Archive for September, 2009

A change of season always triggers a  fit of cleaning and organizing in my world.  Don’t neglect your office technology and gadgets from a good quarterly dusting.   At the very least, have cans of compressed air on hand to loosen debris  from your keyboard and blow off accumulated dust from the back of your desktop fan.  Keeping your computer fan dust free helps it do it’s job cooling the components, which naturally extends the life of your computer.

Want to get more creative than compressed air?  I’ve found some handy cleaning devices to keep at the office.

Cyber Clean

A crazy looking putty that picks up gunk off all kinds of gadgets – keyboards, cell phones, and more.

continue

Are you wondering if you should pull up the reigns on your Facebook usage?  It has certainly been a question of mine, simply because my “Friend” list has expanded beyond the familiar and into the more nebulous territory of acquaintances,  friends of friends, long lost friends, and who-knows-what around the corner.   I like the aspect of inclusion that the network and its features offer, and I’m not necessarily concerned about privacy issues, but I do want to focus my usage on right exposure over over-exposure and inappropriate exposure.

Here is a great article that introduces easy steps for making your Facebook network a responsible one:

http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/09/16/16readwriteweb-5-easy-steps-to-stay-safe-and-private-on-fac-6393.html?em

So you don’t like spam

Lets face it, if you have an email address, you’re going to get spam. If you are running your email on a server platform , then your IT should be on top of it. And if not, give us a call. Anti-spam solutions running on server can be expensive and taxing to the server. If you are not a huge company , or would like a personalized solution, SpamBayes might just be for you.

Spam Bayes uses bayesian analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference ,which in a nutshell can predict outcomes based on evidence. As the information changes so does the hypotheses , reflecting one probability as likely and another as unlikely.

So lets get to the actual program, This will run on multiple operating systems ( thought in linux and OSX you will probably need to compile it from source code). It can either run as a standalone program or as a plugin for certain programs. You can find the download section here http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ .

continue

If you are a Google Apps aficionado, or if you are newish to the world of Google Apps you may wonder how to optimize your use of them.   If found an article that outlines 7 ways you can integrate multiple Google Apps, like Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Voice, etc., making them more interactive and accessible.  And if you know nothing about Google Apps, you’ll certainly get a glimpse into the new wave of computing.

Read here:  http://lifehacker.com/5355512/seven-easy-ways-to-integrate-your-google-apps

An easy solution for the user who occasionally needs to to send a large file (over 10MB) via email, whether it is an image, an mp3, or a massive Excel spreadsheet, try using a service called YouSendIt.com.   It is super easy to use and free, if you choose the Lite plan and your file doesn’t exceed 100MB.

The steps for using it are essentially the same as attaching a file to your email:  login online, add the contact’s email address, attach the file or files (not exceeding the size limit) from your computer and send!

YouSendIt also offers handy applications to streamline office productivity.  If you use Outlook,  download the plugin to integrate YouSendIt into your Outlook email, or download YouSendIt Express which enables desktop sending and receiving.

continue

Tired of sifting through too many lines of text when researching?  This tool will not only help you spice up your search life with a visual, but it will also serve to narrow your search results with relevant or related topics.

How do you utilize it?  Enter your initial search (mine was windows 7);  at the top of the results page select “Show Options”;  under “Standard view” select “Wonder Wheel”.  Now that you have the Wonder Wheel working, you can follow the most relevent search topics off the spokes.

If you open results in a new tab, you can continue to reference the related searches on the wheel, which may make your web surfing more efficient.  Nevertheless, it’s a fun new tool.   I’ll be using it for brainstorming blog topics.

Ok, we’re just adding in the voting system today so you can give us feedback on the posts that we put here but we have two options, thumbs up/down or a star rating system. Right now they’re both active so you can look at them, but which do you like better? Hit the “Read more” link and leave us a comment below about which you think should stay and which should go.

So, which should stay? Stars or Thumbs?

For the longest time I used to use NERO burning rom, I used to be able to edit music , burn cd’s of all types of formats. It was my goto app for when I needed to place data on cd’s and dvd’s. Things started to go wrong around version 7.5. It was no longer the sleek fast and all around awesome application I had grown to love. It was re-coded to look shiny and nice, and started using microsoft .net libraries. So I started looking for alternatives , and the best that I have found is imgburn.com.

http://www.imgburn.com/

ImgBurn supports multiple formats (bin, cue, iso, nrg), multiple audio formats (AAC, APE, FLAC, M4A, MP3, OGG, PCM, WAV), and the new version will even let you burn HD DVD’s and BlueRay Video disks if you have the capable hardware.

It will run on all these platforms: Windows 95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008 and 7 (including the 64 bit versions)

continue

If you’re running Wordpress on your site, please, please update to the latest version.  There is a virus going around that is using a vulnerability in older versions of Wordpress that allows a remote attacker to add spam links to your blog, insert a malicious user administrator account into your site and other nasty things.

Please upload from wordpress.org or use the auto update link within your Wordpress administration panel.

Read a full report at Techcrunch

It’s been just over 3 months since Bing hit the web waves and despite the hoopla of its marketing campaign I’ve only recently tested it out for good measure because I’m a habitual Google user. If you haven’t explored it yet, I offer you my reflections.

Bing has bling appeal. A colorful homepage picture posts new everyday, which when moused over offers pop-up factoids about the subject of the picture. The picture of the day also carries over into a cross fading header on search pages. I like the “ambiance” this creates, color feels good.

Bing organizes. A tidy left column keeps a running list of your recent searches, offers related searches as another list, and in yet another list, breaks out specific categories like “Restaurants” and “Tourism” to help you refine general searches for, say, “NYC.” Bing will also organize search results to group categorically on the page, so a search for NYC offers 3 to 5 general results followed by 3 to 5 more results associated with NYC Maps, followed by NYC Restaurants, followed by NYC Tourism, etc. This is handy and efficient, but such “smart” technology may interfere a bit too much with results. I still found some searches on Google were seemingly more comprehensive, or at the very least brought up results I actually wanted.

Which leads me to my main point, I’m using both search engines now, as well as a variety of browsers. I can’t pick sides. I like certain functions on both, so I’ll be switching between the two.

continue