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 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

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

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

1.  Three asterisks (yep it’s a thing)

Open a new word document and type *** then hit enter.  Word will automatically create a dotted line across the page.  In fact, it’s just one of a few examples.  === will produce a double line.  _ _ _ will produce a single line.  ~~~ makes a jagged edge.  The ones I could find are in the image below (click to see it full size).

Why would word hide these away?  No idea. Not even a clue.  I’m not sure what industry or profession was clamoring for this feature…  Moreover, as far as I can tell, this doesn’t count as Autotext or Autocorrect.

2. Autotext allows you to finish common words or phrases simply by pressing enter.  You may have noticed that when you type “best r” on a new line, you are offered “Best regards,”.  If you press enter, Word will finish the line for you.  This also works for months (try typing “Oct”), days of the week (try “mon”) and the current date.  That, by itself, isn’t that weird.  What is kind of strange is how open the possibilities are.  You can add your own entries and they can be absolutely anything.  Here are dumb examples that I’ll probably regret adding to my dictionary:

and    

3. Autocorrect was designed to take common misspellings (a word that is itself easy to misspell)  and correct them for you.  acn becomes can.  Ammount becomes amount.  However, it does much more than just fix your mistakes.  Here are some examples:

Those are just some of the many built in examples.  However, the possibilities are endless if you create your own.  It’s relatively simple to set it up, in your options menu, you’ll see the settings.  Here is an example:

When I was a chemistry grad student, I used this feature to turn H2O into (something that is not possible on the web, hence the strange image floating above the line)…

4. Random text

This one is weird but kind of useful.  Have you ever needed some random text to fill out a space, to check a font or whatever?  Try this: type “=rand()” and press enter.

In Word for Mac, the result is this paragraph 3 times:

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

A quick side note, that phrase (the quick brown fox..) has every letter of the English alphabet…  The phrase that will print with Rand() is different in each version of word, so give it a try!

I think that about does it.  Let me know if there are any other weird word features via email: ab AT justanasterisk.com.

Enjoy,

~ab

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

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:

Push Gmail, Calendar, Contacts

Comes straight from Google for free (Mail was included back in September 2009) and here are the steps to set it up.  When you make a change to your email, calendar of contacts, the change appears almost instantly on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Photos

If you’re using Gmail, you have a Google Account. This means you have a Picasa account, even if you haven’t activated it. Just head over to picasaweb.google.com. Your storage is shared with your email (most people have about 7GB). If you need more space, it’s available for a reasonable rate (see my picasa post for more details).

Storage (iDisk)

Dropbox is a service I’ve talked about before.  It’s easy to use and it integrates with both Windows and Mac.

See the little icon with the box and the check?  i got that to replace the default MobileMe icon on my Mac with several hours of coding…  HA! Just kidding.  It was as simple as dragging the old icon off the tool bar and installing Dropbox (10 seconds).  I would love a free Mac product to store my stuff, but using Dropbox is a breeze and it’s free.

Find My iPhone

Finally a service that doesn’t have a free alternative.  You setup your MobileMe on your iPhone and the service will help you find it if you misplace it or someone steals it.  I won’t downplay how great this service is, but if it’s the only part of the MobileMe family that you can’t get for free… is it worth paying $100?  There is a similar product on the app store right now (who knows for how long) that’s called “Find my phone” which does exactly the same thing (as far as I can tell) for only $0.99.

The moral of the story

I’m not trying to be a jerk.  My new Mac has made me very, very happy.  Moreover, I’m perpetually enthused about Apple products.  My only complaint is that MobileMe is $100.  It should be free or at the very least, uber-cheap.  If that were the case, I’d convert over from my google alternatives in a heartbeat.

In short, don’t believe all the hype quite yet.  If someone is asking you to pay $100, it should probably be for something entirely unique.

Enjoy!

~ab

“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):

1.  The “cloud” is the internet – the mass of computers connected together all over the world.

2.  Often we use software on our computers (Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, ITunes, etc).  We have seen the disks to “install” these things.

3.  Sometimes, we use software on the internet (Gmail, Google Calendar, Twitter, etc).  This software is not on our computers as it’s “on the internet”.

4.  ”On the internet” means that internet applications are really on someone else’s computer (according to our definition of the internet – point 1).

Therefore, in super, super simple terms:

Cloud Computing = Making someone else’s computer do the work.

Soooooo – if cloud computing is just making someone else’s computer do the work, I try to make my computer do the minimum amount of work possible (it’s only fair).

A great example of this concept is the Chromium OS – Google’s attempt to make an operating system that’s based on “cloud software” (this would be in place of Windows or Mac OS that may be on your computer now).

Here’s a quick video to learn more…

So now you know what cloud computing is, but you might be wondering “what’s the big fuss???”  Imagine this futuristic world:

You no longer need a computer.  Everything around you has an internet connection and you can login to your website from everything (even the toaster). On your website, you have your documents, which you can edit with Microsoft Office.  However, the software for Microsoft office is also online, so there’s nothing to install… You can just open a document and start typing.  When you’re done, you click email and your email opens.  Your photos from your camera have uploaded to the site and are available to email to your friends (remember everything is connected).  You write yourself a few reminders in your task application and head off to work.  All this information is available via your phone if you need it (or the next toaster you come across).  In fact, no one cares what program you have or device you carry, because it’s all instantly and universally available.

Thus ends my reverie…  Maybe I’m biased, but to me, cloud computing is the amazing attempt to simplify our lives into a single internet presence.  It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but the steady shift of our software from our computers to the internet is the first phase. Buzz word it may be, but it’s still an awesome concept.

Not much else I can add…  Hope this has been a fun post.  Ping me with questions – ab@justansterisk.com.

Enjoy,

~ab