Sorry I was MIA last week. The Republican National Convention was held a couple miles from my house and I became a news junkie. I have to admit that I was more interested in what was going on around town because of the RNC than what happened at the RNC – but it kept me busy.
This week I wanted to share a quick tool that will help you edit photos.
Picnik: http://www.picnik.com
You don’t need to register – you simply upload your photo or other image. Then you can do basic editing, resize, rotate, crop, change contrast, colors, sharpness and red-eye. Then you can save it to your desktop, your Flickr account, Facebook, or email it to a friend.
It seems to deal with only the most popular image formats (jpeg, gif, bmp, tiff and a couple others). But say you had a digital photo you wanted to post online or send to someone without overwhelming their email in-box, you could use Picnic to resize and you’re in good shape.
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OK maybe I’m the last person in the world to know how easy it is to zip a file or folder using XP. In case I’m not the last I thought I’d share what I learned today:
How To Zip a file or folder
1. Select the file or folder you want to compress.
2. Right click and choose Send To
3. Slide Right and choose Compressed (zipped) folder
4. Allow the file or folder to compress.
5. You should now see an icon with the same name plus a Zip
o It may even have a zipper on the folder.
6. This is the compressed file that you may put on the server or send via email.
If you want to send a large file or a whole folder to someone via email is often makes sense to zip it first to compress the size. It makes it easier to send but more importantly easier to receive as a smaller file. To unzip you can generally just open the file and files should automatically expand. One word of caution, you shouldn’t unzip files from people you don’t know or even from people you know but aren’t expecting to send you anything. It is very easy to send a virus in a zipped file.
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Today’s Byte is courtesy of my Dad, who is a big GoToMyPC user. His computer at work uses a lot of monitoring software that he doesn’t have or want at home. Specifically he has cameras around work that feed into his desktop monitoring. To see what’s going on from home, he logs into his desktop at work using GoToMyPC (https://www.gotomypc.com/).
I know he’s been very happy with it and often uses it as a remote server for shared files. It’s $20 per month for each computer you want to see.
There are a couple of similar products that are out there for free (such as LogMeIn https://secure.logmein.com) but I don’t have any experience with them.
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A widget is a tiny application you can post on your desktop, web site, or blog. For example I just had a client want a little weather box on the corner of their web site – not that the weather is bearable in Minnesota again.
WdigetBox (http://www.widgetbox.com/) is a huge collection of free widgets. Here’s an example of what you can get:
Weather widget, (http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/weather-badge)
Matisse Artist (http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/MatisseArtist) where you can assemble cut outs to create art
Movie Moron (http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/movie-moron) – movie news and reviews
ESPN (http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/espn-bottom-line-widget)
Happy widgeting!
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I rarely do this – but I’m going to give a huge product endorsement for the Byte this week. This year I got a Flip Video (http://www.theflip.com/) for Christmas. Really I got it about 6 weeks ago and we have just loved it.
The best thing about the Flip Video is that it’s so easy to use. You turn it on then push the red button to start filming and push the same button to start. You can zoom in or out a bit. It’s very easy to hold and the videos seem to turn out not so shaky. Also it’s very easy to upload the videos to YouTube. The Flip Video comes with a USB port on the side so all you really need to do it plug it into your computer and the software will walk you through the process of uploading to YouTube – you just need to set up an account ahead of time. Here is a sample video: http://10qs.wordpress.com/2007/12/16/playground-equipment-in-dublin/ (It’s a video of playground equipment in Dublin – not techie but more fun than the video I took of the Christmas play at the girls’ school.)
Also I want to thank Andy from Minneapolis for sending a great one-sheet cheat sheet on saving .docx documents to .doc. I posted it on the Byte of the Week blog. (http://byteoftheweek.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/automatically-save-docx-as-doc/)
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I want to thank Andy Rose for his great one-sheet (Save as Doc) on how to automatically save .docx as .doc. Apparently this came up often at his office and he was kind enough to share the cheat sheet he made for co-workers.
Thanks!
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Last week we ran into a problem when my husband, using his laptop with Vista with Word 2007 tried to send a document to someone who didn’t have Word 2007.
Word 2007 automatically saves documents with a .docx extension. Unfortunately no one with earlier versions of Word can open these documents. Microsoft Word has a fix you can download if you want to open a document from someone else:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444731033.aspx
Here are instructions to help open the .docx items if you aren’t a Microsoft user:
http://www.ghacks.net/2007/07/25/how-do-i-open-docx-files/
What we found was an even better fix if you wanted to make it easier for someone to open was to save it with a .doc extension.
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Yesterday a friend of mine (Bill from Mahtomedi) sent me information on a free online video phone service, SightSpeed (www.sightspeed.com). You visit their site, download the software and magic presto you can make video calls to friends who have downloaded the same software. It took only a few minutes.
Admittedly you have to have a camera, mic and speakers – but other than that you don’t need much. Bill and I tried out the service and it was a little echoy – but it worked. You can also make audio-only calls. It’s a great, free way to talk to and see friends around the world.
If you sign up, feel free to list me as a call buddy and we can test out the service.
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I stumbled upon StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/) last summer and promptly forgot all about it. I just heard a rumor about Google looking into buying it, which makes me think we’ll hear more about it in the future.
What is StumbleUpon?
It’s a toolbar for your web browser that helps you find interesting web sites based on your profile. They build your profile first by asking you to select from a list categories that would interest you. Next you can approve or disapprove of the sites you visit, which helps them recognize what you like and also helps to promote or demote web sites accordingly. You can also email web sites to friends and review web sites through StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon Groups
You can join a StumbleUpon group to meet others with similar interests. You can share your favorite sites or join an online discussion. People can see when you’re online.
If I had time to surf for stuff I think I’d really like StumbleUpon. Unfortunately it can eat up a lot of time, which is not what I need these days. I do like to review client web sites through I haven’t yet noticed that it helps bring in traffic.
Completely Unrelated
On an unrelated note for folks who might be buying flowers in the Twin Cities this weekend (May 18-21), if you mention NACAC (North American Council on Adoptable Children http://www.nacac.org) at Linder’s flower marts, they will receive 15% of the pre-tax total. I have a good friend and Byte reader who works at NACAC so offered to pass that on to folks.
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Last week I learned a little about Twitter (www.twitter.com). It’s kind of like speed blogging for the really lazy. You sign up and get free web space where you can post endless text messages. Generally those messages are very quick, 1-2 sentences.
Here’s a sample from a complete stranger: http://twitter.com/MikeWills I picked his because his posts are a combination of work and real life and I think that’s generally how these things go.
I signed up too: http://twitter.com/AnnT
As you can see I just signed up. I will be very surprised if I ever post again.
I’ve been trying to think of a practical application. I think if you were a teenager with lots of time and a great need to be heard that this would be a good format. Maybe if you were on vacation or moved temporarily to a new place it might be fun to keep in touch with people at home – and maybe the people at home would read it.
From a work perspective maybe you could twitter as you worked out a problem – or maybe use this as an online brainstorming tool. Perhaps when you looked at your notes later solutions or idea would come up.
Even though I can’t really think of any great applications somehow Twitter caught my attention.
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