The Opera browser is yet another alternative to Inernet Explorer and its really good. For older computer with less processing power and ram, Opera is great. The only reason I don’t use it all the time is because I have many extensions in Firefox that I need to use.

Either way Opera does have this great feature that I wish Firefox had and that is a a rewind button.

The Left arrow is the regular back button, but the double left arrow is the rewind button and its great. Here is how it works.  The following is an exerp from the Opera website.

Specifically, what happens when you rewind is that you go back to one of these points in your history, whichever is latest:

*    The last page you visited on a server, if you have left the server
*    The first page you visited on a server

Suppose that you have a browsing history like the following:

1. www.opera.com
2. www.opera.com/about
3. www.opera.com/download
4. www.opera.com/mini
5. widgets.opera.com
6. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock42
7. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock43
8. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock44
9. mini.opera.com

Rewinding will then take you back through the URLs that are emphasized in the above list.

So why is this good? Because it saves you tons of clicks.   Say you go to google and  search for ‘computing tips’. You will get tons of sites. You click on first result and go to that website, call it example.com . The site is good and you visit 12 pages of its site. But you want to go back to google’s results to check out other sites.   With the  traditional back button you have to click back 12 times to get back to google, or with Firefox you can click drop down box and try and find google’s result page.   Those methods are fine , they are just too messy or waste time. With Opera’s rewind button you are back where you want to be with 2 clicks. The first click will take you back to the first page you visited on example.com then the next click your back to where you want to be. Google’s results page.  Then you can visit the next result.

I used Opera for bit at a time, but every time I use other browsers I find myself missing this feature. All browsers should definitely implement it.

What do you guys think? Should browsers implement it? If you have not tried it, download opera and use it for a week and see what happens.

The beauty of the Internet lies in communities and free public programs.  Not communities of people( well those are good and have their purpose) but communities of knowledge.  Every topic out there pretty much now has a page. If the topic is of vast interest it might even have a forum.  If the forum is established and popular you can find information going back years and years.  I will give one example of a great community.  Recently I came across a trojan called Virtumonde on a computer. Damn thing would not come out. Norton could not remove it. Spyware search and destroy could not destroy. Jeezzzz!. What could remove it? Well that is where this communities of knowledge come in.  Look into the right forums type of your problem and you will get plenty of information to lead you in the directions.  I got plenty of information and hopefully eventually to a solution that works for me.

So this communities of people sharing information exist all over the world.  If they have been around for a while they will have plenty of users and information you can acess and read.  There is pretty much a forum from everything from congressional bills to the color blue.

So free programs. Yes. They exist. There are tons out there and some really great ones. They can possibly take a bit longer to learn then the main stream programs but hey if you have the time why not. And on ocassions this free programs work even better then commercial ones. Take my example. NOrton could not fix the  trojan Virtumonde but guess what a free program did. How about that?

So to conclude the post. Whatever you are looking for…. Sometimes it takes a while to reach the right site, but once you do you have reached a wealth of information that can keep you reading for as long as you want.:)

p.s. Google, Yahoo, and MSN don’t always have this great sites at the top of the searches; look past those few pages of search results.

Like everything in life, if you have two of something the easier your life will be.  Say you have two cars.  You wake up and one does not start, well no biggie you have another car and take the other to work( The chances of the other one not starting are very slim). You will worry about the other one later.  :). There is no difference in the computing world.

Say Firefox goes bad temporarily and you don’t want to re-boot and re-starting Firefox process is not working. Well no worries, just start up a copy of Opera, or Safari. I actually have all major browsers installed.  Firefox is my main one, and occasionally it does go bad, thus I use the other ones.  Of course, none of other have my bookmarks, or saved passwords so if you need to do other things more then just browsing you will be stuck.

But its a safe bet to have two of each thing installed. I pretty much have two of everything. I have open office installed and office 2007. And  yes office 2007 has stopped working on a couple of times and when in a hurry and need to get something typed up fast open office write does the job excellently.  I don’t stop my progress if a program acts up, I just another one.;)

Having two things installed is also a good way of diagnosing if something is not working. Say you are browsing and a page doesn’t work. You can’t tell if the web page server is down or if its your browser not working. Well just open up another browser and if you get the same error, well most then likely its the web page server that is not working… Of course this is assuming your internet connection is working( you can see other sites, besides this particular one).

So I am the occasional typist. I pop open Microsoft Word 2007 when I need to type something fast and need to correct it.  The grammar check and spell check is pretty darn good…. no complaints there. But today I needed a little something more involved. I was created a 3-4 page report, with nested list number list and bullet list.  I tried for about 30 minutes a simple example to get everything to align correctly. But I simply couldn’t.   Its probably due to the fact that I have not studied the new interface, but well to me it seems that it should be pretty intuitive.  The goal was something like this.

1.0 Main

1.1 submain

*

*

2.0

What a pain, just to get the simple thing. I would click multi-list button and i would be the first item. If i gave it heading 1, the number would dissapear. For the sub items I tried looking for heading 2. But no where to be find. I didn’t want the identation for subitems… no where to be found(probably cuz i don’t know where to look)… i wasted too much time.. I admit I was doing it in word because the different styles look good, but i now I just wanted it to work. I gave up.

I soon pop up. Openoffice writer.  Quickly I had a multi-list. I quickly realized that the headings(heading1,heading2, etc) correspond to items on multist. So all I had to do was type something and give it heading 1 or heading 2 and it would automatically know what number to put beside it. also I found the ‘bullets  and numbering’ button and wow. Everything is there.  Level by level. You click on level one, you can adjust the numbering scheme, the indentation, everything .wow. Click on level two and do the same. I wanted level 1 and level 2 to look exactly the same, I just changed heading 2 to look like heading 1. What a freeze. Took me 15 minutes to get the hang out it.. And now I have a 4 page document looking good… and i just tested the table of contents feature… and wow. Automatically created it.

So Word is good… but when you on the run and need to create somethign fast with multilist… somethign simpler like Open office write could save tons of head aches and hassle.

A few days ago I received an invite from the team at www.getdropbox.com.  I had totally forgotten that a few months or weeks I signed up to be one of their beta testers. So the invite arrived. Of course I was totally no idea what exactly the software did so I again took at look at their video on their home page. And wow, did I get excited.  And that doesn’t happen to often.

I won’t explain the whole features since their video which is only a few minutes long does a great job explaining how drop box works.

The company plan on charging for their software, but right now you get 2.0 gigs of free space as a beta tester. The awesome thing about dropbox is that is works just like  plain folder except with cooler features.  To start off you download the software, then you have to link it to your account( you create a dropbox account).  When your dropbox account you can link computers to your account. The reason for linking seems to be the following. Your email and password for your account provide the necessary information to keep track of whatfiles you have in your dropbox folder, since there is also in online interface where you can acess files online.

The neat thing lies in the following. So your dropbox folder functions just like a folder. Its sorta like a shared folder. So say you have three computers. Laptop at home, desktop at home and work pc. All in different locations. With drop box you install the software and link the accounts. All three computers will have a folder called  My Dropbox inside My documents folder.  The awesomness lies in that when you put any file in any of the My Dropbox folder in any of the computers, those changes to that folder migrate to the other computers. So say in my home desktop computer I put 3 pictures. Those 3 pictures will magically appear in the My Dropbox folder of all the other computers. Is not that awesome. So its sorta like shared folder in a windows home or office network, but here you can be in different part of the world, no need to be in same physical network.  So that is only one the kool things about getdropbox.

Another extremely cool thing is the following.  Say I wanted to show someone a picture briefly. If I send them a picture of an attachment they will have record of it forever.  What if I just want them to see it for a second.  Well since the world wide web is ment to be public it is very hard to do that, but you can come close if the other person is not too computer savvy.  My Dropbox folder comes with a handy Public folder. You can put any thing inside this folder and anythign that you put inside this folder has a public url. So you can copy that url and send it to someone. When they are done with the link, just delete the file in the folder and that file, picture will no longer be visible.

Lastly, you can share folder with friends.  Say you have a folder of  picture you want to share with family member but not your friends. You can set to share certain folder by email invitation. So when your family members get their invite and create their account , right inside their drop box they will see that   folder you shared and none of your other drop box files. So now you can add pictures to that folder and whomever you shared it with, will view all changes.  Which is very vey neat.  This way you can share folder with diferent sets of friends.

I have a few invites… so if you want to give it a try send me a comment with your e-mail.

So a friend gave  me her old computer and says ‘ I can’t use it, it has a virus or something’.  Turns out it didn’t have a virus it had a huge problem with the hardrive.  The computer didn’t boot. I got a blue screen of death with error code 0×00000024. I did a quick search on the Microsoft site and quickly learned there was serious problems with the hardrive.   Basically there was something seriously wrong with the hardrive. I didn’t have the OS and my friend didn’t care what I put on it, as long her daughter could use it for teenage stuff.

Of course with all the buzz I immediately went to Ubuntu.  It was a wrong decision with a system with only 256 mgs of Ram.  It runs a 2.7 Ghz processor so I figured it would be ok. Not so.  It was way too slow, not that just that but I had to install extra software so that it would play youtube videos.  So ok,  Ubuntu also has a version for slower systems. I figured Xbuntu would be fine. Not so. It was still way too slow for a system that has a 2.7 Ghz processor.  Alright…. So on to some more choices. Due to time constraints burned Damn Small Linux  and installed.

Of course it ran super fast; extremely well but it was hard to configure the video resolution.  I got stuck with like 8 colors and small video resolution. Not good. A quick google search showed me configuration files. I could not find an easy control panel to fix this, so I figured for a teenager this would not be good.

So which linux distro to try next. Another quick Google for something like ‘full featured small distros’ had puppy Linux on the results.   I decided on Puppy lInux and bingo. Under 100 MB it installed fast and out of the box youtube worked.  Well I had to connect to network first, ( a one time setup) but it worked without a problem. The sound was not installed yet, but of course in the setup menu there was an entry to install sound. And there are install menus for most of the other important components of the computer like Video. A teenager would not be able to do it, but I can and it will be easier then trying to change settings by configuration files. Ran the wizard and within seconds had the sound. YAy! So sound works. Youtube works. What else will a teenage need? mmm I think that is pretty much it.  They might need instant messaging software, but that will come later… The essential are there.  Furthermore, the destkop is visually appealing and the speed is intoxicating as it should be. Kudos for Puppy Linux.

There is lots of hype out in the www about something called ajax. What exactly is it? Well according to wikipedia it basically “is a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications”. What does that mean? Well lets see. Say you took a piece of paper, a pencil, a pen and some white out and put them into a little package that you decided to call “Papete”. You took exiting items and packaged them together an called it something different. Ajax is sort of like that. It took existing technologies, javascript, xml and asynchronism and called it ajax.

So what is ajax and what does it do? Well going back to the fictional “Papete” example. Say you sent the package to your friend Bob. Bob will take your items and create a masterpiece of an illustration for your business, with out the use of anything else except your items. He will have pictures of your business, your logo and text describing what you do. Bob sends you his work by mail. So say he sends you his first draft and has a couple mistakes, you correct the errors and send him a letter saying where exactly he messed up. Bob of course has to start from scratch again with only the items in the “Papete” package. Of course this will take time. So on his second draft he has more mistakes, the process repeats itself until eventually its perfect. And the process could pretty much keep going even if its perfect but you want to keep changing things in the illustration over time. This process of sending Bob the changes and Bob redoing the changes from scratch of course is time consuming and not really idealo. What if there was a better method.

What if you could just send the changes to Bob, and he magically does the changes on the first draft of the illustration. No need for him to start from scratch or anything. Once he reads the changes he magically makes the paper change to have the new changes even if he is not physically present where the paper is. For example say the illustration needs to change the Business name from ‘Bu’ to ‘Bo’. Once Bob reads the changes  he magically somehow makes the illustration text read ‘Bo’ instead of ‘Bu’. So of course Bob has some really powerful powers if he can do this. This would saves tons of time and effort since all changes happen in that first draft.

Well what Bob does with his magic is pretty much what Ajax does for the internet. See every time you visit a page you are asking Bob(Your Browser) to send you a page. If you visit another page on the same site—nothing changes on the new page just the content) Bob sensd you the whole new page from scratch in a sense. So the browser is sorta stupid. It keeps re-drawing each illustration from scratch even thought there are only minor changes from one page of a site to another. So this is where the magic with ajax happens. Just as Bob was able to magically fix that element of part of the illustration that needed changing ajax does to web pages. Say you are viewing a gallery. Instead of asking your browser for a new page every time you want see the next picture you ask your browser to just change the picture element and nothing else. So instead of the browser fetching a new page each time( when nothing really changes between pages except the pic) with ajax the browse is able to just magically fetch the new picture and nothing else. So what is so special about this?

This means that just as Bob was able to save time by magically making changes, ajax allows web pages and web applications to saves tons of time by only changes parts of pages that need changing not the whole page.

Note:
This comparison between Bob and ajax is written for a quick explanation of ajax. For detailed information visit the wikipedia page found here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX

With so many free tools out in the internet ranging from free word processors to free media players, I knew that there was something out in the World Wide Web for backups. I did an extensive online search and narrowed by search to Mozy Online Backup. They have 2.0 gigs of free online storage and since well I only had 1.2 Gigs to backup that was perfect. I downloaded their software and in about 20 minutes had a fully automatic system backing up my documents folder. It’s been running for about 3 months and doing a great job. It runs by itself at nights every week or so and backups all my data.

Yesturday I got some updates for a site and could not find the folder where I kept all my information for the site. I could not find the ftp information nor the notes I keep on that site. I searched my desktop for about an hour thinking where did that folder go?. I did a windows search. Run google desktop search and nothing. Finally I figured, well maybe if I unnoticeably moved it or deleted the folder. My last resort was to look at my backup folders.

I went to a folder that is part of hiearchy of folders thats gets automatically saved by Mozy and right clicked for the windows context menu, and behold. There in front of my nose was the Mozy entry “Restore file in Folder”.

I clicked on it and to my amazement and joy found that folder that had misteriously dissapared. I restored the folder within 5 minutes had the folder back in my computer. How about that?

Mozy does offer a bigger backup size for a small fee. And I might have to use that once I accumulate more then 2.0 gigs, but for the meanwhile. Mozy Online Backup is awesome.

And trust me, every one needs a backup system. It doesn’t have to be an online system, but you do need one if you are in any type of business or if you are close the the information on your computer. It saved the day for me and I know this online backup system can potentially save the day for you. So give them a visit at Mozy Online Backup.

For a free service of backing up 2.0 gigs,It rocks!!!

OCR stands for optical character recognition. The basic idea being, say you found an old printed hard copy of an essay from high school. You scan it into your computer as an image. So just like any other picture you can see it, but what about if you actually wanted to go in there an edit sentences. What then? Well unless you a graphics master guru,( which will still take you hours and hours of hard work), you won’t get anywhere trying to edit it. Why? Because the computer views the scanned document just as an image. It is not editable text. That sort of text that you type when you create a text file or a Microsoft Word Document. You could retype everything, but of course that would take some time. So OCR is the process by which software looks at the pixels of the image and “attempts” its best to translate those symbols (characters) into editable text. That way you can edit the document just as if you had yourself typed it.

So that explains the process. Is there any free tools out there that do this. The answer is yes. But they are not very good. This article concludes pretty much what I concluded…

OCR software

So those are all  free OCR software or engines with the exception of one. There is plenty of good OCR software out there that you have to purchase. If you have a high end scanner, you probably already have a OCR engine that can convert a scanned document into editable text. Some common ones I have seen are Omnipage and ReadIris. Both very good at this.

Does any one have a good free one out there that they know of?

Email Marketing can be an inexpensive and effective tool for driving traffic to your website and/or brick and mortar business.  It can also turn off your customers and drive them away.  Here’s a few tips for getting the most from your email lists:

1. Building your list.  Make sure you have permission from your customers before sending emails.  Too many businesses buy lists only to have them end up in the Spam box.  You don’t want your reputation to be tarnished by being seen as a Spammer!  Always include an “opt-out” for any Emails you send.  Offer your customers an incentive in exchange for their Email addresses.
2. Ignoring Requests.  The importance of having an “opt-out” option on your Emails is worthless if you don’t update your database and honor those who wish to “unsubscribe.”  Your integrity and business image suffers as a result. 
3. Tracking Results.  Most Email programs available today allow you to track results within 24 to 48 hours.  It is important to evaluate the system before you sign up.  Does it allow you to track how many Emails were sent, successfully delivered and how many “click-thrus” resulted from the batch?  With all the options online today, it’s important to know what you’re buying.
4. Frequency.  It is vital that you stay in your customer’s mind, however Emailing too frequently can guarantee either being ignored or ending up in the spam box once again.  If you’re sending coupons or offering special sales, monthly Emails or newsletters are a good rule of thumb.
5. Purpose.  Before you design your Email, decide what action you want your customers to take.  Are you asking them to “click” to visit a website or to download a printable coupon?  Make sure that any links you send them to include links that can be tracked for reporting purposes. 

Incorporating these five tips before doing an Email Blast can make your campaign more successful resulting in more dollars in your business bank account!

Good luck and Happy Emailing!