Tech and life

I listened to a podcast recently which got me thinking about free versus paid software and online services. I’ve blogged about free software and alternatives to commercial programs before but Tracy Holt made a great point on The Techie Geek Podcast 90. Tracy and Russ were discussing freeing up space in web email accounts rather than paying for unlimited storage. Tracy ran through his lengthy routine for archiving emails then admitted he would have been better off paying $50/year for unlimited email storage which he does now:

‘My time is probably worth more than all the time I spent trying to free up space’

He’s right and that applies to software as well as online services, particularly if you run a small office/home office (SOHO). If buying software or online services or upgrading from free to premium versions is going to save you time in the long run, that precious time saved is also going to make you more productive and you should earn more in the same time available. So far this has definitely applied to me in my day job as a freelance copy editor. For example, I’ve invested a small amount in two commercial macros for MS Word which both save me a lot of time in the long run.

MegaReplacer is a batch search and replace macro for Word. You add a bunch of words you want to search for in a file and their replacements, for example, commonly misspelled words and when you run the macro it  goes through the file prompting at each occurrence whether you want to replace it. It’s essential for an editor. Without the macro, you just can’t do that quickly and you’ll most certainly miss some words anyway.

ReferenceChecker is a macro for Word to spot inconsistencies between reference citations in text and the reference list. It’s not important to understand exactly what the macro is doing unless you’re a copy editor, but believe me, it’s a lot quicker than going through the text manually and checking each citation against the reference list, and vice versa.

So particularly if you run a small office/home office, consider investing in commercial software or add-ons and weigh up the differences between premium and free versions of software and services and see if the increased productivity they’ll bring will save you money in the long run.

Have you invested in commercial software or add-ons, or paid for online services to increase productivity? Let us know below.

Search is synonymous with Google. For most of us, when we search, we google and we don’t give a second thought to trying or using any other search engine. Why would we? Google is just fine isn’t it? I’ve been online since about 1998. In those days, I used to read (paper) computer magazines to get the low down on all the best tech products and services to use. I seem to remember them recommending Alta Vista for search when I started, then I think around 1999-2000, Google became the recommended search engine and I switched to that and honestly I haven’t used any other search engine since then.

Why not just use Google?

Frankly, since the introduction of Google+, I’m a little worried that Google is heading to take over almost everything we do online, and collect masses amounts of data on us in the process. Apart from that, I believe Google needs competition to keep it on its toes and the competition needs to be encouraged especially if it’s providing a good service. So I thought it was time to look around and see if anyone else comes close to Google in search. Spurred on by very encouraging recent articles on DuckDuckGo by Rich Menga at PCMech, and Scott Nesbitt at Make Tech Easier, I decided to shun Google search for a couple of weeks and use only DuckDuckGo just to see if it was a viable long term search alternative for me.

So how does DuckDuckGo shape up?

Well DuckDuckGo is actually very good. I like the cleaner, uncluttered interface and better privacy. Definitions when presented are pulled from Wikipedia and shown in a red box at the top and the search results overall are fine for me and I’m sure for most people. Specialist searches are a little different though and actually very good. Here’s my experience:

I’m actually a freelance editor and often have to research published medical reference details. Authors tend to get the detail wrong here or miss out stuff so it’s left to the editor to sort out/check publication details like page numbers, volume number, year of publication. Very often I would just paste the article title into Google and it would come up with the full reference details usually on the first page of results – PubMed is a great source for these details. But when I tried this procedure in DuckDuckGo, I couldn’t get the details I wanted in the results – because in a general search, DuckDuckGo doesn’t go to PubMed. But then I discovered what they call !Bangs, or specialized site searches. There are a whole bunch of these specialized searches as listed here, including PubMed and to launch this, you just type!pubmed along with your article title and it usually pulls up the result. Not strictly true as it actually launches the link and opens PubMed with the result in the DuckDuckGo window. Which brings me to my next point.

Customizable

Settings are great in DuckDuckGo and it’s very customisable. You can elect to have results open in a new window, which is what I prefer. But in the case of bangs discussed above, they open in the same window. A click on the back arrow is needed to get back to DuckDuckGo. So I sent feedback to DuckDuckGo about this last weekend – and got a reply that same weekend – something you wouldn’t get from Google I might add – you can’t actually contact them! They responded:

…there is a strong case that a bang command is an external page by definition and should open in a new window. I’ve added it as a defect in our bug tracking software so I should get to it sometime soon!

Very impressed. Another minor change I made was to turn off highlighted (and clickable) results when you move over them. I often like to copy text straight from the results page and you can’t do this with highlighted results – once you click on the text it follows the link. To turn this off, go to Settings, Color Settings, and turn Highlight from Green (default) to off. Incidentally, once you have DuckDuckGo set up the way you want it, you can save the URL parameters so it will always load that way. I have DuckDuckGo loading in a tab when I start Google Chrome and I’ve added those URL parameters. You can add your own customized parameters in Chrome. Go to Wrench, Options and add it to your start up tabs.

Do you use a Google alternative for search? Bing, Blekko? Have you tried anything else? Or are you happy to stick with Google for the long haul? Drop a comment below.

Incidentally, if you are interested in reading about other Google alternatives, not just in search, here’s a great article on Techie Buzz.

Yesterday I received email notification of a blog comment which I should check was spam and approve or trash. It looked like spam – a couple of words and a shortened URL. But was the link important or interesting? I was a little wary and knew that this could be a security risk, i.e. don’t click a link if you’re not sure where it’s leading or you don’t know the sender. If you come across a shortened URL on Twitter, you can hover your mouse over it and the full URL will often appear – but not always. So what can you do to check out a shortened URL before you click?

Unshorten the link

Paste the link into unfwd4.me or unshorten.com to see the full URL. You may then be able to decide if the link is reputable and worth following. Still unsure? Try the link scanners mentioned below.

Scan the link

Copy the shortened URL into LinkScanner Online or Online Link Scan. They’ll scan the site and alert you if there may be a problem following the link. Or if you have time and want to try multiple antivirus engines, try the scanner at URLVoid.

After you click the link

After you’ve decided to click, browser plugins like McAfee SiteAdvisor and WOT (Web of Trust) provide another tool you can use to alert you of known dubious or untrusted  sites. I use McAfee and have found it to be fine. There are free and paid versions. The download link to the free limited version (SiteAdvisor) is currently at the bottom of their Downloads page. Web of Trust is also highly regarded in this fight against ‘clickjacking’ and avoiding malicious sites.

You don’t have to scan documents to your PC then save them into Evernote organizer in two stages, you can set up your printer/scanner to scan directly into Evernote. I’ve already posted about scanning directly to Evernote with an Epson Perfection 4180 scanner.

I recently got a Canon MP series multifunction printer with built in scanner (MP280) and had no trouble setting it up to scan directly to Evernote. Here’s what you do.

When you installed your Canon printer drivers and utilities on the CD which came with the printer, you would have installed MP Navigator, the application which, among other things, allows you to scan directly to an application, in our case Evernote. Switch on your printer and place a test sheet on the scanner tray. On your PC desktop click Start, All Programs and navigate to Canon Utilities and click on that and open the MP Navigator folder.

For me it was actually called MP Navigator EX 4.0 but you may have a different version. Then double click the executable file in that folder (again for me it was MP Navigator EX 4.0 as shown above) and that should open Canon MP Navigator. If you intend to scan stuff frequently to Evernote, you could copy a program shortcut to your desktop. To do this, drag that executable to your desktop while pressing the Ctrl key (this makes a copy rather than moving it).  Once MP Navigator is open, click on One-click at the top right and you should see the options below.

Click on Custom and that should open a box like below. If it starts to scan now, just click Cancel.

This is the part where we select Evernote as the program we want to open the scan with. So under the section Application Settings, click Set as shown above, then navigate to your Evernote folder (for me it was C:\Program Files\Evernote\Evernote but it may be different for you. You’re looking for the Evernote executable file as shown below:

Select that file and click Open. Evernote will now appear as the application in the Open with: box on the previous screenshot. Click Apply in the bottom left corner to save Evernote in that box, then click the green Scan button in the bottom right corner and if all goes well the test page should be scanned and Evernote will open to show it.

By the way, now this is set up, in future when you click Custom, everything will happen automatically so make sure you have your page loaded ready for scanning.

A few months ago, I posted on the top recommended Google Chrome extensions which I compiled from recommendations across the blogosphere. I thought I’d now list the extensions I find most useful, i.e. the ones I’ve installed that I use pretty much on a daily basis.

Several of my top extensions are also in the earlier post – LastPass, Clip to Evernote, and Shareaholic so I won’t say any more on them. Here’s the rest.

Diigo

I’ve been bookmarking sites with the Diigo extension for quite a while now. Diigo lets you import all your bookmarks from Delicious at the start and then you can set it up to send copies of subsequent bookmarks back to Delicious so you have all your bookmarks on two independent sites. This is the extension I use the most… by a long way. I wrote a post on bookmarking versus searching some time ago which you might like to read.

SiteAdvisor

SiteAdvisor will give you a safety rating for the site you have just loaded in your browser.

SEO Site Tools

SEO Site Tools gives the page rank at a glance and some SEO info on the site your browsing. There’s more info on it here.

Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus works away in the background to remove ads and pop-ups from websites as you browse.

iReader

Fed up with all the clutter on sites? Then install the iReader extension for distraction-free reading. The iReader icon appears at the right end of your browser address bar – click it to remove all the clutter and leave a page that’s a joy to read. The options let you disable images too if that’s what you want. You can also print the page without all the clutter. And if you’ve installed a pdf utility like doPDF, you can even print the decluttered page to a pdf. After installation, doPDF appears in your Print menu so you now have the option to print to a pdf format file. Here’s a post about using iReader.

Google Quick Scroll

The Google Quick Scroll extension helps you find what you’re looking for on a webpage faster, particularly on long webpages. I’ve written about it before here.

Google Reader Filter

If you spend a lot of time in Google Reader, then Google Reader Filter is a must. It cuts out entries you don’t want to know about and highlights ones you do. Again I’ve written about it before here and it now works in Chrome.

Facebook Disconnect

Facebook Disconnect prevents Facebook from tracking you when you visit a site which uses Facebook Connect.

Google Calendar – weekend coloration

Weekend coloration adds a different colour for Saturdays and Sundays. Not very distinctive on the new look Google Calendar though.

Unburner

If you click through to posts from Google Reader, you’ll see a lot of feedburner ‘junk’ appended at the end of the URL. Unburner removes all the unnecessary stuff so you get a clean URL for bookmarking. I’ve blogged about it here.

Well that’s my roundup of my useful Google Chrome extensions. I’d love to hear about any others that you find awesome. Drop a comment below.

A few weeks ago, there was a flurry of posts about the Chrome extension Super Google Reader which lets you read RSS feeds in full form in Google Reader. Some blogs only give truncated feeds and you have to visit their website for the full post so I thought I’d give it a try. Once I had reopened Reader, I had access to full RSS feeds using the Readable tab which Super Google Reader had added at the top of the posts as shown below.

But I noticed that Google Reader had slowed down considerably after I enabled that extension. Refresh, Mark All as Read and changing folders were all unacceptably slow so I ran through my slow Reader checklist which I’ve already posted just to ensure that the Google servers weren’t at fault. They weren’t. When I disabled Super Google Reader, speed was back to normal.

So if you’re experiencing Google Reader to be slow and you’re using Super Google Reader, try  disabling the extension and see if that helps.

On 4th and 5th May, I found Google Reader to be suddenly significantly slower than usual in Marking all feeds as read and opening new folders of feeds. I use Chrome browser. Of course the first thing that crosses your mind is what have I done? Is it my fault? Have I done anything or added anything new (eg browser extensions) which may have slowed it down? I know that buggy extensions can cause slow-downs and I’ve blogged about this before.  I hadn’t installed any new software or any new browser extensions on my desktop PC and none had been updated. So I loaded Google Reader in Firefox – still slow. Okay, so I booted up my Acer Aspire netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Edition and Chromium browser – Reader still painfully slow. All other sites including GMail seemed to be okay, so the problem seemed to lie not with me but with Google’s servers. How could I double check?

First port of call, the official Google Reader blog – but no mention of anything there. So then I turned to Twitter and searched for “Google Reader” slow. I counted about 18 tweets on 4th May reporting something along the lines of Google Reader is painfully slow for me today. Most seemed to indicate a recent slow down and weren’t rants about Reader being generally slow.

So that seemed to confirm it. Just sit tight and put up with it and see how things are tomorrow before taking more drastic action like changing feed reader. Sure enough, things were much better the next day. Running the same search on Twitter as before, I found only 2 relevant tweets on 5th May and none on the 6th. So the ‘Twitterverse’ seems to be a really good mirror of slow online services.

So that’s my quick diagnostic on a slow online service. Just a pity that the official Google Reader blog didn’t take the time to alert us of the temporary problem.

Is there anything else I might have tried? Have you any tips on troubleshooting a slow online service? Drop a comment below.

I’ve been using the web based to-do app Doris for about a year now and quite like it. There’s also a Desktop version now and an iPhone app but regrettably the developers just haven’t kept pace – no Android app as yet.

I was listening to a recent CNET to the rescue podcast and Rafe Needleman mentioned Wunderlist, an awesome to-do app so I thought I’d take a look.

As well as downloadable programs for Windows and Mac, Wunderlist has a web app so you can have your to-do lists synced on Windows, Mac and Linux machines as well as Android phones, iPhone and iPad. You can also share your lists.  Here’s some basics on using Wunderlist. Create a new to-do list using the hotkey L or click Add List at the bottom right of the screen. If you don’t like the default wood panel background or the awesome leafy background I’ve chosen, you can choose from a number of others from a drop-down list and also toggle the side bar.  The other buttons along the bottom are pretty self-explanatory but play around with them to see their actions.  You can drag tasks up and down a list to reorder them and also drag them from list to list. Starring tasks brings them to the top of a list. You can also add notes to tasks to give more info about them and search for tasks in the search box at the top-right.

There are some very nice touches too. You can assign a date to a task which shows up near the right end of the task entry. This is updated to Tomorrow, Today, Yesterday as the task date approaches and passes. Double clicking on this date allows you to reschedule tasks. At the bottom of the screen, tasks due Tomorrow, Today or Overdue can be viewed by clicking the buttons. You can also add new tasks by emailing them to me@wunderlist.com, and can choose to be alerted via email when tasks are due. So even if you don’t have the latest mobile phone, you can keep up with your Wunderlist to-dos on the go.

A nice example of syncing a list to your mobile phone would be a shopping list. Just add items to your list wherever you are and call up the list on your Android or iPhone while shopping. Of course, you can also do this with other apps like Evernote.

As David Pierce points out in a recent post about Wunderlist, a recurring tasks feature would be a nice addition. I currently get around this by putting these in Google Calendar. These recurring tasks are pushed to Rainlendar my desktop calendar and so I can see them on the desktop of my PC.

I have Wunderlist loading in the left-most tab in Chrome so that it’s always displayed first when I open my browser. To do this in Chrome, after you’ve signed up for Wunderlist, drag that tab to the left-most position. Open the other URLs you want at browser start-up. Then click the spanner symbol at the right end of the tool bar, Click Options, and under the On startup section, select Open the following pages. Click the button Use current pages then check that Wunderlist is listed at the top and the other sites you want are listed below it.

So if you’re looking for an awesome  to-do list app or want to upgrade to a more feature filled one or one that syncs to your mobile device, I encourage you to try out Wunderlist and see what you think. It’s free at the moment. Let us know what you think of Wunderlist in the comments or tell us about your favourite task management program.

Sites like for example Ge.tt make file sharing real easy but if you’re sharing an important file (e.g. sensitive financial data), just passing a shared file’s URL to your recipient isn’t very secure – anyone can get at your data if there’s no password protection or encryption at the sharing site. If you’ve emailed the link to your recipient, that can have security issues as Lifehacker explained in a post today. You have no control over the recipient’s server and they may download your attachment from an unencrypted HTTP connection (i.e. not HTTPS). Clearly for the most sensitive data there’s no substitute to passing it on in person if possible, but failing that there’s a couple of options you can try to improve security during file sharing.

Password protected file sharing

There are a number of sites which offer password protected file sharing and I’ve just picked out a couple. For example Wikisend

The service is free and you can share a file up to 100MB with password protection. Obviously sharing the link and the password in the same email is not the smartest idea so you should really try to send the password to your recipient by a separate route for security.

Another service is divShare

With their free account, they offer up to 5GB of storage and 10GB downloads/month.

File encryption

Another route to secure file sharing is to email the encrypted file to the recipient but again sending the password separately. The encryption plus the need for a (strong) password to decrypt it should deter any snoopers on hosting servers.  I use the free utility AxCrypt to encrypt all sensitive files on my computer. And when you right click on a file to encrypt it, you get the option to Encrypt a copy to a EXE. This creates a password protected self-decrypting exe file which you can email to your recipient. They don’t need to have AxCrypt installed to decrypt the file, just the password. Again, send the password separately. Another possibility would be to use the archiving utility 7-Zip to create a password protected encrypted archive with your file or files.

Dropbox

The Lifehacker article mentioned above notes that Dropbox offers encrypted transmission for file storage and sharing. You and your recipient can set up a shared Dropbox folder. Anything you put in that folder would travel encrypted from your Dropbox folder to Dropbox’s servers to your recipient’s Dropbox folder. In a blog post today on Download Squad, they note that Views.fm can let you create public or private shares of your Dropbox folders. Private shares are only accessible to people you invite via email, and you can see and edit who has access right from your Views.fm shares list.

So there’s some thoughts on secure file sharing… or at least securer file sharing. It’s clearly not perfect with distribution of passwords to access shared file an area of concern. So do you secure your shared files in any way? Drop a comment below with your thoughts.

Google Reader Filter is an excellent tool for filtering out blog posts with keywords that aren’t of any interest to you in your RSS feeds. But if you use the utility CCleaner for your PC maintenance to delete temporary internet files, history and cookies etc., perhaps you’ve noticed that it also strips out all your carefully entered keyword excludes and highlights from Google Reader Filter.

I used to get around this by copying and pasting my keyword excludes and highlights into a text file so I could always paste these back into the filter later. After all, it takes time to build up a good comprehensive list of filter keywords and it’s annoying when you lose them. But this is also a little time consuming to have to repeat this each time you run CCleaner.

So I had a look at the settings in CCleaner to see if there was a way to preserve the Google Reader Filter settings. After a bit of trial and error, I came across the answer. If you open CCleaner and go to Options and choose Cookies:

In the left column, you’ll see a list of cookies which will be deleted next time you run Cleaner. To prevent Google Reader Filter settings from being removed just move all the google cookies (in my case, google.co.uk, google.com, www.google.com) to the right hand Cookies to Keep column as shown above.

Now, when you run Cleaner (the top option in the image above), then reopen Chrome or Firefox, all your Google Reader Filter settings should still be present.

On a side note, in CCleaner, you can also save any other important cookies you want to keep, for example to prevent deletion of specific site log in details after you run CCleaner.