Saturday, November 27, 2004

The Bleeding Edge: Podcasting

So, you've figured out how cool RSS subscriptions can be. Getting all your news and blog reading aggregated together via RSS feeds. It's great. It's addicting and it's getting better. In the last few months a new technology has arisen called Podcasting. Basically this is using the familiar RSS feeds and adding media content such as MP3s. All over the world, people like you and me are creating their own "radio shows", compressing them to MP3 format and serving them up for people to subscribe to via a feed reader.
The advantage here is that these feeds can be synched to your iPod or other MP3 device and then you can listen to them in your car or anywhere! Regular new content to listen to sounds pretty cool to me.
How do you get started?

The software will get better and the feeds will increase. Get in on the ground floor now!

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Friday, November 26, 2004

Google Releases Software Suite

Inside Google reports that Google has released a Software Suite containing Google Toolbar, Google Desktop Search, Picasa, Google Deskbar, and Gmail Notifier. This page lists all 5 or you can download them all in one 5MB file.

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Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Camcorders Finally Find Hard Drives

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > State of the Art: Camcorders Finally Find Hard Drives:
"JVC is the first company to see that particular light. Next month, it will release its new Everio GZ-MC100 and GZ-MC200: a pair of breathtakingly small, tape-free camcorders. Both models store gorgeous video - technically speaking, MPEG2 files in DVD format and quality - directly onto a tiny hard drive."
Yes! This is SO cool. I'll probably wait till there are more players in the market to drive prices down a bit (looks like these are around $1400) but not having to hassle with tape degredation is a cool thing.

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Load up your USB drive before you visit your parents

Engadget has a useful list of things software to load up on your USB drive before you visit your parents. Go read it...if you aren't on the road already. And if you are, save the list for the next round of holidays :)

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Monday, November 22, 2004

Windows: Important Basics

Are you protected from spyware and viruses? This site has lots of good information and links to software to help you get your system clean and keep it that way.

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Sunday, November 21, 2004

Slashdot | Worm Exploit Distributed by Advertising Network

Slashdot | Worm Exploit Distributed by Advertising Network. Interesting post. Glad I don't use IE. :)

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FOXSports.com - RSS Feeds

Keep tabs on all your favorite sports via FOXSports.com - RSS Feeds

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Friday, November 19, 2004

New form Google Labs:Google Scholar

Google Scholar
From the 'about':
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

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Add on for Google Desktop: DNKA - remote desktop search tool.

Here is an interesting add on for Google Desktop Search:DNKA - remote desktop search tool.
The goal of this product is to serve up your google index and let people browse to your machine and search it. You have full control of what ip addresses you allow to search your machine and you can also change GDS from its default port of 4664. This could come in handy if you have a small office and you can't remember which machine you stored a document on. With this you could just browse over there and search. Yeah, there are security issues. I mean you wouldn't want to have GDS indexing all your stuff and then a co-worker be able to browse in and look at it. But, there are cases like at home or certain similar environments where it could come in handy.

It only took a few minutes to set up. The docs (what docs?) are scant but I was able to set it up on my desktop machine, connect in with my laptop and search my desktop machine. You have to use the server (my desktop in this example) machine's NIC ip address (obviously, 127.0.0.1 is local only) but on the laptop just browse to the ip of the desktop with it's ip address and port 4664 and you are good to go.

A suspicion I had was right, however. I mapped a drive to the desktop machine from my laptop, opened MS Word and saved a file to the mapped drive (Z: in this case). The new server configuration didn't pick up the file at all. Since I have GDS running on the laptop as well, I did a local search on it and the file was there instantly showing "Z:\myfile.doc" like you'd expect.

So, yeah, this is pretty cool with limitations. If you put it on a server, one thing you could do is write some script that whacked your Google index every night, slapped in the relevant reg keys and then re index. For a small business with few users that may be a good solution as long as the users knew it wasn't 'real time'. Kind of a Poor Man's Google Search Appliance.

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Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Sage 1.3 released

Sage 1.3 was released today
: "Sage now interprets Live Bookmarks just as it does regular bookmarks, allowing the user to subscribe to feeds using the auto-discovery mechanism in Firefox. Live Bookmarks may be added to your Sage Feeds folder using Firefox's orange feed indicator icon, making them available for reading in the Sage sidebar. This gives users a quick and easy subscription method, while Sage's built-in 'Discover Feeds' function provides a more thorough scan."
I'be been using the preview release for a couple weeks now. It's great. I love being able to use the orange Live Bookmarks button to easily add feeds. Also, Sage supports OPML well so you can export/import feeds. Something that native Firefox doesn't do. Also, Sage actually formats feeds rather than just showing the titles and you having to click the link to the actual blog which is how Live Bookmarks works.
Check it out!

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Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Wired News: RSS Edges Into the Bureaucracy

Interesting Wired article: Wired News: RSS Edges Into the BureaucracyTalks about government agencies starting to support RSS more and more. Has links to NASA and State Department feeds. Cool. But this annoys me:
"'What needs to happen,' said Matthews [a librarian in the Utah State Library], 'is I think Microsoft needs to support this with Longhorn when they release it. Once it becomes a feature built into the operating system, I think RSS will really take off.'"
XP is already bloated. If people want RSS let them go get it in a 3rd party tool. That could even be a MS tool. But don't make it part of the OS.

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Saturday, November 13, 2004

I'm getting tired of the name of my blog

Human Experience in a Digital World is too long. Need something shorter and more 'catchy'. Thinking...

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Google Desktop Security Warning Issued

InternetNews.com has posted an article:Google Desktop Security Warning Issued
Google Desktop Search lets users search documents, spreadsheets, e-mail, instant messages and Web pages that have been visited by that PC. To enable this, it creates cached versions of Web content -- which could include sensitive corporate information stored on servers and accessed via a Web interface.
They have a good point. People need to realize that Google Desktop Search is for single user workstations. People can easily search your results and see what you have been reading if you share your PC. I've got it at home on my shared PC but that's not a problem because we all have access to everything anyway and sharing info is cool there.
The corporate environment does need to look at these issues. Even more critical is laptop deployment. If you've finally taught the CEO to keep his/her data on the server (no small feat) and then they have GDS installed...viola, all data is cached on the laptop and if the leave it in a cab the next time the are in London...shudder. Hopefully you've got other security in place.

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Friday, November 12, 2004

How to not save your form information in Firefox

As you browse, Firefox keeps the history you enter in fields like search forms and other forms you fill out. If you don't want it to do this:

In Firefox, go to the Tools menu, then click options
Click the Privacy icon on the left.
Go to the Saved Form Information and deselect the box that says "Save information I enter in web page forms and the Search bar"

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Thursday, November 11, 2004

SpellBound

If you fill out lots of forms on the web or blog or enter into discussions or you name it, you might want to check out this extension for Firefox called SpellBound. Once installed it lets you right click in your text box and check the spelling of your entry. Excellent.

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Firefox tip: Control where links form other applicatons open

Here's nifty feature of Firefox. You can control where new links are opened from other applications. For example, if you are browsing and you flip over to your email program and you get a link you want to check out, you can click it and, based on these settings, have it open in a new window, a new tab or the most recent tab/window. I the "most recent" is like IE's default. Which is hugely annoying to me since I was on a page an don't want where I was to be disturbed.

Try this:
Tools - Options - Advanced
Tabbed Browsing
"Open links from other applications in:"
-a new window
-a new tab in the most recent window
-the most recent tab/window

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Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Updated: My Firefox Help Tips and Tricks

I updated my Firefox Help, Tips & Tricks page with some of the links I've blogged about recently.

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Mozilla Firefox Start Page

Google has created a special Mozilla Firefox Start Page. You are given the option of making it your new home page when you install Firefox 1.0.

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Firefox Help: Tips & Tricks

This Mozilla site is huge with tips. Firefox Help: Tips & Tricks. You'll find tips on making your button bars more XP like or Windows Classic like. And things like speeding page rendering and even running Firefox for removable media like a USB drive.

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Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Released!

It's here! It's here! Mozillazine reports that Mozilla Firefox 1.0 is Released. I haven't had a chance to download it or anyting else. I'll report my experiences as I do. The linked article contains links to the downloads.

Take back the Web!

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Monday, November 08, 2004

Introduction to Mozilla Firefox

Here is an awsome Introduction to Mozilla Firefox that includes screenshots of how to set up Firefox and info on tabbed browsing and so forth. 8 good pages packed with information.

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On The Verge: From Internet Explorer to Firebird FireFox

More good links and tips for making the switch to the Fox: On The Verge: From Internet Explorer to Firebird FireFox

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Switching from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox

Here is a link to a good page on Mozilla's site: Switching from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox
It has info on extensions and helps get you up to speed when you switch browsers.

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Firefox Proxy Exclusions

I discovered something this morning. Sometimes you need to put in addresses to exclude in your Firefox proxy settings. For example, if you want to exclude the address for Google Desktop Search you would put in 127.0.0.1:4664. Now, if you have more than 1 of these types of addresses, you need to separate them with a comma. I stress this because IE uses semicolons to separate it's addresses. So be very careful if you are copying you addresses from one browser to another.

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Saturday, November 06, 2004

Searching Thunderbird

This isn't really GDS so I appologize but for those uses of Thunderbird
out there...go get 0.9. It's search is excellent with a search bar built
into the toolbar, highlighted search results like Google and you can
even save results into virtual folders. Why is that cool? When you open
the folder the next time, it does a search and brings back all your
results into the folder.
Release notes here: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/
Get it here: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/




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Friday, November 05, 2004

Congrats to Mark Loretta

With all the hubub of the election I seemed to have missed this San Diego Padres News Mark Loretta (Padres 2nd Baseman) won the Silver Slugger award.
The Silver Slugger is given to the top hitters in each league at each position by Hillerich & Bradsby Co., the maker of Louisville Slugger bats. The winners were picked by Major League managers and coaches, who were not allowed to vote for their own players. Selections were based on a combination of offensive statistics -- including batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage -- and an overall evaluation of a player's offensive value.

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Thursday, November 04, 2004

Status.Blogger.Com

So I found out that Blogger had a status rss feed. Sweet. Also found out that mail-to-blogger is currently having a problem. No wonder it's been so freakin' slow. Took 36+ hours the last time I posted via email.

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Outbox extension

Here is a nifty extension for Thunderbird. Often I want to create email offline and send it later. This extension gives you a button to put on the toolbar to accomplish this task. You can save messages but it isn't intuitive to me. If they want people to convert they should add a button like this to the default install. Check it out: outbox.
I'm using that latest tbird 0.9 released today and this extension works well.

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FreePOPs

Do you use web mail like Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail? If so, you may want to have a look at this: FreePOPs.
It runs as a little service on your machine and you can then set your POP client (e.g. Thunderbird or Outlook Express) to get mail from that web account. I'd rather have a nice rich client than the web for reading and writing my mail and this makes that possible. Give it a try.

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Best map yet

Best map yet for election returns
http://network.ap.org/dynamic/files/specials/election_night_2004/us_map_govsenhouse/index.html?SITE=CSPANELN&SECTION=POLITICS

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Don't post to blogger via email

This post sent via email 11:17PM 11/2/2004

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More good election sites

I've got 4 tabs open (thanks, Firefox). It's interesting to see who is
calling what. At the moment, Yahoo! is calling WA yet they also say it's
49% to 49%.

CNN http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/
USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/
PBS News hour http://www.pbs.org/newshour/vote2004/index.html
Yahoo! http://news.yahoo.com/electionresults

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Tuesday, November 02, 2004

C-SPAN: 2004 GENERAL ELECTION RESULTS

C-SPAN: 2004 GENERAL ELECTION RESULTS My favorite site so far for tracking the vote.

Note: I attempted to blog about this via email. A nice idea but I don't think it works well. I've just sent another test email to see.

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CNN.com Election 2004

The madness has begun. Ya gotta love the web but it's kind of addicting to watch the results come in as polls close. CNN.com Election 2004 Seems to be the best site so for. Lots of clickable information for us news junkies.

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Monday, November 01, 2004

Speed your Google Desktop Search with Firefox

This is a really nifty extension of Firefox using keyword shortcuts and a simple url hack to speed searching of your desktop. Give it a try:

1. Launch Google Desktop Search
2. Type someting into the search field and click Search Desktop. I'm going to search for Frogs. Doesn't matter if you have any files with Frogs in the text, the only thing that matters is the URL that gets returned.
3. When your results come back, bookmark the page!
4. Now Click Bookmarks - Manage Bookmarks
5. Find the Frogs bookmark you just made and either right click on it or click Edit - Properties
6. Change the name field to read "Google Desktop Search"
7. Look through the Location URL for the word Frogs the URL will look like http://127.0.0.1:4664/search&s=2749441201?q=frogs&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Search+Desktop
8. Replace the word frogs with "%s" (no quotes)
9. In the keywords field, enter "gds" (no quotes)
10. Click Ok

Now when you want to search your desktop for lets say Cookies, go to the Address Field of Firefox (yes, the place you usually type in http://blahblahblah.com) and simply type "gds Cookies" and you will start a search of your desktop for any file containing the word Cookies.

By the way, you can create these for regular Google too. Start off the steps above with a Web search instead of a desktop search.

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How to get Google Desktop Search to index your Firefox Cache

Seems like the 'holy grail' of Google Desktop Search at the moment is to have it index and be able to search your Firefox cache. Thanks to the the excellent little app called GDSPlus that I talked about over the weekend, I've been able to index most of my Firefox Cache. The process is a simple but lengthy one when written down. I've chronicled the whole process on my Google Desktop Search Tips & Tricks page.
I say "most" of the cache because for some reason it doesn't index everything. I think it has to do with the structure of the cache and/or the web page being cached. Either way, if you follow this you'll be closer to the 'grail' then you were before :)

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