Friday, July 30, 2010

Google Bookmarks - How Do you Use Lists?

Google recently added lists to their bookmarking service. I was wondering how everyone was using them compared to previously.

How do you use Google Bookmark lists?


Thursday, July 29, 2010

Foray into Windows 7: Part 3 - First Impressions - UI

"My new computer came with Windows 7. Windows 7 is much more user-friendly than Windows Vista. I don't like that." - Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory [video]

So far my journey into Windows 7 has a few notes. Here is my stream-of-consciousness laundry list of thoughts.

The taskbar grew since the last time we met it. A little bit taller and a little bit wiser in Windows 7. The taskbar now also has nicer icons for Wi-Fi and battery built in (oops, this is just a ThinkPad thing).The "Show Desktop" button taking permanent residence on the taskbar is a welcome change. I would have just added it as a quick launch icon (though I'm not sure how it works anymore). Our beloved programs now merge with their icons which blurs the line between desktop and application. I like how each individual tab can be accessed from the taskbar when working with IE or Chrome. Sometimes I'll hunt through each of my open programs looking for certain content and forget that it was just on another tab. Having actions as the context menu makes a lot more sense than the "Close, Max, Min, Size, Move, Restore" found in previous versions. Perhaps the only time I have ever used "Move" was when a window was off the screen and I've never used "Size".

Pinning programs to the taskbar is nice. Pinning documents you have open in the programs on the taskbar or start menu is even nicer. Pinning recent documents FTW.

My gadgets no longer have a nice "drawer" to fit in. I'm not sure how you can call it the "Sidebar" program if there is no bar anymore. It's alright, I've abandoned my gadgets anyway. I never really used them unless they were set to "always display". Going to the desktop seems like too much work just to check my CPU speed or get the calendar. Maybe it will come back. My first use for the sidebar was mainly to reduce my window real estate so I didn't have to mouse too far on my widescreen.

Windows Snap: LOL! I'll use it occasionally but it isn't spectacular. It's almost as fast as manually resizing.

Now here is an interesting find. You can now backup your credentials and encryption so you won't ruin your files if you reset your password. Or at least the option is more user friendly. I also like the more prominent credentials manager but we should probably hide that from a non-power user.

Paint has a ribbon interface!

Calculator has so many more functions! I'm a programmer but I doubt I'll ever use the "Programmers" mode. You can also now take the Xths root of a number. Nice addition. Has anyone ever noticed that the scientific mode never had a square root button? I guess if you were smart enough to use that mode you were smart enough to use x^(1/2) to get the square root.

Anyone else have any first impressions? I haven't had much time to go into depth but I'll write about it soon.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Foray into Windows 7: Part 2 - Booting Up

So my new laptop finally arrived! No real new features to note over my laptop except this one has an LED screen which is significantly brighter than the normal LCD laptop screens.

My first test was to see how fast the initial Windows boot was and how long it would take to get to an interactive desktop. Seeing as this was the first boot there would be some final Windows setup to complete so that is measured separately.

The finishing setup touches went by pretty quickly for a total of 9 minutes until I was logged in for the first time. One item of note that I thought was very thoughtful on Microsoft's part was including setting up a wireless network as part of the initial setup. The integration of Wi-Fi into Vista was a vast improvement over using 3rd party wireless setup tools or the XP tool and now it's nice to see that setting up a Wi-Fi connection is a major part of the Windows 7 install. It was too easy, in fact, just clicked my network and entered my key. Another curious part of the setup (and might be true for earlier versions) was that the password hint field is required. This seems like a major security weakness by making it easier to guess a user's password. I wonder the percentage of users with their hint being their password backwards. I would feel much safer without a password hint but instead I took this opportunity to throw a would-be hacker off my trail. Use "It's a month" (but don't use a month as a password) and set the account login failure lockout to be around 5. They will start guessing months and then get locked out.

After my first login I shutdown so I could measure a clean boot-up. The shutdown itself was very fast at about 10 seconds. There is nothing more annoying than waiting for your computer to shutdown. Starting back up it took me 90 seconds to log in again. That is an alright time, but then again the Lenovo laptops come with a significant amount of software utilities that always start. I imagine if I use ReadyBoost my time would improve as well. Unfortunately my ReadyBoost card has been recommisioned as a camera card.

So far the Windows 7 experience has been clean and quick. We'll have to see if this trend continues when I load my software. Have you noticed anything working faster or slower in Windows 7? Write me a comment! More to come.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

3 Ways to Free yourself from the Multitude of Customer Cards

Tired of carrying around all of those customer rewards cards in your wallet or on your keychain? You can cut back on those by consolidating them into a single item to carry or store in your car or for those more tech-savvy users, go digital. This is just a quick summary of some of the information I found while working on my own.

1. CardStar http://www.mycardstar.com/
This is what originally got me started on this project after reading about the service on Mashable. Great if you have a smart phone.
Lifehacker

2. Digital copies
If the barcodes work on an iPhone app then you might be able to email or upload pictures of your barcodes to your phone. Load them up on the screen and hand to the cashier. You might want to have a backup in your wallet the first time you try, just in case it doesn't work.


3. One card
There are a number of sites which will offer to create a single card that you can keep in your wallet. Or you can make your own using tips found towards the end of this post.
http://www.keyringthing.com/ <- My final solution. http://www.justoneclubcard.com/
Lifehacker

Getting good barcode images

You have a couple options in order to copy or create your barcodes.
1. Use an online generator
Most generators will need to know the whole card number. However, some companies don't put it on the card so here are some tips:
UPC-A numbers are 12 numbers so if you have 10 numbers try starting it with a 4 and the last digit is a check digit which can be calculated online from the other numbers
Long numbers or alphanumeric codes will likely be "Code 39" barcode and have visible space between each character
Read wikipedia on how to read a barcode number. The largest space or bar will be 3 bar-widths.

http://www.barcoding.com/upc/
http://www.justoneclubcard.com/index.py?view=advanced

2. Scan your cards
3. Take a photo
Lifehacker

Monday, July 19, 2010

Foray into Windows 7: Part 1 - Leaving Vista Addendum

Speaking of Vista's perception, I had forgotten all about the Mojave Experiment.

In the experiment users were taken through Microsoft's "next OS" which was revealed to be Vista after everyone had given positive feedback. Now there are a number of sources pointing to the shortcomings of the experiment to measure on an absolute scale the rating of Vista. However, I believe we have forgotten the basis of scientific experimentation which it to attempt to disprove a hypothesis. In this case, Microsoft's hypothesis was that Vista's PR had no impact on user's perception. If a rebranded OS and a fresh explanation of the new features had an effect then Vista's bad press certain had a play in perception.

However, this experiment can't show us that Vista is great yet most blogs will discredit the experiment because of glossing over of drivers, software, and setup. Because these are issues also found in XP and 7, these issues being in Vista should not affect it's reception vs. the Window's baseline. If people love XP and 7 more than Vista is is not because those OSs are any better in those areas. Well, maybe 7 I'll have to see...

See Also:
NY Times - Blog Posts Poke Holes in ‘Taste Test’ by Microsoft

Thursday, July 15, 2010

#GoneGoogle - Taking off into the Cloud

I originally micro-blogged about this on my twitter @MatthewMMorrow but here is a full write-up.

I don't know what initially caused it. It was like a disease. Us geeks get strange urges to do something geeky for no real reason. On the positive side, I am very happy where I've come. I have weaned myself off of my dependence on desktop based personal management software. I have left my comfortable Microsoft Outlook software and surrendered to Google.

How it was

I used to use Outlook for everything. I probably had a dozen email accounts so I could best filter my email and reduce spam. My Outlook PST files are now interred at a whopping 1.51GB. Performing a backup of my data would take a long time and couldn't be done with Outlook running so it rarely happened. Outlook was my email, calendar, tasks, contacts, and notes hub. The problem was that my laptop had to be running and I had to have access to it in order to check my email and go about my daily business.

How it changed

GMail
My first to step was to setup GMail and all my email accounts. Grabbed my desired username (which is used for all my Google services) and loaded up GMail. Luckily GMail will check external POP3 email accounts. (Guide from mydigitallife.info) Perfect! Now all future mail will be received by GMail. I turned on "leave mail on server" in each Outlook account so it didn't affect GMail's retrieval.

The next goal is to get all my old email into GMail.
There are notable differences in the features available to email messages:

  • GMail uses "labels" instead of folders. Labels are quite different because you can have multiple labels per mail message. To maintain a heirarchical structure you can use the "/" character in your label. For example: Animals/Puppies will tell you that Puppies are grouped under Animals. In GMail labs I recommend the "Nested Labels" gadget will let you expand and collapse your label hierarchy like you would expect to happen to folders.
  • Gmail uses "Star" instead of "Flagged". Again a GMail lab called "Superstars" will give you multiple "Star" actions.
  • GMail groups your emails into converstaions. An email and all its replies will be displayed as one entry and expanded when opened. Keep that in mind while looking for old emails.
  • GMail's Inbox is a type of tag. When you "archive" an email it will remove it from the inbox and it can be found in the "All Mail" screen or in the screen for the labels it was tagged with.
  • GMail discourages deleting in favor of "archiving". I say just go ahead and delete something. Messages are held in trash for 10 days.

I used  this guide from labnol.org to help me move my emails. It was fairly straight forward but since I had an Outlook Archive PST I moved those folders to a special "Archived" label.  This is also a very good time to organize your emails. I would recommend organizing and double checking in GMail. You can do a simple item count to see if everything transfered but remember, converstaions count as 1 item while they can contain multple emails. Also, make sure you drag any "Sent Items" to the appropriate GMail IMAP folder.

I'll post later about how to trim down your unruly email cache.

Google Contacts
The next very important feature from Outlook was my contacts. Who would I email if I didn't have any contacts? Microsoft even tells you the easiest (but also less advanced) way to export your contacts. I'd review your contacts and make sure no important data is missing (e.g. birthday, anniversary, addresses). Export and Import wasn’t the approach I took…

Google Calendar (and Contacts again)
Since I can sync my phone to Outlook's calendar and contacts I also wanted to be able to sync Outlook and Google frequently and automatically. What is also important is that for the calendar I use multiple categories to color my items. There is another difference in Google.
    Google Calendar does not have categories. This is a huge oversight! GMail has labels but Calendar has nothing of the sort. The solution is to make multiple calendars. (Here's how: http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/2841.aspx). Unfortunately that means each event can be on one calendar (unless is just a copy) but its a simple solution for now.

So for my syncing I had to turn to some 3rd-party solutions. This section turns into more of a software review...

The winner:

gSyncIt (http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/) - The software I ended up purchasing for $15. This will also sync notes (to Google Docs) and tasks (to Google Calendar) and has advanced filter options. Once its setup it works great.

NOTE: PLEASE BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE USING ANY SYNC SOFTWARE, ESPECIALLY IF YOU ENABLE "DELETES". I ACCIDENTALLY DELETED ALL MY CONTACTS THROUGH A BAD SYNC BUT GOT THEM FROM THE TRASH"

Google Tasks
Google Tasks is a joke. For a task you can only provide title, description and due date. My Outlook tasks were more complicated than that. I need at least repeatability and preferably repeat after completion. Remember the Milk doesn't provide the latter and does not currently offer any way to sync with Outlook.

My choice cloud-based task software is Toodledo (pronounced to-dull-due). They also recommend software that will sync between their service and Outlook software that will sync between their service and Outlook. Bonus: Toodledo also provides a "notebook" feature and the software will sync your Outlook notes with your Toodledo notebook! My favorite feature is syncing by importance (not priority). Importance = 2 + priority (3,2,1,0 or -1) + starred (1 if you marked it as starred) + due date (6 - overdue, 5 due today, 3 due tomorrow, 2 due this week, 1 due 2 weeks). This means that your lower priority tasks with a closer due date are more evenly matched with your higher priority far away tasks. Getting a pro membership will let you share task, create subtasks, show statistics, and give a recommended schedule of tasks to complete based on time. One downside is that completed tasks are deleted after a while (6 months) but I might not miss them.

Conclusion

Well that covers all the features of Outlook. I am very glad I moved my data to the cloud. About a month after my transition I spilled soda on my laptop and had to get it sent into the factory. All this time I don't have Outlook but it doesn't matter. I can check my email and tasks from any browser anywhere. Speaking of browsers, I'll write about how to make all my information more accessible using Chrome and also about the other Google services I've tried.

Of course there are other minds, like those at zenhabits.net which prefer to go Google-free. The main lesson I learned here is that cloud computing rocks and the more cohesive your services the more synergy you gain.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Foray into Windows 7: Part 1 - Leaving Vista

I'm fond of Windows Vista. In fact I'm reluctant to upgrade all of my computers to use the new operating system. The new features aren't terribly interesting or worth effort of upgrading. To top it off, the Microsoft commercials seem to only focus on the new "snap" feature. Neat but not that neat.

One of the most cited reasons for switching to 7 is that it is less "buggy". I didn't even notice that Vista was buggy. Perhaps the only bug I encountered was the slow network speed due to Remote Differential Compression (which was solved by turning it off). I'm willing to be that most "bugs" were due to user unfamiliarity, UAC, lack of driver support, and lack of early software support. In fact this list at AskVG.com tells us that 7 has a few bug fixes over Vista. Yet, 7 is heralded as much more stable. Hardly a major stability upgrade. Perhaps we have Apple fan's sensational journalism of the beta version of Vista to blame for its poor reception.

If it wasn't for the amazing accidental damage warranty from Lenovo, my replacement laptop will have Windows 7. So, I'll be jotting down some of my observations.