TQT: Queue YouTube to a Specific Time…

Ever have a long YouTube video that you want to share with others, but the good part is at the end? Well here is a nice little fix for you.

Since I gave my iPad the boot last week, I thought it was only fitting to demonstrate this technique with a Blendtec video of an iPad getting bent in half, shoved in an industrial blender, and pulverized into a powder.

The link for the video usually looks like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko

If you click that link, you will end up watching entire 1 minute and 40 second clip. It’s very entertaining and you should definitely watch it.

If you want to get straight to the good stuff, you would want to start the video at the 55 second mark. You can easily have YouTube do that for you by adding the following to the end of the link:

#t=0m55s

You can modify the 0 and the 55 to whatever you want. The final link will then look like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko#t=0m55s

Bam! iPad demolished!

If you want to watch another cool video starring The Digitante In Action!, check out the video below. If it doesn’t show up, click here to watch it at the YouTube site.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/JC5Qyqy7Pyg&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b

Tungle Yourself…

Before you go and thing I’m some sort of perv, I want to describe what Tungle is. It is a website that syncs with your calendar (Google Calendar or Outlook, for example) and then shows your free time to the world.

Don’t worry though, no one will know why you are doing in the time that is marked as busy, but they can easily select a block of time, an appointment time length, and submit it to you to schedule a meeting. Very convenient, especially when you think about all those back and forth emails with people:

Me: I’m free on Sunday afternoon and Monday evening.

You: Hmm, I can only make it on Wednesday during the day or Friday all day.

Me: Wednesday only works late and Friday is out of the question. I’m on vacation all next week also.

All of this headache could have been saved just by me sending a tungle.me link. Then you could consult your schedule, block out some times that work for you and I would confirm them, automatically adding them to my calendar.

Let’s check it out more in depth though. Head to the Tungle website and click the big, purple “Sign up free” button.

The main thing to figure out here is what you want your Tungle.me link to be. Mine is http://tungle.me/thedigitante.

Once you are signed up for Tungle, you need to fill out your profile. This will is when you will select your regular availability, fill out your profile with contact information, add any other public profiles such as Twitter and Facebook, and adding any exceptions to your availability such as vacation.

Selecting your regular availability is as easy as using a little paint roller to paint the times you can meet. It even turns to a little eraser if you need to delete some availability.

Once you are done filing out your full profile, you can also sync your Tungle calendar with Outlook or your Google Calendar.

Additionally, there is an iPhone app available and a BlackBerry app that will be coming out in the next little while (I’m actually testing the Tungle for BlackBerry beta).

The only thing left to do is share your calendar with others who want to meet with you!

Do you want to meet with The Digitante? Why not visit my Tungle site to set up an appointment? Do you have a Tungle site? Post your link in the comments and I’ll add you to my Tungle contacts!

TQT: iPod charging…

Since Tuesday came and went without a post (actually, this entire week came and went without a post), I figured I’d try and squeeze in a Thursday Quick Tip. Let’s just say you are lucky there are two days that begin with the letter T.

Tonight’s tip refers to charging an iPod, but this advice is equally applicable to many of your electronic devices, especially your phone. The USB port on your computer can not only be used to transfer data to your mobile device, but it can also be used to charge your mobile device.

When I’m traveling, I like to do everything I can to not have to check a bag. This inevitably leads to me cutting back on as much stuff as possible. To do that, I generally take a USB cord and simply plug my cell phone or iPod into the USB port of my computer to charge. This saves me from having to take a cord with a big bulky plug with me.

Additionally, there has been a movement in the last year or so to standardize the charging ports for cellphones and other devices to use a connector called micro-USB. The beautiful thing about that is instead of taking a cord for your cellphone, a cord for your camera, a cord for your wife’s phone, etc, you will be able to just bring one cord and charge all your devices. Convenient!

Got your own tips on how to charge various devices or how to pack lighter for a trip? Let me know in the comments!

Friday Night Links (3/26/2010)…

I would have to say that this week went much better than I was expecting since it was the first week that I was alone with the twin 1 year olds while Mrs. Digitante headed off to Florida for work. Fortunately I have two really good little girls who made my life easy.

Now it’s about time to cap of that week with gaggle of links. Let’s do it.

• Laws of Negotiation – In the United States, negotiating is something that is looked at with embarrassment and nearly shunned. However, in much of the rest of the world, negotiating is the only way to get what you want. Everything you purchase boils down to two things: 1) You have something the business owner wants (money) and 2) He has something you want (the goods or services). While negotiating is a good thing and you should definitely do it, you need to be sure you are fully prepared and know what to expect and what not to do. Check out this guide for specifics.
• Hidden Cost of Living – Typically, people look at rent or housing prices in the urban core of a city and instantly think it’s too high. However, the Center for Neighborhood Technology added transportation costs to housing costs to get the true amount of your income you are spending. Amazingly enough, most urban core costs are less than living in the suburbs. I can only imagine that will get worse if gas prices begin to rise again. Be sure to check out your location to see what the cost of living looks like where you are.
• Shine Stainless Steel with Flour – Over time, those shiny new stainless steel sinks tend to get cloudy and the finish turns to more of a matte. No need to spend money on expensive stainless steel cleaners and polishers when you have a bag of flour right in your pantry. Just sprinkle it on dry, grab a cloth, and start polishing till you get a nice mirrored finish.
• Magnetic Nail and Screw Holder – In high school, I worked construction. Part of my job was putting up shingles, screwing down deck boards, and hanging drywall. I had a nice tool belt (actually still have it) and it had a little pouch hanging on it that would hold nails and screws. The problem is that those nails and screws were not stacked uniformly in the bottom of the pouch. No, they were pointing every which way and each grab in there for another screw caused 4 or 5 screws to poke into my fingers. No fun. If only I had known about the MagnoGrip Magnetic Wristband. Makes me kick myself that I didn’t come up with it first.

Ignite Indianapolis 2010…

Just to recap from last night because I’m lazy:

I attended an event called Ignite Indianapolis. The premise is there is a docket of speakers who are equipped with a Powerpoint presentation and the subject can be whatever they want. The catch is, each slide shows for exactly 15 seconds and there are 20 slides, so the full presentation is 5 minutes (it is also referred to as Pecha Kucha). Timing and pace are everything: some presenters hit their next point exactly as the slide flipped, others rushed through their thought as slides kept turning despite their fumbling of words, and others had speeches with long pauses waiting for the next slide to appear. It’s amazing how long and short the same 15 seconds can feel. I will cover all the presentations with some critiques tomorrow.

Hey! What do you know? Here are the critiques and comments in order of appearance in the program:

1. Ken Christie, President, The 543 Group – He used to work for Disney as an “Imagineer.” What that means is he came up with all the cool rides and displays you see when you go to Disney World. Due to the format, I didn’t get to delve into what he invented and worked on which would have been pretty awesome, I would imagine. Imagineer? Anyway, he went through the process for being creative and it was pretty cool to see something as off-the-cuff as being creative has a structure to it.
2. Dustin Wortman, Student, Ivy Tech – Dustin was, mostly by self-admission, an Anime nerd. I’m not really into Anime, but he did a nice job of covering information on Anime, Manga, and Hentai. Fun fact: Hentai literally translates to ‘pervert.’ Alright then. If you don’t know why that significant, I would recommend NOT Googling it at work.
3. Ann Edwards, Design Strategist, Point Brake – Earlier today I read and commented on Ann’s blog. She certainly looked nervous but her statistics that she presented were pretty amazing. I can’t remember them off the top of my head, but they involved massive exposure gains by companies when they did simple redesigns of product packaging and other small changes with huge impact. Maybe Ann will swing by and post some stats or a link to her presentation.
4. Joe Wilkert, GM & Publisher, O’Reilly Media – I was disappointed by this one. The title was ‘iPad: Important or Irrelevant’ but I’m not sure why the term irrelevant was even included in the title. The entire presentation was a big, fat iPad love fest. I think it’s save to say Joe has an iPad on order with Apple.
5. Stacie Porter-Bilger, CEO, Hoosier Academy – I was extremely interested in this one because Hoosier Academy is a school where the students only go to the physical school grounds once a week. The rest of the time, they are completing homework online. It felt very relevant to me. Having a pair of 1-year olds who are growing up quickly will do that to a person.
6. Daniel Poynter, Founder, GNIC.org – Daniel is in the midst of an experiment (or art project, as he calls it) where he found a person and asked them, “Who is the awesomest person you know?” He then went to the person that was awesome and asked them the same question. Additionally, he is recording all the conversations he has along the way. There were some very interesting responses in there.
7. Jason Moriber, Principal, Wise Elephant – This was far and away the most entertaining of all the presentations. Jason was bounding around the stage, waving his hands, and generally being a complete lunatic. His slides were hand drawn on a whiteboard and very clearly described what he was talking about. The same speech given orally only would have been a snooze-fest, but the active, visual way Jason presented created a huge impact in my brain.
8. Kevin Makice, PhD Candidate, IU – The thing that I loved most about Kevin’s presentation was his cadence. He didn’t match what he was saying to each slide, but it didn’t matter because he was making points that were already impressed on your brain by prior slides. Example: He spend the first 5 slides talking about robots in general and in the meantime slides flashed up with phrases on them. On the sixth slide, he rehashed those five phrases. I felt prepared and I also felt like it was ingenious.
9. Bob Mattax, Developer, Developer Town – Alright, when a presentation is called ‘Why Houses?’ and the guy works for a company called Developer Town, I just assumed he is a real estate guy. Who cares? Wow, was I taken for a loop when I found that he actually builds little “sheds” for software developers. Here’s how it works: you have these little plug-in-able houses on wheels. They have a light on the outside that indicates the occupant is busy, customized paint and features, and windows so you can see in your coworkers house. These little houses are supposed to be placed in a warehouse which is far less costly than an office cube-farm. Outgrow your warehouse? Unplug, wheel them in a truck, take them to a larger warehouse, and plug them back in. Amazing concept.
10. Brian Shafer, Co-owner, Walnut Valley Bison – This presentation made me hungry – both for a nice bison burger and for a tour of the bison farm. The visuals in this presentation were stunning: piles of bison skulls 30 feet high and 2,200 lb beasts staring down the camera. Not to mention, I would have never expected a presentation at this sort of even geared toward bison.
11. Dan Miller, Owner, VCS Indy – This presentation probably was struggling the most for timing and content. Dan under-estimated the amount of time each slide was going to take, relative to his speech and was playing catch up the whole time, even skipping parts that he couldn’t get to in time. As for content, I find computer viruses to be a quasi-interesting subject, however, I’m not sure this was the crowd for it. I’m guessing half the crowd was against him because they were Apple fanboys to begin with. In the end, no solutions were offered – just information – which made the whole thing feel kind of pointless. Dan, if you point out a problem, you HAVE to offer a solution.
12. Doug Karr, CEO, DK New Media – While other presentations may have been more interesting, informative, or entertaining, Doug’s resonated with me the most. I’ve worked in corporate America for nearly 10 years and there is nothing I hate worse than meetings. They keeping you from doing what you need to do, you get more work while you are there, and the people running them have no idea what they are doing until they take your idea and use it as their own. Wow, so frustrating. Meet or die? I’d rather die.

If anyone has a link to all the presentations, I would love to see that in the comments. Additionally, if you were a presenter, let me know how you feel about my critiques! And don’t worry, I plan on presenting at the next Ignite Indianapolis so I may rue the day I ever laid into these guys…

SyncBack: Synchronize and Backup…

I’ve covered a number of posts about backing up your information (Twitter/Facebook/Gmail with Backupify and documents/spreadsheets with Dropbox), but I haven’t really touched on how to protect yourself from a catastrophic failure of your computer.

In a tweet by Eddie, a frequent commenter here, he posted another lecture on backing up your data, by Merlin Mann. A quote from that article says:

Assume that [your hard drives] are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

While in his article he talks about a schedule for backing things up, I am going to give you a tool that will help you get things backed up in a simple, quick, and scheduled fashion.

If you have important documents and want a completely automated system for backing them up for a cost of $250 (which includes setup, external hard drive, and USB thumbdrive), you can skip the rest of the article and instead contact me from the About The Digitante page.

First of all, you are going to need a place to put everything and placing all your important info on the same hard drive that it is on right now is a terrible idea. If your hard drive crashes, everything is gone, including both copies of your Barbie doll database you’ve been working so feverishly on compiling. What you need is to invest a few dollars, in an external hard drive (this Seagate can be had at less than $80).

Once you’ve hooked that up, you need to get a program called SyncBack Free (a paid version is also available, but probably unnecessary for our needs). You end up downloading a .zip file which you will have to extract. You can extract it wherever you like, but keep track of where it goes. Extracting it to your desktop is probably the best place for it.

Double click the file you extracted to start the installation. You can pretty much click your way through the Next > buttons. After you finish installing you are going need to set up a profile so answer ‘Yes’ to the dialog that pops up. Then we need to choose between the type of set up we want: Backup or synchronization.

Here are some usage cases for each of the options above:

• Backup – Used to keep a copy of a file or files elsewhere for safekeeping. These should be kept on a separate disk and should also be stored away in a safe place such as a safe deposit box.
• Synchronization – Used for organizational purposes such as making sure your music or picture files are the same in two different folders. If changes are made in one place (adding new photos on your living room computer), then changes are copied in the second location (a folder on your laptop).

We are going to choose Backup. The default settings should be fine, but you can certainly tweak them on the Advanced tab if you like. The only thing we need to add is the source and destination directories.

The source directory is going to be all the information that needs to be transferred. To backup 99.99% of the information you will need in the future, you can try backing up the directory ‘C:\Users\USERNAME’ where USERNAME is the name you use to sign on to your computer.

The destination directory is going to be a folder on your external hard drive. You can just call it Backup if you like so it will look like ‘X:\Backup’.

After this is complete you will see a plain English description of what will take place when you run the profile you just created. Mine says:

Next, you can do a test run which does not copy anything, but does generate a report telling what copied successfully and what failed to copy. This is optional if you know what is going to be copied.

Be sure to schedule the backup to run on a regular basis, say once a week or so.

The only thing left to do is run the job. It may take awhile, depending on how much information you have to copy. Be sure to review the report briefly after the job has completed running error-free.

Congratulations! You just backed up your data. Be sure to take Merlin Mann’s suggest and do complete backups on multiple hard drives and keep one at home, one at work, and one elsewhere. Additionally, keep your absolute must-have documents encrypted on a USB thumbdrive. If you have gotten this far, you are truly a pro!

Tuesday Quick Tips: Alt Key…

Over the past couple of weeks of posting my Tuesday Quick Tips, I’ve actually be learning a ton of stuff. I would encourage you to head back to the past postings and check out the comments for each. A couple of weeks back, my buddy Eddie pointed out that the middle-click tip was perfect for closing non-focused Internet Explorer tabs since they don’t have a little x on them to close them. Excellent tip and one that never crossed my mind.

The tip for tonight is the use of the Alt key. You may have noticed little underlined letters in the menu bar of your programs. In Firefox, it looks something like this:

If you hold down the Alt key and then press the ‘T’ key, you will notice the Tool menu opens. Once that menu is opened, you will notice even more menu items with underlines. ‘D’ for Download, ‘S’ for Google Search, ‘O’ for Options, etc. By continuing to hold down Alt, you can keep pressing the letter key corresponding with the shortcut. Clicking Tools, then options with your mouse requires navigating a mouse and clicking.

These types of navigational maneuvers with a mouse might seem like they are fairly simple, but most tasks performed with a mouse are much slower than their keyboard counterparts. Check this non-scientific study that I did on the use of the Ctrl key in copying and pasting information.

As an added bonus, if you use the ribbon located in Microsoft Office 2007, holding down the Alt key shows an overlay of shortcuts for all the commands you could ever need.

What do you use your Alt key for? Are you a keyboard short-cutter or a mouse-only type? Let me know in the comments.

Tuesday Quick Tips: Middle Click…

If you’ve ever used a mouse, you pretty quickly notice there is a left mouse button which you can use to click, double click, and hold down to drag things around. The right button brings up a little menu called the context menu that has commands that you can use to perform available actions such as copy and paste, create a new folder, and look at the properties of various items. Finally, there is a scroll wheel that allows you to, well, scroll around on web pages and documents.

What you may not realize is that the scroll wheel also has the ability to click! You may have to investigate what it does in various circumstances, but here are a couple things for you to try out:

1. When browsing the web, click the scroll wheel on a link. You will notice that link opens in a separate tab or window in the background leaving your current page available to continue using. Most of the links on my site will open in a separate tab or window, however, they open immediately, taking you away from whatever you were reading. This is especially helpful for things like Friday Night Links. Try scroll wheel clicking each link, then you can go read them after you’ve read all my commentary!
2. Open up a PDF document (try it on a Form 1040 in honor of tax season). If you scroll wheel click on the PDF, you will see a circle with some arrows pop up. If you move the mouse, it will pan around the PDF. It makes for nice fluid navigation of PDF documents.

Now that you are armed with these tips, try scroll wheel clicking in other programs. Let me know if you find any other secret middle clicking secrets in the comments!

Portable Apps…

Last week I talked about using someone else’s computer and the traces it can leave behind. Furthermore, sometimes you aren’t allowed to install programs on the computer you are using such as when you go to the library or if you are in a corporate environment.

However, there are applications out there that can be installed onto and used directly from a USB flash drive. Probably the first thing you would want on a USB flash drive would be a  web browser. By carrying a web browser, you can use a secure browser, such as Firefox, and be sure it is up-to-date and can even bring your setting along for the ride.

If you are interested a USB flash drive pre-loaded with about 30 portable apps ranging from a PDF reader to an office suite, contact me from the About The Digitante page and for $25, I’ll send one to you, all loaded up and ready to go. If you have specific requests for programs you would like to see on your USB flash drive, we can make arrangements for that as well.

In the past, you’ve heard me ramble on and on about Mozilla Firefox. As a reminder, Firefox is an excellent replacement for Internet Explorer, a much maligned browser amongst savvy internet users. Firefox is fast and stable when compared to Internet Explorer and a few days of using it will turn you into a Firefox convert.

While using Firefox at home is great, sometimes you end up at other computers with no Firefox and hence, none of your settings or information.

By installing Portable Firefox to a USB flash drive, all those settings and all that information comes with you. Installing couldn’t be easier either. Just download the files from Portable Apps, begin the install, and select your USB flash drive.

Once you’ve installed it, you can head on over to the directory in which you installed it; in my case, I headed to E:/FirefoxPortable.

Once there, I was sure to read the help file since using a portable app isn’t exactly like using a desktop app. Once I familiarized myself with the help file, I simply double clicked on the PortableFirefox.exe and launched the browser.

Its as simple as that. If you want to get a little more complex, the help file also gives you some tweaks that will allow you to import the settings from your regular Firefox as well as enable most addons, plugins (eg Flash), and helper apps (eg a PDF reader).

A final note: while using portable applications on a USB flash drive is super convenient, it can also be super hazardous. PortableApps.com has also provided a safety guide so you can protect yourself, especially if you use your drive with an unknown computer that may already be chock full of viruses. With a little caution, you can avoid bringing all those viruses to your home computer.

Aside from Portable Firefox, do you use any portable apps that you would like to see covered here? Did you even know such things as portable apps existed? Let me know in the comments!

Tuesday Quick Tip: Delete Autofills…

We’ve all done it: you visit your favorite site and misspell your login name. Uh-oh, now you are stuck with a misspelled autofill entry for the rest of your life, right? Wrong!

Who’s Teh Digitante? My evil twin brother perhaps? Hardly. He’s just a phantom that we can easily make go away with a couple of keystrokes:

• Type the first letter of the username so the autofill pops up, as above.
• Scroll down to the misspelled username.
• While it is highlighted, press the delete key. If that doesn’t happen to work, you can try holding the Ctrl key and pressing delete or holding the Shift key and pressing delete. The plain ol’ delete key seemed to work in all the situations I tried it in.

The entry should permanently be gone. This also works on any other autofill field such as if you move to a new address and you want to banish your old address. Or perhaps you are embarrassed that someone might see that you were searching for Britney Spears lyrics in the search box in the upper right corner of your browser.

Using someone else’s computer? Delete YOUR username from their computer when you are done logging in. Someone else using your computer. Delete THEIR username from your computer as well.

Is this the first time you’ve ever heard of this trick? Know of some other ways to go about this? Know of any way to edit existing autofill entries? Share in the comments!