Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

April 16, 2010 | Comment

Google has release a number of interesting and useful updates over the last few days and removed (or planned to) remove a big one.

Firstly the good stuff. Gmail now allows you to drag and drop files to be attached – a real time saver. You simply drag the file over the attachment area and drop – job done. It works well on both Windows and Mac with Chrome. The second change in Gmail is the ability to add a calendar invitation into an email. Again a great improvement.

The other major changes have come in Google Docs where a … Read the rest

Google Street View Star

March 15, 2010 | 1 comment

Last May I wrote about working from home and seeing the Google Street View car pass my house. Now, some ten months later, the results are in and the pictures have been uploaded and there I am at our window, standing like some shadowy Norman Bates.

You can quite clearly see that I am holding a cup of tea but it also looks like I have positioned it to protect my genitals! Maybe I misunderstood those articles about Google taking your privacy and thought they meant privates!… Read the rest

Clipping to Evernote from iPhone Safari Browser

January 17, 2010 | Comment

One of my favourite tools is Evernote, the note taking application. I regularly find snippets of information on the internet that I want to retain and come back to later. Evernote provides a number of tools that sit in the browser allowing you to clip directly to your account. This is enormously helpful and I have always wished that I could do the same from the browser of my iPhone. Well, I discovered this weekend that you can. Rather than repeat the tip you can go here to see what you need to do.

Perfect Evernote bliss has finally been … Read the rest

Your Own URL Shortener

January 11, 2010 | Comment

URL Shorteners are all the rage these days what with bit.ly, tinyurl.com, flic.kr and the rest. They take the incredibly long URLs that are generated from tools such as WordPress and turn them into something shorter and more manageable. So, for example, the URL for my last post on my top tech of 2009 was http://www.spokenlikeageek.com/2010/01/07/top-tech-of-2009/ but sending it to bit.ly it becomes a more manageable http://bit.ly/7fozBD.

So why bother? Well Twitter is one driving force. With only 140 characters to play with a full length URL like that shown above would leave you very little to play with. … Read the rest

Top tech of 2009

January 7, 2010 | 3 comments

For the last few years Michael Arrington has been producing a list of the top tech that he has regularly used in each year and I thought this year I would give it a go. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2009 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

A lot of my life is spent in a browser and this year I changed over from Firefox to using Google’s Chrome. Why? Because it is fast. In fact it is the faster browser I have used and speed is important to me. I don’t … Read the rest

BBC iPlayer on Nintendo wii

December 14, 2009 | Comment

The BBC has been doing a sterling job with its iPlayer making it available in all sorts of places. I had an opportunity to try out the Nintendo wii implementation over the weekend and I was pretty impressed.

To date all my iPlayer watching has been done on a computer of some description or another (or very occasionally on my iPhone). What was great about the wii was that I was able to hook it up to the TV and get access to programmes on the device they were originally intended for.

While the picture wasn’t broadcast quality it was … Read the rest

Online EPS Viewer

December 11, 2009 | Comment

I love timesavers like this.

EPS files are great for high quality graphics and are essential for press ready artwork but viewing the files can be a real pain. Typically you need a high end Adobe product or a specialised viewer which I don’t want to have to install just for the odd occasion when I need to view EPS files.

Along comes 3M to the rescue with their online EPS viewer and it is just perfect. You locate and upload the file you want to view, press the button and seconds later you see it on screen. No fuss.… Read the rest

My Space? Your Space More Like

December 7, 2009 | Comment

Really interesting article in the FT yesterday about the rise and fall of MySpace drawing a (contrasting) comparison to the current web sensation Facebook.

I have to admit that while I really struggled with the point of Facebook but I have never got MySpace. Not at all. Ever.

Potentially I can see Facebook being a real drain on peoples time (you need Responsinet to deal with that). I find the mindless games and quizzes that appear to be a waste of space and I still fail to see the business benefit but least people have stopped poking me. That said … Read the rest

TweetCloud

December 2, 2009 | Comment

I have covered word clouds before when I looked at the service Wordle. Another, similar, service has popped up over the last few days offering a similar service for your Tweets, tweet cloud. Having pointed it to my Twitter stream @spokenlikeageek (you are following me, right?) it produced the graphic on the left showing the most frequently used words over the last year. Oh and what a surprise! I love my iPhone!

The top six words were:

iphone
google
windows
apple
netbook
chrome

Does that scream geek to you? I would be interested to know what your top … Read the rest

So Now What?

October 14, 2009 | Comment

So I received my invitation to Google Wave today and for a full thirty seconds there was much excitement as if I’d had an invite to the party of the year. So I logged in and then the realisation hit me that I have no one to connect to on the service and not the first idea of how to use it.

I watched the introductory video of some mad Australian in a lab coat explaining what each area of the screen does and then decided that Wave is a lonely experience right now.

So I put out a message … Read the rest