just an asterisk

This post will be a grouping of useful translation links.  During the last few weeks, I’ve been busy with contacts in various countries and find myself Googling “translate x into y” quite a bit. I stumbled on the table below at this link (included just incase they add further languages). The title is Translation “Bots”. You may have heard of the evil bots that control computers and send spam – Google isn’t into that. These bots are for chatting. For example, if you click on the en2ar link below, a chat window will appear and will translate what you type in English into Arabic. Sweet.

So what is a bot? It’s just software that imitates a human in some capacity (over simplification but true). A chat bot imitates someone chatting. An evil email bot, imitates someone sending evil emails. Anyway, as mentioned, the table at the bottom of this post has all the bots I could find.

For additional translation entertainment, you can hit up the standard Google Translate, which is also pretty amazing. One thing that I often do is paste a web link into the translate box and then click on the link that appears to the left. This will take you to a translated version of the site you requested! Insane!

That’s it for now – as I said, busy as heck.  Enjoy translating!

~ab

The table for your translation bot pleasure:

I hate, HATE, the new trend of ads that scream at you. I have no interest in hearing about car insurance while I’m browsing, especially when I have to scramble to mute my speakers in a crowded place. Do you think, after you’ve embarrassed me publically, that I’m going to click on your stupid ad?

I declare war.

If you read this and you’re using Chrome, install Adblock. Teach the jerks at these ad agencies that you’ll not only ignore their messages but you’ll block ALL messages going forward because of their abuse. What is Adblock? Here are some examples of how it works on Chrome (but it’s available for Firefox too).

Here is a Google search for “Super Bowl” without Adblock – notice the ads on the right.

The same search with Adblock turned on – notice the lovely blank space (you can turn off this type of blocking within Adblock’s settings).

Here is another example – the main page of the New York Times with ads and with Adblock turned off.

Here is the same with Adblock turned on.

I understand that some might find this duplicitous, taking the free content without looking at the ads that fund its existence. However, please believe that my goal isn’t to hurt anyone’s livelihood. Instead, I hope that by rejecting ads temporarily, we’ll provide a simple message to ad agencies – be creative, sway our opinion with wit and originality, not with loud ads that interrupt our browsing experience. After all, we didn’t come to the site to hear about refinancing out apartment – we just wanted the weather…

Let me know your thoughts in the comments – do you think this is cheating?

~ab

Sometimes, I forget how powerful a phone can be… The truth is this: my phone may be able to do 1 million things, but I’ll be darned if I can remember 5% of this magic when I’m under pressure. It’s like a Swiss-army knife with 100 tools – I only use the the bottle opener and the knife (incorrectly, as a screwdriver).  I don’t believe that I’m the only one in this state.  Feature overload is pretty much the norm these days.

As a result, I like to practice using features when I find them.  Some stick, becoming part of my daily routine and ritual, others fade away as simple novelty.  Knowing what your iPhone or Android phone can do is good.  Learning which features are right for you is better.

Just to give you an example, I was waiting for the wifie at the wine store and remembered Google’s photo search called “Goggles” that is part of the iPhone Google App.  Not really needing an excuse to buy wine (“google told me to”), I tried it out on a nice bottle of cabernet.

Googles Goggles (a tongue twister ain’t it?) went to work on my cab, using the image as the search query.  The result was pretty spectacular – even by the standards of the ever impressive Google.

In less than a minute, I was reading a great review of my selection and soon after SOLD.  It was a great shopping experience.  I was selected a bottle that looked about right (2 minutes), Googled it (30 seconds), learned about it (1 minute) and finished my purchase.  Not bad!  The process was fast enough that I would have happily continued to photograph bottles for a while, but the results rich enough to help me make an educated decision.  Sweet.

In closing for this rather short post, remember that the point isn’t Google’s Goggles.  The point is that my phone had a feature that was worth exploring and that a little practice was enough for me to see how I could use it in future.  That’s the key – use it and see if it’s useful to you.  If not, no sweat.  There are another 999,999 features to look into.

For the record, the wine was excellent.

~ab

When I tell someone I have an iPhone and after the unavoidable “antenna” questions, the second line of questioning is about battery life.  In the hopes that it might help someone, here is what I did yesterday on my iPhone:

6am ( 5am CST) – woke up in NYC and unplugged
1 hr music on the plane – anti-screaming baby white noise.
2 hrs in Airplane mode – reducing consumption I suppose.
1 hr talking on arrival – conference call.
20 min facetime – interactive utilities repairman visit with my wife at our apartment on her phone.
30 read emails – over the course of the morning
10 sent emails
2 photos – whiteboarding session capture
1 video (<20 sec) – simply goofing off
1 youtube clip – again, goofing off
Google Reader push all day – I read the odd article while I walk between meetings.
Exchange push all day – email is set to PUSH.
50 + text messages – Wifey and I like the chat feature.
4:30pm CST – Check point: 48% battery life.
3 app downloads – I’m still learning what is good out there…
Chatted another hour – Calls for work + personal
20 more text messages – Wifey and rental car arrangements with the team.
more emails – they just keep on comin’
9PM CST – Checkpoint: 18% battery remaining… plug in phone to sleep.

That’s not bad.  My blackberry had slightly better battery life, but I couldn’t do a few of those things… Also, it’s not like I really need to facetime every single day… Anyway, hope this helps someone decide if this is the right phone for them.  I was using it for 16 hours and still had 1/5th left to go.

Good luck in your mobile decisions.

~ab

Maybe you don’t know this, but when you search for something in Google, and then click on my blog (or any blog) and arrive here, I can see what you searched for to get here. It’s a bit strange and voyeuristic, but it helps us bloggers figure out what people actually want to read.  For example, I know that someone searched for “three asterisk microsoft word” and ended being disappointed on my site (he/she only stuck around for 30 seconds).  By way of apology, I offer the answer that this mystery person was probably looking for, along with some other weird word tricks.  In the future, you won’t even have to think it before I’ll write a post… :) Read more »

I don’t publicize my blog very much at my day job.  It’s just not really relevant to what I do for a living and frankly, I like having a strong line between work and play.  However, this is a luxury that may disappear soon (if it hasn’t already).  This past week, I read this article which demonstrated the elephant memory of the internet (and resulted in me learning something new about that expression.)  Basically, one of the contributors of DownloadSquad.com (a great blog for software) attempted to remove himself from Facebook a few months ago.  He was surprise to find that his Facebook image was still available from Google’s image search, even when his account was closed.

The truth is this:  when your picture goes out into the lovely webs of cyberspace, it’s never gone.  It might be just sitting on a shelf without a label – that is, until the technology to link you to the evidence comes along.  As an example, try Googling yourself on Google’s image search:

When I tried this, I found my photo on page 17 of the results from a site that I had never seen before.  That alone was pretty strange.  However, don’t stop there – add a piece of information about yourself that others might know (like the company you worked for last) and you might be surprised how much the field narrows.  I went from page 17 with millions of hits down to page 1 with my picture as number 2, just by adding a former job to my search.

Companies liked LinkedIn and Facebook are the source of many of these images, but there are also companies that archive older pictures from the Facebook or LinkedIn database.  For example, Radaris (which does background checks) has a copy of my LinkedIn image (how is that ok?).  Long story short, even if you remove a picture from the site you’ve signed up with, you might be too late.

There really isn’t a fix for this. The best answer is probably not to post things unless you’re sure you want the world to see it.  I know that we’ve heard this before, but the supporting evidence is rarely so easy to find.

Best of luck staying safe out there!

~ab

It’s a bit of a misnomer actually – rich text doesn’t have anything to do with riches or wealth. In fact, it’s not even the correct name, as Microsoft has sole proprietorship of the term “rich text” so our emails are technically “enriched text” (which probably would have been a better name…)

But anyway…

Here is what is really important:  Gmail has always supported signatures, but they were lame. You could write in plain text and split it into multiple lines. This all changed today when Gmail introduced “rich text” signatures, so I thought I’d walk through what you can do now.

Part 1: Rich is mostly about formatting

To see your signature, go to Settings and then the General tab. You’ll see the signature window about half-way down the page.

As you can see from my screenshot above, rich formatting gives you that toolbar that you’ve seen above your Gmail for so long. Using the simple buttons like bold, italic and underline, you can add basic flourishes. There are also font options, colors and high-lighting for your spicy new signature. One of my favorite additions is that you can insert true links into your emails.  For example, you can put a link to “my site” rather than spelling out the web address of your homepage.

Part 2: Inserting photos

Inserting photos into your signature is now much easier, although it still requires a bit of work. The first step is to click on this little button:

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be asked for a website where you’ve stored your photo. Yes, I realize that it’s a bit of a pain to have to keep the image online, but as you can see, once you have the link it is very easy to include a photo – even a very stupid one.

When you’re done typing the address, you should see the image appear in the box below the address field (as mine did above). Click OK to finish.

When you’re done with part 1 and/or part 2, don’t forget to save your work! You wouldn’t want to lose it!

Have fun with the new signatures. Feel free to brag about any cool ideas in the comments!
~ab

In truth, I get it. The idea is so simple: click a button, pay $100 for a year and receive your push mail, contacts, calendar, storage for your photos and files, plus a “find my iphone” application all in one handy interface to your computer. However, it forever irks me when I’m told about these services as if they are the only game in town. I mentioned my doubt to the Mac Store genius a few days ago and was told “yes but MobileMe is seemless and far less complicated”…

That sounded like a challenge to me, so I wrote out my alternative to MobileMe system.  I thought it would take longer, but it’s actually quite simple.  Here are my choices: Read more »

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion about what “cloud computing” really means.

“Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information, are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like the electricity grid.” (Wikipedia)

I’m a geek and the above, although well intentioned is about as easy to understand as the other buzzy language I hear on the topic.  Let’s write our own definition (in a few parts): Read more »