (minus 3G, if you don't opt for that).

If you want 3G, of course, you're going to pay for that, just as you would with your phone. So, you will have to have a data plan. AT&T charges $24/month for a 2 gigabyte plan. Trust me, 2 gigabytes can be used pretty readily if you consume much on-the-go data. Users will no doubt become adept at turning on the WiFi, and turning off the 3G, whenever possible, to save data usage.

Synching is pretty much the same as synching an iPhone. You plug it in, authorize the computer of your choice, and your purchased music and apps are automatically transferred to your device. And while most of the time you'll prefer to charge your iPad using your ac interface (wall plug), you can recharge using a computer's USB port. I had the odd experience the other day of plugging to iPad into my computer's USB port, and while it was recognized, it announced that it was "not charging." I read today, however, that when you plug an iPod into a USB hub or low-power USB port, it will charge - just verrrryyyy sllloowwwly, so it may not register as charging.

You will probably also want to invest in a couple of handy addons: a usb port interface, and perhaps a card reader. These will help you transfer files, because the iPad itself doesn't have a USB interface, nor a card-reader port. And I recently learned that you can use a USB powered microphone (and I understand a headset equipped with a mic), as well as the built-in mic to record notes, and even (with the appropriate app) record and edit sound. I am testing out VC Audio Pro now, and so far the results are excellent - the app is $5.99.

The most glaring failing of the iPad is the lack of Flash. Though as a practical matter, for 75% plus of the things you'll want to do (such as watching YouTube videos), you don't really need Flash. In fact, some of my geekier friends see the demise of Flash looming in the somewhat-near future. Video compression has gotten so much better (witness the fact that YouTube will send a Flash-video to Flash-enabled devices, and a non-Flash video to others) that it's very likely that a lot of the production that had been done in Flash will now be done in video/After Effects. But what matters to you is that you can still have a relatively full Internet experience without Flash. Having said that, though, it would still be nice for Apple to get over itself and allow it!

Finally, the beautiful screen of the iPad just begs for it to provide GPS - and it does, but again, you're going to have to opt for the 3G data plan to make that dream a reality.

I'll spend some time using the device, and I'll get back to you in a few months with an updated report. But so far, it's worth every penny.

Minecrafting

2011-01-17T11:45:00.000-05:00

As you know, I'm not one to complain about wasting time on computers. I celebrate it!

But I have to admit, I've met my match with a fun little game called Minecraft.

The premise of Minecraft is simple; the execution is whatever you want it to be.

Basically, you are a little (very pixely) miner who is dropped down onto an equally pixely piece of land with more or less no instructions (other than how to move and jump). Most of the rest of the specifics come from, er, mining, the many websites and posts devoted to playing the game.

Game is perhaps not the right word, because other than the monsters (creepers and spiders and so forth) that come out at night, you're really not playing against anyone. You can put an instantiation of the game on a shared space, or you can find others playing, and you can chat with them, or join forces, but unless you raid them and take their stuff, you're really not competing with anyone.

The idea is to create a world for yourself. The raw materials are all there: trees, and animals, ore, dirt, stone, fire, and so on. But all of it is in its natural state. It's up to you to find it, gather it, and combine it in ways that allow you to build farms and homes and caverns and harvest animals and wheat and the like.

And you have to do all of this while protecting yourself from the monsters that start to roam at sunset. One of the hardest parts of the game is to get through the first night, which seems to fall awfully quickly. Do yourself a favor, if you play the game, and read up on it before starting. Otherwise, you'll be frustrated, as I was, to get killed over and over again. After each death, you simply "respawn" to start all over again - but you also lose any objects you have found or made!

A couple of friends helped by leaving me some tools to help me get started, otherwise, I might have never gotten past newborn.

Much as I enjoy the game, I'm simply not in it with some people I know, who not only play avidly, but have constructed amazing and complex lairs, complete with flowing lava, skylights, patterned floors, indoor pools, protected fields for wheat and trees, and animals roaming safely behind impenetrable walls. It makes me wonder if I would ever have gotten past the hunter-gatherer stage of development.

If you want to try it, don't say you weren't warned: www.minecraft.net to download the $20 game.

All Together Now

2011-01-12T10:29:00.000-05:00

Have you checked out the new "social purchasing" apps that have been circulating lately?

Surprise, surprise, they're actually impressive.

I'm not sure where this whole "social media" thing is headed, to be honest. Since Facebook has become more an attack of the targeted advertising than a networking site, I'm predicting that it's popularity may very well wane. The Internet crowd simply doesn't put up with the advertising the way we did in television's hay day. For one thing, there was an implicit contract there: you give me entertainment, I pay for it by watching your stupid ads.

With the Internet, the contract is a little different. We all know that at least where social media sites are concerned, we are the entertainment! We are the content. We go to Facebook to share news, events, funny things, music, and so on, with our selected peers. We're not expecting to be passively entertained, and we are not under the impression that somebody at Facebook spent months producing a really compelling piece of entertainment for us, for which we will pay with either lucre or attention.

Eye tracking tests have demonstrated that people using the Internet are really good at not seeing ads. That's one reason why some advertisers resorted to those little follow-ads that drop down the page at predicted eye level as you scroll for content. They're infuriating, of course, and if you even notice what the ad is for, you're likely to hate the advertiser rather than want to find out more.

But I digress.

Groupon is the mothership of the social purchasing apps. The creators (the app was bid on by Google, but the inventors didn't sell) use a simple technique: get a really, really, really good deal for users (geo-targeted), and then make the offer good only if a certain number of users in that area sign up. So, maybe it's a 90-minute manicure-pedicure for $25 (maybe a half-off bargain), good if 10 people buy it. So it behooves you to pass this information along, if you want the deal. You're definitely inclined to send this to friends.

And many of the deals are implicitly social - bargains offered at salons, spas, restaurants, workout clubs, and the like. So a woman may buy a facial offer, and then invite her friends to get in on the deal so they can go together, or a group of friends buys a half-price deal at a local eatery with the intention of going together.

Naturally, the creators have tied the deal in with Facebook and other social apps, so you can advertise for them by noting that you've bought a deal using a Groupon coupon.

The two that I've joined are Groupon and Living Social. And I've definitely found deals on both!

Random Internet

2011-01-05T12:59:00.001-05:00

The other day, just for fun, I typed "random" into Google to see where it would go. I remember in the good old early days of Google finding it fascinating to just enter strange and unusual search strings, just to see what you'd get.

At any rate, what I did get was a site called "Random Website." This site simply send you, when you click "Randomlink" to... a random link! Clicking it a few times sent me to Rotten News (about what you'd expect), Quincy Shanks Records (horrible hardcore punk artists), a story about Morocco, a minimalist blog called "Unraveled," and a story about Ted, the homeless man with the golden voice.

Seriously, one of my favorite things about the web is the things you don't think, or expect, or even want, to find. Yes, I use it every day for information that I actually intend to use. I can't even estimate how many times a day I look up some fact or figure for the work I'm doing, but I never fail to be amazed at how much sheer, crazy, unexpected, well - random - information is available.

Another fun way to track down the untrackable is via Stumbleupon, another site that lands you in unexpected spots. For this one, though, you have to join (become a stumbler), and then you can select topics (such as movies, multimedia, magic/illusions, science, spirituality... and about 490 more.

Needless to say, either one of these will keep you occupied for far too long. And whatever you do, don't access them at work!

All I Want for Christmas (is way too expensive!)

2010-12-23T10:46:00.000-05:00

While I certainly quote liberally from other writers (especially ones who write for outlets like EnGadget, SlashDot and anything by ZDNet), I rarely spend an entire article re-posting and commenting on somebody else's post. But I have to say that this article struck me as wise words, and I wanted to share some of it with you. If you want to read the whole thing, you can just link on over to it here.

Otherwise, stay with me and we'll parse it out.

The writer has given 10 reasons (an aside: I always find it a challenge to choose a nice, even number of "reasons" or "best books," or something like that... why can't it be my Top Seven Reasons for Not Wanting an iPad?) why he won't be getting an iPad for Christmas. (Leaving out whether anybody wants to give him one!)

The first two are obvious, and won't matter all that much to most of us who are lusting for an iPad: it'll cost less next year, and there will be more features next year. That's just a given with technology, whenever you choose to jump in. I remember when I thought my computer's 4mg of memory was the cat's pajama's. (And we even used that expression back then!) Granted, the price differential tends to be dramatic with Apple products, and while I wasn't a first adopter of the iPhone, I can certainly feel for those who bought that very first model only to see the price drop - and drop dramatically - only a few months later.

The next two reasons are the ones that made stop and ponder, and decide to write this post.

Reason three: the writer doesn't want to support Apple's crazy profit margins. Says he, "OK, I admit it: I've been wrong about Apple stock lately. After correctly turning bullish at $85 two years ago, I turned cautious waaay too early. My mistake? This isn't a technology company. It's a luxury brand, like Hermès or Tiffany. And it's wooed customers so they'll pay almost anything for its products. Last Christmas, Apple's gross margins were 41%. That's incredible. It's good for Apple, good for stockholders—but not so good for shoppers. Me, I don't want to support someone else's 60% markups with my own dollars. Generally speaking, the smarter move is to invest in the Tiffanys of the world—and shop at the Wal-Marts."

This is a point worth stopping and considering. It's true, there is nothing - and I mean nothing I buy in the luxury model. Brand names just don't mean much to me, especially when the quality of another item is equivalent, and far cheaper.

But, of course, that's where Apple products have always had a bit of an edge - they are usually first-out with something new, like the iPod's scroll wheel, or the iPhone's touchscreen interface. And one thing you can't dispute, Apple designer's have a knack for knowing how to make the interface feel good to users. (Try typing on a Mac laptop keyboard, and then go back to your HP or Toshiba. There is just something very satisfying about the feedback from the Mac's keyboard that you don't find elsewhere.) (I could also argue that they do things in the internal packaging of some of their products that defy logic, like burying the memory slots in some of the laptops, but that's another story.)

All by itself, though, the luxury brand argument won't be enough to deter some shoppers until you pair it with the writer's next point, "Competitors are coming."

As we've already seen with the Droid vs. the iPhone, it is better to build another, maybe not better, but just-as-good mousetrap. Of course, the Droid wasn't necessarily cheaper. But now there has been time now for competing engineers to suss out what is so great about the iPhone, and make those features available on a wide variety of other phones, or take another

His next point is one that has always had me scratching my head where Apple is concerned: No Flash. If you're going to serve up the Internet, how in heck do you do it without offering Flash? Flash is ubiquitous. (Really!) And while some developer's feel that perhaps its time has come, there being other choices now that are simpler, cheaper, and easier to deploy, in the immediate future, you want to see flash (like, can you say YouTube and Hulu?) you're not going to see it on your iPad.

From there on, his points are good but it could be argued that these are true for any and all Internet, even technology, platforms: high cost of add ons and data plans, wasted time - which is only slightly different from his next point, the games which eat up your life, it'll get boring (well, that's debatable), and one final solid point: the Apple cult is starting to creep him out.

There is something to be said about the cult of the Apple fan. My good friend and technology guru, Al Fasoldt, (see his column Technofile) was once an avid defender of all things Intel, and then one day, like Paul on the road to Damascus, he had a conversion to Apple, and is now its most devoted fan. I agree, Apple products tend to take a lot less of our time in just plain fussing. And to an extent, founder Steve Jobs has shown some wisdom in guarding the gates against hardware and software that isn't absolutely compatible with the Apple products - and moreover, the Apple experience.

While it's possible to go too far with this philosophy (see Flash, above), it's also this fanatic devotion to brand that makes it possible to simply boot up your Apple device and -- whoa, it works! (Of course, when it doesn't, it's mighty hard to figure out why, and if you've ever tried to mess around behind the scenes in an Apple product, you'll soon be lost in a maze of sudo -s and bash commands (reminding me faintly of the old DOS days)).

So, bottom line: yeah, I still want an iPad. Are you listening, Santa?

A Little Phish for Christmas Eve

2010-12-15T13:50:00.000-05:00

There is a new scam circulating via email promoting updates to reliable software, such as Flash Player, Google Earth and Skype, and introducing new software, such as online tv players (Replace Your Cable!).

Here's how the email looks. Be aware that they always follow the same pattern: they contain a four digit code, and they are always signed by a team member. In other words, it all looks very up and up, and looks like it comes from the software originators. Here's a sample:

Hot New Google Earth Tips, Discoveries & Tools!

Do you want to experience Google Earth on a different level? From desirable locations to a powerful application that lets you visually map your contacts, you're just a couple of steps away from experiencing a new dimension to one of the world's most powerful mapping tools.

Your Earth Code: 6208
Download new features here more

See the Earth like never before!

- 3D Terrain views!
- Take to the air with the Flight Simulator
- Share locations & maps with friends & contacts
- Check out Google Earth's most viewed locations

Your Earth Code: 6208
Enhance your Google Earth experience here

Our free eBook lets you customize your Google Earth - change lighting depending on the time of day, discover the solar system, look at 3D views, create sight-seeing tours and so much more!

- Easy-to-follow instructions
- Access exclusive NASA satellite imagery!
- Navigate POV street-level locations from around the globe

Your Earth Code: 6208
New features available here

Best Regards,

Larry Walters
Earth Online Team

If you click on the link, you'll be taken to a nice looking site (but check out the URL - it will say something like www.officialversion.su) and asked for your name and the promo code. You can enter ANYTHING and you'll still go to the next page where you'll be asked for money! Most of this software is free, by the way - and certainly a site like Google would never solicit business this way.

The most recent one I received was for a Flash Player, which, aside from being free, would never deliver product from anyplace but Adobe.

So beware, there is always something new under the sun when it comes to phishing scams.

Furling the Jolly Roger

2010-11-29T14:50:00.000-05:00

Double bad news for those who would, er, share files. Two of the top file-sharing apps/sites have been hit with lawsuits and/or cease and desist order.

In the heyday of what is now affectionately known as "pirating," sites like Kazaa were popular places to find applications, movies, and mostly, music, that owners had uploaded to share. While technically there's little that can be done, particularly in the case of video and music, to stop an owner from giving the original, or a copy, of a song or a movie to a friend, the idea of wholesale sharing is another story altogether - at least, it is if you're the RIAA or MPIA. And needless to say, the software industry has been busily trying to prevent the sharing of software, to the extent that they've made it darned hard on anyone who buys the software to use it!

(Dear Software Manufacturer,
Yes, it is true that sometimes people's computer's crash, sometimes multiple times. Sometimes people buy new computers. Sometimes, they work on more than one machine - but since they're only one person, they can usually only work on one machine at a time, and there's isn't some nasty "other" person "stealing" your software.

When you tie a particular copy of software to a particular computer, you're making it very hard for the owner of the software. Sometimes, users just aren't in a position to deactivate one instantiation of software before wanting to load that application onto another machine. See above, "crash."

Surely there is a better way?

Thanks,
Disgruntled User)

In the news recently, two stories highlighting the fact that while things have been quiet lately, the heat is definitely not off those who would infringe on copyright restrictions. In short, Limewire (the website that inherited the mantle of top peer-to-peer sharing website), and Pirate Bay (the website that was most frequently accessed for locating and downloading torrents) have run into significant trouble.

Limewire, in fact, has been taken down. Access the Limewire website, and you get this message: "LimeWire is under a court order dated October 26, 2010 to stop distributing the LimeWire software. A copy of the injunction can be found here. LimeWire LLC, its directors and officers, are taking all steps to comply with the injunction. We have very recently become aware of unauthorized applications on the internet purporting to use the LimeWire name. We demand that all persons using the LimeWire software, name, or trademark in order to upload or download copyrighted works in any manner cease and desist from doing so. We further remind you that the unauthorized uploading and downloading of copyrighted works is illegal."

Uh, yeah, they didn't know people were posting copyright material. Ok.

And the four men who started Pirate Bay have been sentenced to jail terms, and stiff fines, by a Swedish appeals court. Of the two, this one is by far the more controversial ruling, given that Pirate Bay is really nothing but a search engine. Users have to have a torrent downloader installed, and Pirate Bay isn't really involved in where, how, or why you download a torrent.

Observers have wondered why Google has kept notoriously mum on this subject, as it has strong implications on web searching in general. A corollary: if I search for a gun on Google, find one, buy one, and then shoot somebody - can Google be held liable? It's a question that should, in light of the fact that Homeland Security has just seized a number of web domains ("The Department of Justice has obtained seizure orders against a slew of commercial websites accused of selling a wide variety of counterfeit commodities, including DVD box sets, music, software, sports equipment and handbags—82 sites all told."), have us feeling a profound sense of disquiet.

While stopping the wink-wink-nod-nod "I'm not responsible" file sharing enabling of a site like Limewire is one thing, taking it to the next step and halting what amounts to searching (which granted, can lead to illegal activity, but isn't guaranteed to do so), is, not to put to fine a point on it, overstepping, and doesn't signal anything good to the free use of the Internet - which most of us who care about such things support.

It's definitely a topic we'll be watching as the story unfolds.

Wonders Will Never Cease

2010-11-18T15:52:00.000-05:00

The other day I watched a friend describing a conversation he'd recently had. Instead of holding his hand up to his ear, pinkie and pointer extended in the classic "talking on the phone" gesture, he held his imaginary iPhone, air-texting the messages back and forth.

And today, a friend sent me an hysterically funny link to a website devoted to those funny, embarassing, Freudian, wish-you-could-take-them-back, "did they do that on purpose?" auto-correct moments that have only existed as long as the iPhone has been around. (I still insist that iPhone auto-corrects "Harvard" to "garbage" on purpose!) http://damnyouautocorrect.com/

So I started cataloging things that we now take for granted as part of our lives that when I was a child - heck, when I was a young adult! - didn't exist.

Of course, email. And the horror of "reply all." All you have to do at a cocktail party now is say, "Did you ever hit 'reply all?'" to be inundated with funny, sad, blush-inducing moments.

Of course, nobody "googled" anything in 1995. Now, there are those among us who would probably give up our beloved dog, not to mention first-born, before we gave up our Google.

We take for granted, no matter where we are, what time of day or night it is, that we can get money, check our balances, listen to our favorite songs (you can't possibly know what deprivation is unless you lived in a time when the only way to hear your favorite song was to wait for it to occur randomly on the radio... you know, the radio. A funny little device with knobs. Knobs? Oh... never mind...), watch a movie, talk to a friend anywhere in the world. Instantly. No charge.

We can shoot, edit, and share our own movies. High def.

We can download ten or twenty books onto a device the size of a notepad and carry them around with us. With tons of room to spare.

We can share our thoughts, dreams, hopes, and plans for lunch with our 1478 best friends instantaneously - with photos! We can watch a tv show with our family members who are 500 miles away, and comment on the action via text messages with all the joy of sharing our reactions and none of the annoying noise. And we can point our smart phone at the show as the credits are playing a great new song and invoke the app Shazaam and find out what the song is, go to iTunes and buy it and download it and listen - all in about 5 minutes. Or if we're not quite so nice, we can check for a torrent of the song. Torrent? Well, that's a file that broken up into little bits and spread out over so many different computers it can't really be said to exist anyway, effectively bypassing copyright issues.

We can buy groceries, cosmetics, clothing, sporting goods, books, drugs, office supplies, and a boyfriend, and never leave the house. Heck, never leave the chair, or our comfy jammies. We can PhotoShop 10 years or 10 pounds off our image, diagnose our fainting spells, and have a Skype conversation with family members whom we'd otherwise never get to see.

We can play games, research a term paper, settle an argument, and chase down the truth about UFOs all with the flick of a wrist. And all at the same time. Oh, the power!

I watched a one year old play with my iPhone recently: he grabbed it in his chubby little hands and wasn't going to give it up. He already knew how to flick the screen to move from one "page" to another, and to push the button at the bottom to return to the menu screens. His four-year-old sister could play music and games, and could send a text message with "Hi" and her name.

What, I can only shake my head and wonder, will the world be like for these little ones as they grow up with all this - taking it for granted as part of the universe they command? Where will they take it? Prometheus comes to mind.

Wish I was going to be around to watch it all unfold!

Fail.Me

2010-11-08T11:25:00.000-05:00

There is a new logism people are using as a one-word substitute for "you're kidding, right?" Or perhaps, "over my dead body," or "be serious, idiot!" That word is "Really?" I have never said it, and I probably never will, but if I were going to, I'd probably say it in reference to anybody who suggested I sign up for the social network site, failin.gs.

As is often the case, I can't do a better job of describing the site than the originators do themselves:

"failin.gs seeks to answer that age old question that perhaps all of us have asked ourselves at some point in our lives.

"What is wrong with me?"

Of course, nobody is perfect. We all have our own idiosyncrasies and personality flaws. Think of the people you know. We are sure you can think of theirs. I bet they can identify yours as well.

Create a profile and invite people to leave anonymous constructive criticism about your character. We all want to improve, don't we?

By creating an account you agree to our very exciting terms of use and also agree to play nice.

Need an invite? Request it here.
We are still in private beta, so we haven't opened the doors to everyone yet, but if you want an invite, give us your email and we'll send you an invite as soon as we can.
Email address:
How does it all work?
It's ridiculously easy. Totally anonymous.

1. Sign up for a free account
2. Fill out your profile
3. Announce your URL! Tweet it, post it on Facebook. Get it out there!
4. Sit back and brace yourself for honesty you've never gotten before."

Life isn't hard enough, right? Yet I confess to a morbid curiosity about the kinds of things people might actually post about a friend on a site like this.

But not enough to actually sign up - or to tell anyone that I did! I'll live in blissful ignorance.

Cutting Groupons?

2010-11-03T11:49:00.000-04:00

I got an invite the other day to a new internet service - it's called Groupon, and I have to admit it's intriguing.

It's along the lines of those special offer coupon books you used to be able to buy - perhaps still can - which gave you (usually) significant discounts on a variety of goods and services.

The service is national - and so are some of the offers, like hotel and travel packages - but it's also local, so local vendors can offer two-for-one meals, or dinner and theater, or a spa service, in your local town. It's sort of a mashup between a social network and a couponing service.

Here's how Groupon explains it: "Groupon negotiates huge discounts on popular local goods, services and cultural events. Then we offer the deals to thousands of subscribers in a free daily email. The deals are activated only when a minimum number of people agree to buy. So our subscribers get a great deal and the business gets a ton of new customers. Win-win.

"More than just a deal site, Groupon is a city guide, a social tool and the best way to experience your city without paying full price."
There's an Android and an iPhone app for the service, so if you're out and about and want to find out if there's a Groupon available for a restaurant or store or museum in your town, you can check it out then and there.

And you can give a Groupon as a gift.

To get started, go to www.groupon.com and sign up - and invite your friends.

The Facebook Fenomenon

2010-10-20T13:33:00.000-04:00

If Facebook wasn't popular enough already, then the movie The Social Network will make sure that everybody knows about it. In fact, the person I went to see the movie with immediately jumped on his Facebook page after the movie to update it. I guess he wondered what all the noise was about.

I've been a Facebooker since it was opened up first to my university, and second to my, er, ahem, age group.

One of the points made in the movie - and whether it is true or not that Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg really had this (brilliant) insight will probably never be verified - is that the smartest thing the Facebook crew ever did was keep it cool. To do that, they kept it exclusive for as long as possible.

Don't believe it? Just look at MySpace. It started out as more or less a music/teen thing, but quickly degenerated into, more or less, garbage. The people you want to know aren't the people frequenting MySpace.

True enough, Facebook is now open to the general public, but I remember the days when we avidly watched to see when (and if) our university would be added to The List of schools part of the Facebook network. And then there was the age thing.

As most everyone knows by now, Facebook started out at Harvard, when then undergrad Mark Zuckerberg hacked the school's computers to get photos and personal data on the women, and created a "hot or not" kind of website that went viral almost immediately.

Because of the amazing response (in the movie, the application takes down the school's servers), Zuckerberg realized that there was something far bigger than his first, slightly peevish attempt. And from this, Facebook was born.

Now, there is still some debate as to whether it was all his idea, or whether he had help - in fact, the accusation was made that he simply stole the idea from some other students who recruited him (a classic computer nerd) to code a dating site for them. But Facebook never was, and isn't now, a dating site, so that point remains very much up for debate.

What Facebook is, however, is a meeting ground; it's sort of a virtual campus center, bar, festival, block party all rolled into one. You'll find old friends, make new ones, catch the latest viral wave, and pass around jokes, videos, and photos. Even parents and kids share information (though some kids would probably rather not!).

Once Facebook began to monetize itself (that is, sell ads), it became quickly clear to me at least that the ads were even more relevant that Google Mail's ads, which, clustered along the right hand side of your mail interface, are the result of Google parsing your emails and serving up ads based on what it extracts as keywords from your emails. I've said it before in this column, but I am never nearly as annoyed by advertising that is relevant to me and my interests as I am to scattershot, intrusive advertising. If I'm taking a trip to Maui, and you serve me up info about something happening there during my trip, I'm actually grateful for the insight rather than bugged by the wasted space.

Facebook uses a similar approach, relying on your self-declared interests (in your profile) as well as what you choose to click on in your newsfeeds, and what you choose to post. (If I write, "I just saw The Eagles at Austin City Limits, it's fairly certain that if there is an ad placed for an Eagles appearance in my vicinity, there will be an ad popping up for me on my Facebook page.)

But did you know that the information shared with you from your friends posts is also selective?

Facebook still is elitist. Not everybody on your friend list gets equal time.

I assumed, without thinking about it too hard, that one friend of mine had to spend her whole life on Facebook - there were posts from her popping up in my newsfeed all the time. Other friends are never there.

What I didn't realize is that in part she made that happen (by being very active and having lots of friends) and I made that happen (by chatting with her, and often clicking on her posts).

Of course, once you start thinking about it, you quickly realize (in a classic "duh" moment), that of course you're not seeing everything your friends post! Don't believe me? Just click on one of your friend's pages, and you'll find dozens of posts you've never seen. If every post from every friend on your list popped up on your newsfeed, you'd be deluged and it would all become just so much noise. Instead, Facebook uses some (secret) smart algorithm to decide which posts make it to the feed and which don't.

In a recent article in The Daily Beast, Thomas E. Weber explains that there really is a system, and it's not an easy one to crack. In short, the more your friends click on your links, the more you'll get into the newsfeed. But in order to have friends click on your links, they've got to see that you linked to something! If you're popular with your buddies, you'll eventually make the feeds, as they will visit your page often enough to get the ball rolling.

So, if you're just getting started, tell your friends, sign them up, and ask them to visit your page as often as you can.

InPage Beta!

2010-10-18T14:04:00.000-04:00

Here is news that will make website owners happy, but is sure to devastate developers who built an empire on a shortcoming of Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a tool that provides website tracking information, in a vast array of reports, to website owners and developers. It tells site owners how many visits, from what platform, whether they had Flash installed and what version, what their click path was, how long they stayed on the site (and each page), when they dropped off, and so on.

Google Analytics also had a tool called "overlay," which allowed the site owner to see where on a page users clicked - in so-called "heat map" form. It was a so-so tool, and many people found it difficult to use, and therefore... didn't!

Third party developers were quick to fill the void, and created additional tools - for a fee - that would provide sophisticated site overlays, giving site owners real, solid information about how users responded to pages. It was really the next best thing to eye-tracking (this is the in-lab study of websites that literally tracks where users look on a page, identifying the pattern of where individual users looked, how long they stayed on a certain location, as well as providing aggregate results for many users).

Now Google has introduced a new analytics tool called InPage Analytics, users will get a truly useful page analysis that provides the detailed information about users click patterns on a page by page basis.

What's so good about this, you ask? Well, imagine that you put an offer on your site in the upper left corner, and nobody clicks on it. What's wrong? Is it the wording? Is it the location, the color, the size? With the data you can collect from a tool like InPage, you can test different locations and patterns and sizes and colors, and see what it is that makes people click. Next time you create an offer, or design a webpage, you have real user information available to start creating a webpage that people love to visit, and are likely to respond to.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I really think Google is one brilliant company. Keep it up, Google!

Prioritize Me!

2010-10-15T13:44:00.000-04:00

Not too long ago I ran across a half-serious half-mocking post about email addresses. Basically, you are very cool and tech-savvy if you have your own domain (like, nancy@nancyroberts.com).

Next best a Gmail address.

After that come all rest, but if you have an AOL , you are over 50 or seriously un-techy, or both.

It took me a while to get used to Gmail. In world of Outlook, you organize your email into folders. Yes, you can search, but primarily users get idea: it's in folder that subject/client/event, and it came in roughly middle of August. I go look.

In Gmail, presumption entirely that you will search you want. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not as happy with search results as I might be. That aside, you learn to tag (or label) your emails (you can set up a rule that will label all emails coming from a particular person or in a certain way). Then you can view only those emails (sort of like going into a folder), or you can search a specific email by subject, sender, date - whatever.

Now Gmail has added "Priority Inbox," a feature allowing you to view your mails according to, well, according to priority. Tag any sender as priority, (you can continue to star your mail as well), then if you have priority mail turned on, those emails will be at top of your list, no matter in order they arrive in your inbox. That way, your attention always directed to your most vital incoming mail.

To start working with this feature, go to "Settings" in top right of your window, then select Priority Inbox from menu than runs across top of resulting interface. Now you can select settings you want your priority inbox. They can always be adjusted going forward once you see how feature working you.

And if you prefer to see your emails in the regular, "as arrived" way, you can toggle between "Inbox" and "Priority Inbox" by simply click the appropriate selection in the left-hand menu of your Gmail window.

Big, Fat Anti-Malware

2010-10-07T10:47:00.000-04:00

Have you noticed that your virus scans are eating up your resources from time to time? Welcome to the club.

When one of my computers is running its scan - and because I have the "freeware" version, it runs the scan at the most inopportune time! - it bogs down and becomes almost unusable.

I recently read an article than explains this, so I wanted to share that with you.

Basically, the problem has to do with three things: the age of the code in most anti-malware software, the number of threats that are out there, and the fact that products must now support a host of OS's.

Anti-malware software (anti-virus, trojan detection software, etc.) has been around almost as long as the Internet. Amazing how fast the Black Hats get ideas! If only they were on the White Hat side! Nevertheless, it was very shortly after we began using the Internet heavily that malware made its appearance, and anti-malware became available. Which is to say, some of these products are very old. For example, I use AVG, and have done for... I hate to admit this, but probably 15 years.

Over time, malware became more and more sophisticated. Virus profile updates were essential. In the old days, most malware protection software operated by scanning for what is called a signature, or definition. This was basically a file that was added to the kernel of your OS. The malware detection software looked at all your files to find any evidence of one of these signature files, and then it was isolated or destroyed.

But as I said, Black Hats are smart. So soon they were writing malware that had no readily available signature file. So White Hats had to find other ways of detecting the bad stuff. Enter heuristics, behavioral analysis and emulation. All three of these are essentially variations on a theme. What they do is look for dangerous behavior of a file or bit of code. They might say, oh, a file has been added to the kernel, and malware adds files to the kernel, this is dangerous behavior. (Of course, anti-malware software adds files to the kernel!)

Another problem is that because no one anti-malware software product is the best-in-class in every type of malware detection and destruction, many of us are running multiple products, all of which can interfere with one another, and slow our computers down even further.

Yet another complaint many people have - and I have run into this one, too, with my email at work - is something known as "real-time scanning." This is an algorithm in which each time the user tries to access a file, a malware scan is run on that file to be sure it's not infected. This can slow down your file access enormously.

What to do? There is no perfect solution, but you can opt for the products that come with the highest satisfaction ratings for both protection and performance. According to PC Magazine, a reliable source, in my book, here are the best freeware versions available today:

Ad-Aware 8.2
Avast 2.0
AVG 9.0
Malwarebytes 1.26
Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0

The Targeted Consumer

2010-09-23T11:49:00.000-04:00

I've said before in this column that advertising is annoying only insofar as it's not being directed at me. This is particularly true on the Internet.

Some co-workers and I were talking about advertising the other day, and I pointed out how all of us will buy magazines that are basically life support systems for advertising, and we'll page through the ads, actually checking them out, because we are interested in the subject matter. We, in the parlance of the marketers, "raised our hand" by buying the magazine. So if it's a computer magazine and there are tons of ads about software and hardware, bring 'em on! And if a women's fashion magazine is full of ads for clothing, cosmetics and jewelry - well, isn't that what we signed up for?

The Internet has, thus far, been a bit of a dismal failure for advertisers. Eye tracking tests demonstrate that people are remarkably adept at not looking at all those annoying banner, popup, flashing, spinning, and even programmed-to-stay-page-center ads. While we've adapted to commercial breaks on television as a necessary nuisance, we either ignore them, or find them highly annoying when we're surfing the Internet.

One of the things marketers need to understand about the Internet is that people who use it do so because they have an objective. They are not passively sitting back hoping to be entertained (television), or actively seeking information on a topic (magazines), or even gathering the news of the day (newspapers). Usually, we are seeking a particular piece of information, or performing a particular chore.

Enter targeted advertising. It's both exciting, and more than a little creepy.

I was reading one of my favorite online journals the other day, and realized that the ads were talking about Syracuse. Here was one announcing the conversion of P&C to Tops, with a grand opening close to my home. Another one was about the average price of an iPad in Syracuse. Still another was touting images from a stock photo house I had checked out the day before. In other words, "they" knew who I was, and were serving up ads tailored to catch my interest.

The creepy part of this is obvious. The exciting part is: if I'm going to be advertised to, isn't it way, way, way better to have those ads be something I'm actually interested in? Believe it or not, there is a good side to advertising: we learn about products and services we might not otherwise be aware of. And if we want one of those products and services, well, then advertising is an actual benefit.

I will say, though, that the ads pushing products based on my search activity are a bit more problematic for me. But my best guess is that the trends I'm noting thus far are just the tip of the iceberg.

Makin' Movies

2010-09-20T13:48:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been spending a lot of time fooling with audio and video on my computer(s). Up til very recently, this has been a very complex world, full of arcana such as codecs and containers and file formats. It still is somewhat complex, relatively, but best choices are emerging that make it easier for the average user to know what the defaults are, and not have to be concerned with an extraordinarily steep learning curve.

First and foremost, you're going to need a powerful computer - that much remains the same! Don't even think about editing video if you haven't got a good processor, plenty (and I mean plenty!) of hard drive, and as much RAM as you can possibly manage. Video, and even audio, require lots of power unless you want to spend a lot of time frustrated, waiting for the computer to do its job.

Next, get a couple of monitors. You can edit video (and certainly audio) with one, but you'll find yourself a lot happier if you have plenty of desktop space, and a way to segregate folders and files and supporting programs (like PhotoShop) on your desktop.

If it's video you're interested in, make sure you know the basics of your camera. Recently, I shot some video at a friend's wedding. The camera was a decent Canon pro-sumer model, and I set the audio to 16 bit (which is a decent quality) for the best sound reproduction. I had intended to transfer the footage to my Mac for editing using a little junky camera that played mini-DV tapes. But oddly, the computer wasn't recognizing the playback! I checked all the settings (I intended to import the footage into Final Cut Express), and everything looked right. But as it turns out, this camera, though it had digital out, had to be connected to the computer via USB (USB evidently taking precedence over FireWire in this instances). Once that mystery was solved, the next one was why did the audio not come through? In this case, it turns out that the camera will only handle 12-bit audio.

Actually, part of the point of this article is that if you make the right choices from the beginning, at least for the time being you're not going to have to worry about things like this! That is to say, use a newer model camera, the newest version of iMovie (Mac) or MovieMaker (Windows), (or some big brother software, like Final Cut for the Mac, and Premiere for Windows), and most of your settings will be default and everything will just happen the way it should - trust me!

As far as software is concerned, for most home movies - and frankly, for many corporate applications - you're going to have all the horsepower you need with the "included" software for each platform. iMovie and MovieMaker will both import your files, and let you drag and drop clips to a very easy-to-understand timeline. They both give you a selection of commonly used effects, and allow you to add titling. (Effects are things like fades and dissolves).

Many video cameras for sale today will be "high def," and offer the 16x9 format (wider than they are tall). The video quality is gorgeous, and if you use some simple rules of photography (don't shoot into the sun, frame your subject so that it's the most important thing in the frame, zoom to the point of emphasis, and so on), your footage should be more than adequate for most projects. It's always a good idea to plan ahead, shoot more than you think you're going to need, get lots of angles, hold your shot a little bit on either end, and don't talk while you're shooting! If you're going to use a tripod, if you can afford one, get a quick-release model - otherwise, you'll miss a shot that comes your way while you try to unscrew the camera from the plate.

Having said that, if you're going to need some very close shots, or if you're going to be zooming in from a long distance, seriously consider a tripod, because event he best "anti-shake" compensation won't make up for the normal movements you'll make while trying to hold the camera still.

Now that you've shot your video, it's time to transfer your clips to your editing platform. The important thing to note here is: transfer short clips that start a little before and end a little after the shot you actually intend to use. Otherwise, you spend a lot of precious time shuttling back and forth to find your in and out points - even with digital video - if you have big, long clips downloaded. And name your clips! If you have 10 of them, it's not a big deal to keep them tracked. If you have 50, it's another story.

When it comes to editing, less is more. A lot of crazy effects (just cause you have them) won't enhance your project. While breaking a long project into chapters is a good idea, and you can burn your project to DVD this way, a lot of transitioning and tons of effects rarely do anything to add to your story. Usually it's a good idea to choose a couple of transition types, a couple of fonts, and a single background, and let it go at that.

The next computer-based challenge is outputting your finished product. This has traditionally been one of the most problematic areas of home video production: what on earth are all those formats, and when would I use one?

First, know what you want to use your project for. If you plan to distribute it via DVD, keep the quality as high as possible. The limitation here will be what your processor can handle. In general, the larger the video size (720 480 is considered high quality at a 16 x 9 aspect ratio (movie style); 640 x 480 is a large 4 x 3 window (regular "TV"), and the higher the quality, the larger the file size. Your computer will work a lot harder to render a larger file than a smaller one, and may even bog down. So if you have a less-than-ideal computer, or a very long project, you may have to sacrifice some quality.

Save your project for DVD as a .mov (Quicktime) H-264.

If you plan on making a YouTube video out of your project, go with a smaller video window (320 x 240), .mov or .mp4. YouTube will be re-encoding, but at least you will be sending something decent quality, and not too big a file size.

I know there are video pros who will have better suggestions, and I also know I'm probably committing a Big Sin by looking for a one size fits all - but I am! It's very difficult to keep up with all the aspect ratios, file sizes, file types, containers, what will play back on what. So I just try to find something that works well in *most* cases, and hope for the best!

Digging the Internet

2010-09-20T11:28:00.000-04:00

When "surfing" the "world wide web" first became a way to spend a free moment (or ten), I used to love the serendipity of it all. Follow stray links, and you could end up anywhere. It was all kind of like driving in the country without a whole lot of street signs.

Now, while there is a lot more information available, and it's so well-indexed by Google and the other search engines that even little oddball sites have way pointers, I rarely find myself just wandering around without a map.

The other day, though, I was researching a topic for work and actually ended up in one of those "I can't believe I found this" situations. I actually had one of those moments of realizing how big the world is, and how many little worlds are contained within it, ones that go on quietly in their own little orbit, important that those who occupy them, but not even noticed by the rest of us.

What I found was a site aggregator called "The Armory." Relating to a term associated with online gaming, The Armory is a collection of "Geek House" sites. What's a Geek House, you ask? This is quite literally a house occupied by self-proclaimed Geeks who gather together for the purpose of... well, geeking out. Following arcane and intellectual pursuits or interests, such as, obviously, anything computer related. But it might also be Sci-Fi or Fantasy, role playing games, Amiga computers, and sundials.

What's even more fascinating about this site is that its connections date back ten or more years, some of them still exist, and some are just rubble to be picked through for clues about who was there, what they did, why they thought it was important to create a living space, a website, a locus of information - and then just vanish, like some ancient culture we can't quite understand.

And I started to wonder, as I have done before, what "cyberspace" will be like fifty years hence. While, yes, the actual machines that bear the code that is the reality of a world created online will have to continue to exist somewhere, be connected to the web somehow, even for those sites whose servers have gone offline, there will be little traces here and there, such as the links on The Armory to sites long abandoned.

Archeology, 21st century style!

Skyfire?

2010-09-07T12:05:00.000-04:00

One of the notable downsides to the iPhone is its failure to display Flash on visited websites. This makes it difficult to navigate - these days, Flash is everywhere you go.

But Skyfire might (might!) change all that.

As reported on AppScout.com, Skyfire has submitted its browser app to the Apple App Store for review and possible inclusion as one of the approved apps. (That's how it works, folks. Apple has done it again, though with a twist: back in the bad old days, Apple refused to allow third parties to develop applications for its computer OS. Big mistake - everybody wanted a PC because there were more games and more software available for the PC, since Microsoft opened up its OS to anybody who wanted to write applications for it. While Apple now will at least consider a third party developer's application for the iPhone, it still has the hoity-toity attitude that it must "protect" its users from badly done applications. Or something.)

Skyfire is already available for the Droid, where it transcodes websites' Flash to HTML5 on-the-fly. Another stand-out feature of Skyfire is that it allows users to share websites with their social networking friends using a simple icon click.

So how soon will Skyfire be available for the iPhone? the AppScout websites wraps up its article, "Skyfire claims that if their browser is rejected by Apple, it means that Apple's aversion to Flash is not just technical, but also political in nature. Only time will tell if Skyfire is approved. If it's rejected, it'll be interesting to see what reasons Apple gives. If it is approved, iOS users may be able to enjoy Flash video without the Flash very soon."

She's A Bar Code Hero

2010-08-31T12:17:00.000-04:00

How far can we take consumerism?

How about - too far?

I was just introduced to a new app called "Bar Code Hero." It's kind of a riff on FourSquare, in which users visit a location, ideally over and over again, such as a bar in their neighborhood, earning points towards becoming mayor, earl, king, etc. of that location.

Now you can do the same with products! Yep, with very little effort, I could become the Queen of Spice Drops (or fill in the name of any product you use or consume obsessively).

Let's let the creators explain it:

"Barcode Hero is a social barcode scanner that works with Facebook. Show off your collection and go shopping with friends, scan barcodes to compare prices, follow other shoppers to see their scans & recommendations in real-time, and share your own tips to help others discover the stuff you love.

How does it work?
Barcode Hero helps your in-store shopping by connecting you with helpful information and with other shoppers:
Visit any retail store
Scan a product barcode

Get smarter in seconds:
Recommendations from friends for similar products
Comparison prices & product info from top online retailers
Earn sharable game-like achievements based on the products you scan

Now, I have had the experience of having a friend call me and ask me to check out ABC product on Amazon (the acid test for pricing). How much? How many stars? In other words, can I get it cheaper on Amazon and do people like it?

Well, Bar Code Hero eliminates that phone call, theoretically. Now the same person can check in with Bar Code Hero and find out how the price of the store he's in compares, and see if the product comes recommended by his friends.

I have to say that my immediate reaction to this was: on a cold day will I use this app! But then I got to thinking about it, and realized that there are times when I would find it useful - for example, when I'm debating whether to buy that $15 tube of mascara. Nine cosmetic purchases out of ten are a waste of money - how nifty to be able to check it out before you buy.

Never let it be said there isn't room on the planet for yet another mousetrap!

What's a Nice Person Like You Doing in a Place Like That?

2010-08-24T15:31:00.000-04:00

So all the talk on the Internet today is Facebook Places!!! Whoo-hoo. The buzz(kill) is that it will wipe out poor little upstart FourSquare, which, er, put location networking on the map.

You remember, we wrote about FourSquare in this column way back in March of this year: "It may not be quite that perfect, but that is the idea behind a kinda-new geolocating social networking app, Foursquare. It actually sounds, in theory, more like a game: "Foursquare is a web and mobile application that allows registered users to connect with friends and update their location. Points are awarded on weekends and non-business hours for "checking in" at venues. Users can choose to have theirTwitter and/or their Facebook accounts updated when they check in." (Wikipedia)

While I never got hooked on it, I do know some friends who found it lots of fun - they tended to be young and urban, as that's where it was most likely to have real impact, though I also found folks who were loving the whole idea of becoming the "mayor" of a particular location they were fond of. The locations themselves found this a good thing, too, especially when they were being "bid on" by users stopping by over and over to rack up visiting points in hopes of winning a mayoralty.

Facebook Places. I dunno. I've tried it out, and while it has potential, I don't quite understand it, either the interface, or the point. For quite some time, Google has had Google locations, which allows you to share with friends who are likewise signed up to do so your location, either from your desktop computer, or from your mobile phone. This can be fun when friends are traveling, for example, especially if they are the type who'll leave messages about their travels.

Facebooks' location app is along the same lines: tell us where you are and what you're doing, and we'll share that with friends who are also signed up.

The Fearful among us have already started bleating about the safety factor: if people know where you are right this very moment, ostensibly your house could be robbed, or you could be met by someone you really didn't care to see. Yes, those are dangers. As is keeping regular habits, such as going off to work from 8 -5 every day, or out running every evening from 7-8, and so on.

The easiest way to get involved is via smart phone. And some friends who are also playing! Or, you can use the touch.facebook.com site. Once you're signed up, you can select a place near you (you will be geolocated by the system), and tell everyone where you are. If the place you are visiting doesn't have a public location already on the system, you can add a place. Be careful here... adding "home" may not be exactly what you want to do, even if you assume the only people who'll see it will be your friends.

You can also tag friends who are with you, but again, this is something you should share with them before you do it on the off chance they don't want other people in your networks to know where they are at this moment.

At this point, the real distinct advantage Places has over FourSquare is the sheer volume of users. Facebook has, I think, beaten Twitter out as the number one social app of the year, if not the decade. Most people I know have it open on their desktops all day long, or check in on their smart phones periodically. Twitter had its moment, but seems to have faded a bit - though I grant, it was where I first confirmed the earthquake early this summer, and I still find it amusing to check in now and again.

I'm likewise sure that Facebook is far from done in terms of adding features and fun to its Place app, and in the near future we'll see more of the quirky gamelike interplay that made FourSquare more than just a check-up-on-your-buddies app.

My Google Account

2010-08-16T11:42:00.000-04:00

I've often wondered what would happen if Google went down. A major hack, a catastrophic server failure.

Well, that didn't happen, but I did get a minor scare.

When I tried to log in to my Google account one fine Monday morning, I was rejected!

I had spent the weekend away, and had taken a complete Internet break. (It happens!) So I don't really know how many days the account had been "suspicious." Nor do I have any idea why.

When I tried to log in, Google simply told me, "We've detected suspicious activity on your Google Account, and it has been suspended." I could look into the Google definition of "suspicious activity:"

Some messages have disappeared.
Messages you didn't send are bouncing.
Your friends complain that they received spam from you.
Messages that you didn't send appear in Sent Mail.
Your Last account activity shows sign-in activity at unusual times or from unusual computers.
Your Gmail settings have changed, but you didn't change them. Settings include: vacation responder, signature, forwarding, filters, and others

Needless to say, I noticed none of these things, nor have any of my contacts reported any unusual goings-on.

The "fix" for the problem wasn't comforting: Google asked me to enter my cell phone number, to which a code would be sent. Using that code, I could reset my password. Without thinking (dumb, dumb)I sent the cell phone number. I did get a verification code, which (fortunately for me!) did work to reset my account with a new password.

A thoughtful person concerned with security would have first asked: would Google ask for my cell phone number? Upon checking, I did learn that this is indeed how Google handles what they suspect is a compromised account; if it had not been, however, I would have just happily made matters worse by handing over my cell phone number with nary a blink.

Looking into the matter further, I have learned that many people have encountered the same problem, though typically with a little research, users discover spam sent using their account, or some other activity that signals a potential problem with their account. I could find no such activity with mine.

In general, though, users aren't very happy about not being able to reach someone at Google for assistance, and about being asked for a cell phone number as a remedy. (And of course this begs the question: what about that, admittedly rare, person who doesn't have a cell phone?)

Download a Video

2010-08-13T12:42:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wanted to download a YouTube video?

Needless to say, there are more than a few considerations.

First, there's the legality. That's a bit of a knotty problem. YouTube takes the position that it's the responsibility of uploaders to only share legal material, that is to say, non-copyright material. Thus, if we are to assume that only copyright free material has been uploaded, there's nothing wrong with downloading it.

Of course, that's not the case. But the other oddity is that while some copyright holders don't like the idea of their material being shared (usually just bits and pieces of it), others have no problem with it, feeling that "any press is good press."

On the other hand, there is plenty of material on YouTube that, while it may be owned by someone, it's not technically a copyright protected piece: a home movie of your kids, for example, that you freely posted.

Not too long ago, for example, I wanted to download a friend's baby crawling, and use it as part of a silly project I was working on. I might have asked her for the clip, of course, but since it was already up on YouTube, why not just download it for instant access?

There are a few steps to doing this, none of them particularly onerous any more, and most of them with free versions of the software required to perform them.

Here's what I do:

First, you'll need to download the video. There are any number of downloaders available, but what almost all of them have in common is the ability to access a video on the Internet, and to convert it (typically on the fly) to a format that you will be able to play at will on your computer. (YouTube makes flash video out of uploaded files, so you'd have to have a flash player to play the downloaded video back - and typically, most of us don't. Flash Player is most often a plugin for your browser, and we don't generally have it as a stand alone application on our machines.)

I use YouTube Downloader, a free application that is very simple, barebones, and works just fine. You can find it here.

Now, you'll need a tool to convert your video. I found that while YouTube Downloader has a "step two" option, allowing you to convert your downloaded file to a more usable format, the quality of the resulting video was not up to par.

So for this step, I use Super. Super is a very powerful conversion tool, that will accept almost any file format, and will convert it to just about any file format (for video files). Don't be scared off by the download site. It looks a bit like you're going to end up in one of those pornographic popup nightmares, but trust me, you won't! It does take a bit of doing to find the link that actually downloads the file, versus the many, many,many links that just take you further into the site. The thing to do is, in IE, right click on one of the download links, and then "Save target" to start the download.

The interface on Super is simple enough - the challenge with video always is to know what format you want to convert to and from. In the case of Super, it doesn't really care what the format of the original is, it merely wants to know how you want to encode it for the converted product. It's not the purpose of this article to go into a lot of discussion of the various formats and their purposes, so I'll just leave it that you make your selections, right click on the "Drop a valid multimedia file here" panel to specify where you want your converted file saved, and click "Encode" to start the operation. It's fast, reliable, and the output product is usually very good.

"Wave" Goodbye

2010-08-06T13:28:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I wish I could start a website called "I told you so." It would be where people could go to post predictions, opinions, evaluations, etc., and then, when they proved to be right, they could cite the date on which they first called it, and say, "See, I told you so!"

In this case, the subject is Google's Wave, and the date was June 4, 2010.

I wrote (in this column): "When it first launched, I was a beta user of Google's Wave.

Funny thing, I never really used it! I'm not sure why, but I suspect I just didn't "get" it.

Part of the problem, if indeed "problem" it is, is that a Wave is so many things - IM, email, document, discussion. It's hard to know what your point of entry is."

On Wednesday of this week (August 2, 2010), OnlineMediaDaily wrote, "Say 'So long' to Google Wave. The search giant said Wednesday that it plans to stop developing the much-hyped collaboration tool as a standalone product, and its site will likely be shut down next year. Yes, despite having "numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," Urs H"lzle, SVP of operations at Google, wrote in a company blog post Wednesday.

"Unmentioned in the official product obituary: Google's impatience," remarks Gawker. "Google Wave was released to the world just this past May, barely two months ago. A fundamentally new communication system like Wave is useless without a large base of users, so Google really should have given the product more than 77 days to catch on." Still, "Wave had so many different features that it confused many users, who never figured out how it worked," writes The New York Times' Bits blog. Indeed, "The service was deemed too complicated by many users, with an explanatory video lasting more than an hour," notes the Financial Times. "Earlier this year Google had said it planned to simplify the service, but this failed to boost uptake."

The truth is, most products that are successful are successful because they solve a problem. Some products may, indeed, solve a problem we don't know we have until the product is created - like, cell phones, for example. I'm not sure a lot of people went running around wishing they could be on their phones anytime, anywhere. But once the phones came online, the benefit - and the problems they solved - were immediately obvious. Safety when traveling; keeping an "eye" on the kids; letting people know when you'll arrive without having to stop; not needing a quarter for the pay phone - or even having to hunt a working one down.

But with Google Wave, people were neither clamoring for it, nor did they see the obvious benefit when they first tried it out.

As I always do, I tried to find a use, and I wrote: "And there are far more sophisticated uses for Waves (than the Christmas gift collaboration I suggested), such as getting a far-flung work team together to brainstorm, or even share the writing of a document. There are task lists which can be shared with your team - and remember, you can link a series of Waves together so that a project's shared discussions can all share a common reference point."

I concluded that I was willing to give Wave another look. But the truth is, I didn't do it.

And as the OnlineMedia writer pointed out, you really have to have a "large base of users" to make the application useful.

See? I told ya.

To Infinity and Beyond!

2010-07-30T12:01:00.000-04:00

I was listening to a couple of my co-workers chat the other day. It went something like this:

"That presentation could be adapted for a mobile app."

"Now that they've opened up the API."

"Working Java ME, right?"

"Right, and we have to keep the file size under 1 meg if it's going to run on iPhones."

Or, something like that, anyway.

And it dawned on me that ten years ago, even five years ago, this conversation would not, could not, have been held.

I know that it's been said so often that it's become a cliche from which I want to run screaming, but "the world is moving faster and faster."

If you think about it, the Industrial Revolution lasted about one hundred - one hundred - years, roughly the entire 19th century. There were sweeping changes, to be sure. Mankind moved from the country to the cities, from an agrarian lifestyle to the factories and offices of the towns and cities. Goods became cheaper and more readily available. Machines did the heavy lifting, enabling more work to be done by fewer hands, and freeing up time so that people could do other things, like get an education. And this, of course, put more brain power to work on the problems of everyday life, leading to further breakthroughs in medicine, engineering, and science in general.

Still, it took about one hundred years for the full scope of this "revolution" to be realized.

Now comes the what, electronic revolution? The technology revolution.

Leading the way were things like photography, movies, radio, telephones, and television. Heck, modern plumbing! Miniaturization. Computerization. Vaccinations, the elimination of many diseases, and anesthesiology. Space travel, the splitting of the atom, the mapping of the human genome, and the Internet (thanks, Al!). Of course, this has taken place over roughly the last century, as well. But if the changes in the previous century were massive, those in the 20th century were monumental.

We can now communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere - including visuals. A computer can guide us from point A to point B as we drive our cars. We can access more information more quickly than ever in the history of mankind - and more quickly than any human will ever be able to fully appreciate. Computers themselves have gone from enormous, room-sized glorified abaci to tiny etched silicon chips that can, after a fashion, reproduce themselves, only better.

I have often reflected that people born in the middle of the last century were brought up under a whole new set of rules: radio, television, and movies gave unprecedented access to developing young minds; plenty of inexpensive food and superb public education meant strong bodies and developed minds; cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other labor-saving devices meant these people were never slaves to manual labor.

If all that resulted in a brave new world in the second half of that century, how much more so will children raised in this first half of the twenty-first century change the world they inhabit as adults? I watched a little three year old flipping through photos on an iPhone recently, and could only marvel at what the tools at her disposal would mean in terms of her ability to move the world forward.

If there is a reason to live forever, it's simply this: to see what the world looks like in 2050, and 3000, and beyond.

Pssst... Got a Problem with Outlook?

2010-07-22T10:05:00.000-04:00

Much as I like to bash Microsoft along with everyone else, I have to say that until recently I have not had a problem with Outlook. It's pretty much a workhorse email client/calendar application that works well and serves as a standard for software of its kind. The others in the email client/calendar category are more or less also-rans.

Yesterday, however, my faith was shaken.

Outlook simply failed to launch, the explanation being that my .pst file was corrupt.

To understand how fatal that problem is, you have to know that Outlook stores all your personal data in this .pst file, which is a data table - not a folder of items, but a real database type storage file. So your contacts, your saved email messages, your calendar info - all of it is here. And if it "goes bad" you're in a world of hurt.

What to do? The error message kindly informed me that I could run the "scanpst.exe" file, or "Inbox Repair Tool," which would find and fix errors in the file. A little research also let me know that I might have to run the chkdsk command, which will check for disk integrity on your hard disk.

Now the problem is, where on earth are these files located?

First, I wanted to find the .pst file. The location of the file depends on the version of Windows you're running. For Windows 7, my OS, the path is: C/Users/(your name)/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Outlook. Yeah, I'd figure that out without help! I thought that if I right clicked on this file, a contextual menu might help, and indeed, an option for scanpst.exe was available, but it was my virus protection software version. Running this proved to be of no help.

Now I had to find the system version of scanpst.exe.

Turns out this was also located in a hard-to-find spot: C/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Office12. The location of this file will depend in this case on which version of Office you're running. Having found this executable file, I could now run it. It will scan your file, create a backup, and attempt to make the needed repairs to the corrupt .pst file.

What I really learned from this was that it's very helpful to periodically make a backup copy of your .pst file, which can then be invoked should anything go wrong with your current version. Granted, you might lose some data - but at least you will be able to run your all-important email client. (To do this, you will have to rename your backup - which will be called Outlook.bak, and remove the current version, or at least, rename it. Programmers will typically rename using a convention like OutlookOLD.pst.)

There are also a number of commercial products which you can purchase or download to help resolve a .pst error.

The Art of the Now

2010-07-16T12:07:00.001-04:00

The book An Infinity of Little Hours, about an ancient and unchanging order of monks, has one monk discussing God's perception of time as being "one eternal now."

And we know that for many tribal people, the concept of linear time is meaningless: when incarcerated, native Australians would pine and die, feeling that the "now" of their imprisonment would last forever.

So what about this concept of "now?"

Since stumbling on this factoid, I've been quizzing everybody I know: "In terms of duration, what is 'now' for you?"

This mainly serves to make people look at me as if I've grown yet another head.

But it turns out to be a legitimate question.

Neuroscientists have determined that "now" exists between approximately 30ms and 3 seconds. Put in its most accessible way, if you tap on a drum, for example, people will have difficulty distinguish taps that are less than 30ms apart, and therefore will consider them a single tap; taps between 30ms and 3 seconds apart will be perceived as happening "now," and taps greater than 3 second apart will be perceived as happening at different times - "then" and "now."

This has become of increasing interest to researchers of all kinds, because technology has enabled us to, more and more, process more and more of the "now" in our day to day lives. Of course, as pointed out at the beginning of this article, the very notion of "now" versus past and future presupposes linear time, but we'll leave that alone for now.

One of the best ways to illustrate the increasing significance of "now" to to think about Twitter: users are able to share a 140-character slice of "now" with friends. "Right now I'm listening to this music." "At this moment, I discovered an interesting item on the Internet." "Here is a photo of where I am right now."

The power of this really came home to me recently when my home town (Syracuse, NY) experienced an earthquake. When our office realized what was happening, we checked out the Internet for confirmation and a report. We were on the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake report; we were looking for news updates. I happened to be on Twitter, though, and while the other, standard reports were slow, within second of the event beginning, tweets were popping up that confirmed the quake and reported its magnitude!

Now, granted, legitimate venues have to confirm sources before they report, which takes time and slows the cycle.

But, in a way, that's the point. More and more of us have access instantaneously to information - unfiltered information.

It's unquestionably game-changing.

There are several websites that track Twitter trends. One of them TrendsMap, is particularly effective because it displays trending topics of conversation by rank (size and darkness of font), as well as geolocation.

I can't find any specific information about thresholds - what constitutes a significant enough number of tweets to get on the map, or to warrant a larger, darker font? Needless to say, topics tend to be clustered around larger cities, but you can zoom in on your location, or simply select "my location" from the toolbar (the application uses your Twitter registered location to identify your location). (Amusingly, the topics for my location the day I write this are "thunder" and "lightning." Weather. How original for Syracuse, NY!)

Personalizemedia.com recently quantified the new density of now: in the last three minutes, we're told, 90,000 tweets were published; 74 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube; 7000 images were uploaded to Flickr; 4.8 million searches were performed on Google; and 500 million emails were sent.

That's a lotta info.

And we're told that only 20% of the world's data is actually "structured" data. That is, data that can be easily processed - stuff like ocean temperatures, or (as above) how many images were uploaded to Flickr in the last three minutes.

The rest is unstructured data for which it is difficult to understand the meaning. So, in the case of most of that information quantified above, what does it mean that the hot topic for Syracuse tweets on July 16, 2010, was thunder? There are so many variables: who tweets (demographics)? Does it matter that July 16, 2010 was a Friday? And of course, there was a thunderstorm that particular morning. Would the same tweets have occurred in Philadelphia, given the same day of the week and a thunderstorm?

Here's an interesting app for the iPhone: it's called "Glow." It's a mobile application (this is a category of app that relies heavily on your location for its usefulness) that tracks how you and others "feel" on any given day, in any given location. Where are you, what are you doing, and how do you feel? A street view provides augmented reality (you look at the world around you through your iPhone camera, and the app layers information onto it: in this case, other Glow users who happen to be in your vicinity (as well as their reported emotional state!). (Eek! Stay away from that guy - he's in a terrible mood!)

Tweemotional reports on the emotional trends on Twitter. At the moment I checked the site, Tweemotional reported that the emotional state of Twitter was mostly EXHAUSTED, followed by: angry, anxious, ashamed, bored, cautious, confident, confused, depressed, disgusted, ecstatic, embarrassed, enraged, exhausted, frightened, frustrated, guilty, happy, hopeful, hysterical, jealous, lonely, lovestruck, mischievous, overwhelmed, sad, shocked, shy, smug, surprised, suspicious. Welcome to TGIF!

Needless to say, there are any number of other tracking apps that will check news mentions, influencers, even people's opinions, in a real-time fashion. Of course, it goes without saying that this information is, at least for the time being, highly demographically skewed to users of the media that produces the trackable information. But if FaceBook's quick adoption by the, ahem, "older" crowd is any predictor, more and more of us will be participating in the activities that provide this real-time information as time goes by.

The actual usefulness of all this remains to be seen. For example, we already know that reporting election results in eastern states can have an effect on voting patterns in western states; what will infinitely more information in an infinitely faster timeframe do to any of the decisions we make all the time?

Marketers are salivating, of course; political parties are definitely on this bandwagon; news operations are interested, wary, and frightened all at once; the rest of us are just jumping in and muddling around, treating the whole thing as one part magic, one part tech/work, and one part amusement park.

The whole merging of time, location and activity puts me in mind of a question my son used to ask me when he was about two and I was going to go somewhere without him: "How home are you gonna be?"

2010-07-12T13:28:00.000-04:00

We've talked in this space before about the future of computing - whether we'll actually make the transition to "log on anywhere with any machine, run your apps and access your data in the cloud" computing or not.

Security remains one of the big, no, HUGE roadblocks to this happening. The technology is practically there, but for anything other than harmless personal stuff, most people will remain reluctant to trust their data to the cloud. (Quick reminder: the "cloud" refers to the application-based internet.)

One thing many of us already do is carry our data with us via thumb drive, and as thumb drives become larger and larger in terms of carrying capacity, while remaining tiny in form factor (they don't call them "thumbs" for nothing!), this becomes more and more practical.

Another option is to carry your apps with you.

We've all been there before: you're traveling, and using a "strange" computer - nothing looks the way it should, you don't have the tools you need to get the job done, and you're slowed down by the, well, strangeness of the strange computer!

One good tool for doing remedying that is PortableApps (portableapps.com). Of course, you have to be a fan of open source, but, that aside, you can take a fully featured suite of apps with you wherever you go. As PortableApps explains it, " PortableApps Suite is a complete collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/schedule, instant messaging client, antivirus, audio player, sudoku game, password manager, PDF reader, minesweeper clone (glad they included the important stuff!), backup utility and integrated menu, all pre-configured to work portably. Just drop it on your portable device and you're ready to go."

A "portable device" includes not only your flash drive, but a portable hard drive, and even your iPod.

The version 2.0 preview is scheduled for release Tuesday, July 13, so this would be a great time to try it out.

On the (Shutter) Fly!

2010-06-29T16:33:00.000-04:00

If I've told you this one before, bear with me. It's worth repeating.

Shutterfly! Fly, as in very, very cool.

About six months ago, I wouldn't have said that. I would have griped about the upload speed, and errors, and inability to get logged on... but, as usual, I'm ahead of myself.

Shutterfly is a photo sharing and printing site. Once upon a time, you simply uploaded photos and you could then have them printed, or share an uploaded album with other users. Even in this relatively "primitive" form it was a quick, easy, and free way to share photo viewing, and prints (of any size) could be requested by anyone you'd invited to share in the album.

They started to add a variety of printing and project features, like calendars, cards, more sizes and editing options (cropping and sepia tone, for example) to make photo sharing even more fun. My mom, who isn't exactly a computer wizard, loved being able to ask me for prints from any uploaded family photos - and in about 5 minutes online, an order would be on its way to her.

Then Shutterfly created photo sharing websites, and that is a feature I have really enjoyed. Any uploaded album - or individual photo - can be added to any of your personal "websites," hosted by Shutterfly.

First, create an account. Then, select the "share" option. You're invited to follow a wizard which walks you through the steps of creating a shared website. You choose from a variety of templated layouts, including picking, cropping, and placing banner photos. Name your site, and invite others to view or share ownership. If your friends or family members share ownership, they're also free to add or caption photos.

Anyone invited to your site can order prints as well as viewing your site, and if you set your preferences that way, they'll also be notified whenever you've uploaded any new images. One friend does a monthly photo journal, including a little writeup of family activities, along with lots of photos (and videos!) of her growing children. Each month, I get a friendly email inviting me to see the latest - including a teaser photo from the newly added images. It's irresistible!

As I said, a few months ago, Shutterfly ran into what probably was server size and/or speed issues, and bogged down to a crawl. I thought it was my Internet connection, but then I heard from other users that they were having difficulty logging on, or uploading photos. Sheer laziness prevented me from finding another site - and after all, I did have a lot of time and photos invested in staying on this site!

The site had experimented with a new Flash uploading app, and perhaps that was the problem, as well, as it never seemed to work properly.

Then, about a month or so ago, all the problems disappeared and the service was back, faster, better, and easier to use than before. Right now, it's about as fast as upload as I can imagine, and the interface is a pleasure to use.

Flickr and Picasa are two other excellent entrants in the same space, but I find both of them to be aimed more squarely at the arts and/or "adult" market, whereas Shutterfly seems to be the family-friendly alternative, ideal for sharing the photos of the kids, the family reunion, the Little League game shots, or the Science Fair images.

I was away for a family weekend, and today it took me all of ten minutes to update my family photo website - and another five before I got comments back from family members. Now that's instant gratification!

ePublish Unum

2010-06-24T10:58:00.000-04:00

As a recent ebook adopter (I have the Barnes and Nobel ereader on my iPhone, and I now have a Kindle), I've been wondering about the future of print-and-paper. Is it doomed?

One of my favorite online (hmm, yes, I did say, "online") journals, TechRepublic, pointed to an interview with Paul Hawken, founder of home-and-garden supplier, Smith and Hawken, about his conviction that as concerns printed matter, "They’re going to go away completely. Pretty soon people won’t be able to start their fires because there won’t be any paper. I think paper is done."

Strong statement. But it certainly does answer one of the questions that must be asked about where the written word is headed. Among other issues raised by the proliferation of online and digital copy:

1. How can and will copyright be enforced? Already, blogs and other outlets (like this one!) borrow material freely from other websites and digital sources. While this battle was originally fought during the early days of copiers, it continues to be an issue. (The RIAA, by taking drastic and draconian action, has slowed music piracy significantly from its Napster heyday.)

2. As an extension of number one, how on earth are writers going to earn a living? People expect online content to be "free." (I notice that some of my favorite podcasts have gone to a pay-for-service model, and their listenership has fallen drastically.)

3. Can digital delivery really replace the printed page, and the look, smell, feel, heft of a book? So far, much as I like my Kindle, I can't say that the actual sensory experience of it comes anywhere close to the experience of an ink-and-paper book.

4. Will digital delivery outmode publishers altogether, or merely change their go-to-market model? Already the quality of editing - if there is indeed any editing going on at all, which I question - has fallen off markedly. Books are full of plain out grammatical errors, as well as stylistic and other flubs that, in times gone past, a good editor would have found.

5. As an extension of #4, will all attempts at style, grammar, construction, vocabulary - all the hallmarks of good writing - simply be forgotten in the rush to "go live?" And because, like texting, we "get" the message, and don't really care if the sentence is well written? I notice all sorts of neo-construction going on in people's communication these days. One of my least favorite it the tendency to hyphenate anything and everything. So the sentence, "Are you logged on?" becomes "Are you logged-on?" even though it makes no sense. (A "logon" or a "log-on" is a noun created out of a verb. But if you using the verb form, there is no need to hyphenate it.)

There are no doubt many more questions that will be raised as we plow forward into this brave, new, online world. Bill Gates was famous for having said that computers (he was specifically referring to desktop publishing) would level the playing field, allowing creativity to flourish at an individual level, effectively reducing the power of the gatekeepers. What remains to be seen is whether that was a threat, or a promise.

Kindle

2010-06-23T15:04:00.000-04:00

This article should really be a merging of tech and books - I was lucky enough to be given a Kindle for my birthday!

This is really a perfect gift for a geekish reader. I wasn't sure I was going to appreciate it, as, when it comes to books and reading, I am a bit of a Luddite. I like the smell of books, the heft of them in my hand, the typeface, the feel of the paper.

Of course, that was more true once upon a time than now, and I still love to read an old book just for those reasons - it's simply a lovely sensory experience, as well as a feast for the imagination.

But many modern books, along with the abysmal failure of editing, simply aren't the works of art they once were: very often, too, we read a book in paperback form, which is in many ways more of a trial than a pleasure. You're lucky if the glue doesn't give up the ghost long before you're finished, and you find yourself holding pages in place while you read, or resorting to the old scotch tape on the binding trick.

So, along comes an electronic book, and the adjustment isn't nearly as profound as it might have been, say, 20 years ago.

Naturally, once the computer made its way into the average person's home, it didn't take long for bookish sorts to want to move the Library of Congress to electronic form.

In fact, the Guttenberg Project was, and still is, an attempt to do just that - create an electronic version of all the books in the public domain, making them, ostensibly, available to any and all readers who have access to a computer.

Interestingly, a PDF document is considered an "ebook" of sorts. Meant to be read rather than edited, a PDF maintains the wording and the layout of the document as it was originally created, as well as compressing the file size of the book, periodical, or document, to a slightly-more-manageable size than a word processing document.

Stand-alone e-readers have been around for quite a while, but it was only in the last few years that they really started to become an acceptable alternative to paper-and-ink. By 2009, the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader had actually gained some marketshare, even at their roughly $250+ pricetag, and Amazon, of course, had the great advantage of selling its ebooks via its already popular marketplace, whereas Sony asked you to logon to Sony Connect to make purchases.

Evidently the model was working well enough that superb marketer Barnes and Nobel jumped into the fray with the Nook ereader, which teams up with Barnes and Nobels' extensive library, and Apple, coming at the whole thing from its never-to-be-ordinary direction added the iPad to the mix - which, true to Apple's typical approach, is a book reader plus way, way, way more. (And it's also way more expensive!)

From the standpoint of the form factor and usability, the readers (with the exception of the iPad) are all pretty much the same. While one has a keypad (Kindle) and another softkeys (Nook), a more difficult choice is size and shape. They're all more or less rectangular, but some have a cover so that they open kind of like a book, and some are very large which makes for better reading for newspapers and periodicals.

In making a choice, the best thing you can do is literally pick up each one, think about how you're going to use it (books, carry it around a lot, newspapers on your commute, etc.) and choose accordingly.

For my purposes, the Kindle is just right. I will admit that the shape and weight are taking a little getting used to, particularly as I tend to do a lot of my reading either in bed or a lounge chair in the yard. The "book" is a little small, and doesn't balance quite right in two hands, but is too big for one. Also, as you read a single "page" on the reader twice as fast as two, even two paperback pages, you're hitting the "next page" button far more frequently than turning a page, so the whole process feels a bit more fatiguing.

On the plus side, you can choose orientation (portrait or landscape), font size, and other readability characteristics. Buying a book, even shopping for a book, is easy. And with the Kindle, you get Amazon's famous "You'll be interested in" knowledge of its repeat customers' tastes and preferences.

The battery life on the Kindle is nice and long (about two weeks with WiFi turned off, about seven days with WiFi enabled). The device has a 2 gigabyte memory (about 1.2 of that is available for storing your books). Speaking of WiFi, that's more or less how you order books, though you can hook the device up to your computer via USB - which is also how you'll charge it up. Using either a USB connection to your computer, or the included USB to wall outlet plug, you can charge your Kindle quickly and easily.

Among other special features, the Kindle will "read" PDFs, and supports text-to-voice if you feel like listening instead of reading.

Once you've started a book, the Kindle "marks" your place, so as soon as you access that book again, you're returned to the place where you left off. I do find that I'm not as likely to quite remember where I left off in a book when reading via Kindle. Maybe that's something that will stop being as noticeable once I've gotten used to the interface. You can read several books simultaneously, which of course is important to me, as well as a variety of newspapers and periodicals. You can also markup a document, and check for word meanings and further information.

All in all, I am very happy with my Kindle - though I have to admit, it will never entirely replace my love affair with physical books. But for ease of access, and for the ability to pull four books out of my purse while sitting in a waiting room, it can't be beat.

iPhone G4, Droid Incredible, HTC Evo

2010-06-17T14:57:00.000-04:00

The iPhone G4 marks the advent of a sea change.

Of course, we could argue that the Droid did that, too. And the HTC Evo 4G (a real guy's device, if you ask me!). In fact, the new Droid (Incredible) release has features and functions that, within the smartphone universe, make it a pretty exciting choice, as well).

So what's new and highly desirable?

For my money:

1. HD video camera
2. Large (I mean, LARGE) storage capacity
3. Flash for the still camera
4. The ability to run Flash when browsing
5. Tethering capability
6. A reasonable cost-per-month
7. Size
8. Battery life
9. Number of apps

So, let's compare these three devices - they certainly seem to be the front runners.

1. HD video camera: Yes to all three
2. Storage: Onboard, the iPhone is the winner, if you opt for the 32 gig version. The other two have SD cards, and can ultimately store up to 32 gigabytes, as well.
3. Flash for still camera: both the Droid and the HTC have dual flash, and the iPhone only single. all three have auto-focus, and both the Droid and the Evo will shoot 8 megapixel stills (the iPhone is a paltry 5).
4. Run Flash? Yes (Flash Lite) for both Droid and Evo. IPhone - nope!
5. Tethering capability: This is really a provider issue more than the phone itself. All the phones are capable, but you'll have to check out the carriers restrictions and costs for your plan.
6. A reasonable cost-per-month: Again, this one is going to depend on what services you want, and also, frankly, on coverage. Even if you have a great plan and you're getting dropped all the time, what good is it? Another $10 a month to stay connected seems reasonably cheap!
7. Size: here's another "it depends." The Evo is clearly the largest with a 4.3 inch screen (480x800 pixels). The Droid comes in at 3.7", and the iPhone at 3.5. For some, the larger the better, both for visibility and ease of typing (all are on-screen keyboards). For others, carrying around a big "brick" is not desirable. So test each in your hand and see which one feels the most friendly. I honestly didn't think I was going to like the iPhone's keyboard, or size. But I quickly adjusted and now I'd never go back to the teeny cell phone.
8. Battery life: The iPhone, with its internal battery, is hands-down the winner with an anticipated battery life of about 300 hours standby time. Both the other phones advertise 146 hours standby.
9. Number of apps: this is a tricky one, as there is a big difference between "apps" and "useful apps." However, the iPhone, with over 200K apps, clearly pummels both of the other phones (with about 70K apiece). That said, find out which apps each one offers, and make your decision according to the ones you'd actually use, not just play with once or twice and never look at again.

There is one feature of the iPhone G4, however, that I think would make me go for that one over the others, and the one that I think will make all the difference in time to come: onboard video editing.

Not only is this cool, fun, and useful, but the possibilities in terms of news coverage and vblogging are truly monumental.

Just the idea that ordinary "folks" can be on the scene of just about any event, can capture it in HD video, edit the event on the fly, and submit a fully finished "story" to a media outlet - or even post it to a website immediately, linked to Twitter for "instant" access - well, that's nothing short of incredible, and game-changing.

I'll be very interested to see what comes of this, and I hope it's not just more and better home movies of your cute cat.

Computer Monitor Recycling!

2010-06-08T19:48:00.000-04:00

While attending a meeting of the PC User's Group of Central New York, someone brought up a topic dear to my heart just now: what do I do with two old (I mean, ancient!) computer monitors that have been cluttering up my basement for... er... a few years now? Said this savant, "Take it to Best Buy!"

Here's the scoop:

"Under the law recently signed by Gov. David Paterson, all manufacturers that sell electronic equipment in the state must have a free, convenient electronic waste, or "e-waste," recycling program in effect by April 1, 2011.

"Under the new law, each manufacturer will have to recycle or reuse its market share of e-waste by weight, based on its three-year average of annual sales in the state. They'll also have to submit annual reports to the Department of Environmental Conservation documenting that they have met goals for collection and recycling.

"The law covers televisions, VCRs, DVD and MP3 players, game consoles, fax machines, and computers and their peripherals such as monitors, keyboards, mice, scanners and printers."

Says Best Buy: "You trust us when it's time to buy the latest electronics. You can also trust us to help you safely dispose of your old ones.

Regardless of where you bought it, what brand it is, or how old it is: bring it to us. We'll make sure it's properly and safely recycled. It's all part of our Greener Together™ program.

And we'll take just about anything electronic, including TVs, DVD players, computer monitors, audio and video cables, cell phones, and more. Most things are recycled absolutely free, with a few restrictions."

Now that's news I can use!

Tell Me I'm Missing Something

2010-06-06T21:13:00.000-04:00

I must be missing something here. I'm reading the magazine The Week, a tidbit about Facebook.

For those of you who aren't familiar with The Week, it's a compendium of short synopses of news stories and articles as reported by other journals worldwide. A single short article might quote several other journals or writers, some of whom may have covered the essential story very differently.

Anyway, the tidbit in question is about "Facebook's ambitions new plan to expand its presence to other websites," prompting a "sharp warning about our privacy" from Democrat Senator Charles Schumer.

Astoundingly, Schumer finds a privacy danger in Facebook users being able to click on a "like" button on pretty much any website (in essence, Facebook users will see a "like" button added as web pages as they browse). When the like button is clicked, the page will automatically appear on the user's Facebook page.

Schumer's objection to this? Quoth he, "Facebook is limiting users' ability to keep their Web browsing private."

Come again?

Let's see... I opt in for Facebook. Don't have to do it, can quit if I want.

I choose to click on the "Like" button. Or don't. If I don't, nothing gets published to my Facebook page.

Oooh, danger, Will Robinson!! People will know what I have actively added to my Facebook page as something I like!!! My privacy has been invaded!

I am the first one to not like invasive practices on the Internet. I don't like it when I'm sent places I never intended to go, I certainly don't like it when software is downloaded to my computer without my knowledge or consent; I'm not even crazy about having my habits and tasted tracked and used, even in the aggregate, to target me and others like me more effectively with marketing.

But still... this is an all voluntary arrangement. Either the article as reported, or Chuck Schumer, are way off base on this one.

Waving Works!

2010-06-04T10:50:00.000-04:00

When it first launched, I was a beta user of Google's Wave.

Funny thing, I never really used it! I'm not sure why, but I suspect I just didn't "get" it.

Part of the problem, if indeed "problem" it is, is that a Wave is so many things - IM, email, document, discussion. It's hard to know what your point of entry is.

With later iterations, that has been cleared up somewhat. For one thing, there are now use cases, which helps us understand how people have successfully used a Wave; for another, there are pre-formatted Waves: discussions, meetings, brainstorming, voting. This helps us get a handle on how we might actually put one of these into action.

So let's use a very mundane example: sometime in October my family and I (in different combinations) get into two important discussions: where are we meeting for the various holidays, and what gifts we will jointly get for all our other family members. What this has meant is a ton of emails, a few phone calls, and a lot of confusion.

Here is a nice application for a wave, or a series of connected waves. You can create a single wave, and then address elements (blips, or wavelets... that is to say, individual messages or sub-threads) to selected groups from your entire universe of Wave participants.

So think of your whole family as participants in the Wave. They're all privy to where are we going to meet? Who's bringing what food? Where is everybody staying? And so on. Then, you have subgroups: Buying for mom, buying for Aunt Susie, buying for cousin Matt, and so on. Needless to say, cousin Matt is excluded from the sub-thread discussion of his gift, but everyone else is automatically included and able to chime in.

Now, you address all your ideas and comments to everyone in the thread, you can share images, links, and other pertinent data immediately and with all the Wave participants. You can even schedule a time to be on "live" as a group, so you can have a "right here right now" discussion. And if someone can't make it, they can catch up with the discussion later (Waves are stored and searchable).

You can even send out a voting proposition: "Get Aunt Susie the blue hand-knit sweater." Participants can vote yes, no, maybe.

And there are far more sophisticated uses for Waves, such as getting a far-flung work team together to brainstorm, or even share the writing of a document. There are task lists which can be shared with your team - and remember, you can link a series of Waves together so that a project's shared discussions can all share a common reference point.

All in all, it's time to give Google's Wave another look.

InfoShare

2010-05-25T10:14:00.000-04:00

My parents used to talk about what things were like when they went to school; my grandparents talked about what things were like when people still had manners. Now we talk about what things were like back in the wild, wild west of the Internet.

"Remember sitting and "surfing" for hours just to see what you'd find?"

It's true, 15 years ago we spent a lot more time hunting around, following trails, and discovering hidden gems of Internet lore. I even had a book - a book! - that, kind of like the phone book, provided URLs to "all the home pages" (home pages!) on the world wide web."

Now, with social networking, instant messaging, and email as part of our minute-to-minute existence, interesting websites get passed around readily from person to person, and there are websites like "All My Faves" that classify and list sites of particular interest. A day almost never goes by that someone doesn't send me an interesting website to explore.

Another trend is toward news magazines and daily updates from these news magazines, many of which are simply cataloging and organizing online content for you based on an interest profile. Urban Daddy is one of these, so is Thrillest, both of which are aimed at young, professional, urban males.

Users can opt for a daily email update, which typically contains the latest stories posted on these sites (all of them ad-sponsored - and what a boon to advertisers who now know exactly to whom they are speaking, and have the instant gratification of knowing exactly how their ads performed!), or they can subscribe via RSS for notifications of new content.

The sites are also very fond of viral sharing of content, and will usually make it very easy for readers to email a story to a friend.

Which leads me to one of the purposes of this post: a friend recently did forward me an email notification from Thrillest, featuring another great Internet idea: service swapping. We all know about Freecycle, and Craigs List, where we can exchange, sell, or give away goods, get jobs, and find dates (and other friends).

Featured application "Swap Right" aims to hook people up to swap services: I'll bake you a cake for your wedding if you'll landscape my garden; you change my oil and I'll babysit your kids.

One caveat where many of these great networking ideas is concerned: they work best in densely populated areas. So while places like Syracuse can have modest success with them, the sheer numbers of choices you get in a New York or Boston will make them much more successful than in our neighborhood.

The Year in Google

2010-05-22T10:05:00.000-04:00

I'm getting ready to do a yearly presentation to the PC User's Group of CNY. Several years ago, I started doing a yearly Google update - I guess I had become known as a Google Girl. I'm not sure there is such an archetype, but if there is, I surely fit the mold. I've been a fan of Google since it was first launched.

At that time, Chuck Swanson, Al Fasoldt and I were still doing the TimeWarner weekly call-in show, Point 'n' Click. I had started using Google pretty much as soon as it was launched, and my co-hosts were amused that as soon as a topic was brought up on the show, I'd busily type a query into the now-famous search engine, and come back with amazingly accurate, on-target results.

That, of course, was the beauty of Google.

The other search engines (Yahoo, HotBot, AltaVista, etc.) all, in my opinion, monetized too quickly. That is to say, they allowed companies to pay for search terms. This, of course, seriously reduced the relevance of the results on any given search. Users were forced to wade through pages of paid-for placement before getting to actual, useful results.

Not so Google. Simple interface, straightforward results. Just what the world was waiting for.

And Google has kept its corporate eye on the prize - yes, it's a corporation and ultimately, it wants to make money. Its mission, according to its founders, is to organize all the information in the world (dare we say, universe?). This is a wonderful mission, to may way of thinking, because you never get "there." The goal is cloudy at best, and moving for certain - speeding away from us much faster than we can gain on it. Google employees will have something to do for the rest of their lives, their children's lives, and their children's children's lives.

Some people find this a little ominous, and I have to admit that we don't yet know the potential of having that much data - especially data about human behavior - not only available but quantified. Google has been amassing information about us, what we do, when we do it, how long we do it... since 1998. And just as Amazon never fails to amaze me in its ability to predict which products I'm likely to want to buy, Google knows probably more about my predictable behavior than I do!

Each year, as I prepare to do my presentation, I think about the ways in which Google has become part of my life: of course it's my search engine of choice. And now I extensively use Google Chrome as my browser (though I have to say that, as with search engines in days of yore, I used different browsers to accomplish different chores, because they don't all behave the same way with various technologies). I use Google Maps when I want to find out how to go somewhere, and how long it will take me to get there. (I also use this tool on my iPhone.)

I use Google Voice and have a phone number with that service, though this one hasn't caught on as well as I'd like. I loved th idea that I could program all my phone numbers (office, cell, home, and/or others) into the service, and it would ring through to all of them, allowing me to selectively pick up or not. It also asked the caller to identify himself (once was enough from each discrete phone number) and then I could pick up or let it go to voice mail. All my voice mails were transcribed and stored for me, and the message was sent to my Gmail (or other email account).

I use Google docs, of course. And I'm writing this now on Blogger, a blogging service Google picked up when it became apparent that blogging wasn't just a momentary fad. (I'm always amused at the way people tend to dismiss new technologies-cum-communication methods: they're fads and will never catch on. Like podcasts. Or Twitter. Or Facebook.)

Google Buzz and Wave have never really caught fire - and I'm not sure why. Buzz is perhaps just another also-ran. What's good about it is that it's available right on your Gmail interface. What's not good about it is it simply never developed the cachet of Twitter. Perhaps it was tied too tightly to the Google brand? Wave, supposedly a collaborative tool, is another idea that was good in concept, but just hasn't happened in reality.

I have found lots of use, though, for Google Sites. Both as a social tool (you can use them to set up a site where family members can organize a family reunion, for example, and share photos and videos after the event) or as a business tool (I use them to create project sites for my work projects - a location where all the details of a project can be stored, and where anyone associated with that project can have 24/7 access to links, files, progress reports, and to-do lists).

My next chore in preparing for my presentation will be to dig into Google Labs. If you've not been there, this is a great place to explore to get the pulse of what's going on in the computer technology world. Google Labs is all about the online technologies that Google is exploring, and that are almost-ready-for-prime-time. Of course, it won't tell you what other exciting stuff is going on under the covers, so to speak, but it does give you hints - and usually lets you play with products as they getting ready for general release.

One thing that seems very apparent to me: more and more of us will rely on Cloud Computing, plus small, portable notebooks (which will need very little in the way of processor and hard drive, because they will be mainly connecting to massive, ultra-fast servers, where all the software and data you'll be using will reside). Why carry a big fat old laptop around, when you can tuck a tiny, thin, cool-running notebook into your purse or briefcase, and link up just about anywhere to get your work done? And now, with built-in cell phone connections, you'll have access virtually anywhere you go.

Well, as you can see, I do love doing my homework for this annual event. (Sure, force me to learn about Google!) If you're out and about, stop by the Liverpool Library on Monday, June 7 at 7pm, and say hello.

A Little Spin

2010-05-19T10:00:00.000-04:00

A friend sent me a link to a pretty scary website.

Oh, yeah, there are lots of scary websites out there, but this one has a particularly creepy appeal.

It's called Chatroulette, and its entire purpose is to pair random strangers from anywhere in the world into webcam-based chats.

Now, the notion of chatting with total strangers is just about as old as the web itself - and yes, it always had creepy overtones, and was always used for, shall we say, less than savory purposes. I recall back in the 90s when everyone was flocking online, chat rooms were all the rage. Users would sign up for a chat service - AOL offered them as part of its basic service, no special software or skills required - and then drop in to a "room" where a bunch of people would "be" holding a text-based conversation. Sometimes, two users would drift off into the corner...er, private room... where they could chat one on one, because the real downside to chat rooms was that most of the "chat" was even more inane and boring than a typical cocktail party - and even more disjointed. After a while, two or three people would end up controlling the conversation, and everyone else would be reduced to "lurking," or sitting back and just watching the most "talkative" engage.

Frequently, of course, the reason for the private chat was monkey business. While I always found this strange and risible, some people really seemed to enjoy it.

Now comes Chatroulette, which takes the basic model and amps it up with a web camera (which of course has been employed in other chat situations), and a pairing algorithm.

The point is to log on, initiate your camera, and you'll be paired with another random user for a chat.

The site was created by a high school student from Moscow, and has become the darling of the media - probably just because it does have the potential to be both interesting (you can end up chatting with someone half way around the world, brush up on your Italian as you chat with someone in Rome, or learn first hand about the volcanic eruptions in Iceland) and nasty (come on, its cameras and strangers).

Predictably, most users are American males, and equally predictably, there is plenty of objectionable content - or, more to the point, plenty of hoped for objectionable content! As Wikipedia tells us, "A user was twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than to encounter actual female nudity."

When a user doesn't like the person with whom he's been paired, he "spins" for another conversation, or "nexts," leading to the insulting expression, "You've been nexted."

The site's creator, as of March of this year, was running it from his bedroom - and hosting about 1.5 million users, give or take.

Make it Easy to Use!

2010-05-14T08:45:00.000-04:00

What brilliant software programmer came up with "Reply All?" This is just one of the many puzzles of usability that truly fascinate me.

Usability is the emerging study of what's called "HCI," or "human computer interaction (or interface)."

Just because you can do it from the standpoint of the programming is no reason to do it. We've always got to consider human tendencies.

For example, one thing we know about humans - and it's not a particularly pretty truth in many ways - we will find a way to use almost any new technology for the purposes of sex. In fact, if we find a way to use something for sex (for example, VHS tapes), that fact alone will propel the technology forward. So it's a given that social networking would promptly devolve into a means to engage in some form of sexual interaction; we now have "sexting," or exchanging sexual texts on our cell phones; webcams quickly became a way to engage in long distance sex or even to market sexual favors over the internet.

My point isn't so much to go into a rant about using technology for prurient purposes: it's more to suggest that we really do need to consider the human factor in any computer engineering.

A while back I whined about the fact that all those swipe card instruments at stores treat "credit or debit" protocols differently - there is no one single approach so that once you've learned it, you've learned it for good. Fortunately, software designers were smart enough to, for the most part, adopt the shopping cart system pioneered by Amazon. The point is, is worked. People got it; people were able to use it. Once you learned it, you were able to apply the terminology and basic process across a wide variety of websites and applications. Not so the swipe card: with some systems you hit "Cancel" if you wanted to apply your card as credit versus debit; with others you hit "Enter."

Nobody wants to be confused. Nobody wants his time wasted. Nobody wants to click around trying desperately to get a job done. Remember, the object when we're on a retail website, or at a DIY gas pump is: get the job done, not play with interface.

I recently tried to update my Garmin GPS maps. I have never encountered so many roadblocks in my .life! What was odd was that the software acted as though it was taking care of business for me - it said, plug in your unit and we'll tell you what to do. Ha!

First, it was a "registration required" upgrade. Interestingly, the website allowed me to buy the maps without a "registered" product. It did not, however, allow me to download these maps to my "unregistered" product. Of course, I'd registered my unit years ago - the email account with which I'd registered it didn't even exist any more.

When I finally got the registration problem solved (it took a call to Customer Service, during which I was informed there was a half hour wait time, and that I should call back "in the morning," (it was 9:30 am), and an email to Customer Service, after which I had to wait two days for a replay), I went through the whole download and unpack the maps, upgrade your browser plug in, run the software which took (no kidding) an hour, I finally, finally got to attempt to install the maps only to find out that the software would not run on Windows 7. Of course, no indication was given to me of this little glitch - and surely, surely Windows 7 is widespread enough now that this should be considered a major warning to users!

I think you get my point. Usability is a key discipline in this brave new world of computers.

Oh, and one more not-so-small point. Usability is not a design issue! Some of the worst usability I've ever encountered has come from designers. Designers, particularly those who come from the print world, are not particularly interested in how usable a product is,only in how pretty it is.

One designer I know created an interface that was meant to be used by a presenter. He was supposed to grab a tiny - invisible - handle on a scroll bar with his mouse (or touch pad) while presenting, and scroll a small window to a non-locking location to show his audience the next set of bullet points. What?? Yes, it looked nice - tiny and elegant and had nice fades at either side of the active part of the scrolling window. But usable? Not even remotely.

Usability is part industrial design, part common sense, and mostly, a real understanding of how people tend to, and like to, do things - what we already know, what we expect, and what we're comfortable doing.

Droid Appeal

2010-05-13T14:29:00.000-04:00

"The Motorola Droid is an Internet and multimedia enabled smartphone designed by Motorola, which runs Google's Android operating system." (Wikipedia.)

But that doesn't really tell you much, does it?

So far, the buzz on the Droid has been all that and more. While I do have a couple of friends who started out on the iPhone, moved to the Droid, and are less than enchanted, almost everyone I know who has gone from regular-old-smartphone to Droid is delighted.

With its similar form factor, and touchscreen interface, the Droid is clearly an entrant into the iPhone space, with an aim at doing the iPhone at least one better. For example, Droid will do search-by-voice command, a primary feature of the Droid, but only working on specific apps on the iPhone. A lot has been written about the Droid versus the iPhone, but from what most reviewers can ascertain, it's a genuine neck and neck contest - right down to the data plans and cost of the phone. Truly exclusive to the American version of the phone are software applications: Google Maps Navigation, an Amazon MP3 Store applet, and Verizon Wireless Visual Voice Mail management.

The Android operating system, which is what powers the Droid phone, is a key, and potentially lethal differentiator between it and the iPhone. With the release of Android 2.2 late this month, users are anxiously awaiting a host of significant predicted enhancements:
Tethering: (Tethering is the use of a mobile device such as a mobile phone to supply Internet access for another device which is otherwise unconnected, using the mobile device as a modem); Android is expected to provide tethering via USB
WiFi Hotspot: Android will act as a hot spot for other WiFi enabled devices (it's unclear if these two features will be offered at a cost by providers)
Full Adobe Flash support (a feature not available on the iPhone, and annoying as heck when browsing the Internet these days!)
More speed: some benchmarks show Android 2.2 providing up to a 450 percent boost
Apps on SD card: there is also some speculation that Android 2.2 will allow users to install applications on an SD card, so the number of apps you can run would no longer be limited by the built-in memory of the phone.

One major complaint about the Droid that I've heard has nothing to do with the OS: many users complain that "typing" is just not as easy on the Droid. It was hard enough for me to make the conversion to the virtual keypad of the iPhone - in fact, it was a major consideration when I made the switch. I had heard users complain that it too more than a little getting used to. If text messages I get from friends is any testimony, it's clear that the Droid really is more difficult to use - typo occurrence is way up, as far as I can see! Or perhaps the auto-correct algorithm is not as sophisticated - and frequently inventive and entertaining - as the iPhone's.

Some friends have also speculated that the Droid may grab market the way Microsoft did from Apple way back in the 90s: just open the OS to developers, and watch them make a market for you.

So far, I'm keeping my iPhone. But then I only have a year to go on my contract...

Google Docs Rock!

2010-04-23T10:34:00.000-04:00

I love Google Docs.

This morning, I'm getting ready for work. I have a little laptop nearby, and I was checking emails, and there was notification in my Gmail that a shared spreadsheet had been altered by one of its owners.

Clicking the email open, I learned what values on the spreadsheet had been changed. So I got double, no, triple... wait, quadruple! notification: the sheet had been adjusted; I knew who did it; what was done, and I knew what time it was done. Wow.

I've been using Google Docs for a long time, and if this is an application you haven't discovered, I can only tell you to give it a try.

Google Docs supplies the full functionality of Word Processing, Spreadsheets, and presentation software (like PowerPoint), all free, and all fully web-enabled, meaning, you can share them with others for viewing or editing. This last is of course the feature of Google Docs which makes them most powerful.

The people with whom you share a Google Doc don't need any software to open, view, and edit your document. There are no "version" issues (whenever Microsoft, for example, issues a new version of PointPoint or Word, and a user saves a document using a new version, there are potential conflicts when another user tries to open (and edit) that same document using an older version of the program in question). There are no problems with version control (this is another use of the word "version," referring to the problem of two people opening and editing a document at the same time, usually not knowing someone else is editing it. Microsoft and other program makers try to overcome this by locking a document when it's open for editing by Person A, but Person B can just open a copy and go right ahead and edit!). Google Docs handles version control by first being web-based, meaning, editing can go on simultaneously by two or more people because it's all real time. I don't save the document to a drive, it's stored online - so if I change a word, that word is changed right then and there.

In addition Google Docs tells me that someone else is online with that document open, making changes to it. In fact, it will even notify me who it is, and what cell of a spread sheet they're making a change to.

Another great feature of Google Docs is that any improvement to the software is immediate and requires nothing from me to take advantage of it - no costly upgrades, no installation of anything. It's just there.

Some people worry about the security of a document on Google Docs. While it is true that your document is stored "in the cloud," (that is, on Google's servers) rather than on your hard drive, there is a remedy for that, too. You can download your document and delete it from cyberspace. Now whether the Evil Empire has kept a copy and will use it against you some day, I can't say. I do know that I have been using this service for years now, and I have not yet had a negative experience as a result.

The one thing you need to do to use Google Docs is open a Google Account. And that's about it. To open a Google Account, just search for iGoogle or Google Accounts, and you will be walked through the steps necessary to get started. Once you have a Google Account open, you can opt to get Gmail, or start a blog with Blogger, shop using Froogle, or do an amazing number of things using the many online applications Google offers.

Recycling Technology

2010-04-15T09:56:00.000-04:00

Where do old computers go to die?

Or, vampire-like, get resurrected?

One place is to a warehouse is Rochester, NY, and to the ministrations of Chris Colbey, owner of Colbey Technologies.

Colbey came to his current business indirectly - as many entrepreneurs do - having worked as a project manager on specialized construction sites. Simply tiring of the travel and the demands of the work, he apparently indulged another passion for technology, and an amazingly broad and deep knowledge of that technology, to create his asset recovery business.

Essentially, Chris will take your old computers, printers, monitors, smart phones, phone systems - you name it - and will repair, reformat, reuse and resell that equipment, saving the owner on disposal fees, and possibly making a profit in the bargain.

Colbey was green before green became popular. As his brochure indicates, "We have over 15 years of environmental experiences in compliance methods dealing with solid and hazardous waste. We are dedicated to the environment and no other company in New York State can make that claim."

I visited his warehouse and was toured around. Equipment is roughly divided into technologies: piles of old monitors here; laptops there, some in parts-only mode, some waiting repair and refurbishing. Up front he plans to have a store front to attract some walk-in trade (and believe me, any geeky type who loves the idea of resurrecting and reusing technology will feel like the proverbial kid in a candy store here), as well as offering some office furniture.

Refurbishing services include "computer repair and reformat (single to triple pass that meets or exceeds DOD specifications), monitor and printer processing and repair, as well as handling other technology equipment. We also offer equipment destruction services." (For computers that have held sensitive information, for example.)

While Colbey's target is the enterprise-level customer, he can also help you out on a one-off basis, and can frequently find that oddball part that you need to repair your computer, or just the right new-to-you powerful machine at a discount.

Contact Chris as:
Colbey Technologies
585-732-6865
sales@colbeytech.com

Daily Dose

2010-04-05T12:26:00.000-04:00

Every day just before noon or so - there's no official time for it - someone in my office passes around something funny from the Internet. It's not really an organized event. I think people are just starting to get ready for a little break, and by then, something has arrived in someone's email, or been RSS'd to their iGoogle home page, or texted to them, and suddenly, someone will burst out laughing.

Naturally, we all want to know why, and pretty quickly, an IM shows up with a link.

The latest was the YouTube channel, "Will it Blend?"
http://www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec

This one is good for about fifteen minutes of laughter, groans, and commentary. It's definitely one of the better ones.

In fact, YouTube is a great source of office humor.

I thought I'd share a few other sources of momentary amusement from the Internet.

http://theoatmeal.com/

http://www.ruethedayblog.com/

http://cuteoverload.com/

http://epicwinftw.com/

http://xkcd.com/723/

And a few that are just fun and interesting to check out:

http://www.likecool.com

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com

http://www.boingboing.net/

Enjoy!

Not for Squares

2010-03-19T11:55:00.000-04:00

Let's say you sold shoes in New York City.

Let's also say that you knew Susie Q loved to buy shoes and lived in New York City.

And then suppose you knew that Susie just happened to be having lunch with friends in your neighborhood.

Now what if you could invite Susie over to see some new Manolo Blahnik's you have in stock - and that if she shows up in the next hour, she can get a discount?

It may not be quite that perfect, but that is the idea behind a kinda-new geolocating social networking app, Foursquare. It actually sounds, in theory, more like a game: "Foursquare is a web and mobile application that allows registered users to connect with friends and update their location. Points are awarded on weekends and non-business hours for "checking in" at venues. Users can choose to have theirTwitter and/or their Facebook accounts updated when they check in." (Wikipedia)

Though I can't confirm it, I'm guessing that the name is a play on the game Four Square, which is a game played with a basketball in which players attempt to score points by hitting a target square. Each player (four) stands in a target zone, or quadrant. So the idea is to score points by putting the ball in a location.That's kind of what Foursquare.com is all about, too.

Users get "badges" and other awards depending on when and how often they check in at participating locations. Your location information and badge status are reported to your "friend" network, with the added bonus of your being able to share your location and activity with your buds. So let's say you're out for a late-night drink at a popular hot spot; anybody on your network will learn that, and can join you there.

Again, from Wikipedia: "Foursquare started out in 2009 with limited availability in only 100 worldwide metro areas: Amsterdam, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver,Detroit, Helsinki, Houston, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego,San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington,D.C., Seoul, and Bombay, India. In January 2010, Foursquare changed their location model to allow check-ins from any location worldwide. As of March 2010, the service had 500,000 users internationally.

Foursquare currently has iPhone, Android, Palm, webOS, BlackBerry, andWindows Mobile application.

In February 2010, the company entered into new commercial partnerships with Zagat, Bravo, Conde Nast, The New York Times and several other firms to offer tips, specials and new badges to followers."

Right now, Foursquare's stats look like this:<
Over 500,000 users
Over 1,000,000 badges have been awarded
Over 1.4 million venues with 1200 offering specials
Over 15.5 million check-ins.

So while the application really does target big cities and the young adult out-and-about crowd, it's easy to see how marketers might be salivating at the idea of an interested group getting just-in-time messaging that they might actually appreciate getting, versus the old "throw enough stuff against a wall" model of advertising.

There are a few things to be said about the privacy aspect of this application (and frankly, any of the many geo-locating applications that are just gaining popularity recently). There is always a danger in letting (potentially) the world know you're not at home, or in letting the world know that you're a single woman out at 2am. Duly noted, and the jury is still out on this aspect of this type of social networking. About that I can only comment, it didn't take all that long for criminals to figure out how to capitalize on Craigslist, either.

Let's see where this one takes us!

Spot(ify) On!

2010-03-17T15:20:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting insight: did you know that you're not getting the "full" Internet experience?

Well, that's kind of an exaggeration, and it's a bit of a stretch from the example I'll give you to my conclusion, but bear with me!

I recently felt like the left-out-kid when I followed a funny thread and found a very nasty, but viral, video that all the ICs (Internet Cognoscenti) had been passing around for quite a while. To get the gist (and don't tell your mom I sent you here!), take a look at this "reaction video." http://www.comedycentral.com/tosh.0/2009/07/09/2-girls-1-cup-the-biggest-reaction-video-ever/
The real "story" behind the story isn't the truly twisted video... it's shooting the reaction of the people who watch the disgusting thing. And as it turns out, there is a whole small industry in "reaction" videos to this, and no doubt other funny/weird/revolting content.

Now, I keep up with a lot of stuff on the Internet. I have three full pages of RSS feeds, many of which are simply aggregator sites, on my iGoogle site. Between that, and the stuff I get passed from my friends and co-workers, I feel as though I don't miss a lot.

But then you find out about an application like Spotify (www.spotify.com), and you can't help but wonder what else you're missing. And the reason you're missing it is even more concerning: because the site is designed to supply music content, and because there is no obvious payback to the record industry, they're not supporting it. You simply can't access this service inside the US. (Right now, Spotify is only available in Finland, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.)

The idea behind Spotify is to make a library of millions of songs available instantly on your computer, or your mobile device. Spotify also allows you to share songs with your friends. You discover a great tune and pass it along. Included with your Spotify membership are such features as offline music, playlists, sharing, "find similar," biographies of groups, purchase, search, and even artist-dedicated streaming radio.

The record industry, of course, would prefer we bought the songs via iTunes for $.99. There's nothing to say that you still wouldn't like to have the song in your owned library. While Spotify does permit you to create playlists, even collaborative playlists (for that open office space tune sharing, or a Friday night get together), I would still want to have a locally owned library. And Spotify does have a "premium," or paid level, ($15/month) which shows no ads (oh, did I forget to tell you? the basic plan includes ads, which is how the folks at Spotify make their money). Ostensibly, there is room in there for payback to the record industry. It's just that their ever-dwindling share of that once-fat pie would shrink further still.

No, I won't hide the fact that I think that the record industry behaved badly for so long it's hard to let them off the hook. I think that rather than $.99 per song they could be charging $.50 and still making a decent profit. And I think that for years, they stood as gatekeepers between us and who-knows-how-many amazing talents: they simply would not cut records for or promote artists they chose to ignore. And there were few, if any, avenues for these artists to get in front of the public (other than through local venues). Now, while there are still some marketing and managing benefits to an artist or group having a label, it's not an absolute pre-requisite. Through avenues like Blip.fm, or Pandora, users can find music "similar" to something else they like, discovering all kinds of new talent along the way. Some of my greatest musical adventures have been avenues chasing from one artist to the next, all because a Blip DJ I like blipped a song, I "discovered" it, and that led me to try a song that came up as an erroneous result, and... well, you get the idea.

And because I publish my blips to my Facebook and Twitter accounts, my friends have heard many of these songs, discover them, and then often return something to me saying,"If you like that..."

I wholeheartedly endorse this kind of viral movement of music throughout the Internet.

So I was really disappointed to discover that I'd have to wait - perhaps indefinitely - for Spotify to come to a computer near me. Here's how The Daily Beast's Nicholas Ciarelli explained it:

According to reports, Google and Spotify have considered a partnership in which consumers would be able to use Spotify's premium service for no charge on an Android smartphone, while Google would foot the users' bill. Spotify has a similar arrangement with Telia, a Swedish mobile carrier that bundles the music service with its phones and pays for the first three to six months. For Google's Android software, such a partnership would be a deft maneuver against Apple's iPhone, the defending champion of smartphones.

"Deal or no deal, though, the most consequential roadblock to the U.S. launch has been anemic support from some of the major U.S. record labels, which speculate that not enough users will upgrade from Spotify's free, ad-supported service to the premium version. Witness the statements by Warner Music chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. during a conference call with analysts last month. "Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry, and as far as Warner Music's concerned will not be licensed," he said. "This sort of 'get all the music you want for free and then maybe we can with a few bells and whistles move you to a premium price' strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.""

Perhaps we won't buy as much music as we once did. There are certain songs I don't mind listening to, but I don't care if I own them. So yes, if they were available free, my $.99 would not make the coffers of the RIAA. My personal feeling about that is: if advertising money supported the artists and the distribution network, then that would be fine with me. And, I would be willing to pay a reasonable premium fee to pay the artists and the distribution system, have access to a full and rich library of listening, and not necessarily house a particular song on my own hard drive.

Whatever the ethics and path we take to get there, clearly, the recording industry is changing - has changed - and will never go back to the way it once was. And an application like Spotify is one good alternative.

For Five Bucks I'd...

2010-03-11T10:25:00.000-05:00

Ever have one of those goofy ideas for making money?

Mine was "permission." For a small fee, you could call me and tell me some crazy thing you wanted to do - chuck it all and move to a cabin in the woods; buy a new car; spend the day at home watching old movies - and I would give you permission.

I figured that often, that's all we needed to help us make a final decision. We were simply waiting for mom or dad or teacher or somebody to step in and say, "Permission granted."

If you've ever had one of these brilliant schemes, then you're going to want to check out Fiverr - the place for people to share things they're willing to do for $5.

It's really pretty simple. Offers are posted by most recent, or according to category.

To offer:
Name your service.
Share it on Fiverr.
When an order comes in, you're notified. Assuming you want to do it, you accept.
Your get a $4 credit on Fiverr once your work is delivered.
Collect your earnings via PayPal.

To buy:
Find the service you want.
Pay $5 via PayPal or credit.
Communicate with the seller, and be sure the service is performed. (Fixes should be done within the first 24 hours.)
Provide feedback and review to Fiverr.com

So what kinds of things are offered for $5?

On today's home page (which by default displays the most recent):
I will review your website and offer SEO advice
I will write your company name on my arm
I will create an Avatar movie portrait from your picture
I will leave flirtatious/didn't-we-have-so-much-fun comments on your Facebook wal
I will send you a postcard from Morocco by post
etc.

Predictably, some are fun and silly. Interestingly, some of them are kind of ok! Unfortunately, you can't solicit services, so let's say I wanted a target audience member to take a look at my website and give me feedback - I couldn't advertise for these folks, and pay a hundred or so of them to take a look and tell me what they think.

But the site is relatively new, so that feature may be in the works.

In the meantime, amuse yourself, or find someone willing to cut your grass for five bucks. That would be a deal!

Camera de-Bugs

2010-03-05T12:17:00.000-05:00

More iPhone updates.

I have a 3G. One of my (few) big beefs with this phone was that in a single, but very significant way, I went backward when I switched from my Motorola Razr to my iPhone: no video! With my old phone I could take photos and also short video clips. For inexplicable reasons, the 3G would not record video, though a jailbroke 3G could (so clearly, it wasn't a technology issue!), and the 3GS would.

The other annoying thing was that the camera lacked a zoom control!

Just recently, I installed three little applications that took care of all that. And your phone needn't be jailbroke to get them!

First, there's iVideoCamera from the labs @ laan. This is an extremely cool little app that allows video recording, WiFi Sharing (via networks like Twitter and Facebook), SMS sharing, and emailing.

In addition to shooting and sharing, users can store and process video using effects (4 are included, additional effects are for a nominal download fee). Included are Vintage, Heat, Snow and Breaking News. You can also opt for Dancing Hearts, Night Vision, Infinite Zoom, and the brand new "obama vision," whatever that is, among others.

It works pretty much as promised - a nice quality video was sent to a friend in reasonably quick time. And it's only $.99!

Next, to solve the zoom problem, and get some other nifty features as well, download Gorillacam from Joby. A free app, this one allows you to zoom, and with the "anti-shake" feature enabled, will do a reasonably good job of stabilizing and focusing those closeup photos. You can also enable time-lapse, a bubble level, a grid, a three-shot burst (kinda like the old motor wind for rapid-fire photo sequences), a self-timer, and here's my favorite: if you've ever tried to take a photo of yourself, or one of you and a friend, you know how difficult it is to hit the little camera icon when it's on the "back" side of your iPhone. With the "Press Anywhere" feature, you can touch any spot on the face of the phone to snap a photo. Sweet!

Finally, there's CameraBag from NeverCenter. This app lets you shoot a photo, and then filter it to create some fun (and even useful!) effects. Granted, it's a $2.99 application, but with it you can add these effects to your shots:

Helga: this desaturates and adds a vignette border as well as crops the photo.
Lolo: crops the photo to a square, adds a white border and increases situation and contrast.
Cinema: desaturates photo and adds a blue tone to the photo.
Ansel: Adds white border and converts picture to Black & White (grayscale).
1962: converts to black & white (grayscale) and increases contrast.
1974s: adds sepia tone to photo, adds white border and crops photo.
Fisheye: Creates a bubble type of effect with your photo. (not really fisheye).
Infrared: Converts the photo to black & white (grayscale) then Inverts the colors.

This application is also available for your desktop.

So, for a $4 investment, you can go from a so-so iPhone 3G to a robust-featured camera phone in three quick downloads.

Who's @ First?

2010-02-23T12:47:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid I read a story about someone tracking down the origin of jokes.

The idea of "who was the first to get this idea" always stuck with me. Who thought up bread, for example? I can see where alcohol would have happened accidentally: you have some fruit juice sitting out and it turns to alcohol. (Though why anybody would have drunk it the first time eludes me...) But bread requires yeast, and measurements. Ok, ok... you start with flat bread or pancakes, which sort of make sense. And yeast does occur naturally under the right circumstances. But why bake it? Why eat it?

This sort of "spontaneous combustion" happens all the time in our world. Somehow, somewhere, an idea generates, and somehow, some way, it gets passed along, but more importantly, it gets adopted. People get it. They use it. (There is a whole interest in, and discussion of memes, or ideas that catch hold and pass along with seemingly little effort. Some think that this happens because the time is right - there are really no "new" ideas, it's just a matter of when the right time for an idea comes along.)

Take, for example, the @ symbol when referring to a person or a person's statements.

This actually began with Twitter: "Twitter, though, may rely on user-generated innovation more than any other company. Early on, Twitter users started referring to others by typing the @ symbol before their name. For example, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, recently wrote about his wife: “Wow, @Livia just took her homemade vegan lasagna out of the oven — I’m hungry!”

“That one really took us by surprise,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive and a founder. Since then, Twitter has added a section to the site where people can see every time they are mentioned with the @ symbol. It began hyperlinking the names so others can click on them to see the subject’s profile page." (From The New York Times.)

Now I see this symbol crop up all over - for example, on Blip.fm, if you want to refer to another person's blip of a song, you use the @ symbol. And I see it even in IMs and texts when quoting another.

Who, I wondered, was responsible for this originally? Why the @ symbol? Why did it seem "right" and catch on? (I can't argue that it seemed right; I found myself using it to designate a person's comments even before I realized it was being done outside of Twitter by others.)

I did a bit of digging, and so far I can't find who was the originator. But I'd love to find out. So if anybody has an inside info, let me know!

What's the Buzz

2010-02-15T12:06:00.000-05:00

What's the newest with Google?

Something called "Buzz."

This is more or less, as near as I can tell, Google's answer to Twitter. And since it's integrated into your Google "stuff" immediately, there is no need to sign on to another app or find friends to get started. So as usual, Google has taken something good, and gone one better.

Google's advantage, of course, is that once you have a Google account, whether for Gmail or any other Google function, there's a lot of integrated info Google can supply to its newest endeavor.

Opt in to Google Buzz, and it will be automatically integrated into your Gmail window; you will automatically be following and followed by other people who have opted in and are in your address book.

Google's description of the service is, "Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. You're already set up to follow the people you email and chat with the most."

Where it seems to go Twitter or Plurk-like services one better is in offering quick and easy sharing of photos and video, as well as updates; but you can also link your Twitter, Picassa, Flickr and Google Readers information.

Share publicly, or privately, and add Buzz to your smart phone to send - and geolocate - updates.

And something tells me that, unlike the unfortunately named "Plurk," Buzz is a name that lends itself to "verbification." (I made that up.) While we struggled with what to call our Twittering activities ("I tweeted it," or "I twittered,") buzzing something is easy to say and to understand.

As I said, Google just has a knack for making a good idea even better.

Re: Pardon Me

2010-02-05T11:58:00.000-05:00

What makes a "meme" go viral?

(Translation: why does a thought, idea, song, picture, whatever, strike a chord in people so that it becomes one of the "right things" to talk about?)

Whole lifetimes have been spent contemplating, studying, and writing about why an idea like Christianity, for example, hit at just the right moment in human history for it to "catch on." The ideas themselves weren't necessarily new, but for some reason the moment was right for people to truly hear and accept them. Likewise the Enlightenment (which spawned more than one revolution based on the need to be self-governing, a massive departure from the feudalism that preceded it, at least in Western culture), feminism (which made several attempts but didn't really capture our imaginations until the 60s), or an interest in vampires (this one has come and gone a few times, but right now it's serious fiction fodder).

About two weeks ago, a web-scourer posted a video on the web culture/tech site, Boing Boing. It was a dreadful but also funny video of a woman (Maxine Swaby) singing a song called "Pardon Me." The production values are horrific, the song itself is trite and silly, and her performance is, what shall I say, amateur at best. But for some reason, it was also worth passing along to friends.

When I first listened to it on YouTube, it had about 300 hits.

I forwarded it to my friends at work, who immediately embraced it - passing it along, and even learning the song and playing it on guitars, or bursting into a chorus randomly during the day.

Soon the "re:'s" started appearing on YouTube.

A "re:" (which is also used in the verb form, as in, "We can re that.") is basically a video that comments on another posted video. Sometimes the re will expand on an idea, sometimes it will pick apart another video. Recent res also include a shot of the original post - as in, the new poster sits in front of his computer screen, plays the original video, and then does his commentary or expansion while the original plays in the background.

In the case of "Pardon Me," we literally sat and watched as this video went viral. Within an hour or two, the hits were in the thousands, then the hundreds of thousands. Even more impressive, though, was the number of re videos that have been posted. Other people singing along with the, er, performer, Maxine Swaby; people who do acoustic version; remixes; and re:re:re posts (a video within a video within a video, sort of).

So why this particular song? Why did the Star Wars Boy go viral (remember him? the kid who shot himself performing, in an endearingly uncoordinated fashion, Jedi Knight moves using the school's video equipment, and then lamentably forgetting to destroy the evidence)?

We get the technology - passing an idea along is now so easy. No need to travel to distant lands and preach on a street corner. All you have to do is hit "forward," and you've passed your new, funny, exciting, scandalous, or challenging idea along to perhaps a thousand people, ultimately. (In the case of "Pardon Me," I passed the link to about five people, who, if they each passed it to five more, expanded our little meme pool to 31 people in two strokes.)

Or maybe Marshall McCluhan was right, and the medium is the message. Without the technology to make it easy, ideas or bits of bad theater like this would go unremarked. I might mention it to someone over a drink and laugh, but it wouldn't go much further than that because it wouldn't be, unlike a big idea, like Christianity or Democracy, worth the effort.

Anyway, whether it was the way she intended it or not, Maxine Swaby has certainly had her 15 minutes of fame, and then some.

Glad I could help.

Notes on Craigslist

2010-01-28T10:33:00.000-05:00

Are you a Craigslist kinda person?

For anyone who doesn't know, Craigslist is a giant want-ads-on-the-Internet web application. Users register, then search for things by city. Jobs, dates, conversation, items for sale. They can also offer these same items.

While I have little experience with Craigslist as a mechanism for finding a job or a friend, I have attempted to buy things using it, and it can be a frustrating experience.

First of all, there are scams. Lots of scams. It's definitely a caveat emptor situation, so proceed with caution.

During a recent search for a product for sale, I contacted one seller with what looked like a very good deal. Too good a deal, as it turns out. While the product was advertised as local, the seller was in the UK. She writes, "I have found a way for us to complete the deal safely and fast, and in this way you will receive the (product) in less than 3 days, if you move fast as well. The solution is provided by a worldwide delivery company TNT, and they will provide assistance in hadling the payment and delivery of the (product)." Uh-huh.

One tip off: if the language seems a bit strange, or the seller seems to be selling something other than the advertised product, better to back off.

There have also been scams which were more like seriously dangerous felonies. Sellers are contacted by a buyer but the buyer turns out to be looking for a vulnerable person to rob. It's always a good idea, especially for a single woman, to refer to "us," and to never meet a buyer or seller alone.

Another problem with Craigslist is that the good deals go really fast. As with eBay, there are some people out there with nothing better to do than monitor online sales, ready to grab up anything that seems remotely bargain-like.

I recently checked out a little app ($10 from http://www.adnotifier.com/) called Ad Notifier. It's a simple little Visual Basic looking program that lets you specify a keyword and a city, and it will notify you (via popup window on the computer on which the app is running) as well as email and/or SMS when an ad matching your search criteria is posted. It searches and notifies every 1-x minutes, depending on your settings.

The downside: you can only specify ONE keyword, even though the application suggests you can search on multiple keywords; so if you are looking for a birdcage, for example, you can't specify other terms. You can, however, search by headlines only, which does refine the search somewhat.

I would also suggest NOT getting your notifications via SMS. You'll pay for each text, and you will get inundated by messages!

Other than that, it is a helpful little app that will give you a bit of an edge on the better deals.

Happy shopping!

TV or Not TV: Ax HDTV Technology Primer

2010-01-19T11:15:00.000-05:00

I've been looking at HDTVs lately, and it's one of those technologies that's kind of confusing when you get started - there are so many acronyms and new terminology - your eyes tend to glaze over when trying to figure out what it all means. So here is a little primer for you, since I bit the bullet and did the research!

First, we tend to stick all large TVs into the general grouping, "big screen tv."

But there are some essential differences among the many models. And you also need to understand that many people are now watching "TV" via a monitor connected to a cable, or running their monitor off a television-receiver-equipped computer (using something like Hauppage's WinTV).Technically, "TV" implies the presence of a receiver. A receiver is simply that portion of a television that picks up and interprets the television signal that's being pumped out into the "air" by a television station. If you have a cable box, it replaces that function - the cable box accepts the data being streamed over the cable and allows you to choose which "channel" you want to watch. If you have a cable but no box (basically, a legacy "drop" from the cable company), you will still need a receiver in the television set in order to see anything; these are the so-called "cable-ready" TVs of yesteryear.

In the Big Screen designation, there are three basic types of technology: LCD, Plasma, and Projection. And there are two types of Projection TV, front and rear.

Projection TVs are more or less "old" technology. They were among the first big screen televisions, and while the picture can be just fine, they tend to require so much in terms of setup (there has to be a proper wall and space enough for the projector to work from behind, or clear space in front for the projector to be able to do its thing), that they aren't very popular any more - except that they are significantly cheaper, and you can get a much larger screen for a much lower price than for a comparable LCD or Plasma TV.

LCD and Plasma both offer the advantages of a slimmer profile (and if you really want to go thin, you'll want to look at recently-released OLED models - organic light-emitting diodes, which can permit a flat panel TV that's less than an inch thick!) and superior picture quality, as compared to the cathode-ray tube TVs from the old days. Cathode-rays tubes are necessarily bulky, and are limited to about a 40-inch display by virtue of the tube technology itself. So when manufacturers wanted to go bigger, they had to figure out a new way to make a television.

LCD (liquid crystal display) TVs use two glass plates with liquid crystals between them, and to put it in simplest terms, light passes through the crystals, causing them to behave in ways that result in a picture to your eye. A Plasma TV is similar in that it's made up of two glass plates, but this time with gas-filled cells sandwiched between them, which, when charged, will react by creating what we perceive as a picture. Both, just because of the way they're made, result in a much smaller profile than their predecessors.

Another designation you'll need to know is "p" versus "i."

"P" simply refers to "pixels," and is a way of telling you the theoretical upper limit of the number of pixels a television is capable of displaying. So when you see "1080p," it means that, ideally, this television will be able to display 1920x1080 pixels - which is what is required for HD viewing from, say, a full HD broadcast, or a Blu-Ray disk. A 720p television, by contrast, offers an upper limit of 1280x720 pixels, therefore, a significantly lower resolution.

"I," on the other hand, refers to "interlaced." It can be the same resolution as the "p" television, say, 1080, but the difference is in the way the picture is displayed. An interlaced display will scan the image onto the screen one line at a time, first the odd lines, then the even lines (this is how the old cathode-ray tubes also work - via odd/even scan lines). A "p" television, on the other hand, is what's called "progressive scan," and will display each line of resolution sequentially, in a single pass, which results in a smoother, cleaner image. This matters largely when there is a lot of fast action in the content - sports, or action movies, for example.

But all that said, the truth is, there is very little content available in true 1080p. Almost all high-def broadcast today is either 1080i or 720p, and bandwidth restrictions mean that probably won't change in the near future. Blu-Ray and Playstation games do offer higher-res content, and if you plan to hook your PC up to your display, you'll probably want to go 1080p.

Now how about the quality differences between plasma and LCD? This is an area of hot dispute. In the simplest, quickest terms: Plasma will offer better black levels (black will truly be black as opposed to some shade of grey); LCDs will be better when viewed with higher ambient light levels. And if you want to go BIG, you're going to want to look at Plasma. Plasma screens supposedly offer greater viewing angle, as well - you can be sitting at an acute angle to the screen and still see a decent picture.

While there used to be differences in the lifespan of the two TVs (plasma TVs would top out at about 20,000 hours), newer sets in both technologies will give you 60,000 - 100,000 hours - which, even at the 7.5 hours the average American TV is on, is still more than the 7 years most of us keep our TVs before replacing them with bigger, better and newer.

Plasma screens used to be susceptible to "burn-in," in which, particularly in the first 200 hours of viewing, a particularly strong and persistent image could "burn" into the display, so that an artifact of that image would remain on the screen from that point on. This really isn't the case in newer models. There is less chance for burn-in at all, and when it does occur, it's self-correcting and will disappear within a short time.

So what's the bottom line? The knowledgeable guys at CNET say, "If you're in the market for a big screen television — and we're talking 50 inches and above — then we'd suggest plasma as a safe bet. Plasmas give you more bang for your buck at the big end of town, and while LCDs can give you better resolution, plasma still has the edge in terms of picture quality. One other thing to look for, whether you opt for plasma or LCD, is an integrated HD digital tuner — some TVs still have analog tuners, which look pretty terrible on a large screen.

"At the smaller end of things (17-inch to 42-inch TVs), LCD is the only way to go if you want something slim and tasteful. And the best thing is that LCDs are getting cheaper all the time."

And as far as the 1080 vs. 720 choice, it's really a question of cost. If you can afford it, or if you plan on hooking up your display to your computer, go for 1080. Otherwise, for now, you'll be just fine with 720.

Windows 7 - Report

2010-01-18T17:10:00.000-05:00

When Windows 7 first launched, I did a short report on it based on the best information available at the time, but I wasn't actually using it at the time.

Since then, I've upgraded machines and my new computer is running this version of Windows.

I think I'm safe in saying that I, along with many others, was reluctant to buy a new computer if Vista was going to be installed on it - and who wants to change out the operating system right out of the box? There's always some worry that something else will go wrong if you change a major piece of software on a brand new computer.

Yes, Vista was a big blunder, but so far, I have nothing but positive things to say about Windows 7.

Yes, it takes a little getting used to - the interface is different and has a lot more "chrome," that is, (flashy) user interface. It's true, Microsoft is finally catching up to Apple in the attractiveness of its displays.

Running programs are identified by cute little shadowed icons that sit in your taskbar; when an icon is hovered over, a little "spotlight" lights up below it.Remain there for a moment and thumbnail of what's up on that program's active interface will display, reminding you of where you left off. When you click on an icon, it smoothly launches that application.

Of course, all of this takes more system resources, so that's why Windows 7 takes:

1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

And Microsoft isn't kidding - you really will want that much system power to have Windows 7 run smoothly.

What else? Silly things like some gadgets that you can add to your desk top - currency converter, weather, clock, calendar and slide show - or add additional gadgets from online sources.

Then there's something called "Jump Lists." This is actually kind of handy. Is there something you do every day? Your Jump List can take you right to a document, a picture, a song, or a website you access frequently. Jump Lists are up to you, and will also depend on the program in charge of the file you return to; so for example, your browser will show a list of the websites you access most often.

Here's another feature I'm still trying to figure out... it's called "Snap," which is a design/layout term for attaching an object to a grid line (visible or invisible) in order to line things up neatly without having to go in and nudge each object. Snap for Windows 7 does something similar - it allows you to resize open windows on your desktop by simply dragging them to the edges, or by using your Windows/Left Arrow keys, or Windows/Right Arrow. What it seems to be good for is moving several open Windows into side by side views without having to drag and resize them. For example, right now I have one browser window open as I write this post, and another open to view some Window 7 information.

Of course, none of these things is reason enough to upgrade to a new OS (unless of course you have Vista and are really desperate).

But I'll be taking notes as I explore, and I'll let you know how it goes.

Energy - It's in the Air

2010-01-12T16:32:00.000-05:00

I was in Maryland last summer, on a business trip.

I had traveled there with some other people, who left me at my meeting and took the car off to other locations. I was to call them when it was time to be picked up - in a location other than the one where I had been dropped off, and unknown at the time of dropoff. In other words, I really needed a phone connection to my group.

Like a dolt, I had forgotten my cell phone charger. I did have a car charger, but no AC charger so I was rationing use.

Toward the end of the day, the phone was bleeding power before my eyes, and of course ran out before it was time to call for my pickup.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a public phone these days? You do start to wonder if there isn't a point to be made that everyone "needs" a cell phone today. I wandered around the location where I was for a while, looking for a pay phone, and finally begged an office phone from a kind soul - though of course, I couldn't even access my contact information as that was on my dead phone. (Fortunately for me, I'm enough of a Luddite that I also keep a paper planner - just in case.)

Too bad I didn't have an Airenergy charger.

This is a mini-USB device that plugs into your phone, and that uses WiFi signal to generate a charge for your phone. So all you have to do is find a WiFi hotspot, and you'll be able to get power. As we learn from our friends at coated.com, a test of Airenergy indicated that it could bring a Blackberry from 30% to a full charge in an hour and a half - simply using WiFi. That may seem like a lot, but in an emergency, a few minutes charge time for enough juice to make that emergency call isn't such a big deal.

Manufactured by RCA, and slated to hit the shelves this summer, Airenergy is supposed to cost in the $40 range - and it will become part of my PLSS (Purse Life Support System).

Made with iPhone App: CatPaint, Or, The Joys of Having Too Much Time

2010-01-04T10:26:00.001-05:00

Fried Motherboard for Lunch

2009-12-28T13:35:00.000-05:00

More learning from disasters...

This time, it's a fried motherboard.

Here's what happened: I installed a third party dual-monitor video card. What I didn't do was check the specs on whether the motherboard in the computer in question would support the additional current that would be required to power up the new video card. Remember, the video card plugs into the motherboard, and when you boot up your computer, you're powering on all your drive controllers.

In this case, everything was operating just fine until I ran a graphics-intensive application that took control of one of my displays. The application also ran just fine, but when I ended it, my system locked up. Because the application had taken control of my main monitor (I was running an extended desktop, so my task tray and program icons were on the monitor that had been commandeered) I was unable to to an emergency power-down, and had to power down the system and reboot without a proper shut-down sequence. When the system attempted to power up again, the power supply came on, the fan started, but the system immediately shut down - indicating a non-functioning motherboard.

I tried unplugging one of the monitors; I tried swapping which monitor remained plugged in; I finally tried removing the video card and using the single-monitor card. I also tested all of the RAM just to be sure that it wasn't one of the components that had failed.

I finally had to conclude that somehow the monitors had drawn too much power, and burned out the motherboard.

What do do now? I had a lot of files on my C drive, so I really needed to get to them. It's always possible to get a drive enclosure, in effect creating an external drive out of an internal drive (the enclosure provides power and a connection, like a USB connection, to an internal drive, allowing you to plug it into an other system).

While researching what to buy, I discovered a neat little device that would solve my problem with a minimum of hassle: a Thermaltake Black X Duet dual internal drive dock. Attached to your computer via a USB cable, you simple plug your internal SATA drive (or drives) into the device, and your computer will "read" the drive as another available local drive.

It works like a charm, and I was able to access my files within minutes.

And for future reference, next time I hook up a new card to my motherboard, I will check the specs to be sure that the total power draw across my motherboard won't cause that motherboard to fry!

Notes on Security

2009-12-21T16:17:00.001-05:00

Like most people, on long drives I get into some very interesting mental conversations with myself.

On one recent trip, for no particular reason, I began to wonder about what, exact, "SSL" refers to. I mean, I know it is an acronym for "Secure Sockets Layer," but what exactly that means, I didn't know. Other than that we should look for some such designation on a website when we do business with that website - particularly if there's a money transaction.

So, of course, I had to do some Internet Research.

For starters, I learned that "SSL" is actually outdated. From Wikipedia (the Poor Man's Favorite research tool): "Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide security for communications over networks such as the Internet. TLS and SSL encrypt the segments of network connections at the Transport Layer end-to-end."

So, let's do a little translation.

A cryptographic protocol is basically a system by which data is encrypted and decrypted. (Think of it like when you were a kid, and you and your friends used a code assigning a number to each letter of the alphabet. You all knew that A was 1, and so on. So when you received a message that said "89," it meant "Hi.")

Again, from Wikipedia: "A cryptographic protocol usually incorporates at least some of these aspects:

Key agreement or establishment
Entity authentication
Symmetric encryption and message authentication material construction
Secured application-level data transport
Non-repudiation methods

More difficult to decipher (all puns intended) words! Ok:

1. Key agreement or establishment: the two parties involved decide how the "decode ring" is going to work.
2. Entity authentication: both parties can be demonstrated to be who they say they are.
3. Symmetric encryption: the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt the message
4. Message authentication: this more or less speaks for itself. This is a means by which a message is verified as "real."
5. Secured application-level data transport: the actual means by which the data is broken into "units" (packets) and sent from one host to another is secure.
6. Non-repudiation methods: the use of such services that provide proof of the integrity and origin of the data; and an authentication with high assurance that data can be asserted to be genuine.

Got it?

It's all meant to demonstrate to you that that email your friend sent is really what it claims to be; or that when you send your credit card number to eBay, it's safe to do so and won't be grabbed by someone midstream (so-called "man-in-the-middle attacks").

What do you need to know?
- Make sure any website you do business with (any website to which you submit private information, especially financial information, does this transaction on a "secure server." A secure server is "a Web server (the computer on which a website "lives") that supports any of the major security protocols, like SSL, that encrypt and decrypt messages to protect them against third party tampering. Making purchases from a secure Web server ensures that a user's payment or personal information can be translated into a secret code that's difficult to crack. Major security protocols include SSL, SHTTP, PCT, and IPSec."(From Webopedia http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/secure_server.html).

- Expect that the website will have an SSL Certificate. The certificate is issued by a "Certificate/Certification Authority," which is responsible for saying "yes, this person is who they say they are, and we, the CA, verify that."

- Look for the URL to begin "HTTPS" rather than just "HTTP." (The S means you're doing business on a secure server.) As opposed to HTTP URLs which begin with "http://" and use port 80 by default, HTTPS URLs begin with "https://" and use port 443 by default. (A port is more or less a communication "channel" by which your computer directs incoming/outgoing traffic correctly; thus, port 80 is routinely associated with standard HTTP traffic; port 443 is usually associated with HTTPS traffic.)

- Use "strong" passwords when creating accounts for on websites that will use your personal information. A strong password is some combination of alpha characters and numeric characters ("special" characters may or may not be accepted; it's best to choose your passwords without them) that only you will understand, but that you will also be able to remember. Thus, "1234" is not a strong password (a serious understatement!). A geeky friend told me that he has created a method which creates a new password for every web account, but which always follows a pattern (so he can remember it easily). Thus, he might use his wedding date (61205), plus his mom's first initial, plus the first three letters of the name of the website. While the first three letters of the website might be guessable by a hacker, the rest of the password would be very difficult to stumble upon.

We'll do more on this important topic in upcoming reports!

What's the Bzzzz?

2009-12-16T10:53:00.000-05:00

I was reviewing some end-of-year Top Tens from my various tech sources, and I was intrigued by two "promising technologies" for 2010: Opera Unite, and Google Wave.

What Opera tells us about Unite: "Opera Unite is a new technology platform allowing you to share content directly with friends without having to upload anything to a Web site. You can stream music, show photo galleries, share files and folders or even host your own Web pages directly from your browser."

In essence, when you run Opera on your computer, it has become a de facto web server, inserting you directly into the "fabric of the Internet."

Web servers are basically a computer equipped with the software necessary to deploy web content as requested by users: Opera Unite is that software. I have yet to try this out (I will, of course, and will report back to you!), but according to Slashdot, "While nginx, one of the fastest web servers available, is 5 times faster [than Unite], a PHP+Apache+MySQL server is only 2 times as fast. A compiled C++ server, the MadFish WebToolkit, is 6 times faster. He concludes that Opera Unite's server is impressive, and that the others come nowhere close to the ease of use."

The idea here being that you, the Average Joe/Jane, can serve up your own web content without an IT degree.

Google Wave, for which I have requested a "limited preview" invite, is described as a "personal communication and collaboration tool."

This technology also goes right to the heart of what I think will be the "big development" of the next few years: bypassing the existing learning curve that restricts the average person's ability to deploy web content.

A "wave" is described by Google as being equal parts email and document: while an email exists among those copied, and is at best a threaded discussion in some sort of chronological order, a wave is a multi-media document that can be appended at any time by any participant in the document, and at any point in the document - with essentially "any" content (that is to say, it can include video, music, and so on, as well as text).

Each wave can be played back, tracing the wave's development - who added what when.

It's all part of the "hive mind" mentality that has, bit by bit, become an increasingly dominant part of Internet knowledge sharing.

Layar and 10GUI

2009-12-08T12:27:00.000-05:00

Two topics for today: Layar, and 10GUI.

These are two really out-there technologies that I think you'll be seeing more of!

Let's start with Layar. This is an entrant into the category of technology known as "augmented reality," and has been introduced as an app for the iPhone (Layar Reality Browser). (You have to have the iPhone 3GS, because it required the digital compass functionality not available in previous releases.)

The technology is sort of a mashup technology: it blend a real view of the world with... well, with pretty much anything you want to "layer" over it. So it might be houses for sale layered over a view of a neighborhood; technical specifications over an industrial site; an historic view over a "now" view of an historic site.

With the iPhone app, you invoke the application, then use your camera to "look" at something. The real time video you're looking at becomes a clickable browser, with the type of information you requested layered over the "real" world. The application is free.

10GUI is a new way of looking at... or, feeling?... human-computer interactions. Til now, the mouse and keyboard have been the only realistic combination of inputs for using your computer.

Minority Report aside, it's impractical to think that we're all going to end up standing up and throwing apps around a huge, wall-sized screen one day.

10GUI has an slightly different take, though the technology is based on touchscreen technology.

You'll still be seated at your desk, you'll still be viewing a monitor... but you will also be using a large touchpad/keyboard combination that allows you to use all 10 fingers on the touchpad. Your two little fingers will be used to touch the edges of the pad and invoke global or local menus; a single finger can click on an item, two fingers can "pinch" an item to enlarge or reduce it in size; four fingers can "pull" a screen up or down (scroll), and so on.

While some observers think there is too much of a learning curve for the technology to be widely accepted, I disagree. The iPhone has been successful largely because the gestures really are "native." They make sense, and are easy to learn and remember. So it would seem with the gestures the designers have associated with actions on 10GUI - as I watched a demonstration I couldn't help thinking, "Yeah, that's right. I "get" that."

Watch for this technology to take off... I know I'll be on the bleeding edge of this one!