Perhaps fax machines and sending and receiving faxes are fading fast, but many of us still deal with companies by fax. Most corporations still use and even require certain documents via fax. Some folks don’t feel comfortable with email and some don’t know how to attach documents in an email!
We ditched our landline earlier this year and now use T-Mobile’s @home service. We still have our old land-line phone number, but we can’t use it to fax, bummer. That’s when I became interested in what was out there for faxing from my computer.
First, I have to say if you have documents generated on your computer, internet faxing is a quick, inexpensive and convenient way to send your information directly to a fax machine where it prints out just like you fed it through a machine on your end.
Here’s a place to look at several fax reviews. These all come with a monthly fee, but it’s much less per month than paying for your phone line and the ink your fax machine guzzles each month. Have you priced your local print shop, Staples or Office Depot for their fax fees? Our local Staples quoted me about $1/page and the guy told me the prices were pretty much the same around town.I think he was embarrassed to tell me the price, but I’m glad he warned me before I had to shell out $12 for my fax. What a racket!
If you’re looking for free faxing, efax allows free incoming faxes. It’s hard to find this feature on their site anymore, but you can use the link. You’ll be assigned a number, but don’t expect to get one in your area code. If you sign up for the pay accounts, then that is available. I believe you have to receive a fax at least once a month to keep your number.
I recently found FaxZero and really like it, with a couple of reservations. I like it because you can send two free faxes a day with a limit of 3 pages each. The three pages can be text you type or documents. There are two shortcomings: they accept only .doc, .docx, or .pdf and only one document per fax. So an excel or picture file can’t be sent with FaxZero. The other is that only one document can be attached per fax. Even with their premium service, only one document can be attached. Their premium service is $1.99 per fax with a limit of 15 pages/1 document per fax. It’s great if you can get everything into one document. But this is too limiting for me.
The fax service I found that allows multiple documents to be attached and supports up to 178 file formats is myfax. Their lowest plan is $10/month, which seems to be a great deal if you fax more than 10 pages a month.
I’ve used both efax and FaxZero and they’ve both worked just fine. For my needs, I still need a stand alone fax machine from time to time to send documents not on my computer. Luckily, I have a friend at a near by office who allows me the use their machine for free.
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Facebook has rolled out yet another major change, this time in our privacy settings, causing a mix of delight and dismay for many folks. Back in June, I wrote about making lists from within your Facebook friends to get ready for the part I was most excited about—the ability to control WHO sees any posts or status updates.
If you’re a casual Facebook user and not too concerned about who sees your friends or what groups or pages you’re a fan of, you probably accepted the default settings presented to you when you logged in some time this week. In fact, Facebook said in one of their announcement that only 15-20% of people even change their settings – amazing.
I’ve been reading quite a few articles I’ll post links to, that suggest that Facebook isn’t really giving us that much more control over our privacy. If you check out the official Facebook Blog, you’ll see quite a bit of feedback people have given. The main objection is to the fact that now, all of our ‘friends’ are publicly available for viewing. This was not the case before.
Five Settings You Should Know On Facebook – San Francisco Chronicle
Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly – Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Facebook Privacy Fiasco Begins – TechCrunch
How to Fix Facebook Settings – Webware
I was going to make a list of What Users Gained vs. What Users Lost for this article, but you can read that in my links. Since Facebook quickly makes changes in response to feedback, information here could fast become obsolete.
Instead, I’ll point out where you can go to check and change your settings to increase/decrease your privacy.
- Do you want your Facebook profile to be found if you are ‘googled’ or ‘binged’? You can choose to be ‘indexed’ or not. This is found in the privacy settings – then click on ‘Search’. Here you’ll find a place to uncheck a box to clear you from being indexed by search engines. I tried this and found I was removed right away, so that’s reassuring.
- Ability for others to view your friends. In the past, Facebook had a control to allow or not allow others to view who your friends are. Now this control is gone. A workaround for this can be found – but it’s not in your Privacy settings. Instead, you’ll need to click ‘Profile’ and go to your profile page. Along the left, you’ll see the box containing your friends. Click the pencil icon to open up the choices here. You can choose which friends to show up, a grouping of 6 or more friends, or to keep it completely private, uncheck the box ‘Show my friends on my profile’. You can also choose to not show your gender or home city in your profile settings. So it seems if you remove yourself from being indexed and remove the option to have your friends to be viewable on your page, then no one would be able to see that information. That’s the way it worked for me, although I’ve read others had different results.
If you use the options above, it seems you can pretty much remain as invisible as you can be without deactivating your account. The casual user probably has little concern over these things, but folks who want their private lives separate from their work lives have reason to be concerned. We’ve all heard the stories of how potential employers search out publicly available information on social networks on job candidates and these candidates were not given offers because of the poor choices they’ve made in publishing their activities.
One other area of concern is in the ‘Third-party Apps’ that I see many of my friends using—you know the ‘What Harry Potter character are you’, and the ‘Farmville’, etc. apps that so many people use and scatter invites to get the rest of us to join. Here’s an article from TechWorld that succinctly points out that we no longer have the ability to decline access to our profiles and information that these app developers get. Who are these people? We just don’t know. I participate in very few of these – so sorry friends – but this is why I decline or ignore these kinds of requests! You can remove apps you’re not using in the ‘Applications and Website settings’ from within your privacy settings, but I think they probably have your information unless developers purge this information at set intervals.
I hope this article will prompt everyone to check out their privacy settings and adjust them to your needs. If anyone has tips or suggestions, please leave them here.
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As a traveler and travel arranger of hundreds of trips, I wish TripIt would have been around when huge chunks of my time went to making and communicating travel plans.
TripIt came about in 2006 from frustrated, but technically savvy travelers in Silicon Valley. They wanted the ability to have all their travel plans condensed in one place using software that builds and revises an on-line, shareable and printable itinerary.
TripIt does all this and more. Set up your free account at TripIt and jump right in setting up your profile and adjusting your settings for sharing and privacy.
TripIt seems really big on the ability to proclaim your travel plans to the world. Choose from LinkedIn, Windows Live, RSS feeds, Plaxo and a Twitter-like app as well. When you initially set up your account, TripIt will encourage you to let the software scour your contacts for any other TripIt users. If it can’t find any, they will ask your permission to send everyone in your address book an invite to join. So be careful where you click. Some travelers, especially groups, could find this feature helpful.
What It Does and How To Get It Done
It’s not complicated – simply forward your travel confirmations to plans@tripit.com. That’s pretty much it. The illustration below is a current listing of the many travel companies from which TripIt can process travel confirms. From there, TripIt will organize by date your air, hotel and car reservations. If you’ve made dinner reservations, it will add that too. In addition to this, it automatically adds in weather, maps and directions.
Say you have an upcoming trip and you’ve done some on-line research and wish it could be incorporated into your itinerary, just use TripClipper to send your ‘clips’ directly to your account. No more writing notes on scraps of paper that get lost.
Keep your travel plans in sync by following instructions to add and automatically have your travel plans updated in Outlook 2007, Google Calendar, Lotus Notes, iPhone and iCal. Check the link for detailed instructions for each supported calendar type.
Mobile App
When we’re traveling we need instant access to our itineraries. TripIt has a mobile app and has developed apps specifically for the Android, iPhone and is nearly finished with the Blackberry app.Go to m.tripit.com on your mobile phone to get set up. With these apps, you’ll be able to call your hotel or airline with a simple click.
Misplaced your itinerary? No problem. Just send an email to plans@tripit.com and your itinerary will be emailed to you.
For Travel Arrangers, Virtual Assistants, Admins
If you are a travel arranger for several people, simply set up an arranger account and have the ability to set up individual travel plans for all your travelers and keep them informed as to any changes.
With Tripit Pro you also get ($69/year):
- point tracking – keeps track of all your frequent flyer programs
- alternate flights – get options for alternate flights if your scheduled flight has problems
- itinerary monitoring – you’ll receive text messages about flight delays or gate changes
- ability to automatically share every trip with key people
Whether a corporate, small business or individual traveler, why not sign up for TripIt and try it out. It looks like a great timesaver and resource.
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If you’re from Oklahoma or live in Oklahoma, then you know “The Jingle”. It was written back in 1956 and was made for B.C. Clark Jewelers, an Oklahoma City jeweler since 1892. The catchy tune kicks off each year at Thanksgiving and plays both on the radio and TV. It’s easy to remember and sing along with.
It’s one of those songs that emotes goodwill—if you hear it while in a store or in an elevator, you get a shot of instant goodwill towards all mankind. If you’ve moved away from Oklahoma, it’s something you miss every year. Of course, you can catch it on YouTube, or put it on your player, but the spontaneity of haring it on TV or the radio is gone.
Here it is, for your enjoyment.
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I’d been looking into getting a student version of Windows 7 for my daughter’s computer to upgrade her from Vista. I purchased one this week and the options during the purchase were to download a file, or I could order a DVD for an additional $13 and wait a couple of weeks for it. I know the steps to burn a DVD from an ISO, so I went for the download from Digital River.
To my surprise, the download wasn’t an ISO, it was an .exe format (DLMWin7HP32US.exe). After downloading, there was an extraction process for the purpose of doing an in-place upgrade. An in place upgrade doesn’t wipe the hard drive – it just installs over what is there. Some people may like this, but I wanted to take this opportunity to wipe the hard drive as it’s been used for more than two years with no reformat. In order to do a clean install, I needed to boot from a DVD.
So I did some searches on how people had accomplished this. One site I found was called Windows 7 Forums. There I found a huge message board and instructions on how to create a bootable DVD. I read through that – it seemed too complicated! I then noticed there were over 60 pages of comments from folks. Lots of people had lots of problems following the instructions and having success. I skipped to the last page of comments and found the solution!
Gizmodo came through again. They published a short article with links to an ISO and instructions on how to burn a DVD from the ISO. They said that Microsoft recognized that people were having problems with Digital River and the whole process and had provided an ISO. I did some searches and couldn’t find anything on Microsoft’s site about this (does anybody else find searching Microsoft difficult?)
I was a bit uneasy downloading from the Gizmodo link, but everything turned out great. Below is a graphic of the icon and type and size of the file. The download took a little over an hour and then I had my ISO file. Then I burned my file to a DVD and booted from the DVD (to boot from a CD/DVD, do a restart and hit F12 as it boots up to change the boot sequence to your CD/DVD drive). The install went perfectly and quickly. We waited to activate until the install is completed per Paul Thurrott’s instructions on his blog site. I’ve done it three times with three different types of Windows 7 installs and it’s worked perfectly each time.
Backing Up and Restoring Data & Applications
Before doing the install, we used Windows Easy Transfer to back up all her data to an external hard drive. This was the second time I’ve used Easy Transfer and it’s worked great both times. It keeps all your settings, favorites, email preferences – even her previous desktop wallpaper came back. I highly recommend it. If you are currently using Vista, you have Windows Easy Transfer – not so for XP users.
Easy Transfer backs up everything BUT applications – for reinstalling applications, I found the How-To-Geek had the answer – Ninite! Ninite is a site that lists dozens of the more common web apps that many of us use, as well as even iTunes. Choose the apps that need to be reinstalled on your computer by clicking the check box and Ninite downloads an installer and quietly installs the programs in the background. Some examples of what’s available: Audacity, Firefox, Evernote, Picasa. They had nearly all the apps needed. We chose about three at a time to download and install with no errors. Then because we’d used Windows Easy Transfer, all the settings and preferences were loaded when the applications were started. It was wonderful!
I’ve got one more computer to upgrade and then our household will be all moved over to Windows 7. If anyone has other resources to share or would like to relate their experience on an upgrade, please leave a comment!
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Last week, I wrote about getting your Twitter fix on LinkedIn by using the Company Buzz feature to search for topics while in LinkedIn. Wish I would have known then that Twitter and LinkedIn were going to be sharing updates as it would have been all one article – so this will be pretty brief.
It was announced this week that folks using LinkedIn now have the ability to have their LinkedIn updates go to Twitter. I even got a personalized invitation to link my two accounts.
It’s a very simple process. Log into your LinkedIn account and look under ‘Applications’. There you’ll see the Twitter hyperlink. Click and you’ll get to Twitter settings:
Of course, you’ll need your Twitter log in information. After that’s entered in, then you’ll be able to apply further controls as seen in the graphic below. It’s nice to have the flexibility to control who sees the tweets and what kind of tweets you want to share.
Adding your tweets to LinkedIn probably isn’t a good idea if you’re using Twitter for personal purposes instead of business. It’s probably not advantageous to your professional profile to see ridiculous tweets coming through for co-workers and prospective employers to view. A workaround is the ability to use the hash tag #in when you want to have your tweets go to LinkedIn. For me, it’s a good fit since I use both Twitter and LinkedIn for business. Of course, you can post an update either at Twitter or LinkedIn and it will appear in both places.
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Google Voice made some attractive changes announced in their blog October 26th. Until now, those of us lucky enough to receive an invitation had to make a difficult choice to change our number over to our Google number—or not.
This week, Google said they recognize how difficult it is for some to give up their numbers, so they’ve been able to tweak the technology to allow people to keep their original number and keep these GV features:
- free voicemail transcription (delivered to your email address)
- ability to do an on-line search of transcribed voicemail
- customized greetings for different callers
- SMS and email notifications
- low-priced international calling
If you decide to make your GV number your only number, you also get these features:
- ability to use your Google Voice number to reach you on all your phones
- SMS via email
- call screening
- call recording
- conference calling (up to 6 people)
- call block
Here’s a chart from Google that gives a side by side of the above for easier comparison.
The big appeal of Google Voice for many of us is the ability to use one number that we can program to reach us from all of the phone numbers we use. We don’t get that if we keep our original number.
Having the ability to import my contacts, assign groups to them, record a specific greeting for business, personal and family groups is both efficient and professional. I can further direct GV how to handle a specific group or person’s calls at a certain time of day. For instance, I would program GV to send all my family calls to all of my numbers so I wouldn’t miss them. I would program my business group to ring only certain phones at designated times of the day.
Here’s a short video that quickly explains the benefits of Google Voicemail.
Having It Both Ways
I’ve got a Google Voice number—and I still have my mobile and home numbers because I didn’t want to be too hasty in eliminating numbers I’ve had for a long time.
Why not use both numbers. I’ve decided that’s what I’ll do for now. I can give my GV number out for certain purposes/circumstances and enjoy the ability to program instructions for specific groups or callers.
If I go out of town, I can choose to forward my mobile and home numbers to my GV number and have the ability to handle all my calls in a specific manner. Any voicemails will be transcribed and emailed to me for easy review and retrieval.
I’m not using my Google Voice number very much yet, but it’s nice knowing it’s there and on the few occasions I have, it’s such a timesaver to get voicemails emailed to me instantly. The transcription isn’t perfect, but enough so I can recognize who called.
One thing I haven’t gotten to work is the free SMS. It’s my understanding that if I use GV SMS, charges wouldn’t apply. However, after using it exclusively for several days, I checked my on-line T-mobile account and they were still being counted in there. I will check out the Google Voice Help Forums more to see if I can get an answer there.
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Picasa 3 - Movie Maker Review vs. Microsoft Live
I hadn’t used Picasa for quite awhile, so I downloaded the free Picasa 3 and noticed a pretty nice interface for making a movie, so I tried it out, then compared it to Windows Live Movie Maker.
I’ll say right away that Picasa is the big time winner. It was pretty easy to select my photos from different folders and put them in the show. I found it was easier if I somewhat had them organized before bringing them in as the provided timeline shrinks the pictures and you can’t see everything all at once, scrolling to the right is necessary. Later, I decided to remove some pictures – just highlight and click remove.
I used text slides to introduce different sections of my movie. The slides are pretty plain, but background color, text color and font sizes could be adjusted. I found it easy to place my text slide where I wanted it. There is also an option to add a caption to pictures and move/rotate it for the effect you wish.
There were quite a few options for slide transitions, but only one transition can be applied for the entire movie, which seemed a bit limiting, but I suppose it prevents folks from going crazy with various transition effects. You can also set slide view duration and overlap.
In addition to pictures and text slides, movie clips can also be imported – that’s handy to have.
Yes, you can set your movie to music – options are below. Be aware if you choose music, then it will override the ‘slide duration’ setting chosen earlier.
Here is Picasa Help should you need some.
Picasa beefed up the extras included when you download the desktop version. It’s easy to upload your photos to a web album, email a collection of photos, print, export to a folder, visit a picture printing service to order prints, make a collage, movie and also new is geo-tagging (the location of your picture will appear on a google map).
When you’ve finished tweaking your movie, click the ‘make movie’ button and depending on how many slides you have, it could take some time to render the movie. There is a button to publish your movie directly to YouTube, but it didn’t work for me.
Picasa 3 is head and shoulders above Microsoft’s Windows Live Movie Maker. Functionality was severely limited and it’s definitely a backwards step from Windows Movie Maker. With Windows 7 coming out soon, they’ve decided they are not even going to include movie maker, instead it will be a separate download if you want it. Read more about it at O’Reilly’s site. It includes a link to get the free download. Hopefully, the Windows Live team is working on developing something as good as Picasa 3.
For greater detail on Picasa 3 movie maker and photo editor, complete with screen shots, check out Michael Muchmore’s article in PC Magazine.
May 29, 2009 at 7:04 am | Web Tools, computer tips
- Posted by lynndye |
Let’s all admit it, privately if that makes you feel better, that we’ve googled ourselves– ‘ego-surfing’ its been called. If you own a business and want to be well-known, then you probably want to be found when someone googles your name. Get yours here.
In April, 2009, Google infused its profile services with the option to ‘claim’ your name. The greatest advantage to doing this is that Google promises that if you fill out a profile, when someone does a name search on you, it will appear at the bottom of the first page in a Google search. This could be a huge benefit for the small business trying to be found on-line. Have your business name show up right under your name – you choose how to fill it out and how much to reveal about yourself. This is another free service from Google – the only requirement is that you have a Google account and email address.
Filling out the profile form is a bit like Facebook, but much quicker. You can list places you’ve lived, places you’ve worked, schools you’ve attended and your interests, There’s a bio form where you can do an ‘about me’ section. There is an option to put links in this form to direct your friends and associates to a particular site or announcement you may have.
It might be good to set up a Picasa or Flickr account, if you don’t have one, as there is a section to display pictures right under your name when people look at your profile. Pictures enhance your profile and you can use it as a business tool, or just for fun.
There is a contact information section for listing your email address, phone number, address. By default, this information is private. You control who can see this information. This is accomplished by either setting up some groups, or using the groups you may already have set up – for instance your contacts are considered a group. If you want to post your IM handle, you can do it here.
After the information about you is filled out and tweaked to your privacy requirements, then you can start adding links to all your social networking, blog and websites. If you’re a heavy Google user, you’ll see these fields pre-populated for you, but you can choose to show them or not. Add Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Twitter – anything you can link to, you can have show up here.
If you choose to make your contact information private, (and I did), be sure you check the ‘allow’ box below so people can get in touch with you somehow without revealing your email address.
If you wish to delve deeper into Google Profiles, check out Danny Sullivan’s post in Search Engine Land as he has more detail, including more screenshots and information on how to verify your profile.
Privacy Concerns? Here is one article on this subject from…wired.com - “Google Wants You To Profile Yourself”.
Curious about who has filled out a profile - check out the Google Profiles page and do a search! I filled mine out just yesterday and it showed up right away at the bottom of the first page. What are some of your experiences?