Entries by Bob Appleby (1518)

Saturday
Oct112008

New Windows Live Features!

If you are trying to keep up with the cloud computing onslaught, Microsoft has just release a new product updates that enhance your web interaction dramatically. If you are a media producer, photos, video, or written content, then you will love some of the new interaction within Microsoft’s Live programs. The new download is available for updating your current applications at: http://download.live.com/. I had originally heard about this new update on Windows Weekly, and finally this morning I decided to load it up and give it a little whirl.2008-10-11_0754

They've added some functions for photos and movies in photo gallery and moviemaker. This new moviemaker program is not as extensive as the version that comes with Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate, but the one feature that I do like is its ability to post directly to Microsoft MSN’s Soapbox site. When you tell it to publish all of the information that you need to enter to publish it is presented for you to fill out in a nice dialog box and it very quickly and easily converts in uploads your video content to the site. Once it is there it is very easy to attach the video to your blog and voila! you have your presentation ready and available for all of your readers. Believe me, this is much simpler than the convoluted process you had to go through before. It also appears that if you are using Windows Live Writer, and you use the insert video function, this will also allow you to post the video up to Soapbox or YouTube. You can also connect directly to either your YouTube or Soapbox account to connect videos that you have already uploaded to the site's.

I use Windows Live Writer for creating and posting all of my blog entries no matter which site I'm currently posting to. We have added quite a few new features including an edit, preview, source tabs at the bottom of the screen too quickly change your view of the blog you are currently editing. You can turn on word count so that you can get a handle on how verbose you are as you are writing. There are quite a few more features included in the options tool that allows you to control your experience with the application as well.

There is a new toolbar add-on into Internet Explorer that gives you direct access to your Windows Live applications. This gives you direct access to your mail photos and calendar sites as well as quick search, mapping and translation buttons. There are new versions of Messenger and Mail which are quite interesting as well if you use these programs. It's worth a look, and these programs are all free. Can't beat the price!

Saturday
Oct042008

Intel Project Submission

October 04

Intel Project Submission

IMG_2569 Well, we had a busy evening on Thursday and Friday. I helped Scott, Ed and Chris put together video submissions for an Intel contest to show innovative ways of using Intel products by system builders. Scott used an Atom Board in his project. He installed all of his components into a model of the Millennium Falcon. He rigged up the hard drive LEDs so that they flash when the hard drive is being accessed. The left-hand side gunnery bay/observation deck is used as a docking area for the wireless mouse.The large antenna on the top deck is actually a wireless network adapter. The right side is where all of the motherboard connections are.

IMG_2537

Ed's creation to the left, beautiful work of art that he created in his woodworking shop.  The top is a sheet of tempered glass so you can look into the system and see the different computer components that he used in the system.  He designed the system as a media center server that is being used for all his digital media functions in the family room.  He is running Microsoft's Media Center and is using the system as a DVR as well.  IMG_2584Looking at the front left you will see an area that houses a disk array that is used for both his programs and storing all of his digital data. The right front side has several components for controlling fan speeds and reporting on different conditions in the box. It also provides different connections for connecting different kinds of devices to the unit. Listen to his video for the full description.

Chris has a unique system as well. The Trogdor the Terminator is Chris's idea of the ultimate game machine.  He has lots of bright lights that will dazzle you when you are looking at the machine.  He had a friend who paints cars, custom paint the outside of the case, he has a side panel etched with a wonderful design. But the truly remarkable addition to his work of art is the addition of a fully functional Atari game machine in the top area of the case. The Atari cartridges are inserted into the top of the case and all of the game connections are located on the front panel during. Be sure to listen to Chris's video to get a full insight into all of the things he has done to his box.

It is great to see the ingenuity of our technicians and their craftsmanship to put together some very unique systems. I wish them all luck with their entries in Intel's builder's contest.

Monday
Sep222008

Other Interesting Hobbies...

IMG_2073Kathy and I visited Kecksburg this weekend for their fireman's festival. This is the third annual fireman's festival incorporating a car show and Kecksburg's  number one attraction: The UFO. The fire department had the typical skill and food booths that most fire departments have as well as some booths showing off local vendor's crafts. There was a native American booth (Teepee) with some "Natives" pounding on drums, chanting and dancing, a leather working booth and my brother Ed Appleby and John Stein were there with their club to demonstrate their skill with blacksmithing. They had an area setup above the fire hall with several different crafts being shown including woodworking, rope making and Ed and John were pounding away on metal making all sorts of useful items. My niece, Patricia was also there but I didn't get to see her demonstrate her skill. There was hardly enough room with Ed and John to do their work. I took some pictures of John putting together a flag holder and Ed making a candle stick holder as well. Kathy came away with some booty for their stash and bell from the leather maker as well. She loves to put these on the door handles.

According to an article in Pittsburgh Live this is the first year that the UFO angle is being incorporated with the festival. An interesting cover-up story that has some strange turns. There have been documentaries on this incident on the Sci-Fi Channel, Unsolved Mysteries and soon on the History Channel. The Crash occurred on December 9th, 1965. A lot has been written about this incident but interesting enough I hadn't heard a thing about that I can remember until this past weekend when John told me they were going to have a booth here for the fireman's festival. If you are are interested in these kind of things be sure to take a brief tour of all the articles on the Internet describing the incident. This should get you started.

Saturday
Sep132008

Chrome! Do we need another Internet Browser?

2008-09-13_1140

Google is making a compelling reason for using yet another web browser.  After reading the comic book that is available that describes generally the reason that Google brought out a new browser product makes for a compelling reason to use their program.  The one negative that I've heard so far is that when you save your passwords that you are typing into the system for accessing secure areas, they can be easily viewed in the password area.  They are not encrypted, they're sitting there and standard text format for all the world to view who has access to your desktop system.

However, Google touts the new security functions that are built into the browser that disallows any cross talk of information between tabbed windows or from your local storage sources.  Each tabbed window is maintained as a separate thread which allows the processing of Web-based applications to occur simultaneously without interfering with processes occur in another tab.  You can easily detach a tab to separate a browser window from the current window that it resides in.  If you're doing a lot of research this makes it very easy to display information side by side from two separate tabs at the same time.

2008-09-13_1148The default home page shows the nine most visited websites with thumbnails, in nine most recent book marks, and a quick search far too quickly jump to information pages that you may be looking for.  It allows you to add a quick link bar at the top of the screen for those sites that you want to be able to quickly get to on a daily basis.

Another new feature that I like is the ability to create an application shortcut that you can store on your desktop, quick launch bar or  start menu. (see picture at right).  This will display a very clean interface with only the site application in the window making it appear as though it is a true program application.  This delivers greater screen real estate for that application and make it easier to work with the online application as well.  If you're an avid user of programs like Google's document applications like Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Gmail etc..., You may make great use of this feature.

As in most applications there are many different features that can be accessed through easy to learn keyboard shortcuts.  Be sure to check these out. If you plan use this application it will help you to become more efficient with it.  The address bar that sits atop the normal Google Chrome window simplifies your Internet experience by doubling as a search box.  To open a new tab click on the plus icon next to the last open tab. You can reorder your tabs by clicking and dragging them to a new position and as I have mentioned above, you can't drag that tab completely out of the current window and create a new window for that tab where you drag a drop that tab. Because the tab windows are running as separate threads you have complete crash protection between tabbed window sites. To browse the web without storing a record of the session you can open a window in incognito mode by clicking on the page menu and choosing new incognito window. A new window will open that won't save and information from the Internet session. For more feature information go to Google Chrome's Feature Page.  If you want to download go to Google Chrome's Download Page.

Look for updates as we push this new program to it's limits.

Wednesday
Sep102008

250GB! Come on now Comcast! You had better rethink this!

Comcast is planning on instituting a 250GB limit to the amount of data users can send and receive beginning October 1st. I have received my email from them so we know this is what they are planning to do. Why do I think this is a problem? Let me show you an example of a heavy internet user, me, and how I compare to their model of an average user which they say never even comes close to 10% of the 250GB limit! Really?

Your Monthly Allowance:

 

250GB

Let's start with my new hobby that I have embraced so grandly. I have gotten a new digital SLR camera that takes pictures at a 10 megapixel resolution. Currently I am only storing in JPEG format but I will be collecting the images in raw soon and this number will increase dramatically. I am taking about 500 pictures per week and storing to my network drive. These images are automatically being transferred for backup to my Amazon S3 off site storage account. This backup is using bandwidth. Average picture size is 2.5mb x 500 x 4 weeks per month.

2.5*500*4=5,000

245GB

Now I am also taking about 1/4 of those pictures and posting them to a gallery account on line so that would use: 2.5 x 125 x 4

2.5*125*4=1,250

243.75

Still have lots of bandwidth. Now, about once a month I am taking some video which probably averages about 2gb per month throughout the year on average. December, April, May and June seems to be the heaviest months. On these months I will take about an hour's worth of video which is equivalent to 5gb. Again, I am backing this up to Amazon S3 and posting most of this to my galleries. Since we are talking about worse case scenarios, this would be about 10gb of data being posted

10GB

233.75

I have started watching a lot of my favorite television shows on HULU because it is simpler and these presentations have fewer and shorter commercial breaks. A typical 1 hour show (40-48 minutes real time) is using about 250mb per show. Let's say that I am watching 5 of these per week. (so what happens in a family of four, with kids that watch 3 hours of TV per day, 7 days per week? 3*7*250*30=157,500. There's a chunk!)

250*5*4=5,000

Or for a typical family that accesses their entertainment around 150GB

83.75

Most other browsing, email and even remote access to work probably wouldn't amount to much. But there are some people using the system rather heavily that I wouldn't call abusive that could come very close to Comcast's cap. Add things like movie downloads, High Definition Movies can be 8GB or more per movie, streaming music from online radio stations, music and podcast downloads from music sources like iTunes, Amazon, Audible and Microsoft Marketplace. The Internet is becoming a big source for our daily entertainment and even though Comcast doesn't think this cap can be reached easily in a true digitally oriented home it can be pretty easy to come close to that cap every month.

Here's the icing on the cake! Comcast is not even going to give you a method of seeing where you are on your usage cap! They leave that up to you. However, if you exceed it they will call you up and tell you that you have exceeded it and if you exceed it again you will be cut off for a year. If this is the only service available to you then this is plain unacceptable! I know that when I signed up for service Comcast was touting unlimited usage. Where has that gone?

Saturday
Sep062008

I Can't work this way!

September 26

I Can't work this way!

I heard imagea scream from the adjoining office. What is that. I can't work with this in the way!

The image I have inserted at the right shows Jude's frustration with Microsoft's need to hold your hand in sometimes the most annoying ways. While the Paste Options Button can be helpful at times to control the format of the information that you are pasting, it can seem to get in your way when you are trying to see the underlying cells. If you want to turn off the Paste and/or Insert Options Button features it is very easy.

imageClick on the Office Button, then click on EXCEL OPTIONS button. Pick ADVANCED and then scroll down until you see the CUT, COPY and PASTE section. You will see three check box options. The first two when checked will display the options button you see to the right when you copy and paste. To turn it off, you will need to uncheck these boxes. Be sure to click on the OK button to save your changes.

To turn this option back on all you have to do is go back into the advanced options and recheck those options.

Here's a quick video  to show you to do it.

Friday
Sep052008

Power Tip: Launch Apps Quickly!

One of the things I like about Vista is the search function that allows you to quickly find an application that you can launch by quickly typing in a few characters found in the applications name. This works real well from the search function. You also have the ability to launch the RUN command dialog by holding down the Windows Key and pressing "R". Type in your command to launch and Voila. up pops your program if you typed it in correctly. In fact, you can drill down through your directories very quickly by typing in your starting point and let Vista prompt you for the directories that are on your machine. I put together a quick How to Series Video that you can see the Windows Key + Search function in operation.

Sunday
Aug172008

Google's Picasa Application

I was very much impressed in the enhancements to the Google's Picasa program which I had to go back and review again for the article that I just finished for the Laurel Mountain Post. I reinstalled it on my Vista Desktop at home and it automatically found all the images I had on the local machine. I then redirected it to the Network Storage Drive I have setup and Bingo! it found all of those pictures for me as well. The Picasa interface is simple and easy to use and they have added quite a few enhancements that allow you to edit your images, post them to Google's Picasa site, create a self playing CD with the Picasa software on it to pass along your pictures to friends and family and to create a movie/slide show as well.

You need two things to get started. First and Internet account, and second, a Google account. With Google everything centers around having a Google Email account so if you don't have one go ahead and set one up. It is free so even if you decide not to use if for your general email, you can use it for all the other Google Apps that require know who you are. Click here to setup your own account. Once you have established your account go to Picasa's site to download the application.

imageAs you can see in the picture on the right the program interface is simple and straight forward. The program once it installs will automatically search your local storage drives for pictures and will set them up in folders. The first time you send your pictures to the web you will be asked for you associated GMail information and once you enter that everything flows from there. If you have a lot of pictures and you want to use this space as a backup for you files you will want to upgrade your storage capacity. For $20 per year Google will give you 10Gbytes storage that is shared between your email, Picasa and Google docs locations. If you plan to be real active in all of these three sites and you have more than 10Gbytes of photos and videos you can go to the next level. The only problem that I see here is that you are given around 6GB by GMail and 1GB by Picasso for free anyway and the $20 is just giving 3GB to be shared between applications. If you are going to buy the extra space you may want to consider starting out at the 40GB level.

imagePicasa's import function seems to be slow if you have movies on your camera. It appears to read the file before it will give you the thumbnails of the contents of the the device for import selection and since movies are typically very large compared with snapshots the process takes a long time. Since the program has to read the entire contents of your memory cartridge before you begin to pick and choose what to import this takes time as well. Once it is up you can preview and choose the images you want to bring in. Using the Shift or Ctrl Key you can pick and choose which pictures you want to import. A button on the bottom begins the import process.  You get a dialog box that allows you to enter the directory to store the images, Meta Data for Date, Location and Description and the ability to delete the pictures off of the card when you are importing.

Once you have the images on your system, you will have many options to choose from to work and view your images. You can pick and choose a selection from same or different folders to produce a slide show, push the images to your Internet Picasa Storage Area or publish a GIFT CD to give out to friends and family. You can place a star on photos to select them as favorites and they will automatically be placed in a star folder as well that you can show in a slide show or produce a CD. If you right mouse click on a photo you have many options that you apply to picture very quickly, including, moving to a new folder, publishing to your Website, making it a screen saver, rotating the image and even deleting it from your system if you are getting rid of the "BAD ONES".

I have put together a little video overview of the image manipulation functions that you can access here: Picasa Video Overview

Saturday
Jul052008

Since I seem to be on the topic of backup... Let's take a look at Windows Live Mesh

imageWindows Live Mesh gives you the ability to store up to 5GB for free on a centralized storage area on the Internet. Once you setup your account you don't have to load any software to be able to access your data from any machine. All you need is a browser and an Internet connection.

Windows Live Mesh is still in beta but it seems to working pretty well. It will interesting to see where Microsoft takes this capability. The basic concept is the ability to load a small application on your computer, and link it to your Live Mesh account. Anything that you drag into the folders of the account gets shared to all of the systems that are part of your Mesh Network. This allows you to synchronize information with your business workstation with your home workstation without having to drag the files back and forth or emailing them to different email accounts.

Just install the live mesh software on each device.  Then add folders to your mesh.  Your forceful than be automatically synchronized and always available for all the systems you have set up on the mesh.  You'll also get access to the machine remotely and init programs on that machine the matter where you are.

It is all so simple to share files and photos with friends and family and colleagues.  Simply invite them to a folder.  Everyone has kept up to date because files can be synchronized automatically with all of your devices in all of their devices. To take a tour of this product click here. Enjoy!

Monday
Jun302008

Don't try plugging in your camera's memory card with the camera on!

322659029_2008-06-29_flowers_around_our_house_007How stupid can I be. You'd think that I would know better, but obviously when you are in a hurry you sometimes do some very stupid things. Here's a lesson for all of you so that you don't have to be the one to have it happen to you. When inserting a memory card into a device consider turning it off so it doesn't get the jolt from the power supply in the unit you are plugging it into. I had videos of the bike race that we have going on here in PA with the bikers riding across Pennsylvania. A nice overview of this event can be found here. I wish I could have saved the pictures I took, they were pretty neat but things happen. So be careful because sometimes there is no recovery. Anyway, I was so angry with myself, I reformatted the card, luckily I didn't blow it up completely, and took some pic's around the yard which you can see here. Enjoy .

Sunday
Jun222008

Woops! Found a little problem with Carbonite...

We did a new installation on my machine with some of Adobe's graphics programs and we found out that Carbonate Backup caused a problem with installing CS3 on my notebook. It was becoming a problem because I planned on working with a lot of the applications this next week while I am off. Yes I am strange and find a lot of comfort in working on projects involving different programs and applications. I am truly looking forward to spending some time learning some new applications. Anyway, I started talking about how Carbonite caused a problem installing Adobe's CS2 Suite applications on my notebook. Once we uninstalled Carbonite the programs loaded without a problem. I haven't tried reinstalling the Carbonite program to see if the problem persisted yet. More later as we work with this.

Sunday
Jun222008

Google Docs - A nice alternative word processing, spreadsheet and presentation application

imageI was a bit skeptical about Google's Google Doc application, but once I began playing with it I found that most of the general functions that I use can be found in these applications. I did bump into their limitations but for something available online in the cloud, these applications can fill a nice niche. Here is quick look at the Google Document Management Screen: Video Overview of the Google Document Mangement Screen

In the document management screen (overview of the file functions) you have the ability to download your document in multiple formats including a zipped HTML file, open document, PDF, RTF, Text, and Word format. Managed sharing allows you to set up individuals as collaborators or viewers of your documents and two email those individuals the site location of the document that you are sharing.

The publish command allows you to use this application to store documents that you can later push to your blog site. So you can work on a document and when you have it ready for publication you can then push is quickly and easily to your site. It works great with Google's Blogger and it has connections to other popular sites like Wordpress and LiveJournal. I tried unsuccessfully, albeit with out much real effort to push this up to Microsoft's blog program (which is what I use for my active sites) I will update this as I play with it a little more.

image Other document management functions that you can apply from this screen includes Renaming the document, Deleting, Create Folders to manage your documents, and create spreadsheets, word processing documents and presentation files. The presentation program very simple, shareable slides that can be controlled from one machine to multiple connected viewing systems. If you were on the conference call, or speaking with the client, you could direct them very quickly to the document by sending them an e-mail pointer to the presentation document, and you would be able to control the speed of the slide presentation from your screen on theirs.  The one limitation that I found that bothered me, was that I was unable to share are a video from a site other than YouTube. Of course this would be the first connection that they would create since both are properties of Google. Even this has a limitation though, the video image control box will be shown on the slide presentation that you cannot controlled remotely.  This means it you can start the video you will have to have the individuals on the other side click on the play button themselves.  I inserted some links onto the pages and with that I was able to then give the users on the other side of the presentation the ability to jump to another video presentation URL.  So the real limitation here is the inability to control the whole presentation yourself, but, for a free application this is pretty nice.

image Some other document control features that you have in this application include: uploading a PowerPoint presentation that would then be converted to this format, you can import individual slides from a PowerPoint file but individual animations are not imported. You can print the presentation, either to paper or to a PDF file, with or without speaker notes, and with a choice of how many slides per page. You can also save the document as a PDF document slide presentation the you can shipped out as well. The Publish button allows you to create a mini presentation module that you can insert into your site as a video module. My Live Writer Program didn't like it though.

I created a document that shows the basic formatting that you can do with a page and describes what you can expect and what the limitations are. You can see this more clearly if you jump to this video. You can see this document as a PDF file by clicking on this link.

I'll talk about the spreadsheet application as I have a chance to spend more time with it.

Sunday
Jun222008

Intel Modular Server Seminar

This week we held a little introductory seminar using our new Intel Modular Server that we will be putting in place for our own network system. We are really looking forward to having this in place and the response from those IT professionals that attended the seminar solidified our view of just how great this product really is. Ken Lindsay, one of senior network technicians did the presentation and did a wonderful job showing the resiliency of the system. Beyond the redundancy of the  power supplies, motherboard and Raid drive arrays, all of the components interact to take advantage of the modular control interface. Unbelievable control to switch functions within the unit. We demonstrated losing a drive, rebuilding the array, switching your server to a spare server module and the ease of moving functions from one server module to another. If you lose a server module you can be up and running with your spare in less than 10 minutes. Down time is minimized by an unbelievably short time frame.

We also showed the management module's logging features to track faults and the potential growth path within the product as well. Be sure to contact to register for the next scheduled presentation. 724-838-7526 or email to sales@paconnect.com

Thursday
Jun122008

3PM Uggg! On our way to Baltimore.

Nick and I got an early morning start yesterday to attend a Northern Video Show in Baltimore. We took the Route 30 Route to Breezewood, only encountered one deer that we saw, and followed the TOMTOM pretty accurately right into the Show Site north of Baltimore in 3.5 hour quick romp. The traffic was not bad and we ended up being the first to sign in and were able to have our discussion on the pros and cons of each service plan that we are considering for our service support software. I think that we have a clear winner but that is not what I plan on talking about right now.

I attended the refresher course on IP Networking while Nick attended the Avermedia and Azelea Networks presentations. the IP refresh was a good index-logo+Inc拷貝.jpgoverview, didn't contain too much that I didn't already know, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded what is what and how things work. Will see if it gets me to a point where I might crack one of my many books on IP Technology to expand on it again. Nick said that the Avermedia presentation was interesting but he didn't get too much more out of it except contact information for their field support people which can always be useful. They gave us some hints on how to get the PTZ Sony IP camera integrated with their software that we are going to try and that would be really a good outcome of this show. Nick was really impressed with Azelea's Mesh Technology product. This is a product that lends itself for wiring campus wide areas to the Internet. The types of organizations that this works well for include municipalities for giving their police and emergency personnel remote access back into the city systems, setting up general campus or municipal access to the Internet, (they have done large areas in China for the Olympics, construction sites for local area communication, wireless broadband, video surveillance and other applications. In smaller setups like hotels this would give property-wide access to Internet access as well as employee communication within the property area as well. Some neat potential there.

We had broke for lunch and some face time with the vendors in their booths. I attended the ACTI presentation while Nick went to the ARM Electronics presentation. Again the biggest benefit was the contacts, we now have access to the main ARM support guy and I got together with the primary support tech with ACTI. The ACTI presentation discussed megapixel IP Camera technology and the different technologies used for encoding the video and the benefits and problems with the use of each one. Very good discussion of where the digital video technology is right now and where it is going in the near future. It gave me some insights into what to look for, how to size systems correctly and what we need to control when it comes to client expectations.

Nick's Arm presentation led him into some discussion about the problems we have had with night vision video capturing and we now have some solution paths to follow. Another product that I found at the Vendor Booths was from a company called Videolarm who claim to be the first manufacturer of video housings in the market. They have a fully adjustable Infrared Illuminator that might help us out in some of these low light areas. Distance adjustable from 100-660 feet, five year warranty and an adjustable beam angle of 30, 40 and 60 degrees. There other products are also highly ruggedized as well.

D-Link was also highly promoted by Northern especially in the IP video slide presentation. I have brought back some of their information as well. For the most part there wasn't too much being shown by the vendors when it came to lenses and such except by ARM. I think Nick got a good bit of insight with that. All in all this was a good conference to attend that gave us support for what we already know, reinforced that we are on the right track and gave us the contact that will help us on into the future.

Thursday
Jun052008

ZDNet article on the memory usage by different Browser Programs

Browser memory usage - the good, the bad, and the ugly!See the article here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2024

Interesting to see how during the day your system can be bogged down more and more by simply using your browser. Think about your system having only 512mb of memory or less and you are using IE7. You can easily see what the consequences are.

Friday
May162008

SmugMug (still loving it)

Picture2I 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

Wednesday
May142008

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

Thursday
May082008

SmugMug Photo Site

SmugMug Logo 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?

2008-05-08_2212First, 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 Tour3-products2are 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

Friday
May022008

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.

Friday
Apr252008

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.

LuluIt'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/