Friday, December 29, 2006

Go back up your Gmail


There are reports all over the web about users losing all of the mail in their inbox, which is sort of scary considering how much a lot of us rely on Gmail as a sole mail source.  My suggestion: pick an e-mail client that can use POP, enable POP in Gmail, download all of your e-mail, back up the download however you back things up.  You could probably set up some sort of way to do this daily, weekly, monthly, etc.



Note that Google's PR department is stating that this only affected 60 accounts, but what if one of those accounts had been yours? 


Thursday, December 21, 2006

Askville


Amazon sent me an invitation to their new service called Askville this morning.  Essentially Askville is a social question and answer space that uses questions as the basis for social interaction and discussions.  I like that there are lots of people asking totally free-form questions and getting lots of answers -- I think I'd probably ask questions about good restaurants, places to stay, etc. when traveling to a city I was unfamiliar with just to see what locals or people that have been there before would say.



There is some system of points and levels and "quest coins," but I didn't spend much time reading about any of it -- you can find details here in the FAQ.  I have to guess that Amazon may use some of this content to link through to products that they are selling to provide even more valuable product information and insight.



Check it out.



Link  


Electric Orange


INGDirect just sent me an e-mail about a new paperless checking account that they are offering called "Electric Orange."  As with most of their offerings, Electric Orange offers some pretty aggressive interest rates:



  • 5.30% on every dollar for balances of $100,000 or more

  • 5.05% on balances between $50,000 and $100,000

  • 3.00% for balances up to $50,000



In addition to the aggressive interest rates, Electric Orange also offers free bill pay, free electronic checks (this is a paper-free check solution that sound pretty cool as it's conducted via e-mail and secure hyperlinks), and a debit MasterCard. and free ATM access at 32,000 locations in the US.  In doing a little more digging about the ATMs, it appears that ING will use the Allpoint ATM Network of surcharge-free ATMs.  I searched my zip code with Allpoint and it appears that most of the machines are in Targets, Rite Aids, Costcos, liquor stores,  bars, and other random places -- this is what would make me think hard about opening an account like this as it's hard for me to envision myself doing my ATM banking at Target.



Electric Orange is currently only available to existing Orange customers, so you'll need to sign up for a Savings account in order to be able to enroll in Electric Orange.



Link 


Denver blizzard update


Thanks to everyone for the e-mails and comments.  Below are some pictures from this morning.



Backyard at 8AM:



Backyard 8AM



My truck in the driveway last night around 10PM -- this was after having shoveled the driveway 3 times:



Truck in driveway



Here's our daughter in the driveway standing next to the mountain of snow as we were shoveling this morning:



Child in driveway



There's still about 2 or 3 feet of snow out in the street in front of our house, so I'm not necessarily planning on going anywhere, though it is fun to play with the truck in the snow.  A few of the neighbors have been out in their snow shoes and have told me that the main artery streets are relatively clear, but no one is out driving on them.  At some point I may have to make tracks in the snow so that others in the neighborhood can use them to get out as our residential streets are considered tertiary and are therefor the last streets that the county plows. 


Wednesday, December 20, 2006

WriteToMyBlog responds quickly


Within a few hours of my original post , WriteToMyBlog has updated their site to reflect the changes in the "new" Blogger implementation and I am happy to report that I am having no problems using their service to post.



 Not only did WriteToMyBlog leave a comment on the original post, but they also sent me a personal e-mail addressing my issue.



Bravo! 



By the way, it appears that WirteToMyBlog supports my cateogrizing blog posts, which is a new feature of the "new" Blogger. 


2006 Denver Blizzard


Got some notes about the blizzard, so here are some pictures:



 My backyard at 4:30PM:



4:30PM



Backyard at 8:00PM:



 8:00PM



Basically my chocolate lab and rotweiller are in the snow up to their shoulders. 


New Blogger transition

Ok, so I changed from the "old" version of Blogger to the "new" version of Blogger that used to be the "beta" version of Blogger, but now is not longer in beta. Transfer took quite some time, which I assume has to do with the large number of posts archived in this blog. Here are some other strange things that happened:
  • A bunch of comments that I had already moderated needed to be moderated again -- 28 comments to be exact.
  • Some random posts got syndicated via RSS, so I apologize if you got some posts in your reader from a few months or even years ago.
  • WriteToMyBlog stopped working completely regardless of whether I choose "Blogger" or "Blogger Beta." I'm hoping this is some sort of Google API issue and that WriteToMyBlog will resolve it shortly
I'll keep you posted on other things that I notice, but the fact that I have to use the Blogger editor to publish posts and that the "new" version still doesn't have Technorati tagging support is probably the most annoying.

Major winter storm in Denver

An absolutely massive winter storm has been dumping one inch or more per hour since early this morning in the Denver Metro area -- shoveling out the driveway yields very large mounds of snow on both sides of the driveway and I suppose less snow to shovel tomorrow. To be honest the driveway's been shoveled 3 times today and about 2-3 hours after shoveling, with the exception of the ever-growing mounds of snow, it's impossible to tell that it was done.

I just heard that DIA is not planning on starting normal flight operations until tomorrow night, so I really feel for all of the people stuck at the airport especially this close to the holidays.

The bright side of all this is that with this amount of snow and the forecasted cold temperatures through next week, it will be a white Christmas.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Full instructions for Gmail Mail Fetcher


Mail Fetcher is the name of the POP3 access that Google is adding to Gmail accounts and full instructions on how to use it are now available in Gmail help.



I'm just waiting for it to be enabled on my account.



Link 


Monday, December 18, 2006

Google Co-op


Someone sent my a note about Google Co-op, which allows you to create custom search engines and share revenues generated by custom searches.



I had to take a look at some of the featured examples and specifically at the blogger examples to see how people are using this -- looks pretty interesting, but I don't have enough time right this second to see if it's something that I can use.



Check it out if you're interested.



Link 


Google Apps for Your Domain solutions with Google Notifier and Google Mobile


I have some information about Google Apps for Your Domain ("Google AFYD") that I figured other might find useful:



  1. Google Notifier .  Although it appears that it might not support it, if you enter your e-mail address from Google AFYD (i.e., "username@googleAFYDdomain.com") as your "username" in the Notifier application, Notifier will provide you e-mail and calendar notifications as it does for normal Gmail accounts.  The nice part about using notifier is the closer to Outlook experience of notifications for new e-mails and pop-up notifications for Calendar events.

  2. Google (Gmail) Mobile.  Google Mobile supports Google AFYD in much the same way as described above -- enter your e-mail address from Google AFYD as the "username" and Google Mobile works as it does for any other Gmail account.  I have to say that with my Cingular 2125, the Google Mobile experience is less than pleasant and I'm simply going to stick accessing Gmail via my mobile browser using the http://gmail.com address.


I'll continue to post as I learn more about utilizing Google AFYD.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Google domain registration and Apps for Your Domain tested


So I went ahead and registered RossHollman.com with Google to try out not only their domain registration service, but also Google Apps for Your Domain ("Google AFYD") -- note that I wrote about this service just a few days ago.



Registration took literally around 3 minutes: I signed in with my Google Account, checked the availability of the domain, proceeded through the registration process, and, of course, used Google Checkout to pay for the registration.  Following payment, I clicked the link that had me set up an administrative account and immediately took me to the Google AFYD Dashboard -- Start Page was running immediately, E-mail took about 45 minutes to configure itself, Chat was running immediately, and Calendar was running immediately; Domain Web Pages required my interaction in order to start running.



While waiting for other services to start up, I went to RossHollman.com, which was already active and resolving with DNS -- the page redirected to the default Start Page as I had not yet configured Domain Web Pages.    So, the next thing I did was configure the Domain Start Pages, starting out with the www.rosshollman.com main/index page; I very simply created the main page on the site with Google Page Creator in about 5 minutes.



I left to run some errands, and when I came back, the E-mail  service was running, so I checked out e-mail administration, and was pleasantly surprised to find that for my $10 per year, Google allowed me to create up to 200 unique user accounts (note that you can create user accounts using a spreadsheet to lay out usernames and default passwords, exporting the spreadsheet as a CSV file, and uploading the file to the Google AFYD dashboard) -- quick math tells me that if Gmail offers around 2.5GB of free storage for each e-mail account, that Google AFYD is giving me around 500GB of storage.



It did take me a little while to figure out what some of the Google AFYD services were, but I've got it figured out now, so here's a quick list of services with analogs to common Microsoft products and services:



  • E-mail -- web-based e-mail that is similar to Outlook and the Exchange server that supports Outlook.  Contact sharing is available between users, which is similar to the Outlook Global Address list function.  Calendaring is easily accessible from the e-mail window, though not as directly integrated as Outlook; one nice feature is that the e-mail service is intelligent enough to recognize calendar events within an e-mail and give you the option quickly click and add them to your calendar.  E-mail provided by Google AFYD still runs contextual advertising, which is something not seen in current iterations of Outlook.

  • Start Page -- a landing page for all domain users, which makes it like a very basic version of SharePoint.  The administrator can lock certain areas of the page in order to provide domain-specific data to users while other areas are user-editable.  Presumably once Google launches a storage solution there will be some sort of document sharing interface, but that does not currently exist.

  • Chat -- Google's direct competitor to MSN Messenger with tight integration into the e-mail interface.  Administrators have the ability to restrict chat to other users int he domain or to allow users to chat with others outside the domain, control that is available through Exchange.

  • Calendar -- web-based calendar that is similar to the Calendar included in Outlook and Exchange.  Users can keep multiple versions of calendars with different sharing permissions for different users inside and outside the domain.  All of the standard features of Google Calendar are included int he version implemented by Google AFYD, including SMS reminders for appointments.

  • Domain Web Pages -- primarily for administrators, this is a web-based WYSIWYG web page creator that works in a similar fashion to Microsoft Front Page.



It is important to note that individual domain users can gain access to all Google products such as Docs and Spreadsheets and Google Reader, but there are not currently any sort of administrative controls for these products.



For a startup that's bootstrapping, a small business that just getting off the ground, or even a large family that wants to set up a common domain with individual e-mail addresses (think "hollmanclan.com" with each family member receiving their own address), it's hard to imagine being able to get so much for so little.



Happy to answer any further questions about the service if anyone has any.



Link -- Google AFYD  


Friday, December 15, 2006

Gmail is apparently adding the ability to check other accounts


Only because I just finished the previous post hoping for it, TechCrunch is reporting that Gmail is in the process of activating the ability to check other e-mail accounts using POP.  Here's the screen grab from TechCrunch:



Get mail from other accounts - Gmail



I truly cannot wait until this is activated on all accounts -- once it is, I'll probably go set up my master Gmail account on my personal domain, using Google Apps for Your Domain to do the registration and provide the domain-specific e-mail services. 



Link  


Gmail account consolidation


I've finally tired of checking multiple Gmail accounts, so I sat down to figure out how to get all of my mail coming to a single, master Gmail address -- there are multiple parts to this tutorial, so I apologize for the length.



FIRST -- set up forwarding in the account you want to stop logging into:



  • Log into the Gmail account you want to stop logging into

  • Click "Settings" in the upper right

  • Click "Forwarding and Pop"

  • Click the radio button next to "Forward a copy of incoming mail to . . ."

  • Enter the address that you want the mail to be sent to in the box that says "email address"

  • From the drop-down, decide what you want done with the forwarded mail -- in my case, I selected "delete Gmail's copy" so that no new mail will be added to the account


  • Decide if you want to do the Optional Pop part below, if not, click "Save Changes"




OPTIONAL POP (totally optional) -- set up POP access to get any saved mail out of the account you no longer want to log into and into the single account you plan on using



  • Click the radio button next to "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)"


  • Select from the drop-down what you want done with mail that is accessed via POP -- in my case I selected "delete Gmail's copy" so that once all of the old mail is extracted via POP, it is deleted from the account I'm no longer logging in to

  • Click "Save Changes"



SECOND (optional) -- configure your master Gmail account to allow you to respond to e-mails with the address from the account you will no longer log into.  If you have no desire to continue to use the address of the account you are no longer logging into in your replies, but still want mail forwarded from said account, you can skip this step.



  • Log in to the master Gmail account

  • Click "Settings" in the upper right

  • Click "Accounts"

  • Click "Add Another E-Mail Address" -- this will trigger a pop-up window


  • Enter your name as you wish it to be seen by recipients and the e-mail address of the account you are no longer logging into

  • Click "Next Step" -- this will trigger a verification number e-mail to be sent to the e-mail address of the account you are no longer logging in to and change the pop-up screen to an entry screen for the verification number


  • Leave the pop-up screen open and click "Inbox" in the Gmail screen -- if you have configured forwarding correctly, then the confirmation e-mail should be in your Inbox

  • Click the e-mail from Gmail to open it

  • Select the verification number and copy it

  • Go back to the pop-up window and paste the verification number into the "Verification Number" field

  • Click "Next Step" -- the pop-up window will close and you will be left at the Inbox view

  • Click "Settings"

  • Click "Accounts" -- if everything went through correctly, then you will now see another e-mail address listed from the account you are no longer logging into

  • I suggest checking the radio button next to "Reply from the same address the message was sent to.", which will cause Gmail to automatically use the address that the e-mail was sent to when replying.



OPTIONAL OLD E-MAIL IMPORT (totally optional continuation of the Optional POP above) -- this will allow you to pull out all the e-mail saved in the account that you no longer wish to log into and load them into your master Gmail account.  Note that many of these instructions are duplicated from my original post on how to get e-mail out of Ureach and into Gmail.  Further note that these instructions are for Windows.  I would not suggest attempting this process on a dial-up connection and have only tested on broadband.



  •  Download gExodus.  Once done, you will have a zip file — be sure to use the WinZip Extract
    button instead of dragging and dropping the files out of the archive. 
    The first time I installed, I did a drag and drop and the program could
    not find the Python dll file.  Once you have extracted to whatever
    folder you have chosen, go ahead and double-click the gExodus exe file
    to make sure it works.  Keep gExodus minimized throughout this process
    until I call for it in the instructions.

  • Download and install Thunderbird
    Once installation is done, launch Thunderbird and cancel out of the
    wizards.  Unless you are going to continue to use Thunderbird, there is
    no reason to waste time filling in any information.  Keep Thunderbird
    minimized throughout this process until I call for it in the
    instructions.

  • Maximize Thunderbird  and follow the Google Instructions to configure it for the account that you no longer want to log into.

  • Once Thunderbird is configured, click "Get Mail" -- if everything is configured  correctly, Thunderbird will download all of the mail from the account you no longer want to log in to

  • The most important thing to do is to located where the Thunderbird
    mail files are on your computer.  In order to do this, you must have
    invisible files and folders activated in your Windows view options and
    you should have the hidden file extension option de-selected (Google
    this if you don’t know what I’m talk about).  I highly suggest locating
    the folder before using gExodus, but it depends on your level of
    comfort.  The files are located here:

    • C:\Documents and Settings\xxxx\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxx.default\Mail\Local Folders\Outlook Express Mail.sbd

    • Note that the red letters represent items that will be unique to your system.

    • Note
      that there will be a regular version of a file and a .msf version of
      the same file in the folder (i.e., “Inbox” and “Inbox.msf”)



  • Maximize gExodus

  • Under “Account Setting” enter your master Gmail address

  • Under
    “Import From” either paste in the path from your Explorer window or
    click the “Browse” button and navigate to the file that you want to
    import.  Note that you should select the file that does not have the
    .msf extension (i.e., “Inbox”)

  • Under “Label”, you can add a
    label if you really want to, but read the example below the box — I did
    not use this when I did my imports.

  • Leave the “SMTP server” alone and click “Import into Gmail” -- Note that if you have a problem with the address that's in there, click the "MX lookup for Gmail" link jsut below the box and enter one of the results that comes up in the browser


  • The “Progress” box will let you know about any errors, when everything is complete, etc.

  • gExodus essentially forwards all of the e-mails in the file you
    have decided to import into your Gmail account — while the To and From
    information is retained, the date information that shows up in Gmail
    will be the date and time the you run gExodus; there is no way that I
    could find to fix this issue.

  • Every e-mail shows up in Gmail as
    an unread e-mail, so you will need to do a select all on every page and
    mark every e-mail as read.



All of the processes and steps listed on this page can be used for forwarding multiple Gmail addresses to a single, master Gmail account; at the time of writing this post, I have 2 Gmail addresses forwarding and incorporated into a single, master account.



It is my hope and I have heard rumors that Gmail is adding POP access support to Gmail accounts so that the vast majority of whole Thunderbird and gExodus process described above becomes obsolete.



As usual, use all the stuff in this post at your own risk and your mileage may vary -- I'm always happy to help with questions.



Good luck! 


Google Apps for Your Domain now offers domain registration for $10 for 1 year


If you are looking at registering a domain, you may want to take a look at using Google to do it.  Simply go to the Google Apps for Your Domain link below, click the "Sign In" link, either set up a Google Account or log in with your existing account, and check domain availability.  Once you register you domain, Google automatically configures their Google Apps such as Gmail and Page Creator to work on your domain for no additional charge.



This is very cool if you wanted to register, say, your name as a domain from a personal perspective or if you were a small business and wanted to set up a quick website and office software system for very little cost.



Link  


Anyone have any Venice Project tokens?


If you have one and are willing to share, I'd love to check it out -- just shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment.



Thanks. 


Here's a surprise: hackers have already "cracked" Vista


While not really available to consumers until the end of January 2007, hackers have already released a solution that allows you to bypass Vista's authentication system.  Essentially the solution consists of a virtual machine that emulates the working of an authentication server for the business and enterprise editions of Vista.   Lots more details in the link below.



Link  


Thursday, December 14, 2006

WriteToMyBlog Blogger display tweaks


I apologize that some of my posts this week had some extra paragraph breaks -- I'm pretty sure this only affects those of you reading via the web and not those reading via syndication.  In any event, when using WriteToMyBlog with Blogger, be sure to log in to your Blogger account, select your blog, click the "Settings" tab, click the "Formatting" tab, scroll down to the bottom, change "Convert Line Breaks" to "No", click "Save Settings", and then click "Republish Index".  If you do not follow the aforementioned instructions, Blogger will add a second carriage return to each paragraph break, which makes the posts hard to read.



Link -- WriteToMyBlog



Link -- Blogger 


Talkster is live


Ok, I'm a little behind on this announcement, but because Talkster was willing to let me participate in the private beta, I wanted to be sure to mention that the Talkster service is now available to the public.  There are lots of improvements since the last time I reviewed the service, not the least of which is the user interface, which now makes it much easier to interact with the site.



It you are looking for a VOIM service, Talkster is worth considering.



Link  


Wednesday, December 13, 2006

MacBook Pro switch


I recently started using a MacBook Pro as my primary computer.  One of the biggest attractions was the fact that I could not only run OSX, but could also run Windows through a variety of different methods.



The MacBook Pro that I am using is the 15" with 2GB of RAM, 120GB hard drive, and all kinds of other nifty bells and whistles -- full specs here at the Apple store, just look at the middle model on the page.  In order to also run Windows, I am using Parallels rather than Apple's Boot Camp solution -- I like that Parallels gives me the ability to run Windows as an application, easily create multiple virtual machines, and does not require restart of the system to switch between OSX and Windows.



One of the interesting experiences in switching to a Macintosh full time is realizing how little I need to do with Windows -- 85-90% of the stuff that I do on my computer I do in OSX and most of it is either no different of a user experience than Windows or is a better user experience than Windows.  Certainly there are some applications that are not made for OSX, some sites (especially corporate intranets) that run more effectively with Internet Explorer on Windows, and some file types (i.e., Outlook PST files) that need to be used with Windows applications for a better user experience.  By the way, if you are looking to get PST files converted into a format that you can use with OSX, Aid4Mail seems like the best program out there for around $50, but note that it is a Windows application, so if you are leaving Windows for good and don't want to run Windows on your Mac, you should do the conversion of the PST files prior to switching.



Another interesting experience for me was realizing how many of the applications that I spend time with on a dialy basis are hosted applications and are, therefore, operating system independent.  If you aren't currently using a lot of hosted applications, you may want to do some Google searches about hosted alternatives to common applications -- in many cases, hosted solutions are cheaper or even free.



Getting Outlook contacts easily into the OSX Address Book challenged me for a little bit until I realized that I could simply install the Plaxo software for Address Book and sync everything together -- this process took less than 5 minutes to download the software and sync all of my contacts to Address Book.  Certainly there are other solutions to getting Outlook contacts into Address Book, but this seemed like the easiest solution. 



The built-in video camera on the MacBook makes me wonder why its' taken me so long to get into video conferencing -- if you know people with iSights and MacBooks, there is no reason not to use iChat for video conferencing because it's just too easy.



I'm sure that I will have more information on this and please feel free to ask any questions as I'm happy to share my experience.


Top 10 business books of 2006 from Amazon

Pretty cool list of the Top 10 Business Books of 2006 from Amazon.com -- don't mind the fact that the list appears on 800-CEO-READ.


Link

Monday, December 04, 2006

"It will be small as shit"

If you read my linkblog, you’ll see that I’ve linked to a bunch of posts about the iPod phone (read “iPhone”) rumors that were supposedly “confirmed” by Kevin Rose of Digg.  To his credit, Kevin has correctly “predicted” many Apple releases, so it would be silly to totally discount everything he has to say.

Thankfully Kevin has succinctly summed up the iPhone with the statement in the title of this post — I sure hope that he’s right so that I can figure out exactly what the statement means.

Link

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Is the PS3 the cheapest Blu-Ray disc player?

It seems that if you can find one of the 20gb PS3s for the retail price of $499, then you’re saving about $500 off the cost of Sony’s first stand alone Blu-Ray player and you get some bonus extras the the stand alone player just can’t give you.  Alternatively you could get the Samsung Blu-Ray player for $666.66 (strange number, huh?), which is only a little bit more than the PS3 20gb, but probably cheaper than you can get one for right now — at least it, unlike the Sony player is available for Amazon Prime.

It’s worth thinking about if you’re an early adopter . . . or you could just wait a few months until production ramps up and more movies are released at which point the market will be flush with PS3s and the stand alone players will likely be much less expensive.

Link

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Zeitgest

For those looking to compare and contrast top searches at Yahoo to those at Google, please visit Google Zeitgeist.  Note that the Zeitgeist for 2006 will not be available until, well, the end of 2006 — does that make you wonder why Yahoo can release theirs before the end of 2006?

Anyway, how many times did you search for “Britney Spears”?

Link

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Yahoo top searches of 2006

It launches at 9PM PST or 1 hour from the time of this post.

Check it out.

Link

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J K J J Shift+S S GS J J

For those of you that use Google Reader, the title of this post makes total sense to you; if you do not use Google Reader, feel free to skip this post or use it to convince you to start using Google Reader.  Below you will find a link to the Google Reader keyboard shortcuts, but the most common that I use are:

  • J — move down a post list
  • K — move up a post list
  • Shift+S — shares or unshares a post
  • S — stars a post
  • GS — goes to starred items

The biggest problem that I have these days is that Google Reader is the only “application” that uses these commands (to be fair, Gmail uses some similar commands for similar things) — I find myself trying to use J to scroll down various other websites and even to scroll through Word documents.

Link

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Frugal Cuisine

Frugal Cuisine is a blog that basically details recipes and tips for eating well while only spending $2–$3 per day on food.  Interesting stuff and some tasty looking recipes.

Link

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Cool gifts for guys

There are a lot of people out there that can’t come up with cool gifts for guys.  Luckily, Design*Sponge has a post that features a bunch of cool gifts for guys that range from the $20 range up to the several hundred dollar range.

Also check out the November archive for other gift guides that are not necessarily male-oriented.

Link

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