SmugMug (still loving it)

I have been uploading like crazy this week and everything seems to working just fine. I have been using their tools to move things around, edit keywords for searches, and setting up text in the description fields. All pretty neat.

They have three different subscription models that range from reasonable to pretty expensive unless you have a following for your pictures and they are selling for you. Definitely not me! If you are interested, the site is: www.smugmug.com

Reposting New Intel Modular Server Project

Here is the new slide presentation with narration that I did last week from Intel's PowerPoint Slide Package. It came together pretty will I think.

ims project wmv2

SmugMug Photo Site

There are so many places that offer free storage of you images but very few give you as much control and ease of printing as SmugMug. Recently I keep hearing about this site and it made me very curious to see why so many of the industry commentators speak so highly of SmugMug.  So I took a quick look, signed up for the 14 day trial, spent half an hour uploading files, purchased by first set of prints, and quickly signed up for power user account.  That is how impressed I am of the site.  Now why on earth would I pay a store my photos when sites like flicker, Microsoft live spaces and others offer this storage for free?

First, I like the fact that there is no advertising on your site.  That in itself is worth a lot.  Nothing is worse than having some kind of dating advertisement show up on your page that you are displaying pictures of your wife and family.  The second reason is the amount of control that SmugMug gives me to not only set up the theme of my homepage but also to stop a separate theme for each gallery that you set up.  A gallery is a directory or storage area for set of photos. Once you have installed their upload program then you will be able to copy your pictures to your galleries. You can categorize your galleries so that they can be sorted, you can categorize your images by using keywords, you can put captions on the images that describe what they are, and there is room for comments that to be left by you or your visitors.  You can also sort your photographs so they appear in the order that you would like them to be displayed in. It takes only minutes to learn how to use it and customize your gallery. 

I jumped right into the power user account set up so that I could store videos as well as photographs.  You can select more than one photograph at a time to upload, and a stored in their full resolution unlike the free sites which will downgrade then to fit their storage requirements.  Your yearly fee includes unlimited storage, your videos are limited to 2.5 minutes Max for DVD quality video files.  If you upgrade to the professional version you can upload 5 minute videos in HD format and 10 minute videos and DVD quality format.  There is one caveat though, your files are limited to a 512 MB maximum size.

The last thing that I want to talk about is the buy this photo feature.  They give you a large number of choices for printing these pictures at very reasonable prices.  The only thing I don't like is the cost of shipping which I think is a bit exorbitant, however they do need to pay for someone to package the pictures and send them out to you.  You can also have your favorite photos placed on different kinds of items like shirts, bags, cups, photo books, greeting cards, note pads, posters, coasters, playing cards, puzzles and even ceramic tiles.  You can also have them create a CD or DVD of your images as a backup that can keep for safekeeping.  You can never have enough copies of your precious moments.  If you're interested in the site you can sign-up at www.smugmug.com and if you use this coupon code FkoWZ8IjsnygW to get a $5 discount on signing up for your very own SmugMug account.

To view my account go to: http://www.bappleby.smugmug.com

Revisiting Carbonite

About a month ago I was talking about my system crash and getting my system back up to speed, and one of the reasons that I was able to bring my system back as quickly as I did was the fact that I had been backing up using a service called Carbonite.  This is very reasonable service, $49.95 per year for unlimited storage, had taken about a week to get most of my files that I needed backed up uploaded to their service.  When I restored from their site it only took a couple of hours for the data that I needed to be reinstalled on my machine.  It's great to see something worked as advertised.  The one drawback that I see with this service is that it does not include attached Storage Devices, like my network hard drive and it's piggybacked USB hard drive.  I can understand why they have not included that this price since if they did I would be able to map any drive on my network and back up its content as well.  Since the license is for individual workstations this cannot be allowed.  Their work around when I called their tech support is to copy the files I want backed up on to my computers local drive and then back up from there.  There is one problem with that, if you remove a file from your hard drive that is marked as a backup file then after 30 days of its being gone from your system it will be deleted from their system.  This prevents you from archiving and creating more space on your hard drive and using them as offline storage.

So if you're thinking of using this service then keep in mind what it was designed for.  The $49.95 yearly fee covers active file backup for one machine of its internally attached hard drives.  The service will not support USB or firewire attached storage or a backup of any files are located on this machine.

Publish! Publish! Publish!

I think down deep in my heart I'm always wanted to be a published author, writing that "super exhilarating, can't put it down" spy novel or some deep thinking manuscript that everybody must read.  Well this morning while I was looking around Twitter I came across a book publishing site called LuLu.  This site helps you to put together your idea for a publication, put it into a format that can be distributed and then provide a distribution path for that publication.  Whether you have created your epic spy novel, delicious cookbook, eye popping calendar or photo book, whatever your idea, they can help you to produce itm print it and distribute it.

This is also great for making short run for technical books for your company, catalogs, or brochures.  They can produce hard back books or paperback, perfect bound, saddle stitch or spiral bound books.  They can be in full color or just black and white.  Or they can just be electronic, to be distributed through the Internet.

It's free do sign up, and until you use their service for publication you can work on the development of your publication and then pull the trigger when you're ready.  They provide a site for you to manage your projects, and help you to manage the selling your masterpiece.  This includes using their online shopping cart system to collect the funds for your sold works.  This is all pretty neat stuff and I have a couple of projects in mind already.

Links: http://www.lulu.com/

Wiimote repurposed for multi-point interactive white

Jude just came back from the WIU vendor show in one of the interesting things that he came back with was a demonstration of using the Wiimote as a multipoint interactive whiteboard.  The link I will give you is from engadget and has it pretty neat video showing how works.  I think I'd love to have one of these right at my desk and have it pointing onto my desk surface.

"While certainly there's been no shortage of Wiimote hacks, the number of genuinely useful ones has been considerably more limited. It looks like you can now add one more to that list, however, as Johnny Chung Lee (he of the Wiimote finger-tracking hack) has now upped the usefulness even further with a makeshift multi-point interactive whiteboard. There's a bit more involved with this one than just a Wiimote, however -- namely, an IR-emitting pen (or two), which the Wiimote tracks while relaying all the necessary information back to a PC. That, as the video after the break shows, allows you to turn any surface into a multi-point whiteboard with the use of a projector, or turn any LCD screen into a touchscreen, of sorts. Best of all, Johnny has kindly provided the necessary software free of charge, so hit up the read link below if you want to give it a shot."

wiimote projector whiteboard

Johnny Chung Lee Project - Wii Johnny is a Graduate PhD student at CMU and has several other projects that he has posted to this site using the Wiimote for other tracking experiments. The 3-D is pretty neat as well. He has a blog at: http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/  called procrastineering. Enjoy!

Spam 101

Brian Fine has put together an article that will help us understand a little better about how to protect ourselves from all that nasty SPAM! Here is a little excerpt from the article or you can click here to read the entire article. 

By now anyone who regularly uses email is familiar with the idea of spam. To be considered spam a message has to be both unsolicited and bulk. Unsolicited means that the recipient has in no way requested or subscribed to the messages. Bulk means that the message is sent out to a large (hundreds to millions) of recipients.

Spam messages cost money. First there is a cost in resources: bandwidth to deliver the message, and server memory and space to process it. Second there is a cost in man-hours, as the recipient has to “sort” through the spam on the chance that an actual email is there.

What can we do about it?

Brian Fine - In House Technical Staff

Google On Line Tools...

Google seems to be offering something new every day. Of course a lot of their tools have been around for a long time and we just don't have the time to look at each and every one of them.  I have been playing around with Goggles Blogger program, adding extra gadgets, and trying to add to the look and feel.  Very nice program, very simple and very straightforward.  You can add the basic elements that you want to have added to it, add your own code if you want to or leave it plain and simple like I have.  If it weren't for the integration of Microsoft's Live Spaces I would probably move to this in a heartbeat.  I like it that much better.

The other Google product that I started playing with is the Google Reader.  This product allows you to create an RSS Feed Aggregator.  What this means is that you can select all your different RSS feeds and look at the current postings all on one page.  It is like building up your very own technical/personal online newspaper that you can view each morning with your cup of coffee.  It allows you to quickly drill down into the articles that you are interested in which for all of last time sensitive information workers is extremely important.  The other benefit is that you don't have to worry about installing a news aggregator on your machine like Newsgator and others, and this setup is available to you on any machine that has Internet access.  This makes it very portable just not available when you don't have Internet access.

Jing - Wonderful New Support Tool

 

OK, you're now seeing me using voice to text recognition and it is being recorded by the Jing.

So we will insert the URL at the bottom of this message and you'll see it appear at the bottom of this message.

Tutorial on the Jing Program

This is really a neat application.  You have to be very careful on how you use it but if you understand what is going on in the screen sizes that you have to deal with you can get a good feel for what the other person will see you when you produce what you are creating for them.  You will see what I ran into when trying to record and use voice recognition at the same time.  I am looking forward to putting together a lot of quick training videos they can be shared on the fly both internally in our company as well as with our customers.

This program is offered by TechSmith who also makes Camtasia a program that I use for capturing screen displays for training purposes.  This is a beta program that you can take advantage of the share information quickly with customers and friends and family.  To get more information on this product please visit http://www.jingproject.com/.

Office Wide Spam and Virus Protection:Astaro

I can't imagine anyone who likes the daily ritual of pressing the delete key to rid themselves of all of their unwanted, unsolicited e-mail spam.  There are 23 of  us in our office, and if their incoming e-mail is anything like mine then this problem causes them all to lose between 45 minutes to an hour of productivity each and every day as they check their e-mail.  To resolve this we implemented a system from Astaro that we use as a Security Gateway for all of our Web Access.  The nice thing about this product is its unified approach for our total IT Security Protection.

Astaro Security Gateway provides immediate protection for your network, web access and email traffic. The Astaro solution integrates more security applications than any competitor in one award-winning management device. A complete range of hardware appliances scale to the performance level which you demand.

For more information on this product and it's capabilities be sure to visit our Solutions Center webpage and contact us so that we may configure the right system for you.

Up and Coming - Microsoft's Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008

Last Wednesday's release candidate is termed a Feature-Complete Beta of its Hyper-V virtualization technology, which is an add-on to Windows Server 2008.  A release candidate is a final beta before the code is considered finished.  Microsoft said it was on track to ship Hyper-V by August. The code is available on Microsoft's Web site.

In this newest beta, Microsoft has added support for new guest operating systems that can run on top of Hyper-V: Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (x86), and Windows XP SP3 (x86).

The company also said users can install the Hyper-V Manager snap-in to the Microsoft Management Console on Vista SP1 (x86 and x64). The snap-in allows for remote management of Hyper-V.

Jeff Woolsey, senior program manager on the Microsoft virtualization team, says the three most common roles virtualized among early adopters are IIS, application server and Terminal Services, and that the four most deployed Microsoft applications are SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Exchange Server and Forefront. He said more than half are running an antivirus/security application, nearly 50% are running a backup appliance, and approximately 75% are running Hyper-V with some attached storage.

On another note, Microsoft acquired desktop virtualization vendor Kidaro. Kidaro offers management technology aimed at making it easier for enterprises to deploy, use and manage virtual PCs. The platform comprises several components including a client that handles encryption and firewall security and integrates the virtual machine applications into the end-user computer. The management server assigns configurations and security policies for users and compiles information about clients for monitoring and auditing.

Microsoft expects that the software will help accelerate migration to Windows Vista because it can minimize compatibility issues between applications and the OS. In addition, the software makes the use of virtualization less noticeable to end users, which should also speed adoption, Microsoft said.

For more information follow these links:

• Microsoft releases feature-complete Hyper-V beta
• Windows Server 2008 Virtualization and Consolidation
• Hyper-V Leaves Linux Out In The Cold
• The Roadmap to Virtual Infrastructure: Practical Implementation Strategies (White Paper prepared by IBM)
• Cost Effective Analysis of Scaling with Virtualization (White Paper prepared by Coyote Point Systems)
• Disaster Recovery and Virtualization (White Paper prepared by Ixilix discussing using Virtualization as part of your disaster Recovery Plan)

The Crash! continued...

As catastrophic as losing all the information on your hard drive can be, if you have performed consistent backups you should come out better in the long run.  Luckily, three weeks ago I began testing a new offsite backup product called Carbonite to back up my critical data on my notebook.  The backups took a little while to complete, about four days for 25 GB of data, but it made it very easy for me to get download my OneNote project files to another computer while I had the service department replace the drive and bring it up with a fresh load of Vista Ultimate.

It took about a week to reload the different applications that I run but I now have a system that is consistently faster, and doesn't have the garbage on it from loading and unloading test applications.  Refreshing your computer by doing a fresh load every 3 to 6 months does wonders for your productivity.  The downside is the time lost during the reconstruction.

During the down time, I was using my desktop from home at the office. I didn't want it to be joined to our network so I started using the terminal server client to access most of our applications that I run on a daily basis.  What struck me was how painless it was to be able to jump between the live windows session and the terminal session as I was doing different projects.  The one drawback I did find was that because I did not join this machine to the network was a little hard to move files between two sessions.  But it could be done without too much trouble. 

Now that I have the laptop up and loaded, I am running most of our legacy applications, we have some Access 97 databases, our accounting system, and our CRM program that are rather dated, on a terminal server. And I am running all my research with Internet Explorer, OneNote, and Office Applications in the notebooks operating system.  Because I'm using their RAM from the terminal server I have found that I'm running much faster than before when I have ten to twelve applications running at the same time.  It makes sense now that I think about it and I am glad that have taken advantage of this ability.

If you have any questions about the process I went through or if you want to know more about remote access and terminal services feel free to let me know and we can discuss this further.  Happy Easter!

Camtasia Studio - Create Your Own Presentations

I have been working with the Camtasia Studio product for a month now and I am so thoroughly impressed with it's capabilities. This is a great product for anyone who needs to either present their company or product lines or  needs to provide training materials for their employees or for clients.

With Camtasia Studio, anyone can easily record and edit high-quality screen videos to share on the Web, CD, and mobile devices. You can use Camtasia Studio to create and share:

• Training videos
• Tech support tutorials
• PowerPoint presentations
• Sales demos
• Screencast

It took only minutes to get a feel for how easy this program works to give you professional quality presentations in most of the formats that you would possibly want to publish in. You will see more and more projects from my desktop becoming available in the next few months as we continue to produce new content on our Product Solutions Showcase.

Look for demonstrations on equipment, programs and gadgets that may interest you. As always, we are open for suggestions for content that you might be interested in.

Crash! You never think it can happen to you...

This past weekend I have some strange things occur with my system that I attributed to some Microsoft updates that had come down from on high, but as it turns out it probably was my hard drive failing.  On Tuesday it finally gave up the ghost, and totally crapped out.  Over the last few days I have let the guys try to resurrect my drive but to no avail.  So I've been working with my desktop from home running completely within terminal server and it really hasn't been a bad experience except that I'm down to one monitor now instead of two.  Using terminal server, I don't see how I can have two monitors up and running to show me two sessions at once.

Once again the new drive installed an up and running it will be hard to run might primary applications for research in communicating with my customers on the machine and still run terminal server for all my legacy applications.  That really seemed to work very well and I kept the speed up the cause I had fewer applications running locally and within the terminal server window I was using the memory from the server rather than on my local machine.  It's just like having two computers on my desk which helps me to expand my capabilities and increase the responsiveness of both systems.  So next week I'll run it through that scenario and I'll report back on how well it works.

So you want to Recycle your computer equipment responsibly? Here's How...

We all want to act as responsibly as possible when it comes to disposal of hazardous materials that can be found in a lot of computer components.  Goodwill Industries of Pittsburgh is accepting your computer equipment to be recycled. They have two locations in the Pittsburgh area, one and Banksville and the other in Belle Vernon. The addresses are listed below:

BANKSVILLE
2866 Banksville Road
Pittsburgh, PA 15216
[get a map]

BELLE VERNON
140 Finley Road
Belle Vernon, PA 15012
[get a map]

Here is a short blurb from their site: "Goodwill will consolidate and sort equipment for shipment to a Dell product recovery partner for reuse or recycling. Equipment that meets minimum standards will be refurbished and resold and all proceeds will support its non-profit job training and community programs. Equipment that cannot be refurbished will be responsibly recycled. Donors will be responsible for removing data from hard drives and other storage media before donating to Goodwill."

Nuance PDF Convertor - Legal Office Demo

 

I converted the video from QuickTime to Flash so you can easily view it.

Great little alternative program to Adobe Acrobat Writer for doing PDF Conversion and Document Management.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Handy Product for Active Road Warriors

 

The Belkin Mini Surge Protector with (2) USB Charging Ports.

I admit, I am a gadget freak! I can't begin to tell you how many different Electronic Devices I carry with me even on a short road trip.  I always have my camera, battery charger for the batteries that go into different devices, my GPS, my Zune, my laptop, my phone and portable speakers.  You know I can't go for a minute without being entertained by something!  For just $24.95 this little device turns one outlet into three plus gives you two charging USB ports.  USB connections are for charging only and cannot be used as a USB hub.  What a great little product that doesn't take up much room in your bag.

Upgrading to Office 2007 on a Windows XP Machine…

When I first install Office 2007 on my home XP machine was my inability to search in my outlook and OneNote programs. Microsoft every move the search functions from within office and require that you install Windows Desktop Search utility. Even though this utility was free it was a surprise when I tried my first search in my mail folder and nothing showed up. After I installed the search utility could well for it to index everything that was on my system. However, once everything was installed I was very impressed with its speed and accuracy. Not only was everything indexed and crossed index by application type, I was able to choose under which I wanted to search and limit the results for. Very nice! For more information visit:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/choose/windowsdesktopsearch.mspx

Even if you don't upgrade to Office 2007 and are still using an earlier version, having a full text search function in your system is a great help. Here's where you can download your free copy of WDS 3.01:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/b/d/9bd9c91f-7a74-4084-9198-49d2cfab7947/WindowsDesktopSearch-KB917013-V301-XP-x86-ENU.MSI

New product line-Scanshell

Ken has found a son of a product that we are looking forward to adding to our solutions store. If any if you have gone to the doctor's office recently unit knows that the office personnel ask you for your Medical Insurance card so that they can scan it for the records. This new product works with many different applications as well as its own database application for collecting the insurance information off of your Medical Insurance card. This helps to more accurately collect information may need to properly bill your insurance company as well as speed up the process in which to document this information. The unit that we are most interested in is the Scanshell 800N/800NR/800DXN. These products are perfect for driver licenses, corporate or medical ID card scanning. It interfaces to any standard USB Port, takes only a few seconds to scan, has an auto detect function and is TWAIN compliant. As I complete our final negotiations with this distributor I will post this product under our solutions center with greater detail as well as our product cart listings. Download the brochure on the Scanshell 800n

Making the Most of Your Time

Any one who knows me, knows that I am so in love with using my time as effectively as possible. Time is the one commodity that once it is used is definitely lost. I love to fill this time with things that either entertain or educate me. There are many ways to get, view and distribute all the information that is available both on the Internet and other sources.

If some of the information that you are looking for is available through the Internet it has probably been made available through either a RSS feed and/or through podcasts indication sources (which is a fancy way of saying iTunes). I subscribe to many podcasts using the Zune Marketplace. This is a free alternative to iTunes that works well whether or not you own a Zune Media Player or not. Several of us at the store recently picked up the new Zune 80 GB media player. I am currently running Vista Ultimate on both my work machine as well as my best of the home that I'm using as a media center system. This in works especially well on the desktops system because it is capable of importing TV shows that are recorded from the media center system. Takes about 20 minutes to upload a show but it comes across very well. I've also taking some of the home movies that I have created and uploaded them to the media player as well.

With podcasts, choose which ones you are interested and subscribe to them, and then mark them to the synced with the Zune. From that point on every time you connect your Zune to that computer it will check for updates from the market place download the new episodes in automatically upload them to your media player. It's that easy!

If you are interested in joining the Zune Social, as it is called, go to www.zune.net/setup to install the application on your machine that will allow you to connect to the Microsoft Zune Marketplace.  Enjoy!