Author Archive

7 more reasons to try out Google Apps for your business

Below you will find the seven secrets of Google Apps that
can save your business scads of time, money, and effort. If
you’re ready to try Google Apps follow this link.

Link

1. Eliminate email hassles instantly - 99.9% uptime
guarantees that you will always have access to e-mail and
no lost messages. Say goodbye to spam, viruses and
phishing attacks. Find out how to send and receive e-mail
from other e-mail addresses, all from your single Google
Apps account.

Create your one stop e-mail account.

Link

2. Reduce costs - Get enterprise class, worldwide access
infrastructure all for only $50 per user per year. No more
costly server hardware and systems administrators — it’s
all handled for you. Google Apps scales as your business
grows.

Get started in just three minutes.

Link

3. Instant collaboration - Have your whole team working on
the same document at the same time. Do you need to bring an
external consultant? Just add him or her to the list of
collaborators, and they can make changes as necessary.

Start collaborating now.

Link

4. A working history - In each Google document,
spreadsheet, or presentation all of your changes are
tracked so that it is easy to revisit a previous version.
Not only that, changes show which author made the change.
No more tracking of different versions with messy e-mail
attachments.

Sign up for Google Apps

Link

5. Instant backups - Google automatically backs up your
e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations as
you’re working on them. No need to worry about hitting the
save button to avoid losing all your work.

You’re ready to create more in less time.

Link

6. Hassle free software upgrades - You always receive the
latest version of Google Apps software. It’s as simple as
opening up a browser window. No more worrying about
operating system compatibility, hardware compatibility, or
paying for those pesky upgrades.

Get the latest Google Apps

Link

7. Work remotely - have your e-mail, documents,
spreadsheets, and presentations on your local computer for
those times when you’re traveling or away from the
Internet. Once you reconnect to the Internet your documents
will sync with Google and be backed up automatically.

Try Google Apps now.

Link

Avoiding spam

Change your email address instead of unsubscribing.

http://blog.otherinbox.com/2008/11/its-better-to-c.html

Google Mail reliability @yourdomain.com

Get Google’s extreme reliability (despite a few complaints to the contrary) and their excellent and always improving spam filter along with 7gb+ (at the time of this writing) of storage space FREE. You don’t even need to register the domain through Google, you can simply point a subdomain where they suggest and any email for your domain will get delivered to your Google Apps accounts. Additionally Google Apps provides collaboration tools, website hosting (intranet maybe?), instant messaging (corporate IM anyone?) and much more. I’ve already gotten Google Apps for a couple of my domains, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend you do the same. Link here.

BT keyboard “fix” for Maemo / N800

Change the repeat rate for a keyboard: create udev rule ‘KERNEL==”event[0-9]*”, SUBSYSTEMS==”bluetooth”, RUN+=”/usr/sbin/chroot /mnt/initfs evrepeat /dev/input/%k 5000 100″‘ and add “mount –bind /dev /mnt/initfs/dev” to startup script.

N800 + iGo + E51 = happy geek

Posting this from MaemoWordPy on my Nokia N800 typed on an iGo/Thinksmart Stowaway bluetooth keyboard using my Nokia E51’s GPRS/EDGE via bluetooth as a test of an option to update my blog more often.

The nice thing about the N800 is that for an ADHD person like me, the fact that the screen/window manager is optimized for one application up at a time means I have less distractions when working on something. On my tablet I tend to have a dozen windows with sometimes literally hundreds of tabs open and I often find myself opening a new window, sometimes in a new browser to follow another train of thought.

Hopefully if you are new to the blog you’ll find something useful, otherwise leave some comments and let me know if there is anything technology related you’d like to see some comments on, I play with anything and everything so there’s not much I don’t have an opinion about (or some information on).

Like a knife to the back or a bullet in your heart

ebay sniper

Recently I’ve noticed that eBay is rather (un)friendly to a lot of sellers. Not only is their fee structure constantly in flux, but they’ve taken to removing/demoting the listings of sellers that don’t maintain a certain volume/feedback ratio. I can understand a little bit how intervening on the behalf of the seller, but goddamn it all isn’t FREE trade all about making mistakes and learning from others? If they would fix the FEEDBACK system rather than shoring/shimming/propping it up with the blood and bones of smaller resellers that can’t recover from a couple negative feedback they would be a lot more friendly commerce place and people wouldn’t regard eBay with the fear and horror that many a small business and even some large PowerSellers can attest to.

Changing Dell service tags via USB Flash Drive (or CD)

“Tools” required:

1 formatted floppy disk

1 USB key or CD-R
1 hour of your time (maybe more, maybe less)

1 trial version of WinImage

1 copy of the DST (Dell Service Tag) utility from a friendly guy’s site

As a project for work my boss wanted me to find a way to set/reset service tags on a few of the (thousand+) Dell PCs the business owns. The main concern was that the motherboards had been replaced and by default come with a blank service tag, and since we use the service tag internally for both warranty tracking as well as asset tracking so having a motherboard that doesn’t have a tag proves difficult to manage and introduces overhead that the big bosses don’t like. Enter Google, I hunt around for a while but can’t really find anything concrete, most places assume that everything BUT the service tag can be changed, until I stumble upon a post in Dell’s own forums alleging a way to change the tags. I read through the post here, and followed the links but didn’t have a floppy handy and really didn’t want to make my fellow interns in other business units have to hunt up a floppy either, so I searched for a way to make the tool run from USB. Read the rest of this entry »

The wonders of social networking sites (and the dangers)

I’m not a fan of social networking. Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and these other sites generally annoy me more than they interest me, and for more reasons than I can list in a single post. The main issues I have with them are their blatant invasions of my privacy and their loose standards for what consists of “private” data, the recent Myspace picture fiasco is just one example of just how poorly all the users of Myspace, from 10-110 are protected from those who might want to prey upon them. That’s why I found it refreshing that a new site that doesn’t claim to be a social network, but an actual literal FRIENDS network has shown up, and they have gone out of their way to inform users that adding people that you don’t know to your list just because they have a cute picture on their profile is dangerous. So I present to you, iSwirl, the friends network for your phone.

Vista loses hibernate, how to get hibernate back on your Start menu

http://www.reviewingit.com/index.php/content/view/32/

According to this guy, its a simple command: in the Run dialog as administrator type “powercfg /hibernate on” and hit Enter. BAM!!! It’s back on the start menu.

Hallelujah, I fixed my black screen on resume from sleep by setting the ATI External Event monitor to manual in Services, but then I lost hibernate, this guy is my hero.

Still alive and kicking

Yeah, Grinder reminded me its been over a month since I last posted so I figured since I was killing time anyways I’d see about posting up a sweet software program I found today in my quest to get Remote Desktop working over SSH because my router decided to block the RDP port unexpected today. I found Bitvise’s Tunnelier and I’m not ashamed to say I’m going to buy a copy of the expanded version even though the free one has all the features I’d ever need. They make it so simple to get up and running that it almost makes me want to cry, especially since I’ve researched the “hard way” and had that running once or twice before. That just makes me appreciate the simple and straightforward interface they present all the more. The best part is previously I was using the remote desktop connection to connect to a PC that had an SSH client installed simply because I didn’t want to mess with the headache of reconfiguring a new one in Vista with who knows what kind of compatibility. Tunnelier installed and ran with no modifications and no issues whatsoever, kudos guys.