Ursinet.com

Ancestry.com is offering a free 14-day trial.

jah — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:10:24 +0000

I highly recommend it, especially if you’ve ever dabbled in genealogy. I was almost immediately able to plug in some information and find three more generations with government-certified documentation on my father’s side.

Browser Wars

jah — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:09:51 +0000

Internet Explorer 8

Still takes an unacceptably long time to open up extra tabs.

Chrome

Installs very quickly. Opens up new pages and seems to accommodate
Popup control is not detailed enough.

Firefox

Scrambling to keep it’s secondary lead over Chrome, I found that it did not work with memory management as well, so it was always subject to crashes.

Videolan – the best video player, but not perfect

jah — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:00:32 +0000

I’ve been using Videolan as my primary media player for videos for a while now. It even plays flash video that you download.

BENEFITS:

Unlike the default media player in Windows, it has all the codecs you need and it is free. I can’t believe Microsoft really thought we would pay for an untold number of codecs just to watch on videos, which should be in universal players and formats.

CRITIQUE:

When I go from video to video that has a different default size, why won’t it stick with the same size window I manually created? that’s rather frustrating.
It does not notify you when there is a new update available. You have to seek it.

Itunes

jah — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:57:27 +0000

I’m trying to maximize the way I use Itunes for my ipod, but I don’t think most people appreciate all of the features that it has. Here are some that even my daughter didn’t know about, which I had to figure out on my own:

BENEFITS:

For goodness sakes, use the rating system. Not only does it tend to play the higher rated songs more, but you can change them on the fly when you’re listening to your songs.
Duplicate finder is built in.
Mass update categories, genres.
Use the smart playlists, which are dynamic.
Sort by Date Added to make sure that your newest songs are always categorized and rated approrpiately.
If I don’t recognize an artist, I will give a neutral category.
I have Smart Playlists for 4 and 5 rated songs and then one for 5 rated songs when I know I’m not going to want to be flipping through songs, such as while I’m driving. Both of these lists have an exception for Holiday music.
Until I can actually clean up the files on the hard drive, I put the least liked or shortest duration sounds/songs on one star.

CRITICISMS:

It is very unclear what happens to “removed” items on the local drive. There is absolutely no file maintenance system and there is no way, apparently to change the file name from within Itunes.
What’s worse is when you change anything on your actual file system, you either have to retrieve the information by seeking the folder again manually and you are plagued with a bunch of exclamation points for which there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to clean up.

Metapad – Notepad on Steroids

jah — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:39:28 +0000

It’s free and much more useful than any other notepad/workpad, yellow sticky or any other kind of gadget that is available in Windows.

See http://liquidninja.com/metapad

Outlook Reminder Fix for “year 4501″ Problem

jah — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:34:22 +0000

Problem: When setting a custom Reminder in a Microsoft Outlook 2007 e-mail with the Follow Up Flag, the default date comes up for some people as 1/1/4501, which is rather annoying.

Fix: From the Flag drop down menu, go to Set Quick Date. Set it for Tomorrow. Do again and set for Today.

Free Studio Manager

jah — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 03:23:51 +0000

DVDVideosoft.com provides this great software that is incredibly powerful, intuitive and free. The only shortcoming is that it only works on Youtube videos.

I particularly like finding rare songs on Youtube and reducing them into high quality MP3’s that are immediately dumped into an Itunes folder that is automatically added to my library and therefore onto my Ipod.

Now I just need to find an MP3 editor of some kind that lets me trim the audio like one does a video.

Status Updates Shouldn’t be a Nightmare

jah — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:28:20 +0000

Why post on many sites when you can use services like Ping?

Microsoft versus Google Desktop Search Applications

jah — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:16:23 +0000

I use Microsoft because, in part, I am an Outlook/Office user, and they integrate with the software that they designed better, in most cases. I was not thrilled with the web results-like format in Google and I like the immediate gratification I get from clicking on the Outlook item and having it open properly.

Outlook Plugin – Send2 from 4Team Corporation

jah — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:56:20 +0000

I use the Send2 Plugin from 4Team Corporation, which allows me to send out individual emails instead of trying to force bulk email.

This works very well for personalized emails to a small group of people. However, the plugin is not as robust as I would like, causing many reboots if I have too many program open, despite having 8G of RAM on my machine, and often crashing or taking many hours to process just a few thousand emails. While I have used many different bulk emailers, I really wanted to have something that was a plugin that showed the proper name of my addresses in the To: field and to have a perfect audit of what actually went out in my Sent Items.

So for now I am using Send2 in batches when I have thousands of emails to send out. When I called their tech support about the problem they remoted in and said I had everything set up fine but that it just wasn’t intended for that many addressees. So what is the limit? They didn’t give me one. I don’t understand how they can sell this as a bulk mailer if it truly isn’t.