Love ya Google - Docs

Topic: Google Docs|Level: Beginner-Intermediate|Type: Informational

Another really great Google product I just recently had to start using; Google Docs.
http://docs.google.com

Google Docs is a completely free (naturally) web-based system for creating, editing, organizing, and sharing various types of documents.
Docs provide support for working with
Documents (like Wordpad or MS Office Word),
Spreadsheets (like MS Office Excel),
Presentations (like MS Office PowerPoint) and
Forms (as in data-collection Forms you can then link/email/embed for other people to fill out)

You can even Upload documents started in most other similar products and Google Docs will automatically convert them.
Documents: HTML, Plain text (.txt), MS Word (.doc, .docx), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw)
Presentations: MS PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps)
Spreadsheets: Comma Seperated Value (.csv), MS Excel (.xls, .xlsx) and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods)
and PDF Files.
And you can even Export any document out of Google Docs back to the various other formats for other applications if you need.

So not only is Google Docs a really nice way to create and maintain your documents online (so you can even access them from any where with Internet access), but you can even Share them! When you Share a document you can choose to allow the people you share it with (by email address or anybody who's given a special link) to only be able to view the documents or also be able to edit them. Multiple people can even be in editing the same document and the same time! And all the document types automatically have a revision history so at any time you can go back to view the document prior to any revisions. And you can set the document to send you an email notification should anybody make changes to it.

Data Storage is pretty amazing

I just got one of these 16gb microSD cards... (they really are this tiny)


And was thinking just how much information that tiny little thing can hold.
16 gigabits of data printed on Letter size paper in Courier New 12-point font with a 0.5" margin on all sides it would take 4,214,964 pages!


That would be 843 Cases of paper!
7.65 metric tons of paper to hold the amount of data on that one 0.4 gram card!

Love ya Google - Picasa

Topic: Picasa|Level: Beginner - Intermediate|Type: Informational

Google Account
Ok, first of all if you don't already have a Google account go get one. Once you have your Google account you can use all their many products with your one account. Even if you don't use their email (even though they do web-based email by far the best) you can still use whichever other products (iGoogle custom homepage, Picasa, Orkut, calendar, documents, blogging, notebook, G Talk, etc) you want with that one account.
(But if you're still using yahoo or hotmail/msn or any other web-based email service... just do yourself a favor, leave them as your spam email account and get a gmail account. Gmail even allows you to pull email from other POP3/IMAP enabled accounts to the Gmail interface if you do want to keep them around but not check 2 accounts. If you want more info about gmail see my Love ya Google - Gmail post

Picasa Parts
http://picasa.google.com/
Picasa is a Google product for photo (and video) management and hosting. There are two parts to it; the desktop application and the Picasa Web Albums.
The Picasa desktop application allows you to sort your photos in to albums, view, edit, label, caption, delete them, etc. There is even a Mac Beta version (http://picasa.google.com/mac/).
The Picasa Web Albums allows you to upload photos from Picasa (desktop application) to online Albums that you can then share.

Picasa Desktop Software
The Picasa desktop software has lots of features for sorting photos in albums, editing them, all sorts of things. The dekstop software also makes sharing any of your photos very easy. The buttons across the bottom allow you to Upload (to Picasa Web Albums), Email, Print, Export, send to a Blog, make a Collage or Movie/slide show, or even Shop for printing services (send your photos online to be printed and picked up in a store of your choice.)

To get any of your photos or videos online all you have to do is click the "Upload" button. A simple interface then appears where you can specify what album the item is uploaded to, size settings, and visibility of the item. Items that have been uploaded to the Web Albums will show a small green Up arrow in the lower-right of the image. If you edit an image that has already been Uploaded, after making your changes and clicking Upload again Picasa will change the existing online image to reflect your changes, rather than creating another image online.

Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web Albums part is the online image hosting part of the service. Your "Web Albums" can be completely different from your desktop software's "Albums". You can have images in desktop albums but not in web albums, or images in web albums and not in the desktop albums. You can also choose to have an album in your desktop automatically synchronize to a web album. Using this option you can even have them sync, then manage and delete images through the web interface from anywhere, and when you sync your desktop again it will even reflect those changes on your local computer.

You can also select an image through the web interface, and in the "Edit" options select "Edit in Picasa" (if you're on a computer with Picasa installed), and selecting that option will download the image to the local computer, open Picasa to edit the image, and when you close the editor it will automatically upload the changes back to the web.

Your Picasa Web Albums can have different levels of being shared. Anybody can go to your Picasa Web Albums page (i.e. http://picasaweb.google.com/nickolashook ) and see Albums you have set for "Public" visibility. "Unlisted" albums anybody can get to if they're given a special link, but they do not show up on your Web Albums page. "Sign-in required to view" albums allow you to click a "Share" button, and specify people (from your Google Contacts or manually typed email addresses) that will be emailed a link to the album and then have to be signed in to see them.

Face Recognition
Another really cool feature of the Picasa Web Albums is it can detect faces in your photos and group the faces it detects to be of the same person. You can then specify who that person is (even pick them from your Google Contacts if you have them set up there) and then you can easily find all the photos of a particular person by simply clicking their name.

G1 > iPhone * 2

Topic: G1 & Android Cell Phones|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational

Ok, I'm not an iPhone hater... Quite contrary, I very much wanted one for quite awhile. But fortunately I could never get one in my area. And I say fortunately because I've found one that I love far more than iPhone.
iPhone set a new standard for smart phones and because of it's enormous market penetration any new apps are generally developed first for it. Given that, iPhone is amazing.

But if you're not an apple-head, or can't get AT&T or Cingular or w/e the "exclusive" service provider is calling itself now, or don't use a Mac/iTunes, I strongly recommend you check out Android (operating system) and the G1 (phone). Android OS (open source, developed by Google) will be coming to other devices (not just phones) and other carriers very soon, but is currently only available on the G1 from Tmobile.

But the G1 is very close and in many ways superior to the iPhone! Better camera resolution, removable micro-SD card for media, full QWERTY on-screen keyboard And slide out keyboard. And especially if you use gmail as your main email or google calendar because your email, contact list, and calendar are all completely integrated and synchronized to the phone, with 'push' email and updates to the device. Edit anything on the phone or computer, it automatically syncs to the other. You can also configure any POP3/IMAP mail clients to be received to your gmail account and thus sync'ed to your phone too. Or if for some reason the phone fails (though I know of nobody who has had any failed hardware short of dropping it in water or off a ledge to hard concrete), once you get it fixed/replaced all you have to do is sign in to your gmail account and all your email, contacts, and calendar are automatically resync'ed.
Also has full integration to Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, and Windows Live; full HTML & Java web browser; 3.2mp camera & camcorder

Or if you like Google Maps (regular maps, satellite maps, or even street view maps!!), they're completely integrated as well and with the phone's GPS and open source development there are some pretty amazing maps & location applications available for it too. ("Find me the nearest movie theater, give me show times, and now give me turn by turn directions to it")
And the phone even has a YouTube application built right in with very impressive quality!

As for media, the G1 is integrated with Amazon MP3 and Google Checkout for payment processing of songs or applications purchased in the Market. But you also don't have to have a particular application (iTunes) to get media in your phone. Sync via WiFi, USB cable, or load directly to the removable media card! And items purchased through Amazon MP3 are generally a bit less expensive than Apple Store and don't have DRM on them so you can transfer to PC, Zune, or any other device.

Another really cool thing, the Android OS also has something called "intents". Which allows an application with any piece of information to basically "announce" that is has some piece of info and any other application on the phone that can do something with that kind of info may take it and make use of it... For example, the Shazam application most people are familiar with can tell you what a song is and then "announce" that it has a song artist & title. Then the Amazon MP3 app can take that and take you to buy the song. Or you might use the "Places" application which uses your GPS information and online data to find places of interest (banks, gas stations, restaurants, theaters, etc) near you. You can see how far the places are or read reviews on them. But then you could click the Address of the place, the application "announces" it has an address, then the Google Maps might pick it up and give you turn-by-turn directions to it or allow you to see the Street View image of the place, or click the phone number and the phone application will pick it up and call them.

And as far as cost (again Tmobile is only carrier at the moment, but Android is being implemented on new devices by other carriers right now), I got a deal on the phone but I think it's $180 with 2-year contract regularly. Then I have the smallest minutes plan, 300 anytime minutes for $30/mo, and unlimited texting & data for another $35/mo (or they have a $25/mo with unlimited data only option too). So $65/mo total even cheaper per month than the iPhone would be even if I lived in a main service area!

The only things I still think the iPhone wins on is it's a more aesthetic device (but new Android devices are coming), it has multi-touch, screen is a little bit larger, and the software catalog is bigger (though again as more and more Android devices get to the market, their penetration is just going to keep growing and since it's even cheaper for developers to get registered to post & sell their apps it's almost guaranteed apps will start getting developed with Android as the standard then ported to iPhone)

Just what is "Twitter"?

Topic: Twitter|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational

Twitter is basically a super-simple social-networking or "micro-blogging" service. It's a way to keep up on your friends or celebrities or whatever topics people are talking about and a way to let others know what's going on with you.

Tweeting
"Tweets" are short (140 character max) updates and messages people post. One of the main things that has made Twitter so huge is because it's so easy to post tweets.
via Websites: You can of course post your tweets and read what everybody you're following is up to from the main website (twitter.com) or from the mobile site (m.twitter.com). Of course all your account setup is done from the website as well. But more commonly you'll probably end up interacting with the Twitter service from some of the other options...
via SMS: Another very common way to tweet is through a cell phone SMS text messaging. Once you create your Twitter account, you can link your cell phone number and once set up all you have to do is send an SMS text message to 40404 (or other numbers available for outside the U.S.) and your text message is posted as a tweet. All the services from Twitter are free, the only monetary costs are if your cell service provider charges you for text messages.
via APIs: Twitter also makes their APIs publicly available. So any software developer can pretty easily make something that will post tweets and many can even show you tweets from people you're following. There are applications that integrate in to your web browser, ones that are stand-alone applications to run on your computer, ones that run on cell phones (on nearly any carrier/platform), nearly anywhere software applications can be written, there's an application available that implements the Twitter API.
"TwitterBar" is one I like that is a Firefox add-on that you can type a tweet message directly in the address bar on any page and a special image button shows up at the far right end of the address bar that when clicked posts what you have typed as a tweet.

Following/Followers
Once you have your Twitter account you can "Follow" your friends or celebrities (and anybody else can then Follow you) and then from your homepage (or whatever application you chose to use) you can see all the tweets from the people you're following sequentially.
To Follow somebody, you of course first need to Find them. The "Find People" link from the Twitter home page allows you to search for people by their name, by their email address, or you can even provide your email account and password and the Twitter service will check all the email addresses in your address book and find any of them that are set up as users. (Some people may not want to use this as it does give your email address and password to a company other than your email service provider, but the Twitter service does not store your password at all and they are a reputable company, so it is safe in my opinion.)
You can also find people easily if you're given their Twitter username. For example mine is "nickolashook", so you can get directly to my Twitter page by going to twitter.com/nickolashook.
Once you find somebody all you have to do is click the "Follow" link and that's it.
You can even start Following somebody from your cell phone if you have it linked to your Twitter account. You simply send a text of "FOLLOW username" to Twitter and that's it.

Getting Updates
You may end up having lots of people you're following on Twitter, then want to get the tweets from a subset of them sent to your cell. Once you have your cell linked to Twitter, all you have to do is go to your "People I'm Following" page (twitter.com/following) and click the little cell phone button beside those people and that's it. You can also from your account settings page set a "Sleep" time, in which updates will not be sent to your cell.
Or you can start getting updates sent to your cell by texting "ON username". You can also start Following somebody and get updates from them in the same text with "FOLLOW username, ON username"

@ Replies
You can post tweets that are directed at a specific person, but are still in the public timeline. A message such as "I'm Dumbfounded @nickolashook" would show up publicly, but I'd get a special notification through the website that a message had been directed at me. Also, others reading that message would be able to click my username to be taken to my page.

Directing Messaging
You can also send Direct Messages (or "DM") to other users. A Direct Message is one that's directed at a specific person and only can be viewed by them. To send a Direct Message you post a tweet in the form of "D username Your message". For example "D nickolashook Hey, what's up" would send the message "Hey, what's up" directly to me and only would be viewable by me. Direct Messages sent to users with mobile updates enabled even get the message sent as an SMS text message to them.

Tweeting Pics?
Twitter itself does not provide a direct option to post photos. However, most users use a service such as twitpic.com to post photos. You log in there with your Twitter username & password, and you're given a special email address to send photos to. Photos then sent to that address are uploaded to their servers and a tweet is posted with a link to that photo.

Topics & Trends
One of the other things Twitter is renowned for is you can search the social web for news on various topics as it happens or just see what people are talking about at that moment. The Search finds tweets on whatever you want to find.
Users also tend to use "hashtagging" in their tweets when posting messages of a particular topic. A hashtag is a pound or hash sign followed by some text that users can then Search for to find tweets for that topic. For example, recently everyone who was talking about the Obama inauguration were using #inaug09. This way you could search for this to follow the conversation.

Google Wave

Topic: Google Wave|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

Watch for this thing!
Google's answer to "What would email be if it were invented today?"

Simple communication object called a Wave
- Email style conversations
- Instant message style conversations
- Share photos & rich media
- Interact with Blog sites / wiki like sites / any interactive content system
- Collaboratively edit documents
- Rich APIs for interactive content such as games
- Integration with other system APIs (i.e. Twitter)
- APIs to integrate to existing workflow systems

Some of the already created "Robots" in it...
- Context based Spell Check - It recommends or corrects spelling based on the context of the sentence, not purely comparing what you type to list of dictionary words (i.e. it automatically would correct "I want been soup" to "I want bean soup")
- Media Sharing - Photos dropped in the wave conversation are instantly shows to all participants and those people even see thumbnail images before the entire photo is finished uploading
- "Bloggy" automatically posts and persists the wave in a Blog and anybody interacting in the wave conversation in the blog will have their contributions instantly show up in the original participants wave client
- "Rosy" - 40 language real-time translation! You type in your language, your other participants in the wave conversation sees what you type instantly translated to their language.
- "Tweety" Puts your Twitter messages & tweets right inside a Wave and allows you to post tweats and replies from the wave & search tweats for a particular subject and get continual search updates to the list

Spyware Cleaning

Topic: Maintenance|Level: Beginner|Type: How-To

If you're connect to the Internet, there's a good chance you have stuff running on your computer you don't want that's dragging its performance down. These "spyware" applications can come from a variety of sources and do all sorts of things you don't want. But a big problem with them is if they're running it's memory and processing time your computer can't give to the applications you do want to run.

So the most common procedure I use to clean computers of Spyware is...

1. Download & Install "Spybot - Search & Destroy"
Go to http://www.download.com and search for "spybot search destroy", or just use this link. Download & Install the application

2. Download & Install definition updates for Spybot
During the Installation of Spybot it will give you this option to Download Definition Updates. Do so.

3. Reboot the computer to Safe Mode
Reboot your computer. While it's booting up and all that stuff is flashing by on the screen repeatedly and fairly quickly tap the [F8] key. After a couple seconds (before Windows starts loading) you should get a black screen with white text and an option near the top to "Start Windows in Safe Mode". Select that option and press Enter. Windows will continue to boot, but may look a little different than you're used to. That's ok. Safe Mode is a mode in which Windows runs with minimal drivers and software support. Basically in normal mode all those spyware things generally start automatically with Windows and then 'hide' themselves. Safe Mode prevents them from doing that so Spybot can have a better chance at finding and eliminating them.

4. Run a full scan of the computer with Spybot in Safe Mode
Start Spybot from your Start Menu and continue through the options to run a full scan. This will take awhile, possibly hours, depending on speed and size of your computer's contents.

5. Allow Spybot to clean out any problems it finds.
Once the scan is finished, Spybot will list all the problems it found and will give a button to Fix Selected Problems. Click that and wait for the clean-up to finish. Reboot your computer normally to get back to regular Windows mode and you're done.

What's a "Torrent"

Topic: Torrents|Level: Intermediate|Type: Informational / How-To

You may have heard the term "Torrent" before (in computer terminology, not like a hurricane). A Torrent is basically a way of downloading very large files or groups of files from other users over the Internet. It's similar to Peer-to-Peer file sharing, but has a couple benefits over them. Now I don't claim to fully understand how all of this works myself, but I know enough to understand what it does.

What's in a Torrent
A Torrent basically contains information on where to go to download a file or files. They're ideal for getting very large, popular file(s). They're commonly used to (frequently illegally) share TV Shows, entire seaons of TV shows, movies, entire CDs, entire software applications, etc.

How they Work
First of all you have to have a torrent downloader application. There are a few common ones out there such as uTorrent (www.uTorrent.com). Once you have a torrent downloader application, you then use it to open a .torrent file (that could possibly be found at various torrent hosting sites such as thepiratebay.org or mininova.org, or simply doing a web search for something you want to find along with the word 'torrent' in the search). The .torrent file contains information about what file or files are contained in the torrent and about some "Trackers". The Trackers are servers on the Internet that keep track of users that are downloading but not uploading ("Leeching") or also uploading ("Seeding") the file(s) in that torrent also. The Trackers do not actually host the file(s) contained in the torrent. When you choose to download the contents of a .torrent with your downloader application it then asks the Trackers who else is sharing the file(s) in it. Your downloader app then goes to them and starts getting chunks of data from them. The downloader app also does this with potentially many other users all over the Internet, all at the same time. When you download a file from a particular website or server you're pulling that file from a single source. But with torrents you potentially download pieces of the file(s) from multiple sources at the same time. This allows the file(s) to be downloaded much more quickly than trying to pull them all from one source. Also with torrents your downloader app takes care of asking the other sources for different chunks of the file(s) to maximize download efficiencies.

Benefits of Torrents
Because of how Torrents work they are ideal for sharing large amounts of data / files. Also more popular items can then be downloaded more quickly because there're more users who have that file to share. Torrent technology also makes it possible for your torrent downloader application to priorize particular files in a torrent's collection of files, or even particular torrents above others. You can even choose to download some files but not others from a particular torrent's collection of files. Or you can pause and resume large downloads without issue if you need to shutdown your computer or sharing application for some reason.

Legality of Torrents
Torrents and Torrent technology itself is not illegal. However they are more often than not used to share copyrighted material. A Server on the Internet that hosts files for downloads is generally a publicly registered entity. Therefore if they were to illegally host copyrighted material they could easily be found and face legal action. However, somebody hosting a .torrent file or running a Tracker is not actually sharing copyrighted material, therefore they have a degree of deniability protecting them. However, this is a very gray area of the law and is undergoing some change right now. One of the biggest torrent hosting sites on the Internet, thepiragebay.org, recently had its 4 founding members arrested and fined several million dollars each for copyright infringement.

Lynda.com

Topic: Education|Level: Various|Type: Training

If you're wanting to get educated on any particular piece of software, before buying any books I strongly recommend first checking Lynda.com. Lynda has training videos for MANY products from many manufacturers, and typically broken down to multiple skill levels. The videos are very well laid out and they're written and recorded by professionals in the field that actually use the products. They also are not afraid to say if some part of the product is flawed or flat out doesn't work and how to get the best use out of it. They're definitely a better way to go for over-all education of a product over books, in my opinion. Although books still have the benefit of a easy ongoing reference, for the initial learning, go with Lynda.

(Anybody for a game of Charades... -sounds like- *snitchagorrent*)

Love ya Google - Gmail!

Topic: Gmail|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational

Google is taking over the World! ..Wide Web.

Google is a pretty amazing company, and put out some pretty amazing products. And one of the really great things about all their services is they are all seamlessly integrated to their other services where appropriate. And once you create your Google account, you can easily activate any of their Services you wish to use without creating a new account for each... One Google account does it all!

The topic of this blog is their email service, Gmail. Like most web-based email services (like Yahoo and Hotmail), Gmail is free to sign up for, accessed right from your web browser, and it's an email service. But that's about where the similarity ends. Gmail is by far the most impressive email service I've used so just go ahead and sign up for a gmail account now, you'll love it. But if ya really want some more info on it first here ya go...

Auto-Saved Drafts
As you type messages they are continually automatically saved to your Drafts group incase your webbrowser crashes or any other undesirable events.

POP3 Integration
If you have other email accounts with POP3 access available, you can set them up to have Gmail pull the messages from them as well.

Forwarding & POP/IMAP
You can also have other POP/IMAP email clients (Outlook, etc) pull messages from your Gmail account. Although I prefer to not to run those bulky applications if not necessary, that option is available.

Superior Contacts List
Gmail provides a great interface for maintaining your Contact List. You can provide multiple addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, notes, and even pictures for your contacts. And with the ever growing array of Google intergrated products and services your Google Contact List can be used in several other systems (a couple of which I'll explain shortly).

Conversations
Gmail uses a pretty smart system that based on the sender and subject of an email it keeps a string of emails grouped together as a "Conversation". You send an email to somebody and when they Reply back to it it comes back to your Inbox and shows the previous messages in the conversation more like a Chat interface than just a bunch of deeper and deeper indentations in mess of text at the bottom of the message.

Chat
Google Talk is a Instant Messaging chat service that is built right in to Gmail. You can actually Chat with other Gmail or AIM users (and I've read they're working on integrating other IM services) right from your Email window and Chat converstaions are even kept in your email as another mail message or Conversation.

Labels (not Folders)
Most other email services allow you to use Folders to sort your messages. But the problem with Folders is you 'move' your emails in to them and they exist only within that Folder. Gmail uses Labels. With Labels you can assign multiple Labels to a given message and still find your messages by clicking on the Label you want to look through and it will show you all messages with that Label assigned to it. But you also have special Labels like the "Inbox" label. A message tagged with "Inbox" of course shows in your Inbox, and simply removing that Label "Archives" the message to your "All Mail" group.

Filters
Gmail provides a very sophisticated and yet very simple interface for creating Filters. Filters allow you to do various things with your mail messages as you receive them (or at any time you manually want to run them). With Filters you can do things like automatically assign your "Friends & Family" Label to messages if they are received from your indicated senders. You can automatically Archive (skip the Inbox) messages if they come from other senders. Or even automatically delete messages from others.

** Labs **
Labs is where the real cool stuff in Gmail comes in. Labs are small applets that you can selectively choose which ones you want enabled in your email and they can do all sorts of really cool stuff. You really just have to look through the list of available Labs to see which ones look good to you but some of the ones I use are...
- "YouTube previous in mail" When you receive an email with a link to a YouTube video this puts the video right in the mail message.
- "Pictures In Chat" If you use Google Talk this uses the Picture for your Contacts right in the Chat window
- "Custom Label Colors" Gmail Lables have a handful of Color styles you can assign to your Labels, but this one lets you create your own custom Label Colors
- "Multiple Inboxes" This shows multiple panels of Inboxes in your main Inbox screen. These additional Inboxes can be custom Labels, Starred Messages, or various other configurable options
- "Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat" This one's really cool! If you have a Mobile phone number set up for a Contact you can click their name from your Chat list and select the Send SMS option. You'll then get a regular Google Talk chat window up but messages you send to that person are delivered to their cell phone as SMS messages. If they reply to you from their phone the message comes right back to your Chat window.
- "Google Calendar Gadget" If you use Google Calendar (another great Google service that will probably be a topic for a later blow) this will show your Calendar in a side panel in your mail interface.

Firefox Bookmark Tricks

Topic: Firefox|Level: Beginner|Type: Tips & Tricks

Bookmarks (a.k.a. Favorites in some other browsers) in Firefox have some really nice features and tricks you can do with them. Obviously Bookmarks are saved links to pages you're likely to want to revisit.

Types of Bookmarks
In the latest version of Firefox (Firefox 3 at the time of writing this), Bookmarks can be in one of 3 main groups or folders; "Bookmarks", "Unsorted Bookmarks", and "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder".
"Bookmarks" is the main library collection of all your bookmarks. These are the ones that show up in the lower part of the Bookmarks menu.
"Unsorted Bookmarks" are ones you've created but haven't specified a particular location in the full "Bookmarks" collection for the item to be in. Typically these are the ones created with the "Bookmark this page" address bar button (more on this next).
"Bookmarks Toolbar Folder" are ones that show up on a special menu bar you can optionally turn on or off (more on this later too).

Creating Bookmarks
The easiest way to create a bookmark is while on the page you want to bookmark click the white star image button at the right end of your address bar. That's it! This will create a bookmark in the "Unsorted Bookmarks" group with a single click. If the page is already bookmarked the star image button will already be colored in.

Or you can create a bookmark by clicking the "Bookmarks" menu then "Bookmark this page" (or press Ctrl+D) or click the star image button once to bookmark the page in Unsorted Bookmarks and then a second time to bring up a window with additional options for creating the bookmark. From this window you can specify a custom Name for the bookmark, a folder to create it in, or some Tags for the bookmark (more on Tags later).

You can even create bookmarks by drag-and-dropping about any obvious page-specific thing (the page Tab, the address bar, the item listed in your History, etc.) to about anywhere you can see your bookmarks listed (the Bookmarks Toolbar, the Bookmarks Library, etc.)

Using Bookmarks
Bookmarks on the Bookmarks Toolbar are the easiest to use (if you chose to have the Bookmarks Toolbar on) as you can just click the item on the toolbar to go to the page (or middle-click to have it opened in a new tab). You can toggle the Bookmarks Toolbar on and off by clicking the "View" menu -> "Toolbars" -> "Bookmarks Toolbar".
The rest of your bookmarks in the regular "Bookmarks" group can be accessed by clicking the "Bookmarks" menu and locating the bookmark in the lower part of the menu.

However, an even easier way to get to any of your bookmarks is to simply start typing the part of the name or address in your address bar. Firefox has a really great feature that as you start typing in the address bar it will automatically search your bookmarks' names and addresses (and even your browser history) and provide you with suggestions in a drop-down menu that you can then click (or again middle-click) to access the page. Also, from this drop-down menu of items you can easily tell which items are coming from bookmarks and which are from your browsing history because the bookmarks will show the yellow star icon listed with the item.

Organizing & Customizing Bookmarks
Firefox allows you to create Folders for organizing, reordering and grouping your bookmarks. Organizing bookmarks is very easy in Firefox. You simply click the "Bookmarks" menu then "Organize Bookmarks" (or press Ctrl+Shift+B). This opens the Bookmarks Library window. From here it's pretty intuitive and simple for creating Folders and reordering, organizing (by drag-and-dropping), deleting and creating new items.
You can also change the properties of the bookmark (Name, Location, Descriptions, Tags, Keywords... more on Keywords and Tags next) by selecting them here and changing the options in the lower-right pane of the window.
This window also has an option on the left for History. You can create bookmarks by drag-and-dropping items from this History item to your bookmark folders.

Using Tags
Tags allow you to provide additional quick one-word notes to bookmarks. These tags can be specified when creating the Bookmark. Firefox will automatically provide Suggested Tags when creating the bookmark that you can simply click, or you can type a comma-delimited list of your own tags.
These tags can be used to locate your bookmarks from the Bookmarks Library window under the Tabs item in the left tree, or by simply typing the Tag in the address bar and selecting the item from the automatic search suggestions.

Keywords
Keywords are a feature of Firefox I just recently discovered and love! Keywords allow you to type a particular keyword in the address bar (i.e. dict), hit Enter and be immediately taken to the indicated page (http://www.dictionary.com).
Additionally, you can make Smart Keywords that take whatever you type after the keyword and provide it as part of the page address. That is you can type "dict schadenfreude" and be immediately taken to a dictionary.com look-up on the word Schadenfreude, or "wiki firefox" and be taken to a Wikipedia search results page for Firefox, or about any other searchable website.

To set up a Keyword on a bookmark go to the Bookmarks Library ("Bookmarks" -> "Organize Bookmarks"), locate the bookmark you want to put the keyword on, click the "More" button if you see it and you'll then see the "Keyword" field. Type whatever keyword you want to use for the bookmark here and that's it. You can now type that keyword in the address bar, hit Enter and be taken to that page.

To set up a Smart Keyword first go to a search results page on the website you want to use, for example, try doing a search for "Decatur" at http://maps.google.com/ (this is easiest to set up if you only use a single word for your initial search). Now bookmark the page, then go to the Bookmarks Library and locate the bookmark you just created. Again click the "More" button if you see it, and provide a keyword in the Keyword field (i.e. "map"). Now, in the "Location" field you should see a portion of the address that contains the text you searched for. Change your search word here to " %s " (that's percent sign and lower-case 's', without the quotation marks). So based on the example you'd see "http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Decatur&output=html" and you'd want to change "Decatur" to "%s" so your Location property is now "http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s&output=html". Now you could type in your address bar something like "map Orlando, FL" and you'll be immediately taken to a Google Maps search results for Orlando, FL.

Here's a page that has 15 Smart Keyword bookmarks you can download and instructions how to import them in to Firefox: http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/geek-to-live-fifteen-firefox-quick-searches-129658.php

Xmarks
http://www.xmarks.com/
I've mentioned Xmarks (previously known as "Foxmarks") before but it's worth bringing up again here and giving some more detail on it.
Xmarks is a Firefox add-on that you create an account with and it automatically synchronizes all your bookmarks (including all the properties, Keywords, Tags, etc), and if you chose even your Firefox saved website passwords, to their server database. This way you can have Firefox and Xmarks on multiple computers (home, work, laptops) and you have the same bookmarks available from them all. It also servers as a back-up of your bookmarks, this alone makes it worth the download.
Also, Xmarks uses the large collection of bookmarked page data to help rank and provide similar page data. This information is available from Google search results page (which adds an Xmarks icon to the right of the search results that you can mouse-over for more information), or it's available by clicking the Xmarks icon it adds to to the right end of your address bar.

Installing Firefox Add-Ons

Topic: Firefox|Level: Beginner|Type: How-To & Recommendations

As mentioned previously, one of the coolest parts of Firefox is its support for 3rd party developed add-ons (a.k.a. change-arounds or extensions). Add-ons are small bits of programming script made in a particular structured way that they can fit in to Firefox's modular design. The standard Firefox interface handles installing, running, listing, and removing the add-ons. Much beyond that the add-ons can change nearly any part of how Firefox operates.

Add-ons commonly do things like add additional tools to the main Toolbar or Status Bar, they can add completely new Toolbars, or they can change the way the actual HTML of a page is processed and displayed, among many other things. Add-ons also can automatically update themselves when updates are available. Firefox will even typically prompt you with a small nofication window when updates are available and in 1 click have them all downloaded and installed.

If you haven't already tried Firefox I encourage you to go ahead and download & install it now (http://www.firefox.com)

Types of Add-ons
There's actually a few components collectively referred to as "Add-ons".
Extensions - These are the add-ons that add or customizable your web browsing experience with selective tools. Extensions are the ones that are typically thought of when speaking of "Add-ons"
Themes - These are the ones that customize your browser's colors, toolbar graphics, and appearance. Only one Theme can be enabled at a time. Themes allow you to make your browser look like other types of browsers, or reflect things that represent your personal taste (animals, places, sports teams, etc)
Plugins - These are applets that run completely in the background and allow other applications to interact in the web browser. These are components that allow your browser to use PDF Documents, Java, MS Office documents, Windows Media Player, etc. Plugins you about never need to install or manage in any way; they're automatically downloaded and installed when needed.

Getting Add-ons
So to get started customizing and enhancing your web browsing experience in Firefox click the "Tools" menu at the top, then "Add-ons". This will pull up the Add-ons window where you can review and change options of your add-ons.
From the "Get Add-ons" tab, you type an add-on name in the Search box if you're looking for a specific add-on. Or you can click the "Browse All Add-ons" link (or just go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox) to peruse the vast catalog of available add-ons.

Installing Add-ons
Installing the add-ons is incredibly easy. Unlike when installing regular applications on the computer, Firefox's modular design allows it to manage the entire install process.
Whether you searched for and found an add-on from the Add-ons window or from the Firefox Add-ons web page, simply click the "Add to Firefox..." button. The add-on will be downloaded, set up, and you'll be prompted to restart Firefox. Do so and that's it. And remember Firefox can even automatically reopen all your previous tabs when you close and restart it.
You also can install multiple add-ons all at once, and then restart Firefox when you're finished. Although, you'll typically only want to install a couple at a time and restart so that if something changes in a way you don't like you can more easily determine which add-on made the change to customize or remove it. And frequently following the browser restart the add-ons will open new windows or tabs the first time to get any necessary options set or provide usage instructions.

Recommended Add-ons
Some of my personal favorite add-ons and recommendations are:

• Adblock Plus - This one can block nearly all advertisements from site as you visit them. It places a little "Block" tab in place of the ad that you can click on to allow the ad to show in case you want to or it incorrectly blocks something you don't want it to for some reason. This one's a near essential.
• Answers - Alt-click a word or some highlighted words on a page and get a pop-up definition or description.
• Better Gmail 2 - All sorts of enhancements for Gmail if you use it.
• Cooliris - Pages that list collections of images that are set up for it (Google image search, Flickr, Myspace/Facebook people's photo pages), you can click an icon that appears in the corner of the images when you mouse-over them that will open a kind of 3D-ish wall of images that you can quickly and easily drag and slide around to view the images. Hard to describe, but work looking at.
  
• Download Statusbar - The built-in download manager for Firefox opens a small window with all downlads listed in it. The thing I don't like about it is it is a stand-alone window that will move behind your browser or other windows and you can't see the progress of the download. Download Statusbar adds a new status bar along the bottom of the main browser window that shows the progress of all downloads across it. It also allows you to pause and resume downloads from most hosts, and has various options for things like having some file types automatically disappear from the status bar when done downloading (images) while others remain until opened (application installers). Another near-essential.
  
• FaviconizeTab - This one allows you to set particular websites to have their tab reduced down to only show the page's icon (removing the full page title from the tab). This is handy for reducing the size tabs I always have open (work homepage, iGoogle homepage, gmail) to take nearly no room. It also allows you to set a hotkey like Ctrl+Click'ing a tab to reduce it down to only an icon.
• FireFTP - Very nice built-in FTP browser & manager for those that use FTP.
• FireGestures - This one allows you to set up gestures where you hold the right mouse-button down and draw something that indicates an action for the browser to take. For example right-click drag a straight line from right to left to go back a page, or left to right to go forward a page, etc. Many gestures are set up by default and you can customize all sorts of additional gestures.
• Forecastfox - Puts local weather and forecast in your bottom Status bar. And can even provide slide-in notifications and and additional icon "!" for severe weather warnings.
• FoxTab - Provides a Vista-like interface for switching between multiple open tabs.
  
• Google Toolbar for Firefox - All sorts of Google related searches and tools from a new dedicated Toolbar.
• TwitterBar - If you use Twitter, this one allows you to type a tweet in to your address bar and click a special Twitter icon to have the text you just provided there sent to your twitter page.
• Wizz RSS News Reader - This is the one I mentioned in the previous blog about RSS Readers. Opens your RSS Feed list in a new window or side-bar.
• Xmarks (previously named "Foxmarks") - This one allows you to synchronize your Bookmarks to an on-line database. That on-line database can then be synchronized to other computers (same bookmarks on work pc, home pc, and laptops) and it can be browsed from your own my.xmarks.com web page from any computer.
  Additionally Xmarks uses it's huge collection of bookmark data to extend Google search results with a special icon showing similar sites and various details of pages right from the search results page, and similar information from a pop-up window access from the Xmarks icon added to the address bar of a page.
  One more near-essential if you use Firefox on more than one computer.

Customizing Add-ons
Most add-ons have various customization options. Frequently you'll be prompted for various settings after the add-on is initially installed and the browser is restarted, but you generally have various more customization options beyond those.
Select the add-on from the "Tools" -> "Add-ons" window, and if you see an "Options" button, clicking it will pull up the add-on's options window.

Disabling / Uninstalling Add-ons
Once an add-on is installed you may want it temporarily disabled for some reason or you may decide you don't like it. Disabling or Uninstalling them is just as easy as installing them. Select the add-on in the "Tools" -> "Add-ons" window and click the "Disable" or "Uninstall" button. The "Disable" button is replaced with an "Enable" button when it's disabled.

What's this RSS / Feeds / Subscribing stuff?

Topic: RSS|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational & How-to

What Is RSS?
You've probably heard of "RSS" or "Feeds" or "Subscribing" (in terms of web stuff), but didn't know exactly what that all meant. They're all basically referring to the same thing. "RSS" stands for "Really Simple Syndication". RSS Feeds are content that you selectively subscribe to and get it when and how you want it.

Email is a push service; senders actively distribute stuff to you. If you want them to stop sending stuff to you, you have to explicitly tell them to do so. RSS, however, is a pull service; you selectively retrieve your content and the senders don't necessarily know who all is pulling what they're providing. RSS has quickly become a very popular and effective way of providing content. This content can be anything from news, store promotions, comics, weather forecasts, people's blogs, really anything that is provided on a continual updating basis is a good candidate for RSS.

With RSS you generally use some kind of RSS Reader application. In your RSS Reader application you create a list of the "RSS Feeds" (a special web address that is where the content is published) that interest you.

The magic of RSS is that content is always published in the same consistent structure. They have a Feed title, and each item in the Feed has a published date & time, title, body content and usually each item links to a web page containing additional content. Your RSS Reader application can take those pieces of information and display them to you in a consistent way, regardless of where they're actually coming from or what they contain.

How To Use RSS
So to use RSS, the first step is to figure out what you want to use to subscribe to them. Most web browsers have built in components for reading and subscribing to RSS Feeds. But these components are frequently pretty simplistic, and many many more sophisticated and more customizable Readers are available.

Some RSS Readers are web-based and others are local applications on your PC or web-device. Web-based readers have the advantage of feeds you subscribe to are saved on the web-hosting service and are thus available from any PC. On the other hand local pc readers have the advantage of generally being a bit more sophisticated being that they do not have the limitations of what a web page can do.

My current reader of choice is the web-based one, Google Reader. This service saves your Feed subscriptions with your Google account and the reader page itself is sufficient for my personal needs.
Alternatively, another Reader I've used and is quite nice is a Firefox add-on called "Wizz RSS". Wizz RSS opens its feed list in a new browser window or a side-bar window and provides various features like searching and all the standard Firefox tricks like being able to middle-click an item and have it open in a new Firefox tab.

Subscribing to Feeds
So how do you know when a page or some content is available via RSS? Usually you'll see an icon similar to this somewhere on the page:

Also, most pages that are available via RSS are coded so that you'll see the RSS Icon right the address bar of most browsers. For example, you probbly see the RSS Icon at the right end of your address bar on this page.

Clicking the RSS Icon from the address bar, or usually from elsewhere on the page, will then take you to the actual RSS Feed page. This is the page you want to provide your RSS Reader the address of.
Sometimes there are different versions of an RSS feed available. Clicking the RSS icon from the address bar or in some way elsewhere on the page, you might be prompted for which version of the Feed you want. RSS and Atom are two slightly different types of Feeds. Given this option I'd recommend just selecting the RSS one for now.
Also, the same content might be available in a few different way such as when subscribing to your news website's Feed you may be able to select All News or only Technology or Celebrity News, or you may even be able to select between things such as including images in the Feed items or not. All these types of options are up to the feed's author on how they want it to work.

Now from the actual Feed page you generally have two options. Most more sophisticated browsers give you a way right at the top of the page to Subscribe to the feed using various Readers the web browser is aware of. Firefox has the built in "Live Bookmarks" which is a special type of Bookmark for reading RSS.
Alternatively, you can copy and paste the address of the page and use the option in your Reader of choice to add a feed. Generally other Readers have a kind of "Add a Subscription" button that when clicked will ask for the address of the Feed.

Push and Pull Subscriptions
Many content services however provide support for both push email notifications of new content as well as RSS pull support. For example, this blog is published through blogspot.com. Blogspot.com handles setting up the RSS feed as well as providing a way that if you chose, you can have it send you an email when an author creates a new post.

Web Browsers

Topic: Firefox|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational

Some people tend to think "the Internet" is that big blue "e" icon and the only thing the computer is for. That "e" is actually "Internet Explorer" (not "the Internet"), a product from Microsoft commonly referred to as "IE", and it's just one piece of software that may be used to access the Internet. The problem is since it's preloaded with Windows it's the only application most people use, and it is far from the best.

People using a Mac computer get there's preloaded with "Safari", which is now also available for Windows. And there's also "Chrome" which is a relatively new product by Google that may be worth keeping any eye on since Google puts out amazing stuff all the time. I haven't done much with Safari or Chrome yet, so nothing really to them at this time.

This post though is about another option, Firefox ("FF") from Mozilla. Firefox (available for free download here: http://www.firefox.com/), and it's quickly becoming one of the most popular browsers in use even over IE! And once you've tried it you'll likely see why.

So some of the quick things that make Firefox my browser of choice and reasons for anybody else to check it out...

Open Source
The Firefox source code is all open source. This means there's a lot more people in the development community who can find bugs and security holes and get them fixed.

Innovation over Replication
Firefox (to the best of my knowledge) was one of the first browsers to support multiple tabs for different pages as well as several other features they have that others are just now implementing.

Auto Crash Recovery
If the browser crashes for some reason (whether because of corrupt code on pages, the operating system, or some generic memory problem), when you open the browser back up it can restore all the tabs and pages you previously had open.

Customizable Themes
Themes are the images, colors & font styles of the browser's toolbars, statusbars, and buttons. 3rd party developers are able to create new themes that you can easily pick one you like and in a matter of just a couple clicks have implemented.

Add-Ons (a.k.a. "Extensions" or "Change-Arounds")
This is the most impressive part of FF in my opinion. FF supports 3rd party development of add-ons. These are what turns a good browser in to an amazing tool! You can easily peruse the catalog of available add-ons and select the ones you want to install, try them out, and if they don't work for you then you can just as simply remove them. I'll provide a list of some of my favorite and more essential add-ons in my next blog, but it's still worth checking out right away for anybody still using IE or some other browser.

Automatic Spell Check
Any text box you can type in automatically has misspelled words given a little squiggly red line that you can then simply right-click to get spelling correction suggestions

Middle-Clicking (or Wheel-clicking)
If you have a middle mouse button or your mouse wheel can be 'clicked', this is a wonderful thing with Firefox. You can middle-click a link to have that page link opened in a new tab, you can middle-click your tabs to close them, or you can middle-click your navigation buttons (back, forward, home) to have them opened in new tabs too.

Automatic Self-updates
Firefox as well as any installed add-ons can even automatically check for updates and download them so all you have to do is restart the browser after it prompts you and you're up-to-date.

So download & install Firefox (http://www.Firefox.com/), then once started go to Tools -> Add-ons -> Get Add-ons -> Browse All Add-ons and start seeing what looks good to you. ("Adblock Plus", "Download Statusbar" are must-haves!)

Also, I plan on customizations and tweaks to Firefox to be the subject of some blogs yet to come.

Blog Intent

I'm a tech-gamer-geek. I spend a lot of time reading tech articles, playing with software features, and working in the IT field. Through these I learn lots of various pointers and things that I use to make technology work better for me. I thought some of these pointers would be good to share to hopefully make some others people's lives and use of technology a bit easier for them; that is the intent of this blog.

I intend to keep the postings somewhat selective. Much of the information I read are about systems I never use or have tried and didn't like (or just don't like or use Yet). There's no point for everybody to be overwhelmed with such information.

However, I'm sure it will also include various other things that occur in my life that I feel relevant enough to share, but the primary focus is on the tech tips & tricks.

Also, a lot of people I know who are likely to read this are a bit of tech-gamer-geeks too, and maybe they'll be able to share some of their own know-how and tricks with me through this.