Joy and Bob Schwabach

NO-BRAINER BACKUPS

Joy and Bob Schwabach — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:22:42 -0000

If the computer’s hard drive dies, most people go out and replace the whole thing. That's because they never backed up the system, so they’ve not only lost all the files and programs, but the operating system as well.

For shame. We know a fellow this happened to and now he’s nothing but a pitiful wreck. What he needed was a no-brainer backup, and we found one. Yes, yes, it’s too late for him, sad wasted hulk, but not for you. A company called “Rebit” (think of the sound a frog makes) has come out with a hard drive that does all the thinking for you. Just keep it plugged into your laptop or desktop and use your computer as usual. If the computer's hard disk fails, and your computer won't start no matter what you do, you just replace the hard disk, plug in Rebit, and follow the on-screen directions to restore everything. Yes! Everything!

Rebit comes in sizes from 80 gigabytes for $170 and on up to the 500 gigabyte level for $220. You probably won't need that much, however, since it has the good sense to delete old backup files when it starts to get full. It works in those brief moments of inactivity when new and great ideas are springing into your head, so it won't slow you down.

New Rebit software lets you back up six PCs at once. You should choose a backup drive that is at least as large as the largest drive to be backed up. The software can be password-protected for each PC to keep information private between users. To save storage space and avoid needless duplication, only one copy of the operating system or any particular application or file is stored on the backup drive. Rebit also offers backup software on a CD, so you don't have to buy one of their hard drives to restore your whole system, but can use one you already have. More info at Rebit.com.

If this sounds all like something we wrote about before, congratulate yourself on being an alert reader. But actually, what we wrote about before was called ClickFree. It's a drive too, but it backs up your files, not your whole operating system and programs. New to ClickFree is a transformer cable you can buy to turn any hard drive into a ClickFree drive and use it to back up the files on multiple computers. It's $60 from goclickfree.com.

Tech Tips

CNET.com/newsletters has some great tech tip newsletters delivered right to your email inbox. One of our favorites is called “CNET Tech Specials.” Readers pose questions and they're answered by the whole CNET community of users. One of the greatest thing about the Worldwide Web is its sheer size. With a billion people out there on line, there’s somebody who knows the answer to almost any question.

Recent newsletter answers dealt with what to do if you're running out of hard disk space and you don't want to buy a new drive. One answer suggested using only the free and very compact anti-spyware and antivirus programs, such as Windows Defender, Avast and Spybot Search and Destroy, because they take up much less space than McAfee or Norton. Another responder suggested downloading the free “Ccleaner” from download.com. It cleans up temporary files, duplicates, your Internet browsing history and other such digital flotsam.

SnowFly Said to Motivate Employees

Good employees sometimes quit their jobs or slack off when they don't feel appreciated. A new web-based incentive program from snowfly.com boosts morale by letting them play games and earn money when they meet the employer's goals.

Snowfly has found that employees produce more if they're given as little as twelve minutes of game play per week. Winnings from the games are immediately posted to the employee's personal Visa debit “game card.” Typical earnings are about two hours of pay per employee per month; the company itself is said to benefit from increased sales and reduced employee turnover.

It turns out that employees seem to like their jobs more when they've accumulating points, sort of like a gambler on a roll. An element of luck makes the games more exciting than typical incentive programs. Forty two percent of employees who earned game tokens at work took them home and played them online with their children in exchange for chores, exercise, and homework. To set up the system, employers buy reward tokens at snowfly.com.

Digital Piracy

The Business Software Alliance has paid out $136,100 in rewards to 42 people who reported software piracy. In other words, they noticed that their school or company had illegal copies of a program. Illegal copies at schools are common, and a lawyer we know says that oddly enough, he’s noticed illegal copies are common at law firms he’s visited.

Anyone who has information about possible software piracy can report it confidentially via BSA's online reporting form at www.nopiracy.com, or via BSA's toll free hotline at 1-888-NO PIRACY.

Books

“YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts; by Lastufka and Dean; $30 from oreilly.com.

It’s like climbing the charts in a pop music hit list: You develop a following and one day, you’re famous! Well, sort of. Alan Lustafka, one of the authors, has a steady following of more than 10,000 viewers for his short comic videos. It’s like having your own TV channel, and you write and produce the shows.

Can you make any money on YouTube? Well, yeah; a little. YouTube is now owned by Google and accepts partners with popular YouTube channels and shares ad revenue. You can find out how by Googling “Making Money with YouTube.” There are YouTube videos on the subject.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site: oncomp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com. You can hear us on Internet radio at BlogTalkRadio.com/oncomp.

THAT'S SHOW BUSINESS

Joy and Bob Schwabach — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:20:55 -0000

Let's start with a few of the highlights from the annual Consumer Electronic Show (CES) held each January in as Vegas.

One of the more interesting developments is a new kind of Web TV, worked out in a collaboration by Yahoo!, Intel,Toshiba, Samsung, and a few others. Some time later this year (2009),you'll be able to buy new Internet-linked TVs. in addition to the normal picture, they will have a strip of icons along the bottom of the screen. Collectively, they're called the "Widget Channel." You will be able to click on "news," "stocks," "weather," "photos," or "YouTube" to start with. More icons will undoubtedly be added as the release point nears.

These Internet connected TVs are expected to cost around $300 more than regular high-definition models, though competition should drive down the difference. Right now, only about 1 percent of the population has Internet on their TVs but that's expected to climb to 14 percent by the end of the year. By 2010, such TVs are expected to dominate the market.

-- Among other new products from the CES, accompany called "Dashboard Devices" is bringing out a $2700 computer for the car that collects your email and reads it to you as you drive along. It will also play Internet radio channels and have a seven-inch touchscreen for quickly bringing in other functions.

-- A new kind of "green" battery called the "Fuji EnviroMax" will deliver reliable current but be harmless to the environment when it is no longer useful. It doesn't contain cadmium or mercury and can be disposed of through normal waste systems; the other ingredients will be biodegradable. Batteries for toys, radios, and flashlights are expected to cost around $4 per package and longer life batteries for devices such as digital cameras, remote controls and video games will be $6 a pack.

HyperSpace is Hyper-fast

If you're like most PC owners, you can make a cup of coffee before your machine boots up and is ready to go on the Internet. There's a faster route to the Internet and we've been trying it out. It's called "Hyperspace," and what it does is connect to the Internet the instant you turn on your computer. HyperSpace-enabled "netbooks," which are tiny laptops used mainly for email and web surfing, will be available in the next few months. The's more info about this development and who's doing it, Phoenix Technologies, at phoenix.com.

Android Apps

The Google Android phone came out in October and already has more than 400 applications; called "apps" for short. This is a small number compared with the roughly 10,000 apps already out for the iPhone, but some of the Android apps are quite different and worth mentioning:

-- One that is sure to cause some nervous moments in the retail undustry is called "Shop Savvy."This bit of software turns an ordinary camera-enabled cell phone into a barcode reader. Once it reads a product's bar code it connects to the Internet and automatically initiates a Google search that finds the best price for that product from any online supplier. Some of these suppliers will also have physical stores, and may even be across the street or a few blocks away.

-- The "Locate"android app can beset to prohibit incoming phone calls to ring on your cell phone in areas your select. For example, you can prevent calls coming in while you're in the executive meeting room, at a movie or concert, or in potentially embarrassing situations. If a call comes into those areas, the cell phone will automatically switch to "vibrate" instead of "ring" mode.

-- The humorously named "Breadcrumbz" let's you take photos with your cell phone as you move along, to create a kind of pictorial story of your day. The program also uses GPS (global positioning) totag each photo with it's location.

-- The "Ringdroid" app lets you create your own ring tone from any voice or music file on your computer. It can a snatch of a symphony or some choice dialog from a favorite movie.

The Google phone is $179, and right now, you have to get it through T-Mobile. It's made by the Taiwanese company HTC, but many other companies are set on making a Google phone that will work with other cell phone carriers. Samsung recently hired about 80 developers to work on this task and is rumored to be working with Sprint, the third largest U.S. carrier. Motorola and Sony Ericsson are also reportedly working on an Android phone.

The Numbers Report -Recession-Proof Electronics

No matter how bad the recession gets, people won't give up their electronic toys, according to Accenture, which surveyed 3,000 U.S. citizens in November and December 2008.

Ninety-seven 97 percent of respondents said they were not willing to give up home access to the Internet; 92 percent were said they would not give uptheir cable or satellite TV service; 90 percent said they would not give up their cellphone service

The survey also revealed that because of the global economic downturn: 56 percent of consumers have become less willing to pay a premium price for environmentally friendly consumer electronics, while 44 percent of consumers said they would be willing to pay a 'green' price premium.

Internuts

An animation called "Sebastian's Voodoo," the story of a voodoo doll who sacrifices himself for his friends, brought $25,000 in prize money to its creator, Joaquin Baldwin from Sherman Oaks, California, to help him commercially develop a video. There were 1300 entries from 27 countries for this Sony sponsored contest. See most of the others at aniboom.com.

THINKING INSIDE THE XOBNI BOX

Joy and Bob Schwabach — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:19:00 -0000

Let’s get right to it: Xobni (pronounced Zobnee) is “Inbox” spelled backwards. Its promise and purpose is to make life easier for people who use Microsoft Outlook for their email. And by the way, it's free.

What impressed us most was Xobni's search function, which is very fast and makes it easy to find important messages. Type in a key word and the appropriate emails pop up in a couple seconds. We also liked the links to social networking sites. For instance, if someone on your email contact list is also on the networking site, LinkedIn, you will see his or her photo, job title, connections and other info in a sidebar on the side of your screen.

The same is true for Facebook and Skype contacts. With Facebook, you can see your friends' latest updates. If the person is a Skype user, you can simply click on the name to start a Skype call. For each contact you will see a chart showing how many emails you've received from them and when they typically write. This last provides a good clue on the best time to get in touch. Xobni also has the ability to bring Yahoo email into Outlook. You can find a free download at Xobni.com.

Video Phone Calls

Most people who want to make video phone calls use Skype. You just plug in a webcam into your computer, download the free Skype software, and follow the easy instructions to make free calls to other Skype users, or cheap calls to regular phones.

We've been testing a new system that lets you make Internet phone calls to any kind of landline, cell phone or Internet phone. The phone includes a video screen that shows you a picture-in-picture view of yourself, as well as the person you're talking to.

It's called the “Vidtel,” (for video telephone), and it sells for $200 from Vidtel.com. There’s a $20 a month charge on top of that. This covers unlimited calls in the U.S. and Canada, and an additional five cents a minute for calls to most other countries. If you want to see the other person on your video screen, they have to have a Vidtel phone too. But there’s no software to install, you just plug it in. The Vidtel looks just like a regular landline phone with a 4.5 inch by 3.5 inch viewing screen built in.

The Vidtel must be connected to the Internet to work, of course, just as Skype must be connected to the Internet. We use a long Ethernet cable that goes through a tiny hole in our living room wall and connects the Vidtel to our router. The video phone does not have WiFi built in but it does support WiFi so you would need an adapter for it to work wirelessly. We could have used something like the “HomePlug,” sold by Netgear and others, to turn the local wiring system into a carrier for digital signals, or the Dlink Wireless Pocket Router.

We have tried several of these video phones over the years and the is the best so far. Besides getting to see your aunt's new baby or your cousin in the service, the Vidtel phone offers many other features that traditional phone companies charge extra for. These include Caller ID, Call Forwarding, Call Waiting, Voicemail, Caller ID Blocking, Anonymous Call Block, Speed Dialing, etc. If you miss an incoming call, the service sends you an email telling you who called. You can ring two phone numbers at the same time until one call is answered or goes into voicemail. Perhaps best of all for many people, you can call people from your Vidtel phone by name, without having to memorize or store a number.

Soon to be a Major Wristwatch …

The next “must have” accessory is likely to be a Dick Tracy-style video-phone wristwatch. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, LG Electronics showed off their first prototype of the video phone watch. It will have full cellular broadband connectivity, which will let it bring in voice and picture. A tiny video camera built into the watch will let the other party see wherever the wearer points it. The watch will also have a touch screen interface. The price has yet to be announced, the delivery date is expected to be late this year or early next.

Internuts

-- FirstOnMars.com. First on Mars has links to 12,500 episodes from 600 popular TV shows on 63 major network sites. You can select shows by genre and style, such as “dark,” “dramatic,” “exciting,” or “hilarious.” You can also share links to these shows through social networking sites.

--Bill4Time.com Hey you freelancers and anyone who charges customers by the hour. (We once heard about an attorney who charged clients if he thought about them while stuck in traffic.) This program tracks billable time and automatically bills hours for work done. It links with QuickBooks and other popular accounting programs. The latest version has more than 30 updates, most suggested by users. (You can go to ideas.bill4time.com to suggest your own.) It's free if you have three clients or fewer. There are $20 and $40 version for bigger firms.

CS 4 Books

Photoshop Creative Suite 4 came out recently in a bundle of programs so large that you can be excused for not knowing whether it's worth upgrading from CS3. We've found a series of books that can guide you. They're the “CS 4 on Demand” series, by Steve Johnson, $27 each from QuePublishing.com.

An easy way to see if there’s anything in CS4 you really want, is to look at the table of contents for each book. You can do this at Amazon.com, which lets you see the table of contents for any book. Any section that talks about a new feature is labeled “New!” in red ink. So, for example, we learn that in the new Photoshop there are around 60 new features, including new cloning and masking tools, new ways to adjust color replacements, and new ways to create online photo galleries. That’s doing it quick and easy.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site: OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com, and heard on our new Internet radio show: www.BlogTalkRadio.com/oncomp.

BEST OF THE BEST

Joy and Bob Schwabach — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:16:54 -0000

So many programs, so little time. Let’s start the New Year with what we consider the best of the best. By that we mean the programs we found to be the most useful over the years, the ones we use all the time.

The first, and by rightful place, is Smartboard for Windows. We have used this program for 20 years. It is what is called a “clipboard extender.” Windows comes with a clipboard that can hold whatever text or graphic you have marked with the mouse, if you then type control-c on the keyboard to save it. Unfortunately it only saves one.

Smartboard can save a virtually unlimited number of such clips, whether text, photos or graphics. It is the mother lode for boiler plate. “Boiler plate” is a term for material that is used over and over again in many documents. For legal documents, boiler plate can often be several paragraphs of text and sometimes even pages. It can be your name and address, a common beginning or ending to letters, a frequent answer to common questions, etc. We use it every day, many times a day. Need to slug in your address, phone number, email, web site … whatever? Type it, copy it with control-c, and then just click on that item from the list in Smartboard to paste into whatever you’re working on, wherever you have put the cursor. Want to copy something from a document, a web site or an email? Mark it, hit control-c and it’s automatically saved in Smartboard. The latest version of Smartboard can even read the text back to you out loud.

Smartboard is a little hard to find. If you do a Google search, you end up of with dozens of sites wanting to sell you a white board of the kind used in meetings and classrooms. What you want to do is go to X2net.com, the home site for the Smartboard we’re talking about. It says it’s only for Windows XP and earlier but we have it in Windows Vista and it works fine. You can download a free trial version and if you like it and want to buy, it’s $28. It’s an odd price but this is an English program and it was probably the dollar equivalent to Pounds Sterling.

Another clipboard extender that has proved popular is ClipMate, from Thornsoft.com. It’s $35 and can be installed on portable flash drives, like SanDisk’s “Cruzer.” Joy has used it for several years but is switching to Smartboard, because Clipmate occasionally locks up for her.

Snagit

The name is Snagit and it’s the champion of Windows screen grabbers. “Screen-grabber” is a self-explanatory phrase. Click to start Snagit, then mark any part of the screen you’re looking at and then click to save it. Of course that’s just the beginning.

You can grab any part of a screen, the whole screen or a series of screens. You can capture any part of a video while you’re playing it. You can do the same with computer games. You can capture the scrolling frames of a web site, PowerPoint presentation, classroom lesson, training film, etc., no matter how long it is. You can capture any and all of this with sound, and you can add comments to the screens.

Let’s say you’re searching the web and you see a picture you like or a product shot you want. You can right-click the picture with your mouse pointer, and then choose “save-as” from the selection box that pops up. Give it a name and save it to any file you want. But some pictures are protected and can’t be copied that way. Sometimes large areas of a web site are protected from copying. Sometimes it’s just a nuisance to try and collect everything this way. No problem, just mark the protected image with Snagit and you’ve got it, no matter how much it’s protected.
Snagit costs $50 from Snagit.com, and they have a trial version for free.

Picasa

This is the easiest, fastest, “bestest” photo editor and manager we’ve found. And it’s free! The name is a play on the famous artist, Picasso.
We do a lot of picture editing to get things to fit on our web site and for email. Picasa has all the usual tools you find in more expensive editors and especially our favorite: “fill light.” This has saved many a photo that was simply too dark to view easily. It lightens the photo without washing out the primary focus. They even have an “I’m feeling lucky” button, for a one-click fix for lighting and color. For that old-time photo look, you can select soft focus and sepia tinting. When you’re satisfied it’s the way you want, you can add text to the picture.

Picasa can make pictures into posters and collages. You can turn a sequence of single shots or video clips into a movie; then add an audio track and post it to YouTube. You can, of course, group your photos and other images into folders by subject matter, time and sequence. We first found Picasa many years ago when it was a tiny company called Idealab. It has since been acquired by Google and you can get your free copy at Picasa.Google.com.

Picasa is a Windows only program, though there is an upload tool for Mac users who want to use Picasa web albums for online storage. Mac users can get a lovely new program called “ilovephotos,” which is also free. You can get it at ilovephotos.com. It has a real high-tech trick: if you tag people’s photos with their name and email address – like family members, for example – the program will recognize those faces in any new photo and send them a copy, if you like.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site: OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com and heard on our new radio show blog: www.BlogTalkRadio.com/oncomp.

JOY HITS THE HIGH NOTES!

Joy and Bob Schwabach — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:15:12 -0000

What could be more fun for the holidays than a pink guitar? Not much, says Joy, who found her inner folk singer when we got a pink electric guitar from iPlayMusic.com. At first, the lessons threw Joy for a loop, but after an hour or two the frowns turned to smiles, and she says the lessons really rock (or “folk,” if you prefer).

A bundle with lessons, amplifier and an electric guitar sized to fit a young person’s hands and reach lists for $200, the same as the adult electric guitar package. There's also an acoustic guitar with lessons lists for $100 to $130. (An acoustic guitar is the traditional instrument, the kind that has been around for centuries.) These seemed like very low prices to us, so we went to a busy local guitar shop to check things out. The owner said the prices were very low but the guitars were medium quality and a little difficult to tune. We had in fact broken a string trying to tune it. He replaced the string and tuned the guitar for us for a dollar.

The best thing about the iPlayMusic video lessons is that you can put them on “Loop” and let the teacher keep repeating himself until you get it. That's something you can’t do with live lessons. After you learn the first three chords and a strumming pattern, you're ready to play Sloop John B, popularized by the Beach Boys. Then it's on to the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Bob Marley and others.

Must be because of the season, but a couple days after the iPlayMusic guitar we got another one for review from FretLight.com. This one had LEDs that light up to show you where to put your fingers. The lessons start at the beginner level, but most of the software in this package seemed very complicated to us. You can get an adult-sized FretLight guitar plus software for $200.

Fuel Cells

The Medis “24-7 Power Pack” claims to be the first fuel cell for personal use. Squeeze it to start the chemical reaction and it will power a cell phone, flashlight, radio and many other portable devices for anywhere from several hours to several days.

Fuel cells have been on the horizon for quite a while now. The first one was demonstrated by a Welsh scientist in 1838, and magazines have carried gee-whiz stories ever since, speculating that fuel cells in the basement would someday power our homes. This hasn’t happened of course, but it still may. Some buses in Switzerland have been running on fuel cells for several years. The Germans recently built a fuel-cell powered submarine capable of staying submerged for weeks. Things are moving along.

What ordinary individuals can get right now is the Medis Power Pack. It’s about the size of a deck of cards and twice as thick. Inside are chemical reactants that come together when you squeeze the pack to break a thin film. There are a dozen different types of materials used to produce the reaction that generates electricity and most of them have just water and carbon dioxide as wastes.

The Medis Power Pack produces 3.6 to 5.45 volts and can generate up to one watt of power. It can run continuously for about 20 hours. The cost seems modest: $23 for the cell plus $12 for the cable that connects the cell to most devices. You really need the cable, so call it $35 for the whole deal. We wish we had one when we lived in Southern California, where power outages were frequent. You can get the cell and more information at their web site “Poweritanywhere.com.”

More Laptop Theft Protection (Free!)
You can get a free software alarm that goes off if someone tries to steal your unattended laptop. It notices when the computer is unplugged (and someone has to unplug it if they’re going to take it) or if the mouse is moved. It’s called Laptop Alarm and you can get it at download.com or Syfer.nl. The program works with Windows 98 to XP, but not with Vista or Macs.

Internuts

-- A reader in Thailand alerted us to YouBundle.com, a very unusual site that has bundles of specialized knowledge on relatively narrow topics. For example, a contributor who likes fantasy books put together a group of sites he recommends for their information about books and authors. Another presents his choices for video games, some free, some not. Another lists places to go and things to do only if you’re rich. You can also bundle videos. Some of the bundles have user ratings, called bump or dump. It’s definitely eclectic.

-- You can listen to a Slacker Holiday at web radio station Slacker.com. We hesitated not a moment and caught a Japanese children’s choir singing something incomprehensible. But it sounded cute. You can also tune in “Holiday Hits,” “Jazz Holiday,” “Country Holiday,” “Holiday Party,” “Latina Holiday,” “Soul Holiday,” and for something weird, “Dysfunctional Holiday” music. You can download their free player and click “seasonal,” or just go to Slacker.com to listen.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site: OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com.

ALL A-TWITTER

Joy and Bob Schwabach — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:12:39 -0000

All A-Twitter
“Twitter” is a free program and service that lets you send updates to anyone and everyone about what you’re doing and what’s happening. A “Twitter” update is called a “Tweet,” and it is limited to 140 characters. You can send a tweet from a computer, any device that connects to the web or from smart phones like the Blackberry, iPhone, Ipaq, Palm, Samsung, etc.

Is this useful in any way? Well, yes, as it turns out. Looking on the disaster or breaking news front, it reported last year’s earthquake in Los Angeles as it was happening and about ten minutes before the Associated Press sent out the news. A search engine technician in California said there were about 50,000 “tweets” of warning in the first few seconds.

On a more mundane level, you can tweet anything as long as you keep it short. Users send tweets describing something interesting they’ve come across, a news item, a web site, a personal message, or a philosophical observation. Anyone who has signed up can follow anyone else’s tweets just by tagging along. If the initiating tweeter doesn’t want to be followed, he or she can make their comments private, but this is unusual. Joy signed up with Twitter and had 25 followers in one minute.

Twitter users (should they be called “twits?”) find they can get up-to-date information from news organizations and others just by going to a web address like “twitter.com/APNews,” and clicking the “follow” link. Almost any source you can think of can be brought up on Twitter. We compared Twitter.com/TechCrunch with TechCrunch.com and much preferred the Twitter version (which has over 35,000 followers). Give “Twhirl” (Twhirl.com) a whirl if you want pop-ups on your screen when someone tweets.

Twitter has been compared to cell phones in the way it gets people connected, and several new books on twittering have recently come out. One of the latest has the lengthy title: “Twitter and the Micro Messaging Revolution, Communication, Connections and Immediacy, 140 characters at a Time.” It is available only as a download for $249 from book publisher oreilly.com. (Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Publishing, has more than 10,000 followers on Twitter.)

Is the future of book publishing to simply skip the print part and go directly to the Web? The huge old-line publisher Houghton-Mifflin, recently announced that it would accept no more new manuscripts for publication, until further notice. Is that what they call a straw in the wind?

Colorful Editing

When you collaborate with several colleagues on a document, it's difficult to remember who wrote what and where you put it.
One solution is to collaborate online, with a free service like Google Documents. But if you and your co-workers can't be online at the same time then you might want to go upstream with a Swedish company called Nordic River. Their new software is called “TextFlow,” and it highlights each person’s comments in different colors. One click lets you include or reject the changes. It’s still in beta testing, so it’s free for now. You can get it at TextFlow.com.

Our Best Cheap Gift Idea

Joy used to like making fake magazine covers with photos of relatives and friends. It would be something like “Wood Cutters Monthly,” with a picture of one of her nephews standing with one foot on a log. It was fun and limited only by your imagination in creating new and unlikely magazines.
Unfortunately, we can no longer find which photo editing program allowed her to do this and after a hundred other programs have gone by, we can’t even remember the name of it. So we found a couple substitutes.

One is “YourCover.com,” a web site that charges for what we used to do for free, but so it goes. YourCover.com puts your submitted photo on a magazine cover for $3.45 a design. You can print it out yourself and use some rubber cement to mount it on a piece of cardboard, or for $45 they’ll print it out and frame it.

The magazine covers look very realistic. The “Oh Baby” cover, starring your baby looked especially nice. They also have holiday, anniversary, birthday, graduation and many other themes, with 60 suggestions for personalized headlines. You can do a back cover too, and it might be fun to put more photos in between to make a photo book. Or you could paste a front cover on a cardboard box and fill it with cookies.
We did a web search on services that will take your picture and make it into the cover of a real magazine and we found MagaFake.com. MagaFake lets you put your picture onto a totally realistic looking cover of TIME Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vogue and many others. We’re trying to figure out if this is legal. If it’s not used for any commercial purpose, maybe it is.

The cover we created came out greeting card size, but we used Alien Skin’s “BlowUp” utility to make it 8x10 inches. We then moved that into Ulead’s Photo Impact our most used photo editing program, and added text. Other photo editing programs could also have done the trick. MagaFake is free, but of course printing, mounting and framing are all up to you.

iPhone Apps

-- For 99 cents at the iPhone application store, you can get the “Personal Formulator,” which contains 30 formulas. Say you're shopping. The Formulator can figure out how a purchase will increase your minimum monthly payments, or how much an item will cost after multiple discounts. The Personal Formulator can also convert miles to kilometers, meters to feet, etc. as well as figure out monthly car loans, insurance reimbursements, and so on. There are also business versions of the Formulator at the iPhone app store.

-- There are 6.9 million Apple iPhones out there, and new things to do with it coming in every day. Griffin's free “iTalk” can be used for podcasting on the go and for recording speeches and lectures to be played back later. The main reason it’s free is that it carries some advertising. This and a second free utility for broadcasting your iPhone material over a wi-fi network are both available at http://www.italksync.com/.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site: OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com
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LIGHTS! CAMERA! AVATAR!

Joy and Bob Schwabach — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:10:24 -0000

What does every video game addict need? A 3-D figure of their favorite game avatar, that’s what.

An avatar in video game talk is a character that stands in for the player. They can be pulled from a selection in the game itself or created anew by the user. The avatar can be a fairly normal looking figure in an online world like Second Life, or a fearsome fantastic warrior in World of Warcraft.
For $129, FigurePrints.com will use a 3-D printing machine to recreate that avatar as an action figure. At first they are concentrating on figures for “World of Warcraft.” This is an MMORPG, which, as you probably already know, stands for “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game.”

FigurePrints is starting with World of Warcraft because the game has more than 11 million players and the avatars always look great. If you go to worldofwarcraft.com you can see many of these avatars displayed in the game’s “Armory.” Awesome.

The finished figure is delivered in full color in a bell jar. The so-called “printing” is done with a machine the size of a photocopier. It squirts layers of plastic in precise amounts to replicate a figure, or any shape, in three dimensions. These solid modeling machines have been in use in industry for a few years but their cost of several hundred thousand dollars each made them too expensive for all but aerospace, auto and defense work. Recently, however, their price has fallen to around $20,000.

These action figures are likely to prove popular with game players, just as they have with players of the board game Dungeons and Dragons. Recent surveys have found that 81 percent of people in the age group 18-29 play video games on a regular basis. Not only is this a lot of people, but it is also the age group most sought by advertisers. This is the group that spends the largest portion of their income on consumer goods. The game playing numbers for all adults are also high, around 50 percent.

Another company entering this personal figure field is Fabjectory.com, which will recreate a three-dimensional figure of your favorite Wii game machine figure, your Second Life avatar or Google SketchUp. These figures did not look as good to us as the ones from FigurePrints.

Twitter-Squatting

Remember cyber-squatters? These were people who years ago registered domain names like CocaCola.com, or Sony.com, and sat on them, hoping that those companies would have to buy the names back from them. They were the hip, fast-moving and aware players. We were not among them. Some of those early domain names were later resold for millions of dollars.

Now we have Twitter-squatters. There are an estimated five million users of Twitter.com, a number that is increasing by around a million a month. It turns out that a lot of companies are using Twitter.com to keep the world updated with frequent 140-character news blasts. The new squatters have already taken up site names like twitter.com/cocacola and there are lots of names still up for grabs.

You can sign up for any Twitter.com name that isn't already taken, but you can only have one name per email address. A lot of Internet Service Providers let you have 5-10 email addresses, however. Yahoo.com lets you have an unlimited number of email addresses.

Green Border, Chrome Border

An alert reader wrote to mention that the “Zone Alarm ForceField,” we wrote about recently looks and acts like the “GreenBorder,” we wrote about a few years ago. Both programs create a protective shield when you browse the web.

ForceField puts a giant shield around you as you surf the web, protecting you from bad guys. It costs $50 from ZoneAlarm.com. “GreenBorder” also used to cost $50 but was taken over by Google and is now free as part of Google’s new web browser “Chrome.” If you opt to use Chrome, you get a protective browsing shield with it. Google software writers say the shield makes it impossible for anyone to view the credit card numbers you're typing, read your tax returns, or start running a program without your permission.

Since one costs $50 and the other is free, what’s the difference? We put that very question to the folks at Zone Alarm and they made a couple of good points. Google’s “Chrome” browser, they pointed out, protects you from known phishing sites – web sites that look legitimate but are not. ForceField flags these and potential phishing sites that haven't been identified yet. ForceField also protects plug-ins, programs like QuickTime, that let you watch movies inside a browser. Chrome developers are still working on that.

We like Chrome for other reasons. For one, it guesses what you're looking for. Start typing a few letters into its combination address field and search bar and it fills out the rest with the most likely web address. Click the plus sign to open a new page and you’ll see a collection of thumbnail images representing sites you've visited before. You can do stealth browsing if you wish, leaving no trace of where you've been.

We recently read a CNET.com poll showing that more CNET users use Chrome than the browser, Opera, which has been around much longer. These are “early adopters,” and they are often the edge of the wedge in finding what later become popular products. You can read more about Chrome at Google.com/chrome.

Outdoor Networks

These days it's common to find restaurants, libraries and schools with wireless connections to the Internet. But if you want to cover a wide area, like a business district, park or resort, you need signal repeaters.

Meraki Solar claims to have the world's first solar-powered wi-fi repeater. Its purpose is to provide high-speed Internet service for large areas, indoor or out. One of the first users is the area of shops and businesses known as Harvard Square, adjacent to Harvard University. Several Meraki repeaters were installed on the roofs of local businesses and poles outdoors. The cost was around $10,000 and provided wireless Internet coverage over 24 acres.

The cost can be much less for any school or business willing to do it themselves. Each unit weighs about two pounds and costs $848-$1,497, depending on size of the solar panel. The bigger it is, the greater the range. More info at Meraki.com.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site: OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com.

NOBODY READS THE MANUAL

Joy and Bob Schwabach — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:04:00 -0000

“Nobody reads the manual,” cry the tech support people. And it’s true. Manuals are boring, hard to understand and sometimes dead wrong (that’s because the manual is often written and printed before the product is finished).

So let’s give up on that part and just wait for the movie. The movie is the video demo part. It’s simply a how-to-do-it show that someone has recorded and placed online or on disk. It’s one of the best ways to show someone how to use a new program, learn to dance the tango or clean a jet engine. There are a couple programs to help us along.

Some companies use “GotoMeeting,” which allows them to do a video demonstration over the Internet in real time. But if everyone’s not there to see it, it makes more sense to have a video that can be played back on a web-site or sent in an email. For that purpose, Camtasia Studio moves to the fore. It is used by Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, the FBI, IRS, Federal Reserve and other biggies to show the folks out front how things work and what to do about it. Flickr.com, one of the largest photo-sharing site on the web, uses Camtasia videos on its site.
The new Camtasia Studio 6 from TechSmith lets you create high definition video in low-definition file sizes. For instance, a test video that was 398 megabytes with the old Camtasia 5 took up only 14 megabytes with the new version, and looked just as good. Another new feature lets you edit the audio portion of the video separately. That way, if you make a mistake while you're talking through a training session, you can fix the audio portion and leave the video alone.

New Camtasia hot-keys make video creation much faster. You can add call-outs (printed comments that provide extra information about some point) just by pressing the letter “C” on your keyboard. You can do transitions between frames or subjects just by pressing “T.” Usability studies show that this kind of thing cuts creation time by two-thirds.

Where do you post your videos when you're finished creating them? Techsmith used to charge an arm and a leg to let you post them at their ScreenCast.com site, but now that’s free. You get two gigabytes of storage space as well as usage statistics on who's watching which video.
At $299, Camtasia is less than half the price of its nearest competitor, Adobe Captivate. You can get a free trial at Camtasia.com.

A Keyboard to Go

It turns out that the reason you make more mistakes typing on a laptop keyboard than on a desktop is not just because the laptop keyboard feels cramped. Some laptop keyboards are nearly identical in size to a desktop's, but still don't feel right. Laptop keyboards are low profile; desktop keys are taller and slightly concave at the top, fitting your finger better. Your fingers stay put on the keys of a desktop keyboard, and this leads to fewer mistakes.

We got a new keyboard for traveling with a laptop and we love it. It’s the “OnBoard Travel Keyboard” from Atek.com. It’s a full-size keyboard with a cord that plugs into the USB port of a PC or Mac laptop. It costs $30 and come with a sliding cover to protect the keys. The cover can also be used as a stand to give a slight tilt to the keyboard, which makes typing even more comfortable.
With this secondary keyboard, you can set a laptop at a level where the top of the screen is slightly above eye level, which experts say will save you a lot of neck and back pain. All in all this is the best keyboard we’ve seen for laptops.

Internuts

-- Wordle.net: Ever wonder if you over-use certain words or expressions? You can see your paragraphs as a “word cloud,” with the most frequent words represented larger than the less frequent ones. The words can even be in different colors. Just go to Wordle.net.

-- BlogTalkRadio.com/oncomp: We just started doing a radio show on the web. That’s we, as in Bob and Joy, the authors of this column. We think you might find the show amusing. To go on a bit further about this web site, you can listen to all kinds of talks and interviews on BlogTalkRadio, some featuring famous people, some not. There are no ads on our show.

Unusual Books

-- “How to be a Geek Goddess,” by Christina Tynan-Wood, is an engaging guide to the ins-and-outs of technology that would be just as handy for would-be Geek Gods as it is for Goddesses. Joy loved it. The feminine view is apparent here (“small external drives fit in your purse,”), but if you slide past those references, you'll find information on every subject under the high tech sun, from keeping your computer safe to getting “groovy gear and gadgets.” Lots of tips and tricks are included. You can find a sample chapter if you Google the title, or you can go to Wood's high-tech blog at geekgirlfriends.com.

-- “The Manga Guide to Statistics, by Shin Takahashi; new from NoStarch Press, $20 at OReilly.com. “Manga” is a Japanese comic-book genre, and in this one you learn the basics of statistics through a comic-book teacher. This is an English translation of a title from a best-selling series in Japanese.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site: OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com. You can listen to our free-wheeling radio broadcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/oncomp.

THINKING ABOUT INK

Joy and Bob Schwabach — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:58:23 -0000

It’s not your imagination: printers really do tell you to replace your ink cartridge long before they are out. Sometimes it is weeks ahead, sometimes months. We have experienced it with both ink jet and laser printers.

PC World magazine recently also ran tests on this subject. They discovered that printers tended to give “out of ink” messages when they still had anywhere from 8-45 percent of their ink remaining. A Canon MP610 inkjet shut down with 24 percent of its ink still remaining in the official Canon cartridge. Using a cartridge made by LD Products, a third party supplier – meaning not from Canon, the tests found that 45 percent of the ink remained. We once used a Konica Minolta laser printer for three months after getting an “out of ink” warning.

Why do printer makers do this? Because, as serial bank robber Willy Sutton once said to a judge who asked him why he kept robbing banks: “Well, your Honor, that’s where the money is.” If you add up the tiny amounts in cartridges, liquid printer ink will cost you about $5,000 a gallon. In ordinary business use, printer ink replacements will cost nearly a thousand dollars over a three year period, making the low initial cost of the printer itself a trivial consideration. Replacement ink cartridges are so profitable to some companies that just a few years ago they accounted for all of Hewlett Packard’s profit. It still accounts for most of the company’s profit, making Hewlett Packard primarily an ink company.

On the plus side, Hewlett Packard (H-P) inkjets fared best in using nearly all of their cartridge contents. On the minus side, their laser printers fared worst in tests in the emission of fine particles, according to a study by the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Twelve of the 13 printers with the highest levels of fine particle emissions were made by H-P. The company so dominates the printer market, however, that 18 of the 22 models that emit no particles, were also made by H-P. You can get a list of all makes and models at The DailyGreen.com. H-P’s spokes-people have said there is no significance to whether or not a printer emits fine particles but numerous studies have found that such particles seem to be linked to a number of health problems. A search on the Web found several sites with commentary on printer emissions and YouTube.com even had a video on the subject from the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

The Decline and Fall of Email

Here are the signs:
There are now “no e-mail" Fridays at major companies including Intel, U.S. Cellular and giant accounting firm, Deloitte.
Young people tend to use cell-phone text messages, instant messaging, and social networks for their mail. A 2007 Pew study stated that while 92 percent of surveyed adults said they regularly used e-mail, only 16 percent of teens made it a part of daily life

Gmail Warnings

Meanwhile, back at the office … If you use Gmail, don't put anything in an email you wouldn't want your boss to read. We've discovered that Google’s “autosave” feature saves your text in such a way that your company's network administrator could view it before it's sent. Good luck and godspeed.

Internuts

-- Trends.Google.com will let you know what’s hot and what’s not, looking at some worldwide trends. For instance, jobs at McDonald's are increasing fastest in Australia and New Zealand. (Do a search on “Mcdonalds jobs” without the possessive apostrophe). A search on “unemployment” shows a steady rise in the U.S. Basically, they track key-word frequency in news stories.
-- Buzzillions.com offers four million consumer reviews in 3000 categories. A 2008 study by the e-tailing group, PowerReviews, found that nearly nine out of ten online buyers read customer reviews at least some of the time. And according to Forrester Research, 60 percent of customers say they trust the reviews that appear on a retailer’s website.
-- Logoease.com and Logomaker.com offer to make free logos for your websites. You choose an icon and text from a menu and build it online with a couple of clicks. Logomaker then gives you the code that lets you embed it on a website. Logoease gives you the graphic in ten different formats, including “encapsulated PostScript” (EPS), which is what commercial printers need for their presses.
GeekStuff4U.com – Unusual stuff, like handmade Japanese keyboards made with traditional “washi” paper, and USB hubs in the shape of Star Wars characters. May the fo rce be with you.

Travel Scanner
Xerox has a new lightweight portable scanner we like. It’s called the Travel Scanner 100 and it weighs less than 11 ounces. At low resolution it can scan six pages a minute. The scanner draws its power from the computer’s USB port, so you don’t have to carry a power transformer.
We’ve reviewed many portable scanners and they are all pretty similar. (Maybe they’re all made in the same secret factory somewhere.) What we liked about this one – aside from the fact that it works well – is that it came with PaperPort 11 software, the latest version of that excellent software. The other scanners we tried saved a little money by bundling older, cheaper, versions. Other bundled programs here are OmniPage Pro and Presto BizCard 5, for reading scanned text and business cards.
You can scan documents at up to 600 dots per inch (dpi), which is fairly high for ordinary use. (The lower you set the resolution, the faster the device will scan.) We had no trouble scanning color photographs in the protective plastic envelopes that came with the scanner. It was also easy to scan glossy ads. The software will scan a printed page directly into a PDF file if you wish, making it editable instead of just readable. Travel Scanner 100 sells for $150-$200 from discount web sites or stores.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site: OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@oncomp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com. You can hear us on Internet radio by going to BlogTalkRadio.com/oncomp, or follow us at twitter.com/oncomp.

Starry Night

Joy and Bob Schwabach — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:29:55 -0000

Anyone who has looked at the night sky has wondered about what they see. It would be nice to know if that bright star is Betelgeuse, in the belt of Orion the Hunter, or Polaris, the North Star that has guided so many travelers for thousands of years. In fact, most of us haven’t a clue.

So we have been trying out a new device from telescope maker Meade (Meade.com). It's called MySky Plus, and it looks like a ray gun from a sci-fi movie. It has a trigger and a viewing screen a little smaller than a business card. When you aim the gun at an object in the night sky and pull the trigger, MySky Plus will try to identify the target, show you a star map and provide a spoken explanation.

The MySky lists for $199, though we also saw it for $149 to $169 at various Internet stores. We’ve looked at other writers’ reviews of just what it is and what it does and noticed that none of them were right. It is nearly always described as a GPS device that explains what it sees in the night sky when you point it at some celestial object.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is not a GPS device, it simply has a database of major locations around the world and you pick the one that’s closest to you. After all, being a few hundred miles away from a major city is an insignificant difference compared to the distances of space. And, since the device has no lens, it can’t “see” anything. If it were a true GPS, the location would change as you move.

What the MySky does is operate like a modern version of an 18th century sextant, a device with a curved scale marked in degrees, against which you moved a pointer. Sighting along the pointer at some known star or planet, you would read off its angle above the horizon. Then you would mark its elevation against the time and date, comsult your astronomical charts, and get a reasonably accurate fix on where you were. The MySky does much the same thing. When you point it at something in the sky, it registers the angle of inclination and compares that with your Earthly position. It next consults its clock and onboard database of star maps to tell you what you’re seeing.

This can be pretty exciting stuff, if often inaccurate. In short, this is a toy. It is a fun toy, and the descriptions and videos it provides are very educational, but nonetheless it’s a toy. When we searched for commentary from user groups, many adults expressed delight at learning about their night sky for the first time. One man was so excited when MySky informed him he was looking at Saturn, that he immediately went out and bought a telescope so he could see the rings. Actually, you can see the rings of Saturn with a pair of good binoculars, but his purchase of a telescope raises an interesting point: The MySky Plus sells for close to $200, but you can buy a pretty good telescope for around $100-$140.

Of course a good telescope (many of which are also made by Meade) will let you see the actual stars or planets but won’t tell you what you’re looking at. Some newspapers print brief descriptions of what can be seen in the night sky from their location. Public television also carries starry sky descriptions for some locations.

You can also get a good idea of what you’re looking at by downloading Google Earth from Earth.google.com/sky. Once installed, type a location and click the “sky” button to see maps and star names of what the night sky looks like from any place on Earth.

Internuts

-- Instructables.com boasts over 17,000 home-brewed projects from around the globe. We looked at hooking a treadmill up to your video game machine, adding a rapid-fire button to your mouse and modifying Disney’s “Wall-E Robot.” We also learned how to pick and husk a coconut (and were warned not to stand underneath when picking), and how to make an electricity-producing wind turbine. You can also check out a book called “The Best of Instructables, Volume 1,” $35 from Oreilly.com.

--Sprout.com offers a new and free way of searching the web. It's a little like stumbledupon.com, in that it browses the web at random. You give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to rate whatever comes up and over time the downloadable program learns the kinds of things you like and starts to focus. Click on a smiling fish when you like a site and you'll get more like that. Choose the frowning fish, and you'll get fewer. And by the way, if you’ve never tried the earlier stumbledupon.com, it’s definitely worth a trip.

Books

O’Reilly’s “Head First” series is totally great, as they like to say in Silicon Valley. We often consult “Head First HTML,” to figure out web page coding. Well, here are two new ones, just as much fun as the others. Joy says they make the subjects so interesting and easy to understand that you don’t even realize you’re learning.

-- “Head First Statistics,” by Dawn Griffiths; $35 from Oreilly.com. Don’t know the difference between the mean, the median and the average? Don’t worry, hardly anybody does. But you’ll learn about it here all right. What about reversion to the mean? Standard deviations and variance? (This reminds Bob of an amusing story about Karl Gauss, the mathematician who started it all.)

“Head First Physics,” by Heather Lang; $35 from Oreilly.com. Heather (if we may call upon an undeserved familiarity) starts out with the example of the reader falling into a hole which happens to go all the way through the Earth to the other side. This is something that has happened to many of us, and here in Head First Physics we learn why we start to slow down, rather than speed up, as we go deeper and deeper into the hole. Aha!