Google Reader: A different way to view your Buzz stream

As you may or may not know, Google Buzz is tightly integrated with another Google product besides GMail. That product is Google Reader and it may help you quiet some of the noise so you can “listen” to one person at a time.

Google reader allows you to subscribe to websites and blogs that have RSS feeds – most sites do. In fact, Google has just enhanced Reader to create a feed for sites that don’t have a feed.  This allows you to be notified whenever there are changes to a site to which you’ve subscribed.
More on Google Reader can be found here.

So, the interface in Google Reader is a pretty basic but powerful two column display. On the left are your lists of subscriptions and on the right is the summary or complete post of the site you are navigating. There are shortcuts allowing you to scan quickly through lots of subscribed site updates in a very quick fashion.

With the advent of Google Buzz, another section appeared (at least I never noticed it before) on the left called “People you follow” with a parenthetical count of unread updates,  from all the people you follow in Google Buzz.

So what you say? Well, what if you’re short on time and just want to scan some updates of a few folks? This feature in Reader allows you to do that without having to scan your whole Buzz stream.

Scanning your whole Buzz stream can take quite long and require several pages refreshes. Using the Reader feature lets you zero in on a few of your favorite folk’s updates.

Also, the drop-down menu next to the “People you follow” section enables one to sort Alphabetically and Recency along with other presentation options.

I found this section of Reader to be quite handy for my Google Buzz consumption.  Let us know what you think?

Now this is real-time!

Update: Added video below explaining PSHB

Update: Wow, that was fast!  Less than a minute it was available in reader and in Google Trends Latest Results

Just finished reading a post by Jessy Stay about the Google’s apparent turning on of the” firehose” in Google Reader.  He mentions a conversation with a Google friend.

I quickly queried a friend of mine at Google, who stated, “They can neither confirm nor deny my suspicion” (that it was launched), but I was “observant”.  Sounds like they just launched Pubsub Hubbub support.

So to test it out (via this WP plugin) I’m putting up a new post to see just how it works.

Seems the holidays got a little extended for me… hope to post this week.

Thanks to all my fans for your patience.

Really, both of you, thanks

Save some cash:

As we progress into the 2009-10 winter season,  it’s a great time to get an energy audit done and start saving money.  If not, then envision precious dollars slipping through the unsealed cracks in your house.

Home owners can either do it themselves or spend a few bucks up front to have a professional come in an give you a detailed assessment.  Residents should check with their local utility providers about incentive programs.  Energy providers are under increasing pressure to reduce consumption and are eager to pair owners up with local companies that provide energy audits.

A checklist for the DIY homeowner:

A basic guideline – wherever there’s a hole you’re probably losing energy.

Examples of that include windows, doors, fireplaces, and electrical outlets.  Look for cracks in insulation and caulking and mend as necessary.  In the basement consider insulating those hot-water pipes.

Other convective places to inspect include floors, walls, and ceilings.  Here you may want to check your attic  and wall insulation.  One should also evaluate replacement windows.  The return on the initial investment gets shorter as energy costs go up.

Your local home improvement centers offer a myriad of products to help you easily fix these a lot of these issues with little time and effort.

If you want to spend a little more you might consider a professional assessment.

What a pro can offer:

Thermographic Imaging. A picture is worth a thousand words.  What thermographic imaging provides is a picture of heat, colored by temperature differences. Professionals point the special hi tech camera at your walls, windows, ceilings and doors.  It becomes immediately obvious where the heat is going.  Sometimes simple caulking can make a huge difference.  You may also benefit by adjusting the dampers on your forced air venting.  Or a more expensive option may be recommended such as door and window replacements.

Fan suck: OK, that’s not what it’s really called.  That just seems like a good name for it – it’s really called a blower door test.  The procedure involves positioning a fan in a door and closing up the rest of the house tight.  An attached computer measures the air flow into your house from the outside as the air is sucked out.

Other tests that may be offered are duct leak testing that involves forcing air into the ductwork.  Additionally, workers do obvious visible inspections – most likely crawling into spaces you may not have thought of.

Do something

Doing nothing won’t save you money and as energy costs rise it just gets worse.  A bonus to the cost savings is that you should also be more comfortable having eliminated those pesky drafts.  Any effort should be realized in smaller utility bills.  It all adds up.

Have fun and let us know how you saved money on your utility bills this winter season.

Google presented a demo of  its unique operating system, dubbed Chrome OS on Friday.  The concept was introduced back in July of 2009.  They also released all the source code for the OS to the open source community.  How does this affect me you may ask.  Well, right now, not so much.  In a year, that may be a different story.

Operating systems are a necessary part of your computer experience.  It’s the king of all programs running on your system allowing you to access all the internal and external devices and programs you use daily.

The problem is, as our computers get more complex operating systems become more complex.  This complexity leads to a slow startup and multiple background programs running  and well, what many call “system rot”.  User frustration with their computers running slow, being infected with a virus, or a multitude of other issues is a growing problem.

Google attacked this problem in its unique out of the box way and presents us now with a revolutionary solution, the tenets of which include simplicity, security, and speed.   Sergey Brin (co-founder) says that all along, the driving force behind this effort has been to improve the user experience.  It should be noted that improved user experience means that users will be online more, see more online ads(a majority of which are managed by Google)  and purchase more of the advertisers’ goods and services.

To optimize this new OS, Google has defined a reference hardware specification.  Solid state drives (no moving parts) is a major component of the design, along with a full sized keyboard.   More details will be forthcoming in the months ahead as they work closely with PC hardware vendors.  Google hopes to be ready for a full roll-out in time for the 2010 holiday season.

The Chrome OS demo employed the use of an off the shelf netbook equipped with a solid-state drive.  Speed was impressively demonstrated with the push of the on button to the login screen taking only 7 seconds.   Repeated emphasis to the audience was that most people spend a majority of their time online; answering and sending email, browsing the web and using other online applications like YouTube to view video and listening to music with online application like Pandora.

Boot-time and security were also discussed as being compelling reasons to totally revamp what is essentially a piece of technology that’s getting a little long in the tooth.  Sure,  initially this will not replace your current desktop computer.  Not all applications that most need currently exist in the “cloud”.  Google hopes, however, that this will be the starting point and envisions this Chrome OS computer as complimentary  for now.

Enough of me trying to describe what Chrome OS is or its benefits to the user community.  Below are some videos that will do a much better job.

Let us know your thoughts, we’d love to hear your take.

Chrome OS Descritption

Chrome OS Demo

And a look at the Chrome OS UI which will evolve

Office 2010

Microsoft  just announced the beta version of Office 2010 – now available free for download.  Just make your way over to the download page and in a few minutes you’ll be downloading a 700 megabyte install file.

You have your choice of either the Developer or IT Professional version.  I chose IT Professional – I haven’t yet explored the differences in the Developer version.

Getting the goods:

You’re then led to a page of important details about this beta.  Not the least of which is that you must uninstall any previous versions of MS Office currently installed on your computer.  The rest is self-explanatory – system requirements, 32-bit v 64-bit, etc.

Clicking the “Get Started” button brings you to a MSN, Hotmail,  Live Sign in.  Sign in or sign up and then sign in.  The next page contains a form asking you to describe yourself as a beta tester.  Easy enough.

The  Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta Product Key presents itself next prompting  you to “Print This Page”  Do what is says or at least write down the MAK key somewhere safe.  You’ll need it to activate Office later.

Then pick your download of choice (32-bit or 64-bit) from the bottom of the page.  Since the download is on the large side, Microsoft provides you with a Download Manager tool allowing you to pause and restart the download as needed.  Depending on your broadband speed the download could take anywhere from several minutes to more than an hour.   Budget your time accordingly.

The Install

The Office 2010 Install is not unlike previous Office installs.  Double click the downloaded file and wait a few moments for it to uncompress and start the install process.  I’d suggest you chose the “Custom” install.  If for no other reason you’ll be able to see what and where things are going to be installed.  I’d recommend choosing “Run All from my Computer”.  This guarantees that all the features are installed on your hard drive.   After specifying these few options the install then proceeds quietly, taking several minutes.  Near the end of the install the program will automatically check for updates and install them if available.  The Thank You screen is displayed below.

A Quick look

This Professional Edition of Outlook 2010 contains virtually everything Office has to offer – Access, Excel, InfoPath Designer and Filler, Outlook, OneNote, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word, and SharePoint Workspace.  Also included in the tools folder are the Digital Certificate for VBA Project, Clip Organizer, Language Support, Upload Center, Picture Manager and Send-a-Smile

Send-a-Smile is the Microsoft Office feedback tool. Parked in the task-bar are ”Smile” and “Frown” cons.

Click on either and it instantly takes a screenshot and embeds it in a dialog box allowing you to add comments clarifying the accolade or bug report.

The interface is easy to use which makes it more likely to be used by beta testers.  I found the “Smile” side of what’s ostensibly a bug reporting mechanism.  However, once you think about it, the positive feedback is also valuable.

Starting with Word

Starting up Microsoft Word allows you access to the “Backstage” as they put it by clicking on the “File” tab.  Here you’re presented with several options along the left column.  Many are familiar, like “Save”, “Save As”, “Recent” and even “New”.  However “New” now presents a much more intuitive interface allowing one to click on a template in the middle area and have a sample presented in a small window on the right.  The templates can be either local or available via Office.com.

Social. No program or suite of programs is complete without some sharing ability these days.  Click on the Share option in the left column and you’re presented with several choices to Share using Email, Save to SkyDrive, Save to SharePoint,  or Publish as Blog Post.

Try it for yourself

We’ve only scratched the surface on the comprehensive suite of office tools that is Microsoft Office 2010.  From our initial testing, things seem very stable, especially in flagship apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Oh yeah, Outlook now has an option allowing you to configure Text Messaging.  The release of this beta for Office reminds me of another beta from Microsoft – oh right Windows 7.  Let’s hope this works out half as well.  Looks good so far.

Let us know what you think.

Google Alerts is a great addition to Google’s plethora of free services – one that you shouldn’t overlook. This recently added powerful tool allows you to track conversations about any topic completely unattended. Just feed it the search term, refine the search type and let it go do its job.

In a timely fashion you’ll receive links with snippets of text related to your search terms. You choose to have results delivered via email or to your feed-reader. The icing on this cupcake is its ability to schedule the frequency of deliveries – “As it happens”, “once a day” or “once a week”.

Configuration of your Google Alerts is simple. At the Alerts site you complete 4 fields. Enter the “Search Terms” you’d like to track. The next two fields are drop-downs where you specify “Type” (where to search), and how often to deliver results. And lastly, where you’d like alerts delivered.

Types include News, Blogs, Web, Video, Groups, and Comprehensive (all of the above). The “where” can be a feed to your reader, by default this is Google Reader. Or if you prefer, enter your email address. You’ll have to experiment with this a little. It alldepends on what your tracking. If you’re tracking something popular like “government health care” you may want to direct that to your reader so as not to overwhelm your inbox. Whereas, tracking the last sighting of your favorite celebrity may be something different.

Think of the possibilities. Tracking sports, news updates on a high profile event, or just keeping up to date on an emerging technology.

One should also mention that there is no limit to the number of alerts you can set up. One of my favorites right now is tracking “Black Friday”. I read the returns in my reader along with my other feeds. I also just bought a Roku, so I’m tracking its mention everywhere for the upcoming new channels to be announced soon. This I do daily to my email inbox

I highly recommend you give Google Alerts a whirl. It’ll just take you a few minutes to set up and then you go about your business. And before too long you’ll be the goto person on the latest advances in silicon doping – cool dude!

Try it and share your take.

Here’s a short video demo:

Wakoopa

Are you being efficient with your time at the computer? Wakoopa can help you with that. Are you wondering if there’s a better web browser? Wakoopa can help you with that. Would you like software recommendations based on your daily software usage? Wakoopa can help you with that. Would you like to share what software you use? Wakoopa can definitely help you with that. Do you like discovering new applications? Wakoopa can help you with that.

Wakoopa is a software usage tracking site that garners its power from the users’ willingness to share how they use their software. Wakoopa enables this via a program running in the background locally on your computer.

Wakoopa Tracker

The download is free (PC or Mac) and dead easy to install. Once the Wakoopa Tracker installed, it quietly records and reports your usage statistics back to your Wakoopa account. Wakoopa then charts your usage and displays it graphically. – both active and background programs. I found the background programs enlightening. I had no idea that I had so many programs running in the background. I used that knowledge to trim unnecessary applications.

The Social Wakoopa

Another powerful feature of Wakoopa is that it employs what’s called the “Wisdom of the Crowd”. That’s the notion that cream rises to the top with large audiences. Since no one person can greatly affect a preference the Wisdom ultimately offers the best choice.At least that’s the theory. Additionally, any user can write a review of any software they use and post it for others to see.

You can receive weekly reports via email or your profile anytime on the Wakoopa site. From time to time it’s nice to browse the site to see what everyone else is using.

Sharing is easily enabled. Wakoopa offers widgets allowing you can embed a Wakoopa branded badge on your own site to brag about the software you use. Facebook integration, making friends with other Wakoopa users and the forum like interface online demonstrates Wakoopa has embraced social networking.

More details can be found at the Wakoopa Site. If you’re interested you can find my Wakoopa page here.

Let us know what you think.

Where to start

There’s Bring your daughter/son to work day. Why not bring a friend or relative to the Internet Day. In this case though, the day can be any day of your choosing. As the person that “knows computers”, do them a favor, make it sooner rather than later – they’ll thank you (or curse you) for it later. Help them take the first steps on the net’s “yellow brick road”.

Yes, believe it or not, there are people, a surprising large number of people that don’t spend most or even part of their day on the computer. I know, crazy ain’t it? You must know someone like that. They’re intelligent, busy individuals that work outdoors or if they’re indoors they do other things.

Most of these folks have computers for offline purposes like game playing or to use their home finance software. The computer is usually turned off and they either plant themselves in front of of the TV, read a book, watch a move, play a sport, or meet people in real life.

Fortunately or unfortunately sometimes, lots of information is now presenting itself online without an offline equivalent. Sure, a lot of it is garbage but there is some valuable content available for the first-time that would have been impossible to appreciate otherwise.

For example, there are medical sites like WebMD. Here you can click on the model of a human body, enter your symptoms, and be presented with a wealth of medical literature about possible causes. Fine art sites like the Louvre online allow you to take tours of themany galleries

And a huge number of news outlets running 24 hrs a day with multi-media rich content.  Not to mention the enhanced coverage of any sport you can think of, local, national, or international.

These reasons alone are usually not what drives one to get online.

Inevitably, one gets interested in getting online after hearing someone talk about it. “Twitter, what the heck is Twitter? And why does Oprah use it now? Can the wife talk to her on it?”

This is when you become the computer help desk so you might as well be prepared. Here and in future posts, I take a stab at listing some things that will get anyone a great start. No, Solitaire is not one of them – even if there is an online version. (Actually, Solitaire is a great way to teach someone how to use the mouse which we assume one knows at this point).

So grease your scroll wheel, here we go, let’s answer some questions!

How do I log on to the Internet?

You don’t actually “log on” to the Internet, you navigate a connection. So first they’ll need to call their local cable provider and have them explain the particular Internet offerings available. Dial-up is pretty much non-existent these days except in some very rural areas. Once installed and configured at their computer either directly or via a wireless router they can now proceed to “browse” the web.

To navigate the Internet highways you’ll need a tool – that tool is called a browser, and there are a number of them. Above you can see the icons for four of them. Virtually all browsing is done using one of these browsers.

Google put together a video describing what a web browser is:

Internet Explorer comes with your PC running Microsoft Windows and Safari comes with your Mac running the latest version of its operating system, OSX (not really important). I should mention, however, that there’s a version of Safari available for your PC as well if you so choose.

Next to Internet Explorer(blue), Firefox(yellow) is the most used browser. Below is a graph of browser usage from Wikipedia. From a security standpoint, Internet Explorer(IE) has been the most vulnerable to attack since it’s the biggest target. This has improved greatly since the release of IE8 however. And Microsoft does release regular updates so if you choose to stick with the your preloaded IE you’ll most likely be OK; so long as you have a virus-protection program running just in case.

Firefox’s popularity is due in part to

1)It’s not IE: There exists a long history of security vulnerabilities that make some people still gun shy to use it.

2) Customizations and Add-ons : There are hundreds of third-party extensions that have been written to extend the capabilities of the Firefox browser. Some popular add-ons include

• Adblock Plus – like it says, block ads,
• Xmarks, synchronizes your bookmarks across multiple computers,
• WeatherBug – local weather conditions, radar and alerts

Plus hundreds more that you can find here: Add-ons for Firefox

3) Speed – websites load faster

Other web browsers:

Opera and the new browser from Google – Google Chrome are also fine choices. Google’s latest version is quite snappy. Links to each are here: Opera, Chrome

In our next posting to donstech – How do I send and receive email?

Next to browsing, reading and sending email is the most popular activity to perform while online. There are several applications available to manage your email. As with browsers, both the Mac and PC come equipped with their respective versions of an email client that run locally on your computer and connect remotely to a computer to download and send your email.

Or you could use one of the Internet hosted (in the “cloud”) clients like GMail,Windows Live or Yahoo Mail. The advantage to using the hosted email is that you’ll be able to see your email from wherever you are as long as you can get online since access is via the web browser.

First you’ll need an email address. Let’s start there in our next article.

Please let us know what you think. Register and comment.

Note that you can use your Facebook or Twitter login to comment as well.

Amazon offers, at 15 cents per gigabyte, a very affordable backup solution on their S3 Internet cloud infrastructure.

Jungle Disk is a subscription file backup service. Customers are billed monthly for gigabytes of files stored and transferred. The free desktop software provided facilitates the configuration of scheduled backups.

Access to your files is as easy as double-clicking on the disk icon now available under “Computer” on your local computer. You can also backup and get to your files from any computer using a web browser and going to “myjungledisk.com”.

Security is also addressed with Jungle Disk by allowing you to optionally encrypt your files being backed up.

Your initial monthly fee will may appear larger than you’d expect but this is due to the charges for the more significant first time upload costs. Upload fees are 10 cents per gigabyte, dowloads 17 cents per gigabyte. After your first upload, only changes need to be transferred. So if you haven’t added or changed any files, there are no upload fees. My experience is that monthly fees are in the range of a couple of dollars up to $20 or more if I’ve added significant data to my storage.

Features of the Jungle Disk service:

• Unlimited storage – 15 cents per gigabyte
• Pay only for the space you use – not minimum charge per month
• You files are encrypted and therefore secure from prying eyes
• Reliability – Amazon has multiple redundant data-centers strategically located around the country
• Backups are easy to configure and reports can be sent to your inbox daily

More detail can be found here: Jungle Disk Reliability

Support is stellar

Amazon’s support is a reference template for all companies to use. If you’ve used Amazon to purchase anything you’ll know what I mean. Jungle Disk is no exception. Online comprehensive help, including videos and tutorials, walk you through all the details. If you cannot find what you need in the prepared text you can also visit the Jungle Disk support forum where lots of users congregate to share what they know.

One obvious disadvantage of Jungle Disk or any remote storage is that you’re out in the cold if the site goes offline and your only backup is located online. While this has happened more than once in the past couple of years at Amazon, one can accept that risk knowing that their files are available nearly 100% of the time.

Still, many are comforted knowing that their files are available locally on their external backup drive, for example. One must also understand however, that hard drives fail and the larger the drive, the more data is at risk. And then there’s the unexpected – robbery, fire, flood, etc. It’s just prudent to know the risks, local or remote. There’s nothing wrong with having two backups, just in case.

Amazon’s Jungle Disk is just one online backup solution available on the Internet. Just Google “online backup” and you’ll see what I mean. When it comes to the safety of your precious photos and other files, you should go with a company that has a good name, references, and you’d expect to be in business in ten years or more. Amazon has been around since before the first Internet bubble and I expect them to be around for a long time going forward.

That’s my take on it, tell us what you think.

How often do you backup? What’s that, you don’t backup? Do it now please.