Couple of new additions…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post called The Digitante: The Man, The Myth, The Legend. It ended up being a very popular post so I’ve added it as a sub-page under the About page.

Additionally, in posting about Google Voice, I learned that I could put a widget on my blog that would allow anyone to call me directly from my blog. Basically, you can click on this picture in the upper right corner:

A little dialog box pops up that asks you to type in your name and number. Google Voice then calls you and once you answer, it connects you to me. Talk about convenience.

As always, I am open to suggestions on any topics you would like to discuss and I am always available to discuss an technology that is giving you trouble or you would like to know more about.

Google Voice…

Google’s most recent technological unveiling is arguably its most game changing: Google Voice. Imagine that you could make phone calls with any phone, anywhere, anytime. Imagine that you could have one number that rang your home phone, your cell phone, your vacation home, your work phone, or even a hotel phone. Imagine that you could have a log of all your outgoing, incoming, and missed calls, a transcript of all voicemails sent directly to your voicemail and as a text message on your cell phone, and could record your call with customer service at the touch of a button.

All those scenarios (and more) are possible with a Google Voice number.

First, the not-so-good news

Google Voice is currently available by invitation only. This means you have to sign up for an invite and they will email when they have availability. My invite took approximately 3 or 4 weeks to come, but I have no idea what the current wait time is. To sign up for an invite, just enter your name and your email address. Simple as that. Then comes the tough part: the waiting. Trust me, the waiting hurts.

If you are in the military, you can use your .mil email address to get an invite in a day or two.

Sign up and set up

When you get your invite and sign up, you get to pick your own number. Mrs. Digitante’s Google Voice number ends with her birthday. My Google Voice number contains my nickname – (317) 456-AHOW (2469). They have a search feature that allows you to type in letters or numbers to search for a number in your area code. You get to select the area code as well. This was especially handy for Mrs. Digitante because she has a Chicago area code, 312, but lives in Indiana where the area code is 317. You can imagine people confuse the 2 for a 7 and misdial her number all the time. Now she has a 317 number that rings on her 312 cell phone and everybody is happy.

After sign up, the first task is to connect the Google Voice number to a phone. When you do this, Google calls the phone you select and asks you to verify a code and if it is your first phone, it will also ask you to add a mailbox greeting. You can add as many phones as you want including cell, home, work, and any other phone you want. The best part is that people can call you as a local number no matter where you are. Vacationing in Florida? Why? Its hot and muggy there. But it doesn’t matter because your friends can call you just like you were at home in Sheboygan eating a bratwurst.

Next you can set up how you want to treat your voicemails. You can select to have them transcribed and sent to your either your email account or you can have it texted to your cell phone. Either way, you still have the option to listen to them on the phone or on your computer. The transcription is shaky at times, so you may need to rely on listening to the actual recording.

Google Voice also has call screening features. You have options to request that your caller state their name if they are not in your address book. I don’t use this feature unless the person has their caller ID blocked. You can also check Do Not Disturb so that you can enjoy a nice night out with the significant other. It just directs all calls to voicemail.

Taking and making those calls

Once you have all your settings tweaked, you can start receiving calls. Making calls is not as simple, but certainly isn’t difficult.

Unfortunately, you can’t just dial the number and use Google Voice. If you just dial the number, the person you are calling will see your phone’s number and not your Google Voice number. This gets confusing for them because they don’t know what number to call – your Google Voice or your regular phone number.

There are a couple of options for making calls:

1. Dial your Google Voice number – This will connect you to your voicemail. From here you will be given the option to press 2 and enter the phone number you would like to dial.
2. Use the Google Voice site from your computer – You simply sign into Google Voice, click the Call button in the upper left corner, and enter the number. Google Voice will then call you and after you answer, it will call the other person.
3. Use the Google Voice application or the web on your phone – If you have a BlackBerry or Android smartphone, you can download an application that has all the features of the Google Voice site and will add a menu item ‘Call using Google Voice’. The Palm Pre and the iPhone may have apps available, and they are not official but should work fine. If you have most any other phone and you have access to the web on your phone, you can navigate to http://www.google.com/voice/m and use the Google Voice mobile site. You would probably want to be sure you either have a plan that includes data or investigate how much the data you use is going to cost before you explore this option.

Google Voice also includes free calling to Canada and has extremely good rates for calling overseas numbers so if you make any calls to foreign countries, Google Voice is a great tool.

Godspeed

Hopefully your invite for Google Voice arrives shortly and you can begin to enjoy the benefits. In the meantime, if you have any questions about why you would need Google Voice, feel free to contact The Digitante by heading to the About page and emailing or calling.

Picasa…

I am pretty excited to write about Picasa, but not for the reason you might think. You see, I have about 2,000 pictures that I’ve taken since I got our new camera February. And that is just the beginning. I also have 700 wedding pictures from a couple of years ago, 1,200 pictures from our trip to Europe, and another 2,500 random pictures. And that is only the main hard drive – I have a separate hard drive that has all my old pictures from my old computer totaling in the multi-thousands.

That being said, I need to do some major work on my photo collection. I have blinking eye photos, blurry night shots, and pictures of the ground. It used be that you had 24 to 27 shots and you had to use them wisely. But with the new found convenience of digital photography, we are getting lazy and taking extra shots and not necessarily deleting the bad ones.

Picasa is going to help me organize my photo collection. I’ve let this slide for too long. Tonight you get the unique pleasure of learning about a great photo organization and sharing tool while The Digitante gets his life in order. Huzzah!

A bit different

Picasa is different than most Google services, mostly because Picasa was not a part of Google for a long time. Picasa is a photo organization tool and it mostly operates on your local computer. Unlike other Google tools, it is a download but like other Google offerings, its free.

After downloading and installing Picasa 3 (the current version), the first task is to allow Picasa to find all the photos on your computer. If you leave all your photos in one place, you can have it only check in a limited number of spots. However, I keep my photos on multiple hard drives and all over my main drive. For my first run through, I’m going to do a full scan.

While scanning, you have the option of using Picasa as your default picture viewer. Its up to you. I am going to select it, just so I can have a chance to try it out on a more regular basis.

Once all your photos are loaded you have a couple of options.

Get to editing

I used the term editing loosely. Picasa basically provides you with buttons that allow you to perform simple tasks such as touching up blemishes, adding text or a watermark, and straighten or crop a photo. In true Google fashion, they also have an I’m Feeling Lucky button which attempts to automagically adjust all the editing tools to give you a great picture (hopefully!).

Below are two pictures, a before and after using the I’m Feeling Lucky button, so you can get a taste of what its capable of:

As you can see, the quick edit changed up the contrast and definitely gave it a much brighter look. And in case you didn’t know, that is me (Andy – The Digitante) and one of my daughters when she was about two months old.

Your next move

So now that your pictures all look professional quality due to the carpal tunnel inducing clicking you did with the I’m Feeling Lucky button (Kidding! Try using GIMP for a more professional approach), you have a number of options for your photo collection.

First and foremost, you can upload your pictures to Google’s online portion of Picasa called Picasaweb. And with Picasa’s sync feature, you can even edit your pictures AFTER you’ve uploaded them and all your changes will be uploaded to the online photo as well. That means no remembering which photos you changed. You can upload up to 1Gb of photos for free to Picasaweb. Then the prices run from $20/yr for 10Gb (about 4,000 standard pictures) up to $500/yr for 400Gb (useful for extremely large, high quality RAW formatted images). Uploading your photos also serves as a backup in case anything would happen to your computer and you would lose all your photos.

You can also email your pictures. The best feature here is the ability to have Picasa attach resized photos, meanwhile, your original photos are left untouched. Be sure not to resize them too small or your recipients may have trouble getting a good print.

Speaking of prints, you can elect to print your photos on your own photo printer or you can also order prints from over a dozen online photo printing shops.

Additionally, there are features that allow you to publish photos directly to your blog, “geo-tag” photos marking their location on a map, making collages, and making slideshow movies.

My next move

Now that I’ve worked with Picasa a bit, I need to work on some of its other features such as tagging people in my photos (it has a face finding feature) and renaming my collection so it is easier to navigate. Picasa has definitely made my life much easier and less overwhelming, even in the short time I’ve used it.

If you would like to discover how Picasa can simplify your photo organization, feel free to email or call The Digitante by heading over to the About page. There you can find all my contact information.

Day off…

What a slacker I am! I had some visitors come into town today for the night so I was off enjoying the company. I’ve got a nice big post about Google’s Picasa, so you can enjoy that tomorrow night.

Friday Night Links (9/11/2009)…

Hockey, radishes, paintings, and help with your grocery queuing skills. What more could you ask for? Nothing. Nothing I tell you.

• Fantasy Hockey Scouts – Perhaps the biggest advance in hockey was the introduction of High Definition Television. Finally, you could see all the action and not need that horrendous glowing puck. Slightly behind HDTV is the advent of Fantasy Hockey Scouts. From their lair deep in the heart of Canada, the FHSers spend their time combing statistics, making outrageous trade rumors, and cavorting with other fantasy hockey lovers. The result? You get the Breakout Bible which predicts the season’s big winners and you get the Scouting Report so you know who to pick in your draft. As FHS says, “You don’t have a copy yet?  For your sake, we hope nobody in your league has picked one up.”
• Bigness Mushroom – Your next Mario Bros. themed party needs to have these tasty little nuggets. In a couple of seconds, you can produce power-up mushrooms that will have you whistling the Mario Bros. song all day long. As a bonus, check out this classic video (warning: sound).
• Paintings – They look like photographs, but these are actually paintings by some very talented artists. The most amazing one is the pepper shaker with the reflection of the guy “taking the picture” in it. Amazing.
• Grocery Store Not-So-Express Lanes – Well this story has math and stuff in it so it must be true. Kidding aside, this is pretty much in line with my experiences at the grocery store. However, once coupons or check writing are involved, all this math goes right out the window.

Google Docs…

Microsoft Office owns a lion-share of the word processing (Word), spreadsheet (Excel), and presentation software (PowerPoint) market. These tools have great feature sets and can perform tasks from the mundane to the complex. There were a number of drawbacks to Microsoft Office, including the big two: file sharing and the cost.

Google Docs has managed to cure these two woes and added a bunch of other common, useful features.

The common stuff

Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations have similar options as their Microsoft counterparts:

• Documents – Inserting images, links, and tables; print preview; headers and footers; spellcheck; texting formatting.
• Spreadsheets – Inserting and deleting rows/columns; comments; formula toolbar; formatting rules; solve and validate data.
• Presentations – Themes; speaker notes; inserting images, links, and tables; slide import from PowerPoint.

Google Docs’ first big win: file sharing

Since Google Docs, much like Gmail and Google Calendar, is all online, you can access your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from any computer with access to the internet. This allows you to focus on other things rather than figuring out if you have the most recent version of the file on your thumb drive or saved in your email.

Not only do you have online access to your files, but you can switch your files from Private to Public or share them with certain other users.

As you can see, you can directly email people to let them know they have permission to edit and collaborate on your documents. Additionally, you can get a link directly to the document that could be posted to your blog. After all this, you can also check and see who has access to your document and what type of permission they have, either editing or viewing. You can also make the document private again so no one can see it.

Google Docs’ second big win: cost

For the most basic version of Microsoft Office, you are looking at spending $150. Fortunately, access to Google Docs is free. For most basic, non-work tasks, there are no features that you are going to be missing. A few that could be missed if you work on more advanced projects would be mail merge in Word and macros and Visual Basic in Excel.

Even in the event that you need a feature that Google Docs is missing, you still don’t need to purchase Microsoft Office.

You may remember that we have talked in the past about open-source software. OpenOffice.org is a robust, free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. The below screenshot is from the OpenOffice.org website. You can see that it is very similar to Microsoft Word 2005. OpenOffice will be getting the new Word ribbon style bar in it’s next iteration.

Get collaborating

If you would like to get started with Google Docs or would like to know how to use some of the features of documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, be sure to head to the About page. Once there you can find contact information for The Digitante. Feel free to send an email or call with your questions.

New Apple announcements…

I’m taking a short break from our little Google series to catch you up on the little Apple shindig that happened today. It was a pretty boring deal with no new products and no particularly ground-breaking features. However, there was a bit of intrigue in there.

iTunes 9

• They added iTunes LPs which have lyrics, concert videos, exclusive songs, and photo albums. Oddly enough, they don’t include lossless, uncompressed versions of the song for high fidelity listening. Boring!
• Improved interface, an App manager, and tweaks to the syncing procedure. More “who cares.”
• A Home Library that allows all the computers on your account to automatically import songs from other computers. Basically, if you download a new song on your desktop, next time your laptop is on the same network, it will import that song from your desktop. This feature is great, especially for anal retentive people like me who do everything they can to be sure all their music is the same on all computers.
• Tweet your current listening selection. Meh. Its kind of cool, but I doubt I’d ever use it. I’ve got much more important things to post on Twitter.

iPod Nano

• The Nano got a camera and a microphone. This is pretty nice and it includes a voice-over feature and effects for the camera such as night-vision (the green blurry footage) and 19 or so other effects.
• On the aesthetic front, it got a new paint job that is shiny instead of the matte finish in prior generations.
• FM tuner: Welcome to 1998, Apple. 1998 is approximately when the first mp3 player got its FM tuner. Downside is you need to plug in headphones to get reception. Not a big deal for the most part though.
• Did you know that people that use a pedometer walk approximately 2,000 more steps than those without? Did you know the iPod Nano now has a pedometer? Get your walk on!

iPod Touch

• Upgraded processor in the 32 and 64Gb models. Boring!
• The 8Gb version price is lowered to $199. Boring!

That about covers it aside from some extremely minor updates to the iPod Shuffle and the iPod Classic. If you have any questions, ask away in the comments. Back to the Google series tomorrow with Google Docs!

Google Calendar…

So far, you can use Google’s Gmail to communicate about meeting up with your friends. Then you can use Google Maps to figure out how to get to the meet up. However, all of that is for naught if you forget what time you need to be at the meet up. Google Calendar has come to your rescue.

First time in your calendar

If you already signed up for a Gmail account, you can use the same username to login to Google Calendar. On your first login, it will ask you some basic questions such as your name and your timezone. The next screen should show you a nice clean calendar only dotted with the occasional US holiday. You can add all kinds of pre-filled calendars such as sports schedules for your favorite teams, local weather, and various holiday calendars.

As you can see, The Digitante is ready for the full swing of football season. In addition to the pre-filled calendars, you can easily add your own appointments to your calendar using the buttons located just above the small calendar on the left.

Each of the three options does something slightly different:

• Create Event – This allows full customization of your event including recurrence (example: repeats the first Tuesday of each month). You can determine the time and length of the appointment. You can invite guests who will receive an invite from your Gmail address. If you include a location, the appoint will include a link to a Google Map of the location. There are tons of other features that you can try out related to custom reminders and privacy settings.
• Quick Add – You can schedule an appoint using what is called “natural language.” An example would be to type ‘Lunch tomorrow at 1p for 2 hours repeats annually.’ This would add an appointment for September 9th at 1:00PM which would last for 2 hours and would occur annually on the 9th of September. After it has been added, you can edit the details. I like this feature but it isn’t the most accurate due to misinterpreting the occasional phrase, but does a decent job and is quick.
• Task – A nice little task manager will pop up along the right side of your calendar. This is more for to-do type of items that don’t necessarily happen on a specific date and time but still need to be done when you can get to them.

I need to remember to check that box!

But I’m on the go

As with all Google applications, you can access them from your phone.

• Text messages – You can get reminders sent to your phone via text message by heading to the Settings menu and accessing the Mobile Setup tab. You must verify it is your phone and I would highly recommend adding a texting plan to your phone if you don’t already have one. Texts are $0.20 for most carriers without a texting plan and most have plans starting at $5 for about 200 messages.
• Mobile browser – You can access your calendar from the browser on your phone (even an entry level flip phone). With mobile access, you can not only view appointments but also add new appointments which will show up on your calendar online. No need to be near a computer!
• Google Sync – The final installment of this series will focus on all the various Google Mobile applications available including Google Maps, Gmail, and Calendar. We’ll skip them here for now.

With both of these, it would be wise to determine how many texts you would use or how much time you will spend on the mobile browser before adding a texting plan or data plan to your account since if you use less than 25 texts per month, you would be better off just paying for them individually.

To determine your needs as far as data or texting are concerned or if you need help setting up and getting started with your Google Calendar, you can contact The Digitante by heading over to the About page.

Happy Labor Day!

That would be Labour Day if you are in Canada. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed your extended weekend and it will be back to the Google series tomorrow night. See you there!

Friday Night Links: Big, Fat edition (9/5/2009)…

This edition was so big and fat, I had to do it on Saturday morning instead of my usual Friday night posting.

• Homemade BBBQ Smoker – The extra B stands for BYOBB. That extra B? That’s a typo. Its a Simpsons quote, folks, look it up. Simpsons quotes aside, anytime you can build a $1,000+ ceramic smoker for $50 is a good day. Metal smokers shed heat like crazy, but the ceramic will give you all the insulation you need to get that slow-cook goodness.
• Canadian Cellphone Contracts – While we have it pretty good here in the US as far as cell phone contracts and service go, our friendly neighbors to the north don’t have it quite so good. However, a group that represents the carriers of Canada recently proposed a “consumer bill of rights.” It includes contract opt outs or grandfathering if a material change in pricing is made, better customer service, and privacy improvement. As usual on these sort of things, the proof will be in the proverbial pudding.
• Buying a Chef’s Knife – This includes everything from various types of knives to maintaining the knives to how to select a cutting board. Very helpful around the kitchen.
• Discounted HDTVs – This one is a little late, but you still have some time. Best Buy is massively discounting all its TVs, most likely to make room for new models that will be gracing the showroom floor shortly for the upcoming holiday season. If you aren’t sure what TV is best for you, you can always contact The Digitante and we can figure out what you need. Just head to the About page for contact information.
• Disk Defragmenter – As you add and delete files from your hard drive, the pieces of those files can’t always go right next to each other. A defragmenter will move those  pieces next to each other and really speed things up. This is especially important if you have solid state hard drive such as the hard drives that come in some netbook laptops. Lifehacker has a weekly feature where they ask what everyone uses for a particular task and then declares a winner. Defraggler won the battle of the defragmenting programs.  Check it out and speed things up.
• Bulk Hard-Boiled Eggs – Technically they’re not boiled at all, but cooking eggs in the oven will speed up the process and hopefully provide you with easy to peel eggs.