Fly By Night Publishing's Weblog

Share Your Computer Screen With Others Instantly

Philip Siddons — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:14:05 +0000

Share your Screen with Others Instantly

(For al fully graphic representation of this how-to piece, go to:

http://flybynightpublishing.com/PDF/Share%20your%20Screen%20with%20Others%20Instantly.pdf

If you’ve ever wanted to show others what you are seeing on your computer screen, this is a fun, free software service. First, go to:

http://www.screenleap.com/

Click on the green Share your screen now button and install the application on your computer.

Once you decide to share your screen, you’ll get atemporary page, telling you how to share your screen. I got this:

I typed in the URL (under “Send viewers this link”) on the address line of my iPhone’s browser and was immediately able to see my home computer screen. As I moved around on my home computer screen, I saw the same movement on my iPhone. This brings new impact to your question, to a computer-knowledgeable friend, when you ask them “What’s this on my screen?”

Spamex – a great online tool to keep unwanted senders at bay.

Philip Siddons — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 01:23:06 +0000

Every time you disclose your Real Email Address, you lose all control over how it is used. Consider the online service Spamex at http://www.spamex.com/

You cannot MAKE someone stop sending you email or prevent them from disclosing it to others. Spamex solves this problem!

Essentially, you can make up an email address of your choice and use it on websites or purchases where you do not know what the recipients will do with it. Whenever something is sent to that disposable address, it gets routed to your real address but the sender never knows your real address. When you receive email through this disposable email address, you can choose to eliminate the email address or keep it running. It is disposable and won’t affect your regular email address(es). You can turn it on again to work later or never use it again.

What I tend to do is make an email address so that I can tell for whom it was first intended. If they sell that address, I can tell they sold it if I’m getting spam from some other vendor.

For instance, if I buy something online from Acme123.com I don’t know these people. I decide to make a disposable email address and call it Acme123@spamex.com. Two months later, if I get unwanted sales emails from Acme123.com or from LostWeightFast.com, I can see from the email that got to me that Acme123.com actually sent it or sold the email to LostWeightFast.com. Not bad for less than $10 a year.

With Spamex you can:

Hide your Real Email Address
Stop unwanted email permanently
Reveal who disclosed your information
Keep track of logins and passwords
Make it easy to change your Real Email Address at any time

Read what our users say about Spamex

With Spamex Disposable Email Addresses you can safely provide a working email address to anyone and not have to worry about whether they will send you unwanted email or sell your email address to others.

Spamex works with everything

(Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, PC, Mac, Unix, AOL, Earthlink, Juno, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express, Pegasas, and more…)

Editing Your Video

Philip Siddons — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 22:29:56 +0000

Since you’re being swept along with our video-oriented culture, you probably have a smartphone with a video camera recorder. After you’ve grown tired of taking videos of the cats sleeping with their heads resting on one another and your grandchildren standing in awe of the festivus holiday tree, you want to expand. You get a Flip camcorder and start recording in High Definition. You start using it at work to record your bosses speeches. You get testimonies from grateful clients, telling how they’ve benefitted from your firm’s services. As soon as you start putting your videos up on a streaming service like You Tube or Vimeo, you start to lust after a $2-4,000 video recorder and you seriously consider mortgaging your home, selling your car, and hoping to get an attorney who will work pro-bono on your divorce. There are limits.

Before you start to make Steven Spielberg nervous, you have to edit your videos to make them better. Titles. Transitions. Fades. Sound consistency.

Enter TechSmith’s Camtasia. Lots less expensive that Adobie’s Premier and easier to learn.

http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/

Here’s a PowerPoint slide show produced for Homeland Security, documenting how one hacker was caught approaching Eric Mower Associates advertising agency and ultimately causing serious change in that firm. The slide show was turned into a video by Camtasia with little effort in less than 5 minutes.

http://vimeo.com/16587044

QR bar codes for your blog, web page or emails

Philip Siddons — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:58:36 +0000

A QR (“quick response”) code is a square barcode that makes getting URLs, location coordinates, any text or contact information onto a phone quickly. With a barcode scanner app installed, you just point your phone’s camera at the code to read its contents. Here’s what reading this QR code looks like on my web page.

You can put QR bar codes on your web page, blog or even in your signature for your emails.

Why make these code images for your readers to see? They can scan them and get information you provide without having to type them.

To read them (and retain their information) with your smartphone (a cell phone with a camera and internet access) here is a good article surveying several aps. http://news.cnet.com/qr-code-readers-for-iphone The recommendation by this author and Google for the iPhone is Quickmark.

DropBox App

Philip Siddons — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:19:08 +0000

DropBox enables you to have a place on your hard drive for anything you want automatically backed up. Now you can use this centralized location from your smartphone. For those of us who are workaholics, this is a work-anytime-anywhere kind of tool.

Download the New Dropbox Mobile Apps
With the addition of iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile apps, access to your Dropbox is never far away. Start work on a document at the office, add a paragraph on the bus, and polish it off at home. You can also save pictures and video directly to your device, stream media from your Dropbox, and export files to other apps.

Refer More Friends. We’ve Doubled the Max Referral Credit!
Every person you invite to Dropbox will net both of you 500MB of space! To top things off, we’ve upped the referral limit from 5GB to 10GB, which means you get more space for the Dropbox love you spread.

Dropbox is Your Personal Time Machine
Dropbox keeps a history of every change you make to your files so that you can undo mistakes and even undelete files. There’s no need to worry about lost work when Dropbox has you covered.

Browse Our Fast Growing Library of Partner Apps
A bunch of mobile apps can now view and edit files straight from your Dropbox! Browse our Dropbox Anywhere partners page for a list of available apps or check out a few of our most popular apps below:

	QuickOffice QuickOffice is a mobile office tool with great Microsoft Office file editing.
	1Password 1Password can create, remember and restore your passwords all directly from your web browser.
	GoodReader GoodReader is the most popular PDF and general file reading app for both iPhone and iPad.

Video Converter Software

Philip Siddons — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:36:23 +0000

Someone from a TV station hands you a DVD of someone from your company interviewed on their show. You want to put it on your company website but after a lot of hits on converter software, you feel a bit lost.

Or you create a lot of videos yourself with your Flip HD mini-cam but can’t for the life of you figure out how to convert it to a DVD format and get it on a DVD to give to someone.

Then there’s getting your videos to your friends with an iPhone.

Enter AVS Video Converter. If you get their whole package for $60 you also get abouit 16 video and audio creating & editing packages. The Video Converter, alone, is worth it.

So if you are getting into videos in any way, this seems like a must-have tool. It’s made my work a lot easier.

Here’s what the tool’s screen has in it. Notice the variety of file formats one can convert to and from. (a screen shot appears if you follow this link):

http://www.flybynightpublishing.com/technologytips.html

Share smart phone videos from anywhere

Philip Siddons — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:05:08 +0000

Qik.com allows you to take videos from your smart phone and instantly share them on a website.

Sharing live or saved videos with your smart phone. See bottom of http://bit.ly/aUc2df to see an embedded live feed from my phone.

Of course this illustrates that (1) you really have to have content worth watching in order to share (something more than just cats taking a nap and (2) you should try to hold the smart phone steady so it doesn’t look so shakey.

Web Pages That Gather User-Supplied Information

Philip Siddons — Sat, 22 May 2010 23:17:53 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with more professional looking web forms at work and have found something that works great but costs about $170 a year for the subscription. Take a look at these two web pages (They’ll be up only through June 2010 because once the event dates pass, they’ll be taken down.). With these forms, people can fill out with their information and automatically submit without going into their email client.

The nice feature about the forms is that they make web pages more interactive, helping people easily get information to individuals in an organization secuely. They also look more professional than some other forms I’ve tried.

http://buffalourbanleague.org/Attendance-AnnualMeeting.html

http://buffalourbanleague.org/Attendance-ScholarshipAwards.html

This is a valuable and quality programming tool available to non-programmers. Subscriptions to use it can be obtained at AWeber.com and there is a 30 day trial available. So if you want to make your website(s) more interactive, allowing your visitors to easily submit information (of your choosing), this may be the tool you’ll use quite a bit.

While the email you receive with the user’s information has more wording and information than just the field names and the user’s data, you can log into your AWeber account and download a spread sheet of the data. This is quite helpful when you are collecting large amounts of information such as hundreds of attendees to your annual fundraiser banquet.

Check it out at; https://www.aweber.com/login.htm

Using the Posterous Bookmarklet – Posterous Help

Philip Siddons — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:16:15 +0000

via posterous.com

This is the window you get to automatically share something on your screen in Posterous

Posted via web from Fly By Night Publishing Posterous Site

Google Gives Good Phone

Philip Siddons — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:30:44 +0000

Google Voice. New but pretty awesome. Imagine having a free phone number in your area code that when called, rings all of the phones you want (office, home, cell) AND transscribes voice mails it receives and emails them to you. For instance, you have a delivery or repair person coming at some weird “sometime between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.) as if people don’t have to work. You could give the delivering company your Google phone number and when they call, it would ring your cell, your significant other’s cell, your home phone (if you still have a land line in addition to your cell), your office phone. Whichever of you picks it up, gets the call. And if neither of you gets it, it goes into vail. AND that voice mail gets digitized into an email to your Gmail account. Check it out and get yourself invited at: https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?ltmpl=bluebar&service=grandcentral&continue=https://www.google.com/voice/account/signin