Coachella Trading Company - recent posts from Digital Life community

Concerned about privacy? Opt-out of Google with new Opt-Out-Village...

2009-09-30T19:17:12-07:00

In the village they can guarantee your privacy because there are no computers. If you have any questions about the opt-out village, type them up and email them to a friend. Google will get back to you within 24 hours.

From the description at YouTube:

Web users who choose to move to the desolate village are guaranteed an environment free from Google products and natural light from the sun.

Source: The Onion News Network

Open letter/song to Lily Allen regarding her stance on music piracy (why you being this silly?)

2009-09-28T15:54:44-07:00

Apart from being a fantastic “parody”, using one of Lily’s songs as the basis for this letter, Dan Bull is helping to bring to light the fact that what we call digital piracy isn’t as simple as people make it out to be.

After English recording artist, talk show host and actress, Lily Allen joined the ranks of the anti-piracy movement in England it came to light that even on the blog she started to speak out against piracy, she was in fact guilty of plagiarizing other people’s work from other websites.

This “song/email” is an upbeat and positive exploration of the other side of “piracy”.

The Matrix runs on Windows XP?

2009-09-27T19:53:54-07:00

Will you take the red pill or go for the blue screen of death?

Try hitting CTRL + ALT + DELETE!!!

Original production from CollegeHumor

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Tetris: The movie trailer

2009-09-27T19:45:37-07:00

You didn’t think those pieces turned simply by pressing a button did you? Enter the dark future that is…Tetris.

Original production from Black20 Studios .

Black20 Trailer Park Presents: Tetris – The Movie.

A brother dies. A hero is born. Get in line for adventure. Tetris is here. Created by Thomas Edward Seymour and Mike O’gorman

The opening and ending music for Tetris is by the Band “I” The songs are Fist Stick and the Golden Egg. You can find more info on slingslang.com

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Infinite Solutions: How to recharge non-rechargeable alkaline batteries

2009-09-27T17:44:19-07:00

Tired of just throwing away old batteries? This tip will show you how you can give your old batteries new life!

From the description at YouTube:

The right kind of batteries are never around when you need them. I’m Mark Erickson, and this is Infinite Solutions: Home Edition. In this episode, I’ll show you how to recharge dead batteries using other types of batteries that still carry a charge.

IMPEDANCE RATIO CORRECTION: 2AA = 3 9V

Need more help? Contact me at www.marksinfinitesolutions.com

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Infinite Solutions: How to increase your Wi-Fi Signal

2009-09-27T17:39:56-07:00

Tired of not finding a connection to an unprotected WiFi hotspot when you are out an about. Mark from Infinite Solutions shows you how to dramatically improve your Wi-Fi connection.

From the description at YouTube:

Do you need a stronger wireless signal or greater network access? I’m Mark Erickson, and this is Infinite Solutions. In this episode, I’ll show you a simple hack to extend the range of your wireless card.

Need more help? Contact me at www.marksinfinitesolutions.com

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Minesweeper: The movie trailer

2009-09-27T15:51:46-07:00

You’ve played the game on your PC. But did you ever think about the real men and women the game is based on? This shocking new film reveals the horrors and glory of real minesweepers protecting freedom everyday!

Original production from CollegeHumor.

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Infinite Solutions: How to unlock wrap-around mode in minesweeper

2009-09-27T15:41:19-07:00

Infinite Solutions:

Honestly I never truly mastered expert level and so playing this even more difficult wrap around challenge mode is beyond my abilities of reason. I’ve been watching the minesweeper FRAPS of the truly gifted mine sweeping champions and hope someday to be able to master this. Thanks for the tip Mark!

Testimonials

I just never thought minesweeper could be a challenge again without a patch or expansion pack. But it turns out that months worth of new minesweeping action was at my fingertips since Windows 95. -hoover69

I can’t get past expert level to unlocks??? Anyone have crackeds executble so’s i can make play in wraparounds? -laemon23

From the description at YouTube:

Think you’re good at Minesweeper? Is it just not challenging anymore? I’m Mark Erickson. This is Infinite Solutions. In this episode, I’ll show you how to unlock the new wraparound mode to make Minesweeper exciting again.

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The truth about getting help for your computer from your "guru friend"

2009-09-22T18:29:54-07:00

So the next time you ask your friend for help because your printer won’t install on windows vista, try this…

Between the flowchart and the example problem you now know everything you need to know to become a “computer guru”.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet comic courtesy of XKCD: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License

Add-ons coming for Google Chrome (soon?)

2009-09-13T16:15:09-07:00

I’ve been saying for a while, despite being an ardent fan of Firefox, Google Chrome is amazing but missing extension support is a deal breaker. Google Chrome is fast, runs smoothly, and feels good. Not to mention the improved use of screen real estate that caused me to make my Firefox look like Chrome. But I can’t live without Firebug or AdBlock+.

At the web 2.0 expo (September 2008) Google engineer Ojan Vafai stated during a panel roundtable that Chrome would indeed support extensions (add-ons). He expressed concerns about stability throwing jabs at Firefox and Internet Explorer.

However, Google Chrome is now 1 year old and it looks like add-ons might be just over the horizon. Earlier this week Google turned on extension support in Chrome for development releases of the browser. This means that anyone who wants to develop extensions can download the “test” version of Google Chrome if you will, and start developing/porting their own add-ons (AdBlock+ anyone?).

From the Chromium development blog:

Good news for extension developers: as of today, extensions are turned on by default on Google Chrome’s dev channel…We’ve been working on enabling extensions for a while, but until now, they were hidden behind a developer flag…Removing the flag is the first step in our launch process, and it means we’re ready for a few more people to start using extensions, the kind of adventurous people who populate the dev channel…Going forward, we are working hard towards a release on the Beta Channel.

And if the developers are building programming add-ons for Chrome, it can’t be long before the stable release (public download) of Chrome is able to use them.

Here’s to hoping.

Must-have add-ons for Firefox…and why my browser looks like Google Chrome!

2009-04-10T14:02:30-07:00

I no longer spend a lot of time customizing my computer and applications. Sure when I first install a computer I will adjust some minor appearance items and do a few optimizations. Unlike my early computer days when I would spend hours (sometimes days of aggregate hours over the course of weeks) tweaking every little thing until no one else but me could use the computer. But over the years it actually started to feel more efficient to use as much standard with software as possible. After your 100th Windows install (that’s a whole other story), and countless other software upgrades and new applications, tweaking every menu and keyboard shortcut stops making sense.

Then, years ago now, add-ons for Firefox (back when it was still called Firebird) entered my life. The wonderfully utilitarian and functional Firefox could be tweaked and bent to my will, creating a browser beyond a browser, a browser that could wash your car, make pizza, and practically do your taxes; making everything so much easier and hassle-free. Like my first computer I tweaked and contorted Firefox until it was unrecognizable and sometimes wouldn’t even load. Over time the excitement waned and my Firefox add-ons were pared down to a minimal set of must-haves and I ceased even checking for new add-ons unless recommended by a friend or colleague.

While stumbling the internet (StumbleUpon being a must-have add-on) I came across an article that proclaimed Firefox already dead due to the release of Google’s Chrome and even IE 8’s new found stability and supposedly useful feature set. While I loved the layout and new features that Chrome offered I did not find it as marvelous and crash-proof as so many had claimed. But the real deal breaker was the lack of add-ons.

Thanks to Adblock Plus the internet is actually a pleasant useful tool and a joy to use. I often forget there is such a thing as flashing banner animations. Only recently was I reminded of how amazing Adblock Plus was when I debated a friend on why he would want to develop his own player and stream his own videos when he could just host them at YouTube and forget about the bandwidth. He argued some aesthetic and functional issues, but his primary argument were the ads. Like a noob I had no idea that YouTube and many other online video services were now serving in-video ads. Adblock is so good that it even blocks those.

If for this reason alone Firefox is far from dead. It could be threatened by Chrome if Google creates an add-on system, but I am sure they are suffering great consternation what to do about the Adblock Plus. It wouldn’t surprise me if they are ready for add-ons but don’t want anyone blocking their own ads so are debating in their awesome building what to do.

At any rate, one of the things I preferred about Chrome was it’s intelligent use of screen space. Chrome essentially kills the title bar, putting the tab bar in it’s place, and then has only one toolbar for navigation by default. With a whimsical hope that someone had created a ‘Chrome’ add-on for Firefox I headed over to the Mozilla Add-ons site. Long story short, my Firefox now basically looks like Chrome, and I have gained valuable screen real estate for the one thing that is most important in a browser: viewing web pages.

So having wasted several hours last night after again bending Firefox to my will and trying out so many add-ons (and even the new Firefox Beta 3.1b3) generally rendering my browser near useless in the futile attempt to make my online life more efficient, and then uninstalling most of them, I share with you my current list of must have add-ons (and some other add-ons I am trying out to see if they help me in anyway).

My must have add-ons for Firefox

Let me start by saying that a must-have add-on is generally utile. A must have add-on isn’t eye candy (though should look good if it has a UI beyond a context menu) and is something you pretty much need to do what you do efficiently with joy in your heart. These must-have add-ons fit fill that gaping hole in my digital life.

AdBlock Plus

As mentioned already, Adblock Plus actually makes the internet usable. Without it you might as well be walking through Times Square or downtown Tokyo with only one earbud in blaring random snippets of noise from your iPod, with a kaleidescope up to one eye with your right hand tied to your left with a very short rope while attempting to read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. And that’s just when you are trying to read a news article.

AdBlock Plus is a painless add-on once installed essentially eliminates every trace of ads from the internet. With it’s subscription service you don’t even have to spend any time configuring it. With wildcard and regular expression support you can easily customize the functionality to suit your needs.

With AdBlock Plus the internet is information and entertainment. Without it you are in the Eighth Circle of Hell for sins involving conscious fraud and treachery. Of course I suppose I might feel different as my own company expands it’s marketing, but I’ll deal with that hypocrisy and schizophrenia as it comes up.

Without AdBlock Plus there is no other browser worth using. Say what you want about speed, stability, memory leaks, security holes (IE not Firefox), but if I am offered to ‘hit the monkey’ one more time I’m headed to the bell tower.

StumbleUpon

I am a stumbler. I have been stumbling for over 2 years, stumbled 6,720 items, liked 1,723 of them, and disliked 45. Everything else were simply shades of gray that do not exist in my world. In fact I love StumbleUpon so much because it fit my pre-existing pseudo-quantum rating system: So-Good, No-Good, and everything else is probably just fine but neither great or suck.

If you are unfamiliar with StumbleUpon, it is like a social bookmarking service meets TIVO. You view a web page. You click a button to say you ‘like it’ or ‘not for me’. If you are the first person to like/dislike a page you can write a review.

But the real joy and power of StumbleUpon comes from the ‘Stumble!’ button. Click the ‘Stumble!’ button and a web page (article, video, picture, news) is randomly selected based on interests you have indicated in your profile. With each stumble and each review you make, the ‘Stumble!’ button becomes less and less random matching sites you have liked/disliked with others who have liked/disliked similar items with similar interests, until you begin to wonder if you even need a search engine at all. Then you remember you have work to do.

StumbleUpon has replaced television in my life. There is a world of information and interest that just drops into your lap when you start using it. This is not necessarily a productive tool, but StumbleUpon is a utility for the enrichment of your soul, and as such, despite the hours that will vanish while stumbling, will enrich every part of your life and continued development as a happy healthy human being.

_While it is possible to use StumbleUpon without the add-on toolbar, that implementation is crude and not nearly as fun or seamless, making it less than viable for Chrome and other browsers.

Web Developer toolbar

Endless tools indispensable tools for the web developer. Selectively disable/modify/create/test styles, scripts, images, cookies, meta redirects, referrers, pop-up blockers, and more. Form tools. Acquire path, size, meta, and structure data. Create preset browser sizes. Validate. Show and hide content on demand.

This tool is exactly what it says it is. This is the swiss army knife of web developer tools (but no toothpick to lose!). Whether you are troubleshooting an existing site or testing new development, you need the Web Developer toolbar.

Chrome offers some useful web developer tools built-in but nothing that fulfills the functionality of the Web Developer toolbar.

Firebug

Where the Web Developer toolbar is a multi-tool for testing, Firebug is a surgical medkit for web development.

Dig in deep with Firebug. Inspect the DOM. Inspect source code with visual selection of elements. View styles and block level dimensions. See not just the styles in use, but the styles that have been ignored in precedence. Check status, size, and download time of page elements. Decent javascript console. Edit styles in real-time.

There are even add-ons for this add-on. Add coding reference materials. Manage cookies. Overlay design docs to compare pixel-perfect layout. Log PHP, JSON, and XML. Get more benchmarking for javascript. Use YSlow to test your site against Yahoo rules for high performance web sites. Drupal specific debugging and logging.

While there may be more tools out there that I would find useful, between the Web Developer toolbar and Firebug almost every development and troubleshooting need I have ever had had been covered.

Chrome admittedly has an amazing developer toolset ready-to-go. The built-in inspector is fabulous offering much of Firebugs functionality. But this also would be an example of a feature that maybe should be an add-on. Trust me, most people I know will never understand what the developer menu items are for, and would likely be happier (even if they don’t know it) if that little bit of menu clutter didn’t exist in their world. So despite an excellent implementation in Chrome, it could also be considered it’s own argument for add-ons.

SEOpen toolbar

I would describe myself as only mildly obsessed with SEO. Well, I am obsessed, but temper it with a commitment of making good content over gaming the system. As such the SEOpen toolbar suits my needs at this time just fine.

With the SEOpen toolbar I can quickly check backlinks, page rank, indexed pages, Alexa information, and other quicklinks for checking keyword density, analyzing links, robots.txt, waybackmachine archives, and quick Whois lookups.

There are many sites I use for other SEO and marketing research, but this is the only toolbar.

Chrome and other browsers lacking add-ons simply can’t compete with this kind of tailor made experience. This would be a great example of how I don’t want my browser to ship bloated with features I may never use, but I honestly don’t mind bloating my applications myself, sacrificing initial app load time, and even sometimes per page load time, if the convenience factor is increased by orders of magnitude with useful tools such as these.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer

Yeah I’m old school, but I kinda like just having an old fashioned bookmark file, but synced between all my computers. I’ve tried del.ico.us and even just signed up for Twine on a recommendation at Twitter from Mvellandi but I just haven’t gotten any of these into my workflow. Social bookmarking (besides StumbleUpon) has generally seemed like more work than it was worth. I mean really, how will it look professionally if I accidentally publicly share my midget transvestite porn links?

Foxmarks is simple and seamless. Create a Foxmarks account, install the toolbar on any Firefox install you want to sync your bookmarks with, and you now have all your bookmarks where you want them. You can even access them online from any browser at the Foxmarks site.

I’m going to give Twine a try, but the del.ico.us toolbar was so clunky and clumsy I probably won’t go back again. And unless a social bookmarking site is so easy and useful it doesn’t need an integrated toolbar/button I just won’t work in my daily routine.

With Chrome or Safari, browsers I enjoy using for aesthetics and some functionality, it is like going back 10 years in convenience features such as syncronizing bookmarks. I am big on being able to seamlessly integrate my digital life across platforms. Only Firefox and amazing add-on developers consistantly deliver that necessity on my desktop.

Google Gears

This is more of a utilitarian plug-in than an add-on feature, but if you want to use Google Apps offline it is a necessity. Open source synchronizing tool to let web applications interact naturally with your desktop, store web data locally, and run javascript in the background (among other things I’m sure).

While not just for Google apps, if you use gmail or google docs, this is a must have.

Of course this runs in Chrome (and Safari and so many others) but is nonetheless a must-have Firefox add-on.

Google Gears home

All-in-One Gestures

All-in-One Gestures allows you use mouse movements to control your browser. Hold down the right-click button and flick the mouse to the left and you go back a web page. Same thing but flick right and you go forward. Move the mouse up and down refreshes the page, up down up down forces a refresh from the server. So many other features, but you get the gist. Fully customizable to suit your needs.

This add-on comes and goes in my life. It so useful, but thanks to 100 button pointing devices, and generally improved website and browser navigation overall it is sometimes a superfluous feature. I only reinstalled it last night and asked myself immediately how I used the internet without it (I never remember what all 100 buttons on my mouse do).

From what I can tell there are various ways to implement mouse gestures in all the browsers, but they don’t have AdBlock Plus, so All-in-One Gestures it is! There are even many mouse gesture add-ons for Firefox alone, but All-in-One by Marc Boullet has always worked great and I believe in loyalty.

Nightly Tester Tools

As much of a Firefox evangelist as I am, I haven’t been much of a beta tester for them. While periodically checking out beta releases, I have contributed little to the project (again we’ll deal with those hypocrisy issues at a later date). Thus I really only have this add-on for the ability to override add-on compatibility between versions.

United States English Spellchecking Dictionary

It’s a dictionary. I like words. I like spell checking. Sometimes I even like prescriptive grammar. Not always do I use any of them well. Sometimes this add-on helps.

It is an open source word list created from the original word list by Keven Atkinson for Pspell and Aspell as well as the affix file modified from the original english.aff file as part of Geoff Kuenning’s Ispell.

New Firefox add-ons I’m already lovin’

Some of these I just installed last night, some I have been playing with a for a few months, but these are most likely going to make it to my must-have (or at least remain on the really lovin’) list.

Chromin Frame

Of course this add-on is what created this entire article. I wanted the increased screen space and tab style of Chrome with the convenience of Firefox. Chromin Frame is the only ‘Chrome-itizing’ add-on/theme that actually seemed to work and worked with my current version of Firefox (3.07).

Though I have installed the Firefox 3.1b3 to try out a new add-on theme called Chromifox Extreme which looks more like the real deal styling everything to get that Chromium look and increased viewable screen space. Even better Chromifox Extreme is already released in several colors and I can’t wait for Chromifox Extreme Carbon. I don’t really like the blue of Google Chrome. I want my apps to be some shade of gray and the content of my apps to provide the color. Anything else seems distracting.

Chromin Frame isn’t perfect but the default blue frame and tabs flow nicely with my native app color scheme. If you like the look of Chrome but want Firefox, get Chromin Frame. Oh wait, I just noticed the recommended complimentary add-ons to Chromin Frame to give Firefox near complete Google Chromiumized functionality. I just installed the Chromin Fox theme and AutoHideStatusBar. Now it is truly seamless in appearance I can finally hide the status bar without losing access to my status bar add-ons. Good golly this is a good day (geak alert).

Download Chromin Frame from Mozilla Add-ons

NoScript

Honestly without javascript the internet would be a useless pile of literary and visual detritus rendering the human experience as so much non-linear balderdash. With javascript the internet is a fluid application and interactive experience of human accomplishment and universal wonders that sometimes crashes your browser and is used to steal your life by the less than scrupulous.

I installed it in part to find out how it worked and what the internet was like without javascript, but mainly, despite not being an overly paranoid person, the thought of being clickjacked terrifies me far more than the thought of someone hacking my studio router and getting on my personal computers (perhaps not rational but true). NoScript is recommended as ideal perfection for clickjacking so I thought what the heck.

Clickjacking is a malicious technique of tricking web users into revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages. A vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms, a clickjacking takes the form of embedded code or script that can execute without the user’s knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another function. -Wikipedia

Since installing it last night I both hate and love it already. Unlike AdBlock Plus it is much more time consuming to configure. Even now I am looking at the wikipedia page and see the NoScript yellow alert bar across the top of my newly increased screen space requesting my attention. Yes, allow wikipedia.org. Yes, allow wikimedia.org. And now I can “forever” browse wikipedia free of NoScript warnings, and reasonably safe from a clickjack attempt (because we know so many clickjack attempts happen at the wiki-actually that would be smart, as a lot of people probably use the same username/password authorization information across all their accounts, who would suspect?).

If NoScript had more built-in features and generally-trusted-included white list functionality like AdBlock Plus this just might have wowed me to no end. Where AdBlock Plus prevents me from seeing ads, NoScript allows me to at least put a small dent in the nefarious privacy exploits many companies utilize to destroy society with their shameless marketing techniques. NoScript allows you to easily subvert and block trackers from companies you may not prefer were keeping tabs on you.

Unfortunately I’ve already noticed that some sites I use regularly that were perfectly ad-free and rendered beautifully with AdBlock Plus alone appear less perfect with both running in tandem. Dictionary.com is a good example. Where I had dictionary.com dialed in as the cleanest slickest basic reference site, now half of sidebars are randomly appearing and some content that I thought was blocked might not be, and worse, there might be content that I actually want to see being blocked.

I will continue to sue NoScript for at least the next week before passing judgment. But as a regular Stumbler, the constant popping up of the NoScript alert bar might make me crazy as I might look at dozen’s of obscure sites a night, and I’m not sure having to hand approve all of them is going to fit my quiet seamless integration practices. But if I get rid of it will I be able to sleep at night wondering if I were clickjacked logging into my midget transvestite porn sites?

The other thing working against NoScript is their logo. That banned “S” looks like a Strong Bad Drawing for a detergent or something during the 80’s. Of course I don’t require as much style from a utilitarian product. And it’s free so who am I to complain?

TwitterFox

I’ve been using this for a couple of months now, but honestly until I got my Blackberry Storm a week or so ago, my participation on my various social networks was non-existent. Since then though, I have been posting semi-regularly and managed to get Trader Dan posting as well. However, I rarely post directly to the various sites I belong to. Typically I only visit Facebook or Twitter directly when I get an alert about something that requires me to go visit. Otherwise I’ve been using various tools to track and participate on many social networks at once. Admittedly I’m still getting into the swing of things, but I’m enjoying my intermittent social butterfly status around the internet. However, I use Ping.fm for most of postings and thus only use TwitterFox as one of my tools to keep up with the haps without having to invest too much time jumping from social network to social network.

I really like TwitterFox because I follow various politicians, the UN Secretary General, and NASA among others and it is fun to see the shenanigans pop up in my status bar periodically. But because of tools like TwitterFox I am able to still get in and get personal having discussions and exchanges with folks without it being too much a time waster, while still using Ping.fm for my general posts about me and my adventures.

TwitterFox sits in you FireFox status bar always ready for you to toss off a random thought (tweet) or two into the twittersphere. And when someone you are following tweets it pops up in a little box for a few seconds for you to read if you wish and then quietly and pleasantly vanishes. But you can always click the icon and bring up the entire public timeline to catchup. Twitterfox also allows two or more accounts to be setup and followed simultaneously so you can easily watch personal and professional twitter accounts at the same time and with one click you post to either instantly. Very cool and well executed.

I would call this a must-have add-on but unfortunately I’m not sure yet if social network activity is considered a must-do activity. But we’ll see. Thanks to my Blackberry and these social networks I’ve been interacting with folks I had lost touch with ages ago. Pretty neat, so let’s call it a must-probably-have-it.

What would be really swell is the same exact functionality of TwitterFox for the Facebook wall, MySpace comments and status updates, Bright Kite, Plurk, and so on. I have friends who swear by one social network and hate another. If I had some single (or near single interface like a personally bloated browser) to actively participate in all I would be a lot more inclined to get involved.

PingFire

I’ve been using Ping.fm for a while but just discovered PingFire yesterday.

Ping.fm is a web service for updating multiple social networks and blogs in a single interface. You setup an account at Ping.fm, configure all your social networks and blogs, and from a single text box you can submit blog entries, update status, and send micro-blogs. Very convenient, very well implemented. Ingenious really. This service alone, even without browser add-on, is completely functional.

Ping.fm let’s you post through their online interface or via SMS and email, and even through various devoted apps for your desktop, laptop, and mobile devices. I have my Ping.fm account in my Blackberry address book and instead of just tweeting or updating my wall, I can update them all with the more banal aspects of my life.

Now with PingFire I have the convenience of posting tweets like TwitterFox but to my entire Social Empire!

However I recognize the possibility of such power to be exploited by the nefarious, polluting dozens of sites and thousands of accounts with useless spam-filled garbage. In fact I am so aware of it that I have questioned even using the service as it does separate you somewhat from the actual communities you are posting to. This is exactly why I continue to use TwitterFox and am seeking out more tools to respond personally across many social networks. I mean really I have a ton of friends who use MySpace, which I loathe, but I would still like to interact with them. But I’m not going to login to MySpace every hour to see what is going on. But if I could post through Ping.fm and get direct alerts on my phone and in Firefox when someone responds I will happily participate directly in those communities.

Right now I try to login at least once a week in every social service I am “participating” in to mitigate the impersonal aspects of using Ping.fm.

That said, Ping.fm and PingFire get a tentative must-probably-have-and-I-currently-love-them rating if only because of the possiblity that this service could be exploited and ruin the quality of the communities they are contributing to. So get them and check them out. Just don’t be a dirty whore spammer!

Copy Link Name

How is this not part of the Firefox build? Right-click on a link, copy the anchor text (not the link location/uri or the entire anchor tag, just the anchor text).

Of the least dramatic and most mind-numbing things I do with CoTradeCo is enter products into the online store. Because CoTradeCo is committed to a higher level of service in all things, we do our best to provide more information in our store. You can buy a lot of the products we sell at competitive prices, but most sites offer the manufacturers stock bullet list of features and one or two pictures. Trader Dan insists that go farther whenever we can, offering a ton of high quality useful information and even supplemental related resources. And let me tell you that’s not as easy or fun as it sounds (oh wait that doesn’t sound easy or fun :).

So I often have a hundred tabs open across the internet, vendor sites, distributor logins, ftp sites, and even competitors sites all to write the best most useful production description and specs possible (of course this process takes so long that only 1 in 10 products typically gets that much love ;). In all that research there is a lot of copy/paste action happening getting product names and product numbers and so on. But selecting text in links can be a pain in the ass. Click to close and you’ve gone to the link instead of selecting the text. With this simple context menu add-on, no selecting required, just right-click, copy anchor text. Love it!

This is a must-have add-on for anybody who does a lot of online research.

FoxTab

Okay, this is mostly eye candy. Strangely functional, but eye candy nonetheless.

As you might have already read above I often use a lot of tabs while browsing. So many that they often don’t fit on the screen. The scroll tabs buttons work pretty well and are only mildly annoying. The show all open tabs drop down is pretty functional, but not all website titles are created equal making choosing the exact right tab from multiple on the same domain difficult at times.

Well FoxTab might be my answer. Hit CTRL-Q and all of your tabs appear in a full screen array of visual thumbnails. See the one you want, click it, and you’ve got your tab.

The array of visual layouts include several scrolling thumbnails and a couple of grid layouts. The scrolling thumbnails are fun to just twirl your mouse scroll wheel with and just watch the pages zoom by. But the scrolling thumbnails, while visually mesmerizing, are about as functional as just using the built-in tab scroll buttons.

The grid layouts on the other hand actually make this a visual appealing (though less exciting) way of switching tabs that is still strangely functional. One of the grid layouts at least bends the thumbnail grid in a shallow concave circle making it nicer to look at than a simple grid of colorful rectangles. The background is black and it’s all glossy web 2.0 so it has a pleasant slick look that will probably look outdated in the next year.

The best part is that is shows all tabs across all open windows. This is it’s big selling point for me as I will have a browser on screen for doing research along with my text editor and another on the other screen for making immediate changes to the admin on our sites along with Photoshop and some other tools. Now I can call up FoxTab and get to one of dozens of tabs in any browser I have open. Very nice.

The only problem with apps like this for me is building the proprioception and habit of hitting CTRL-Q when I want to switch tabs. Also since it doesn’t show the page titles at all (at least I couldn’t find the option) it becomes a purely visual scan and with too many tabs open the thumbnails could get pretty small (and even most Mac users will admit that sometimes the open doc icons can be pretty useless). However, the creators obviously thought this through as you can customize all the grid layouts to control how many get shown, whether the thumbnails should be a fixed size or scale based on quantity, and many other features that allow you to make it work for you.

So FoxTab is currently in the trying-it-out-want-to-love-it-but-might-never-use-it-but-it-looks-cool-and-you-should-try-it category.

Download FoxTab from Mozilla Add-ons

Menu Mod

When you are on the quest to eliminate every menu bar and maximize screen space it is pretty annoying that the menu bar cannot easily be hidden be default in Firefox. Menu Mod fixed all that.

Super simple: Hides the menu under a menu that reads ‘Menus’. Click it and the rest of the normal menu items (file, edit, view, etc…) flyout. Hit F2 and the whole menu appears like normal and again it is gone entirely. I have so compacted my menu with this whole Chromium obsession though that now every button and every toolbar I use are all contained within the menubar and hitting F2 actually makes my browser like a kiosk. Oh but the screen space I have gained, and it is how do I say, “Strangely functional.” I have one toolbar to rule them all!

Love it mostly. The only thing I miss is easy access to my bookmarks, but getting used to opening the bookmark sidebar has been no problem. Everything else I pretty much did through shortcuts, mouse gestures, or some other add-on already ;)

Sick of the menu eating up screen space? Get Menu Mod.

This is the one thing I love about Google Chrome and hopefully Firefox will take note and adapt some of the better features. But in the meantime I thank my lucky stars for add-ons. The creator of Chromin Frame recommended the Personal Menu add-on to accomplish something similar, but I found Menu Mod first and it’s working out just fine.

Update: I couldn’t help it and I tried the recommended Personal Menu add-on and it kicks butt. Menu Mod was utilitarian and fulfilled my minimum requirements, but Personal Menu blew me away with the ability for advanced customization with multiple menus, custom buttons with more custom menus, and so on. Besides Personal Menu has the cool icons, and cool icons win over boring text menu items any day (as long as you can tell what the icon is ;). However, Personal Menu could actually be overwhelming for the novice making Menu Mod a better choice in those instances. But now thanks to Personal Menu I actually have one toolbar with everything I need a click away (occasionally two or three but that is rare and so is my need for that damn button :).

AutoHideStatusBar

As I mentioned above I discovered this little gem of an add-on while researching this article. I wanted to maximize screen real estate, but many of my most useful add-ons run and are accessed through the status bar, so turning it off was unthinkable.

AutoHideStatusBar to the rescue. I don’t use the Windows autohide task bar feature, because, well, it blows. Try using Photoshop with autohide taskbar on and you’ll know what I mean. But I wish the autohide task bar worked as well as AutoHideStatusBar does (I love uncluttered screens if you hadn’t noticed).

AutoHideStatusBar is so simply and perfectly customizable that it appears exactly as I imagined it should within a 30 seconds a couple of minor settings changes.

In my case I want it to appear instantly any time I mouse over a link and within a split second of when my mouse gets within 30 or so pixels of the bottom of the browser. But most importantly not to pop up every time I move my mouse over, around, or near it on my way to click on something else. The best part is that it just quietly pops up without affecting the page rendering or rescrolling or any other garbage. Just up comes the informative and useful status bar and just as faithfully returns to hiding until I call upon it again.

Done, perfect. You must get this.

_I would also note and thank the developer of Chromin Frame for listing the other add-on mods, such as AutoHideStatusBar, that perfect my current Google Chromitosus addiction. _

Just installed and on the fence about

I literally installed dozens of add-ons that I immediately uninstalled. The following add-ons are getting a further try out but are currently on the short list, not because they don’t seem good but I’m questioning whether their bloat qualifies as a must-have, and in a world of so-good, no-good, there is no in between.

Colorzilla

This is fantastic. I have often wanted to use an eyedropper while I’m in Photoshop in one screen and sample a color in my browser on the other. Colorzilla offers that and a lot more (well not integrated with Photoshop or anything but still…).

Whip out the eyedropper and instantly get the RGB, HEX, HEX with the # sign, and more. Save it to a favorites palette. Heck, it will even let you open Firebug directly and take you to the element where that color was found (even if it is in a background image).

And of course you have the palette browser and color picker tool. But the coolest feature is the Web Dom Color Analyzer which searches the dom and builds a color palette of the current web page (though this does not include the option to analyze the images on the page, just the colors referenced in the DOM).

Absolutely amazing. Even playing with it while writing this I am wondering why this isn’t in my must-have list. But the fact is despite it’s amazing coolness, I may only need it a few times a month. Even I have limits on how bloated I will customize my browser. So the question will become in the next month whether this is more of a novelty than a standard tool I need? I suppose I could disable it if I don’t think I will need it for a while, but I’m not convinced that this offers too much benefit. There are online services for this kind of tool that might make more sense for my intermittent needs.

However, if you have color issues to work with everyday that even remotely involve web development, you probably must-have this. Works great, and it’s just fun as hell looking at the color palette for all sorts of websites. As for me, time will tell if Colorzilla gets a so-good AND a regularly needed vote to make it a must-have for me. A big selling point would have been if it could import and export Photoshop palettes, but those damned hippy open source people are all Gimp compatible :)

Dust-Me Selectors

Dust-Me Selectors claims to generate a list of unused CSS selectors to help with cleaning up your site and style sheets. I love the idea of this, but I question if I need it as a daily add-on. This definitely seems like a candidate for it’s own application (web or desktop doesn’t matter), maybe even a suite of tools for this kind of maintenance. CoTradeCo is barely a year old and already the site is so large, with some data coming from the database, some coming from the views, some coming from static html pages I hide where Scragz can yell at me later about (just kidding Scragz).

If this tool works it could be a godsend for cleaning up our small library of stylesheets. I have yet to actual get any conclusive evidence that this works (but more likely I haven’t figured out how it works). Though I’d kinda hoped it would be uber-intuitive and fast, but it seems like it needs some training.

However, it remains on the still-trying-it-out list.

Obtrusive Javascript Checker

My interest in this add-on is the same as the Dust-Me Selectors. Much to the chagrin of Scragz, I am guilty of lazy/hasty css throwing inline styles and javascript for the sake of moving quickly to other more serious matters. However that almost always comes back to haunt me when attempting more major stylistic or functional upgrades.

The Obtrusive Javascript Checker quickly (really is quick and it made me happy) will show you how many inline styles and javascript events you have, highlighting each one in the browser window. No complaints about this, in fact it is quite excellent in it’s presentation and functionality. But as a must-have I’m not sure. Since I don’t do regular third party design anymore, I just need this every month or so to check up on myself.

However, if Dust-Me Selectors and Obtrusive Javascript Checker ended up as a suite of web tools or a desktop application, I would be the happiest fellow ever.

If you on the other hand are working on client projects everday, this add-on probably should be on your must-have list.

Installed these add-ons but haven’t tried them yet

The following add-ons looked promising so I thought I would give them a try. But they are so specific in functionality, or involved, that I have yet to use them to give them a proper review. Though I thought I would share them in the spirit of the customizing frenzy my Chromitosus caused.

iMacros

Macros for Firefox. I’m really excited about this, though wondering if I might need a full desktop macro program once I try this out.

Every day I sit down to work I have a specific set of websites and applications I open depending on what I will be working on that day. Most commonly I open my Gmail, Google Analytics, and CoTradeCo at the bare minimum. I am hoping iMacros will enable me to create sets of pages to open and log me into so I can get straight to it. Or at least sit and marvel at my computer doing stuff without me doing anything while I drink my coffee and stare bleary eyed.

Dafizilla Table2Clipboard

In theory let’s you copy formatted tables from the browser and paste them either into a spreadsheet program or even directly into a text editor with predefined delimiters. Pretty handy if it works. I will get back to you.

Regular Expressions Tester

It’s a regular expression tester. It tests regular expressions. I am sure it will be great but unlikley this will become a must-have for me. I’m not a regular regular expression kind of guy, but it does come up. Mostly likely will stick to web based testers or the regular expression builder app I have for the desktop.

So what add-ons do you use? What do you think about the return of the browser wars? Drop a comment or visit/friend/follow/subscribe at my some of my social networks:

You might also be interested in:

Convert a web page to a PDF

2009-04-10T13:48:11-07:00

Ever needed to convert a web page to a PDF? Well html-pdf-converter.com does just that simple and free, without any registration required.

While it may not come up often, it does come up. Maybe you want to an archive copy of a page. Maybe you wanted to follow-up with a customer or colleague and want them to have a copy on hand of an important web page.

Sending a link to a page doesn’t guarantee that the information will be the same on a future visit, or that the page will exist at all. And if you wanted to email that page to someone saving a whole web page to your hard drive, zipping up all the files (html and images), and attaching it to an email can be a cumbersome process and doesn’t always work as well as you’d hoped.

While not a common tool, the html to pdf converter might be just what you need from time to time, and it’s smart to use the right tool for the job. And this single purpose tool does a good job. It renders most pages with decent accuracy, but more imporantly it makes all hyperlinks on the page clickable in the PDF.

I liked it for the ability to archive old pages for later comparison, portfolios, and simple nostalgia.

More PDF converters from the same folks

This free service is a promotional service for BaltSoft’s freepdfconvert.com where they offer a variety of other PDF converters such as MS Office to PDF and even cooler, PDF to Excel. I haven’t tried all their converters, but I thought that the html to pdf site was useful enough to share with you here.

Happy PDFing…

LED concrete display by Innovation Lab

2009-02-14T12:31:58-08:00

In an age where smaller and thinner is better it feels anachronistic to build a computer display from concrete but that is exactly what this is.

This nifty invention is from a Denmark company called innovationlab . Unfortunately their english website does not appear to be complete so I was not able to find out any more information about this fascinating device.

While I couldn’t find info on the concrete display at the innovationlab site, engadget had a blog post entitled Innovation Lab busts out pixel-infused concrete display where they said:

This rock-hard display consists of not-so-average concrete with “embedded optical fibers, arranged as pixels, capable of transmitting natural as well as artificial light.” When light is projected from the rear, the pixels illuminate to display imagery, which could certainly transform a vanilla office building into an ad-filled poster board. While we’re not sure when we can expect these things to start popping up around here, Innovation Lab claims that orders are already backing up

This would be a fantastic display to have outdoors to spice up a garden, city streets, or even as a placard for a building displaying a logo or other simple images.

So simple and elegant.

Swoopo and BidsTick...is the 'new online auction' a big sham?

2009-02-09T00:19:08-08:00

This article is about telling you how to get $1000 electronics and other products for pennies on the dollar and then to explain why it’s a big sham you should avoid at all costs (unless you like playing the lottery).

We’ve all heard of eBay. Online auctions are fun and exciting. Some folks even manage to make a living buying and selling through similar online auctions. Ordinary people and businesses post items to be auctioned off. Sometimes they set a reserve price that must be met, but for the most part the auction is timed and whoever has the highest bid when the clock runs out wins the auction.

Now I understand this is different than a traditional “live” auction. In a “live” auction for antiques or cattle there is a speed talking barker managing the bidding process, keeping it exciting with his slick talk and constant reset of the clock, “Going Once, going twice…$300 to the man in black in the back…Do I hear $325? DO I hear it…”

Today I discovered a whole new kind of online auction and I immediately sensed something wrong with it.

Enter BidStick and Swoopo. On the surface it looks like the excitement of a live auction. With every bid placed on an item the “tick” clock is reset and more people get to jump in on the action. It all sounds fun and exciting with the chance to get outrageously good deals on electronics and a variety of fantastic items.

It only gets better. Did I mention that most of the auctions are only 1 cent bids? That’s right, the price only goes up a penny with every bid. So when I say outrageously good deals, I am talking about a $1140 Nikon D90 DSLR camera with the 18-105mm lens package for $41.62. Or how about a normally priced $500 plus Samsung SGH-i900 Omnia phone for only $16.66. But that’s just the beginning. Folks are winning auctions for things like Bose In-Ear Headphones that retail at $100 for a measly $1.14.

That’s incredible! Who can beat those prices? Nobody!

When good auctions go bad

So what’s the problem right? How can saving up to 99% on things you want and need be a bad thing? Well the problem starts with how the whole thing works.

You are only bidding a penny more each time you hit the ‘bid’ button. However, you have to buy those bids for anywhere between $0.75 cents and $1 dollar. So even though you only raise the bid by a penny, each bid actually costs you $1.01. You bought the right to bid a penny for $1 dollar.

Okay even still, where’s the problem. Even if you bid 50 times on the Nikon camera mentioned above (retail $1140) I’m only spending $50.50. That’s a fantastic deal, that is how do you say, too good to be true.

Except it isn’t too good to be true. If you win the auction you just got yourself a deal that is by any measurement a phenomenal deal. But that is assuming this is the only auction you bid on. That you hadn’t tried and failed at 10 other auctions that you blew $50 bucks each on. But hey that is still only a net cost of around $550 for a camera package that you couldn’t buy outright for under a $1000.

Oh wait, but there are ten, or a hundred, or thousands of other people doing the same thing, some of them never winning an auction ever. And that’s the rub. If you win the auction, you just made out like a bandit, because that’s what you and the creators of these new online auction sites are, dirty ugly theives in the night.

The real price

It’s an incredible deal for the winners because, the losers of every auction are generously buying the item for you in a twisted capitalist version of ‘pay-it-forward’. Of course I might also be inclined to think of it as pyramid scheme. You give me $100 and then get 10 other people to give you $100 and you just made $1000 (well $900 really but that doesn’t sound as exciting). Except that one level down from you, two down from, a hundred people are just throwing away a $100.

Perhaps the pyramid scheme is too harsh. A more fair and realistic way to consider these new auction sites is simple gambling. I am willing to bet $50 on this hand of win the camera. But the odds appear to be stacked in the house’s favor worse than an unregulated casino.

Let’s take a deeper look.

NOTE: The following numbers are from real products being auctioned while I wrote this article. All retail prices are based on Google Product searches during the writing of this article.

Starting with a penny auction at Swoopo:

Nikon D90 12.3 MP DSLR Camera with 18-105mm Kit (Auction #1)

Retail price range: $1140 – $1600
Swoopo bid cost range: $0.50 – $0.75
Auction final price = $41.62
Total bids ( $0.01) = 4162 <br /> Total bidder fees $0.75 = $3121.50 + $41.62 = $3163.12
@ $0.50 = $2081 + $41.62 = $2122.62

Cost of goods = $1140

Gross profit low = $982.62 ($1082.12 – $1140)
high = $2023.12 ($3163.12 – $1140)

The winning bidder get’s the deal of the century, assuming of course that this person did not bid a 1000 pennies (er, dollars) to get that winning bid. However, the real winner here is Swoopo. They swoop in here with a potential profit of $2023 for an item that retails at it’s lowest for $1140 and they no doubt are getting at least a slightly better wholesale cost than that, but I want to give them as favor as possible.

In these examples for the low profit I am assuming that they have given away enough free bids to lower the average bid cost to $0.50 per bid AND they were really paying retail prices to get the goods they are shipping.

But, as luck would have it, the same exact camera package was also being auctioned off right next to it at Swoopo. And it went for only $30 more. Take a look.

Nikon D90 12.3 MP DSLR Camera with 18-105mm Kit (Auction #2)

Retail price range: $1,140 – $1,600
Swoopo bid cost range: $0.50 – $0.75
Auction final price = $72.74
Total bids ( $0.01) = 7,274 <br /> Total bidder fees $0.75 = $5455.5 + $72.74 = $5528.24
@ $0.50 = $3637 + $72.74 = $3709.74

Cost of goods = $1140

Gross profit low = $2569.74 ($3709.74 – $1140)
high = $4388.24 ($5528.24 – $1140)

In these two examples alone Swoopo made a gross profit of at least $2569.74 and as high as $6411.36. That is an outrageous markup that no single human being would ever pay. And fortunately they don’t have to. These new online auction sites have figured out a way to dupe the public into collectively paying as much as 6 times the normal retail price.

Like a twisted carnival game

As I already mentioned, with every bid the clock is extended on the auction. There is no such thing as swooping in at the last second and stealing the prize. There is no last second. There is only everyone else giving up because they spent too much and walking away with less chips than they started with, defeated and looking for the next ‘hot table’ to make up for their loss.

Unlike auction sites like eBay where you might ever see an auction closing in a week, that doesn’t exist in this new auction landscape. From the moment you hit the home page of either Swoopo or BidsTick you are bombarded with 6-10 clocks all under the minute mark, counting down before your eyes, some of that at 2 seconds, oh wait, now at 20 seconds, wait, no, make that 2 minutes. This process repeats over and over until finally someone wins, ten minutes or hours from now.

With this type of setup it is no wonder people aren’t thinking before they drop their money into the machine and begin clicking away trying to get that $1.00 television. But like a carnival game you can count on the fact that you are going to be dropping money in until you can’t stand it anymore.

So is Swoopo or BidsTick a scam?

In my world these sites are the ultimate scam. I say ultimate because they are not illegal unlike other confidence games and frauds. The scam is similar to that of the Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. All people see are the exciting headlines telling them that they won a million dollars or a Samsung 61 inch 1080p LED Powered HDTV for $86. They don’t notice that only one person is going to win, and that along the way they are going to pay a lot of money in magazine subscriptions and bid buys for the chance to win.

It’s a scam because these types of businesses prey on those who don’t see through the charade. It is impossible for everyone who buys 100 bids for $75 to win, otherwise these companies would go out of business. To put it another way, it is impossible for everyone to ever get a $1500 hundred dollar television for under a $100 bucks and expect that company to stay in business. And that’s where I cry pyramid scheme once again.

What online auction companies like Swoopo and BidsTick are doing is currently legal. I’m not even suggesting they shouldn’t be. I believe in gambling. I believe you should be allowed to gamble, on or offline. However, call it what it is. Don’t wrap it up as something else and make it look like you are doing us a favor. The only one getting the favor is the so-called auction company, from the public at large who are either too excited, too high, too dumb, or just bored enough to use your service and make them rich.

So what do they have to say for themselves?

In an Oct. 3, 2008 article at Gadgetell entitled Gadgetell interview: Swoopo speaks JG Mason interviewed Chris Bauman, Swoopo.com’s Senior Manager of Business Development.

JG’s first question, “Why are some people are getting really pissed off at Swoopo?,” garners this innocuous response from Mr. Bauman:

It is unfortunate that an auction has just one winner. It is the nature of the beast. People that don’t win are going to be mad, even regretful sometimes, but those very same feelings happen on other auctions like eBay too.

You simply can’t compare Swoopo or BidsTick to eBay. In Bauman’s own words, they are very different beasts. Where eBay offers a legitimate service where the loser pays nothing, the loser in a Swoopo or BidsTick auction can lose nearly as much as the winning bidder pays. I am sure in certain cases depending on how smart the winning bidder played their hand, the losers often spend more than the winner.

It is so interesting to me that from the outset of the interview, Swoopo’s representative calmly acts as though nothing could possibly be wrong with what they are doing; they operate a wholly legitmate service. However, in TheGoont.com’s blog post, Swoopo – Scam Alerts are Ringing the author says of the JG/Swoopo interview:

“It kind of reminds me of ‘Thank You For Smoking’ – if Swoopo does get sued out of existence, I think Chris might make a great lobbyist for the tobacco industry. Just my opinion.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Later in the interview JG asks, “How are you trying to educate users on the differences in your model vs. a traditional auction?” Bauman responds:

Our about page is very simple explanation about how it works and has sufficed, but can be clearer. We are looking to expand it. We are also looking to do videos as well. The thing that really sets us apart is allowing users to purchase bids and then bid with those. It is definitely not a try before you buy.

Of course not, we can’t have people figuring out the scam before they’ve paid their admission fee to keep the pyramid going another day. To Bauman’s credit however, their ‘new user/tour’ page does in fact outline exactly how the bidding process works. It clearly shows how the bid process works, how much a bid costs vs how much it increments the bidding itself, it also clearly shows how the clock is reset with every bid. The instructions, which were nicely tucked into a single word link on the registration page did not outright lie about anything that is going on. The instructions were simple and clear to understand. They just don’t run the numbers for you and show how much you might end up paying if you lose.

The instruction page at Swoopo even clues you in to the BidButler in case you can’t afford to sit around and pay a dollar to click the button yourself. Their automated system will handle it for you. That’s right they have a system for automated bidding when you can’t be around.

The only problem with the BidButler is that unlike an eBay auction where the automatic bidding only happens when someone exceeds your bid, the BidButler will keep raising the stakes just before the time runs out, because every bid exceeds yours. And as we’ve already pointed out the time is always running out. Swoopo flat out tells you in the help section:

When there are two or more BidButlers set on the same auction, they duke it out there and then, placing all their bids immediately. This tit for tat battle means that the price and countdown both increase with each bid placed. (We do this so that bidders can easily see the auctions that will end soon unless another bid is placed).

I can’t be positive, but I am pretty sure that I personally witnessed it happen. On an auction for a Panasonic Viera TH-42PZ85U 42-Inch the cost shot from $45.89 to $46.99 in less than 5 seconds and brought the clock from 1 second to around 13 minutes remaining. Thanks BidButler! While that may sound like an insignificant amount, the price went up by $1.00 to the eventual winner, Swoopo made an extra $80 bucks or so. Whether it was BidButler or a hundred people clicking wildly, it wasn’t in anyone’s best interest except Swoopo’s.

If you were to see your friend or spouse behaving similarly in Las Vegas you would probably be worried for them.

Farther on in the JG/Bauman interview, JG asks, “Are you concerned about being viewed as gambling?” Bauman responds:

Gunnar, our CEO has been keeping an eye on the auctions for years and has not seen people bid outrageous and not won. Typically been when you come to the site, you came there for a product. We’ve not seen a lot of people go nuts. We try to encourage safe bidding in newsletters, and realize we are introducing a new auction style. There is a skill to Swoopo.

A skill like how to beat the craps table or how to beat the house? And newsletters encouraging safe bidding sound an awful lot like state mandated programs for providing gambler counseling and ‘responsible betting’ leaflets. But fortunately for most people who will experiment with these sites, they don’t have to go nuts for these new online auction companies to make bank.

Breaking news…Coach Handbag auction about to end!

No really, this is really happening in real time as I write at BidsTick where the cost per bid is $1.00 instead of $0.75 like at Swoopo.

Even as I finish this article, A Coach Leather Shoulder Bag is hovering at 1-5 seconds remaining in a ridiculous bidding war. (Though I can’t quite understand why each bid isn’t pushing the time back up more than a second or two as the stated tick time is 2 minutes per bid). Two bidders who we will call Cher and BeHappy, together drove the “price” of that Coach handbag from around $9.50 to over $12.50 in the past several minutes. Every tenth exchange or so between Cher and BeHappy another name will pop up as the current high bidder, but they are few, and one of them using some kind of strategy only appears when the clock actually reaches 1 second (which happens every 14 seconds or so). Oh wait, what is this, we were stuck at 2 seconds, and now the time has vanished, instead proclaiming, “Auction is paused, you can still bid!” What? First we get rid of the tick timer, then we pause the auction while Cher and BeHappy continue to exchange penny, er $1 bids. Ah, now with the clock running again at a fairly 2 seconds remaining the price of lovely Coach Handbag has reached $14.68. And oh my god, I actually saw it close and Cher is the winner with a winning bid of $14.70. Hooray for Cher!

Now let’s examine what just happened. In the course of about 6 minutes, we had two bidders almost singlehandedly bid up the price of the Coach handbag by a little over $5.

$5 in penny bids = $500 in bid fees at full BidsTick prices, but let’s be generous and say that everybody bought in bulk for this auction. So instead of $1 per bid, we’ll go with $0.50. So our total bid fees for that 6 minutes alone now becomes a more reasonable $250.

I will further be generous and say that Cher and BeHappy only accounted for half of those bids. So that means that both Cher and BeHappy both spent at least $62.50 each in those final 6 minutes to acquire the precious handbag. But those other random bidders also covered another $125 of those valuable 6 minutes. So while Cher who won the bag will be paying her $62.50 + the actual $14.70 the auction closed for + however many other $0.50 bids she made during the course of that grueling 2 hour battle consisting of 1,470 individual bids, she at least gets a bag out of the deal.

BeHappy on the other hand might not be so happy anymore. She spent the same $62.50 + however many other $0.50 bids she made during the auction and get’s nothing. She might have just spent a hundred dollars for nothing but the chance to click a button over and over in the hopes of getting a new Coach handbag.

In total this is how the handbag breaks down:

Coach Madison Leather shoulder bag

Retail price range: $498 – $519
BidsTick bid cost range: $0.50 – $1.00
Auction final price = $14.70
Total bids ( $0.01) = 1,470 <br /> Total bidder fees $1.00 = $1470 + $14.70 = $1484.70
$0.75 = $1102.5 + $14.70 = $1117.20 <br /> $0.50 = $735 + $14.70 = $749.70

Cost of goods = $498

Gross profit low = $251.70 ($749.70 – $498)
high = $986.70 ($1484.70 – $498)

Not a bad haul for BidsTick! They made at least $251 on a $498 handbag (which might be it’s own article). Actually after looking over the numbers, I’m going out on a limb and saying that Swoopo is kicking BidsTick butt when it comes to massive profit margins. I’m tired now and won’t be able to get the complete list of auctions I documented in the article tonight, but I will post them shortly and I think you will agree, Swoopo knows how to get the money. But if you want to put it in more positive terms, that means that if you were going to try one of these services, I would go with BidsTick.

But of course I’m not going to suggest or recommend either of these services. In fact I’m not even going to link to them for fear that Google will think we are linking to a bad neighborhood and jeopardize our fragile page rank (which actually happened in another article where I linked to some sample spam sites to demonstrate a point).

This article is about to end…BID NOW!!!!

I had hoped to close by simply showing you the numbers, but since I’m not going to get to that immediately, I will leave you with this quote from Chris Bauman of Swoopo from the Gadgetell interview with JG Mason in response to the question, “How are bidders made aware of who they are bidding against?”

We do not make them aware. We don’t say which bidders you are bidding against simply because we are not assured of the outcome. Our business model says the more bidders we can open an auction to, the more likely we’ll cover costs, which doesn’t happen 70% of the time.

Oblong Valley Celebration Sale – Cattle Auction image used under a
Creative Commons License
courtesy of jonathanvlarocca at Flickr

You might also be interested in:

Putting things in perspective...Shift Happens UK version

2009-02-08T15:15:46-08:00

I just posted an article about (with the video) Shift happens and it’s original PowerPoint presentation by Karl Fisch , director of Technology for Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. While researching that post I stumbled on a slightly more global version of the original video which I’ve embedded here.

This UK version is a testament to how many people have been affected in one way or another by the thoughts presented. How this British incarnation of Shift Happens came to be can found in the more info from it’s home at YouTube:

Karl Fisch, of Arapahoe High School in the US, conceived and created the first version of this presentation for a staff development day. And published it on the web via his website. He released it and gave permission for others to modify it under a Creative Commons licence.

Scott McLeod modified it, to make it more relevant to an audience in a wider context. And published it on the web with a Creative Commons licence. After conversations with Karl & Scott, I modified Scott’s version to include UK-relevant content (it was quite US-centric). And then Jeff Brenman, of Apollo Ideas, applied the creative design to Scott’s version. And published it on the web via SlideShare where, incidentally, it won the competition for the “World’s Best Slideshow”

And finally, with Jeff’s permission, Ray Flemming modified his with the UK context. And published it on the web

Take what you will from the presentation. Karl Fisch discusses the video in much greater detail on his staff development blog, The Fisch Bowl and you can read a quick history and some of his comments as well as my own humble commentary in this CoTradeCo Post

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Putting things in perspective...Shift Happens by Karl Fisch

2009-02-08T15:00:57-08:00

The video you see above was created by Karl Fisch, director of Technology for Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. It was originally created as a PowerPoint presentation for a staff development meeting.

In Karl’s words…

“I put together a PowerPoint presentation with some (hopefully) thought-provoking ideas. I was hoping by telling some of these “stories” to our faculty, I could get them thinking about – and discussing with each other – the world our students are entering. To get them to really think about what our students are going to need to be successful in the 21st century, and then how that might impact what they do in their classrooms.”

After he posted the initial presentation for colleagues to share with friends and family, one thing led to another. Folks like David Warlick and Bud Hunt blogged about it, and somewhere in there Scott McLeod, who had been using it in some of his classes and presentations, posts a remixed version of the presentation, and finally a couple of students post it on YouTube. One of those videos starts to become viral and is further distributed on other video sites. Then in March 13, 2007 it gets posted to Break.com along the way becoming called ‘Shift Happens’.

In a follow-up post on his blog Karl goes on to say…

“I’m not sure that Did You Know? is the video/message I would’ve chosen to go viral. While I think it’s certainly part of the message, I worry that it’s often taken out of context or used in ways that I don’t think are the most helpful for the direction I think we need to go. For example, most of those two million folks that have seen it haven’t read the original blog post, so they don’t know what its intended purpose and audience was (high school teachers thinking about the world our students are entering and wondering how best to help them prepare). (Yes, I know I should’ve thought of that before I posted it, but I really, really, really had no idea it would spread like this. Now I know – pun intended.)”

In that same post Karl goes on to discuss what he feels has been good and bad about this presentation exploding like it has. He goes so far as to break it down almost slide by slide with fantastic commentary on his intentions.

In 7 short months, this thought provoking PowerPoint presentation evolved into a point for global consideration. While I cannot speak to the success of the presentation in terms that Karl is concerned about, for me it vital that we continue to examine the world from fresh perspectives and remember that on this ever “shrinking” planet, we all need to come to grips with living side by side.

What does the future hold? I don’t know. But I like the idea that people like Karl Fisch are thinking about it on a deeper level and trying to make sense of the past, present, and future to the benefit of our youth.

See The Fisch Bowl a staff development blog created by Karl Fisch for the Arapahoe High School.

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Flash memory card trading (and other computer parts?)...a visitor has an idea.

2009-01-08T10:02:08-08:00

Trader Dan received an email today sharing how he and other folks have been trading memory cards and inquired about involving that idea here in the community. Well Trader Dan forwarded that email on to me (he’s busy traveling the world and not so good with the computer/site questions anyway :)

The more I thought about it, I can’t believe we didn’t think of it sooner. It is the most obvious part of a trading post, that is trading “things” between folks. Heck, the way the economy is, it could be a vital part of some of us “getting by” until our stock portfolios are worth anything again :)

At any rate, if you are interested in trading memory cards, computer parts, or any item in any community, go ahead and post it. I will hopefully be discussing the idea more with our friendly visitor with the great idea and we’ll get a prototype down for a new “trading post” post to the community blogs.

For now, if you have something to sell or trade, don’t hesitate to post to any relevant community and topic. We are probably going to eliminate the Shameless Promotions topic from all the communities and create a more robust set of topics (and hopefully sub-topics someday) with improved filtering and rating of posts so that all types of posts can be mixed together in a common set of topics per community, while allowing folks to easily hide various post types they are not interested in.

If you have any other thoughts or suggestions, please feel to respond to this post, or post a new discussion in the Potluck Community CoTradeCo news, comments, and requests

Take care and thank you all for visiting.

Memory Card picture borrowed from an article at GizmoWatch Korean scientists predicting breakthrough 100 GB flash memory cards

Firefox

2008-12-12T14:01:50-08:00

Just would like to share my joy with the fire fox add-on thumbnail expander. It makes me happy every time

fill your life with the satisfaction I have.

http://extensions.danwendorf.com

Zoe...I have an emergency question!

2008-11-21T21:59:22-08:00

What is the deal with the Google ‘add, promote and comment’ area that shows up next to results shown from a Google search?! Am I making any sense? I think it just came out a few moments ago and it is crazzzy!

Search Wiki is what it is called, I think.

Please, help me understand!!

I am ranting over 1090CC

2008-10-29T08:55:58-07:00

Let me be the first to say I love the new 1090 case! But I have to voice my discouragement with the 1090CC. Not the case itself, but the inability to get that case from Pelican!

We have had several customers calling and looking for it somewhere in stock and I in turn have called Pelican to find out “Where is our order”!.

I received yesterday discouraging news!! I was told we are still weeks away??? WHAT!!! I was then informed that Pelican is currently back ordered over 800 cases!! Over the weeks I have been told a ton of stories as to the delay, production problems, quality control problems with the latches and it goes on!! I really don’t know the exact reason for the delay and I probably never will, but I am mad about it! I just don’t understand how you launch a new product, with out being able to distribute it!!

With all that being said, along with the rest of you I wait!!! Are order is still in place at Pelican and when they ship to us, you will hear my shouts of joy nationwide. Ok maybe not my shouts but I will post to let everyone know that they are in stock.

Thanks for letting me rant!!

I wait with all of you – Stacy

Google 2001

2008-10-08T13:58:13-07:00

I think this is sort of cool: Google, in honor of their 10th anniversery has posted their search index from 2001:
Your text to link here…
It’s pretty neat to Google things in the year 2001 and see what shows up…for instance in 2001 Paris Hilton was barely a blip on our cutural radar. Ah, happier times.

pelicase 1090

2008-09-29T05:39:56-07:00

Hi to everybody. I am looking for one pelicase 1090. I hope it will be possible to have it in Germany. Please contact free. BR Aleks

Simple website management with Webby?

2008-09-19T23:23:41-07:00

I just came across something interesting; something that I didn’t know I wanted, but now know that I need.

See, I was redoing my website last week since it had gotten terribly outdated and I wanted to simplify it to basically just a few pages of links to all my stuff on other websites. I decided to use plain old HTML, without any fancy templating, server-side preprocessing, or anything, to keep it simple and portable; it was still going to be more than one page though, and that was going to result in some copy-and-pasting to get them all in the same layout. I knew this was wrong, but I didn’t have that many pages and decided to deal with it.

So there I was, back in 2001, without all the simple template syntax I was used to, pasting skeleton layouts into every new document. Well, just now I came across a possible solution to all this mess: Webby. It looks like it just might be the best of both worlds. You have common layouts between pages, you can use Markdown/Textile/ERB/etc., and you end up deploying with plain HTML!

Unfortunately it’s too late tonight to mess with it. I’ll update this with my results when I do get a chance.

Computer Specifics: How to Embed video in your Wordpress blog (without a plugin)

2008-09-11T09:57:04-07:00

Recently, UK Case Lady asked me how to embed video in a Wordpress blog.

For the record I do not have a Wordpress blog and am relying on the embedded video above and a few quick glances at some other resources for my answer. Therefore I am unable to test this myself, but hopefully the UK Case Lady can jump back in. When I have more time I will look more deeply into this to give a more thorough response that includes how to do embed content with or without a plugin and with the rich editor.

The problem is the rich visual editor referred to elsewhere as a WYSIWYG or Rich text editor in Wordpress. By turning off the rich text editor you can embed video without any problems.

Before logging in to the administrative interface of your Wordpress blog, there is a checkbox option that says, “Use the rich visual editor when writing.” Uncheck that option and you’ll be able to paste embedded content directly into your blog.

To understand the problem you need to know what a rich visual editor is. When you view a web page your browser retrieves the page and interprets the HTML and Javascript code into something visual and friendly that does something. If you have never done it, right click (option-click) on a web page in your browser and choose “view source” or “view page source.” This will open another window displaying the code that is required to render the visual version of the page in the browser.

Rich visual editors or WYSIWYG editors allow an individual to skip the process of writing any funny codes to format their page or post into HTML.

Unfortunately, WYSIWYG style editors, especially those that operate on a web page, tend to eat up, destroy, and even intentionally remove actual HTML that might be entered in the visual editor. This appears to be exactly what is happening in Wordpress blogs. When you paste in the embed code from YouTube (or any other embeddable content or widget that uses either the “embed” tag or the “object” tag (html tags) they are stripped out or otherwise reformatted/rewritten so as to make them non-functional when the Wordpress blog post is viewed.

So the solution is to disable the WYSIWYG editor while posting and editing blogs that require embedded content, such as a YouTube video.

The downside is that when you disable the editor you will now have to manually code/format your post. In Wordpress, much like at CoTradeCo, there is still an editing toolbar that will add the “code” in for you, but you will not be able to see the formatting as you do it, only the “code” that represents the formatting.

You can turn visual editing back on as long as you do not edit any posts with embedded content. Just remember to disable visual editing if you need to post new embedded content or a post with embedded content.

And that is how you can get around not being able to install a plugin. Apparently there are several plugins that allow for pasting embedded content into the visual editor without “eating it up.” But I’ll try to talk about that in another post or in the comments here another time.

Hope this helps you out.

CSS relative absolute positioning

2008-09-09T23:36:27-07:00

A couple weeks ago, while doing some unrelated research, I came across a technique that I had somehow never heard of for absolute positioning in CSS. I want to post it here in case anyone else has missed out on this one.

There have been quite a few times where I wanted a div to be positioned absolutely and to have it’s top/left/etc. to be specified from its staticly-positioned parent, and not from the viewport. It turns out that all you need to do is give the parent position: relative and you can do exactly that.

Here’s the original article I read that goes in way more depth.

Mashups, widgets and your web presence

2008-09-06T14:13:45-07:00

By zoe somebody for Concepts Worldwide meeting news and know-how newsletter Conceptualize!. Also see Annette Greg’s SPOT at CoTradeCo to get a quick overview of how Concept’s Worldwide can help your business achieve measurable results at your next meeting or convention. Annette Gregg, CMP, CMM is Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Concepts Worldwide, a strategic meeting management and meeting planning company.

It was the 1990’s and along came the internet. It was the biggest communication revolution since the printing press. Anyone and everyone suddenly had an affordable means for publishing information about their interests, hobbies, or business as well as transacting business directly.

Fast forward ten years. You have a website. Everybody has a website. But they also have five different social networking profiles, three blogs, a mailing list, a quarterly newsletter, and your competition just put a new widget onto Google showcasing fun stories of customers using their products.

Many people think their web presence starts and stops at their website(s). The information, products, and services you offer on your website are obviously core to your web presence, but in reality your web presence is reflected by everything you and anyone else has posted on the internet about you, your business, and your products and services. The ease of publishing and interacting online redefined not only how a company represented itself but gave the rest of the world the same opportunity to speak on behalf of your company and in worst case scenarios, against your company. Technology such as message boards, forums, blogs, chat rooms, and instant messaging redefined the very concept of word-of-mouth marketing. Suddenly companies and mainstream news sources weren’t the only ones with a voice.

Many companies are still grappling with how to incorporate social software such as Facebook and LinkedIn into their web presence in a meaningful way. While social networking will continue to play a role in how companies, professionals, clients, and consumers meet and communicate there are some new buzz words on the internet that are going to become important.

Mashups

How people use the internet is changing, in large part due to advances in technology, development techniques, and the fact that broadband is as ubiquitous as the internet. The rise of web applications and services that started with web based email such as Hotmail or Gmail now extend to task tracking, advanced project management, and customer relations have begun to grow up. But this is only the beginning.

This new breed of web application often includes what is called an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows third parties to use and interact with the data from their site in new ways on another website application. In plain english, if website X has a database of WiFi locations with addresses and website Y has online mapping capabilities, both offering an API to access their data, website Z can come along using these API’s and create a whole new service that let’s users view on a map all the WiFi enabled locations in a given area.

This is the basis for the term mashup in modern programming.

Every time you use a store locator at a business site that shows you store locations and hours on a google map you are using a type of mashup. The company who is offering the store locator did not create the mapping software or the ability to put clickable pin points for all their locations. They are using some original code in conjunction with the mapping application to create a whole new interface.

In fact taking database information and search functionality from one site and “mashing” it with Google maps is the most popular and useful type of mashup existing today. HousingMaps shows you all the current housing listings on Craigslist through a Google Map. AuctionCloud has taken their eBay mashup to the next level by combining real estate listings at eBay with property estimates from Zillow. Without the API and the mashup, building companies with similar functionality would have required millions in programming and marketing to simply have the userbase necessary to make the functionality worthwhile.

Another great example of a mashup that will help you as you build your web presence through social software is PING.FM . PING offers a single interface to post to all of your social networking and blog sites at once. You probably already belong to at least two social networking or community forum sites. It can become a real nuisance to maintain and participate on all of them. This service uses the API from many different social networking sites to let you interact with all of them.

Where PING.FM uses the mashup concept to help you maintain your web presence in the blogosphere and social networks, Yahoo Pipes or the Google Mashup Editor (GME) are giving whole new ways to keep up with what other people are publishing. Yahoo Pipes and Google Mashup Editor are what is called a feed aggregator mashup. Nearly every website offers some kind of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed that you can add to a news reader to have information sent to you instead of having to visit countless websites. Pipes and GME give people the ability to not simply subscribe to multiple feeds but filter them into one cohesive stream of information like performing a targeted search every time you open your reader.

The concept of the mashup can be overwhelming at first and even counter-intuitive if you are still viewing the internet as a collection of webpages that are little more than interactive brochures. Most companies struggle with how to monetize a website much less sharing information and functionality from their business for others to use and present. But today’s internet user is growing accustomed to accessing their data, not just from “anywhere”, by in “any way” they choose. Mashup websites and applications make this possible, but they are also forcing businesses to reevaluate what information and services they are offering and how visitors will be accessing it.

How the mashup becomes a widget becomes a web application becomes a mashup

The type of technology being developed for Yahoo Pipes, Google Mashup Editor, and others goes one step further by allowing people to create actual mini-applications using the information, resources, and functionality of any web application with an API or a feed. This kind of application is often referred to as a widget.

A widget is a small application or snippet of information that gets its information and functionality from another source. If you have a custom Google home page you’ve seen and used widgets. A widget might simply include content from a website, or it might check your mail, or show the latest web site statistics, let you post to Twitter, or anything you can imagine so long as it’s publicly available through a feed or API.

A widget, in modern programming and internet terms, brings everything we’ve discussed so far together and puts into bite-sized chunks that can be used by anyone to quickly access and utilize the information shared through mashups andpublished and shared via RSS. Again in plain english, a widget can be thought of as a few lines of code placed on a webpage or blog that then includes the functionality or information from another website or mashup allowing visitors to see and use that third party information “offsite”.

What this means is that you could build a widget that finds breaking news stories in your industry, blog postings about your company, and/or updates your personal todo list from your corporate project or customer management software. That’s right, you could build it. Mashup widget editors are appearing making it possible for the average person to create basic widgets they can use on their websites or blogs. Even better and more complex, you can make widgets and mashups out of existing mashups and widgets recombining information endlessly further taking advantage of the collective creativity.

Mashups, widgets, your web presence, and beyond

So how can you use mashups today for your existing business and further improve your web presence?

You can start by exploring what content is available in your industry and providing news and resources from the around the internet directly on your website. What information or resources are out there freely available to display on your site which adds that old fashioned “stickiness” to your site?

On the publishing side of widgets, if you have a newsletter or mailing list you publish to regularly, you could create slimmed down versions as widgets that people could include on their personalized Google home page, their various social networking sites, or their blog with tips and tricks, word or concept of the day factoids, or news headlines from your company and industry. If your company is regularly posting video and images to sites like YouTube, you can make a widget for the picture or video of the week. Where you were pushing content to your audience, your audience might decide they would like to share some of that advice and information with their site visitors for you on their websites.

The trick with mashups and widgets, like building a website, is identifying and creating interesting and useful content that stands well on its own. Mashups and widgets are the next stage of information sharing and interaction, but these new tools are only as useful as the information they are mashing up and providing. Just as people discovered posting ads and press releases on social networking sites was not very productive, creating mashups and widgets of random and loosely related content are probably not going to find a large audience either. But it is worth noting that when it comes to the finicky tastes of internt users and potentially viral media, it isn’t always obvious what constitutes interesting and useful information.

If your company is already building relationships, sharing useful information, and building quality relationships through existing social software, it is not a big step to start exploring how you can harness your companies vertical expertise and well developed web presence with the power of the mashup and widgets to supercharge your web presence and add value to your existing business products, services, and marketing. Think of the mashup as a new type of business partnership with far less commitment.

Where does it go from here?

The concepts of social software, mashups, and widgets as I’ve described here and exist today are where the internet was 10 years ago. At the time of this writing most mashups and widgets being released are purely entertainment giving us new ways to look at pictures, watch videos, or read interesting articles and factoids. But in some of the examples shared in this article we are beginning to see emerging possibilities that make the internet as we know it today appear to be a crude pile of random information.

As new interconnections of data and information from the millions of databases around the world are mashedup we are going to see disparate data turned into extremely valuable resources that we can only dream of today. There are hundreds if not thousands of publicly accessible databases of information available from government sources alone. What could be done by combining these different sources of publicly available information for business planning, development, and marketing purposes? What information and resources does your company offer that could be mashed up?

It is no longer simply a question of how to market to your customers. It is a question of what type of relationships, resources, and tools are your offering. Widgets and mashups extend the possibilities for those relationships and interactions far beyond a website or blog.

Today social software is part of that offering. Mashups and widgets are going to become a part of the modern web presence. How will you use new technologies and relationships to add value and grow your business?

Zoe somebody is an internet consultant and entrepeneur. He is co-founder of imotion design and CoTradeCo trading post & community, an agile company building its own brand of social networking and looking for some useful stuff to mash up.

Marine with Laptop on top of the Westin

2008-08-08T18:31:00-07:00

I am on top of the Westin which is the second tallest building in Washington State with my laptop. I am a Marine and I need a Pelican 1090 to protect my laptop.

Computers 101: Welcome to the show. Or why memorizing is not learning.

2008-07-28T13:28:13-07:00

Have you ever sat your computer, frustrated, not understanding why something that worked yesterday isn’t working today? Are you lost and confused when you have to install software? Does your head spin when you call tech support because you don’t even understand what they are asking you?

Computers 101 is a series of articles intended to share the basics of how a computer works and why in the belief that understanding WHY IT WORKS will help you teach yourself how to use any software, accomplish any task, and even begin fixing problems yourself without calling IT or your “guru” nephew.

Computers 101 articles

Core articles

What and how. Or why the sum of the parts are bigger than the whole.
Computer metaphors and conventions. Or why it looks and works like that.
Files, file structures, and file systems. Or why you can’t find anything on your computer.
Operating system fundamentals. Or why you should already know everything you need to know about your computer.
Application programs. Or why knowing one thing means you know a whole lot more than that.

Beyond fundamentals

What is email? Or why it isn’t for file sharing.

The titles and topics are likely to change over time as I merge and separate topics. But the core articles list really represents everything you need to know to be a competent computer user. The Beyond fundamentals list represents more fine grained topics that help put everything in perspective on specifics while still focusing on the how and why instead of simply telling what to do.

More about the Computers 101 series.

I’m not a computer scientist. Far from it. In fact I personally feel like a bit of a novice, maybe intermediate on good days, when it comes to my computer knowledge. This fact doesn’t stop people turning to me constantly with computer questions, expecting that I can tell them in a few clicks of the mouse how to fix or do anything. In reality I am a designer creative type who just wants to sit down at their computer and have everything magically happen, without crashing, without losing data, without spending hours reading manuals, without having to learn anything. I just want to click a button and have that new design ‘happen’. I just want to click a button and have that new website appear. I never want to build a computer, format a hard drive, fix a broken network, or modify mysterious settings to optimize my computer. In short I’m just like everybody else.

But I’ve been working with intimately for over 10 years and my brain happens to learn things best by doing. And while I’m doing something I start asking questions like how and why. Once I start understanding the how and why I quit doing the thing I was learning by rote and build a bigger picture of what is happening. As this occurs a whole new world opens up where as I learn the next thing and I’m not memorizing a process but intuitively predicting how the next thing should be done. As this happens my learning curve drops dramatically for the next step.

This is no different than how a math text book doesn’t start with calculus. It starts with basic maths, addition and subtraction, multiplication tables, building on itself so each subsequent step just makes sense.

Fortunately AND UNfortunately computers are designed to let you jump right in. No learning required. Open a word processor start typing. When people get stuck they just call a friend and say, “Hey I’ve typed up this document and now I want to print it, what do I do.” The friend replies, “Just click the big button that has a little picture of a printer on it and then click Okay.” This of course assumes that you bought a computer with everything pre-installed and ready-to-go.

And so on. Every step of the way people learn to use their computer by memorizing a set of steps to accomplish certain tasks. As they continue they might accidentally click buttons that make a certain thing happen and accidentally learn new things. For the most part people have no idea what is going on, they just know that when they do one thing a particular result occurs. Which is fine. Until they want to do something new, or worse, something goes wrong.

Then all of a sudden they have no idea where to even begin to get out of the problem situation. Calls to their friends no longer work because they don’t know either. This is where the modern myth of the guru is born. The guru is the secret ally you have, the person who knows everything, the computer genius who can fix it when everything goes wrong.

What happens when people call their guru, be it the IT department or their gifted nephew, is that the guru, sick of being called, simply passes on some rote solution that gets you out of the current situation. Similar to calling their friends, people then memorize the process to get of that particular situation should it happen again.

Years ago though, after the umpteenth phone call requesting magical help, I finally decided that I would no longer simply tell somewhere to click and what to type to make something happen. If they wanted my free advice, they were going to have to actually learn something in the process. That was the beginning of this series of articles.

I theorized that people were memorizing and not really learning when it came to computers. People would even buy or take computer courses that taught processes and not understanding. So I came up with the brilliant idea of offering a series of workshops that would, instead of teaching you how to make a formula in Excel, would teach you everything about how your computer works so that you could figure it out yourself. The classes would start with everyone writing down one thing they wanted to learn how to do that inspired them to take the class in the first place, and then I would explain that I would never tell them how to do it, but by the end of the workshop they would have their answer.

Well being an idealistic visionary whose brain works on overdrive this didn’t really go anywhere. Then a couple of years ago I was asked to teach a computer class for the stagehand Union IATSE local 122. Finally I was going to be able to put my ideas into practice. Unfortunately, I think when they asked me, they were expecting the rote information directly pertinent to the jobs and tasks that matter to the local, not a comprehensive 8 hour workshop. I wasn’t nearly prepared as well as I thought, and I was only going to be given 2 hours with no hope for more time in the months following. So while the workshop wasn’t an abysmal failure, it was far from a success.

I learned a lot from the experience and if the opportunity came up again I would be far better prepared to accomplish my goal.

And that’s when it occurred to me. I could simply take my notes and presentation materials from that class and turn them into a series of articles here at CoTradeCo. Thus Computers 101 was born.

Life is fairly hectic for me so it will probably take a while to get it all put together and properly reorganized and rewritten. In the meantime I will be posting bits and pieces as I get the time and revising them as we go. The first article I posted was actually about how email works which is far beyond my core fundamentals that I want to cover, but I needed to post that so I could usefully cover some topics I promised someone a while back.

I hope you find this useful. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to post your questions and comments either in the articles or start your own posts in the Digital Life and other communities at CoTradeCo. I am so keen on helping people with their computers, because I would have never figured it all out without those people who took some time out of their days to explain it all to me.

All Computers 101 articles by zoe somebody are licensed under creative commons, attribution and share alike.

Computer mess image used under a
Creative Commons License
courtesy of phil_g at Flickr

Computers 101: Computer metaphors and conventions. Or why it looks and works like that.

2008-07-26T16:07:25-07:00

The word ‘computer’ is inaccurate. Originally computers were people who did calculations such as accountants or people who wrote up large tables of complex data calculations. Early computers did little more than replace those people and were hence called computers.

A modern computer still performs advanced mathematical calculations, but more relevant to you and I is the fact that a computer interprets and represents data visually and aurally. A computer can follow rules to tell us if an English sentence is grammatically incorrect. It can show us where and how an audio wave form is distorted. It can monitor our actions and offer assistance when performing certain actions.

Universal Information Machine might be a better name. Unlike most other machines, a computer is not inherently preset to perform one function. We can at any point give it new instructions and ask it to do just about anything within the confines of the platform and peripherals. And if the platform and peripherals are too confining we can simply alter all or part of the platform or peripherals, even inventing whole new devices, in order to accomplish a task.

The only problem is how do we interface with such a device? If I pick up a power tool I can quickly learn that one switch controls the speed or direction of operation and the trigger activates the device. The trigger will always activate the device; it won’t suddenly start playing my favorite song when I pull the trigger. This is where interfacing with a computer has proven difficult.

Because a computer can do anything depending on what programs you have running, and the keyboard and mouse are still the most common method of interacting with a computer, every button on your keyboard can become a whole new function to a whole new device with the click of the mouse. In one program the ‘space bar’ may actually create a space in a text document just like a typewriter. In another program the ‘space bar’ will be play/stop media. The computer itself does nothing except follow instructions and the set of instructions (application) you currently loaded virtually changes your computer into a whole new device.

Metaphors and your computer

This is where computer metaphors become vital. Metaphors are the basis for nearly all computer interactions and this is how they are designed. Software designers consider the type of function the software will perform and then model every aspect of it’s functionality around some real world device. Word processing programs function identically to a typewriter and in some instances like a physical typesetting machine. Graphic Design programs use photographic, darkroom, and illustration terminology to function. Multi-track audio recording software mimics the function of an entire recording studio. Video editing software replaces an entire editing bay full of equipment.

Most software is designed to mimic a real world device or environment wherever possible. Reason being that if you know how to operate an entire recording studio you will find it easier to use a digital version of it if it looks familiar and uses similar vocabulary.

Even the core interface of your computer, the operating system, has been given a real world metaphor; the desk or office.

Your computer is a desk with a filing cabinet

Your computer is a filing cabinet with interchangeable power tools all over it. Your computer is a desk where you put things you are currently working on. This is most commonly utilized graphical user interface metaphor for a computer. It is so pervasive because it makes sense and it works. It so intuitive that we rarely ever think about it even though the main screen on your computer is called the desktop, directories are often called folders, and our documents are called files.

Desk & Filing Cabinet

You are the operating system itself.
Your desk is the RAM and screen
Anything you are touching is in the cache
The drawers of your desk and the filing cabinet next to your desk are hard drives
EVERY ITEM sitting on your desktop, in the drawers of the desk, and in your filing cabinet are your files and peripherals.

Turning on the computer: Sitting down at your desk
Opening a program: Choosing what you are doing when you sit down at your desk: Picking up the phone, making space for paper to write or draw on.
Navigating your computer: Looking over the top of your desk, rummaging through the drawers in your desk, or getting up and walking over to the filing cabinet and locating a file
Opening a file: Grabbing a piece of paper, a book, a stapler, a drink and setting it in front of you at your desk, or dialing the phone
Using a file: Writing on the paper, reading the book, stapling something together, drinking your drink, talking to someone on the phone
Closing a file: Setting the item aside

If you are disorganized and don’t put things into a logical place in and around your desk it will make it difficult to get anything done. You wouldn’t store a drink in the filing cabinet. If there is something you do all the time at your desk, like make phone calls, it wouldn’t be smart to put your phone in the filing cabinet. Also, things you keep on your desk such as the phone or stapler are like widgets running on your desktop or programs running in your system tray.

Your computer will become just as messy and unusable as a messy desk if you don’t keep it clean. Not maintaining your computer can actually make it unstable and slow. Don’t store all your files in one folder. Defrag, Scan your discs, and run spyware/antivirus software regularly.

By thinking of your computer as a metaphor for real world activities it is easier to understand the computer and shift mental modes when using different applications.

Conventions on your computer

It is also worth mentioning that software design follows various design conventions. Users quickly learn to expect that a particular keystroke will perform a certain type of action and thus it becomes a de facto standard. When starting to learn new software, it is usually easier to expect that it will be more similar than dissimilar to previous programs you have used. Software designers know that people don’t like to spend a lot of time learning new things and they especially don’t like things changing all the time for no good reason. This is why the scroll bar is always on the right side of the window. This is why the HELP menu is always the farthest right menu header. This is why the print option is always under the FILE menu.

Start noticing and learning obvious conventions used on the computer platforms you use and the computer will become a truly simple tool to use.

How to use computer metaphors and conventions to your advantage

Once we accept or create a metaphor for how we are interacting with the computer we now have a vast amount of inherent knowledge as to what to expect from how the software works. We can predict where a particular command might be and more importantly we can begin to understand why a piece of software doesn’t do what we think it should. People have asked why they can’t edit the picture they just imported into their word processor. But if they stopped for even a second and thought about it, the answer would be obvious. Do not be fooled into thinking this is not true because a type of software has added extra functionality outside of its original scope, that it has also become that other type of software. It’s just convenient added functionality, but it will rarely do everything you need in that other area or do it as well.

This part of a series of basic computer skills and knowledge articles. The goal is to provide a more in-depth understanding of computers to folks who don’t want to be computer science majors, but would like to feel proficient using a computer. The topics of these articles are chosen based on the notion that if you understand what your computer is doing, you will be able to figure out how to fix any problem (or at least know who and what to ask to get help).

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to comment here and post other questions in the Digital Life and other communities at CoTradeCo.

See more in the series in the post, Computers 101: Welcome to the show. Or why memorizing is not learning. or simply browse the Digital life Computers 101 community blog topic

All Computers 101 articles by zoe somebody are licensed under creative commons, attribution and share alike.

My desk @ office image used under a
Creative Commons License
courtesy of Matalyn at Flickr

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Computers 101: What is email? Or why it isn’t for file sharing.

Computers 101: What is email? Or why it isn't for file sharing.

2008-07-25T14:52:03-07:00

If you use a computer the odds are you have an email address, even if you don’t have regular access to the internet. People send billions of emails a day, but like most technology, most people have no idea what it is or how it works. But with email being the single most used and abused communication tool in existence it might help you to understand the basics of what email is and what it isn’t.

Email is a text message copied and transmitted to one or more recipients.
Email in your inbox is really one big text file with bookmarks (called headers) that indicate where one email ends and the next one begins.
Email attachments (even your pictures and spreadsheets) are converted to text format and back to pictures or spreadsheets when you receive them.

But to really understand email we need to cover a few basics about how the internet works and how your computer interacts with it.

The internet is actually a number of network protocols that define the rules for communicating between computers.
Server software on one computer manages the rules and routing for a given protocol
Client software on another computer connects to the server software and interacts with it

To put this in more plain english, when you open your web browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer aka the big blue E on your desktop) you are opening a client.

When you type an address into the address bar or open a bookmark you are telling your client (the web browser) to interact with the server (the web server that has the published information you want to see). The client asks for it, the server finds it, and sends it back to be viewed and your client formats it for you. Pretty simple.

Protocols and why you don’t know what they are

Many people think of the internet as web pages, but in reality that is only one protocol, HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), more commonly referred to as the world wide web. There are many protocols such as FTP (file transfer protocol) to transfer files between computers, and SSH (Secure Shell) for secure access between two computers.

The protocols relevant to our email discussion are SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), POP3 (Post Office Protocol), and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).

Servers and Clients

For the protocol to mean anything you need software to use it. To use a protocol you install a client that communicate in that protocol.

But the client is useless unless there are servers to respond to the client requests.

We often refer to the server computer and think of it as a single entity. In fact a server computer is typically just a computer devoted to running MANY server programs. One server computer may be running dozens or hundreds of server programs. Thus the term server can be ambiguous out of context.

The client/server relationship can be thought of as a conversation with a college professor. The client asks questions and the server listens and responds to those questions with information.

You have at least two clients on your computer. A web browser client and an email reading/sending client. You rarely hear anyone call them clients. They are referred to by what they do or a brand name, and the software developers over the years have done a great job of reducing the learning curve for beginning computer users to get started. Thus you have no idea what a client or a protocol is, until you have a problem and when you get on the phone with tech support they probably start asking questions you simply don’t understand.

Email is a text message, one long text message

If you say “text file” to most people they think of opening MSWord and typing something. But that isn’t actually text as far as the computer is concerned. Word processors use some flavor of RICH TEXT which is it’s own special language for determining what “text” is “bold” or “blue” or “24 point size.”

A text file on a computer is literally textual characters in a file with NO formatting other than “new lines” and “empty spaces” that you perceive as paragraphs and spaces between the characters.

And email is just one of those text files. Even when you have attached a picture to it, it is only a text file.

In fact, when you receive email in your client (feeling pretty smart that you know what a client is right about now huh?) the client is reading one text file that contains all your mail in one big text file. Which of course means that when someone sends you an email the server has taken that individual text message (the email) and added it the end of your master email text file (your inbox) to create one big file full of many email messages. Your client does the job of letting you read each message as a distinct email message from a distinct user.

So in reality, even though you have a thousand messages in your inbox, there is only one file that contains them all.

The postman always rings twice and then bounces your email back to you undelivered

Now we understand what client/server software is and that email is really a bunch of text files turned into one text file. But how does it actually get from you to them?

Getting an email address. Telling your mail server who you are.

Well first you have to get an email address. All this means is that we tell the mail server that we want to add a new name to the list of accounts. When we do this the server makes a new text file we refer to as the inbox. Other than adding a password it doesn’t keep track of much else at all, just who should it route and store mail for and the credentials that will be used to access that mail.

Once you have your email address you have to setup your email client. You tell your email client where your mail server is (the server address) and your credentials. Voila you are now sending email.

It really is that simple.

Checking for new mail

When your email client checks for new mail it asks the internet to find the mail server address and passes your request to check mail along when it finds it. The mail server in turn listens to your credentials, checks them against it’s list of users, and if they match it sends back one long text file that is your inbox. Your email client then reads the file into little pieces that you see as individual email messages appearing in your inbox.

Sending mail

Sending mail is the obvious reversal of this process with the extra part of finding the recipient mail server. You create a new text file in your email client. When you click SEND the client asks the internet to find the mail server address, the mail server listens to your credentials, checks them against it’s list of users, and if they match it then asks the internet on your behalf to find the mail server at the address given. If the receiving mail server is found, the sending mail server transmits a copy of your test message and the receiving mail server appends your text message to the big long text file that contains all the email (the inbox).

An email address is actually in two parts, before and after the “". The first part before the "” is the username. The second part after the ”@” is the address of the mail server itself. When a mail server sends a message it doesn’t care about the first part at all. It is looking only for the second part. The receiving mail server only cares about the first part, so that it can see if that username is in it’s list of accounts.

What happens if something goes wrong?

If the any step of the process fails you receive an error message from your mail server or your client. If client can’t connect to your mail server it tells you so. If your mail server can’t find a mail server at the address you supplied it tells you so. If the receiving mail server can’t find the username you supplied in the address it doesn’t tell you, it tells your mail server which tells you. And if your attachment is too big for either mail server your mail server tells you.

Depending on the problem and how the mail servers involved are setup it could take seconds, hours, or days for you to be informed that a message could not be delivered.

If there is no problem your message should be available to the recipient in milliseconds. Yes, milliseconds.

My email takes way longer than milliseconds to deliver/recieve

Yes, I’m sure it does.

That is because while everyone is really sending out a bunch of text messages that should only be a few kilobytes in size, they are really sending high resolution pictures, videos, word processing files, spreadsheets, and really bad jokes.

For reference, a typical typewritten page is 2 kilobytes, an average medium resolution photograph 3,000 kilobytes, and the complete works of Shakespeare 5,000 kilobytes. Note these numbers are “rounded” down for simplicities sake.

So even if you were sending 10 pages of typed text (plain text, not a word processing document) that would be a mere 20 kilobytes and would be transferred in milliseconds from your computer to the receiving mail server. Assuming that the recipient is constantly checking their email, add a second or two for their mail client to wake up, get the new message, and format if for display.

However people are now often sending HTML mail (those fancy formatted emails you get) which is still just a text file with extra information to tell your mail client how to format all that text. That extra formatting information can be as big or bigger than the actual content itself, essentially doubling the size of every email you send and receive.

Attack of the killer attachments

Then when you start adding attachments and we add a whole other step to the process. Encoding and decoding the attachments.

For every attachment in your email your client has to encode that attachment to become text so that the mail servers can send the email at all. Then on the other end the attachment is converted back from text into whatever file format it is supposed to be (a picture or spreadsheet).

So what started out as a simple text message turned into a bloated and highly inefficient way to send files. And sometimes these files are very large thus slowing the whole process down dramatically taking a millisecond process and turning it into a three to ten second (sometimes 10 minute) process.

The server says my email is too big. What is going on?

There are practical limits to what the mail server can handle and still do it’s job. Say you want to email a 5 megabyte file (the complete works of Shakespeare let’s say). No big deal. It’s an awfully big text file but the mail servers and clients churn through it and deliver it in surprisingly swift time depending on the internet connections involved.

Now multiply that by a billion and those mail servers are working overtime, finding accounts, finding mail servers, transferring massive amounts of information and your poor client struggling with all those attachments trying to be as quick as possible because it knows how mad you get when you have to sit there for a minute while it retrieves your email.

The whole process not only slows down your computer and the recipients computer to deal with all that crap everyone is attaching, it slows the entire internet down using the least efficient means possible to transfer files from one computer to another.

Thus to prevent the entire internet from collapsing under it’s own weight, mail servers are set with a limit to how a big of a file may be attached.

My mail server says I can send 100 megabyte attachments, no problem right?

The problem is, what is the limit on the receiving mail server? Your friend or customers mail server might only allow 2 megabyte attachments. So even though you can send it, the email is still going to bounce back. And of course this happens a lot all day long around the world, needlessly slowing down the internet further.

But an even bigger issue is one of simple etiquette. Even if you can send a 100 megabyte file and your recipient has a really fast computer with a high speed connection they have to wait for your 100 megabyte file to download before they can find out whether that other important email arrived.

By sending massive files via email you are slowing everyones life down. Which might not be a bad thing, but it’s kind of rude without checking to see if they want their life slowed down in the first place.

Okay okay, so I shouldn’t send giant files by email. What do I do?

Unfortunately you are screwed. There is no easy way for the average computer user to send big files from one computer to another. Seriously.

It’s not that it is that hard or confusing, it’s just that most people lack the basic understanding of how their computers work behind all those pretty shiny interfaces and even the most basic thing such as using FTP which is designed to send files between computers becomes a major ordeal. And even when you figure out how FTP works, you need a server to send the files to. Everybody could set up an FTP server on their home computers but then you would have to learn about how computer security works to keep from being hacked.

Honestly for years sending files between computers was so ridiculously convoluted for the average user, that it is no wonder that email is the de facto method for file transfer.

And that is why I don’t blame you.

However, in recent years may web services have popped up that make sending large files easy. Simply go to somewhere like transferbigfiles.com or sendspace.com.

Using services such as these gives the recipient the choice of when they download the file. They receive a link to the file instead of the file itself, and the file is then downloaded using http or ftp which is better suited to delivering the data.

In business settings, files are often going to be emailed to a large group of people anyway. So with a little help from the IT department you could also set up easy ways for you to copy files to a central location that you can then send links to instead of the file itself.

And in conclusion…

I don’t really expect people to stop sending file via email. The ability is there and you should use it. I just thought you might like to know how it works, and why it seems so dang slow sometimes. And armed with a little bit of knowledge prevent some headaches.

But now that you do know, instead of whining to the IT department when your massive file gets bounced back, consider using one of the many services created to help folks like you out.

Generally speaking I wouldn’t email an attachment bigger than a few megabytes. But then I can just FTP the file to our many web servers and send you a link myself. For the rest of you who don’t know how to do that or don’t have an FTP server to use, I sympathize and forgive you for slowing the whole internet down. Next time I will be attacking the spammers and giving advice on some email best practices to keep you, your inbox, and your computer safe.

Gotta go email a hundred megabytes of pictures to someone now. Merry day.

For a much deeper but still friendly explanation of what email is and how email works visit HowStuffWorks.com: How email works

This is the first in a series of basic computer skills and knowledge articles. I will likely be updating this one and building an entire Computer 101 section here at CoTradeCo to help folks out.

I will definitely be adding more references and external links for more information and study, but I’m out of time for today. Check back soon. And if you have any questions don’t hesitate to comment here and post other questions in the Digital Life and other communities at CoTradeCo.

See more in the series in the post, Computers 101: Welcome to the show. Or why memorizing is not learning. or simply browse the Digital life Computers 101 community blog topic

All Computers 101 articles by zoe somebody are licensed under creative commons, attribution and share alike.

a day in the life of striatic – oops image used under a
Creative Commons License
courtesy of striatic at Flickr

You might also be interested in:

Computers 101: Computer metaphors and conventions. Or why it looks and works like that.