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Jul
31
Occasionally, everyone needs one…
Filed Under Doing | Comments Off
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I was Stumbling this evening and the FreeHugsCampaign.org site appeared. I’d kinda heard of this previously…and hey, it was mentioned on Oprah, so it must be important right?
Regardless. With a combination of online tools provided by Flickr and BigHugeLabs, I managed to create this lovely, inspirational image of one of my mini Daschunds, Heloise. Hug fodder anyone?
Technorati Tags: Dogs, Hugs, Heloise, BigHugeLabs, Cute, Puppy, Poster
Jul
30
Pownce just doesn’t do it for me
Filed Under Social Media | 6 Comments
Maybe I’m a doof, but Pownce just isn’t ringing my bell.
Sure, it’s a cool social media application. It allows file sharing, networking, link sharing, and event coordination, but it might be just too late for me.
I’ve already established a profile on Twitter and Jaiku. I marry them together through the magic of RSS and a handy little online application called TwitKu: I enter my ‘tweet’ once, in a single window, and it’s sent to both networks…a very sweet tweet 
Pownce doesn’t have anything like that. Pownce just doesn’t show me a stream of all my friends, unlike Twitter and Jaiku. Sure, I could take all my Pownce friends and manually add them to a Feedblendr (hey, where did that ‘e’ go?) feed, but every time I added a new Pownce friend, I’d have to update my Feedblendr feed. Too much work.
So, for now, my Pownce account is seeing little usage. I do have a few Pownce invites for anyone who wants to take it for a spin…but if you really want to partake in my ‘lifestream’, then check out my Twitter or my Jaiku feeds.
Jul
30
Linklist - July 30, 2007
Filed Under Social Media | Comments Off
- Nice social media primer and roundup of important social media sites — Beginners Guide to Social Media
- Chris Prillo on Social Networking — What is Social Networking?
Jul
29
Linklist - July 29, 2007
Filed Under Social Media | Comments Off
- It was the week for giving back:
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- 5 Power promoter tips for new media — FinancialAidPodcast.com (via Bryan Person)
- The gift of giving — Chris Garrett (chrisg.com)
Technorati Tags: links, social media, pr, communications, blogging, blog
Jul
27
Linklist - July 27, 2007
Filed Under In the life | Comments Off
- Add these to your web development toolkit — Two Tools for Polishing Your Web Pages
- Considering the business uses of Twitter? — A white paper by Jim Horton
- PC World’s July Anti-virus software roundup:
- Anti-virus software: Grisoft AVG 7.5 Anti-Virus Professional Edition7/16/2007
The least-expensive program we tested, AVG has average overall malware detection, the worst proactive protection, and a clunky interface. PC World.ca rating: 77, Good
Anti-virus software: Trend Micro AntiVirus plus AntiSpyware 2007
7/16/2007
Poor performance at detecting malicious software (overall and proactive) resulted in a bottom-of-the-barrel ranking. PCWorld.ca rating: 71, Good
Anti-virus software: Alwil Avast 4 Professional Edition
7/16/2007
This program offers decent overall malware detection, but poor proactive protection and an awkward design. It also lacks U.S. phone support. PC World.ca rating: 79, Good
Anti-virus software: Panda Antivirus 2007
7/12/2007
This well-priced option provides good proactive protection, average overall malware detection, and a poor disinfection rate. PCWorld.ca rating: 79, Good.
Anti-virus software: Eset NOD32
7/11/2007
NOD32 has the best proactive protection by far, but its overall malware detection is second-tier, and it has an overly technical interface. PCWorld.ca rating: 84, very good.
Anti-virus software: Norton AntiVirus 2007
7/10/2007
Symantec’s solid program wins top marks for antivirus detection and cleanup, but its renewal and support costs are high. PCWorld.ca rating: 84, Very Good
Anti-virus software: BitDefender Antivirus v10
7/10/2007
BitDefender has excellent malware detection and a good price, but it adds a noticeable (though not show-stopping) system slowdown. PCWorld.ca rating: 84, Very Good
Anti-virus software: Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0
7/9/2007
This effective but expensive program has solid malware detection and the fastest outbreak-response time among currently tested competitors. PCWorld.ca rating: 85, Very Good
Technorati Tags: Software, Anti-Virus, virus, Twitter, Links, Linklist, Web Development, Design
Jul
26
Linklist — July 26, 2007
Filed Under In the life | Comments Off
- Not your dad’s RayBans — The Aloha Experience - a customer service department that ‘gets it’.
- It’s Law. it’slaw. — slaw
- On loyalty and employment — Your Employer Owes You Nothing
- Seth on the next niche for workers — Community Organizer Jobs
- Wordpress geekout alert — WordPress: Dynamic Sub-Page Navigation
- Practising safe blogging at work — Five employee blogging guidelines just for you
Technorati Tags: Links, LinkList, Customer Service, Law, Employment, Job, Work, Working, Career, Wordpress, Script, Hack, Blogging, Blogging Policy
Jul
24
Listen to me. How to convert your blog post into a podcast.
Filed Under Blogging, Social Media | 9 Comments
Lately I’ve been exploring a few podcast and text-to-speech services. I’ve found an interesting combination of services that let me make my posts listen-able and downloadable — even set them up to be part of your regular podcast scrape.
This is a great way to review your favorite blogger, when you’re not able to have your computer with you (on the morning commute, bus, walking..etc), or you need to convert written posts into spoken ones for people with visual impairments or other accessibility issues.
First, sign up for accounts either at Odiogo.com or talkr.com. Both take RSS feeds of your blog and create mp3 / podcast files with your blog content being read by an artificially generated voice. Your quality and accuracy may vary, depending on the type of writing you do. Highly technical words may be completely massacred, but by having both services available, you’ll increase the chance that your post will be read properly, by at least one of the services.
Then, sign up for an account at PodNova.com. PodNova is an online podcast aggregation service, which allows you to release your podcast subscriptions from any single computer and keep it accessible on any computer with Internet access.
It also manages your podcast master subscription list, so you really only have to subscribe to the PodNova feed, and all your podcasts will be downloaded by your podcatcher of choice (Juice, iTunes..etc).
You can also listen to individual podcasts through the PodNova subscriptions page. That’s the option I’m using to provide audio to my blog.
What I’ve done is use PodNova to subscribe to both Talkr and Odiogo feeds, and link to the feed pages here:
Now, using those links, you can access my recent blog posts and listen to them at your workstation, or through your media player of choice.
I’ve also added buttons to my sidebar, though, weirdly, talkr doesn’t have an html page that displays all the the posts in my feed; they assume you’re going to use an RSS reader only. Either I can’t find it or they’re missing the boat on that one, so in my sidebar buttons, I’m linking back to the PodNova Talkr page for my posts. Klunky but it works.
Now, this doesn’t work well for every post. I have a couple of link lists that would just be silly when they’re converted to audio, but for longer, text based posts (like this one), making the audio available simply means that the post could be read, and now heard, by more people.
So, have you listened to any of my posts? What do you think? How’s the quality and pronunciation? Does it fit with your regular podcast listening routine?
Technorati Tags: podcast, audio, text to speech, artifical voice, blogging, blog, audio post, text conversion, cool, voice, sound, speech, iPod, iTunes, PodNova, Talkr, Odiogo, Juice
Jul
23
The essential Palm Pilot file manager — free!
Filed Under Doing | Comments Off
I like free. I also like great applications that work as expected, especially when they’re free. Suffice to say, I like Palm Commander.
Palm Commander used to be a commercial product, but the author has graciously decided to give it away…so you will need a registration code to activate it. Just follow the activation link and generate the appropriate code.
I’ve been a fan of the ‘Commander’ style file management system for years, both in the Linux environment and the PC, so I was rather pleased to find one for the Palm, especially as I was reorganizing my files on the little beastie, and it really doesn’t come with a tool that will do the job.
I’m not going to do a full review, but here’s a quick overview of the way Palm Commander works.
The screen is divided into two panels, left and right. Basically I can do things to a file on either side, or copy/move files between sides.
So, if I have some new text files or ebooks in a ‘download’ directory on the left, I can easily drag them to the right panel, which may be showing a view of a folder on the memory card.
Obviously, there are many more features (clipped from the website screenshot gallery):
Main Screen
I’ve only started working with this application, but so far, it does what I need it to do, and the price is right.
Technorati Tags: Palm Commander, Palm Pilot, Palm TX, Palm, Commander, Pocket PC, Software, File Manager, File Organizer, Freeware, Review, Tools, Utility
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