More iPod Loading Without iTunes…

I realize that last night TQT was missing but it will be back next week as my Tuesday night schedule should be easing up a bit.

A couple of weeks ago, I highlighted how to load up an iPod Shuffle without using iTunes because of some major issues I’ve had with iTunes in the past (read here and also here). This post will fill in the blanks for those of you using iPod versions other than the Shuffle. Unfortunately, this method does NOT work with iPhones and also requires you to sync your iPod with iTunes and load at least one song on there. I, personally, would recommend you do this on your friend’s computer rather than loading that piece of garbage on your computer. Now, off to the races.

The program we are going to be using is called Floola. Floola is a free side project by a helpful chap, so I would highly recommend donating if you like the product.

Start by downloading Floola here and be sure to extract the zip file to your iPod’s base directory. If you go to My Computer, you should see the C: drive and a couple other drives. On of them (E: on my computer) is the iPod. Double click it and you will see a couple of folders named Contacts, Calendars, Notes, and an see-through folder called iPod_Control. This is where you want to unzip your Floola folder to. Head over to the folder you extracted the files to and double click on Floola.exe.

The first task you need to do is choose which model of iPod you have. If you aren’t sure, you can visit Apple’s model identification guide. Floola will also give you some suggestions. It suggested that my iPod Nano 2G was either a 1G or a 2G (where G stands for generation). It also gives you some warnings and instructions, so be sure to read them through.

Once you hit save, you are pretty much home-free. At this point you can add tracks, delete tracks, manage photos stored on the device, and do pretty much everything else iTunes did.

A huge added bonus is that Floola is now saved on and runs from your iPod itself. That means if you visit anyone’s computer, regardless of whether they have iTunes or not, you will be able to update your music, photos, and podcasts using only the information on your iPod.

Have you tried any other alternatives to iTunes that worked for you? Found any hidden gems on Floola that cemented the deal for you? Share in the comments!

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…

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!

Recuva…

Ladies and gentlemen: A quick reminder to fill out the survey if you haven’t already. If you leave your email address, you will be in the running for one of three $10 Amazon giftcards. And I’ve decided to up the ante: if 50 separate people (no cheating by filling it out multiple times) fill out the survey by 11:59 pm on Friday, I’ll toss in a 4th card valued at $25. Be sure to get your friends to fill out the survey. To share the survey, just pass along this link: http://thedig.in/survey

Occasionally there are things in this world that do something amazing but you have to ask yourself, “Where the heck did they come up with that name?” For me, that one was Recuva. I couldn’t stop pronouncing it re-curve-ah. I didn’t know what it stood for, but then it dawned on me: Recover. Recova’. Recuva. Ahh, I get it now.

But really, that’s neither here nor there. What IS here and there is the fact that Recuva will find and recover files that you have deleted. Let’s talk about how it works first.

Delete? Not quite.

In real life, if you wanted to get rid of information, you can toss it in your trashcan and take it back out if you find that you shouldn’t have thrown it away. On you computer you can do the same thing by throwing files in the recycle bin on your PC. At any time, you can restore things in the recycle bin to the original location.

In real life, if you empty your trashcan into the dumpster out back, you could still get your information back, but it might be incomplete and you would most likely need some special equipment to get it back (rubber gloves, a gas mask, some boots). On your PC, you would need to get Recuva. Although you can’t see any records of your file being there any longer, it is actually still there and will be until that area of your hard disk drive gets over-written.

Recovering? Maybe.

As I said, the information, although not showing up, is still there, but you need a little luck and a little skill to be able to recover it. Some things that will help you be lucky are:

• A large hard drive – having lots of space to write new information means the location of the deleted file is less likely to be over-written.
• Infrequent programs – if you information is in an area used by a program that doesn’t write many files, you will be better off.

If you can manage to have these two things in your favor, Recuva may be able to help you out.

Simple to attempt? Definitely.

Head over to the site and download Recuva. Once again, it is free, but if you use it and recover some files. Please show your gratitude by donating to those who put the time and effort into making such a great program. If you aren’t a fan of the Yahoo! toolbar, be sure to uncheck that box during install.

For most uses, Recuva includes an easy to use wizard that should recover most of the boneheaded deletions that most of us make on a day-to-day basis (mp3s, pictures) as well as the gut-wrenching accidental loss of documents after a crash of Microsoft Office or the formatting of a camera memory card.

The types of files are very well explained in the wizard:

In the next step, you are asked for a location. The main thing this will do is speed up the search and exclude files from areas of your computer that you know you don’t want to look.

The last thing you need to do is determine if you want to do a deep scan or not. It will take longer, but it will also piece together information that may otherwise go unnoticed if you do a regular scan. I would recommend a simple scan followed by the deep scan if you don’t first run through.

Now all that’s left is to see if your files are found.

The scan I ran took less than a minute, but I would imagine deep scan could take many hours. It may also depend on the size of your hard drive and the type of file you are searching for (numerous small files will take longer to scan than few large files).

The standard information given is a preview of the file plus the file name. You may notice the ‘Switch to advanced mode’ button near the top right corner.

When you click it, you are presented with a list view as well as green, yellow, and red circles. These circles are an indicator of recoverability. You can find more information on the to the right side of the window.

From this screen, you can also permanently and securely delete any files which you don’t ever want anyone to be able to recover in the future by right clicking on them. This would be very helpful if you are getting rid of your computer and you have tax documents or other personal data that you would prefer didn’t get passed around.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever accidentally deleted? Ever felt sick to your stomach when all your vacation photos vanished into thin air? Let me know in the comments.

File Hippo…

If you’ve been following The Digitante and installing every piece of software I’ve recommended along the way, you probably have over 25 new programs installed on your computer. You could probably spend one night a week trying to update all these programs to the newest version available, but that wouldn’t be The Digitante way.

Programs of all types come out with new versions which add features, increase usability, fix bugs, and increase the security of their wares. For this reason, you should try to be up-to-date at all times. Many programs have automatic updates or update checking built in, but certainly not all do.

We are going to check out File Hippo, a program that automatically updates all your installed programs, keeping track of that stuff for you.

As per usual, the first thing you need to do is head to the link above and download the file. It is super small and takes almost no time to download. The only decision you really need to make is if you want File Hippo to run when Windows starts up. Since it is a very small non-intrusive file, it probably wouldn’t hurt to run it at start up. Plus you would get up-to-date notification of new updates on the programs on your computer.

Once installation completes, File Hippo will proceed to check what you have installed. A bubble will pop up in the lower right corner. Once you click on the bubble, you will be lead to a web page that will contain your results. Here are mine:

You’ll notice it shows beta updates in addition to regular updates. Beta programs are ones that are still being tested and may crash or have other issues, but they also will have new, cutting-edge features. If you don’t want to use beta software, you can select to not show beta software, as shown below.

The only thing left to do is click the green downward pointing arrow next to each program and install the updated version.

You’ll need to excuse me now, I’ve got some software to get updated.

Do you have any annoying programs that don’t automatically update (I’m looking at you, PDFCreator)? Are you even concerned with keeping your programs up-to-date?

Anti-virus…

Over to the right side of The Digitante blog you may have seen the link to my new Facebook page. If not, you may be reading this on a feed reader like Google Reader. If so, click through to the blog and check it out.

I got a request over there for information on anti-virus (AV) software for the internet. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I struggle with how to approach it every day.

On one hand, getting a virus on your computer is very disruptive as it slows your computer down and in extreme cases, can steal your passwords to sites like your bank and your email.

On the other hand, an AV program is just one more program running on your computer, eating up memory, and slowing down on the other things you have going on.

While I’m not going to tell you exactly what to do, I will cover the basics to helping you make an informed decision.

How much should I spend?

Nothing. Plain and simple, there are plenty of free options out there so that paying for McAfee or Norton should not even be an option. Unfortunately, there seems to be a connotation that in order to be good, something must be expensive. In this case, McAfee and Norton are two of the bloatiest (yes, I just made that word up) and costliest pieces of software out there. Not only do you have to buy them, you have to continue to pay year after year. If you search the internet, you will also find stories of people having more trouble removing them than removing the viruses themselves.

Downloadable Software

The AV program I am most familiar with and have used successfully for years is Microsoft Security Essentials. Microsoft Security Essentials is extremely lightweight, running in the background, updating regularly, and providing very solid protection. It certainly won’t bog down you system like a number of other AV programs do.

Running bare

Prior to installing Panda Cloud on the media center, I actually didn’t have any AV running. This is dangerous, but for what I use that computer for, I was very careful about the sites I visited and what email I opened. Common sense will get you a long way, but it takes time and patience to get to the point of being able to go without AV. However, I wouldn’t recommend it in any case.

But I have Linux/Mac! I don’t need AV!

Wrong. Commonly you will hear people who have OS X or Ubuntu (or other Linux variant) state that they don’t need AV protection because they can’t get viruses. While Macs and Linux are fairly protected just by the nature of their programming, that doesn’t mean they can’t pass the virus on to others. If I have a Linux computer, I might get an email with a hilarious video of a cat chasing its tail and then puking, so I then pass that video on to my Windows using friends. If that hilarious video happens to have a virus planted inside of it, I’ve just infected my friend’s computer. To combat this, I recommend Mac and Linux users get ClamAV (Linux) or ClamXAV (Mac). It scans emails coming to you so you don’t pass on a bad virus to your Windows friends.

I have a virus! What do I do?

This is a more difficult question. Most viruses are “quarantined” by the AV program so they stop causing damage. If you find a file you need in the quarantine, you can release it so it will continue to work. Anything in the quarantine can be nuked so it no longer hurts your computer.

Occasionally, you will run across a virus that the scanner can’t get rid of. That is when it is time to call or email The Digitante by heading over to the About page. You can also feel free to contact me if you already scanned for viruses and you computer is still slow to respond. There may be other problems that can be taken care of to speed things up.