Laurel Mountain Post Supplemental – July/August ‘09

I haven’t done this much before except to post when the new issue has been released. But I thought that I would start posting supplemental information to the blog to give my LMP Readers more information about what was written there. In this post you will find pointers to the sites mentioned in the article and more. Let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer them for you.

Social Networking Websites:

MySpace – I consider it a place for the younger generation, but be my guest…

FaceBook – A little more sedate.

BeBo – seems a bit cluttered to me but lots of gadgets and stuff to play with

Cozi - Wish you had some help organizing your family life? Get Cozi. It's the new way busy families keep up with appointments and lists, coordinate home and work schedules, and share favorite memories and photos. All in one place.

Plaxo - Connect to your family, friends, and business network.

ecadamy - offers business networking and features aimed at corporate users looking to grow their contact network. Most of what I see are professional trainers trying to get gigs…

Spoke – provide company research and communications between individuals.

LinkedIn - is an online network of more than 30 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries. When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals.

Messaging Websites:

Twitter – simple mini-blogging

FriendFeed – very much like Twitter but simpler with less clutter has some nice functions to pull in info from other sites

Jaiku - Jaiku's main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams. An activity stream is a log of everyday things as they happen: your status messages, recommendations, events you're attending, photos you've taken - anything you post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds. It offers a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing your activities with them on the Web, IM, and SMS - as well as through a slew of cool third-party applications built by other developers using our API.

Blog Host Providers:

Go Daddy – full service for online anything. Setup personal or business domains, email, website design, blogs, video and photo galleries, etc…

SquareSpace – this is a new comer in the industry that is getting a lot of hype from many of the industry pundits. Its primary draw is ease of use to create a very professional looking web space. Primarily a geared towards blogging it can be used for general website creation as well.

Google’s Blogger -Express yourself with a blog on WordPress. Add WordPress to your profile and share your blog with the people you choose.

WordPress - Express yourself with a blog on WordPress. Add WordPress to your profile and share your blog with the people you choose. one of the oldest and best know blog hosting sites

blog.com - All blogs start free. Just sign up and your account will be registered as a free account. You will have access to most of blogging and photo album management features. Free blogs are ad-supported, so a small advertisement square banner will be placed on your blog to help pay for bandwidth and hosting of your blog. You won't be asked for any payment details.

LiveJournal - Express yourself, share your life, connect with friends online. You can use LiveJournal in many ways: a private journal, a blog, a discussion forum or a social network.

Office LIve – this is a service that I have been using for a number of years. Great to set up  you business with. Allows access to files from any computer. Promotes collaboration and sharing of data with everyone in your group. Setup Blogs, Email, Personalized Domains and more. Pieces of SharePoint services available as well.

Why You Need to Upgrade from Win Svr 2K

Here’s just one more reason to upgrade to a more current server operating system. SonicWALL announces another End of Support for Windows Server 2000 in the Email Security 7.2 release.

Affected Products: SonicWALL Email Security Software and  Sonic Wall TotalSecure Email (Software)

Existing subscriptions services will continue to function for Email Security Software solutions based on Windows Server 2000 for releases prior to 7.2. Windows 2000 will not be supported in the 7.2 release and future releases.

Unaffected Operating Systems
The following Windows Operating Systems will not be affected: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows SBS 2003, Windows SBS 2008, Windows EBS 2008

Announcement Summary - In an effort to provide SonicWALL's customers with as much advanced notice as possible and minimize the impact of the end of support for the impacted OS, SonicWALL is alerting customers to the upcoming support deadlines.

Adobe Media Player

If you haven’t played with Adobe’s Free Media Player you ought to take a look at it. If you are into graphics, video or photography then here is a great source of digital media. If you need help in learning how to use programs like Photoshop Elements, Photoshop, Premier or Premier Essentials. All of it free and quickly accessible. You can download it to play on other media devices and view any of these programs at your convenience.

However, you are not limited to just training videos. If you are interested in TV Shows, they are here as well, so you will have great HULU like functions as well.

Try it out, I think you will like it.

Thief Caught on Video in the act of stealing a notebook

I don’t know why I didn’t post this earlier. However, with the Tribune Review publishing this picture today I thought posting to this site would be appropriate as well.

Not only was he so unaware of his surroundings not to see all the video cameras, but he stole just the netbook without the power cord. So that will be just about good enough to last a day on the battery.

Take a look at the video, it is pretty crisp. Wish we had caught him before he left the store though. This guy came in the store to “apply for employment”. Would you hire him?

If you recognize him please let us know.

800-640-7506.

See video to the below:

If you are interested in the systems used to capture him on surveillance be sure to contact us at the store and we will be happy to show how this can benefit you.

If you are interested in how we put the video together let me know and I can show you the system I used for editing and overlaying the audio to create this web video.

Got to turn every negative action around to make it positive. Hope to hear from you soon.

Oooooo Neat! 43 Inch Wide Screen Display

It’s not too often that I get excited by new bit of technology… well that’s not quite true. The NEC CRV43 “Ultra-Widescreen LCD Monitor Professional” has a unique look with its seamless 2880 x 900 Native Resolution.

My only two complaints about this about this monitor: Hey

it’s slated to be priced at $7999 and I would have liked a little more height resolution, at least 1024 would have been nice. But, all the same pretty darn neat. It is described as: “perfect display for simulation, digital imaging, gaming and other applications requiring lightning-fast response time, a much wider field of view, greater dynamic range and wide color gamut.”

Fast response times (4ms), great for displaying streaming video without ghosting or blurring displays. Medium contrast ration 10,000:1, 200 cd/m² brightness, USB 2.0 connectivity, and single link DVI-D and HDMI 1.3 input connectors. Should be available in July.

CNET’s Review of the new Palm Pre

While CNET’s review of the Palm Pre was more positive than negative they did have some concerns that they voiced about the product. The feature that grabbed my interest most was the ability for the phone to handle multi-tasking. I did not realize that there weren’t any smart phones on the market that can run more than one application at a time. Not even the iPhone. However, is this enough of a benefit to jump from the iPhone bandwagon? My wife thinks that I am attached to my PC by an umbilical cord sometimes and I have a problem running a computer without multiple monitor these days. It is not unusual for me to have eight or more applications running at one time. If I could have more monitors I would. Of course not everyone bounces from one function to another as much as I do but I can see the need for having more than one application available at your fingertips. Anyway, if you are interested in what CNET has to say take a look here to see what they have to say about the Palm Pre.

Paperless Books! EBooks are in the News…

There are several stories coming through the internet today about Electronic Books or EBooks. Amazon is the best known with their Kindle devices and book services combination. They have put together a well coordinated method for acquiring books, magazines and newspapers electronically anywhere you have a cell phone connection. While the purchase price for a Kindle device is a little steep, quite a few new releases are available for digital download with substantial price reduction as compared with comparable hardback pricing. Amazon has released the shipping date of its new Kindle DX, a large format Kindle, for June 10, 2009. The Kindle DX is suggested to be a great unit for student text book replacements as well as making it easier to read Newspaper stories.

I have loved reading and listening to books distributed for electronic devices for many years. Currently, most of the books that I “read” are acquired through Audible.com (another Amazon recent purchase) and luckily I was an early implementer of their technology. My current subscription is grandfathered in giving me 5 selections per month for just 39.95, typically the cost of one audio book if purchased on CD or tape. In fact, I have over 800 books now in Audible format that is always in my library if I wish to listen to any of them again. The great thing about this format the industry wide acceptance of the Audible’s DRM format and the large numbers of devices that can accept the format.

I had also been an early EBook reader as well. I had very early on purchased a Rocket EBook reader that allowed me to purchase books online as well as download .txt file to the unit. It was a little clunky getting the information onto the reader but it had enough memory on it to make it worth while. It was capable of holding hundred or more books, depending on size, and it made it much easier to bring my reading material with when I was traveling.

Today’s EBook devices have better battery life because of the new page display technology. Sony and Amazon have both utilized this technology and this and their ease of acquiring books has given these kinds of devices a rebirth. This industry is in the early throws of its infancy though but it does show a lot of promise. So much so, Google today has announced that it will be offering electronic books as well in the very near future. According to a NY Times article, Google plans to make implement this program by the end of 2009. This would give Amazon a run for their money. Book publishers have complained about Amazon’s pricing strategy and with Google’s entry into this field it will give them a competitive option to choose from. (Currently Amazon charges $9.99 for most best sellers and up to as much as $25 for some new book titles).

Google has another EBook project that is still going on where they have scanned over 7 Million books, the majority of which are out of print. This project is a totally separate venture. From this project Google has made over 1 million public domain books available to mobile phones and Sony EBook Reader. Google doesn’t plan to limit the availability of these books to any specific devices.

The third news item revolves around the purchase possibility of E Ink, the company that invented and produces the e-ink displays for the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader devices by Prime View. There is a relationship between these two companies currently. E Ink provides the flexible displays and Prime View assembles them. E Ink suggests that this deal will provide the financing to  continue the development of color displays that they hope to be shipping in late 2010. This would bring the a much needed upgrade to the current EBook readers that is their main complaint today for being used for text book replacements. Hopefully they will be successful.

SquareSpace vs LiveSpaces 001

One of my first worries was that I didn’t think that I was going to be able to use LiveWriter on this blog site. However, all needed to do was put in the right password and low and behold I was connected. So, obviously that is not a problem. The first impression that I see is the ability to put more than one category on a blog entry. That makes it easier to find previous entries in the blogs by the categories that are in them.

The next problem I was having was putting my logo on the page and it was coming up with some sort of black/grey background. Not what I want… I was using a copy/paste function, didn’t work. So by inserting the picture directly from my gallery worked. Good! That's all for now. Need to get back to work.

Windows 7 – Connecting to the Home Network

I did not have any problems getting connected to my Home Network which consists of several Windows Vista machines.  Without loading and the software was able to directly connect to the NAS drive on the network and access all of the picture files I have stored there.  Very slick and simple, I like when it is that easy.

I have also set up speech recognition using a USB headset and that seems to be working out fairly well.  Of course of the speech recognition has to be trained but out of the gate you can see by this blog entry it seems to be working fairly well.  Of course you can't see how many corrections I might have had to make, but they were far and few between. We'll have to see if it gets better as time goes by.  I was hoping that there would be a big difference but there doesn't seem to be at this time.  I guess Microsoft had their hands full with the operating system and didn't spend much time updating speech recognition this time around.  It is still a decent program, and for free what can you expect?

Bing is here…

Microsoft’s new Search program “BING” is live and running out there for public consumption. So far it seems to be doing alright but I haven’t done a side by side comparison to see how it fairs against Google and Yahoo! As if I need anymore special projects.

As you are typing in your search parameters Bing will give you some suggestions that you can choose to search on. I like this feature a lot. Of course this isn’t anything radically new but I’m glad they are doing it.

The jury is still out with my verdict on IE8. We are all going to have to get used to it since this is what Microsoft is pushing us towards if you are going to continue using IE. Like I said in an earlier article it doesn’t seem to causing problems in some of the applications that I would have expected to have the problems in. We will keep on testing it.

Windows 7 RC – So far I’m really impressed!

Sometimes we are so used to the ways things were that when we run up against something brand new that is truly wonderful we don’t even realize it right away. My installation today of Windows 7 on a newly acquired Acer Aspire One went so smoothly that I didn’t realize at the end of the initial load that it was ready for me to continue on and have the finish its install with a reboot. So… I reinstalled the initial load three time before I caught what was going on. It’s so fast that if you don’t pay attention you don’t realize you are as far along as you were.

So far I have been able to run everything we use internally except Connectwise (this is our service application) in native Windows 7 mode. I installed Connectwise and setup the launch icon in XP Pro w SP3 and it seems to working just fine. It even works with IE 8.0 which surprised us as well.

I haven’t started fine tuning the device drivers but most everything was found automatically without any problem. Skype found and used the webcam and microphone without a problem, and everything but the high def streaming video seems to be working. Had a little problem with media center and the TV sample program so this will be a project I will need to look into.

I have been busy all day loading applications we will see how well all of this works. I will be interested in the Speech to Text functions to see if this has gotten any better. I really do like using that when I sit back and start composing on the weekends and evenings. This is the first day that I have really pushed Windows 7 so I will get back to you this coming weekend to add to my findings.

SquareSpace vs LiveSpaces 001

One of my first worries was that I didn’t think that I was going to be able to use LiveWriter on this blog site. However, all needed to do was put in the right password and low and behold I was connected. So, obviously that is not a problem. The first impression that I see is the ability to put more than one category on a blog entry. That makes it easier to find previous entries in the blogs by the categories that are in them.

The next problem I was having was putting my logo on the page and it was coming up with some sort of black/grey background. Not what I want… I was using a copy/paste function, didn’t work. So by inserting the picture directly from my gallery worked. Good! That's all for now. Need to get back to work.

SquareSpace vs LiveSpaces 001

 One of my first worries was that I didn’t think that I was going to be able to use LiveWriter on this blog site. However, all needed to do was put in the right password and low and behold I was connected. So, obviously that is not a problem. The first impression that I see is the ability to put more than one category on a blog entry. That makes it easier to find previous entries in the blogs by the categories that are in them.

The next problem I was having was putting my logo on the page and it was coming up with some sort of black/grey background. Not what I want… I was using a copy/paste function, didn’t work. So by inserting the picture directly from my gallery worked. Good! That's all for now. Need to get back to work.

One more quick thought about Google Wave

One of the projects that I am currently working with is the integration of communication between all of the sites that I work with to get our message out. I have integrated several application so that I don’t have to publish to quite as many site individually but it is still a chore to easily get all of the things that I am working on out there to the different places that people are following us are using.

Why do I care? If you are taking the time to publish and you think that the information you are publishing is something that your public wants to read and follow than you want to make sure that you make it as easy for them to do so as possible. By publishing to many different communications systems, whether it is your primary blog or something as simple as Twitter you want to try to drive people back to you. Google’s product hints at being able to do this easily and even take it a step further and make the communications more interactive as well as making them as public or secure as you desire. Any tool that can give you these capabilities is well worth a second look.

Google Wave Product – New Communication

A new communication tool that Google is developing to use on your computer systems and mobile devices. It is not  expected to be available to the public for several months but has been put into the hands of developers now to see what they can do with it before it's public release. A very nice overview is available on YouTube and can be accessed from cnet news Webware site.

Supports standard email functions as well as instant messaging. It treats the communication as an object so that it can be real time as well as providing standard email type access. It allows easy drag and drop capability to add people to the communication flow and to bring people in on the conversation at any point. You can easily put threads into the message, share the communication on a blog by adding the blog as a member of the conversation and withhold access to parts of the communication thread by making them private and assign the members to just that portion of the conversation thread. Also if you are added after the conversation thread had started you have the ability to replay the conversation as it progressed, piece by  piece.

They discussed how using this product you can use the editing function to collaborate on document creation. It again allows you to show the changes, but the most interesting thing is that it allows you to view the comments, and playback the order in which the document was worked on. It makes editing and revision control very well controlled. It promises “to become a very powerful document creation tool!”

A Linking function allows you to connect multiple Wave Conversations into lists. This allows you to bring together multiple conversations threads in groups to categorize them and make them easier to access as a group. They describe it as “very Wiki Like.” You group these conversation links by dragging them onto a new Wave Conversation and creating a Wave Conversation about previous Wave Conversations.

You have the ability to use search criteria to search your conversations for information very quickly and in real time as documents and messages are being created.

It is using a very strong context sensitive spell checker that they are providing API’s so that other developers can use them in their applications. The entire application lends itself to having developers create add-ins or gadget tools that create a richer set of functions to the application. Wave allows the developer to use extensions to connect to other communications applications as well. They demonstrated the interface with Twitter which connects your Twitter account with your Wave account and allows for instantaneous communication between the two product applications. They showed some other integration capabilities with an issue tracker application that allows you work within Wave and to have the updates automatically update in the issue tracker program as well.

Because Google and the Wave Project are providing the Wave product as an open API other companies can build their own Wave Systems and host their own Wave Servers that can interact with Google’s and other systems. Each of these Private Wave servers remain private and only the shared communications traverse between the two applications. Because of this you could implement your own internal Wave Server and host it on your equipment and have a private installation being used within your company and still have it have the ability to communicate with external systems as well.

Last but not least they showed an online translation robot that allows you communicate very easily in languages that you don’t know and be able to do so effectively.

Instant Netflix

A couple months ago I restarted my Netflix Subscription because of the ability to acquire instant availability of published TV shows and movies on my Xbox game system.  Unlike a lot of people the only use I have for my Xbox machine is the ability to deliver media from Home Network to our family room TV set.  Now with cable on-demand, cable DVR, DVD movies I also have the ability watch my Media Center video, music and TV recordings I'm adding what can be called Netflix on-demand as well.

To show you just how much Netflix is taking over the market share of the video industry there are so many ways of getting streaming video from Netflix you almost have no excuse not to subscribe to even their most basic subscription plan.  For $8.99 you get all you can eat streaming video plus single DVD Rental each month.  If they're a lot of old shows that you haven't watched you would like to RE watch this is a great vehicle that will allow you to accomplish this task.  So now I have Netflix available to me as a movie rental, which satisfies my need to watch newly released movies, and, instant streaming movies and TV shows instantly from my ex box to my TV or on my computer or from within by media center console.  Now all I need are more hours in the day.  Hey Netflix can you fix that also!

The Netflix Media Center interface has quite a few choices build into it.  Not only do you have Instant Queue, you can also you can add to your DVD Queue, take a look at what you have recently watched, view newly arrived movies and select them for either instant view if that's available or to be placed in your DVD queue, and they have categories that you can browse through and make selections as well. The search function works for movie and TV show titles only, this is something I would like to see changed to also allow you to search by actor and director as well.  I'm sure they'll get there.

So if you have Vista Home Premium or Ultimate this is another great addition to your Media Center application. Enjoy!

June Issue of Laurel Mountain Post is out…

 If you don’t toot your own horn who will?

The new issue of the Laurel Mountain Post is out this week and this issue’s primary theme is on golfing. See my article on golf gadgets on page 26. There are few things listed that aren’t too expensive but the one that caught my eye was the Shadow Caddy. Not too many places where it is available here in the US, it was first introduced in Australia. I can see it having a big splash over here as well.

See the new issue at: http://laurelmountainpost.com/Archives/LMP-May-June-2009.pdf

Hope you enjoy!

Gizmodo-How to install Windows 7 On Almost and Netbook

If you are interested in trying out Windows 7 and just happen to have a Netbook laying around here is an article showing you the step by step procedure for doing so. I found this posting originally through Veronica Belmont’s Friendsfeed page this morning when I began playing with the site.

http://gizmodo.com/5257386/how-to-install-windows-7-on-almost-any-netbook

Bob

FriendsFeed

 Social Networking has become the WORD for a lot of us lately and I am as susceptible to trying out a new service as any other. While  listening to a recent TWIT podcast they discussed their use of this site for their sharing of information rather than using a site like Twitter. I must say this is much cleaner than Twitter and has the ability to allow more in depth commenting and sharing. And isn’t sharing information what it is all about? Anyway, I have setup my site at http://friendfeed.com/bappleby and if you want to subscribe you can find me there. Some of the benefits of this site is the ability to place your contact subscriptions into groups to make it easier to sort out the comment flow. You can make as many different categories as you like to make this useable. It comes populated with Favorites, Personal and Professional to get you started but after you have played around for awhile I am sure you can come up with many different groups.

I have posted a picture of my startup page to give you an idea of just how simple the interface is. You can add a favorites link to your browser that allows you to post a site and/or photos to your comments easily. This is what you see in this photo.

You can use this site as an aggregator for all of your blogs, Facebook, photo galleries (Flickr and Picasa), Gmail/Google Talk, Yelp, YouTube and others. So if you are around a lot of  sites with your postings this may make it easier to share the information around without reposting.

Bob

AVG Free 8.5 Download

If you are looking for a good Antivirus program for your home machines consider the free home basic version of AVG. This product provides basic antivirus support for you machine but if you want something that covers spyware, spam and other types of malware you will want to consider the paid subscription product.

To obtain the free version go to: AVG Free Basic Home Antivirus Software

For better protection and free support consider AVG Internet Security - Antivirus, Anti-Spyware, Anti-Spam, Safe Searching and Safe Surfing on the Web, Identity Theft Protection & Firewall

Prevention is better than cure! Comprehensive cyber threat prevention for Windows-based home users from one of the World's most trusted security companies. Enjoy your online life free from worry with AVG Internet Security.

• Easy to download, install and use
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• NEW Prevents identity theft
• Real-time security makes your online surfing, searching and chatting safe
• Top-quality protection that does not slow your system down
• Free support and service around the clock and across the globe
• Compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7