Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and all the G-Unit apps are officially out of beta now.
Check out more info on the Official Gmail Blog
Five years later, and beta is officially no longer cool.
If you really miss it, then you can turn it back on in the Labs section of Gmail. :)
Yeah, so my whole “making time for more posts in 2008” isn’t exactly roaring, but whatever.
Yesterday, Joomla 1.5 (stable) was released. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I have a great fondness of Joomla. It’s open source, and I’ve used it on several church websites in the last few years. It has its quirks, but once you get past them, it’s a great CMS.
There are some HUGE updates with version 1.5. They basically rewrote the entire core of the CMS, which is great news for developers and designers. Much improved from what I read.
I may be starting some projects soon that require a robust CMS, and Joomla will certainly be first on my list to try. I’m anxious to see how 1.5 works in action. If you haven’t tried Joomla, now would be the perfect time.
Looks like iTunes is dropping their DRM-free iTunes Plus music from $1.29 to $0.99 (which is the same price as their regular DRM music).
I posted recently about Amazon’s new DRM-free MP3’s. Good to see that it’s spurring on changes.
HT: Lifehacker
Well, after many years of talking about it, I finally have all of my data on a regular backup schedule. I have two internal and one external hard drives on my desktop, and an internal hard drive in my laptop – all of which have important data (i.e., I’d be sunk if I lost most of it).
To backup all of my data, I decided to use one 500 GB Western Digital MyBook to hold it all (I already use another MyBook for some of my data storage and really love it).
To schedule and perform the backups, I downloaded SyncBack Freeware. I was originally turned on to SyncBack by a Lifehacker post about it. They were right. It really is that simple, it’s fast, and it does a great job. And the best part is that it’s totally free!
I would walk you through the steps I took to do it, but honestly, the Lifehacker post really does a great job of explaining everything, so I’ll just let it speak for itself.
In the not-to-distant future, I also plan to set up a secure FTP backup of some of the more important files.
My question for you is: Are you backing up your data? If so, how?
Geek to Live: Automatically back up your hard drive via Lifehacker
From CNET News Blog:
Dell.com customers buying an XPS system, Inspiron notebook or Dimension desktop can select a “no software preinstalled” option. This will eliminate productivity, ISP, photo and music software, but not everything.
I’ve been waiting to hear this for quite some time. Glad to see they’re finally allowing you to opt out of them putting so much crapware on your machine so that you can save some of the hours it takes to uninstall this junk when you get a new Dell.
(Thanks: Lifehacker)
Read a great post over at eMinistryNotes this morning about explaining RSS in plain English. I’ve taken a stab at it on our church’s website before, but this video (from CommonCraft) does a great job explaining things.
Check it out.
eMinistryNotes – RSS in Plain English
One of my favorite little start apps, Launchy, just released a new version. There are some new features and other great stuff.
Right now I have a handful of things that I’ve been meaning to post about for a while but just haven’t. This is one of them.
We’ve been sort of redoing our budget and diligently tracking our spending lately since we’re new homeowners and whatnot (trying to stay on top of the game), and being the geek that I am, I looked all over for a good tech solution to help us with that.
Last year at some point, I stumbled upon (after a LOT of looking at other solutions) the website PearBudget.com. Not much to the site except the download link to one of the most awesome pieces of Excel handiwork I’ve ever seen. PearBudget was built to be easy and informative. You can assign categories to three different expense types (regular, irregular, and variable). Everything is very well explained within the cells of the spreadsheet, and there are notes and comments everywhere. You set your budget, enter your amounts, and it tells you in plain English how much you spent, how much you made, how you did with your budget each month (and a summary for the year), so you can easily track and adjust things as you go. I can’t say enough about how awesome PearBudget really is.
Except for one thing. It’s not online.
I’m on several different computers all day, so I like to be able to access important things online whenever I want instead of having to be on a specific machine. Thankfully, PearBudget has a Web2.0 version in the works, but it’s been a LONG time in the making, and although it was recently “finished”, the creator decided to go back to the drawing board to make it even more dummy-proof (AHHH!).
So since I was a little frustrated with this, I set out to find some more options. First, I thought, I’ll just throw PearBudget into Google Spreadsheets. Easy enough, right? Wrong. There are so many notes, comments, and conditional formatting, that it just loses it’s kitsch (and some of its functionality too). Plus, it’s a hefty spreadsheet (as in size), so it’s not exactly optimized for Google Spreadsheets.
Then, I ran into another little gem called Wesabe.com.
We’ve sort of changed our spending methods so that we use very little cash. Most everything is either with a debit card or a credit card (which we pay off each month in full). That way all of our transactions are already tracked for us. With PearBudget, we have to type in each transaction — not a big deal, but still slightly time consuming (maybe 15 minutes, once a week). With Wesabe, you can create a free account, download your transaction data from your bank in any one of a few different formats (thus it doesn’t contain any account info — only transactional data, so there’s no security risk), and then upload it to your account on Wesabe.com.
With the free account, you can upload up to three accounts (which is handy, because that’s exactly how many we track). Once your data is uploaded, you can tag and edit each transaction. I use my tags as sort of spending categories. Then, you can set a monthly spending limit on each tag (category) — there’s your budget.
The cool thing about Wesabe.com is that if you, for example, you eat at a certain restaurant all the time, once you edit the name and the tags in Wesabe, it remembers it the next time, so you don’t have to re-tag or re-name the new entry. It works great. Another cool thing is that it looks at your tags and gives you tips from the Wesabe community on how to save money in that certain area. There are some very helpful tips on there.
You can also set goals and track your progress. For example, if you have a goal of saving $500 for something, you can set a goal for that and use tags to track your progress. You can even get tips from others about it if you wish.
Overall, these are two great tools to help you track your personal finances. There are benefits to both. I’m really anxious to see PearBudget’s Web2.0 project though. I think that could really be a winner — if they ever finish it.
Obviously, there are a lot of other solutions out there, but as far as free options that fit our needs, these were the two strongest. Mvelopes.com seems to be really great too, but it’s a subscription service (and I feel a little weird about paying money to manage and track my money). If you want some more great ideas up this alley, check out some things they’ve had on Lifehacker.com in the Personal Finance Category.
Finance, Google, Organization, Productivity, Reviews, Tech, Web
I meant to post on this a while back, and I just forgot.
Several weeks ago, a friend of mine was having some computer problems, and I really didn’t have time to drive down and take a look at it for him, so I remembered a handy little app that I had run across a couple of weeks earlier called CrossLoop. It is a very simple and secure screen sharing program.
So I told him to download the small CrossLoop client, and I did the same. Once we had both installed it (in just a couple of minutes tops), we each opened the program. He chose “Host” and read the ID number to me (which changes each time), and I chose “Join” and entered the same ID. Then, presto, we were connected, and I could control his PC. I did my thing, and we were done. Problem solved.
Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the most robust remote program available by far. You can’t do file transfers, capture/record your sessions, etc. But for sheer ease of use and price (free), it’s hard to beat. There are occasions where more options might be needed, but for a quick hop onto someone else’s machine to help them out or demonstrate something, it works great. Give it a try.
Hallelujah! No more bloated systems from Dell! (unless you still want one)
I’ve always been sick of uninstalling the buttload of programs that Dell puts on their systems that are totally useless to me (and whoever I might be setting a Dell computer up for). Now, you can buy a Dell system that has a blank hard drive — ready for you to put whatever OS you want on it. It’s great because you don’t get all the stuff you don’t want, you don’t waste time, and they’re finally promoting opensource operating systems and programs (which more people need to be doing).
Way to go Dell!
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