CNET’s Review of the new Palm Pre

While CNET’s review of the Palm Pre was more positive than negative they did have some concerns that they voiced about the product. The feature that grabbed my interest most was the ability for the phone to handle multi-tasking. I did not realize that there weren’t any smart phones on the market that can run more than one application at a time. Not even the iPhone. However, is this enough of a benefit to jump from the iPhone bandwagon? My wife thinks that I am attached to my PC by an umbilical cord sometimes and I have a problem running a computer without multiple monitor these days. It is not unusual for me to have eight or more applications running at one time. If I could have more monitors I would. Of course not everyone bounces from one function to another as much as I do but I can see the need for having more than one application available at your fingertips. Anyway, if you are interested in what CNET has to say take a look here to see what they have to say about the Palm Pre.

Paperless Books! EBooks are in the News…

There are several stories coming through the internet today about Electronic Books or EBooks. Amazon is the best known with their Kindle devices and book services combination. They have put together a well coordinated method for acquiring books, magazines and newspapers electronically anywhere you have a cell phone connection. While the purchase price for a Kindle device is a little steep, quite a few new releases are available for digital download with substantial price reduction as compared with comparable hardback pricing. Amazon has released the shipping date of its new Kindle DX, a large format Kindle, for June 10, 2009. The Kindle DX is suggested to be a great unit for student text book replacements as well as making it easier to read Newspaper stories.

I have loved reading and listening to books distributed for electronic devices for many years. Currently, most of the books that I “read” are acquired through Audible.com (another Amazon recent purchase) and luckily I was an early implementer of their technology. My current subscription is grandfathered in giving me 5 selections per month for just 39.95, typically the cost of one audio book if purchased on CD or tape. In fact, I have over 800 books now in Audible format that is always in my library if I wish to listen to any of them again. The great thing about this format the industry wide acceptance of the Audible’s DRM format and the large numbers of devices that can accept the format.

I had also been an early EBook reader as well. I had very early on purchased a Rocket EBook reader that allowed me to purchase books online as well as download .txt file to the unit. It was a little clunky getting the information onto the reader but it had enough memory on it to make it worth while. It was capable of holding hundred or more books, depending on size, and it made it much easier to bring my reading material with when I was traveling.

Today’s EBook devices have better battery life because of the new page display technology. Sony and Amazon have both utilized this technology and this and their ease of acquiring books has given these kinds of devices a rebirth. This industry is in the early throws of its infancy though but it does show a lot of promise. So much so, Google today has announced that it will be offering electronic books as well in the very near future. According to a NY Times article, Google plans to make implement this program by the end of 2009. This would give Amazon a run for their money. Book publishers have complained about Amazon’s pricing strategy and with Google’s entry into this field it will give them a competitive option to choose from. (Currently Amazon charges $9.99 for most best sellers and up to as much as $25 for some new book titles).

Google has another EBook project that is still going on where they have scanned over 7 Million books, the majority of which are out of print. This project is a totally separate venture. From this project Google has made over 1 million public domain books available to mobile phones and Sony EBook Reader. Google doesn’t plan to limit the availability of these books to any specific devices.

The third news item revolves around the purchase possibility of E Ink, the company that invented and produces the e-ink displays for the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader devices by Prime View. There is a relationship between these two companies currently. E Ink provides the flexible displays and Prime View assembles them. E Ink suggests that this deal will provide the financing to  continue the development of color displays that they hope to be shipping in late 2010. This would bring the a much needed upgrade to the current EBook readers that is their main complaint today for being used for text book replacements. Hopefully they will be successful.

SquareSpace vs LiveSpaces 001

One of my first worries was that I didn’t think that I was going to be able to use LiveWriter on this blog site. However, all needed to do was put in the right password and low and behold I was connected. So, obviously that is not a problem. The first impression that I see is the ability to put more than one category on a blog entry. That makes it easier to find previous entries in the blogs by the categories that are in them.

The next problem I was having was putting my logo on the page and it was coming up with some sort of black/grey background. Not what I want… I was using a copy/paste function, didn’t work. So by inserting the picture directly from my gallery worked. Good! That's all for now. Need to get back to work.

Windows 7 – Connecting to the Home Network

I did not have any problems getting connected to my Home Network which consists of several Windows Vista machines.  Without loading and the software was able to directly connect to the NAS drive on the network and access all of the picture files I have stored there.  Very slick and simple, I like when it is that easy.

I have also set up speech recognition using a USB headset and that seems to be working out fairly well.  Of course of the speech recognition has to be trained but out of the gate you can see by this blog entry it seems to be working fairly well.  Of course you can't see how many corrections I might have had to make, but they were far and few between. We'll have to see if it gets better as time goes by.  I was hoping that there would be a big difference but there doesn't seem to be at this time.  I guess Microsoft had their hands full with the operating system and didn't spend much time updating speech recognition this time around.  It is still a decent program, and for free what can you expect?

Bing is here…

Microsoft’s new Search program “BING” is live and running out there for public consumption. So far it seems to be doing alright but I haven’t done a side by side comparison to see how it fairs against Google and Yahoo! As if I need anymore special projects.

As you are typing in your search parameters Bing will give you some suggestions that you can choose to search on. I like this feature a lot. Of course this isn’t anything radically new but I’m glad they are doing it.

The jury is still out with my verdict on IE8. We are all going to have to get used to it since this is what Microsoft is pushing us towards if you are going to continue using IE. Like I said in an earlier article it doesn’t seem to causing problems in some of the applications that I would have expected to have the problems in. We will keep on testing it.

Windows 7 RC – So far I’m really impressed!

Sometimes we are so used to the ways things were that when we run up against something brand new that is truly wonderful we don’t even realize it right away. My installation today of Windows 7 on a newly acquired Acer Aspire One went so smoothly that I didn’t realize at the end of the initial load that it was ready for me to continue on and have the finish its install with a reboot. So… I reinstalled the initial load three time before I caught what was going on. It’s so fast that if you don’t pay attention you don’t realize you are as far along as you were.

So far I have been able to run everything we use internally except Connectwise (this is our service application) in native Windows 7 mode. I installed Connectwise and setup the launch icon in XP Pro w SP3 and it seems to working just fine. It even works with IE 8.0 which surprised us as well.

I haven’t started fine tuning the device drivers but most everything was found automatically without any problem. Skype found and used the webcam and microphone without a problem, and everything but the high def streaming video seems to be working. Had a little problem with media center and the TV sample program so this will be a project I will need to look into.

I have been busy all day loading applications we will see how well all of this works. I will be interested in the Speech to Text functions to see if this has gotten any better. I really do like using that when I sit back and start composing on the weekends and evenings. This is the first day that I have really pushed Windows 7 so I will get back to you this coming weekend to add to my findings.

SquareSpace vs LiveSpaces 001

One of my first worries was that I didn’t think that I was going to be able to use LiveWriter on this blog site. However, all needed to do was put in the right password and low and behold I was connected. So, obviously that is not a problem. The first impression that I see is the ability to put more than one category on a blog entry. That makes it easier to find previous entries in the blogs by the categories that are in them.

The next problem I was having was putting my logo on the page and it was coming up with some sort of black/grey background. Not what I want… I was using a copy/paste function, didn’t work. So by inserting the picture directly from my gallery worked. Good! That's all for now. Need to get back to work.

SquareSpace vs LiveSpaces 001

 One of my first worries was that I didn’t think that I was going to be able to use LiveWriter on this blog site. However, all needed to do was put in the right password and low and behold I was connected. So, obviously that is not a problem. The first impression that I see is the ability to put more than one category on a blog entry. That makes it easier to find previous entries in the blogs by the categories that are in them.

The next problem I was having was putting my logo on the page and it was coming up with some sort of black/grey background. Not what I want… I was using a copy/paste function, didn’t work. So by inserting the picture directly from my gallery worked. Good! That's all for now. Need to get back to work.

One more quick thought about Google Wave

One of the projects that I am currently working with is the integration of communication between all of the sites that I work with to get our message out. I have integrated several application so that I don’t have to publish to quite as many site individually but it is still a chore to easily get all of the things that I am working on out there to the different places that people are following us are using.

Why do I care? If you are taking the time to publish and you think that the information you are publishing is something that your public wants to read and follow than you want to make sure that you make it as easy for them to do so as possible. By publishing to many different communications systems, whether it is your primary blog or something as simple as Twitter you want to try to drive people back to you. Google’s product hints at being able to do this easily and even take it a step further and make the communications more interactive as well as making them as public or secure as you desire. Any tool that can give you these capabilities is well worth a second look.

Google Wave Product – New Communication

A new communication tool that Google is developing to use on your computer systems and mobile devices. It is not  expected to be available to the public for several months but has been put into the hands of developers now to see what they can do with it before it's public release. A very nice overview is available on YouTube and can be accessed from cnet news Webware site.

Supports standard email functions as well as instant messaging. It treats the communication as an object so that it can be real time as well as providing standard email type access. It allows easy drag and drop capability to add people to the communication flow and to bring people in on the conversation at any point. You can easily put threads into the message, share the communication on a blog by adding the blog as a member of the conversation and withhold access to parts of the communication thread by making them private and assign the members to just that portion of the conversation thread. Also if you are added after the conversation thread had started you have the ability to replay the conversation as it progressed, piece by  piece.

They discussed how using this product you can use the editing function to collaborate on document creation. It again allows you to show the changes, but the most interesting thing is that it allows you to view the comments, and playback the order in which the document was worked on. It makes editing and revision control very well controlled. It promises “to become a very powerful document creation tool!”

A Linking function allows you to connect multiple Wave Conversations into lists. This allows you to bring together multiple conversations threads in groups to categorize them and make them easier to access as a group. They describe it as “very Wiki Like.” You group these conversation links by dragging them onto a new Wave Conversation and creating a Wave Conversation about previous Wave Conversations.

You have the ability to use search criteria to search your conversations for information very quickly and in real time as documents and messages are being created.

It is using a very strong context sensitive spell checker that they are providing API’s so that other developers can use them in their applications. The entire application lends itself to having developers create add-ins or gadget tools that create a richer set of functions to the application. Wave allows the developer to use extensions to connect to other communications applications as well. They demonstrated the interface with Twitter which connects your Twitter account with your Wave account and allows for instantaneous communication between the two product applications. They showed some other integration capabilities with an issue tracker application that allows you work within Wave and to have the updates automatically update in the issue tracker program as well.

Because Google and the Wave Project are providing the Wave product as an open API other companies can build their own Wave Systems and host their own Wave Servers that can interact with Google’s and other systems. Each of these Private Wave servers remain private and only the shared communications traverse between the two applications. Because of this you could implement your own internal Wave Server and host it on your equipment and have a private installation being used within your company and still have it have the ability to communicate with external systems as well.

Last but not least they showed an online translation robot that allows you communicate very easily in languages that you don’t know and be able to do so effectively.

Instant Netflix

A couple months ago I restarted my Netflix Subscription because of the ability to acquire instant availability of published TV shows and movies on my Xbox game system.  Unlike a lot of people the only use I have for my Xbox machine is the ability to deliver media from Home Network to our family room TV set.  Now with cable on-demand, cable DVR, DVD movies I also have the ability watch my Media Center video, music and TV recordings I'm adding what can be called Netflix on-demand as well.

To show you just how much Netflix is taking over the market share of the video industry there are so many ways of getting streaming video from Netflix you almost have no excuse not to subscribe to even their most basic subscription plan.  For $8.99 you get all you can eat streaming video plus single DVD Rental each month.  If they're a lot of old shows that you haven't watched you would like to RE watch this is a great vehicle that will allow you to accomplish this task.  So now I have Netflix available to me as a movie rental, which satisfies my need to watch newly released movies, and, instant streaming movies and TV shows instantly from my ex box to my TV or on my computer or from within by media center console.  Now all I need are more hours in the day.  Hey Netflix can you fix that also!

The Netflix Media Center interface has quite a few choices build into it.  Not only do you have Instant Queue, you can also you can add to your DVD Queue, take a look at what you have recently watched, view newly arrived movies and select them for either instant view if that's available or to be placed in your DVD queue, and they have categories that you can browse through and make selections as well. The search function works for movie and TV show titles only, this is something I would like to see changed to also allow you to search by actor and director as well.  I'm sure they'll get there.

So if you have Vista Home Premium or Ultimate this is another great addition to your Media Center application. Enjoy!

June Issue of Laurel Mountain Post is out…

 If you don’t toot your own horn who will?

The new issue of the Laurel Mountain Post is out this week and this issue’s primary theme is on golfing. See my article on golf gadgets on page 26. There are few things listed that aren’t too expensive but the one that caught my eye was the Shadow Caddy. Not too many places where it is available here in the US, it was first introduced in Australia. I can see it having a big splash over here as well.

See the new issue at: http://laurelmountainpost.com/Archives/LMP-May-June-2009.pdf

Hope you enjoy!

Gizmodo-How to install Windows 7 On Almost and Netbook

If you are interested in trying out Windows 7 and just happen to have a Netbook laying around here is an article showing you the step by step procedure for doing so. I found this posting originally through Veronica Belmont’s Friendsfeed page this morning when I began playing with the site.

http://gizmodo.com/5257386/how-to-install-windows-7-on-almost-any-netbook

Bob

FriendsFeed

 Social Networking has become the WORD for a lot of us lately and I am as susceptible to trying out a new service as any other. While  listening to a recent TWIT podcast they discussed their use of this site for their sharing of information rather than using a site like Twitter. I must say this is much cleaner than Twitter and has the ability to allow more in depth commenting and sharing. And isn’t sharing information what it is all about? Anyway, I have setup my site at http://friendfeed.com/bappleby and if you want to subscribe you can find me there. Some of the benefits of this site is the ability to place your contact subscriptions into groups to make it easier to sort out the comment flow. You can make as many different categories as you like to make this useable. It comes populated with Favorites, Personal and Professional to get you started but after you have played around for awhile I am sure you can come up with many different groups.

I have posted a picture of my startup page to give you an idea of just how simple the interface is. You can add a favorites link to your browser that allows you to post a site and/or photos to your comments easily. This is what you see in this photo.

You can use this site as an aggregator for all of your blogs, Facebook, photo galleries (Flickr and Picasa), Gmail/Google Talk, Yelp, YouTube and others. So if you are around a lot of  sites with your postings this may make it easier to share the information around without reposting.

Bob

AVG Free 8.5 Download

If you are looking for a good Antivirus program for your home machines consider the free home basic version of AVG. This product provides basic antivirus support for you machine but if you want something that covers spyware, spam and other types of malware you will want to consider the paid subscription product.

To obtain the free version go to: AVG Free Basic Home Antivirus Software

For better protection and free support consider AVG Internet Security - Antivirus, Anti-Spyware, Anti-Spam, Safe Searching and Safe Surfing on the Web, Identity Theft Protection & Firewall

Prevention is better than cure! Comprehensive cyber threat prevention for Windows-based home users from one of the World's most trusted security companies. Enjoy your online life free from worry with AVG Internet Security.

• Easy to download, install and use
• Protects against viruses, spyware and online threats
• NEW Prevents identity theft
• Real-time security makes your online surfing, searching and chatting safe
• Top-quality protection that does not slow your system down
• Free support and service around the clock and across the globe
• Compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7

Microsoft Response Point

 We have made our first foray into VOIP market with Syspine’s Response Point System. We are setting up our system  using Syspine’s DOS-A50 4 Port System and 16 phones. It gave us the opportunity to upgrade our Switches with SMC’s Programmable units. We placed a POE switch to support our upstairs systems and to power our phones over the Ethernet connections. We want to try the phones in line with our computer connections to see if there is any significant traffic increase (which translates to network slowdown) with the addition of the new units. When you consider adding 16 new devices to the network infrastructure it is quite possible that there might be some change in how the network functions. It is going to be another week before the system goes into full production and we really see what kind of traffic is generated.

The reason we jumped so quickly on this change in our infrastructure was caused by our focusing on the renewal contract from our current phone line provider. They were requesting that we sign a new contract for a new contract that would lock us in to a two year period to gain a certain rate. We were not very happy at that cost and so we decided to look for alternatives. Since part of our business is providing business class phone systems we have a lot of resources to choose from and the one that looked the most promising to us was converting our standard phone service (PSTN) to digital IP Trunk Line Service. The cost savings is tremendous. We plan on retaining two PSTN lines for backup and for other primary services (Fax, Credit Card and Emergency Services) our primary phone service will now be through the internet. Our provider Packet8 is giving us 12 lines and with the cost of the two PSTN lines we are keeping, we will have about a $500 per month savings by moving to the new service. With the cost of the Syspine equipment purchase we will be able to upgrade our phone system and have it pay for itself from the savings inside of one year. Now part of the reason the savings was so great is the number of lines that we are using but even for a smaller installation your cost savings could be just as significant.

Over the next month I will be documenting different aspects of our new system and how we integrate it into the way we do business. I will talk about the IP Trunking Technology and how it has worked for us and some of the other products that are available for the system that you might want to consider. So be sure to come back to site to see how we are progressing and hear about what tweaks we have to make to get the system to perform to our requirements. I will be posting more detailed configuration information both on our Solutions Pages and creating a configurator on our Products Pages. For now,  let me give you some system specs of what we are using and what the system can do. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate contacting me.

Bob Appleby

How to add the Print Directory feature for folders in Windows XP and in Windows Vista

Had a recent request from a customer to be able to print a directory listing and other than using screen capture  techniques or applications like Jing or Snagit from TechSmith. I did a brief search and found a Microsoft Tech Article describing a method of adding in a batch file that can be called to print directory listing from within Explorer.

The Intro to this paper describes the process as: This article describes how to add the Print Directory feature for folders in Windows XP and in Windows Vista. After you follow the steps that are described in the "More Information" section, you can right-click a folder and then click Print Directory Listing to print a directory listing of the contents of a folder.

You can find this article at: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/321379

Bob

Linksys has a new Power Line Ethernet System

I am ordering in  new product from Linksys to see how well it works. Let me describe the situation for you and see if it might sound familiar. I know that not many of you have setup a Media Center System in your home but we are using one to host up music and television to our kitchen under counter TV using a Linksys Media Center Extender. The problem is that it is connecting wirelessly and every time we turn on the microwave it disrupts the signal between the wireless router and the extender. The easy fix for this is to run a wire to the room and eventually that will probably be what I’ll do, but I don’t crawl through tight spaces as well as I used to so it isn’t that easy of a project.

So… Out comes Google Search and I begin to look into what is available in today’s technology using Ethernet connectivity through your household power grid. Linksys has several products that fit into this category but the ones I am particularly interested in are the new Power Line Series 300 products. These devices turn your existing electrical wiring into a digital network instantly. The PLE300 and PLS300 will dish out speeds up to a staggering 200mbps which is ideal for supporting HD content video.

The PLE300 is a single connection device for extending your network into those hard to reach areas and the PLS300 provides a 4-port switch to allow you to connect multiple devices to this box. The concept is great, next week I will report on how well it works. Wish me luck!

Bob

November 15 Scott’s beautiful Creation

We recently had the opportunity to build a system for one of our customers that gave us carte blanche on putting it together. The basics, a beautiful Samsung 26 inch screen, a quad-core Extreme processor, and Vista Ultimate tops the list. The only thing that we probably should have done was moved the customer to 64-bit and run up the memory. We were a little worried about driver availability so we hesitated on that one. Scott is going to put together a complete write up on this one on his site and I will update the pointers when he finishes. Scott’s site is: http://cid-c1df53b40a2f504d.spaces.live.com/?mkt=en-US&partner=Live.Spaces.

We put together a little movie on this as well that I will push up to the network when I get a chance as well.

Paperport – How to scan multipage documents

There are a lot of different products out there to help you manage your documents, and Paperport is one of the packages that have been out there for quite a while and is maturing quite well. I recently had a customer ask me how to scan multi-page documents and make sure that your pages stay in order. Here is a quick video showing you how to do it with Paperport 11 professional.

See video here.