MacBigot Cached Glances

This is what I’ve set up at http://twtbizcard.com/macbigot . The service is free and simple to use: Just add the hashtag ‘#twtbizcard’ to a @reply to any Twitter user, and they will receive a link directly to your card, with as much information as you can cram into it.

Then, the site keeps track of which cards you have received, and who you’ve sent cards to.

Why is this so attractive to busy networking people? It’s a lot easier to exchange Twitter handles than phone numbers or even email addresses… so if you’re not active on Twitter yet, it’s likely time to at least set up an account: http://Twitter.com .

TwtBizCard Demo from Felipe on Vimeo.

Last night I found I could no longer access GMail, YouTube, etc. (any of the services that use Google’s login) while using Firefox. But, I could log in just fine from any other browser. And in Firefox, I could still log into any non-Google service with no issues.

It’s a good thing that I have more than one browser. I avoid using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer like the plague — it’s a puss-filled excuse for a portal to the world. My weapon of choice is Firefox, which I use about 95% of the time; but I also have Chrome and Safari to test any dramatic changes I’ve strong-armed on web sites I create. Each of them excel in their own way — too bad I can’t pick their advantages ‘a la carte’ and leave the dross behind.

I tried all the standard browser troubleshooting through the morning (rebooting, FLUSHDNS, clearing history and cookies, etc.) — but saw no improvement.

After a bunch of searching, I found lots of people chiming in about disabling the GMail Notifier. So I tried disabling it under Tools/Add-ons, and now GMail and Google Calendar are working again. I even turned the GMail notifier back on later, and nothing broke this time.

If you’re interested, GMail Notifier is a service that camps out in your Windows system tray (bottom-right-hand corner of your screen), or in the menu bar of your Mac to show a pop-up when you’ve received incoming messages. There are also a bunch of other tools that do the same thing; one of them might be more to your liking, so check out this list at “15 tools for the Gmail addict” (CNet.com).

Oh, and because I love you, here’s a quick tip for everyone on other platforms: “How to flush DNS cache in Linux / Windows / Mac” (TechieCorner.com).

This morning, when I tried to go to Facebook.com, I was sent instead to a third-party who had designed their web page to look exactly like one on FB — BUT IT WASN’T. (This spam domain was created on 7/6/2010 and sits on a server in the Bahamas that hosts many other similar scams on other domain names.)

At least this time, these jerks were kind enough to leave their URL visible in the address bar. But they’re not always in such a nice mood. Sometimes, they will leave ‘facebook.com’ at the beginning of the address and hide their real destination further down the line. Most users will not pay attention to what’s on the address bar, or what URL is behind a link they’re about to click on… And that’s how they get to you and your computer.

Let’s be careful out there.

I often use Microsoft Excel, FileMaker Pro, and a strong text editor to do data cleansing — for things such as managing out bad contacts in mailing lists, locating duplicates, and detecting syntax errors. These may seem like trivial tasks which could be done by eyeballing the data — but when you deal with files containing more than a handful of fields and thousands of records, you need to trust your tools.

Because the fine folks at Bare Bones Software do not have Windows versions of my favorite text editors (they are a MacOS-only developer), I had to audition about a dozen tools to manage the same kind of powerful search-and-replace features that I had been accustomed to on the Mac.

The winner turned out to be an open source (free) utility called Notepad++, which does just about everything that I am used to having in TextWrangler — with the exception of the ability to sort lines (which I can still do in Excel if necessary).

Almost all of the web sites I manage are sitting on inexpensive accounts with BtoBDomains.com. It’s a reliable host, and includes free click-to-install applications like WordPress, and free email. Unfortunately for small organizations, there is a cap on how many emails you can send with Outlook (or any other desktop email client) in a 24-hour period. Fortunately for those same organizations, it’s forcing many of them to stop sending their promotional emails using Microsoft Outlook — which is a great tool for business correspondence, but a crappy one for managing your message.

The following instructions are to answer two questions:

1) How do we get around the host’s limit of 250 SMTP (outbound messages sent with email software on your laptop) messages per 24-hour period? [Note that there is no limit to outbound messages sent from the host's webmail interface.]

2) How do we format the body of a message so that it will look presentable on all/most email clients? [A high priority is to include inline images -- that should not appear to recipients as attachments.]

——————————————————————–

For part (1), realize that there are actually THREE methods to send email with your hosted email account:

A) Using the webmail client provided by the host

B) Using email software on your PC/Mac/handheld (Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Entourage, iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, etc.)

C) Giving your GMail account access to send and receive your hosted mail.

For this exercise, we will be concentrating on (C), which gets around usability issues (A) and SMTP limits (B) of the other two options.

You will need:

- Your hosted email username (NAME@YOURDOMAIN.COM) and password
- A free GMail account (go to http://GMail.com to create one if you don’t have one yet.)

After you get logged in on Gmail.com, navigate this way to add your hosted email account to your GMail account:

/ Settings / ‘Accounts and Import’ tab / ‘Send mail as:’ section / ‘Send mail from another address’ /

After you go through the steps as GMail will prompt you, there will be a new feature added to the top of every new message you compose — which is, a pull-down menu that lets you select WHICH email address this message will be sent from (your hosted account, or your GMail.com account).

There are no limits to how many emails a day you can send this way; though we recommend that you put no more than 100 recipients in the BCC field each time you send.

OPTIONAL: In the same area under ‘Settings’, you can have the GMail account receive inbound messages that land in your hosted account. This is not necessary for this exercise; but may be convenient for some users. To do so, navigate here:

/ Settings / ‘Accounts and Import’ tab / ‘Check mail using POP3:’ section / ‘Add POP3 email account’

——————————————————————–

For part (2), you’ll need to make a minor change to your GMail account to add an ‘Insert Image’ button to the toolbar.

Instructions are here:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-in-labs-inserting-images.html”>

Some things to remember when designing the message body:

- Not all email clients present content the same way. Keep things as simple as possible.

- Graphics should never be larger than 600 pixels wide. Resize them BEFORE adding them to the message.

- Some email clients will block images no matter what you do. Remember to include enough appropriate text content so every recipient understands your message.

From the mailbag: ‘What is an easy way to convert a WAV file to MP3, to make it a smaller file?”

There are lots of tools that can do this; but I favor iTunes because it’s available for free on both Mac and Windows platforms — and because it’s one of the best media-management tools I’ve tried (Linux users should look seriously at Banshee).

The ‘short version’ of the instructions is to first make sure that your default encoding method in iTunes is ‘MP3′; then just drag your WAV file(s) into the iTunes song list. Then right-click on the song(s) and choose ‘Convert to MP3′ in the contextual menu.

How to convert .wav file into MP3 file with iTunes (PremiumBeat.com)

Converting to MP3 (Wellesley.edu)

Death by PowerPoint

View more presentations from www.kapterev.com.

Follow-up:
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint (NYTimes.com)

The nice folks at TaxFoundation.org have a well-tooled explanation posted about what they call Tax Freedom Day [PDF] on their site; but the short version is this: If you were to add up all the tax responsibilities of the average American, and plot the number of days on a calendar that it would take you to fulfill those responsibilities, ‘Tax Freedom Day’ is the first day on the calendar you are getting to keep some (any) of the money you earn.

Having said that, knowing now that roughly half of Americans pay no tax to the Federal government at all means it’s likely a bit later in the year for me, since Tax Freedom Day for non-contributors is January 1st. For clarity, that means for every person who does not contribute to Americans’ tax burden, someone else is paying — and for every voter who supports the idiotic claims that ‘the rich aren’t carrying their fair share’, I remind you of our previous story: “How Taxes Work — or, ‘How to Pay for Beer’“, appearing again below for your convenience.

From the mailbag:

“How Taxes Work — or, ‘How to Pay for Beer,

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100.

If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.’ Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free.

But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

‘I only got a dollar out of the $20′ declared the sixth man. Then he pointed at the tenth man, ‘but he got $10!’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!’

‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him.

But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works.

The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction.

Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore.

In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

-David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D. Professor of Economics University of Georgia”

This mailbag question is an inconvenient one if you don’t have a backup — a mouse, that is.

If everything else is still working, but your touchpad/trackpad stops responding, it’s usually because:

1) The cable (inside the laptop) connecting the device is dislodged.

2) The control panel for the touchpad is configured to ignore the device (Start Menu/Control Panels/Mouse-Trackpad?).

3) There was a strong enough static discharge (just like when you get zapped by a clothing rack at J.C. Pennys after dragging your shoes on the carpet) to scramble it’s brains.

For (1), you’ll need professional help.

If it’s (2), you’ll need to do some digging in the Control Panels to locate the relevant settings.

If it’s only (3), a reboot usually does the trick.

—–
I’m happy to report that the user in question bravely removed the palmrest from her PC and found the cable detached; when secured, problem solved!

One of today’s questions was about the difference between ‘Coherence’ and ‘Modality’ modes in Parallels; it took me a while to find a video I like that explains this — because some of them were recorded by people who don’t know how to pronounce ‘modality‘, and it was pissing me off. So the following video that I’m providing is longer and covers a bit more territory than just this concept — but I’d rather share correct information than choose a shorter video by people who need a pronunciation dictionary.

For the uninitiated, Parallels is one of three ways to ‘easily’ run a full Windows environment on your Mac (the other VMWare two are and VirtualBox). Imagine you’ve got several applications running on your Mac: Photoshop, Microsoft Word, Firefox, and… Windows. Then, within that Windows environment, you can run several Win32 apps at once… so by Command-Tabbing through Mac applications and Alt-Tabbing through Windows apps, you have full access to both platforms simultaneously without rebooting.

VirtualBox is the only one that is free (though the copy of Windows you will run inside it is not free — you still need to provide that) — and configuration the first time can seem daunting; but carrying a single laptop with access to all the tools you may need in either platform may be worth the effort.

And no, there is currently no easy way to do the reverse (running MacOS in a window on a Microsoft platform). MacOS comes with all the perks of *NIX-style memory management, and Windows does not. So it’s unlikely that there will be a commercial product that attempts to make this a reality. However, there are several projects out there (like Boot Camp) for dual-boot (Windows & MacOS) or even tri-boot (Windows, MacOS, Linux) systems that allow you to choose at startup which personality you would like your computer to have today.

This was an old presentation I found on my SlideShare.net account when someone asked me about the service… I’d posted it years ago, so it’s kind of funny:

Network Threats

View more presentations from macbigot.

…because the 9-year-old has chosen it to sing in her school talent show (they’re using it to raise money to send for Haiti relief). (LYRICS)

I’d spent a few days hunting around the ‘net, looking for the backtrack recording. Failed.

I’m a keyboardist myself — but I’ve tried to pluck it out on a little guitar we have laying around. It’s a beautiful, but simple song… so if there was any chance in (hot place) for me to pick it up in time for her audition on Monday, I’d handle it. But the woman who promised to love, honor, and not hold back the positive criticism has not (yet) been impressed — so she’s trying to track down a friend of the family who might have a couple of hours to spare.

Now, after a week of struggling (my fingers just don’t bend around a fretboard yet), I just found (and bought) the backtrack and legit chord sheet from JJ Heller’s site — unfortunately it looks like they ship a CD, rather than sending it electronically: http://www.jjheller.com/store.asp …so it likely won’t be here by Monday.

I’m hoping Miss Twinkle Toes can audition with JJ’s original recording in a couple of days, if her school is understanding enough (I doubt it). But just in case, I’ll keep trying to get more comfortable with those cord changes on my own…

Below is my favorite version of it — with JJ playing the harmonica. The Wife likes the studio recording with occasional smatterings of piano (no harmonica); but she’s not always right, you see.

I wish the woman who promised to love, honor, and do my darning had seen this video in time…

Yes, I’m sooooo lazy!

• Virtual Keyboard
  
• Play Online Piano
  
• CMagics Virtual Piano
  
• Interactive Online Piano
  
• e-board interactive piano

All of these require that you have a recent version of the Adobe Flash plugin installed.

I’ve never done this before — and as there hasn’t been a reason for me to try, I never new how easy it is to create an ISO image for the Windows realm (I regularly mount an ISO image in Parallels as a disk, but never created one for myself).

Jeff Geerling has provided the answer:

1. Open Disk Utility (located in Applications>Utilities folder).
2. Drag your disk image into the left-hand pane (where all your drives are listed) of Disk Utility.
3. Click on the file you just dragged into Disk Utility (should appear in the left-hand column).
4. Click on the ‘Images’ menu, then choose ‘Convert…’
5. When the ‘Convert Image’ dialog pops up, select ‘DVD/CD Master’ from the ‘Image Format’ pop-up menu.
6. Name your file, with ‘.cdr’ at the end of the filename, then click ‘Save.’
7. Disk Utility will convert the file to an ISO image. After this finishes, replace the ‘cdr’ at the end of the filename (in the Finder) to ‘iso’.
8. Now, the disk should be burnable on a Windows PC [Ed. Note: or, mountable in Parallels as a Windows-format CD!]

Note: Another way to do this is to use the program ISOlator.

Thanks, Jeff!

Now, for my next trick, I need to make this ISO file bootable (because doing the above procedure kills the bootable nature of any ISO that you touch with Disk Utility). For that, we’ll be taking advantage of some tips from:

Editing a Bootable PC ISO Image using OSX (macosxuser posted at MacOSX.com)

My intended end-game is that I have a Ghost boot disk, and I have a handful of very large Ghost image files (15Gb total) that I want to coexist on the same ISO, so that I can use the same Vista image built for our Dell-using people (with some minor modifications to the hardware drivers) on the MacBook Pro laptops with Parallels that I am deploying to our media designers and Oracle programmers.

Yes, I could have recreated the image from scratch with the Vista install disk — but the intention here is to give our Mac-using programmers access to a Windows test environment so that they ‘see’ what the rest of the staff sees when running our internal apps on a Vista-bearing Dell laptop.

Maybe your kids are old enough that they’ve figured out email accounts are ‘free’, and they’re already ‘out there’, ‘in the wild’, keeping in touch with all their friends.

But if they’re not, you may be wondering whether there is a way to let your kids talk with others by email without letting them off the leash entirely — there is a lot of disgusting junk that lands in most open email accounts these days, and predators that you would like to shield your children from as long as possible.

Older children might just need the firm, guiding hand of a responsible adult — but younger children, to whom you might not be ready to explain the 14th ‘male enhancement’ advertisement that has arrived this week, might be better off in a safer, ‘gated community’ approach to email.

In addition to strict filtering, most of these services allow you, as a parent, to restrict incoming messages to only those senders that are listed in the child’s address book.

So if you’re looking for an inexpensive gift this season, how about giving your kids their own email accounts?

Below is a list of several sites that will provide email accounts for free or at low cost — but don’t just choose by price; each of these is designed just a little differently, and are aimed at slightly different audiences.

Look for one that best fits the maturity and needs of your children — and then let grandma and your kids’ other email-savvy friends know in advance so that there will be a handful of messages waiting when they log in for the first time!

—–
PikLuk.com (FREE, both email and web safety targeted at very young children, only work on Windows)
ZillaDog.com (FREE, no limits to number of children)
ComputerMail.net (FREE, ad-suppported for unlimited family size)
KinderStart.com ($14.95/year for one child)
Zoobuh.com ($30/year for each child)
KidMail.net ($30/year for your whole family)
SurfBuddies.com ($36/year for up to five kids)
KidsEmail.org ($58/year for up to four kids)
KidSafeMail.com ($54/year for up to four kids)
Safe2Read.com ($28 for up to 10 kids)

Schools and other kid-centric organizations looking to provide safer-than-normal email environments should look into vendors that specialize in meeting stricter federal guidelines. A good examples is Gaggle.net.