In school this year I’ve been assigned a very large group research project with four other students.  Traditionally, these kinds of projects start off pretty straightforward, with each person working individually to find data to solve a business problem.  But as the team gathers its research, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort though, organize, and actually use the myriad of stuff found by everyone.  This presents a significant problem when the project begins to take shape and the research everyone has collected needs to be applied to solutions dreamed up by the team after a lot of research has been done.

Luckily there are an increasing number of online collaborative tools that can be utilized to make collecting, finding, sorting, and editing online data found by a group of people easier.  My team has found Evernote and Dropbox to be extremely useful in helping us get through this process more efficiently.

I set up a new Evernote account and gave my team the username and password so that the five of us can use this one account.  Now we can clip data from web pages, tag these data with the subject matter and the name of the person tagging, and deposit it all into this one account.  It takes about 10 seconds to select specific text from a web page or the entire page and save it in Evernote’s servers (using the Evernote web clipper).  The result is a huge repository of research that can be searched and referenced extremely quickly by everyone, anytime.  Additionally, you can make blank notes to allow team members to share random ideas with each other.  For example, we have a note called “solution ideas” where all group members can quickly add and edit a running list of ideas within this note for solving our business problem.  This note is then used to provoke discussion when we have meetings.

While Evernote is great for storing text from websites and personal notes, it isn’t all that great for storing group documents or other files.  Now, it does have the ability to add any file to a note if you have a premium account (at $5 per month), but I don’t love this functionality.  (I discussed this in a previous post, here.  See the “file by file online backups” section.)  Dropbox is the solution my team is using for storing research found in pdf form or original documents that we create for our project.  Using my own Dropbox account, I created a folder called “research” and shared folder this with my teammates.  With everyone using the Dropbox desktop software, the folder and a copy of its contents is placed on all of our computers.  All teammates now have the ability to search for, add, and edit anything in this folder.  And while the folder to find these group docs is stored on our of computers locally, any changes made in the documents within these specific folders are synced with copies of these files stored on Dropbox’s servers, and in turn synced on all of the other teammate’s local folders.  (For more info about Dropbox, I have previously written about it here – again in the “file by file online backups” section.)

I am extremely impressed with these two products, and they have made this massive group project a heck of a lot easier for basically free.  Group collaboration is always tough, but these days I’m glad the Internet has tools like these to vastly improves this process.

Stay tuned for an inevitable future update after I FINALLY get my Google Wave invite – that thing’s all about making online group collaboration easier.

Related posts:

1. Evernote Rocks.

To me, the most interesting thing that was unveiled during the last Apple event was iTunes 9, particularly the Genius Mixes.  I tried them out as soon as I could, and I was really impressed.  iTunes can now scan all my music, find the 12 main types of music I listen to, and put them into newly generated playlists.  It’s all very Apple – these mixes do something very complex yet give the user the impression that it’s the easiest thing in the world to do.  There are no settings or customization offered with these mixes at all.  They just exist on your iTunes, and they work.

Genius Mixes perfectly illustrate why people who buy Apple products tend to become die-hard Apple fans and why Apple is doing so insanely well as a company. Apple is extremely good at adding value to the products you buy from them over the lifetime of that product.  And every time Apple bumps up this value, they usually offer something new you can buy that can make this experience even BETTER!

My experience with Genius Mixes certainly showed me this – and I can only assume others would have similar testimonies.  Prior to iTunes 9, my iTunes music had been governed by select playlists.  So like, since 2002 I was the sole mind behind my music collection organization.  But when I started listening these Genius Mixes, I kept hearing songs that I hadn’t listened to in ages.  There are a number of reasons for this: I might have stopped listening to certain tunes because I actively disliked them.  I could have forgotten to rate them, and since my playlists are largely based on song ratings they were banished from my playlists altogether.  I might have decided that I was tired of certain albums, unchecked them so they would not be included in my playlists, and then forgot about them.  By throwing seven years worth of neglected music into my face, Genius Mixes showed me that my iTunes music collection was way sloppier than I thought it was.

To rectify this, I found and deleted all the music that I simply did not like, I rated songs that had no ratings, and I reevaluated all songs that were unchecked to see if I felt like listening to them again.  As a result, I had an iTunes library that was more organized, more functional, and better than it was before the iTunes 9 update.  Then, after deleting about 10 gigs of tunes off my hard drive, I ended up downloading about 10 new albums.  Of course, I didn’t feel like paying for all of that music, so I yanked 8 out of 10 of those out of bit torrent land.  However, I did end up buying two of them from iTunes.  That is money I would not have given Apple if Genius Mixes hadn’t made me value my music library more than ever.

iTunes is not the only product that Apple makes that gets better with age and really good cheap upgrades.  Snow Leopard was very inexpensive and made me love my Mac more.  The latest OS update to my iPod Touch made me like the device more than ever, which in turn got me to buy even more apps for my Touch.  And the apps themselves illustrate this extremely well, particularly the games.  You buy a game once, and all the many fun updates from then on are free.

In these examples, Apple manages to make people think they are getting things for free or very cheap when they are really not.  They make a low profit on these new additions so that you will enjoy what you have already paid for more.  This in turn boosts your desire to buy from Apple more of what you already have, be it music, videos, applications, and eventually another Mac.  Apple wasn’t the first company to adopt this model, of course.  Netflix’s Watch Instantly service adds a lot of value to the monthly subscription fees its customers pay for DVD rentals, and it will gradually add even more value as more content becomes available.  I’m even now thinking about going out and buying a Ruku player.  Most of Google’s services are free and get better with each update.  And of course the more I use Google services, the more likely I’ll click on their ads.  Apple has borrowed a business model usually reserved for companies mainly selling information goods and expanded it to the sale of its physical goods as well as information goods.

[And here's the obligatory attack on Microsoft]  Most of Apple’s competitors, like, ohhhh, Microsoft, can’t easily compete with this.  Microsoft makes a lot of its money from people purchasing upgrades to its products.  Unlike Apple’s, their software upgrades are usually not a means of getting customers to buy into another revenue stream.  This makes its customers (individuals, computer makers, large companies) reluctant to upgrade, so they force them using various tactics.  This is an old and annoying business model that consumers are increasingly rejecting.  Apple really does “think different”, and it’s making them a hell of a lot of money.  People should pay attention.

No related posts.

Another Mac-centric post here…

So I rushed out and grabbed a copy of Snow Leopard as soon as I could on Friday – I love Mac OS upgrade days.  After a very easy install, I found that the new OS version is everything it was supposed to be: The Finder is a whole lot snappier, I got a whopping 20GB or so of hard drive space back to me, Stacks has a lot more functionality, and just about everything else just works a bit better – all for only $30!  Of course I then needed to know exactly what is working better, what is not working better, and the general consensus of the new OS.  I did some research, and here is what I found:

Articles with some general thoughts on Snow Leopard:

• Here is an article from Forbes.com about why Snow Leopard and Apple’s marketing strategy for it is disruptive in the OS industry.
• Here is a great general review of the operating system from the Guardian. 
• Here is an article from Lifehacker that explains how Snow Leopard’s new Base 10 calculations of hard disk space now calculates true size of your computer’s hard drive.  This, along with the removal of code for PowerPC Macs and printer drivers is what gives your Mac higher total calculations of free hard drive space. 
• Here is an article from Macworld that explains what “64-bit mode” in Snow Leopard is.
• Here is an article from Blorge that discusses which Macs can actually utilize this new 64-bit mode. 

Articles about the great new features Snow Leopard brings to the Mac OS:

• Here is a great one from TechRadar.com.
• Here is a good one from Macworld that discusses the smaller changes that one will notice after using it for a while.
• Here is another one from Gizmodo that lists 15 little useful changes in this OS version.

Articles about software not working with the OS upgrade:
Unfortunately, not all 3rd party applications easily made the switch from Leopard to Snow Leopard…

• Here is a list of various Snow Leopard software announcements from the Unofficial Apple Weblog.  
• Here is an extremely thorough wiki that lists what software is compatible with SL, what needs to be updated, and what has recently been updated to be compatible.  

And as a general gripe in this category – I was using Parallels 3.0 with Leopard and I didn’t feel like spending the $50 for the 4.0 upgrade.  3.0 worked just fine for the little time I spend on the Windows side of my Mac.  When I upgraded and tried to start up Parallels, I got a message saying 10.6 won’t work with 3.0 – it forced me to upgrade.  Quite annoying.  But other than that, I’m loving the upgrade!

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I like finding free little third party programs that add useful functions to the already great Mac OS.  I download lots of these, but there are only a few that I use on a very regular basis.  (Sorry PC users, these are predominantly Mac-only programs.  But I’m sure there are plenty of PC alternatives for all of these applications.)

iStat Menus: This application allows you to view information for 8 different processes in your computer right in your menu bar.  You can check out the status of your CPU, RAM memory, hard drive space, network connection, internal temperatures, fans and power and bluetooth connection.  It also gives you a great replacement for the default date/time display on the menu bar – when you click on the time, a small calendar pops out.

[update - 8.28.09] – It seems that the latest version of iStat Menus will not work with Mac OS 10.6.  Waiting for update…]

Skitch: I talked about this one in an earlier post.  It allows you to take a picture of anything that is on your computer screen.  It comes with some basic editing tools, or you can open any screen shots taken in any other image editor you wish.  It’s more useful than you might think.

Caffeine: Have you ever been watching a video on Hulu or YouTube and your Mac’s screen keeps dimming to save power because it thinks its idle?  Each time it does this, you are forced to jiggle the mouse or touch the track pad to brighten the screen again.  Annoying, right?  Well Caffeine puts a little icon on your menu bar that, when turned on, overrides your computer’s desire to dim the screen.

You Control: iTunes: This is a free utility that gives you complete control over iTunes from the menu bar.  This highly customizable app gives you access to iTunes controls; it displays the current track, artist and album when the track changes; and you can navigate your entire music library from the menu bar button so don’t have to open iTunes nearly as often.

Notify: This little program works just like the Google Notifier, but better.  It keeps track of what’s in your Gmail inbox, displays Growl (see next program) notifications when new mail arrives, has a great interface, and supports multiple accounts.  The big reason why I switched to this program from Google Notifier was that it can check for new messages every minute – GN will only check every 15 minutes.  I also never used GN’s Google calendar notifier feature, but if you do, you can just turn on the calendar notifier and run Notify along with Google Notifier.

Growl: This has been around for a long time, and is a must-have app for Mac owners.  It allows many Mac applications to give you small messages that pop up on your screen when new actions occur in them or new information about them is available.  Once installed, applications that use the program will automatically detect Growl and will begin giving you messages when needed.  All notification settings for each application are highly customizable from the Growl Systems Preferences control panel.

Cooliris: This is a plugin for Sarari 3 & 4 and Firefox that displays pictures and/or videos from websites on a really cool 3d wall within your browser.  It simply gives you a much faster and more interesting viewing experience when you are searching the web for pictures or videos.  Definitely check it out and give it a whirl.

Handbrake: Like ripping DVDs onto your hard drive?  You need this free program.  Its a robust application for converting DVD video into many different computer-friendly video file types.

Hulu Desktop: This application was created by the Hulu folks for making Hulu video even more watchable.  This very slick application can be controlled with the Apple remote, and will make you never want to go back to watching Hulu at Hulu.com again.

Tweetie: This is a slick little Twitter application that is the sidekick to the popular iPhone app with the same name.  There are lots of applications out there to control your Twitter account(s), but I am really comfortable with this one.

MacJanitor: There are a number of “cleaning” functions that your Mac does throughout its day that boosts its performance and clears out unneeded data that can bog down its system.  However, because some of these functions are scheduled to begin late at night, if you shut down your Mac every night they run very rarely.  MacJanitor allows you to start any of these process anytime you want.

Evernote: I devoted an entire post to this one a few weeks ago.  Check it out.

And if this list isn’t good enough for you, check out IUseThis.com – a site where people can submit and vote on Mac applications.  I check there regularly to see what applications people are using.

Related posts:

1. Evernote Rocks.

For a short while, I was the “Junior Service Writer” at Springboard Media in Philadelphia PA.  In this job, I dealt with everyone who wanted to bring their Apple computers in for repair.  I learned a few important things during my short tenure:

1. Customer service jobs are the worst.  The. Worst.  When I took this job, I forgot the lesson I had previously learned both as a waiter and GAP employee: Daily exposure to the unchecked Id of the general public is a powerful corrosive to any optimism, idealism, or compassion one feels towards her/his fellow human beings.
2. As a new low-level employee, it is extremely hard to change the culture or the ways in which more senior employees do their jobs.  It doesn’t matter how correct, brilliant, or “fresh” your ideas are – if people don’t trust your opinions, they will not listen to a word you say.  (And as it turns out, talking about your fancy MBA schoolin’ to make yourself sound smarter just makes you sound like an ass).
3. Most people think hard drives are magic and will work forever.  Then when tragedy strikes and they learn that this is not the case, these people scream and/or sob at junior service writers who tell them they need to fork over a bunch of money for the possibility that their data might be saved.  (No, AppleCare does not cover the cost of data recovery if your hard drive fails while still under warranty.)

Of course, before this job I too was dragging my feet about backing up my computer.  But after watching a second unlucky graduate student completely fall apart at the thought of his dissertation being lost forever, I decided to purchase my first external hard drive for backing up my data.

External Hard Drives

These have always been a great way to back up stuff, and they are getting even better with more advanced software.  As a Mac guy, I of course use Time Machine, which is the easiest backup solution I’ve ever encountered.  Time Machine comes with the OS 10.5, but not any earlier versions of the Mac operating system.  You just plug in an external hard drive, follow the few steps needed to make it your Time Machine backup destination, and turn on the program.  It backs up everything on your computer every hour, as long as your external drive is plugged into your computer.  If you have a Time Capsule, your hard drive doesn’t even have to be plugged into the computer – the hard drive is on your wireless transmitter, facilitating wireless backups.  And finding an old file in your archived data is really easy with the trippy user interface Time Machine has to search the external drive.  I’m not sure if it’s the best backup solution – its simplicity might be a real drawback to people who require more robust solutions like off-site backups.  For those options, check out this blog post.

PC users – check this article out about various free PC backup solutions.

Online Backup Systems

Online backup solutions are poping up all over the place as data storage gets cheaper and cheaper.  Here’s a good review of the biggest players in this industry.  From what I have seen of online backup solutions, there are two basic kinds – ones that are meant to backup your entire system, and the ones that are meant to backup specific files for quick online retrieval.

Entire system online backups
When I first heard of Mozy online backup, I was really excited and tried it out immediately.  This service gives you 2GB of space for free, and an unlimited amount for $5 a month.  When downloaded and set up, it can back up your entire hard drive onto remote servers in Alaska or something.  If the hard drive in your computer does crash, you can get your data back by redownloading all of it various ways or by getting Mozy to send you DVDs with your data on them.

It is the nature of Mozy and other solutions like it to be running all the time.  It took my initial backup of the 70 or so gigabites 2 weeks of constant communication with off site servers to finish uploading.  After this initial backup, your computer syncs any updated files every hour or so.  After a while, I found this to be aggravating and hard to ignore.  There were the occasional error messages, and it slowed down my machine very slightly.  (Others have found this to be a bigger issue.)  Also, Mozy will not backup things that are not on your computer.  Therefore, if you delete a file, it will delete that file off your backup data on their servers after 30 days or so.  It was because of this (I think), every time I opened Windows using Parallels, Mozy would spend the next day or so re-backing up the 6GB of space that Windows takes up on my computer.  It was like it would forget Windows was installed on my machine when Parallels wasn’t running, and then back it up in its entirety every time I used Parallels.  As a result, I never really had any confidence that Mozy was keeping the most up-to-date copies of my files.  I got rid of it after 2 months.

File-by-file online backups
My experience with Mozy has soured my view of entire system online backup solutions.  My external hard drive plus Time Machine is much less complicated, faster, and safer.  There are other online services out there, however, that will allow you to store individual files or entire folders onto off site servers and that provide great web interfaces to retrieve these files.  The problem I have had with most of these is that there is usually no way to edit the file directly from the place it is being downloaded.  There is also usually no way for the file being backed up to be immediately updated on the off site servers after it is edited from my computer.  (Evernote does this to some degree, but the problem with this is that when you store a file in Evernote, it is actually copied from its original location in your computer to a file within the Evernote file system in your computer.  Therefore if you save a file in Evernote, open it later, edit it, and close it, and then you want to email just that file to someone, it’s a pain to find that exact document within the confusing file structure Evernote creates in your computer to store its data.  Once you find it you then have to rename it, and….ugh).

I had planned to end this post with the message that while my external hard drive and Time Machine works really well for my entire system backup, I had not found a file-by-file solution that didn’t end up being more work than just saving files to my computer and ending it there.  But in my research for this post I found a great product that I am now using to back up all of my most important documents.  Dropbox is an online storage product that places a folder directly in my Finder (Windows Explorer for PC folks) which is automatically synced to Dropbox servers.  After moving my most important document folders into this “dropbox” folder, I can open, save, and edit all my documents directly from my computer, and any changes made to them will by synced to copies of these files on Dropbox’s servers.  The service gives me 2 gigs of server space for free, and after that there are pretty reasonable monthly fees for a lot more space – you could back up your entire system.  I’m happy with only saving my most accessed documents, however, so 2 gigs is fine.

There are some other features of this service that are really cool, too:

• I can easily invite anyone I want to have access to any of the files I place in my account.  As long as they download the DropBox software onto their computer, any edits they make to the documents will be synced to the off site servers and all other computers sharing those documents.  If the invitee does not want to download the software, they can download all shared documents, but any edits will not be synced.   
• Each file has a public url, so I can link directly to files using this url and access them via any web browser.
• There is web access to all my files stored online, so I can access them anywhere with an internet connection.
• I can view my stored files on my iPod Touch/iPhone using its mobile website.

With Time Machine, Drop Box, and my AppleCare warranty with two years remaining on it, I feel as confident as I can* that my data is safe and I won’t end up in financial ruin if something happens to my computer.

*AppleCare DOES NOT cover accidental damage to your computer!  So if I spill something on my keyboard or crack my screen, I’m SOL.  I learned that lesson from Springboard as well….so sad.

No related posts.

Since I started this blog, I’ve been using the web application provided by WordPress to write and post new content.  It works fine, but I have found the interface…limiting.  I did a quick search for desktop blog publishing clients, and it turns out there are a ton!  Check out this great blog post about this:

20 Desktop Blog Publishing Tools – Bloggers Edition, Softwares, Utilities, Drivers, Tools.

I’m currently trying out ScribeFire, which is a free Firefox addon.  Its far and away a better way to write content for my blog than what WordPress provides.

No related posts.

Quick post:

So I changed the name of this blog to “Tech Tools for the Young, Professional & Broke” from “Techy Tools for the Young, Professional & Broke”.  I feel this has a better ring to it :-)  After this, I spent about 5 hours trying to get my title bar title (the page title you see in your browser tab and at the top of your browser window) to match this new title.  I changed the title in the “General” section in the Settings tab in my WordPress dashboard.

I scoured the web for help with this and I scoured the html in my theme for the reason why the blog no longer referenced the title I placed in my blog settings to create the title bar blog name.

The culprit: I am using the “All in One SEO” plugin, which allows me to add customized/additional information about my blog for search engine crawlers to pick up and add to their search results.  I had the old blog title entered in this plugin, and this plugin overrides certain parts of my blog’s html, including the title bar display information.

So there you have it.  If your title bar title is not the same as your recently changed blog title, check your All in One SEO plugin settings!!!

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When I began this blog, my main intent was to write.  As such, I was concerned with finding a free way to get my blog up and running (detailed in a previous post).  Wordpress.com was my answer, and it offers a great way create a blog quickly and easily.  Despite this, small issues quickly came up that bugged me enough to switch to using wordpress.org software hosted on a remote server with my own domain and gain more control over my blog.

First, I realized Wordpress.com did not let me change any aspect of the blog template I chose at the site without paying $15 a year to be able to customize the CSS in the template.  Second, I started to notice and desire things to add to my blog – like the addtoany.com button you can see at the bottom of this post.  Wordpress.com blogs offer relatively few options for adding small customizations like this to blog postings.  Eventually I figured out that there is a way to do this, but it is definitely a workaround and not too convenient.  There are many beautifully designed blogs which say they are made with Wordpress, but I knew I couldn’t recreate these blogs with my Wordpress.com account.

And therein lies the big difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org.  If you go to Wordpress.org, you can freely download the open source Wordpress blogging software that can be installed on a your own computer (local install) or on a hosted/remote server.  (And actually, most good web hosting services will install WordPress automatically, so there is no need to download the software from wordpress.org).  Editing your blog using WordPress software installed on your own web site gives you MUCH more control over the design of your blog.  Here are the steps I went through to get my own domain and server space:

1. First, I went to Wordpress.org and found the online installation manual for hosting my own installation of WordPress.
2. Following its advice, I next chose a web hosting site to buy my own domain and remote server space.  There are a gajillion web hosting places out there, but because of my inexperience in this area, I looked for one that was recommended by WordPress, cheap, and could install WordPress onto my purchased server space itself.  It turns out that most quality hosting services cost between $5 and $7 a month, and most will install WordPress for you.  So I chose justhost.com, and I ended up paying $71 for a year of web hosting with all the features and space I’ll need for my little blog.
3. After following the instructions from JustHost and getting my domain squared away and ready, I clicked on the “install WordPress” button in my domain’s control panel (cPanel), and went through the three steps to get WordPress installed.

After this, I went to my brand new blank blog and started the process of moving my old blog into its new space.

1. First, in my old wordpress.com blog dashboard, I selected “export” under the Tools tab on the left of the page.  This allowed me to export posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags and put them into a WordPress export file to be saved on my computer.
2. Next, in my new WordPress blog dashboard (which is very similar to the old wordpress.com dashboard), I selected “Import” under the Tools tab on the left of the page.  This takes you to a page that gives you many (there are 15) options for importing data into your WordPress blog.  Clicking on the “WordPress” option let me import all the data in my saved export file from my old WordPress blog into my new blog.
3. After this, I just had to import the links I had saved in the “Links” tab in my old wordpress.com blog dashboard.  To do this, I clicked the “blogroll” option in the “Import” section of my new blog, which prompted me to either upload a file I could have saved on my computer containing my old links data, or to specify an OPML url.  I did the latter, and typed in http://www.[the name of my old blog].wordpress.com/wp-links-opml.php.  Bingo – all the data from my old blog was now in my new one.

Next, I went about rebuilding my blog.  First I had to find a new theme.

1. While I was pretty happy with my old theme, there are a lot more themes to choose from in the wordpress.org community, so my eye wandered a bit.  After finding one I wanted, I installed it, activated it, and then I was free to tweek the colors, text attributes, and pretty much anything else using the theme editor found under the “Appearance” tab in the dashboard.
   • Incidentally, I figured out that I could actually install the theme I was using for the old blog even though I couldn’t find it using the native theme search function in the WordPress dashboard.  After finding it on the web, I was able to freely download it and then manually upload it into the wordpress software stored on the remote server that holds all my blog data.  To do this, I needed to download the robust (and free) File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client Cyberduck.  PC users, check out FileZilla.  Even though you could probably live in your Wordpress world without ever using an FTP client, its a good idea to figure out how to use one – it’s really easy.  These are what allow you to upload and/or manage files that are housed on your website.  Following the installation directions on the site where I downloaded the theme, I unzipped the file that enclosed the theme data and placed it into the wp-content/themes directory using my FTP client.  This directory was located here: root directory > public_html > wp-content > themes.
   • Another occasion I had to use this happened when I first tried to install WordPress from the hosting site.  It initially wouldn’t let me install it at www.thingsfromtom.com because there was already data in the root directory of my website.  It instead wanted me to install it in another directory, which would have given my blog a url of “www.thingsfromtom.com/techblog” or something.  So I opened up Cyberduck, connected to my website, and deleted the contents in the public_html folder.  (This was just the webpage that justhost.com created as a default location for when people land on www.thingsfromtom.com before I designed any content.)
2. With the theme all set up, all I had left to do was fiddle around with the widgets and plugins in my blog.  (Plugins can be modified from the “Plugins” tab on the left of the WordPress dashboard, and widgets are located under the “Appearance” tab.  There is NO Plugins tab in the wordpress.com dashboard.)  This process is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t get into how these are installed and edited here.  But I will say that plugins are what make putting your blog on your own website and editing the design using the WordPress software totally worth it.

Wow.  That was long.  But I hope it helps anyone who is considering breaking from wordpress.com and taking more control of their blog.  It really isn’t that hard, you get a lot more flexibility in your blog’s design, and you end up with your own domain to which you can design and add other web pages.  Having a website these days is a terrific marketing tool and a great way to learn a skill that can’t hurt anyone in today’s gawd-awful job market.

Related posts:

1. Why I chose Wordpress.com

This is probably unsurprising, but I’m a big Star Trek fan.  As many have pointed out before, a big reason for the enormous popularity of the franchise is its devotion to the idea that technology will solve many of humanity’s problems.  I know its extremely naive, but I just can’t help but buy into Star Trek’s utopian future.  This is why I love Clark Boyd’s PRI’s The World: Technology Podcast. This (usually) weekly podcast is filled with stories from PRI’s The World (many of which reported by Boyd himself) about how technology positively affects the world as a whole, regardless or income or social standing.

Its terrific coverage of the Twitter #iranelection continued long after the major news sources stopped caring.  Its coverage of Internet censorship in China and the ingenious ways Chinese citizens fight back has also been great.  And then there are the surprisingly engrossing stories about new products being created to serve the bottom of the pyramid market.  A few of my MBA classes have touched upon this concept, and this podcast gives proof that there is money to be made from developing products for large numbers of low-income people.  Check out the podcasts about the Eco-Cooker, bamboo bicycles, and the WE CARE Solar Suitcase.

Star Trek isn’t really about how cool technology can be – James Bond and Star Wars movies are much more about that.  (Well, ok – holodecks are pretty cool.)  But in general, Star Trek tech is more about how its application can be revolutionary to a society when deployed on a macro level.  Can you imagine if replicators were invented and became commonplace worldwide?  No more world hunger!  Hardly any of the new products discussed on Boyd’s podcast are sexy or cutting edge.  But the original applications and entrepreneurial creativity shown in the technology featured every week is always staggering.  I highly recommend adding this unique and too-often overlooked technology program to your podcast diet.

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Facebook has come a long way from its beginnings in 2003.  The Facebook babble being generated over dorm room broadband Internet connections back then was certainly not for parent’s eyes.  In fact, Facebook effectively barred most parental participation; you couldn’t join if you didn’t have a college email address.  Its not that it was necessarily filled with obscene or shocking content; it’s just that it was more strictly a social connection tool within a private club primarily for college undergrads.  But as Facebook grows up, it is realizing a larger potential.  Its doors are now open for anyone to join, and it has become an extremely useful and versitile tool (about which I discuss in a previous post.)

Facebook is like the high school pothead that floors everyone at his 10-year reunion by arriving with a Porche, a fantastic career, and a hot wife.  Despite its success, it nonetheless struggles to shake the slacker image that lingers in the eyes of those it grew up with.  Therefore the thought of parents being included in Facebook friends lists is often repellent to most users, particularly to the twenty-something crowd that met Facebook when it still knew how to party.

My own parents were born in the mid-40’s and are currently not Facebook people.  They are computer-friendly people however, as my dad uses his computer and iPhone everyday, and my mom is a very regular email/Internet user.  I increasingly rely on Facebook as an extremely effective and useful way to exchange a broad range of information with people I care about.  If this is the case, why don’t I include my parents in the loop?  I have a few compelling reasons for me to encourage them to create an account:

• With my parents paying attention to my status updates throughout the week, it would give us more to talk about during our weekly check-in calls.  (This works the other way as well.  If your goal is to have less to talk about with your parents when you get around to calling them, giving them a view into your Facebook life could reduce their pries into your actual life.)
• Having access to my Facebook profile would give them a surprisingly large amount of information about what I do all day.  Details like these are hardly ever remembered and brought up on a phone call, but they would probably be very much appreciated by my parents.
• Facebook is making it increasingly easy to adjust exactly who can see exactly what in my profile.  So if I don’t want my parents to see my posted photos, I don’t have to let them.
• Even though they don’t know it, they have Facebook friends to connect with.  First, their friends are friending me with increased frequency.  Second, I’m sure Facebook’s amazing friend-finding tools would show both my mom and dad that a lot more of their friends are drinking the Facebook Kool-Aid than they think.
• Facebook could be a really great tool for them to use – they just need to take the short amount of time needed to sign up and discover that for themselves.

Now, inviting the parents to keep up with your Facebook self might require some permanent Facebook behavior changes.  I suppose it depends on your family’s dynamics, but you probably aren’t ready for Facebook parental supervision if:

• Your profile is filled with pictures of you drunk at parties;
• You regularly include expletives in your status updates;
• Your “friends” on Facebook are mostly just people with hot profile pics that accepted your friend request because they are friend collectors;
• You often share NSFW links;
• You regularly join overtly sexual Facebook fan pages.  I’m no prude, but personally I hate Facebook friends who overflow my newsfeed with messages telling me that they are fans of hot chicks or 2(x)ist Underwear.  I mean who doesn’t love both of those, but I bet most of these people have been blocked from their friends’ newsfeeds, and I’m sure their parents would do the same.

So go ahead – send your parents an invitation to Facebook (and a link to this blog post if they need further rationalization).  Facebook has grown up – why don’t you?

Related posts:

1. I love Facebook and Kool-Aid

It’s August, which of course means an explosion of news articles about how expensive textbooks are and what poor college students are doing these days to keep these costs down.  Where people buy their textbooks and how they actually read them is becoming more and more varied and confusing, making bookselling the latest perfectly good business model to be demolished by the Internet.

Here are the interesting textbook-buying trends that I’ve been paying attention to lately:

• Buying Used Textbooks – This is certainly not new and is now a standard way for students to get their textbooks each semester.  And as Internet search becomes more sophisticated it is becoming even easier.  There are tons of sites to buy used textbooks, but I found you can’t go wrong with amazon.com, bigwords.com, half.com, textbookx.com, textbooks.com, or good ‘ol craigslist.org.
• Textbooks from other countries! – I recently received a tip about nbcindia.com from a classmate of mine.  The books are priced in rupees and the book you receive is reportedly a black and white soft cover copy of your textbook.  But they are really cheap.  This site recommends (among other things) checking out the foreign versions of American websites, like www.amazon.co.uk, to find cheaper versions of the textbook you want.  This blog post mentions two great sites for finding the international versions of textbooks: abebooks.com and textbooksrus.com.
• Textbook Rentals – This recent NY Times article discusses the rise of textbook renting as a profitable business model for textbook publishers and authors.  Chegg.com and bookrenter.com are mentioned in the article and seem to be the most popular sites for this.

• eTextbooks – This is a market that is slowly evolving and maturing.  The newest Kindle DX and the rumored Apple iTablet are certainly making some big waves in the textbook world.  There are lots of good and bad things about these, as I discuss below.  As far as where to buy eTextbooks, I’ve found amazon.com,  cafescribe.com, coursesmart.com, digitaltextbooks.com, etextshop.com, vitalsource.com, ichapters.com, and zinio.com.

fyi: Most of the sites I mentioned above (and a whole lot more) can be found in this great list.  The post says the sites are all geared toward business school textbooks, but really it’s just a huge list of textbook sellers.

More on eTextbooks

Why I’m not a fan of normal textbooks:

• They are out-of-sight expensive if you buy them new;
• They are heavy and bulky;
• When you buy them used from random folks on the Internet you can’t completely trust the shipper;
• The best search function these things have is their indexes.  I mean, come on.

Why I really like the idea of eTextbooks:

• All text in them is instantly searchable;
• All that I buy will fit inside my computer;
• When I buy one, I get it instantly;
• They are much cheaper than new textbooks.

So I actually bought an accounting eTextbook from iChapters.com last year.  While all the above held true, there were times when I regretted my purchase:

• Bad software and DRM ruined the user experience:  When I downloaded my book last year, iChapters made use of this program called Unsealer, which was the key to unlocking the big-time DRM their products come imprisoned in.  It took me hours of searching online forums to figure out how to make this crappy program actually open my book file.  Finally, I discovered that it only works with an old version of Adobe Acrobat Reader for Mac, which resulted in more time wasted scouring to web to find this out-of-date version of the reader software.  Once I got the Adobe Reader to open my file I could use the book as advertised, but Adobe would crash on me fairly regularly.  (Most likely because it was an old version).
• My eTextbook was harder to navigate quickly in class than its physical counterparts:  My accounting class made heavy use of the textbook during class lectures.  Therefore, there was a lot of rapid flipping back-and-forth between two or three pages in the book while answering in-class questions.  This is harder to do on a vertical scrolling text file on your computer screen.  Also, the page numbers in the textbook itself did not correspond to the page numbers that Adobe Reader assigns to each page in the eBook.  It was therefore difficult to quickly flip to a page in the text when directed by the professor.
• My eTextbook had a lack of editing tools: When using a traditional textbook, most people find it useful to highlight important sections and write little notes in the margins while studying.  Surprise surprise, I couldn’t do anything like this using an outdated version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, nor could I cut text out of the document and paste it into a Word document because of DRM garbage.  My workaround for this was to take notes on the book using Evernote, and cut and paste screenshots of important parts of the book using the FANTASTIC program called Skitch.  This worked for me, but obviously wasn’t an ideal arrangement.
• I can’t resell my eTextbook: Even though I don’t want to anyway, my eTextbook does not allow me to sell it to someone else.

But I still have faith in eTextbooks, and I think I’m going to try one again this semester.  I plan to use coursesmart.com to rent one for 180 days.  The company has been getting a lot of good press, mostly from its recent unveiling of its iPhone application.  I’m mostly excited about the great software that their products use, as they address many of the problems I’ve had in the past with eTextbooks.

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As high quality, reliable video becomes more ubiquitous on the Internet due to faster broadband, more sophisticated web development, and better cooperation from content providers, ditching the cable subscription has become a more attractive option to folks.  It was shortly after I signed up for Netflix DVD rentals, video content became available on the iTunes Store, and I discovered the joys of bit torrent files that I decided that my laptop could satisfy all my television needs.  Comcast was another motivating factor because they started raising my bill for no apparent reason and I probably only watched 2% of all the content I was paying a lot of money for anyway.  The rise of streaming video services like Hulu, Netflix Watch Instantly, and Amazon Video On Demand has further cemented myself into a life of picking and choosing what I watch and when I watch it.

This kind of life is not for everyone…yet.

1. All of the ways to get video from your computer listed above require the user to learn how to find and use them.  The learning curves for these vary, and I discuss this below.
2. This kind of video content viewing is very individualistic.  I use MY laptop to watch, control and download MY video content from MY various online sources and accounts.  This is not a handy setup for families or one-computer households.  The television still beats the computer in providing programming that is easily accessible and quickly viewable to a large number of people in the same room.
3. And even if you can work out a plan to reliably get all the video content the household wants to watch onto this one computer, getting the stuff onto on a large screen for an audience is still kind of a pain.  This is also addressed below.
4. While you can read about live events as they happen via Twitter, RSS feeds, live blogging, etc, watching live events online is still pretty rare.  As it stands now, I can’t host a Superbowl party :-(

But for me and an increasing number of people, the cheapness and flexibility of Internet/Netflix-only TV-watching far outweighs the above problems.

Here are some sites you can go to find almost any video content you desire

Streaming Video (mostly free, easy to use, and legal): Here’s a pretty exhaustive list of sites where you can find streaming video, both paid and free.  My favorite free streaming sites with lots of good general content are hulu.com, sidereel.com, and Netflix’s Watch Instantly service.

Video Download Stores (not free, but relatively cheap, easy to use, and legal):  iTunes is my favorite place to purchase downloadable video content.  Amazon On Demand service is also good.  Here’s a blog post that compares 11 popular services.

Bittorrents (kinda difficult to set up at first, free and illegal)

Once you figure out how to use bittorents, you will have quick and easy access to an extremely vast amount of video (and other types of media) content. The technology behind these things make download times really fast, and also make it almost impossible for content providers to stop people from uploading copyrighted material!  There are a lot of places to go to learn about these things, but the quickest way to learn how to use them is to watch this two minute YouTube video.  A couple notes:

• It recommends downloading the bit torrent client provided by bittorrent.com.  As a Mac guy, I happen to really like Transmission (Mac only).  There are lots of them out there, and they all work pretty well.
• There are also lots of places to find files to download with your client.  I usually go between piratebay.org and mininova.org.  Here’s a good list of these.

Once the bittorrent client is downloaded and set up (usually really easy) and you have found a few good places to find torrents for your client to open and download, attaining just about any video is a snap.

Here are some ways you can get Internet video (both streamed and downloaded) to play on your TV from your computer

Internet Set-Top Boxes (expensive, usually easy to use and set up, all with different functions and content): Here is a good list of devices that wirelessly stream video content from your computer to your television and allow you to navigate their content via remote control.  My favorites from this list are the Apple TV – which allows you to watch your purchased iTunes content on your TV – and the Ruko Player – which currently allows you to watch Amazon VOD, Netflix Watch Instantly, and MLB.com content on your TV.  I’m afraid to buy any one set-top box because they are all still pretty expensive and I am not confident that any one will definitely play ALL the video content that can play on my computer.  Therefore I do the next option.

Computer to TV connection (inexpensive, harder to set up, usually creates a mess of wires, but is guaranteed to work with anything that plays on your computer): Because TVs and computers all have different inputs and outputs, it can get confusing figuring out what kind of connection you will need.  Check out this extremely corny but good video for a tutorial.  I have one issue with this video, however: It makes it seem like MacBooks only have VGA output, which is not true.  I connect my Mac to my TV using this Mini-DVI to Video Adapter.  It allows me to view my MacBook display on my TV via S-video or RCA.

*ok, it’s not really easy, but it’s worth it because cable sucks.

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I’m sure you know the kind of people this post is directed to – the annoying, snobby, elitist people who refuse to join Facebook. And if you are in this group, most of your friends think you are annoying, snobby, and elitist. All you anti-Facebookers need to get off your high horses and discover why Facebook is a great tool.

The dumb stuff I hear from these web 2.0 poo-pooing people includes:

1. I don’t have the time or patience for setting up ANOTHER online profile;
2. I’m afraid I won’t have many friends to connect with;
3. Facebook is a stupid waste of time;
4. Anything of importance that I can do on Facebook I can do though email or the phone;
5. Facebook is just a fad, like Friendster (and MySpace. Snap.);
6. I don’t wanna bother putting up little status updates, nor would I care about all the mundane crap that my various Facebook “friends” do all day.

But I know where these folks are coming from. The only reason why I joined Facebook in the first place is that my last job made me…which of course is ironic, considering how much time I subsquentely wasted on it during work hours. The only real prior experience I had with social networking sites ended with a really ugly MySpace page containing a bunch of media plug-ins that never worked. Like this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. (I think that last one is purposefully annoying, but still, creating a page that awful should not be possible.)

Once I started, Facebook was easy to like. Setting up a new account is made as easy as possible, the user interface is extremely intuitive and attractive, and…it has games on it! With which I quickly got bored. Oh, and my fear that I wouldn’t have any Facebook friends was thankfully proved false. Facebook has some amazing tools that helped me find people I knew that were dying to welcome me to their fun cult.

I think the real reason for Facebook’s popularity is that it facilitates more productive relationships with others in your social circles. First, as more and more information becomes digitized and searchable, Facebook is a terrific way to efficiently share information you find interesting with others that have your same interests. If you like to surf, it’s easy to post a link on your Facebook page about the bitchin’ surf board shop you found in Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa; this link will then pop up on all your friends pages, and more than likely some of them will find it useful. And in turn you benefit from your friend’s postings as more and more of them join and connect with you.

But the most important thing I discovered about the site came from reading my friend’s “mundane” status updates. This is actually an extremely effective way to keep in touch with a large number of people on a personal, and even professional, level. I have nurtured many languishing friendships by simply posting a comment or two on a friend’s status update about their new cat or bad customer service experience. The argument that social networking sites are making us value “real” friendships less is absurd. And usually voiced by grumpy old fossils.

So drink deep. Everybody else is doing it.

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1. Parents make good Facebook friends!

I discovered the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen when my marketing class team chose to use it for our group project last semester.  After initially dismissing the device because it seemed like an expensive gadget (two versions for $150 and $200) that couldn’t do anything my laptop couldn’t do, I quickly changed my mind and bought one.  It made taking class notes and recording interviews for my summer internship significantly easier.  And I know this blog is for the broke, but this thing is totally worth the money if you’ve got it.

Briefly, the thing contains a small camera that records what you write via microdots printed on special notebook paper.  While writing on this paper and recording your text, it can also record any sound it hears and syncs this audio to what it is recording with the camera.  Consequently when tap your pen on the paper you have been taking notes on, the audio that was recorded at the time of writing will magically come out of the pen’s speakers!  All of this information can then be archived on your computer (Mac or PC) via software that nicely organizes your notes and makes all your crappy handwriting searchable!  To get a better idea of all this, take a look at this video from Livescribe.  If you’re still not getting it, you should try a little harder and search “Livescribe” on YouTube – you’ll find tons of video demonstrations of the pen.  Oh, and here’s an example of a “pencast” – Livescribe’s online tool for sharing your downloaded notes.  While I think these things are pretty useless in general, I really like this one.

The device has won tons of awards, and its new availability at Best Buy and college bookstores as well as continued presence at Target, Amazon.com, and its own website, shows it has a bright future.

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1. Evernote Rocks.

So I have spent a long time trying out various ways to take notes and jot down ideas.  I’ve got lots of school paper outlines, class notes, brainstorming sessions, etc scattered throughout my hard drive and online.  Most of these are in somewhat organized word documents, a lot are on Google Docs, some in Google Notebook, and others are on small note taking programs like Mac’s Stickies program or my slightly used xPad program.

I’ve never been entirely happy with any of these.  They all work well for some things, and not well for others.  The online programs aren’t available when I’m not connected to the internet and are sometimes buggy; Word documents are a pain to organize and search even with Mac’s Spotlight search function; and programs like xPad are a good start, but are still pretty limited.

Then Evernote entered my life.  Ahhhhhhh Evernote!  I’ve been an almost daily user of it for about a year now, and I’m not going to stop anytime soon.  It now holds 516 of my notes, and they are all insanely easy to find and view.  The desktop software offers a great way to jot down small notes and organize them quickly, easily, and with a lot of flexibility.  All notes are synced to an online account so you can access them anywhere with an Internet connection.  Evernote’s servers analyze any scanned documents you add to a note so that the text on them is searchable.  Oh, and there are various free mobile versions of the program available for most smart phones (and the iPod Touch).  And most of what anyone would use it for is free!  There is a paid version ($5 per month), but there is really no need for most users to buy it.

There has been tons written about this program, so I will stop now.  Check out these reviews:

• Review from Ars Technica
• Blog post about why paying the monthly fee is worth it
• Another random but good blog post about Evernote

Related posts:

1. Group projects are now slightly less awful

Most of my (unproductive) Internet time is spent on Twitter, Facebook, and looking at my various RSS feeds.  Typically, I browse my various Twitter accounts using Tweetie (Mac only), my Facebook Newsfeed using the Adobe AIR Facebook Application, and my RSS feeds using NetNewsWire (Mac only).  These browser-free options are all great, but I am always looking for more efficient ways to view all three of these things at the same.

Yesterday, Mashable.com had a post about Streamy.com.  This is a site that aggregates your Twitter, Facebook, (as well as various other social networking sites) and RSS feeds all into one website.  It even accesses my Google Talk account to let me IM folks.  It has been around for a while, and when I tried it out in the past I found it was really buggy – it never did let me add my Facebook account to my profile.  But after playing around with it again last night for about 30 minutes I was able to load all my various accounts into it, and it works pretty darn well.

It can be slow in refreshing some information and I had to reload the page a few times to get me out of loading limbo, but it has come a long way.

Definitely worth checking out.

Related posts:

1. I love Facebook and Kool-Aid
2. Parents make good Facebook friends!

Honestly, I didn’t put a lot of thought into which hosted blogging service to choose.  I just knew it had to be two things: free (I know what that means) and good (not exactly sure what that means).  In the quick research I did, I found:

Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, Yahoo 360, LiveJournal.com, a dumb ‘ol AOL service, and a dumb ‘ol Microsoft service.  The rest I’d never really heard of, and I figured one of these would do the trick.

I’ve played around with Blogger in the past when I helped design the Fox Net Impact Blog for school.  It worked well, but I always felt like it was going to freeze or stop working when I was editing the layout of my page.  It was especially frustrating when trying to add “Gadgets” – the little boxes of information to the right and/or left of the main blog content that holds links, external calendars, etc.  The blog was eventually finished and it turned out fine, but it wasn’t quite as effortless as the service was trying to be.

So, I first found this site – a review of the ten most popular blogging sites out there.  This review favored Wordpress.com over all others.  Then I read this blog post that compares Wordpress vs LiveJournal vs Blogger.  The post is very helpful and detailed, and again, made a good case for Wordpress.

I didn’t consider the other ones because I’m not a Yahoo fan, I think Microsoft and AOL make crappy products, and I got tired of looking.  The fact is, they all provide the same basic service, which is all I need right now.

Wordpress offers me a lot of options, most of which I have yet to explore.  But from what was written in the links I have mentioned and from my initial experience with the product, I think I chose wisely.

Related posts:

1. My excellent adventure from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a while, but I could never decide what to write about.  Nor have I ever had any really compelling reasons to put in the effort if I did think of a good blog theme.

But then I thought:

1 – I’m an MBA student who will graduate in a year, and a blog would give me a great way to express myself to potential employers who don’t know me at all.

2 – I spend HOURS in front of my computer reading about the latest and greatest internet tools being created every day.  I try to talk about these things with non-dork friends, and they look at me funny.  Now I can just invite them to read my blog if they want to know more about things like….blogs.  Or caffeinated Google search results.

3 – A blog will give me a great way to organize all my interesting Internet finds into one place, so I can look them up later.

Ultimately, I want this blog to be a testimony to my hatred of paper.  More specifically, to my manic sprint to a life where EVERYTHING I do, write, read, and (perhaps) say will be translated into 1’s and 0’s, stored on an unfathomable number of computers around the world, and instantly accessible from my MacBook.

Oh, and James Cameron and George Orwell are full of crap.

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