Study: Facebook use fuels jealousy, hurts relationships

I thought twice, maybe even three times before I posted this. It always amazes me that people want to look everywhere but within for the solutions to the problems in their lives.  So….

This study shows that people need to stop looking for others to supply all of their self worth, and to start looking looking within themselves for this reassurance. If your relationship isn’t strong enough with your significant other to be a driving force in your relationship than maybe you are in the wrong relationship. To blame a software program for causing a relationship problem is the same as blaming any kind of distraction as the cause of the breakdown in your relationship instead of going to the source of the problem, you. You have the sole control of your side of all of your relationships. You can’t control anyone else but yourself, so do your best, put your best foot forward. and lead by example. Remember the Golden Rule. Life can be good if you work on making it so. So….

Study: Facebook use fuels jealousy, hurts relationships

Restrictions on OpSys for Netbooks Defined

Steve Ballmer confirmed that there will be a limit on what the classification will be for Netbooks that can come preinstalled with Windows Starter Edition. OEM Manufacturers have a very tight margin on the low end units so it is very important to them to be able to available as low of a priced Operating System that they can manage to get from Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer stated a recent Microsoft-hosted day with the Wall Street analysts: "Our license tells you what a Netbook is,". "Our license says it's got to have a super-small screen, which means it probably has a super-small keyboard, and it has to have a certain processor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

The graphic above shows you the hardware requirements of what Microsoft machine limitations that qualifies a Netbook to use either of the two lower priced operating systems. The Windows XP Home will actually be priced less than Windows 7 Starter Edition (a premium $30-$40 price point).

We have already seen several machines axed by Microsoft’s Software Police. Dell Inspiron Mini 12 (12 inch screen), MSI Wind U115 (both SSD and Standard Harddrive combined in the System), Archos 10 (500GB HDD and 2GB RAM), Raon Everun Note (Dual-core processor) and Dell Mini 0 (2GB RAM). All of these models are hearing the Death Nell.

You will be able to upgrade your Windows 7 Starter Edition to more capable versions of Windows 7 as you wish but Microsoft’s whole guideline is based on their trying to get the right operating system on the right machine to give the user the best experience. I have been running Windows 7 Ultimate on a 2GB upgraded Acer Aspire One Netbook with no problems what so ever. The video streaming could be a little better but that is the only thing that I could ask for on this level of a machine.

Pandora

What a great app for the iPhone. My wife are sitting around the pool enjoying our weekend vacation time, listening to one of our favorite artists and are discovering new artists whose musical sounds are very similar come across the station. I’m using my iPhone to wirelessly (WiFi) connect to our home network and pipe the music through our portable speakers. How nice!  Simple, straight forward and bet of all, FREE!

Windows 7 Family Pack

Microsoft has announced the pricing for the 3 user family of Windows Home Premium, $150. However, they are also saying that this will only be a limited time offering. The package will include the media and a license that can be used to activate three workstations in a single household. The other side of the coin with this announcement is that Microsoft is planning to offer this while supplies last.

In a briefing yesterday, Microsoft Product Manager Michelle Haven confirmed that the Family Pack is “intended to be a limited-quantity offer” but added that Microsoft plans to listen to customer feedback to “find out if customers love it.”

If you want to have this offer last longer don’t hesitate contacting Microsoft to let them know.

Intel Says It Has a Fix for Faulty NAND Flash Firmware

We’ll see… It will be good if this comes out this quickly and works. 

Intel Says It Has a Fix for Faulty NAND Flash Firmware

Microsoft’s Windows Experience Blog

Located mixed in with the rest of Microsoft’s Windows Blog Sites is their Windows Experience Blog which is jam packed with useful tips and reviews about many different Microsoft products.

Whether you are looking for new product releases, extra help on using an application or product reviews that are not included in the other blogs you will find good information readily available to you. Take a quick look I think you will come away with some useful new tidbit.

Windows XP Mode RC - Serious improvement over beta | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com

One of the keys for us to use Windows 7 in our company’s computer environment is the ability to use Windows XP Mode to access some of the applications that we are still keeping around. This article discusses the new features that have been added to the Release Candidate and the benefits that each one provides us. Good reading for all of you that have legacy applications and don’t want or can’t update to newer versions.

Windows XP Mode RC - Serious improvement over beta | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com

Windows Anytime Upgrade Pricing

Microsoft has announced their Microsoft Anytime Upgrade and Family Pack Pricing. There are three version upgrades that are available.

Here is the basic pricing path from your various starting points to the more advanced versions of Windows 7.

Upgrade to ->	Home Premium	Professional	Ultimate
Starter	$80	$115	$165
Home Basic	$80	–	$165
Home Premium	–	$90	$140
Professional	–	–	$130

You will most likely come into contact with the starter edition of Windows 7 if you purchase a Netbook PC. The three main upgrades that I see that will have any significance will be taking the Starter Edition to either Home Premium or Professional and Home Premium to Professional. In most cases this will be the primary upgrade paths that most of you will be making.

Below is a chart that shows some of the main pricing differences between the versions put together by Paul Thurott and can be found on his Supersite for Windows here: Be sure to click through to this link to see a complete guide to the feature list comparing each version side by side. This will go a long way to help you determine which product is best for you.

Launch of the new TechSmith Education Community Blog and Website

If I were still in education I would be using the TechSmith products all of the time. Even so, I use some aspect of Camtasia or Jing everyday whether it is to include static image in my proposals or blog notes or to create a quick clip on how to do something on the computer with in a program. I love the ease of use of their products and the integration between them. Camtasia and Jing especially have become my mainstays for quick presentations of products and teaching our clients how to use their computers and software. It is true that a picture is worth a thousand words and when you can include the words as well with your narration then you have everything you need in one package.

With the launch of  these two new sites, as an educator you will have more information that you can take advantage of. Be sure to contact us for special pricing and quantity discounts. If you haven’t tried any of these products yet you can get a free download on their site.

Products:

Camtasia Studio Screen Recording & Presentation

Record your screen simply. Add professional polish. Produce stunning videos at any size. Delight viewers on the Web, CD, or portable devices. Train. Present. Persuade.

Free Camtasia Studio Trial

Snagit Screen Capture & Sharing

Take a “snapshot” of anything on your PC screen. Send it, store it, turn it into a detailed graphic, find it later. Snagit makes it easy.

Free Snagit Trial

Camtasia Relay Lecture Capture and Presentation Recording for Organizations

Camtasia Relay allows you to record and automatically produce and distribute any presentation, meeting, lecture, tutorial or demo, and post it for all to see. Give your audience full access to your content anytime, anywhere.

Free Camtasia Relay Trial

Jing Simple Capture with Instant Sharing

Use Jing to snap a picture or make a quick video of anything on your computer screen...then share it instantly! Learn more.

Screencast.com Content Hosting

Host images, video, and pretty much anything else, while maintaining ownership. Share what you want, how and when you choose. Upload. Manage. Share. Use Screencast.com for free: Sign up now »

Let me know if you  have any questions about these products.

Intel confirms data corruption bug in new SSDs, halts shipments | Storage - InfoWorld

Since I reported the price drop on these drive a week or two ago I only thought it would be appropriate to add this little bump in the road for Intel’s new consumer-class X25-M and X18-M SSDs (solid state-disk drives). Seems that if you initiate a  Bios password  on the drive you will lose your access to anything on the drive. Intel will be coming with a firmware upgrade to this issue shortly and you will be able to fix this problem. So far that is the only glitch in an otherwise great product. Shipments of these drives have been stopped until the fix is in and been applied to all channel held devices.

Intel confirms data corruption bug in new SSDs, halts shipments | Storage - InfoWorld

Evernote – finally a reason to use it.

I had talked about this program a while back and had likened it to a poor version of OneNote, a program I am sure that if you follow this blog you know I am a big fan of it. Evernote describes its program: “Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.”

There are clients for:

• Mac OS X Leopard
• Windows
• iPhone / iPod Touch
• BlackBerry
• Palm Pre
• Windows Mobile
• Web Clippers
• SanDisk U3

On the desktop you can create notes the contain both text and audio, find printed and handwritten text within images, Clip web content into notes, capture screen shots and synchronize your notes among all of your desktops and mobile devices. The last feature is what really caught my eye. When I saw that I had an iPhone client I finally found the connection that I was looking for to easily share information between my devices. Information anywhere is a big thing for me and this just one more spoke in the wheel to give it to me.

In the free version you have some file limitations that over the next few months I’ll see if it gives me any problems. They have two versions, free and premium. I have captured a screen shot below showing the differences between the two versions. The paid version costs $45/year or $5/ month if you are not sure that you want to commit to it.

How does this translate into real numbers we can associate with. Evernote has again done the math for us and here is a chart showing what these limitations might be with real types of data.

If you are using this to share textual information between devices the free version should be more than adequate. However, if you are capturing a lot of websites, pictures or audio notes than you may want to consider the Premium plan. In my case, I just want to be able to share data between my desktops and mobile easily and this seems like a great method to do so. I am still using OneNote to share the greater portion of info between my desktops, but I needed this one piece to tie in my iPhone and now I think that I have it. We’ll see.

To give you an idea of the text formatting capability on the web interface I have captured a screen shot below for you to look at. It has standard formatting functions including Bold, Italics, Underlining, Super and Subscripting, Left-Center-Right justifying, Strikeout, indent, Line Insertion, Line Numbering and Bullets, creating a hyperlink and clearing a hyperlink assignment, removing formatting and TODO Checkboxes. You can color your text, change fonts and size (these are limited but you have a small amount of flexibility).

When you are creating a note you have the ability to enter tags for the note to later group on, and to assign the note to a folder that you create that is called a notebook. Once you have assigned tags to your notes then you can list your grouped notes quickly by opening the tags group and showing all of the tags that you have entered. Click on the tag group you are interested in and just the tagged subgroup notes will be displayed. You are given several management tools for your tags as well such as creating new tags, renaming a tag, deleting a tag and removing the tag from all your notes that contain the tag.

You have several methods for getting notes into Evernote. You can clip information from a website, enter info from your desktop application, enter info from a web browser, email to a specified email address, or from your Mobile device. You can then sort your notes on the source of the notes, by the type of information the note contains (images, audio, PDF, Ink, Encrypted text, Attachments, To Do lists, unfinished To Do Lists and Finished To Do lists), when the notes were created and when they were last modified. All in all a wide variety of choices to get at your data and quickly focus on what you are looking for. I didn’t mean to leave out the fact that you can also type in a key word that will search all of your notes and quickly display those notes that contain the search word or characters that you entered.

Lastly, if you wish to create a notebook that you want to share data with others you have that capability as well. Drawbacks, not sure on the onset here that I see too many yet but I’ll get back to you on that.

How to Series – OneNote – Updating auto capture locations

Every month I update where my OneNote Captures will automatically default to when capturing a webpage or Outlook email. The following video will show you what I do each month so that I everything works just the way I like it too!

How To Series - OneNote Updating auto capture locations

CCI Company Picnic

We had a nice turnout last Sunday for our company picnic at Idlewild Park in Ligonier,PA. We had the opportunity to meet and get to know a lot of the family members we hadn’t met before. I have posted the pictures that I took and will be posting Nick’s shots as well shortly. Hope you all enjoy the camera shots.

    

 

 

Apple iPhone 3G and 3GS Security Flaw Patch

A security vulnerability has been fixed by Apple to close the a Security Flaw on your iPhone.

Security experts explained Thursday at the Black Hat security conference that a series of hundreds of invisible SMS (short message service) text messages could be used to embed code into the system's memory and run a malicious executable file.

Users would only notice a single message with a small square in it.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/01/BUME192BCE.DTL#ixzz0MvYKhrVX

To run the update on your iPhone, open iTunes, click on Help and Run Updates…

iPhone 3GS: Initial Impressions

In this article will detail my experience with our new iPhone 3GS’s. As the next few days progress and I get to work with the phone some more and take it through its paces, I will be adding some more bullet points to the sections below.

Pros:

• I have to say that I just love the interface. Once I got used to it and new what to expect, moving around the interface became pretty easy.
• Screen Keyboard-I wasn’t sure how I was going to like this but it is working out pretty well. I would rather have some tactile feedback but the letters popping up real big make it easy for these old eyes to see what I am typing.
• I loved how easy it was to setup the tethering and how well it worked with the 3G connection.
• So far I have seen a pretty strong connection in this area with the phone coverage. I will get back on this as I travel around the country side.
• The guys at the local AT&T store have been extremely supportive. Not only in the sales cycle but also in the post sale time frame where we are beginning to push the units into service. I wouldn’t have expected anything less, but its nice to see that happen.
• I was really impressed with the tight integration between my Garmin and the iPhone. Everyone in my phonebook is searchable easily on the Garmin to give me a heads up display to dial from. I am completely hands free once the call is made. From my initial calls with Nick from the car, it performed well even with the top down and moving along the highway. More testing will tell this tell more completely though.
• The number of applications available to enhance the iPhone’s capabilities is incredible. Whether you need a news aggregator, messaging device, car mileage tracking for work, or WiFi phone service the choices are all there. Most of the apps are either free or at a low cost.
• Got my Audible Books over finally. Had to click on the folder that they were stored in. Then I had to delete them from the iTunes library, those I didn’t want uploaded. Pretty lame that way.

Cons:

• Battery life – this is the one thing that I would have liked to see better. The caveat though is that while I am in the car I can have it plugged in, or if I am using it to tether my notebook, it will also be getting power. The only time it won’t be getting power is when it is in my pocket or when I am roaming around with it. In the next few weeks I’ll see if this becomes an issue for the way I am using it or not.
• I don’t have enough connections in my car for all of the gadgets I am plugging in. I’ll have to see if I can come up with a solution for that.
• There are some video incompatibilities with some of the video podcasts that I view. Initially I have seen this because the podcasts were downloaded using the Zune software. If I download them through the iTunes store they will probably be in the right format.
• The Zune Software and iTunes Software cannot be up and running at the same time. Just a comment. Not surprising though.
• Because you are carrying around a connection to the world’s information sources at your fingertips, if you are an information addict like me you will spend “way to much time” with this little device instead of the time with your loved ones. Be careful, it is addictive.
• Don’t like the earbuds that come with the phone. They hurt my ears.
• I have started loading up content on the iPhone with podcasts and my Audible books. I don’t have a way to connect this back into the car radio easily. Shane has come up with a solution… I’ll comment on this in another post after we have it installed. Thanks Shane.

Back to School – Should you get a Notebook or should you get a combination Netbook and Desktop?

We have been discussing this kind of configuration internally for a long time and I have personally been using this type of setup for myself. I have desktops both at work and at home and I have found that for the times that I need to have a little bit more mobility that a Netbook is filling the need just fine. I feel the netbooks, because of their lightweight design, probably will have less chance of being dropped then a large notebook and will not break your child’s back as they are going from class to class. The 10 inch size screens give you a pretty good display and for the things that they would be used for primarily they will probably fit the bill just nicely. Then if you student is needs the use of a more powerful workstation or larger screen display the desktop will be there for them in their dorm room. Moving data between systems has become even easier with the online cloud storage available from so many sources. So as long as you have internet access you have access to all of your data.

Pricing? A notebook will cost you between $700 and $1500 depending on the model and configuration you choose. A Netbook starts at $300 and you can get a decent workstation for between $500 - $900 dollars. This gives your student the best of both worlds.

Summer 2009 Xbox 360 dashboard update

CNET Reviews took a quick look at this summer’s update to the Xbox 360 Dashboard. I’m not real big in the avatar creation and dressing but this is one of the areas that they have added. You will now be able to purchase add-on clothing and other accessories(yawn…) but there are some other features that might be cool for those of you that have a lot of contacts through the Xbox Community. The picture above taken from CNET, shows how you can share a movie from Netflix with online friends. This is called Party Mode Viewing but not all of Netflix’s movies are available for this. As I see more updates come along I will be sure to pass them along.

Yahoo and Microsoft finally signing on the dotted line…

How long have we been hearing about the relationship trials and tribulation of Microsoft and Yahoo getting together. Well finally they are doing something but what is it?

On the right you see a picture of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer uses a giant pen to sign the 10-year deal, alongside Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, on Wednesday at Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.

The industry says this is a ploy to join their forces to go after Google, of course it is….

"In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo search while Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers," the companies said in a joint statement. The deal is expected to go into effect in 2010 and improve Yahoo's profitability, though not its revenue, the companies said.

For more information read CNET’s Ina Fried’s article at:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10298303-56.html?tag=nl.e404

Ziibii – Newsreader?

I wasn’t sure what I was going to get into with this application but I find it really interesting and can be used as a news aggregator for any sites that you want to follow that have an RSS feed. Ziibii describes itself as a way to:

Enjoy a fresh new way of staying in-touch and in-the-loop
with your friends, photos, and the world around you with Ziibii.

Ziibii blends Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube
- plus your favorite web content - to deliver an iPhone
experience unlike any other. Ziibii is easy-to-use,
fun to explore, and offers plenty of great features.
Ziibii also works hand-in-hand with Twitter and email.

The first few minutes of using it I was completely enthralled watching the information flowing through the screen. You can associate your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and any Web Feeds that you wish to program in. As the summaries are flowing by on the screen just tap on the image of the message and it will display it for you in all of its glory. Once setup I can see you wasting hours upon hours staring at the information passing by. It certainly held my attention.

Wheeeeee! CCI mobile phones are finally caught up to the fun stuff!

With Nick’s help I have gotten my new iPhone 3GS configured pretty close to the way I want it.

First and foremost our concern was with email. I have quite a few accounts and I am still trying to decide if I want all of them to connect to the iPhone or not. It is nice to have access and to manage the accounts from on central interface which is what this is allowing me to do. We encountered two problems, one is caused by the way I have my folders setup in Exchange, the other was with the server settings which is fixed now but required some server tweaking to do so. When we installed the Exchange mail program we lost the camera app on our phones. Turns out this is a security setting that was needed for the government. Once we fixed that the camera app came right back up and worked like a champ. My folder problem I am going to have to work on when I get a chance. Otherwise everything came right over.

The Plantronics Bluetooth ear bud was simple to install and connected without a sweat. It integrates real well with the phone.

The next test I had was with my Garmin 885T GPS unit. It has Bluetooth and that was pretty easy to connect. However, when I clicked on the phonebook icon it just sat their forever. I have a huge contacts database so what was going on was that it had to download to the device. Once it finally grabbed it the interface on the Garmin worked flawlessly with the phone. Great!

The last concern was whether or not I could get my Acer Netbook to tether to the phone and allow me to connect to our servers remotely. This process only took a few minutes and worked wonderfully. I can’t believe how cleanly everything came together. It took most of today to get me there but I have a really strong working setup now to allow a truly mobile office.