Google is a fantastically rich company. It reported revenue of more than ten billion dollars in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Google also offers a vast array of services. In addition to the search engine that we interact with dozens of times a day, Google runs all of these properties:

• YouTube
• Google Apps, a hosted business platform competing directly with Microsoft
• the Android operating system, which runs on more smartphones than Apple’s iOS
• Google+, competing with Facebook for social networking
• Chrome, catching up fast to Internet Explorer as the most popular web browser
• Mail (Gmail), phone service (Google Voice), photos (Picasa), mapping/GPS (Google Maps/Google Earth), digitizing the world’s libraries (Google Books), and oh so much more

How does Google make so much money? Even if you guess the right answer, you still might be surprised to see the visual below.

While you’re thinking, let’s look at how Microsoft and Apple make money. Columnist Ed Bott put the numbers together from SEC financial reports and created nifty pie charts that are well worth a look.

Microsoft is mostly a software company with income fairly evenly split among the business, server, and Windows divisions. There’s more revenue from the Xbox division than you expect but otherwise no surprises.

Apple is a hardware company. The iPhone and iPad generate nearly three-quarters of Apple’s revenue. The computer business is just a hobby and the iTunes store and other services are incentives to make you buy the hardware.

How does Google make money?

Here is a breakdown of Google’s revenue in 2009, 2010, and 2011 – the percentages were essentially unchanged in each of those years.

Google is an advertising company. “We generate our revenues almost entirely from advertising… Advertising revenues made up 97% of our revenues in 2009 and 96% of our revenues in 2010 and 2011.” (Source: Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2011, filed January 2012)

Use that knowledge to draw your own conclusions when you read articles about Google.

The tech world has been all aflutter in the last couple of weeks about changes to Google’s privacy policies. The important change is Google’s stated intention to aggregate all of its data about you and friends in your Google+ social circle and use that data throughout all of its services “to show you more relevant search results and ads, to help you connect with people or to make sharing with others quicker and easier.”

Click over to the Privacy Policy and take a look at the list of ways that Google collects information about you! It includes the information you provide when you sign up for a Google Account or fill out a personal or business profile; information about your devices; your search queries; GPS information about where you were when you used Google Maps; information gathered while you used Gmail or other Google services; your posts and your friends’ posts on Google+; and much more.

Microsoft used Google paranoia as an excuse to run full-page ads in the New York Times about how private things are if you use Microsoft services. Google tried to allay fears with a reassuring letter to Congress about how much of a lovable cuddle-bunny it is.

Google is an advertising company. Everything it does is driven by the desire to show you ads. That’s not good or bad. Microsoft and Apple are not altruists. Just look at the pie chart and don’t be fooled into thinking that Google has any other motives.

Previously: Technology Is Not Getting Easier!

Forbes published an article today that provides a nice postscript about new devices becoming more complex and cranky. Do iOS Apps Crash More Than Android Apps? A Data Dive is rich with details but the important lesson is that these simple, reliable devices in our pocket crash all the time. It’s not just you.

The details are interesting and the article is loaded with pie charts that break down crashes on mobile devices in lots of ways. (Conclusions: apps on Apple devices crash slightly more often than Android apps, but data from the end of 2011 might have been skewed by the release of iOS 5, which required a fair amount of rewriting for apps to work reliably. The pendulum might swing as Google rolls out Android 4.0 this spring.)

When you list the various reasons that apps crash, it’s easy to see the fragmentation that is making our technology world less reliable. Excerpts from the article:

• “One of the reasons for crashes is the proliferation of mobile operating systems on iOS and Android. As Apple and Google have released more new operating systems, each with multiple updates, app developers face more operating systems to test apps on. In data that mobile app monitoring startup Crittercism compiled for crashes between December 1 and 15, there were at least 23 different iOS operating systems that crashed and 33 Android operating systems that crashed.”
• “On the first question of why apps crash, the reasons are many, says Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy. This can be due to hardware issues, such as the use of location or GPS services or cameras; it could be due to the Internet connection, that is, how a phone connects to 3G or WiFi, or that the device is not connected to the Internet at a certain moment, or that something happens during the switch between 3G and WiFi. There could also be issues with language support on certain devices. There can also be memory problems if an app uses too much memory.”
• “Problems can also occur with third-party services that developers use in their apps, from analytics to advertising systems.”
• “In addition, developers also constantly create new updates to their apps to create new features or fix bugs. But again, people often don’t update their apps–just as they don’t update their operating system.”

Next time you restart your phone, go with a resigned shrug instead of anger. You’re not alone.

It’s supposed to be getting easier! After all, smartphones and tablets should be simple to use, right? iPhones and iPads are exposing hundreds of millions of people to Apple’s fabled ecosystem, and for years we’ve been told that everything is easy and intuitive in the Apple world. Meanwhile Windows 7 brings impressive advances in hardware support and security and stability to our computers.

Why does it seem like there are more complaints, not less?

I recommend an interesting article by Farhad Manjoo in Slate: 2011 Was A Terrible Year For Tech. Here are the key points:

“In 2011 nearly every gadget or service that I use on a regular basis picked up new features that made it more frustrating to deal with. Everywhere I looked, I saw feature creep, platform wars, competing media standards, and increasingly chaotic user interfaces. . . .

“Devices and services had a harder time playing together, and simply choosing what to use became an occasion for a flowchart. . . .

“This is something that the marketplace will address over the long run: As one mobile platform wins out, and one media service gains dominance, eventually it will become easier to choose the best way to send messages, watch videos, and keep things synced between your gadgets. But Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft are locked in a battle for the ages. None of them is going to give up soon, and it might be many years before we see a clear winner. Until then, brace yourself.”

I am frequently asked questions about whether service X will work with device Y. There is often no clear answer. When people ask me for help, they’re usually counting on me to deliver something that will “just work.” All too often there is a wide gulf between something that will work smoothly and something that might work but only with endless tweaking and twiddling – or not at all.

Think of the world of mobile devices. Apple and Google both make phones and tablets; Amazon has entered the market with the Kindle Fire, a kind-of-a-tablet; and Microsoft is about to start heavily promoting Windows tablets and phones. Those companies have strongly mixed emotions! Each company wants you to use its services for mail or sharing photos or collaborating on business documents, so there’s an incentive to make those services work on whatever device you choose. But those companies are also bitter competitors who have equally strong incentives to lock you into their hardware and make it hard for you to be satisfied with a competitor’s device.

Another example: Google’s Android operating system is offered for sale in many different versions by many hardware manufacturers. Android phones look different from each other and there is no guarantee that an app for one Android phone will work smoothly on another one. The obvious example: Android apps largely will not work on the Kindle Fire until they are rewritten, even though the Kindle Fire is technically based on Android; Amazon modified the Android OS beyond recognition. But even setting that aside, one of the frequent complaints in Google Market concerns apps that work fine on one model of phone but crash on another.

Not everything will work! Even the things that work have been getting more difficult as “features” are shoehorned in until something simple requires hours of study. Facebook is the most notorious example of a service that has become overwhelmed by its constantly changing interface and the dozens of new functions that appear and disappear around its edges.

It’s not going to get better in 2012. Shop carefully, ask for advice, and lower your expectations. Things are going to be bumpy.

LogMeIn deserves fifteen minutes of your time to understand its basics! Please treat it like any other service that affects your productivity and your security: take the time to learn its features and its controls. Read the information on the web site, figure out the differences between the company’s products, watch the videos! Don’t get caught in a hotel room on a deadline trying to use it for the first time.

This isn’t a tutorial but these are the things I explain most often to new LogMeIn users.

When you sign up for the first time, it’s not obvious that what you’re installing is a trial version of LogMeIn Pro. After thirty days, you will be urged to buy a one-year subscription to LogMeIn Pro.

You’re not required to do that. If you decline, LogMeIn will still work. It will automatically be dropped to the free version of LogMeIn.

There are meaningful features in the Pro subscription. You should pay for the Pro subscription if you might use them. The three big ones:

• Remote printing
• Easy file transfers
• High definition audio and video streaming

There are two different sets of credentials.

When you go to www.logmein.com, log in with your email address and the password you chose when you signed up with LogMeIn.

After you’ve logged in, you’ll see a list of the computers running LogMeIn that are associated with your LogMeIn account.

Clicking the Remote Control button brings up another request for a login name and password. These are the credentials that you use to log into the remote computer when you are sitting in front of it.

• User name is the name expected by the remote computer. You need to know whether your office login name is Bruce Berls, bruceb, or Bruce-Berls!
• This screen is looking for the office password to log into your computer – not the password to log into the LogMeIn web site.
• Log on to will appear if your office computer is part of a domain run by a server. If so, you’re probably putting in credentials for the domain (“BERLSNET”), not the individual computer (“BRUCEB-PC”).

Again, these are exactly the same credentials that you type in every day without looking when you’re sitting in front of the office computer.

You can’t connect to your computer if it is asleep or turned off. If you’re going to use the computer remotely, make sure it’s set not to go to sleep (Control Panel / Power Options) and don’t turn it off when you leave for the day.

Your remote session will appear in a window. LogMeIn will scale the display so everything fits in the window. Frequently that will make everything on the remote display appear to be very small.

In the upper right corner of the window is the button to make the remote session fill the screen. When you’re running fullscreen the display shows everything from the remote computer; your local desktop completely disappears.

In the fullscreen view a small toolbar floats in the middle of the top of the screen. It slides out of sight, then returns when you move your mouse near it. One of the buttons on it will return the remote session to a window so you can work on your local computer without disconnecting the remote session.

If you have dual monitors at the office, another button will appear to switch your display between the two monitors.

There are many more interesting things to know about LogMeIn! Give me a call if I can help you get started.

Most casual photos are taken with a smartphone now. There is something to be learned from a quick comparison of the process of getting photos from a phone to a computer on an iPhone and an Android phone.

It’s a good way to understand why Apple is the most valuable company in the world.

On the phone:

• Install the latest iOS 5 update.

By default, iCloud is turned on and Photo Stream is turned on. If not, the settings are under iCloud. Set Photo Stream to On.

On your Windows computer:

• Install the latest iTunes update.
• Open Control Panel and click on iCloud.
• Put a checkmark by Photo Stream.

You’re done.

Photos you take on your phone will automatically be synced to your computer. There are limits to how many pictures can be stored in your online iCloud storage area (by default, up to 1000 photos will be stored online for no more than 30 days), but there are no limits to what can be delivered through the service to your computer.

There are settings that you might want to tweak. Perhaps you take so many photos that you don’t want to run over your phone data plan limit, or you want to store the photos somewhere other than the default location on your computer. Some people will want to turn off some of the other items synced with iCloud.

But for most people, that’s it. It just works.

Paul Thurrott wrote a nice explanation of the steps to accomplish the same thing from an Android phone. He explains each step, so I’m just going to focus on the highlights here. If you want the detailed procedure, read his article. My purpose here is mostly to make you understand how fragmented and messy it is in Google’s world right now.

• Install the Google+ app on your phone, even if you never intend to use Google+, a social networking site. By default, Instant Upload is enabled. Your phone will begin automatically uploading photos to a private online album. So far so good, except for the part where this begins with an app that doesn’t appear to have anything to do with photos.
• After you take some pictures, go to Google Picasaweb, a website you’ve never heard of. View your photos online.
• Just kidding about Picasaweb! Instead, log into your Google+ page and look for the Photos area. You’ll find Photos from your phone alongside Photos from your circles, Photos of you, Photos from your posts, and Your albums. It turns out Picasa and Google+ display the same photos. Who knew?
• Just kidding about Google+! Although you can view your photos online in Picasaweb and Google+, you can’t get them onto your computer easily from either of those sites. To do that, you have to install Google’s Picasa program, even if you use a different program for photo management.
  • Once you’re running Picasa and signed into your Google account, don’t click the button that says Google+ Photos. That won’t do anything useful.
  • Instead, click on File / Import Albums from Google+ Photos.
  • Click the Sync to Web switch that you hadn’t noticed. (I still didn’t see it the first few times I looked at the picture below, even though I knew there was supposed to be something there.)
  • Oh, make sure you click the Change Settings button or it won’t sync automatically and won’t retrieve the full-size photos to your computer. Oh, and just ignore the words in the dialog about how this syncing service will “Upload this album to Google+ Photos.” This will really download the photos. Really. Honest.

It’s so obvious that people need an easy way to get photos off their phones! It’s simply embarrassing that Apple is the only company to accomplish it elegantly.

Verizon is ready for me to replace my two-year-old Android phone.

Things like this bring my mouse cursor ever closer to the iPhone 4S. It would be so easy to relax and click and be . . . assimilated.

Microsoft Office 365 has been tremendously successful so far, certainly from a sales perspective (millions of subscriptions, although the exact number is kept under wraps), but more importantly it’s also been successful from a technical perspective. There has been no downtime for the last few months. My clients are ecstatic that I can set passwords not to expire. Smaller businesses are being migrated from the older Microsoft Online Services platform; my clients’ experiences have not been completely smooth but no data has been lost and support for minor glitches has been readily available. Life on Office 365 is good.

So although I’m going to describe a technical issue, it’s a fairly insignificant one that has affected less than a dozen people in my personal experience. It’s an interesting and tricky problem!

Basically, at random times Outlook pops up a box and asks for the password for the Office 365 account. It’s usually when Outlook starts but occasionally happens in the middle of the day. Most people find that checking the box to “remember my credentials” makes the prompt disappear for days or weeks but others have it popping up frequently, as often as every few minutes. (Again, to be clear, most people don’t see this at all. This isn’t widespread.)

Take a peek under the hood to understand why it’s not supposed to do that.

The prior Microsoft service, Microsoft Online Services (aka Business Productivity Online Suite, aka BPOS) installed the Microsoft Online Services Sign In program, which ran at startup and displayed its little blue icon continuously down in the lower right corner. Its job was to log each person into the service and keep them logged in through thick and thin. When Outlook occasionally became confused and displayed the above password prompt, no password would satisfy it. The only answer was to shut down Outlook completely and sort things out with the sign in program.

That was never clearly understood by end users so Microsoft reworked the process for Office 365. A different program is installed for Office 365 and the old sign in program is removed. To Microsoft’s eternal shame, the new program has an almost identical name, “Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant,” apparently to make this as confusing as possible. You can imagine how much fun it is to advise people what to uninstall when the list in Control Panel looks like this.

The new sign-in program runs completely unseen. Its job is to get the Office 365 credentials from a user when the program is installed, then provide them to the Office 365 service whenever they are required, all completely invisibly. You’re not supposed to have to put your Office 365 password when you click into the Office 365 portal or Outlook Web Access or Sharepoint portal. Behind the scenes the sign-in assistant is taking care of that for you.

Outlook is a special case. As I understand it, the sign-in assistant does not interact with Outlook. Instead, Outlook relies on its built-in ability to memorize credentials (assisted by Windows). My gut tells me something is done on the server side as well to avoid challenging Outlook very often but I don’t know that for sure.

FIXES FOR PASSWORD PROMPTS

In the last couple of weeks I’ve gotten more reports than usual from people being prompted repeatedly for their Office 365 passwords. I don’t yet know the entire answer but I’ve got some clues, and I’ve been doing some magic dances that seem to help.

POSSIBLE UNDERLYING CAUSE: SERVER CHANGES

There is reason to suspect that Microsoft is moving Office 365 mailboxes from one server to another behind the scenes. That’s meant to be completely hidden! Outlook is automatically updated with new server names deep in the mailbox settings. We don’t care whether the Microsoft server is named ch1prd0404.outlook.com or pod51009.outlook.com.

In one perceptive forum message, though, “WhiteKnight” found that every time one of his users was prompted for a password, the underlying server had changed for the mailbox. He reports Office 365 mailboxes that have gone through seven different servers. Either Microsoft is making more changes than expected as they balance out the Office 365 load, or there’s an error in the way the servers are set up that causes them to challenge users too often.

POSSIBLE FIX NO. 1: INSTALL OFFICE UPDATES

In my experience, the repeated password prompts are happening far more often with Outlook 2007 than with Outlook 2010. In many cases the most recent service pack has not been installed. Office 2007 Service Pack 3 is pushed as an Important update but not automatically installed. It’s a huge download and slow to install and frequently requires a system restart.

A couple of days ago another update began to be pushed as an Important update, called “Update Rollup for Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant.” The KB article describes users being “repeatedly prompted for credentials.” Looking deeper into it makes me think that the update actually addresses a completely different problem and does not affect Outlook – but it’s a striking coincidence that an update for the Sign In Assistant appeared at exactly the moment that I was looking for it.

POSSIBLE FIX NO. 2: SAVE CREDENTIALS AT THE OFFICE 365 PORTAL

Each time I’ve gone to the Office 365 portal on the desktop of a user being prompted by Outlook, I’ve been prompted to put in the Office 365 password.

As I understand it, though, that prompt isn’t supposed to appear. The sign-in assistant is supposed to be providing the credentials so the portal is displayed immediately.

Click below the name where it says “Sign in with a different user ID.” Now you can sign in and check the box to memorize the password again (“Keep me signed in”).

Again, this shouldn’t change Outlook’s behavior. It’s unrelated. It seems to help! Maybe it’s a placebo effect.

POSSIBLE FIX NO. 3: LOOK THROUGH WINDOWS CREDENTIALS

Windows 7 has an interesting Credential Manager. (Type in “credentials” in the upper right corner of Control Panel.) Vista has a rudimentary version of the same thing – look in User Accounts for “Manage Your Network Passwords.”

My list above has a number of names that include RED001. That’s the indicator of the old Microsoft Online Services, since my mailboxes have not yet been migrated to Office 365.

After the migration, all the references to RED001 should disappear and be replaced with servers named xxxxxxx.outlook.com, the Office 365 servers. In one case I was able to remove an old RED001 entry here and stop a persistent password prompt. In two other cases I’ve got Outlook prompting for the old RED001 server password even though the migration to Office 365 happened months ago and all local references and DNS entries have been thoroughly scrubbed.

After that, well, I’m out of ideas. If you find a fix to the pestering password problem that I haven’t mentioned, let me know!

Previously: HP OfficeJet 8600 Plus

Here’s a reminder to always do a custom install with any program, and watch carefully for unwanted software that may be installed alongside the program you want.

HP has a long history of slow installation routines that sneak unwanted advertising and programs onto your computer. The installation program for the HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 Plus is slightly better than the OfficeJet 8500, but there are still too many chances to wind up assaulted with ads and unwanted bloat.

The opening setup screen presents five pieces of “recommended software.” Only if you read the first sentence carefully does it become clear that none of them are required to use the printer. “The software required to operate your device . . . will be installed” – “plus the recommended software listed below.”

The “recommended” software ranges from benign (Help) to awful (HP Bing Bar). I’m sensitive to the Bing Bar in particular, an unattractive Internet Explorer toolbar full of links to advertising pages. Like all browser toolbars, it slows down your Internet experience, takes up space onscreen, and tracks information about your browsing, without offering you anything useful in return. It is not improved by having HP advertising links added to it. (The Bing Bar also takes an oddly long time to uninstall. It shouldn’t take 60-90 seconds to uninstall a toolbar. I have enough reasons to practice drumming my fingers impatiently.)

HP Update is also a particularly annoying program. It slows computers down and pops up way too many notices about how important it is to check for updates to drivers that should not need frequent updates.

Only when you click the button for “Customize Software Selections” do you get the subtle change that should have been there all along – checkboxes to avoid installing the unnecessary extras.

Uncheck all five checkboxes. It’s a start, but not the last of the hidden crapware. Here’s the next screen.

A window dense with text that doesn’t look like any other install program you’ve ever seen. Stop! Your antennae should be twitching right now. It’s designed that way to distract you. Clicking the links leads to interesting places.

Here’s what you’ll find if you click the link for “Web Services Enablement.”

Yesterday I described my intent not to use HP’s ePrint and Print Apps features. This is where those features can be declined without installing unwanted software onto your computer. You might use those features, in which case feel free to install them. They can easily be added later so you might want to start small and look into them later.

Here’s the one that really bothers me – the “Internet Connection Usage Settings.” The sneaky language actually appears on the screen above: “The software may also use your Internet connection occasionally to do things such as check for software updates, search online help, or provide information and benefits relevant to you.”

HP is giving itself permission to pop up advertising for “benefits” onscreen while you work. There was a concealed checkmark to opt out of those ads during a similar setup routine for the HP OfficeJet 8500. The following screen on the OfficeJet Pro 8600 gives you the chance to opt out of receiving email spam by not providing your email address as part of “product registration” but doesn’t seem to have any way to avoid being notified of “benefits.”

Apparently HP really wants to check for software updates, since this is the second screen where the update program appears. I have a strong feeling they want to “reduce the chance of having problems with HP products” by selling me more HP products.

I unchecked all the boxes on the "”Internet Connection Usage Settings” screen, too.

Once all of the options were declined, I had a relatively clean installation of drivers for printing and scanning.

And what happened the very first time I sent a print job to the printer? A popup ad!

Rewards! I could get rewards! Oh boy!

When I said No Thank You (because I hate crap like this), I got another popup ad begging me to reconsider.

I was really really sure I wanted to exit now, so I clicked yes. Perhaps that was the end of it. So far there haven’t been any more popup ads.

Don’t misunderstand me. I like this printer very much. I recommend it. I don’t think HP is much worse than any of the other companies making side deals to install crap alongside desirable programs. (There is a special place in hell for the executives who approved bundling the Ask Toolbar with Java.)

Be careful when you install anything today, whether it’s a printer driver, a software update, or a new program. Keep an eye on those options!

After some research, I settled on HP’s new OfficeJet Pro 8600 Plus to replace an aging inkjet printer and defunct flatbed scanner. My early impressions are good. Here are some of the reasons it’s a good fit for me (and might or might not be good for you).

The fundamentals are all there, better than previous generations. In fact, the OfficeJet Pro 8600 Plus looks a lot like HP is making a serious effort to respond to people’s complaints and come up with something new and satisfying.

Printing is surprisingly fast – pages spit out more like what you’d expect from a laser printer than an inkjet. Color photos on glossy paper come out just fine – I print photos infrequently, so I don’t need anything better. HP claims that this model reduces the cost of ink per page but I can’t evaluate that yet.

Scanning is frequently the biggest disappointment with all-in-one devices, almost always so slow that it’s effectively unusable. The OfficeJet Pro 8600 Plus does not hold a candle to Fujitsu’s ScanSnap S1500, which sucks pages through at a blinding rate and is still the only scanner that most busy offices should consider. For lightweight scanning, though, the OfficeJet is a step far ahead of other all-in-ones and seems quite usable. The OfficeJet has the built-in ability to create PDFs and drop them in a network folder, so scanning can be done from the simple controls on the touchscreen on the device. It also installs a standard TWAIN driver that Adobe Acrobat can use to control the OfficeJet directly. When Acrobat handles scanning, it automatically does OCR on the scanned image to make the text searchable, and it’s a more natural process to give the PDF a useful name and store the file where it should be.

Faxing is included but HP uses the touchscreen instead of building in the unsightly keypad that sits ugly and unused almost all the time on most all-in-ones.

Two-sided printing, copying and scanning is an unexpected bonus. Nothing extra to set up – it just does it.

Fast start-up, too. The printer falls into a sleep mode that uses little power but wakes up quickly when a print job is sent. The “first-page” delay is one of the printer statistics that is usually concealed because many fast printers require as long as 45-60 seconds to get the first page into the tray after being asleep. When the printer in my office is asleep, I get the first page in the tray about 20 seconds after I hit Print.

MODELS 

There are three models of the OfficeJet Pro 8600. The least expensive is half the cost of the “Plus” version and has a smaller touchscreen and less robust document feeder. It might be fine but I worried about the document feeder, since I am particularly irritated by slow scanners. Perhaps it’s the same speed as the Plus model, just smaller capacity. Maybe. I didn’t want to find out.

The Premium model adds a second paper tray for another thirty dollars or so. As it happens I don’t need that; perhaps you do. Personally I’ve always been defeated by second paper trays. There is probably some way to make a print job take envelopes from the second tray, or take the first page of letterhead from one tray and subsequent pages of blank paper from the other. I would admire people who figured out how to do that. I’ve never met any.

Envelopes and special paper aren’t easy to use without the second tray. On the OfficeJet Pro 8600 Plus, the paper tray is the only method of feeding paper. Envelopes or 4×6” photo paper can’t be fed in on the fly. The paper tray has to be unloaded and paper guides adjusted before the printer will pull an envelope through. That might be a problem for some offices that want to have envelopes available all the time. I can live with that limitation easily.

SPECIAL FEATURES

This is where my conservative nature comes into play.

WIRELESS PRINTING  The OfficeJet Pro 8600 can be connected to your home or office network with a network cable. All the computers in the office then have equal access to it for printing and scanning. (It can also be connected with a USB cable but a network cable will be a better choice and give you more flexibility if you have more than one computer in the office.)

Theoretically it can also be set up for wireless printing – the printer sits in the middle of the room not plugged into anything except electricity, connected instead to your office wireless network. I’m sure that can be set up successfully but I don’t intend ever to find out. My previous experiences with wireless printers have frequently been ugly. Wireless technology is fabulous and wonderful and science fictional, sure, but it will also cause you heartbreak and tears. The printer will lose its wireless connection at exactly the moment that you’re printing something on a tight deadline.

Now, you know me – I’m cynical and cranky. Maybe it will work perfectly because wireless printer technology has improved to the point that connections are rock solid! Yeah, that’s it! Also, maybe that was a flying unicorn outside my window.

HP ePRINT  HP is very proud of its online service that will assist you in printing from a mobile device or from a remote location. After you sign up and configure the printer, you can email files as mail attachments to a special email address monitored by the printer, or use a smartphone app to send a print job to the printer.

Whenever we see a new feature that accomplishes something that could never be done before, our natural inclination is to assume we don’t need it. I consider it to be my job on your behalf to get past that. I try to look forward to guess how useful something might be after getting through the learning curve.

No matter how many times I do that, I can never imagine any scenario where I would print something from my phone, or print something on the printer in my office from my notebook in a different location. Never. This leaves me completely cold.

HP PRINT APPS  HP has partnered with lots of big companies to produce special apps for your printer that do something vaguely related to printing – “specially formatted web pages that print swell” or something. It’s an impressive list: Disney, Fandango, Coupons.com, USA Today, Martha Stewart, Yahoo, quite a long list of big companies that have an insatiable hunger for access to your email address. Many of them are designed to let you browse content and print items directly from the miniature touchscreen on the printer instead of the 24” computer monitor across the room. Others can be set up to print content on a schedule so you don’t have the pesky job of remembering that you want to print the entire contents of USA Today every day.

Words cannot express the horror.

This has little to do with printing and a lot to do with advertising. Fear for your browser home page and expect toolbars, popups, and spam if you walk down this road. And if I’m wrong about that and someone from HP wants to earnestly assure me that the print apps are pure and unsullied and it would never occur to them to put an unwanted toolbar on your computer, that makes the Print Apps merely pointless instead of pointless and intrusive, a fairly thin distinction.

APPLE AIRPRINT  The HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 printers support AirPrint, the technology that Apple cooked up for printing from iPads. I haven’t set that up but I can imagine that it will be useful for some people. It might be a sufficient reason by itself for true iPad junkies to choose this model.

You can’t print content displayed on an iPad unless an app is designed to allow that. The publishers of subscription magazines and newspapers aren’t going to let me print articles from The New Yorker that easily.

Tomorrow: a look at the process of setting up the HP printer, with some info about the latest tricks from HP to install crapware.

These are the rules for being safe using a Windows computer in 2012. Memorize them, forward them to your friends, post them on Facebook, alert the troops, sound the alarm, and walk from door to door passing them out to your neighbors!

If a web site brings something up on your screen that might be malware, turn your computer off with the power button. Get your hands off the mouse and do not click on “OK,” “Cancel,” or the X in the upper right corner! Anything that you click might lower the defenses on the computer and install malware.

Antivirus software & UAC will not always protect you against malware if you click OK at the wrong time. The bad guys are liars. They will say anything to get past your defenses, without conscience or remorse. Use your common sense. Read and think before you click OK.

Don’t click on links to web sites unless you know exactly where you’re going.

• Follow links with carefree abandon to and from legitimate sites, but don’t click on links that arrive in spam e-mail, instant messages, web forums, or IRC chats, or that start from an untrustworthy web site.
• Don’t click on links in email messages unless you deeply trust the judgment of the person who sent the message.
• Don’t click on links in forwarded messages.
• Shortened links are becoming popular in Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and social networking sites. You can’t tell where they lead by looking at them. Don’t follow them unless you trust the person who created the link.
• Just because something is listed in a Google search doesn’t mean it’s safe. Make a judgment about where you’re going before you click.

Choose passwords carefully. Your passwords are your defense against identity theft, financial loss, compromised computers, and breaches of confidentiality and privilege. If you use a weak password, or if you use the same password over and over every time something calls for one, you are jeopardizing yourself and your business.

• The best way to manage passwords: use LastPass to create and manage your online passwords. If you’re not already using LastPass, install it only if you are willing to spend time learning about the program and how it works.
• If you are a LastPass user, periodically run its Security Check and update any weak and duplicate passwords.

Install updates from Microsoft promptly. Look in the lower right corner for the update icon (Win7/Vista) or gold shield (WinXP).

Install updates to Acrobat, Adobe Reader, Flash, Java, and Quicktime promptly. Each will alert you from the lower right corner. Most malware in 2011 was installed by poisoned web sites exploiting an out-of-date version of one of these programs.

• The best way to keep up with updates: sign up for the Bruceb Remote Management service.

Install security software and keep it up to date. Home users and small businesses should use Microsoft Security Essentials.

Know the name of your security software. If you get a “security warning” that does not display the exact name of your security software, it is phony; if you click on anything, you will probably install malware.

Never, never, never open email attachments unless you know with 100% certainty that the attachment is something you expected and want to receive.

Back up your computers. Choose a backup strategy, understand how it works, and keep your backups up to date. At a minimum, Windows 7 and Vista users should be using the built-in backup program to back up data and disk images on an external hard drive.

• The best way to be safely backed up: sign up for managed online backups with the Bruceb Cloud Backup service.

Keep your mobile devices secure. Smartphones and iPads are easily misplaced or stolen. Do not keep confidential or privileged information on a mobile device in an unprotected app.

Be careful out there!

A few weeks ago Microsoft released a OneNote app optimized for iPads.

Long-time readers know about my fondness for OneNote, the program you’ve never heard of that’s included with every copy of Microsoft Office 2010, right alongside Word and Excel and Powerpoint. Here’s more information to get you oriented. To repeat: “The concept is simple: OneNote collects information on the fly from any source you can imagine, and helps you find it again later when you need it. That’s any information. OneNote can hold your grocery list as easily as your research or trial preparation.”

OneNote is designed for its notebooks to be stored online in Microsoft’s Skydrive service. It’s the only reason most people will use Skydrive; Microsoft’s free online storage ought to be swell and Microsoft continues to work on it but it shows no sign of living up to its potential.

When you link to your online OneNote notebooks from different computers, the program syncs everything instantly and seamlessly. (Theoretically it’s also possible to share online notebooks with other OneNote users but Skydrive’s poor design turns sharing into a baffling exercise in frustration. I rarely see OneNote used for collaboration.)

The OneNote app for iPads follows a OneNote iPhone app by about a year. The app connects to the notebooks stored in Skydrive and displays them on the iPad with some tweaking to make them more finger-friendly. Not every OneNote feature is supported (no drawing, can’t create new notebooks or sections) but on the whole it’s a good piece of work, well worth a look by OneNote users.

There’s an interesting twist. The OneNote app for iPads is free to install and can be used to view every note in every notebook for free forever.

But when you get to 500 notes, you’ll be asked for money. It will cost you $14.99 to be allowed to edit your notes on the iPad if you sync more than 500 notes. Once you’re over 500 notes, an upgrade notice appears instead of a keyboard when you tap on a note.

That’s rather a lot for an iPad app, don’t you think?

I synced my notebooks and went over the limit within the first thirty seconds after I installed it on my iPad. I could turn off syncing with some notebooks and get under the limit but that misses the point of OneNote.

The price caught the interest of Microsoft watchers, who speculate that Microsoft might be working on iPad sized versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint that could give Microsoft a toehold in the tablet market. At that price, it’s possible to imagine a respectable stream of revenue for the Office division, which seems to be a bit nonplussed by the rapid shift to mobile devices. There are some doubters who see OneNote as an interesting exception with no other apps to follow. Microsoft is staying mum.

If you’re not using OneNote, read about it and watch the videos on the website and give it a try. If you’re a committed OneNote junkie, try it on the iPad – but watch your wallet.