Add all this to a massive backlog of gadget experiences that I’ve had over the last year and I truly hope to find time for this website again.

I’d tell you to stay tuned, but the last 3 posts have said the same thing…so I guess I’ll just have to actually write something this time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to fix all these broken links…

Loving how fast this new server is and I should be able to make it do a lot more.

Fun stuff to come!

It has been very grueling, but we’re making great headway and just started airing weekdays at 6pm ET/PT then replaying at midnight. You can see full episodes at this link.

On the SageTV front, I have been working a little on Meekell. I’ve added a bunch of animations and fixed some bugs. I’m planning on making a release sometime before the end of the year with reworked music and photos sections that should take advantage of the new 6.4 features.

With tech, I have my eye on Canon’s new HD camcorder the HF11. With SageTV’s support for AVCHD on the extender it should be an easy sell. With that purchase I also plan to pick up a Drobo to keep the video safe, then hopefully a new Mac Pro to really get into selling my photography as stock.

There is a lot of stuff on the horizon, so don’t forget about me! I’m still here.

The problem is, I’m trying to merge my older GMail-based login with an OpenID login that Zooomr has migrated to and instead of combining them, it created a second account. Now I’m stuck having to send myself temporary passwords every single day.

I’ve tried their feedback email with no response now after over a week. I’d really like to get things together so I can write a good review when they release Mark III next month, so can someone get on this please? Thank you.

Update 2-11-07: Wow, that’s service! I was helped both the top guys at Zooomr, and we concluded that it was entirely my fault. The solution was quite simple, and I’m embarrassed to say that I managed to merge my Zooomr account quite a while ago with an alternate openID – one different than I’ve been using for a fair amount of time now.

So anyways, problem fixed, and I am really impressed with the great service I received. Seriously, how many companies have their CEO and Founder/Lead Developer helping out customers? Thanks guys. I really appreciate it.

Glass Man Hosted on Zooomr

Check it out, Zooomr is launching v2.0 next week so it’s a great time to give things over there a try.

“Ante Up” – hosted on Zooomr

Go to a conference lately? Any conference, tech or otherwise, and you’re likely to walk away with some incarnation of a memory stick with some vendor’s sales pitch on it. They’re passed around like candy, pretty much every chip company makes one – they’re everywhere. But to be honest, I didn’t really keep one until recently because I really couldn’t find a use for them.

Sure they’re good for holding documents, but my computer does that. If you work on your own desktop every day, your thumb drive begins to collect a lot of dust because it’s tough to remember to plug the thing in periodically to synchronize it. Honestly, I just had a hard time justifying the cost. Tough to justify free? No – the space. In order to have the opportunity to use it, you have to carry the thing around with you all the time, and I carry enough crap I barely use, I didn’t need anything new to pack in my pockets.

But after I was forced to purchase a large thumb drive to save my documents from a crapped out Windows installation, I was stuck with a 1gb drive and no way to return it. I set out on a quest to find alternative uses for the thing to see if I could find a reason not to sell it on ebay. I’ve succeeded.

I’m going to briefly go over what I’ve stuffed into my thumb drive along with a description of how I use it and why. If you have any questions or would like more details, please let me know in the comments. Some of these programs will eventually get their own article because they’re so complex but this should get most of you started.

The Obvious – Backing Up

SyncBack is a little freeware program I use that allows me to backup a number of different folders. I use it to copy most of my ‘My Documents’ and my Outlook database files. What makes this program so powerful is it’s ability to backup only selected sub-directories, and do two-way synchronization. This way, I don’t have to backup my entire Music and Videos folders which would throw me WAY over my 1GB limit before I even got started.

Thumb drives are inherently in-secure. After you backup all your files to it, what if it falls into the wrong hands, like a competitor? All your documents have now been compromised. Enter: TrueCrypt. This is a free open-source program that instantly gives you NSA-grade encryption. The program works by creating an encrypted volume on your drive. This can be either a separate partition, or simply a file that is mounted with TrueCrypt.

I don’t put all my files in such a volume because my files aren’t particularly critical. BUT, I have scanned in critical documents such as my and my wife’s passports, our birth certificates along with a couple of other irreplaceable documents and a list of our bank accounts. This way, I have them available in case of a fire, or if we get robbed while on vacation.

The last pretty obvious thing I keep on the drive is what I call my ‘Family Emergency Kit’. This is basically a collection of program installs which include:

• Firefox-always the evangelist
• Ad-aware SE-#1 support call problem.
• AVG Free-#2 support call problem.
• Hamachi-to add them to a secure network for future remote troubleshooting.
• Ultra-VNC-allows easy-secure remote troubleshooting for future problems.
• Trillian
• TrueCrypt
• SyncBack
• Java VM installer – more on this later.

These are all great to have around in case something comes up and I need to take care of a problem and I don’t happen to have my Tablet around.

The Not-So-Obvious – Portable Apps

Now that you’ve backed-up, secured your important files and collected some useful programs to give to your friends/family, it’s time to set things up so you can plug-in to any public computer and use the things you want to use. The big portable apps I recommend are:

• Firefox
• Filezilla
• Trillian Anywhere (or Portable Gaim)
• Open Office
• Pstart

The portable version of Firefox is great because with some work, you can set things up so you don’t leave a trace on the host computer. Everything from cookies to the cache and history can be saved to the thumb drive, so you can browse confident that your confidentiality is secure. There’s an extension called ‘Bookmarks Synchronizer‘ that allows you to upload your bookmarks to an FTP server automatically so you can keep the portable version up-to-date with any number of other installations, so you’re never without your favorite sites.

I like having Filezilla with me because of this website. I never know when I might have to upload or update something, so it’s great to avoid putting my FTP info in someone’s FTP client or even worse, being without an FTP client entirely.

Trillian is nice to have simply because of the immediacy of instant messaging if you need a quick answer.

Open Office is absolutely awesome, and the main reason I recommended having an installation file for Java around because it’s required to run. This open-source office suite can create and open files that are completely compatible with Microsoft’s Office programs, so if you need to use a computer that is stuck without Office, you can still get some work done in a pinch.

An added bonus to this portable version of Open Office is that you can simply drag it to a person’s computer and give them the programs. My father-in-law recently got a new computer, and couldn’t justify spending an extra couple hundred dollars on Office because he’s retired, so I just dragged the Open Office folder off my thumb drive and registered it. Easy as pie, and it saved him a bunch of money.

Finally, to organize all these programs, I recommend Pstart. This is a tiny program that acts as a portable ‘Start’ menu for all the apps you’ve installed on your thumb drive. I have even created an autorun file on the drive to launch Pstart when it is inserted into a computer so all my programs are right there in the task bar.

The “Are you kidding me?” – Bootable OS

I’m still working on a good way to do this, but with some work, you can setup a bootable partition on your thumb drive and install a fully functional version of Windows using BartPE. (You could alternatively install a number of Linux variants if you prefer. I have tried Puppy OS, and really like it.) This would be particularly helpful in the case of a corrupted registry or crashed hard drive. It would allow you to potentially save critical files you forgot to backup in section #1.

Conclusion

Now you have to make sure you actually use it. I went to a hardware store and found a great key chain attachment that allows me to quickly detach the drive when I need it. This way I have it wherever I go, just in case there’s a computer emergency or I need to do some work at a moment’s notice.

This article is far from a complete look at everything you can put on a thumb drive, but I hope it makes a couple of people think about that dusty little thumb drive in their drawer. If you’re interested in finding more portable programs you can find a bunch of free ones at PortableApps.com.

Photographs have become somewhat disposable. We make sure to take them at big events, and because every picture we take is essentially free, we’re taking more pictures than ever – but without a good way to organize this HUGE collection of photographs, why are we taking them at all?

After I had my first digital camera for a year, I had amassed over 1,000 photographs. I threw them in a folder on my computer. Sometimes I uploaded some to a photo service like Shutterfly, but most the time they just sat there on my computer. Perturbed, I went out and found Adobe Photoshop Album. There are a number of alternatives, but I have yet to find a better organization system than the one Adobe has created. I should mention up front that Adobe’s brilliant solution is offered for free.

This article will not be a complete exploration of all the features the program offers but rather an overview of how it can breathe new life into your photo collection by making thousands of pictures more manageable.

Getting Started

Getting photos into the program is extremely easy, and you have a number of different angles of attack for initially getting your pictures in and for upkeep after you’ve gotten things setup. The best way to start is to ‘File->Get Photos…->From Files and Folders…’. Then all you have to do is select your main photo folder, check ‘Get Photos from Subfolders’ then click ‘Get Photos’. A couple of seconds later (or hours depending on how large your collection is and how slow your computer is) your collection is displayed in thumbnail form for you to start organizing.

The heart of Photoshop Album’s power lies in it’s tagging system. I’ve created a number of sub-categories in my catalogue, but the main categories are People, Places, Events and Other. The basic idea is to create a tag for everything you want to be able to keep track of. I create a new tag for all my friends and family, any holiday or special event (like weddings), every city I’ve taken a picture in, and finally a couple of miscellaneous types of pictures that don’t fall into any other category (like portraits, macro photography, blog pictures etc).

Once a tag is created, all you have to do is drag it to a photograph, and it is applied. At first it takes a lot of determination to bring a large collection up to speed. Correctly tagging 1,000 photographs takes a significant amount of time, but taking making your pictures more accessible is the reason you’re reading this article, right? This is where a Tablet PC really makes life easy, because it is so natural to use a pen to select and apply tags to photographs.

Unfortunately there aren’t any tablet enhancements built-into Photoshop Album, and actually the TIP doesn’t even popup and portrait mode slightly cuts off the tag scroll bar on my X41T’s XGA screen because the program doesn’t scale well to a 786 pixel horizontal resolution (it was obviously designed with a 800 pixel minimum horizontal resolution in mind). Even with those limitations, I still find tagging with my tablet extremely natural and quick (once your tags are created of course).

After your collection has been completely tagged, how is your life easier? Well, let’s say you want to print out a picture for a frame you just got and you know you want to put a picture of you and your significant other while on a vacation in Tahiti. Well, just check the box next to those three tags and you are presented with all the photographs with those three tags attached. Now you can easily pick the best shot for that frame.

But now that you have your picture, you realize that your printer is not up to snuff and you want to get it professionally printed. Rather than having to searching through the hard drive for the picture file you’ve chosen, so you can upload it – just select it and select ‘Print->Order Prints…’ and Photoshop Album will automatically upload the appropriate file to Kodak EasyShare for you and present you with the order screen in a browser so you can quickly and easily get your frame filled.

Upkeep – adding new photos

Once your collection and tagging database are up to speed, keeping things up-to-date are extremely straight forward. Adobe includes a utility that launches automatically when a digital camera is connected or a memory card is inserted that can copy all the pictures to a directory of your choice and delete them after they’re on your system.

There’s also an easy one-click function that launches your scanner driver to bring those shoeboxes full of your old fashioned paper pictures directly into the program.

Other Great Features

Photoshop Album (PSA) has a lot to offer in addition to allowing you simple access to any photo you want. Photos are for sharing, and sharing with PSA is as easy as selecting the pictures you want to offer and clicking ’share’. If mass-sharing isn’t your thing, you can also easily link up with your email program and send them in the same why directly to someone’s inbox.

PSA also allows you to select your photos and burn them to a CD for archival, because nothing’s worse than losing precious memories in a hard drive crash.

The slideshow feature is cool, but the duration between frame changes is too long for my taste and it isn’t configurable. It’s functional and it works great, and even includes the ability to flag the current picture for printing after the show is over, but it just stays on each picture too long to stay interesting for me.

Rounding out the rest of the major features are simple uploading and creation of Greeting Cards, Calendars and Photostamps so your picture can be on a postage stamp. All the features are just as easy as selecting the pictures you want and hitting ‘OK’.

It should also be noted that the program supports some major video formats as well as pictures. So if you find yourself using the video function on your digicam a lot, Photoshop Album also can tag those just as easily as your pictures, so you’re totally covered.

Frustrations and Conclusion

I only have a couple of hang-ups with this program. The first will only come into play if you like to edit your photos more than occasionally. There is no ‘edit with…’ function to send a file to another program to work on it. This really frustrates me sometimes because I tend to tweak nearly every picture I take. Older versions of PSA did have this ability, but apparently they decided that it wasn’t a feature people used, and removed it. Nice Adobe, very nice…

Another frustration is that there’s no ability to write the tag data to the image files themselves. JPGs can have metadata attached in the form of EXIF data. Think of it like the ID3 tags on all your MP3s that tell your audio player what album the song is from and who the artist is. Most cameras automatically write information like shutter speed, apeture, date etc, but EXIF also has fields for tag information. This is significant because otherwise there’s no easy way to take the hours you’ve spent organizing your pictures elsewhere. Flickr, for instance, has the ability to automatically generate tags based on EXIF data in pictures. My last frustration is similar in that there’s no ability to add services to the program, so if you prefer Shutterfly over Kodak.com you can’t easily add a module to upload pictures.

The $99 upgrade to Photoshop Essentials that Adobe offers resolves both these shortcomings. Do I recommend it? No. I haven’t come across any other programs that I might want to migrate to yet, and it hasn’t been a huge deal to find pictures in explorer and open them in Photoshop. I would however really like Adobe to consider supporting these two functions so that I can feel a little more secure with the 10+ hours I’ve surely spent organizing my photographs with their programs.

These few problems aside, Photoshop Album is still a great program, especially considering it’s price point: $0. So check it out, and make use of all those digital pictures laying around your hard drive.

Go to the Adobe Photoshop Album Download page.

RSS is a technology many sites now use (including this one) that basically equates to a news wire. Think of it as their own personal broadcast station that constantly loops the most recent items from that site. Now, just like you need a radio to listen to AM stations, you need something called an aggregator to sort out these feeds to view them and also alert you when something new is added.

So now you’re thinking, “Well that sounds great, Vince! Where do I start?” Well, there are a LOT of different aggregators out there, probably hundreds, and they vary quite widely in their use-ability and compatibility. I have tried a number of different approaches but I think I’ve finally found my RSS nirvana, and I would like to share it with you all.

First thing’s first: If you haven’t already, you really owe it to yourself to switch from Mircrosoft’s Internet Explorer to Firefox (or from Safari to Firefox, Safari is so S L O W). I truly believe that it offers a much faster, safer and more powerful web experience. IE is such a huge hacking target these days that I just don’t feel comfortable running it, and I highly recommend Firefox to all my friends and family, so now I’m recommending it to you because it’s also integral to reading RSS very efficiently.

Download Firefox by clicking the graphic below, install it then come back here and continue on to the next step. You might want to bookmark this article because you are going to have to restart your browser a couple of times before you’re all set.

Welcome back. I hope you’ve enjoyed installing Firefox and all your wonderful bookmarks have been translated nicely. Now it’s time to sign up for a great web-based service called Bloglines. This is my new favorite RSS aggregator for a lot of reasons which I’ll outline as I go, but a quick rundown of the major reasons for recommending it:

1. Free
2. Platform independent
3. Easy to use

So go to Bloglines.com and sign up for a free account. Once you’re looking at your main Bloglines page, make a bookmark for it and put it somewhere easy to find – this will be the only bookmark you’ll have to click instead of the 50 sites you visit daily. I’ll be right here waiting.

[GN1]

Now comes the best part of all, bringing it all together. You have Firefox, and you have Bloglines, now you get to use a great extension called LiveLines. Extensions are little add-ons for the Firefox browser that add new functionality to make your life easier. Don’t be discouraged, this part looks fairly involved written out, but it really is quite easy once you go through it. Find the install link and click it. Firefox should pop-up a bar at the top of your browser like this:

I hope this makes your life a little easier. Let me know if you run into any issues or have any questions. I’m going to do a brief review of how to use Bloglines soon, because there are a lot of really cool features hidden in there. This article should get your started though – Good luck!

It seems that a lot of people within the tablet community are frustrated because they’ve realized that they’re not using their tablets as much as they’d like to because they aren’t taking them everywhere they might need them. The general consensus is that a smaller device would be more likely to make the trip, therefore giving them more use and more productivity. As a general rule this makes sense to me, but I still have one major issue with the concept – a UMPC still can’t fit in your pocket. (I have partially been corrected once, though I also consider it somewhat of a joke.)I just can’t see myself whipping one of those things out at a moment’s notice, and unless you’re a European Carry-All owner, I can’t imagine this would go many more places than a slightly larger, more functional tablet.

As I’ve posted in the past, my primary computing device is a Lenovo X41 Tablet and I recently added a PPC-6700 Windows Mobile 5 phone. I just can’t see a UMPC replacing either of these devices for me. It’s not going to replace my X41 because I wouldn’t be able to touch-type on it, and Bluetooth keyboards can be forgotten. They also don’t stand a change against my PPC-6700 due to it’s large size and no phone component.

Really, the only ultra-small device that I’d consider is the cPC from DualCor. This device reminds me a lot of a Sony U70 with a phone built in. This device, still has the size problem but at least it could replace my PPC-6700 as my PDA/Phone and it would make quick notes really easy with full XP Tablet and OneNote.

After really evaluating how I use my devices my ideal gadget would be my PPC-6700 with a 20gb hard drive and automatic OneNote sync with my Tablet. I rarely find myself places needing to jot down more than a minor note, so the thumb-board on the PPC-6700 is perfect, and it also has voice recording, so with OneNote 2007 and it’s audio transcribing features, I’ll be covered, and any serious computing could be done with my X41 Tablet. I just am not that reliant on full versions of word/acrobat/excel/etc. that I really need a full PC all the time.

I guess I just feel these devices fall in no-mans-land. Too big to replace a phone or PDA and too small to be a serious laptop replacement. Be serious for a second and imagine looking at a 7″ screen for more than a couple of minutes at a time and imagine if you could get any work done without a headache.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think the UMPC/Origami devices are WAY cool – I just don’t see how they can fill any gaps for me. My only guess as to the target demographic is someone who has a desktop pc and a normal phone. Then, these could be slipped into a briefcase very easily and toted around instead of a legal pad, then synchronized with the desktop when needed.

The only other two uses I can think of are more hobby-type activites:

1. A really cool, easy to install CarPC.
2. Awesome remote for home automation.

Time will tell, but I think the MOTR guys had it right when they talked about these being more of a catalyst to make people aware of the way small computing devices can change the way they work.