Here is a short audio review by Steve Holden @ TechNewsRadio.com of the 2nd Edition of the “IT Manager’s Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done” (ISBN: 0-12-370488-X) by Bill Holtsnider & Brian Jaffee.”
That you can embed in to your blog spreadsheets, documents, and forms created with Google Docs? I didn’t, until today.
It’s actually quite easy. Take for example this simple form below.
To generate such a form, log on to Google Docs, create a new document, and select Form. Create the fields you wish to receive responses to then select Embed. The code necessary to embed the new form within your blog is then presented.
Now, to get it in to your blog you’ll need to ensure that you are in HTML mode before pasting the content in to the body of your post. That’s all there is to it!
Any other tips and tricks with Google Docs? Please share.
Hi Everyone!
It has been a long time since you had audio on the the FiT feed. Well here we go again. This time around several of us got together and had a chat. We talked where we have been in 2008 tech wise. What we expected to get for Christmas and where we are going in 2009.
Join Us:
We Chat About:
I have an older WindowsXP based Media Center pc made by HP. It is the model z545. This is a discontinued unit which is too bad. I liked how the black case fits right in with your entertainment gear.
Last night my wife says the remote control quit working. This happens now and then, but a simple reboot usually fixes it right up. This unit is connected to dual Directv receivers. I found to my dismay when the system rebooted it claimed something was corrupt and could not see any tuners. Spending my weekend rebuilding the OS was not something I looked forward to.
After some poking around here is what I did to fix it. Otherwise it was time to look into a Mac Mini as a media center. I just liked having my xbox360 be able to pull tv from the directv over my network.
While a normal episode of Geek Cred features an interview from tech, sci-fi, games, or anything geek, Geek Cred Live is back and going to be a monthly thing. What is Geek Cred Live? Geek Cred live is all about you, the listener. With no special interviews, and no set format or set topic, you are the guest–it’s all about hanging out and talking geek!
The next Geek Cred Live will be on this Friday, November 28th, at 10:30 PM EST (GMT-5)
The live show will be done via TalkShoe.com. If you want to participate, if you aren’t already, sign up over there, download and install the TalkShoe software, and when the show starts, join the Talkcast here, which will let you listen to the live stream and participate in the chat room. If you have something to say, dial-in by calling the number (724) 444-7444, enter the Talkcast ID, 52365, and your pin number, and use the software to request to speak. That’s it!
Look forward to seeing you there!
To find out more about Geek Cred, you can visit the show website at http://www.geekcred.net.
According to this Legal Technology article, it could be.
Sometimes the cutting remark can blunt the cutting edge. Every year firms spend millions of dollars on hardware and software, but when we asked third-, fourth- and fifth-year associates about their firm’s technology as part of our annual midlevel job satisfaction survey (August 2008), we heard a lot more about long waits and condescending IT staffers than we did about innovative products. Specifically, we found, the quality of tech support — the size and organization of the help desk, and the responsiveness and attitude of its employees — often was the make-or-break factor in respondents’ opinion of their firm’s IT efforts.
I saw this first hand a number of years ago. Not specifically with a help desk, but I saw how a crummy attitude, and an unhelpful support person can ruin a tech project. I came in to an organization that had a fairly complex, yet very useful database system. Unfortunately, hardly anyone ever used it for anything outside of it’s main membership function. It had meeting planning, and subscription modules, and no one used them. When I suggested using them to some folks, I was met with fierce resistance, and came to the realization that everyone in this small organization simply hated this database, and I couldn’t really figure out why. I made an effort to educate people on the benefits, help them learn how it worked, etc. and nothing helped. Everyone still hated it.
It was only a couple of years into this job that I learned the reason why. Apparently, when they purchased this software, the software company sent a trainer to work with all of the staff. This person was not especially helpful to new users, had no patience for questions, did not do a good job training, and just generally wasn’t very nice. Everyone hated her, ergo, everyone hated the product.
I’ve continued to see the same thing play out over and over again. If your tech support folks convey a bad attitude when it comes to questions about your IT efforts, it will influence how people view the projects thesmelves.
Have you seen this play out in your own workplaces? Share your stories!
It’s time to roll back our clocks one hour for the end of Daylight Saving Time, and as many sources recommend, a good time to swap out batteries for things like smoke detectors or carbon monoxide detectors.
A few years ago, we picked up a couple of smoke detectors of this type for our family — It’s a vocal smoke detector. It comes with a recommended script for yor recorded message. It’s a very short and basic message calling out your child(ren) by name and instructing them on what to do. Of course, this also means that you must have a family evacuation plan and have worked through it with your children. The recording time is rather small, but that’s the way it’s meant to be — keeping the message short for kids so as not to be too complicated or confusing.
I can’t say I recommend or suggest this specific device, but just wanted to share which device we chose for our family. This model is a few years old, so there may very well be newer, better models on the market. Do a little research first to determine which type of device is best for you and your family. Whatever you do… at least have SOMETHING.
And don’t forget to change out those batteries!
I got the idea to make this great should strap for my camera From PhotoDojo. In essence it is a strap that hangs across your chest that lets your camera hang at your waist allowing you to grab the camera and bring it to your face for quick shots, but also be out of your way when not in use.
I made this strap from 2 straps. I had one wider strap from a free laptop bag I got when I ordered my MacBook pro, and the thinner strap is from an old, and I mean old, camera bag.
The laptop bag strap had great hardware and shoulder pad. I cut off the hardware which was a swivel clip and that allowed me to remove the shoulder pad. The swivel hook’s part that attached to the original strap was wider than the new one which will allow it to slide.
I took the thinner strap, put on the shoulder pad, slid on the clip hook and made the thinner strap one piece with a plastic slip hook. Afterward, I put an eyelet hook on the bottom of my camera in the tripod mount socket. It is a little long, but it works.
Now my camera can hang at my waist and I can pull it up to take a shot without the whole strap moving. You can see an example of how it works here. If you want to order the original you can do so at that link too.
I found myself struggling to create a simple, efficient countdown timer in PowerPoint and finally found a solution to share with you.
My situation is for a training course. I want to give the students 5 minutes to work on an exercise. Rather than making separate slides and have each one run for 60 seconds, I wanted to consolidate text (or graphics) on one slide and display each for the appropriate amount of time. The catch to all this is I want the “5″ to go away when the “4″ appears. Having this all one on slide makes it easy to reuse the slide for other exercises later in the training, rather than copying six (one for each minute and one to say “TIME!”) several times.
Many of us on Friends In Tech are keen photographers and therefore have decent cameras that are capable of shooting in Raw and JPEG mode and a lot of the cameras are capable of shooting both at the same time. This has an advantage in that you don’t really need specialized software to edit the JPEG files and the Raw photos are still available for the heavy duty editing that may be required.
However shooting both Raw and JPEG files in the camera slows the writing of files to the media card and also takes up extra space. In my Canon XT camera the jpg files take up an extra 25% of the media space.
By switching to Raw only, you will always have the benefits of the full original file and detail to work from but it makes it harder for quick edits if you need the JPEG formats.
From a hint on Photoshop Insider by Scott Kelby comes a link to the free (registration and email address required) RawWorkFlow.com’s Instant JPEG From Raw utility. The Photoshop Insider link also has some interesting history on the Raw format and a video on how to use Instant Jpeg from Raw too.
Note that the application does not register itself in the start menu or on the desktop - you just select your Raw files, right click and choose the Instant JPEG from Raw menu option.
Try it and let us know what you think.
We updated our FiT wordpress tonight. Also we added the good iPhone iPod plugin. So check our the site from your iPhone or iPod touch.
We did retire the forums. No one had the time to keep them updated and spam hack free. Right now we may consider using Disqus for commenting instead of the native wordpress comment system to offset the shutdown of the forums.
Look for an increase in posts on. Variety of different topics. Some will be just blog posts. Others may new audio or video.
-George
*Update*
We just added Disqus support. http://forums.friendsintech.com/ now takes you to our Disqus community page.
I’m sure that many of you have seen the Experts Exchange website and sometimes had the frustrating situation where the site insists that you log into the website to see the result. Other times the results are shown to you if you scroll down to the bottom of the page. Thanks to Channel9 forums I’ve discovered that this only works if you came from google.
For example the dns query result shows this resulting page. By clicking on the first link in the google results and scrolling down you will find the answers. Clicking on the saved url will only give you the option to login.
Hopefully this little trick will help you get the answers you need. Is this tactic sneaky? Yes. Is it justifiable to get the answers without joining? In my opinion yes - as they are gaming Google to get to the top of the search engine, then it’s fair game to use this tweak to access the results. If Google had the option to personalise the results so that I could ignore Experts Exchange (or other sites without specifying the ignore option for every search) this would be great ,but as this feature doesn’t exist this tweak should help.
George posted a review on the Belkin 3-Outlet 918 Joule Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger a while back. At the time the price was $22 plus shipping. On Sunday, this will be available from Staples for $19.99, a little cheaper and shipping won’t need to be paid as most people will probably have a Staples store nearby.
I’ve been watching a debate over the last week, or more, on one of the email lists relevant to my current professional field, Litigation Support. It all started with a comment by a computer forensic vendor in which he mentioned that they routinely buy used hard drive on eBay and use them to practice and test their forensic tools, trying to recover whatever data they can. There has been quite a controversy over whether that’s professionally ethical or not, but that’s not really the reason for this post. My feeling on whether that’s ethical or not is irrelevant.
My concern is much more basic than that. I just thought maybe you all would want to think about where your old drives are going when you decide to get rid of a computer! Even if you reformat the drive, much of that data can be recovered with the right tools, and that’s assuming the recycling place you dropped it off at actually takes the time to do the reformat. We’ve all seen too many stories of drives not being wiped at all when they’ve been resold. Surely we all take steps to prevent that, right? On the other hand, how many people do you know who do a quick format and assume it’s clean? It’s not. Do some research, ask around, find a secure way to wipe that drive, or, as one of my listmates suggested take the ultimate secure HD tool to it, a 12-gauge shotgun. 
What other tools do you recommend to your users? Hammers, screwdrivers to the plates, metal shredders? Let us know!
I’ve been using the beta version of SyncToy 2.0 to synchronize my mini-mobile USB hard drive to the file server. It’s been a great safeguard. All of my working data is kept on the mobile unit rather than the laptop’s hard drive due to space constraints. This also allows me to simply take the mobile hard drive home alone to work on as opposed to my entire laptop. This is VERY handy considering that I’ve been commuting by bike a lot lately.
But I only synchronize my data from the mini-mobile hard drive to the server once a day. Today, I found that to be a mistake. Not a major mistake, but good enough of one to make me tweak my method. After working on a project most of Friday, I took the unit home to work on over the weekend only to forget to bring it back in with me today. No problem, I have a copy up on the server. Whoops… if I work with that data, everything I did on Friday and over the weekend is lost.
So… I’ve now tweaked my scheduled sync to run twice a day — once in the morning, and then again in the afternoon before I leave. The task scheduler within XP makes it a breeze to do so too.
Open the task from within Task Scheduler, go to the Schedule tab, at the bottom of the screen check the box “Show multiple schedules.” Then, click on the “New” button at the top and set your second schedule for the task. In my case, the first task instance is set to fire at 9:30AM and the second instance is now set to fire at 3:30PM.
I had been waiting on Belkin to get this unit out since I heard of it. Finally on Monday I stumbled onto it at the Apple Store. It is a nice little three ac outlet travel surge strip with two additional USB charging ports. It will even charge Motorola phones which are notorious for only charging with units made just for them.
Update: You can find the Belkin unit at CDW for $22.
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?edc=1440970
Victor and I each ordered an ATP Photofinder. Our experiences were definitely different. Give our review discussion a listen and hear the good, bad and ugly about the ATP Photofinder.
You can get it at a good deal from Costco. Just click here to find it for $79.99 till June 30th. Buy at your own risk.
Many of us have or are new owners of the Nintendo Wii. A wonderfully fun gaming console. Even my wife loves it. Well loves to kick my butt in bowling anyway.
We like to see our friend’s Miis next to us when we bowl rather than randomly generated Miis. I talk about how to setup your Miis to Mingle on your friends Wii consoles without having to actually send them your Mii itself.
Looking for some great online training content for IT related topics? Check out the CERT Virtual Training Environment. There is a ton of free content. Those of you in the DoD environment can take advantage of the sponsored account agreement with DISA and get access to the full library of online training.
They have topics for all sorts of computer security and forensics tasks. Here are just a few!
This past weekend my son and I were able to take in a Mariners game as part of Little League Weekend. Knowing about the Nintendo Fan Network, we made sure to bring along my son’s DS Lite.
I believe the NFN is only available at Safeco Field in Seattle, but I’m sure there must be similar geeky offerings at other stadiums throughout the country.
If you know of any geeky-goodness like this offered at other ballparks, let us know. Drop us a line or post to the forums about it.
Nintendo Fan Network
Seattle Mariners
Planet FiT
