Monday, June 15, 2009 at 3:41PM A new ZDNet article just came in giving a comparison of features and pricing between the new iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre and Android G1. So if you are in the market for a new phone this article may help make your decision easier.
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 3:40PM I always wondered about this. ZDNet is reporting that an Arizona Video Editor is attributing the way he uses Facebook and Twitter may have given burglars the high-sign to come into his home and steal his video editing equipment. While there is no way to be sure that his posting information to his Twitter and Facebook accounts, his posting detailing his trip to his friends may have been a heads up to the burglars. An article by Anne Wallace Allen for the Associated Press details this particular situation.
A lot of things would have to come together for a burglar to use your online postings to gauge when to take advantage your not being home. First they would have to know who you are, where you live and need to be monitoring you to see when the best time to sneak into your home. But, it probably wouldn’t hurt to be careful though.
As Sam Diaz of ZDNet said: “Still, it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Next time I head out on a vacation, I pledge to not tell my Facebook friends and Twitter followers that I’m leaving. The last thing I need is to come hone to a ransacked house.”
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 3:39PM Take a quick look at this article describing how to reserve vanity pages at FaceBook by “letting them customize the Web addresses that lead to their profiles.” If you are into this then you may want to read this CNet article by Caroline McCarthy.
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 3:38PM I put together a short demo video to show how you can scan to a file. In the demo we have setup the printers internal settings to FTP to file locations on our server. We have setup a function for all of the key personnel in the office where each individual has their own dedicated landing point folder on the server. This is a short video and won’t take long to demonstrate this function.
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 3:37PM 
We have had this unit in our shop now for over a month and I can honestly tell you that I don’t know how I lived without it until now. We haven’t had a decent copier for awhile, we print everything original, but the scanner is what I have come to love. We have setup FTP functions on the printer to allow it to scan to individual directories on our server that you can access and manipulate the scanned documents to your heart’s content. We have taken several functions that created more paper copies and now have fully digitized the functions. We are getting closer to that dream of a paperless office. I have taken to scanning all of my day notes into the system and now I able to quickly use these to working with the information.
This is a color printer so you have full capability of B/W and Color Printing, Scanning and Copying as well as Fax capabilities. I haven’t told you the best thing yet.
What a deal. Here’s a pointer to the product brochure, be sure to take a look. Let me know if this is something that you are interested in and we can setup a demo for you.
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 3:36PM Interesting article from ZDNet’s Andrew Nusca: “Top 10 affordable gadgets for Father’s Day [gift guide]”
Found some neat stuff here that I think I would want as well…
http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=5028&alertspromo=&tag=nl.rSINGLE
Have fun!
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 3:35PM Even though we are not an Apple Fan House if you are a gadget geek you have got to love the Apple iPhone. Apple Announced the new iPhone 3GS ($199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB and will be available June 19th) and drops the price on the 3G to $99. The new 3GS is faster, launching Messaging 2x faster, almost 3x faster to launch a web page and includes OpenGL/ES with 7.2MBps HSDPA support built in.
Probably the best new feature that new owners will use is the 3.0 megapixel camera. There are some really neat features including:
Voice Control has also been added to the unit. Hold down the home button for a few seconds in any application. Commands that you can say float across the screen. Examples include: “Dial computer connections”, “play andy mckee”, “play more songs like this”, “what’s playing now”.
Other features: Built-in digital compass, New accessibility settings, Nike+ support, Hardware data encryption, Improved battery life. 9 hours on WiFi, 10 hours watching video, 30 hours audio, 12 hours 2G talk, 5 hours 3G talk.
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 3:34PM 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.
Thursday, June 11, 2009 at 3:31PM 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 2008Announcement 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.
Sunday, June 7, 2009 at 3:30PM 
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.
Friday, June 5, 2009 at 3:09PM 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 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.
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.
Friday, June 5, 2009 at 3:08PM 
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.
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.
Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 3:07PM
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.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 3:06PM 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.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 3:03PM 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.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 2:52PM 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?
Tuesday, June 2, 2009 at 2:50PM 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.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009 at 10:50AM 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.
Monday, June 1, 2009 at 2:53PM 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.
Monday, June 1, 2009 at 11:35AM 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.
![apple[1]](http://bobstechtalk.squarespace.com/resource/WindowsLiveWriter/NewiPhone3GSgetsalotofPressCoverage_6ED6/?fileId=3457245 "apple[1]")
