It has been a while since I’ve been able to post a new review to this blog. I have been extremely busy and I have had little time to order my thoughts on the subject of technology. So what have I been doing? I’ve been writing. Specifically, I’ve been writing and editing, and publishing, a novel. My first novel, but not my last.

The book is The Perils of Prague, the first book in a steampunk series set in a world where Queen Victoria never died, and the Empire of the Eternal Empress spans the globe, influencing every nation. We step into this world through the eyes of a young English lord, touring the world as his entry into society. An evening’s entertainment at the State Opera of Prague introduces our narrator to Professor Harmonious Crackle and Miss Titania Bang, a pair of wandering scientists. Disaster strikes the performance when the Prima Donna is revealed as a clockwork and a single sustained note shakes the opera house down around them. Surviving the destruction, our intrepid trio must now track down the madman responsible before he strikes again.

The book is available in paperback and for Kindle, and an excerpt is available to view on Amazon.

Every now and then, a product just falls into your lap and you find that it is a solution to a problem that  you hadn’t realized that you had. This is a skill that some companies, like Apple, tend to do constantly. When done well, it leads to some absolutely amazing products! Today’s review is a product that I believe fits in this category. The problem that I didn’t realize I had? When I get up in the morning and get ready for work, I need to sync my phone and load up my daily dose of podcasts, but at the same time, I need to keep my phone with me to play podcasts while I feed the cats, and gather together everything I need to take in to the office. I usually carpool to work, and my time is limited, so I really need to do both at the same time. The solution I didn’t know I was looking for? The Bass Egg Verb.

The Verb is a compact, battery powered, Bluetooth audio device made by Bass Egg (pronounced “base” as in the acoustic range, not “bass” as in a type of fish). The unit retails for $99.95 and is available directly from the company, or from Amazon.com in either basic black or gunmetal. Bass Egg lists the unit as an audio device, and you can find some references to it as a vibration speaker in other places. What does that mean? Simply put, the Verb has all the drivers of a high-end speaker system, but doesn’t have any of the acoustic cones.

So how does the Verb produce sound? Very well, actually. Bass Egg uses a clever induction method that turns any hard surface you put the Verb on into a resonating surface. Come again? In English please! The Verb turns any hard surface you put it on into a speaker. The larger the surface, the bigger the sound.

Sound cool?

Yes, yes it does!

So how does this solve my problem? When I plug my phone into my computer in the morning to sync, I turn on the Bass Egg, which connects to the phone via Bluetooth and starts playing the last audio I played on the phone. Now I can pick up the Verb and take that with me and drop it on the kitchen counter or a nearby table to provide a convenient audio source as I putter around. Bluetooth gives me a 30 foot range from my computer, and the Verb is light enough to carry easily but heavy enough to stay where it is put. The single rubber foot on the bottom grips the surface well to keep the unit from sliding off, but doesn’t dampen the transfer of vibration to the surface that has become my new speaker.

Of course, the quality of the sound that you get from the Verb depends on the type of material you’re using. A wooden table gives a deep, rich sound, while a cardboard box tends to produce a higher, almost tinny sound. Glass tends to give a good, clean sound. Don’t have anything to use? No problem. The box the Verb comes in can be used as a speaker.

The most interesting surface that we tried was actually the roof of a car at a friend’s party. I pulled out the Verb to show it to him, and he put it on top of his Nissan Leaf. Not only did this provide an incredible sound for an outdoor speaker, we then climbed inside the car and found that the sound clearly carried through the car and made the entire vehicle an acoustic chamber.

Now, with any issues involving audio quality, I don’t expect you to take my word for it. You’ll want to hear it for yourself. Usually in cases like this I grab my Zoom H2 Handy Recorder, and headed over to visit my friend John Taylor Williams, a professional sound engineer, to figure out how accurately the Verb reproduces sound with various materials. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to get together and record a sound test, so that part of the review I’ll just have to post later.

The Verb is still Nifty Tech. More to com.

That’s right, four years ago, on February 1st 2010, the first Nifty Tech blog post went live. While technology has come a long way since that first post, it is remarkable how so many of those early posts are still relevant today. For years is  long time in the technology industry, but I don’t think we’ve had a single Nifty Tech pick that has gone by the wayside. If anything, most of the products have managed to improve since the original reviews. And while things have been slow in the past year, we’re not done yet…

The pace has slowed down here at Nifty Tech Central, but not for lack of cool tech! Honestly, it is the people who have failed, not the technology. Our staff has branched out in their personal projects and discovered a measure of success in writing fiction. We’ve also each had personal events that have kept us from looking at the world of technology around us. But there are still new articles in the wings, waiting for those final touches.

One of the hardest things to do when getting a new review ready is make sure that we’ve done our level best to fully research each product. Sometimes, the process of verifying those last details and presenting that information for you, the reader, is very difficult to coordinate. In these cases it isn’t enough to tell you about a product, we need to show you why we are so taken with it. That involves an extra effort that doesn’t always come easy.

While we have slowed down a bit, the Nifty Tech Blog is not dead. You can still look forward to new articles appearing in this coming year: new reviews, editorials, and guest reviews. See you soon!

While we at the Nifty Tech Blog don’t report on the tech press, that doesn’t mean that we don’t read it. Although sometimes we might wish that we hadn’t. It is a known fact that Apple has hired people to work on wearable technology of late. That much has been well reported. But tech pundits have gone on from this fact to deduce that since Apple is investing in wearable technology, it must mean that an iWatch is most surely about to appear. The lack of vision that these pundits display makes it clear why they are reporting on technology, while Apple is innovating in the field. They see only the most basic of possibilities and assume that since they imagined it, it must be true…

Do I know what Apple has up their sleeve? No. I don’t. But I can give you some very good reasons why it won’t be an iWatch.

First off, they’ve pretty much done it.

When Apple came out with the 6th Gen iPod nano, one of the first accessories that hit the market was a variety of bands that allow the user to wear the nano as a watch. Did they take the world by storm? No, not really. Could Apple do it better? Possibly.

But why bother?

The strangest thing about the tech press’ fixation with the iWatch concept is that it really isn’t a great concept. Yes, people wear watches, and some of those people would want smart watches, but more and more people are forgoing watches in favor of their smart phones. Why would Apple injure a market they own in order to create an iWatch? Answer: They wouldn’t.

Why not an iWatch?

What is wrong with the iWatch idea? Well, to start with, it is limited. Yes, you can make a watch that has lots of additional functions besides just telling time, but confining yourself to a watch form factor seriously limits  those functions. Screen size is limited, which in turn reduces your control interface. This also means that while manipulating the controls the user’s hand effectively covers the user interface. These are all part of why the 6th Gen nano didn’t take off like wildfire. On top of that, since the device is strapped to a user’s wrist, it has to be used one-handed, further limiting your control interface. Yes, smart phones are usually used one-handed, but they can be used with both hands.

And then there are simple ergonomics. Let’s say you’ve got the smartest possible iWatch on your wrist. What are you going to do with it? Listen to music? Fine. You can plug in a headset or use bluetooth. No problem. Going to watch video? What position are you going to assume while you watch the tiny screen on your iWatch? Will you hold your arm out from the shoulder, your forearm bent parallel to your chest? Will you rest your arm across your stomach and look down at the screen? How long can you hold that position? Then there are functions like games or surfing the web. Now you’ve got to hold that position and put your other hand in the way to manipulate controls. Not the great experience Apple wants to offer for their customers.

Fundamentally, a watch is a device that you consult briefly to gain information, and then put away. How many functions does a person do every day that fit that mold?

So, what does Apple want to do in the wearable space?

Obviously Apple thinks that it is an important market to get into, but what market is Apple aiming for?

Well, what about the Google Glass? Isn’t that wearable technology? Wouldn’t it be much more interesting for Apple to go after that market?

While I doubt Apple will come out with a product to directly compete feature for feature with the Glass, I can see a lot of potential for them to do interesting things in the market by approaching in the typical Apple way: Implement one key feature and do that very well, and then add the rest later.

So, let’s say that Apple is set on eating the Glass’ lunch. How do they go about it? What are the characteristics of this theoretical iShades product? Well, it needs to be lightweight and comfortable to wear. The heads-up display is a must. It needs to be very light, so wireless connectivity is needed, most likely a Bluetooth connection to a separate processor unit. The real question here is would the iShades be a product in and of itself, or would it be an accessory? Imagine being able to go out for a run with your iPhone strapped to your arm and wearing a pair of iShades and seeing real-time data about your time, distance, speed, and progress towards your run’s goal being projected in real-time on your iShades while listening to your favorite music. And still being able to see where you are going.

The modern smart phone user is often criticized for always looking down at their phones. Now imagine that these users will be able to hold their heads up thanks to the iShades, because now they can see the world around them while reading a book or their Twitter feed. Or maybe a new class of augmented reality games? Or reality aware software that hides content to focus the user’s attention on the world around him before he walks into the person in front of him. Or a pole. Or traffic.

Compared to the iWatch, the iShades has a lot more in the way of interesting possibilities. Let’s not make it just a display device. Let’s add a camera and microphone to the unit so it is an input device, too. Some heads-up displays accept input by watching eye movement and tracking that against the projected display. That might be great for a fighter pilot who has his hands full, but you wouldn’t want to use it as your primary method of controlling a device. So let’s go one step better. Let’s go Minority Report on this! We can track eye movements, but let’s also track the movements of the user’s body. X-Box Kinect already uses a similar system  to track the player’s movements, so the technology is available now. So now you can have the iShades track the movements of your hands against virtual objects projected in 3D space on the inside of the lenses. This means you can really leaf through your music collection, or flip through your e-mail. Even type in mid-air. Apple would love that: a keyboard interface with no buttons.

Could Apple do this? Yes. The technology is pretty much all there. Would they? Maybe. For Apple the question is could they make it small and sleek enough? And if you can make something like the iShades, why would you bother with something as plodding as an iWatch?

What else could it be?

Let’s face it, the iWatch and iShades are just two possibilities from the field of wearable technology. And nothing says it has to be one multifunction device. Apple could be planning a suite of affordable single-function devices that coordinate together into a customizable personal environment. Or perhaps SmartClothes, where the computer controls the color and design of your clothing, giving you the ability to change style on the fly, from something as simple as a variable message T-shirt to an outfit that changes color with your mood or the environment. There are some startling possibilities in the field and we are just barely starting to scratch the surface. Science fiction remains our best view into what could potentially be done with wearable tech.

For now, all we can do is wait and see what Apple announces on Tuesday. And speculate. But if we’re going to speculate, why not speculate on something cool? I’d rather have a future so bright that I have to wear iShades.

[This week, we have something special for you. Over the past few months, we’ve had many people contact the Nifty Tech Blog interested in guest posting on the Blog. Unfortunately most of those inquiries haven’t panned out. They’ve just missed the target of  helping to demystify technology.

But this week, we have something that has hit that target. This is an article offered to us by Rachel Greenberg, who is a bit of a VoIP evangelist. Rachel is actually part of the VoIP industry, in that she contributes to several sites that help customers compare different VoIP providers to find the balance of cost and features that satisfy their needs. Since this article is more about a technology than a particular service offering, and since Rachel is a bit of an insider, we’ve filed this article under Editorials. You may feel there is some bias to the article, but it should still help you on your own investigation to see if VoIP is something that might make your life better.

We hope you enjoy Rachel’s article. – Editor]

A Quick Review of VoIP Service for Anyone Who Hasn’t Heard Yet

Nimble and quick, cheap and unlimited. Now those are words I’ve never used to describe my phone service, and I’m willing to bet that you haven’t either. And that’s why VoIP technology has gained so much attention in recent years.

In fact, you’ve probably used VoIP technology and just didn’t know what it was called. If you’ve ever called someone or video chatted with someone over the Internet through a platform like Skype, you’ve used VoIP technology.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is the technology that lets you make phone calls over the Internet. It’s much cheaper than traditional phone service, which makes calls over copper landlines and through cellular towers.

VoIP is cheaper than other types of phone service for the simple reason that VoIP runs off the Internet, and the Internet itself is cheap and unlimited. Part of the reason that traditional phone service is so expensive is because those old landline and cell towers are expensive to maintain. In fact, lots of traditional telephone companies have converted a lot of their internal systems to VoIP, though most haven’t converted entirely. On its own, VoIP is extremely cheap, so there’s no reason you should be paying so much to make calls through an outdated service.

Most people know that monthly phone service is expensive. Typical service can cost anywhere from $80 to $120 a month. But a residential VoIP service can cost as little as $5/month.

As long as there is an Internet connection between users, all business and residential VoIP providers offer unlimited calls nationwide. No long distance fees, no roaming charges, no pesky pay-by-the-minute plans. And several VoIP providers extend this unlimited calling to Canada as well.

It can be such a pain to cut off phone calls because you’re short on minutes, and VoIP’s unlimited nature completely eliminates this frustration.

And as you have probably experienced, most service carriers charge about a dollar a minute when you need to make international calls. This is outrageous.

Even without an international plan, most VoIP providers starts users off with free 60 international minutes every month. And after those minutes, international calls can cost as little as $0.01/minute.

VoIP also has this cool feature with international area codes. Basically, any VoIP user with an international plan can chose an international area code. All calls made to and from that international area code then becomes a cheap local call.

A lot of people ask whether or not VoIP is adaptable to mobile devices like smart phones. And the good news is that most VoIP providers do offer mobile apps for their service. Many VoIP providers offer Android, Blackberry, tablet, and laptop apps so that users carry their cheap VoIP phone service wherever they go.

VoIP is a really great option if you’re looking to save money on your phone bill.  It makes it easy and cheap to connect with loved ones around the country, or across the world, or just across town.  It’s time to take back “cheap”. And I highly recommend giving VoIP a try.

[Rachel Greenberg is a tech and telecom writer at www.myvoipprovider.com.

If you’d like to be a Guest Blogger for The Nifty Tech Blog, write to us at NiftyTech@NiftyTechBlog.com. Give an example of what you’d like to review and why it should be Nifty Tech. – Editor]

I’ve been lax in dealing with my correspondence of late. Personal matters have driven a lot of things to the side, including this blog. So, when I came across an e-mail from MacPhun telling me that their app FX Photo Studio was going to be free in the iTunes store for just one day in April, I figured that I had missed an opportunity to share this with you. Well not quite. FX Photo Studio, is available FREE TODAY. FX Photo Studio is a photo manipulation app that boasts 194 different photo effects. We haven’t looked at it before as a potential review, but we will be considering it in the future. But if you want to check it out for yourself, today is the best time to pick it up. Just head to the iTunes Store and get your copy for iPhone or iPad before the price goes back up.

UPDATE: Whoops, it turns out I did miss the free day, but MacPhun was so happy with the numbers they got, they have kept FX Photo Studio at free and they are hoping to get 10 million downloads by the end of May.

This article isn’t a real review. To be honest, it can’t be, as I had the product in my possession for a grand total of four days. As the headline above says, this is a cautionary tale. It is a warning about the way that companies advertise their products to make them sound better than they actually are, stupid decisions corporations make that make their products less useful and pull sales out of their own pockets, and how good customer service can still save the day. I hope you’ll read my little tale, as it may give you the opportunity to save yourself some time and money.

The Setting

Our tale begins way back in 2009, when my old Mac G4 that I was using as a server died. To replace it, I bought a Mac mini Server. At that time, the regular Mac mini came with an internal hard drive and a “Superdrive”, as Apple styled their high-speed CD/DVD burner. The Server version, however, came with two internal hard drives, and shipped with a case that didn’t include the slot for the Superdrive. The point here is that the Mac mini Server from 2009 was a computer that did not come with an internal optical drive. To make up for this, Apple, and lots of other folks, sold external CD/DVD drives.

Fast forward to the introduction of the MacBook Air. The Air didn’t have the room for an internal DVD drive, so Apple updated their external Superdrive design to produce a small, portable drive that could be powered through a single USB connection. This was, and is, the Apple USB Superdrive. On the packaging, it says it is compatible with any Mac that does not ship with an internal optical drive.

The story begins

Our action begins about a month ago when I discovered that the DVD drive I use with my mini, and the G4 before it, had quietly died an electronic death in the night. Needing a new drive, I bought the Apple USB Superdrive. After all, it is compatible with any Mac that doesn’t ship with an internal optical drive, right? And a quality piece of hardware to boot.

Last Wednesday, my drive arrived. I pulled it out of the box and connected it up to my mini, then proceeded to pull out a CD that I wanted to rip into iTunes. I put the CD in… and the drive spat it back out. Actually, that’s not quite right. The drive wouldn’t accept the CD at all. I’d push it in, and it would be pushed right back out. I tried it with different CDs, and with my MacBook Pro. No change. This disappointed me, but I figured that even Apple turns out a lemon now and then. I packed it back up in the box and made a Genius Appointment at the local Apple Store.

That brings us to Saturday, and my appointment. I brought a CD along with me so I’d be able to show the problem. The Genius tried my drive on a MacBook Pro, and got the same results I had. Then he pulled out another USB Superdrive, plugged it into the same computer, and got the same result. One lemon, yes, but two? That didn’t seem right to either of us. We took the drives over to one of the Mac minis on display. In case you didn’t know, Mac minis no longer have internal optical drives. He plugged my drive into the mini, slipped my CD into the slot… and it mounted on the desktop.

This puzzled us mightily, so as my Genius went off to consult with other Geniuses, I ejected my CD, and did some research on the online Apple Store. Looking at all the official Apple materials on the page, it should have worked with my computer. Then I noticed the Questions and Answers section at the bottom of the page. Looking through the answers, it became clear that the drive was built specifically for the MacBook Air, the newer Mac mini, and the latest iMac model. As one person put it, “Apple prevents you from using them in other devices by using firmwares in the superdrive that will not allow it.” The Genius came back and confirmed it: The USB Superdrive ONLY works with the latest version of the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, MacBook Air, Mac mini, and the iMac. It DOES NOT work with Macs that come with an optical drive, or have an OPTION to have an optical drive. The firmware will not let it work with other devices.

Rant time

Normally, Apple makes some pretty solid hardware that works with just about everything. And let’s face it, nothing says “works with everything” like a USB drive. Most USB devices work with anything that has a USB port. I can see the device not working with a device that doesn’t provide enough power, but to make a drive that refuses to work with computers where it is perfectly compatible? That’s just insane from a business point of view. Going after a niche market is one thing, but kicking out the rest of your market in order to pursue a single niche is ridiculous. And that is what Apple has done. They’ve kicked out their customers who need multiple CD/DVD drives, and those with older Macs, in order to focus on a niche market of customers who bought four specific models of Mac in the last two years. It’s one thing to say other and older machines are unsupported, but to refuse to even try? Insane.

The Happy Ending

Fortunately, my story ends well. Because the drive, the ONLY CD/DVD drive that Apple makes, wasn’t compatible with any of my machines, and because I had only had the drive for a few days, I was able to return the drive and get my money back. The Genius was very helpful and he agreed with me every step of the way that Apple’s corporate decisions were stupid.

The moral

So, what have we learned from this? Always do your homework before you buy. That includes reading reviews and forums to see what kind of problems people are having with the product. No company is totally reliable, so don’t depend on just the reputation of the brand name. Even the best will make stupid choices. And if you do run into a problem, run it down as fast as possible, or you may just find yourself stuck with a perfectly good product you can’t use.

Yes, it’s been a while since our last review went live. Sometimes it gets like that, with new revisions coming out right when you think a review is ready, or discovering some problem that knocks a promising candidate right out of the water. And sometimes, life gets in the way. This post is about some of that life.

If you’ve ever taken time to visit our Meet the Staff! page, you’ll know that both Scott and I write fiction in addition to writing tech reviews. We’ve each had our own projects from time to time. Now we’ve got a new project  where we’re both going to be participating. It’s not a Nifty Tech project, but I thought I’d share it with you and let you decide if you are interested.

This new endeavor is Scott’s baby, but he’s asked me to be a part of it. He’s launched a Kickstarter project to fund a new fiction anthology, The Way of the Gun. Scott has been playing with the idea of the warrior’s code of honor in the old west for some time now. He’s developed a world populated by Marshals and Rangers, and the religiously scientific followers of the Clockworker. These fabulous tinkerers and healers are in conflict with an increasingly corrupt justice system lead by the Judges, and enforced by the Marshals. And now Scott wants to share this world with you. He’s invited a choice group of authors to play in his new world, and is asking for your help to fund an anthology of stories set in his version of the West.

Scott has lined up a number of talented authors to help flesh out his world, and fill the anthology with exciting stories. They are Jake Bible, the mind behind Dead Mech and The Americans, Justin Macumber, author of the new military sci fi novel Haywire, Zach Ricks, editor of Flagship magazine and author of his own Weird Western series, Jared Axelrod, creator of the rich world behind Fables of the Flying City and yours truely, Doc Coleman, podcaster and author of the steampunk series The Adventures of Crackle and Bang. If Scott’s Kickstarter gets funded, we’ll each be writing our own stories set in his world, and sharing them with you. But in order to do that, Scott needs backers!

Why should you be a backer? What do you get out of it? Well, that depends on how heavily you back the project. At the lowest levels, you get our heartfelt thanks, but for just a little more, you can get an electronic copy of the finished book electronically signed by each of the authors. At the next level of backing above that, you get  a print version of the book as well. If you open up your wallet even more, you could get a character named after you in one of the stories, or electronic copies of some of Jake Bible’s books. And for one very generous person, you could even get a Kindle physically signed by all of the authors. Of course, these higher levels of donation are limited, and some of those available slots are already gone, so you need to act quickly if you want to snag those!

Be a backer! Take a look at the rewards that Scott is offering. Don’t worry if you can’t afford to spare much right now. You can always upgrade your pledge to a higher level before the Kickstarter ends on November 3rd. If we don’t get funded, you’ll never be charged a dime. But Scott and I think this is a great project and we’re hoping that it will get funded, and that you’ll help.

It has been a while since I’ve done one of these. It isn’t that there aren’t plenty of folks out there worth following. Quite the contrary, there are a lot of them. The fault has been mine. I’ve simply been trying to work too many projects.

But this isn’t about me. This is about someone who has bent his creative energies to finding new ways to helping others discover and develop their own creativity. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the man behind the Roundtable Podcast. I give you Dave Robison, aka. @WritersPodcast.

But before I tell you about Dave, let me tell you a little bit about the podcast. The Roundtable Podcast is a relatively new podcast that is taking the podisphere by storm. The show features Dave Robison, and his co-host Brion Humphrey. Each week they welcome a special guest host, a writer who has volunteered their story-building talents to help the week’s guest writer hammer their latest pitch into a workable story. Each Friday is a “20 minutes with” episode where Dave and Brion talk with this week’s guest host and give you some insight into the guest’s creative process. The following Tuesday, the three of them welcome a guest writer, who gives the panel a pitch for a story. The panel then bats around ideas looking for a way to transform that pitch into Literary Gold!

@WritersPodcast is the official Twitter feed for the Roundtable Podcast, but it is also Dave’s voice on the Twitterverse. Dave is the man behind the tweets, and he is just as engaging and charismatic on Twitter as he is on the podcast. He constantly quests for the awesome online, and he finds what he looks for. Dave is entertaining, creative, and fun to talk to. Or just follow him and watch as he interacts with the people he follows. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Fastens your seat belts, folks, this one is one hell of a ride.

If you read last year’s review of Phoenix Rising, you probably either already know what I’m about to say, or you’re already nose deep into the book and not reading this review. For those of you who are coming late into the game, or just enjoy reading my reviews, Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris are at it again! On May 29th, 2012, Harper Voyager released their second Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel, The Janus Affair.  Once again, Wellington Thornhill Books, and Eliza D. Braun have emerged from the Archives of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences to uncover a dastardly plot that endangers Queen Victoria’s England, and possibly the rest of the world.

The winds of change are blowing across the face of the empire, as women all over England are demanding the right to vote, spurred on by visits of New Zealand suffragettes who have come to help their disenfranchised sisters in the mother country. But this change is not welcomed by all. Books and Braun are returning from Edinburgh to London on the latest hyper steam train when a terrified woman vanishes from right in front of them in a burst of lightning. This incident turns out to be the tip of the iceberg, as a quick search of the Archives reveals that a number of influential members of the Women’s Suffrage Movement have disappeared in similar cases. Cases which have been closed half-investigated by their fellow agents in the Ministry.

With Miss Braun’s mentor, Kate Sheppard, come from New Zealand to further the cause, along with her son Douglas, Eliza’s former fiancé, the duo must take the investigation into their own hands. This leads to a fast-paced romp over and above the streets of London as the leadership of the Movement begin disappearing one by one.

Second books in a  series often take a bad rap as pale imitations of their predecessors. Fear not, gentile reader, this is NOT the case with the Janus Affair. Ballantine and Morris have exceeded themselves with an excellent tale of intrigues and machinations as Books and Braun try to track down the missing women and discover who is behind their disappearances, Douglas attempts to renew his romance with Eliza, and Wellington discovers feelings of jealousy he hadn’t been aware of. On top of all this, there is a traitor in the Ministry, working to bring the Ministry down.

The book is beautifully written. The characters are real, and the dialog rings true in a wonderfully snarky way. This is a great story and a great read, and it looks like the next book, By Dawn’s Early Light, will continue on in this vein. If you’re a fan of Steampunk or Adventure and don’t mind a love triangle or two thrown in, I think you’ll love this book.

I am!

I’m going to be a guest again this year at Balticon 46, and if you’re going to be there, and you’re a Nifty Tech Blog reader, I’d like to meet you! While you can find out all about Balticon at their web site, Balticon.org, there are a lot of panels and programs to sift through to find what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for me, I’ve put up my Balticon itinerary over at Swimming Cat Studios. I’ve got twelve panels this year, plus a reading of my fiction on Monday.

See you at Balticon!

Once more, I’m visiting the Time Waster’s category, providing a new review with my personal stamp on ways you can fill up that excess personal time you have from using the Nifty Tech reviewed on these pages.

Free Will (and other compulsions) is the second book in J. Daniel Sawyer’s Antithesis Progression series, which manages to combine science fiction and noir elements into a fascinating future setting. The first book in the series is Predestination (and other games of chance). If you’ve read Predestination and enjoyed it, you’re sure to want to pick up Free Will, and no doubt look forward to the next time J. Daniel Sawyer publishes a book with a short title (and a long and contradictory subtitle). At the time of this writing, Free Will is only available in electronic formats, but is available for Kindle, Nook, and a variety of other formats via Smashwords.

In Predestination, we met Joss Kyle, a one-time National Security Advisor who is now on the run. After being branded as a traitor, Joss has fled the Earth for Space Station Sidon in order to build a new life for himself, and to figure out who was the real traitor who set him up to take the fall. But Joss hasn’t gotten away clean. He’s still pursued by those who would like to use his knowledge, or silence him forever.

Now, in Free Will, events have continued apace. The Lunar Colonies are agitating for open rebellion, despite the power plays and back-biting that are threatening to tear the movement apart. The Persians have become increasingly confrontational, and now have mobilized their fleet and are threatening to take over the outer colonies. The American military is starting to mobilize in answer, and it is becoming harder and harder to see a path that doesn’t lead to open warfare. Senator Bill Shelley, the very man who branded Joss as a traitor, is moving closer to taking over the White House. As much as Joss would like to lay low, a new series of terrorist bombings on Luna and the space stations have been laid at his feet. Now Joss finds that he has one last chance to try to clear his name, and possibly avert an interplanetary war. In the midst of all this chaos, it is time for Joss Kyle to take a stand. All he has to do is manage to go home without being caught.

This is a novel of dirty deals, secret meetings, conspiracy, betrayal, and intrigue. If these kinds of stories don’t appeal to you, you’re not going to like Free Will. Of course, if you do like this kind of story, you’re in for a good read.

And a long one. This is a big book, full of twists and turns, betrayals, reversals, confessions, reveals, and desperate struggles for survival. Sawyer paints events on a big stage, but manages to convey the human details without bogging the story down in endless descriptions. His characters are complex, confused, and real. While some of the lifestyles portrayed in Free Will aren’t exactly mainstream by today’s standards, the characters are human and their choices and reactions ring true. The story is intricate and carefully plotted and draws the reader along to find out how anyone can avoid the disaster looming, and if any of the characters can survive.

While it took me a long time to get through Free Will, I thoroughly enjoyed the story. While this is not the end of the Antithesis Progression, Free Will stands alone as a story, and doesn’t suffer from the weak endings that tend to characterize middle books in a trilogy. The book feels like it comes to a proper ending, and it is only afterwards that one realizes that there are still loose threads to be dealt with. I’m looking forward to the next installment of the Antithesis Progression and seeing what new developments Sawyer can come up with. This is an excellent book for fans of criminal underworlds and high stakes politics.

One of the hallmarks of Nifty Tech is the fact that it takes work off of your hands. As a result, one very easily begins to take it for granted. The tech blends into the background, and instead you focus on just getting things done. This week I’m going to be looking at a piece of tech that I’ve been taking for granted for a while. This may not be useful for many, but for some of you, it could be very interesting, indeed. Today, we’re looking at WordPress.

WordPress started back in 2003 as an open-source effort to create effective writing tools. It has grown into one of the pre-eminent blogging platforms on the net. WordPress is primarily an open-source project put together by hundreds of volunteers all over the planet. They work on WordPress because they use it, and want to see the content others create using WordPress. Open-source WordPress is available for free at WordPress.org, but in order to use it, you’ll have to have your own hosting service somewhere else, and that will cost you money.

There is also a commercial branch of the WordPress project at WordPress.com. To create a WordPress.com account, you don’t need a separate hosting service, but you don’t have quite as much control over your site as you would with the .org version. WordPress.com is also free, but there are a number of add-on features that will cost you money, such as your own personalized URL. Despite the limits to site control, WordPress.com does have the advantage of having some features that are better integrated than what is available on WordPress.org. Among these features is an excellent usage statistics package, and the ability to notify users of posts and comments via e-mail.

No matter which flavor of WordPress you choose to build your site, you’ve got some very powerful tools that work very smoothly together. While WordPress is primarily thought of as a blogging tool, you can build rather robust sites with it. This is because the primary capability that WordPress give you is easy expansion. WordPress comes with a plug-in architecture that allows you to expand the functions available in your installation. Odds are, if you want WordPress to do something, someone else has already coded a plug in that does it. Sometimes it can be difficult finding the right plugin among the thousands already available. In future reviews, we plan on highlighting some of the WordPress Plugins that we’ve found most useful.

WordPress boasts of an installer that allows you to set up a new WordPress installation in five minutes or less, and WordPress is so popular that most hosting providers already have built in support for creating WordPress instances. The five minutes or so to install WordPress is one of the easiest parts. After that, you’ve got to make a lot of tough decisions. These decisions are tough, because there are so many options.

In addition to plug-ins, WordPress supports themes, special documents that control the appearance of your site, and create areas for different kinds of content. WordPress comes with a default theme, but it isn’t very customizable and most people will want something that gives their site a more distinctive look. Again, there are thousands of themes out there that are available to give your WordPress site a special look. Some are very limited, and some are amazingly flexible and customizable. Most of these themes are free, but there are folks out there who make a living, or a least some income on the side, by selling premium themes for WordPress. When you set up your first WordPress site, you may want to set up a dummy site where you can try out different themes and play with their settings without mucking up the content on your main site. It is useful to keep that dummy site around if you plan on revising your site design every few years, or if you just want a place to be able to experiment with new plugins and design elements.

Most people getting started with WordPress will be looking at setting up a blog. WordPress comes with an excellent blogging engine, allowing you to divide your content into categories, create tags, search the blog, and embed pictures and other media into the text. It should come as no surprise at this point to hear that The Nifty Tech Blog is built on a WordPress instance.

WordPress provides an assortment of text formatting tools, media embedding tools, and if that all fails, one can even access the raw html underlying a post and edit that directly. Visual mode gives the author near WYSIWYG editing. There are a few advanced features that won’t show up in the editing window the same way they will show up on the published page, but if you’re using those kinds of features, odds are very little in this blog is going to be new to you.

WordPress also gives you the ability to create static pages, such as the About, Submissions, and Meet the Staff pages in this blog. This is ideal if you have some relatively static content that always needs to be available, or something where you need to be able to clear out the sidebars and display data in a wider format.

WordPress also has a built in media library that allows you to host your own pictures and video for use in your pages. While you can link to media hosted on other sites, it is safer to use images that are hosted off of your own site, in case the other site is taken down, or re-organizes how their files are displayed. Anything managed inside of WordPress, WordPress keeps straight.

If you’ve chosen a theme with sidebars, you can present additional content there in the form of widgets. Widgets are small snippets of code that are usually packaged as part of a plugin and allow you to display additional information, or pull in additional content from related sites. WordPress ships with a variety of basic widgets that help display useful tools for users to subscribe to your blog, or to navigate its content.

There is a lot more in WordPress, but one of the great features it provides is a useful set of defaults so that you can set up your blog in a few minutes and start adding content. The other features you can take your time with and discover later. Or never discover if you’re happy with the way things look right out of the box. And for those who have some skill with php, you can even write your own code and your own WordPress plugins. WordPress gets you started quickly and easily, and lets you go just as deep into the rabbit hole as you’re comfortable with going.

If you’re interested in more, be sure to check the new WordPress category on the blog. As we add new reviews of other WordPress plugins and other add-ons, you’ll see them there.

This is a review that I’ve planned to do for a long time. It seems like each time I get geared up to do this review, the manufacturer changes something about the product and sets me back to square one. Which means that I’m trying to do a review of a very good, unsung piece of hardware and software, and then they do something that just makes it better. Darn them!

Still with me? If you’ve read the title of this article, you know that I’m talking about the Apple TV, currently available from Apple’s online store, Apple Stores about the planet, and other retail outlets for something around $99. The latest incarnation of the Apple TV is a small black box, about the size of a hockey puck. It comes with a power cord and an Apple Remote in the box. To make it work, you’ll need a TV and a cable to plug into the HDMI port in the back of the Apple TV and into whatever ports you have in your TV. For most of us, that means that you’ll want a TV with an HDMI port and an HDMI to HDMI cable to connect the Apple TV. Apple expects that you’ve already got the TV because they  expect customers like you want to be on the cutting edge of big, flat screen technology, and you’re adding on the Apple TV to make your big screen TV do more.

We actually upgraded our TV to make better use of the Apple TV, and were able to get a large LED flat screen TV with two HDMI ports for about $700, but that is a discussion for a separate review. As far as HDMI cables go, prices on them vary wildly depending on the source. You should be able to find a six-foot HDMI cable for under $20, although some places price such cables as high as $70. I’ve yet to see any evidence that a more expensive cable provides better or longer lasting service, so I would recommend you to get the least expensive HDMI cable you can.

Once you’ve plugged in the Apple TV, connected it to your TV, and switched over to your TV’s HDMI input, you’re pretty much ready to go. You will need one more thing to make the most of your Apple TV, but if you’re reading this article, you probably already have it: an internet connection. The Apple TV can connect wirelessly to your existing 802.11n wireless network, or you can connect it to your local router via an ethernet cable. For most people, the wireless connection will be more convenient, but the ethernet connection requires less configuration and is faster. If you’ve made it through the jargon up to this point, you can relax. We’re done with all the techie speak for now.

So, now that it is hooked up, what can you do with an Apple TV?

I am so glad you asked.

The Apple TV Home Screen

Right out of the box, the Apple TV will let you browse Movies, and TV shows available from the Apple Store. You don’t need an account with the Apple Store to browse these offerings, but you will need one if you want to buy or rent any of the programs available. But even if you don’t want to do business with the Apple Store at all, the Apple TV can be a great boon to you.

The TV Menu

The latest version of the Apple TV hardware and software allows you access to a number of internet based content services, including Netflix, the NBA, the NHL, MLB.TV, WSJ Live, YouTube, Vimeo, podcasts of all kinds, Photo Streams, Mobile Me and Flickr Galleries, and internet Radio. The Apple TV lets you pull all of this content from the net and display it on your large TV screen, and play it through your TV’s speakers.

Apple TV provides access to a variety of content from the Internet

And this is really what the Apple TV does so beautifully. It puts all this content from the net on your big TV screen using nothing more than the Apple Remote. If you can use a remote, you can pull movies from your Netflix queue and watch them. You can find YouTube and Vimeo videos, you can search for new podcasts, and you can display pictures from Mobile Me and Flickr galleries. Some of these services will have additional costs, but a lot of this content is free.  Apple TV is the easy way to put this content on the biggest screen in your house.

Or you can pull content from your iTunes Libraries.

Now, let’s say you also have a computer with iTunes installed. If you turn on the iTunes Match service on your computer, you can now access all of your music from the cloud and play it through your Apple TV. If you’ve got iTunes Home Sharing turned on your computer and your Apple TV and your computer are on the same network, then you can reach all the content on your computer through your Apple TV. This includes movies, TV shows, music videos, music, podcasts. As far as I can tell, the only things you can’t access are apps and iBooks. And the pundits keep expecting apps for the Apple TV any day now. I’m not sure I’d want my iBooks on the big screen, though.

Play content directly from iTunes on your computer.

Let’s say you also happen to have an iDevice, such as an iPad, an iPhone, or an iPad Touch. With the latest version of the software, you can now throw your audio and video to the Apple TV through the WiFi network. Want to show your friends the video you just shot? Have them gather around the TV and play it directly from your iDevice to the Apple TV. This is also a great way to show off photos taken from your iDevices. I use it when I am home to play podcasts through the TV while I am working in the living room. This way I can move around and still be able to hear the podcast clearly while I am working. And if a video podcast episode comes up in my playlist, I can watch the video on the big screen.

So, I imagine that some of you are saying, “OK, that is nice, but I don’t see anything fantastic that the Apple TV is doing. All it does is put web and iTunes content on my TV.” To an extent, they are right. It does just put web and iTunes content on your TV. And then you forget that it is there. This has always been one of the hallmarks of Nifty Tech for me: it does what it does so well that you forget it is there. For me, the Apple TV really scores up there. Once you’ve got it set up, it just becomes the magical channel on your TV that lets you pull content from all over the place.

We are sorry for the problems with the previous post “I’m bringing Nifty Back” giving a 404 error. We’re working on the problem, but WordPress doesn’t seem to be behaving properly at all. We apologize for any inconvenience.

UPDATE: The problem is fixed now. Seems to have been a small issue with our permalinks, but we have it all sorted out.

This blog has been quiet for a while, but I wanted to assure folks that it hasn’t gone away. Scott and I have both had to take time away from Nifty Tech to pursue other projects. We had set a pretty steady pace, but with all the demands on our time we weren’t able to sustain it. But the Nifty Tech Blog isn’t quite dead yet. We are in the process of gearing up again, and you will have an opportunity to contribute to the success of the blog.

We will have at least one new review coming up in the next month, but we probably won’t be able to get back to the every-other-week pace we had been sustaining. We do have some guest reviews lined up, and we are very much looking forward to bringing those to you as soon as we can get the edits all stowed away.

We are also looking into more opportunities to bring you more guest reviews and guest editorials. And this is where you come in. If you have a favorite product that you haven’t seen reviewed on the Nifty Tech Blog, or an innovative way of using a product, we’d like to hear from you! Are you willing to write a guest review? Then we really want to hear from you!

We’re also moving from posting reviews on Mondays to publishing them on Tuesdays under the #TechTuesday hashtag. We hope you’ll follow this hashtag and promote it to others.

And it doesn’t have to be a review. We are also looking for new articles for the #FollowFriday series. There are lots of interesting people out there on Twitter. Help us find them!

If you’ve previously contacted us about doing a review, expect to hear back from us soon. We have some old correspondence that has gotten sidetracked that we will be pulling out and dealing with at last.

If you would like to help support the blog, but don’t have any reviews to suggest, there are a couple ways you can help. The Nifty Tech Blog is a reader supported site. We don’t have a sponsor, and we can’t really do advertising without creating a conflict of interest. That means all the costs for the hosting and the tech we review comes out of our pockets. If you could spare as little as five dollars and drop it into the tip jar at the top of the sidebar, that would go a long way towards defraying the costs associated with keeping the blog going.

But, if you can’t afford to spare a few dollars, you can still help. Recommend the site to your friends, link to the reviews that have helped you the most. Or just send us your comments and feedback.

I know things have been pretty quiet around here in the past few months. Things have been pretty chaotic for me this summer and The Nifty Tech Blog has pretty much taken the brunt of it. Scott has also had a tough time of it, with publishing a Young Adult novel and a collection of Horror short stories. We do have some folks lining up to do some guest reviews for us, but that still doesn’t get me out of my share of editing duties.  So where am I going with all this? We have more content coming, it is just going to take a little bit to get it out to you. Part of the reason for this is this week’s Follow Friday pick: @NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, a yearly initiative to promote reading and writing. How does NaNoWriMo do that? Two ways. One is the yearly NaNoWriMo contest. This is a big drive to have folks attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. How does this help? Well, it gets a lot of folks writing. Admittedly, most of what they are writing is horrible. Many don’t finish, and of those who do finish their novels, not all of them ever manage to edit or publish their books. But some do. NaNoWriMo helps people realize that they, too can write. And it has been responsible for launching those writers on new careers.

The second way? NaNoWriMo is run by the Office of Letters and Light, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity. Along with the writing contest is a charity fundraising drive to raise money to help the Office of Letters and Light to provide free creative writing programs in over 500 cities around the world. Most of those funds come from individual donations by NaNoWriMo participants. Others dollars come from Merchandise sales, special events, and grants. But you don’t have to donate to participate in the contest, and you don’t have to participate to donate. You can sponsor a participant, or just donate to the cause.

So that’s the story about NaNoWriMo. But what about @NaNoWriMo? This is the official voice of NaNoWriMo on Twitter. Naturally, there are the NaNoWriMo announcements you would expect in the feed. Status updates, special events, count down reminders. That sort of thing. But @NaNoWriMo is also there to help. Answering questions, providing advice, giving encouragement. That kind of cool stuff!

I will be following @NaNoWriMo closely in the coming month, because I am going to be taking up the writing challenge. This also means that my available time for keeping the Nifty Tech Blog up to date is going to be harshly curtailed. At least for the immediate future. One of my goals in this is to learn to better manage my time and enable me to do a better job at keeping all of my projects up to date. Wish me luck!

If you’d like to see what I’m writing about, and follow my progress, just check out my Author Bio over on the NaNoWriMo site. And please cheer me, and the other NaNo participants, on during the month of November!

The staff of The Nifty Tech Blog would like to offer our condolences to the family, friends, and fans of Apple Chairman of the Board Steve Jobs. Jobs died earlier today at age 56. Given that Steve was always very protective of his private life, no details have been released as to the cause of his death. However, given his struggles with pancreatic cancer, it is expected that cancer was the cause of Jobs’ death.

Jobs was a visionary in terms of business and technology, and his efforts to shape the world of digital technology has had a lasting effect on the world. We at the Nifty Tech Blog salute Jobs and his dedication to finding a better way of doing things. We will continued to be inspired by his vision and hope to continue finding products worthy of Steve for years to come.

Apple is inviting people who wish to express their thoughts, memories, and condolences, to email rememberingsteve@apple.com. We would also like to encourage those who can to support pancreatic cancer research, and other forms of cancer research to do so. It won’t bring back Steve, but your support may make a key difference in the lives of other cancer sufferers. We may even finally find a cure.

Rest well, Steve. We’ll miss you.

The Staff of The Nifty Tech Blog

I’ve been wanting a tablet for a long, looonnnnng time. To tell you the truth, apart from the coolness factor, I couldn’t tell you why, but I was told to get whatever I wanted for my birthday. My Mom had planned on throwing me a big party, and that hadn’t materialized. So, she gave me the money she would have spent. Now was my time to decide. So what did I chose and why? The former should be answered by the title of this review. The later is a much larger answer.

I could have gotten the bottom end of the iPad range with the money I had. I thought about it though, and the iPad is still a flawed device in my opinion. As sexy as it is, a lack of Flash support, internal SD card support, and dual cameras – in the model I would have gotten – are all major short-comings.

I expanded my mind beyond the fruit of Cuppertino and began looking at other options. I could have gotten a Nook Color and “rooted” it. That would have enabled me to install an Android OS, and would be a cheap solution. It wouldn’t have fit my perceived needs though. I wanted more screen real estate and hate the idea of buying something expensive, only to break it in order to get it to work. Besides, I could afford some of the lower end Android tablets given my budget.

After some poking around on-line I read some good reviews of the Transformer (ironically enough while perusing an iPad in Best Buy). It’s a relatively new beast, but I was familiar with the Asus brand, having read a good write up of their laptops a few months ago, and thought it would be a good risk. The price and features were right, so I grabbed it up. For $399, I got the sixteen gig wifi model. It has since come down a bit in price. You can buy one at Wal-Mart for $349 as of this writing. Considering most of the other tablets ran a hundred bucks more for similar specs, I felt good about it.

I’ve had it for about six weeks now, and I think that that’s a good amount of time to play with a device like this before writing a review. I’ve really gotten a chance to put it through its paces.

Apps Screen

The goods – So far I’ve been very happy with the battery life. I’m not a heavy user, but I leave WiFi on constantly and it certainly lasts as long

as i need it to. One of the biggest pros is the SD Card support. You can easily and cheaply double the storage capacity. My only complaint is that getting the teensy card in and out is a little tricky. The Flash support and tabbed browsing make it feel like I’m using a “real” computer at least when it comes to the internet. There are a few excellent apps, unique to the EEE, that come pre-loaded, the best one being Polaris Office. It allows you to create documents,spreadsheets, and presentations compatible with MS Office. I used the tablet to write much of this review in Polaris and Doc was able to open it and do some editing on his PC.

The bads– My complaints are few and for the most part are weaknesses of either the form factor or the Android OS. One of the things I wanted to be able to do was watch Netflix. Currently there’s no official support for it, but it’s on the horizon. With the right firware version you can “side load” it. In Android terms that’s installing anything not available in the Marketplace. You can multi-task to a degree. Some apps lurk in the background, but it doesn’t give you the same capability to switch between programs like a full blown PC would. I’d love to see a camera flash in any device that has a camera.

Typing in Polaris

You really can’t take a good low light picture. At this point the Android Marketplace is a morass of risque content and half-baked apps. I’m not sure how much that differs from the Apple store, but at least you have more options. It still bugs me that you don’t have root access, that is basically the ability to do what you want with a device that you own, but it’s a common problem in cell phones and non-Windows tablets. Finally, I’m not sold on a touchscreen keyboard. I’ve typed part of this review on it, and I’m not over the learning curve yet. The predictive word hints aren’t bad but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve missed the spacebar. You can also type by sliding over letters without lifting your finger and while that’s cool I’ll show you the results of it:

The will Brown Cox manuals over the lazy yoh.

The potential goods – You can get an external keyboard that includes a battery and USB ports. At one hundred fifty dollars I’m not certain it’s worth it. Granted with the recent price drop of the Transformer at some outlets, this makes the whole package the same price as the lowest end iPad or almost any other tablet. In addition, you get the bonus functionality that it offers. So that’s why this is likely a good. Since I don’t know how good the keyboard and since there are cheaper (and perhaps better) Bluetooth keyboards available, I’m withholding judgment.

Verdict – Overall, I’m thrilled with this product. I know I’ve only scratched the surface and as I dig deeper i’ll be sure to let you know what I find. If you know of any good apps, hints, or tips let us know and we’ll feature them here!

I am not a big one for politics. Really, I’m not. A lot of the time I see politics as the opportunity to choose a side between two incorrect answers to an irrelevant question. There are problems inherent in the system, and all the energy goes to choosing sides instead of actually attempting to solve the problems. I just can’t get that worked up over answers to the wrong questions. So, that said, I hope you’ll forgive me if this post comes off as more politically inclined. I will admit that I am a bit ticked off over it, which is why this article is under the Editorial category too. So please indulge me, as I’d like to tell you a little about @Americas911, and what they’ve been doing.

@Americas911 is the official Twitter feed for the America’s 911 Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Leesburg, VA. The Foundation was created shortly after the September 11th terrorist attack that resulted in the loss of four passenger airliners, the World Trade Center towers, and caused a sizable chunk of damage to the Pentagon. The founders of the organization are professionals, patriots, and motorcyclists. They wanted to do something to support the first responders who put themselves into harms way on that day, many of whom lost their lives, and provide support for their families, and provide a visible symbol of that support to the public. That symbol became the 911 Ride, a three-day procession to visit each of the attack sites and honor the victims of the attack, and those who willingly put their lives on the line for us all. The 911 Ride is a charitable fundraiser held every year to raise money for the Foundation’s philanthropic efforts. Each year the Foundation awards $30,000 in college scholarships to children of First Responders, with $180,000 in scholarships awarded to date. The Foundation also donates a new police motorcycle to one of the Police Departments that provide escorts on the annual ride, and provides financial support to First Responders and their Departments. To date the Foundation has donated over $500,000 to First Responders and the Departments they work for. All of the members of the Foundation are volunteers, giving their time and money to support Police, Fire, and Rescue workers.

Today is the first day of this year’s 911 Ride, the 10th annual ride. While in the past, the ride was held close to September 11th, the date of the ride has been moved to allow First Responders and their families the ability to participate on the ride, but to spend September 11th at home to remember, and mourn, in peace. Being the 10th ride, this year’s ride has been somewhat bigger than the usual 400 or so motorcyclists that typically attend. This year the intent was to have one rider for each person who died in the 2001 attack. That’s almost 3000 motorcycles. And that has made this year’s event have more of an impact upon the surrounding areas. And that is what has me upset.

No, I am not upset at the motorcyclists.

I’m upset at the NIMBYs.

There have been some news articles lately, warning about street closures and the possible traffic problems those closure may create during this year’s ride. This has provoked some aggravated response from individuals who are furious that their lives may be inconvenienced by the event. One such poster that caught my eye was ranting over the closure of I66, a major feeder route to Washington DC during part of today’s rush hour. What this person, and the other NIMBYs who flocked to support his rant failed to notice was that I66 inbound to DC is being closed during the outbound rush hour. So the vast majority of the impact on traffic won’t be from the road closure, but from drivers slowing down to gawk at motorcycles heading the other way. And suddenly the mountain becomes a mole hill.

Of course, what really lit my fire were the comments asking how a bunch of bikers got to power to close state roads so they could have a parade and asking, “How can I get that power?” Firstly, these “bikers” are NOT some random group of homeless criminals raiding the countryside on motorcycles Mad Max style. These gentlemen are professionals who are taking time away from their jobs in order to give something back to the greater community. And they didn’t just decide to “go parade” a week or so ago over beers. This year’s ride has been in active planning for over three years, and the organizers have been working with state and local governments for the past decade to coordinate each leg of the annual rides to be as safe and seamless as possible. You want the power to close a major road? Get up out of your armchair and spend a few years doing something to benefit the community, developing relationships, and building a support organization from nothing.

But this post is supposed to be about Twitter. If you follow @Americas911 this weekend, you’ll see a lot of tweets about the ride, including links to pictures (mostly uploaded to Facebook) along the way. I encourage you to do this, and to tweet your support to @Americas911 for the charitable work they do all year round. If you feel like donating to show your support, or joining the effort yourself, you can do so at the America’s 911 Foundation website, http://www.americas911ride.org/.

Summer this year has interrupted the normal flow of things here at The Nifty Tech Blog. While we haven’t been giving you the normal flow of content, that doesn’t mean that we have been completely idle. Unfortunately, we have put a bit of time into researching some tech that didn’t measure up to or standards, but really wasn’t bad enough to rant about. And Scott and I have both had work and family issues to deal with. But sometimes you come across something that is review-worthy even when you’re not looking for it. In this case, I feel like I just have to share some of my summertime reading with you. I recently finished reading Ghost Ship by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. This is one of their Liaden Universe novels and it holds a special place in the collection. It is the third book in one series and the 8th book in another series, and… it’s kind of complicated.

Ghost Ship is the sequel to Fledgling, and Saltation, and it continues the story of Theo Waitley, young Jump Pilot, Starship Courier, and Advertent Student, as she finds herself with a rather tangled problem. Theo has been given a key to one of the most sought after space ships in the galaxy. Sought after mostly because it was lost right after it came online. This ship is now stalking her, with one purpose on it’s electronic mind: to bring her aboard… and have her take her rightful place as Captain. Of course, there are problems with that. Her sometime boyfriend Liaden Scout Win Ton yo’Vala found the ship and sent her the Captain’s key. He has the Co-Pilot’s key, but he was captured by the Department of the Interior and tortured in an attempt to get him to turn over the ship and the Captain’s key. Win Ton escaped, but he has been poisoned, and the only technology than can save him is on the ship.

In over her head, Theo follows some old advice from her father and goes to Liad and puts her problem before the Delm of Clan Korval, the head of one of the most powerful Clan on the entire world! Doing this, she discovers a few things: Korval is battling the same Department of the Interior, The Clan just got kicked off of the planet for using the planetary defense grid to take out the Department’s Headquarters (Oops! OK, not really sorry for that. Necessity.), and the Delm Korval? He just happens to be her half-brother Val Con yos’Phelium.

Confused?

Don’t be. The confusion is in my summing up, not in the writing. And in the fact that Ghost Ship joins the Theo Waitley series with the Agent of Change series also by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. That series starts with Agent of Change and up until this month concluded with the 7th book, I Dare. Those books follow Clan Korval’s stuggles with the Department of the Interior in their attempt to covertly take over the planet Liad and wipe out the unwanted Terran influence. The Department sees Korval as an unbalancing influence and seeks to remove them. Bad move.

Honestly, all of these books are great, even the other Agent of Change books that I haven’t listed and a few more Liaden Universe novels that are outside the two series. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller do a great job of creating real and intelligent characters. The Liaden culture is very intricate and well thought out, but easy to understand while reading. And the contrast between Liaden and Terran culture is fascinating, and frequently underlines how cultural misunderstandings lead to miscommunications in so many different ways. Lee and Miller set a stage to a world that is both familiar and unique at the same time. These really are books that you can’t put down. You’ll read them in record time because you just have to know what happens next, and they leave you still wanting more. I have to say that in my opinion these books are the best of Space Opera as a genre. I finished Ghost Ship in a weekend, then handed it to my wife who consumed its 300+ pages in a day.

I shan’t spoil the book for you, but encourage you to pick up the Theo Waitley trilogy for yourself. Until the next book. For the authors, I bow in the mode of Grateful Audience to Master Artisan.

I follow a lot of different creative people on Twitter. I follow a lot of creatively different people on Twitter. And I follow some people who are just good folks. But sometimes you find someone who is creative, different, and still good folks. To demonstrate my meaning, I give you @Dansr.

Now, I have known Mel since time immemorial. We first met online back in the days when AOL was actually a viable alternative for finding an internet community of intelligent individuals. So that was a LONG time ago. We were both much younger then. Then again, wasn’t everyone?

I met Mel due to a mutual love of fantasy adventures and renaissance festivals. And social networks, apparently, as we’ve kept in touch from network to network over the years. She took her love of renaissance festivals, and her love of music and launched her own performing career as Neidfyre. She has been traveling the faire circuit, performing gigs and visiting far flung friends with her daughter, the Daikini Baby. Or should that be the Daikini Child by now?

Over they years, @Dansr has taken me along with her on these journeys, through text and blog post, and now Twitter. I’ve been able to share these moments with her through the wonder of technology. And she’s been able to weather the storms and misfortunes that have come because her friends have never been farther than her pocket. Mel isn’t perfect, but she is a woman of surprising strength and dedication. Who will, no doubt, deny that accusation on the basis of her own fair share of problems, issues, and fears. She’s not perfect, but she is a very remarkable woman. A reminder that while our world is filled with adversity, there is also wonder in abundance. You may not be able to seek it out yourself, but you can see some of it through the eyes of @Dansr.

This particular Follow Friday was one I was sure had already been snapped up. Thomas Gideon aka cmdln is as geeky and podcaster-y as it gets. He’s hosted the Command Line podcast and blog for quite some time, talking about open source, security, and programming. He’s also a part of the Living Proof Brewcast with John Taylor Williams (probably my next Follow Friday victim).

Thomas is another one of those sterling individuals I’ve met in real life thanks to Balticon. I really enjoy listening to people who are passionate about their pursuits to the level he is, even if they’re talking a mile or two above my head. While I am a geek and a brewer, I have much to learn in both arenas before I’ll be able to cross blades with him. The best thing about him is, he doesn’t come across as didactic or self-important. He’s very down to earth and personable.

This is about his Twitter feed though, so a few words about that. He uses his stream in a few ways. You’ll get links pertinent to techies, that’s for certain, whether it’s a link to a list of security alerts or an opinion piece on the latest bit of news in hi-tech circles. He also feeds you what’s going on in his life. I like that in a Tweeter. It makes them more “real”. He’s not the chatty Kathy I and some of my other #FF recommendations are though, so he won’t overload your streams.

There you have it, another solid recommendation from us here at the Nifty Tech Blog. We hope you have a great weekend and look for new reviews coming from us soon!

This week we have a special late night #FollowFriday to honor one of my favorite late night stars. In this case, the star in question isn’t known for late night television, but is instead a television star who is usually up late at night. Folks, I give you the official Twitter of Pauley Perrette, @PauleyP, probably best known as Abby Sciuto, the quirky and sexy forensic scientist on CBS’s “NCIS.”

Pauley has one of the most unusual backgrounds in Hollywood, itself a place of unusual backgrounds. As an undergrad, she was an honor student in sociology, psychology, and criminal science, and had begun study for a master’s degree in criminal science at Georgia State University. A stint as a bartender in New York City led to her entry into the entertainment industry. In addition to her acting, Pauley has been a director, producer, a published writer, poet, photographer, and a singer and songwriter.

Pauley is also an active supporter of the NoH8 campaign, and a huge number of civil, gay, and  social rights movements. While I hate to skip listing her many activities, worthy causes all, I must admit that I’m afraid I’ll slight one of them by missing them. But many of them can be found in her bio at IMDB.

On Twitter… @PauleyP is usually up late. Very late. Like all night. It seems that Pauley suffers from chronic insomnia, and frequently pops online to tweet to the #TeamInsomnia crowd. Usually she tweets about the things she sees in the world around her. You really get a sense of the conviction she has for helping people, and the fun that she finds all around. I know that at one point the Twitter account was run by someone else on Pauley’s behalf. I don’t know if that is still true. Whomever is behind Pauley’s official Twitter presence has a very big heart and a colorful outlook on life.

That tagline just about says it all. I first got to know Jeff through his efforts at the short story anthology podcast he ran, Great Hites. I submitted a handful of stories to it and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Jeff is an excellent writer and an all around good guy.

Having said that, he’s also more than a little insane. As you can see up there, he’s a co-editor at Flying Island Press so he gets to read slush and help us find good stories. He’s also in charge of Pirate’s Cove, which has put out a ton of great full cast audio versions of Shakespeare plays and classic literature. Jeff does 99& of the work on those himself.

Jeff also knows his way around web servers and is an eleventh dan uber-geek. If you have a question or a problem along any of those lines, you’re likely to get a thoughtful and accurate answer from him.

Perhaps the best thing about Jeff though is his self deprecating sense of humor. Jeff and I play at being nemeses on Twitter and on the Galley Table, but I count him as a friend. Oddly enough, we’ve never actually met in person, but I hope to rectify that at a future Balticon.

So, there you have it! Follow Jeff Hite and you’ll get a good mix of humor and knowledge. Can’t ask for much more than that.

I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who for a long, long, long time. I stumbled across the show in the early 1980’s and have been watching ever since. Some fans of the old series cringe and cried when the new series came out in 2005, but I stayed with it, enjoying the higher production values the new series was able to achieve on the same dirt-cheap budget. And despite some strange stumbles and twists, it has mostly been worth while. One of the masterminds of the new Doctor Who series, and the current executive producer, is this week’s Follow Friday recommendation: @Steven_Moffat. Steven is the crafty mind behind some of the most twisted and intricate plots ever shown on Doctor Who.

In addition to being a writer and the executive producer of Doctor Who, Steven is one of the co-producers of Sherlock, a modern retelling of the Sherlock Holmes stories from the BBC. The first season of Sherlock was a short one, only three episodes, but it was excellently done, and it puts a new light on the characters, showing Holmes’ lack of proper social behavior, and Doctor Watson’s keen analytical mind. Holmes is, of course brilliant, and Watson never does quite pull one over on his new roommate. But this isn’t a review of Sherlock. I’m here to talk about @Steven_Moffat.

If you’re a fan of Doctor Who, or Sherlock, you’ll definately want to follow @Steven_Moffat for the chance to get an inside look at those shows. Steven tweets about the progress of the productions and offers a new insight into show-business. No spoilers though. He is very careful not to release any information that would spoil your enjoyment of any of the shows he is crafting. Tease yes. He will tease they heck out of you by hinting at upcoming reveals, but never actually spoiling the anticipation. And isn’t that what we really want as fans of BBC Science Fiction?

Due to the observence of the Fourth of July Holiday here in the United States of America, and some other recent deadlines and celebrations, this week’s review will be delayed. We at the Nifty Tech Blog hope that everyone is having a happy and responsible weekend celebration. For those of you in the rest of the world, we hope that you have something to celebrate in your lives as well.

I am both a horror geek and a theology geek. If you follow me on Twitter, it’s likely that neither of these things surprise you. it isn’t often that you get those two things in one package, or at least that’s what I used to think. Enter @ZombieTheology. They are like Reese’s Cups Dark, if the candy shuffled around the blighted landscape looking for brains.

They tweet about a lot of zombie related things and they’re good sports, poking fun at themselves, the genre, and their focus. They also use it to feed folks their blog where most of the magic happens. They post stories, reviews, and blog articles trending heavily towards the shambling undead. They don’t shy away from the Christian angle to their passion though.

What’s their purpose in all this? Well with tongue likely planted in cheek, they recognize the lack of “good information and answers from a theological angle on how to deal with and how to understand when the dead rise to destroy the living” and hope to rectify that. Seriously, this blog and twitter account is a gem. if you’re not religious at all, you’ll find some good stories and discussions there. If you are, like me, a Christian who wants to find some like minded horror fans, then this is the place to go.

If you’re somewhere in between or even outside those two groups, follow them anyway!

So, there’s your Follow Friday for this week. Shamble forth into a good weekend!

There are some professions that just have a reputation for being boring. Politicians rate high on that list. As do lawyers. And even librarians. But topping the list of boring professions by far are accountants. There is just something about accounting that tends to make people’s eyes glaze over. But we’re not talking about boring people here. We’re talking about interesting people. We’ve had interesting lawyers and librarians in past Follow Friday posts. Now it is time for a very interesting accountant. He’s not just interesting for an accountant, he’s a downright creative person who just happens to also be an accountant. Meet @PCHaring.

P.C. has been around the podiosphere for a while. He has done voice acting for Escape Pod and the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, and even played violin for Metamor City. But his big claim to fame is as the author and creator of the full cast podcast novel Cybrosis. Cybrosis is P.C.’s debut podcast novel, and he definitely came out of the gate swinging. Cybrosis was nominated for a 2010 Parsec Award, and has been nominated again for the 2011 Parsec Awards in the best story long form category. He currently has two other stories in work. If you’d like to see what P.C. has been up to, you can check out his personal blog at http://www.pcharing.net/. I have the feeling that P.C. has other credits to his name, but I’m having trouble finding them. Maybe there is another set of books?

Enough joking. If you follow @PCHaring on Twitter, you’ll quickly see that he has an agile and creative mind. OK, maybe not enough joking. P.C. does have a jovial sense of humor, and knows when to take a gag and run with it and when to play it straight. He can also be serious, poignant, and insightful. The one thing I would never accuse him of being is boring, even if he does make a living through accounting.

Rumor also has it that he’s working on something all space-opera-y for his next novel. I can’t wait to find out.

I hope you enjoyed the last two reviews of Google Docs. There’s a lot more to this service/software and I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface. For the features remaining, the song largely remains the same, but I feel like a good wrap up is in order.

As a clone to presentation software like Power Point or Keynote, Google offers up Presentation. I know, the name says is all. Google didn’t spend any time coming up with a snazzy title for any of these tools. They just work. As with Documents, Spreadsheets, and Forms, you have the ability to easily share and embed your content. If you already have a Powerpoint presentation created, it’s easy to upload and convert it to a Google Docs format and vice versa. Any Presentation can be downloaded as a Powerpoint, a PDF, or text.

Perhaps the most useful feature of this part of Google’s service is when you actually go to present something. Clicking “Start Presentation” opens what you’ve put together in a new browser window.

From there you can share a link to it by clicking View Together, allowing an audience to not only view the show but to chat. They will also have the option to download it in various formats, print it, create a copy of it, or view the speaker notes all with a click of the Actions button. There are certainly services you could pay for that would allow you to do the same thing, but none of them are free.

That’s about all there is to Presentations. If you’ve used Powerpoint, you see what’s on offer. There’s more to Docs than just these four things though. If you take one step outside of the individual services that fall under Google Docs’ banner, you’ll see a very useful content management service. It enables you to sort and view all documents by type and how visible they are. Folders, called Collections by Google, can be created, sorted, and shared.

Particularly useful is the ability to download an entire collection into the appropriate MS Office/Open Office formats, or into individual PDFs. For those that are a little paranoid about losing something that’s “in the cloud”, that gives you a local collection that you can then back up as part of your regular process. You do have a regular backup process at home right? Hmmm, that’s another post for another day.

Google Docs is really a one stop resource people like me who enjoy having content creation and management at their fingertips, regardless of what computer or OS they happen to be using. The templates, organizational tools, and features will by no means replace traditional office suites any time soon, but they are a great supplement to more powerful, feature rich options. I’m not sure that I can foresee using Docs as my only choice, although I readily admit these days it is my first choice. That would take them having an off line version. Until then, I highly recommend that you get under the hood of this great service and see if it will serve you as well as it has me.

This review is the first in a new series of reviews. I’ve been planning to do this for a while. It has just taken some time to find the right thing to review and time to review it. You might notice that this review is in the category “Time Wasters”.  That doesn’t mean that things in this category are a waste of time. While the rest of the reviews on The Nifty Tech Blog are aimed at productivity, reviews in this category are for ways to occupy the leisure time you’ll have after using all the other products we’ve recommended.

Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel is the first novel from Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris writing together. They take us back to the age of Queen Victoria, and give us a view of a secret organization in Her Majesty’s government. This clandestine organization, the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, deals with the strange, the bizarre, and those things best not talked about in polite society. Agents of the Ministry travel the world investigating these strange and unusual events, and returning dangerous artifacts to Mother England where they can be safely stored away from dangerous hands.

This tale follows Eliza D. Braun, an agent of the Ministry originally from New Zealand. Exiled from her homeland under mysterious circumstances, Eliza is one of the most effective agents of the Ministry. And one of the least covert. After her latest mission led to the destruction of a stronghold of the secret society known as the House of Usher, and the mountain that housed the stronghold, Eliza is put on suspension, and re-assigned from the field to serve the ministry in the Archives, the repository of all these dangerous artifacts and boring agent reports.

Another thing deposited in the Archives is one Wellington Thornhill Books, Esquire, the Ministry’s appointed Archivist, and the object of Eliza’s last mission. Kidnapped by the House of Usher, and returned by the unconventional Miss Braun, Mr. Books was looking forward to returning to the peace and quiet of his Archives, but instead finds himself with an unconventional assistant. An assistant who insists upon reopening unsolved cases of the Ministry and investigating them. Starting with the case of what happened to her old partner…

This begins a roller coaster ride of intrigue, secret societies, and steam-driven science gone mad. With a touch of hedonism thrown in in case you got bored. Everyone has their secrets and surprises, and this book is full of twists, turns, and reveals. This is an excellent book. If you’re at all insterested in steampunk, I’m sure you’ll enjoy Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel.

As a podcaster and a writer I follow quite a few people in those arenas. As a result, my Follow Friday recommendations tend to trend heavily in those directions. Today will be different. My recommendation for this week is John Cmar. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting John at past Balticons and he is a pleasure to talk to. I hope that I’ll have an opportunity to hoist a glass with him at the one that’s upcoming but by the time you read this has already past. Why do I feel like a time traveler?

While John’s primary vocation is that of “Infectious Diseases physician”, his tweets aren’t all about that. Though the ones that are are usually funny and interesting. While I said he’s not a podcaster (though his voice appears in many podcasts) and he’s not a writer (at least not of fiction as he writes for his own blog and at least one other) he’s a hard core geek and a friend to many writers/podcaster and that’s how he arrived on my radar. So you can expect many very finely crafted tweets about those passions as well. He’s not a prolific tweeter so he’s got that going for him as well.

So there you have it, another Follow Friday in the can. Stay tuned true believers (we need a name for you guys), there are more reviews and recommendations coming up. We’ll see you next week!

Normally, I wouldn’t recommend following a Twitter account that only exists as a marketing ploy. To make me change this policy, you’ve really got to be offering something out of the ordinary that makes it worth the trouble. I have to say, @WootShirt does that in spades.

Portal 2 inspired Woot Shirt design!

@WootShirt is the Twitter account for http://shirt.woot.com, a division of Woot.com that offers a new t-shirt design every day. For the first 24 hours, the new shirt is on sale for $10. If it doesn’t sell out by then, the shirt goes into the regular collection at $15 a shirt. Every now and then a popular shirt will come back, but usually, once the shirt sells out, it is gone. So what, you may say? True, there are a lot of sites online to get t-shirts. What makes the difference with @WootShirt are the designs. These are artistic, geeky, quirky, and delightfully obscure designs from a variety of artists. Honestly, these shirts are just all kinds of cool!

If I only had a brain...

“Ok,” you may say, “That explains why I should check out shirt.woot.com, but why should I follow @WootShirt?” I’m glad you asked. You remember when I said that these shirts are on sale for the first 24 hours? When a new shirt comes out, you’ll get notified by @WootShirt. When it is close to selling out, or the sale ending, you’ll get notified by @WootShirt. If an old favorite is coming back, @WootShirt will tweet that as well.

It came out of nowhere!

But it isn’t just a stream of advertising feed. Those tweets are there, but they only happen once every few hours. Enough to be informative without being a pain in the arse. @WootShirt is monitored by a real, live person, so if you have questions or concerns about their offerings, you can reply to @WootShirt and you will get a real answer.

It may not be groundbreaking customer service, but it is a model that a lot of other companies could benefit from following. And did I mention that the shirts are all kinds of cool?

For some time now, we’ve been looking at different turn by turn navigation apps. We’ve seen a number of them that were pretty good, but costly, some that were decent, but free, and even a few that were very useful, but required an annual subscription. The big problem with turn by turn apps has been traffic. Add some traffic problems and the best GPS can become worthless, unless it can route you around the traffic. As a general rule, a dedicated GPS tends to do a better job, but there are times when your dedicated GPS fails or isn’t available. Having an app on your smart phone can make the difference between getting there and getting lost. While Waze isn’t perfect, it does have an innovative take on managing the traffic issue that we think makes it worth the look.

Waze is the product of Waze Inc, a company founded by Ehud Shabtai to fix the problems that he found with your typical GPS applications. Waze is available as a free download for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile phones, so if you’ve got one of these phones it won’t cost you a lot to give Waze a try. So let us give you an idea of what you’re in for.

Waze does two things differently from just about any other turn by turn navigation system out there. First, it doesn’t try to use the computing power of the smart phone to choose routes. Waze depends on the data network to connect your phone to their routing servers which calculates your route and sends the route (and any alternates) back to you. Naturally, this means that if you’re in an area outside of the phone network, Waze can’t calculate your route. For a cross-country trip, this is less than ideal, but for day to day commuting, this won’t usually be an issue.

The other thing that Waze does is that instead of subscribing to a traffic reporting service, and dealing with the latency of reports and updates, Waze uses the userbase to identify traffic areas. Some folks will be fine with this, but others will want to avoid Waze altogether because of it. Part of this is the ability for users to report accidents, traffic jams, police activity, and other road hazards. The other part is that the client periodically reports its position and speed to Waze, allowing Waze to build a model of the traffic flow and determine how big a slow down area is. This aggregate model allows Waze to report traffic with a high accuracy and a very low latency period. So it will tell you where the traffic issues are now, and will clear them out as soon as the traffic dissipates. Privacy advocates will, of course, hate this, as they will view anything that reports their location, no matter how anonymously, as a violation of their privacy.

Like any GPS system, Waze lets you search for an address and plot a route. Waze also highlights the top three destinations that you travel to, and keeps a record of your recent searches, favorites, and other saved locations. Once the route has been chosen, it tells you the approximate distance, time, and gives you an ETA for arrival at your destination. It’s what happens in between that is a bit different.

Naturally, you’ll be getting turn by turn directions along your route. Waze will even give you voice directions so you don’t miss a turn. And you can still play music from your smart phone as you drive. When voice instructions are needed, it will pause the playback, give the instructions, and then resume your music. The face in/fade out needs a little work, especially if you’re listening to something that is heavy with spoken words, like a podcast or an audio book, but it is fine for music.

Waze is built with a bit of a whimsical mindset. As you’re driving, if you come near to another Waze user, their icon will show up on your map. If you tap the icon, you can find some information about that Waze user, depending on how their privacy settings are set. This is part of the social nature of Waze. If you’re willing to let other users ping you, they can send short messages to you through Waze.

The other major social aspect of Waze is the ability to report traffic incidents and hazards. Waze cleverly allows you to do this with only a few finger taps, allowing a driver to report an issue quickly and without diverting his attention from the road. If you are moving, Waze automatically locks out the keyboard, so a driver cannot ping another unless you are stopped. There is an override if you have a passenger using Waze, but for the most part, it isn’t needed. Tap the report button and Waze drops a pin on your location. Then tap the type of event, and select the appropriate level of information. You can add a description if you’re a passenger, or if traffic is completely stopped, but you don’t have to. Just tap Send and the message goes on its way.

Another whimsical aspect of Waze is they fact that it encourages users to participate in the system by awarding points for reporting issues. As you accumulate points, you move up in rank, which presumably unlocks new features. Waze gives you lots of opportunites to earn additional points, including adding “treats” to the map which you can pick up by driving over them, making your commute a little more like a video game and a little less of a chore, hopefully. But please keep your eyes on the road.

The last interesting feature of Waze that we’d like to point out is the ability to create groups. These are collections of users bound together by a common interest or a common geographical area. When you report an incident, you can also select which groups will be alerted to it. This allows you to warn those who will be the most likely to be effected by whatever incident you’re reporting. When you’re stopped, Waze will show you reports from the surrounding area which may effect your trip. If any of these reports are useful to you, just tap the thumb’s up icon to send your thanks to the person who reported it.

Waze does have some of the same issues that other GPS systems suffer from. Maps aren’t always accurate, and sometimes the GPS will instruct you to try and make impossible turns, like mistaking an overpass for an intersection. Waze does let you report these errors, although it may take a while for them to correct them. Corrections through Waze are done as free downloads as soon as the corrections are processed, unlike other services that will charge users for updated maps.

Given the social nature of Waze, best results will take place in areas with a large number of Waze users. If you’re a city driver, and you’ve got a tough commute but good data connectivity, Waze just might be what you’re looking for.

I always feel a bit funny recommending a “famous” persona to my fellow tweeters. I figure, “Hey, if I’m following them and they have a bunch of followers then they must be following them too.” I don’t want this guy to be overlooked though. I’ve been following Chuck for a while now and reading his blog and I find them both absolutely hilarious. Now it should be noted that Chuck himself says that his tweets are Not Safe For Work (and NSFL, which I presume means not safe for life) and that may well be true. His language in both venues is saltier than a cow lick, but if that doesn’t bother you, then by all means give him a follow.

Like most celebrities, although I think he’s just “internet famous”, he won’t likely follow you back, but if you @ him you’re likely to get a reply. I follow him mostly for his spot on advice on writing, the jokes, and links to his blogs. While I am subscribed to it, I often find that a well placed tweet will get me to actually visit and comment. There’s probably a nugget of wisdom in that for bloggers out there. I’m sure I’m not the only one whose Twitter client serves double duty as an RSS supplement.

I hope you find him as funny as I do, but don’t blame me if his tweets melt your screen. You have been warned! When you read this I will likely still be recovering from Balticon, but Doc and I have plenty of content queued up and ready to rock, so check in with us next week!

For a lot of my Twitter stream, this weekend will find people either going completely silent… or tweeting like the Rapture has been post-dated and someone is coming to collect! This is because, like myself, they will be at Balticon, a regional Science Fiction/Fantasy Convention held every year on Memorial Day Weekend by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. The Balticon crew is made up of a number of Sci-Fi enthusiasts who volunteer their time and talents to produce a magnificently entertaining convention in Hunt Valley, Maryland each year. As my nod of respect to them and their efforts, this week I’m recommending @Balticon, the official Twitter feed for the convention!

But the @Balticon feed is not just for convention season alone. The feed is kept live all year round. A number of different panels are recorded at Balticon each year, and private interviews are held before and during the event. Podcasts of these are released from time to time, keeping the convention alive and allowing those who missed particular panels to not miss out completely, and those who were there to relive the experience. @Balticon will let you know when these podcasts will be released, and provides help and assistance through the year on pre-and post Balticon activities. Dragon*Con may be bigger, but our hearts belong to @Balticon!

And don’t think that it is all cold, impersonal press releases, either. There is a real person behind the @Balticon persona and he demonstrates a fair share of wit and personality with his tweets. Of course, there may be a lot of in jokes, but the best way of catching on to those is to show up for the Con! Balticon 45 is running this weekend from Friday at 5 PM through Monday, May 30th at 3 PM. If you can make it to Hunt Valley, day rates are available for quick visits, and you can still register for the whole con. If you can’t make it this year, now is an excellent time to start planning for Balticon 46.

Scott Roche and I will be at Balticon this year as guests and will be doing a number of panels and special recordings, including the Galley Table Live! podcast on Saturday at 3PM. I will also be doing  The Metamor City Podcast on Sunday at 7 PM, and The Shrinking Man Project Live! podcast on Monday at 1 PM. We hope to see you there!

I will admit it, I’m not a power spreadsheet user. I was an English geek in high school and college. I was never into numbers or databases. I did learn a thing or two about them after college when I took some computer programming classes in order to find a real job, so I got to learn more about them than I ever thought possible. That might just make me an ideal user for Google Docs’ spreadsheet feature.

This service gives me everything I need Excel for. I can create and share basic flat file databases. For the non-geek, a flat file database is essentially a collection of information you’d put in a card file full of index cards. There’s no relationship between any of the data. It also appears to have any and all of the requisite functions and formulas that harder core math geeks would need.

Where does this shine? Much of the difference comes, as was the case with the document creator, in the ability to share and comment with other users. There are a few more features that jumped out at me. As with the packaged software spreadsheets, you can quickly and easily make over a half dozen different charts and graphs. With just a few more clicks you can take that and embed it on your website, as I’ve done with the chart below:

The feature that I appreciate even more is the ability to take a spreadsheet you create and make a form from it. I see a lot of people use something like SurveyMonkey when they could use this instead. While SurveyMonkey is a good service, the free account limits the number and types of questions you can ask. With the forms tool you have more options and can ask as many questions as you like and all of the answers populate a database under your control. Better than that, with most online survey tools users have to leave your site to take the survey. With this tool your survey can be embedded directly in the post.

I’d say that, unsurprisingly, Google has hit another one out of the park with this service. While it may not be for hardcore number crunchers, and it may well suit their needs too, if you use basic spreadsheet functionality and you want to be able to share that quickly and easily then this is for you. As I said in the review of their documents services, you wouldn’t want to use this for sensitive data and it’s advisable to download your results and back them up as you would any other important information, but I use this before I use Excel or Numbers.

We’ve sung the praises of folks that we’ve met at Balticon here before and this Friday will be no different. I had the pleasure of meeting @JohnAnealio last year at the live I Should Be Writing where he sang “George RR Martin is Not Your Bitch” and I instantly fell in like. His singing and playing were solid, not always true of folks in his line of music, but more important his lyrics were hilarious.

Once I got home I sought out his blog where you can find many, many equally geeky songs (if not geekier) and it was no fluke. I laughed and sang along and knew that I found a great new singer to follow.

His Twitter stream is virtually self promotion free (almost to a fault), but that is often to an artist’s ultimate benefit. Instead, he talks about music, geeky stuff, and promotes the efforts of his fellow musicians and writers. Since he doesn’t do the heavy lifting for himself, allow me. If you like his music, you can purchase it at his bandcamp site. I know I’m going to, so that I can have some nifty music to listen to on my way to Maryland.

Well that’s our #FF for the week. Look for more content in the coming week. Doc and I have locked and loaded some stuff in advance so we can party with our fellow time travelers. We hope to see some of you in Hunt Valley next week!

Over the past year (and more) I have recommended quite a number of creative people on Twitter. Today, I’m going to recommend someone who takes that a step farther. This is a gentleman who goes the extra mile in creative endeavors by leading them. Creative people can be a difficult lot. This is natural, as their minds are always finding new angles on things. They can be a pretty slippery bunch. And Zack Ricks, aka @MadPoet, dares to lead a bunch of these creative folks. This explains the receding hairline.

Zack is one of the founders of Flying Island Press, and is the managing editor of the company, and of Flagship, Flying Island’s magazine of speculative fiction. In running an online magazine, and Galley Table, the associated companion podcast of Flagship, Zack has to manage a number of creative individuals. On a daily basis he herds a number of creative cats. You can see his personal writings at the Mad Poet Files.

This skill extends to Twitter as well. As @MadPoet, he demonstrates good humor and a wide array of geek knowledge. He also tends to keep conversations on target, avoiding ratholes that creative conversations tend to go down. Unless they’re really funny. Or really interesting. I think you’ll find that he is worth talking to.

If you’re going to be going to Balticon 45 this Memorial Day weekend, you may be able to meet Zack, myself, and the rest of the Galley Table crew as we record a special Galley Table Live show at Balticon. Hope to see  you there!

These days we have so many digital devices that play audio it isn’t funny. Smartphones, computers, MP3 players, even handheld games. Some of these devices have built in speakers to let you play audio, but most of them just come with earbuds, if they have anything at all. For the most part, those speakers are pretty low quality, and the earbuds aren’t really comfortable enough to wear for any length of time. You can get a decent pair of headphones, but those aren’t useful if you want to share your audio with friends. What you need is a decent pair of speakers that also happens to be small and portable. Something that goes with your mobile device.

We went looking for something to fit this bill, and we found Tweakers, the small and portable speakers by Grandmax. To be perfectly honest, we also found the Chill Pill speakers by Chill Pill Audio. This is notable because as far as we can tell, these two products are exactly the same. The only difference appears to be the name. We don’t know if one product is a real product and the other a knockoff, or if they are manufactured by a third party and licenced to Grandmax and Chill Pill. Such things do happen in manufacturing. What we do know is that these little speakers do perform. They retail for about $30, but with a little careful shopping online, you can probably find one of these products for a little more than $20. We got a hold of a pair of Tweakers for this review, so that’s who we’re crediting.

If you’re going to be using Tweakers, you will need two more things to make the most of it. Although odds are you will have these things already. First, you’ll need some kind of device to supply your audio with an 1/8th inch (3.5mm) standard stereo jack. Pretty silly to buy a set of speakers if you don’t have a device to supply the sound. The other thing you’ll need is a something with a powered USB type B slot. For most folks, this will be a computer, but you can also use a power adapter for your mobile device that uses a USB port to provide power. Everything else pretty much comes with the speakers, including a small drawstring bag to carry it all in.

The one accessory that comes in the bag is the recharging cable for your Tweakers. These speakers have a built in rechargeable battery in the left speaker. To recharge the battery, or to charge it initially, plug the retractable condensed USB plug in the left speaker into the charging cable, and then plug that into your computer. If you want to use the speakers while they are charging, the charging cable will also allow you to plug in the right speaker.

The right speaker also has a retractable cable in its base. This is the Line in cable that plugs into your mobile device. Together, these cables allow you to set up your speakers about 14 inches apart and place your device up to 16 inches away from the right speaker. Controls are simple. The left side has a power switch, and the right side has a volume dial. Pretty much plug and play.

One thing that sets these speakers apart is that each speaker has a pop-up acoustic chamber that deepens the sound and bass response when deployed. Just give the top a small twist and the top pops up. While some audiophiles will never be satisfied with any kind of small speaker, the Tweakers give their best sound with the acoustic chamber extended, although they sound pretty good even in the compact storage mode.

To store the Tweakers, Just press down on the top and twist the other direction to lock the top, unplug and retract the cables, and press the bases together. Magnets in each base will hold the speakers together, or will allow you to fix the speakers onto any ferrous surface. The whole package is only about four inches long and slips easily into the bag.

The design is delightfully innovative and compact, but not without a few drawbacks. The Lithium Ion battery will eventually wear out and isn’t replaceable, so the lifespan of the speakers is pretty much limited to the rechargeable life of the battery. The good news is that they are inexpensive enough that you’ll have plenty of time to get your money’s worth of use from them. And with just about all audio products, if you’re very picky about your sound, make sure you get a chance to listen before you buy. No portable speaker will be able to give the same rich sound that a premium set of speakers can, but these do  a very decent job at trying.

Being a writer, I follow a lot of writers on Twitter. But, since Twitter is kind of a geeky thing, most of the writers I follow are also tech savvy geeks. J.R. is no exception.

I first ran into him online when I started listening to V & A Shipping, a delicious mashup of Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit. Our senses of humor are pretty symaptico, and he’s as personable on Twitter as he is anywhere else. He’s gone on to podcast other novels, but most importantly he’s also released a novel in print. It’s called Astel: Chosen and can be purchased at Amazon

He’s not as… prolific on Twitter as I am, which probably explains why he’s written more than I have, but his tweets are solid. You’ll see a little self promotion, a fair amount of conversation, and no small amount of silliness. It’s also worth noting that he’s partnered up with Mike Plested and they have a book coming out in the future. So, it wouldn’t hurt you to follow them both.

There’s your Follow Friday for this week. Look for my upcoming review of Google Docs’ spreadsheet function and have a great weekend!

This one has been a long time coming. And I’ll admit, I’ve been saving this one for a special occasion. This week, something finally fit the bill.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about Tee Morris. It’s not even the first time I’ve written about him on the Nifty Tech Blog. In the first month of the blog I wrote about The Boom Effect, an online fundraiser to provide for the future of Tee’s daughter, Sonic Boom, after the tragic death of Tee’s wife. Then in March, Tee returned to talk about Twitter, which served to kick off the #FollowFriday series. Then in August he dragged me into the world of podcasting with the six-part crossover series with Tee’s Bird House Rules Podcast looking at Twitter clients for the iPad. So why am I writing about him now?

Tee is a man of many talents. When I first met him he was working as an actor at the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Since that time, he has become an author of both fiction and non-fiction books, created the genre of podcast novels, aka podiobooks, become a Twitter evangelist, declared himself the Uber Nemesis of all podcast novelists, and now he has opened a new world full of Steampunk Adventures with co-author Pip Ballantine. This week, they released their mass-market paperback Phoenix Rising, a Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel. This book is a rollicking steampunk romp about Wellington Thornhill Books, Archivist extraordinare, and Eliza D. Braun, an Agent who has become discredited due to her rather exuberant pursuit of her duties. In their work for the highly clandestine Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, they investigate the strange, unusual, and downright impossible. Even when they’re not supposed to. My copy just arrived. After I finish writing this, I’m going to see if I can get the book away from my wife.

So I’ve just told you why you should read Tee’s book. Why should you follow @TeeMonster on Twitter? Ever fed sugar to a ferret? Tee has a frenetic energy, a chaotic wit, and a deep, deep, grasp of obscure geek references. He is silly, snarky, insightful, and connected. And above all that, he talks to people. Talk to Tee, and he’ll talk to you. Tee understands Twitter and building community. He participates. He walks the walk as well as talks the talk. We may not always agree on everything, but he definitely finds some cools stuff. And he’s my friend.

If you want to keep up on what Tee is up to outside of Twitter, I suggest you take a look at his blog, Tee Morris.com, or his professional site, Imagine That Studios. For more on the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, see their website, Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences.com.

This will be the first post in a multi-part post on the phenomenal tool that is Google Docs. First I tackle their Document features.

I write a lot more these days than I used to. I’m also collaborating on a staggering number of projects, and I need an easy way to share, create, and edit documents from any computer I happen to be near. I have a computer at work and two at home (one of which is a Mac) so while something like Dropbox might work, it’s not quite what I’m looking for. I need something that’s platform and software independent. Enter Google Docs.

First of all, you’re getting a word processor that’s got all of the important functionality of a Microsoft Word or Open Office. While there’s a lot you can do with those pieces of software that you can’t do with this, you’ve got access to spell check and most of the important formatting tools. If it ended there, it would still be nice to be able to access my documents from anywhere, but wait! There’s more.

Just like in any other word processor, you can insert images. The difference here is that you can search your Picasa account or do a Google image search and add pictures straight from there. Uploading images or using a URL is also allowed. The built in dictionary is a nice little touch if you don’t want to leave the browser. You’ll find all of these things in your regular programs. So what else is so special about Docs?

Of primary importance for me is the ability to share my documents granularly. That means, I give precisely the level of access I want to precisely the people I want to have it. This can be as simple as generating a link and allowing anyone with that to access and edit your project. While I don’t recommend that level of openness, the feature is there.

If you click Share and chose Sharing Settings, you’ll be provided with this box. Typing an email in the “Add People” box will give you the option to allow them to view or edit the document. You can change which option you chose at any time even removing the person from your list. Incidentally, if you’re already a GMail user (and why aren’t you?) you can use any lists or addresses already created in that address book.

Now that you’ve got the document shared, here comes the fun part. The Discussions button allows you and your collaborators to have a real time or offline chat. I’ve used this more than a few times to spitball ideas back and forth. If you have a problem or a question with a particular chunk of text, you can select it and choose Insert->Comment and it will put a text box on the sidebar. You and your editors can then go back and forth until the concerns are resolved.

The other feature that’s of greatest interest to me is it’s ability to convert your document into other formats.

Being able to download your Google Doc as a PDF or Word document is very useful when you’re ready to come off of the cloud. You can also print directly from Google Docs, whereas in the past it would force you to create a PDF, download it, and then print it. Google is constantly adding new features and my only real complaint is that they don’t always let you know about the new ones.

That’s about it for the word processor features in Google Docs. In future installments we’ll look at the spreadsheet, form creator, and presentation capabilities in addition to the other bells and whistles of the suite itself.

Today, I bring you one @JRDSkinner. I don’t know much about JRD as a person. I do know that he has a podcast called Flash Pulp that’s been running for over one hundred and fifty episodes and that takes a special kind of crazy. According to him, it’s three to ten minute tales full of action, adventure, mystery, and the occult, featuring a regular cast of characters as well as the occasional one-off spook or science fiction story. Sounds well worth checking out to me.

Why follow him on Twitter? Well I know, I follow him because he and I have compatible senses of humor and he’s a fellow creative. As a thread that runs through most of my #FF recommendations, he’s also a conversationalist. In a social media environment that’s rife with people that are all about self promotion, app generated quotes, and RT centric profies, I call that a good thing!

Have a great holiday weekend and look for a review of Google Docs, coming to your browser soon!

This week’s FollowFriday is a very special one for me. Naturally, they’re all special, or they wouldn’t get mentioned. But this week’s pick isn’t just someone who inspires me, she is also someone whom I am proud to say that I have inspired. Let me introduce you to Rachel, also known as @GuestfordJunkie, a lovely young woman, mother of two, and someone who is becoming increasingly light on her feet.

I first bumped into @GuestfordJunkie over on Scott Sigler‘s fan forums. Like me, she enjoys Sigler’s writing. Sigler refers to his devoted readers as “junkies” because they keep coming back for another hit. He even calls the participation points given out for posting on the forums “Crack Hits”. Obviously, the site tends to cater to those with more mature sensibilities, and a certain sense of humor. After getting to know me on Sigler’s site, @GuestfordJunkie, started following me on Twitter, and started following one of my other projects: The Shrinking Man Project, a personal journal of my weight loss journey in podcast form.

Rachel was moved by what I was trying to do with The Shrinking Man Project, with the honesty with which I placed myself out for public scrutiny, and decided that she needed to do something similar to keep her on target with her weight loss goals. So she created The Lighter Mom Project, and the twitter persona @LighterMom. This is her blog chronicling her journey, and the troubles that she has to deal with in order to balance work, family, and a social life while managing to keep her weight under control in a culture that embraces fried, fatty foods.

@GuestfordJunkie is personable, down to earth, and a little self-depreciating. But more than that she is good people. She is definitely someone that I would like to know In Real Life. I recommend you follow her and get to know her. And that you give The Lighter Mom Project a look and offer your support. (And you could always give The Shrinking Man Project a listen, too.)

Everyone hates spam. I’m not talking about the canned luncheon meat that has many fans and detractors, I’m talking about the untold volumes of unwanted e-mail that fills your mailbox, offering you “opportunities” to have larger breasts, lose weight quickly, to make millions with no effort using Multi-Level-Marketing, or to gain ill-gotten millions by helping some Nigerian widow unfreeze the assets of her late husband. All of these are scams, most if not all of them are illegal in some part of the world, and for our purposes we can just consider them to be fraud comitted via e-mail. So what can you do about it? How can you stop the endless flood of spam into your inbox? How can you complain and set the police after these guys?

At the very least, we have an answer for the last question. Cisco Systems has been helping with this issue since 1998, and their answer is SpamCop.net. SpamCop is a service that takes the mystery out of deciphering e-mail headers and figuring out to whom the report needs to be sent. This is a big concern because the last thing a spammer wants is to be identified. To hide their identities they use false headers to “spoof” the source of the email. The address you see on the From line is usuall made up, or is the real address of some other spam victim who had nothing to do with the unwanted mail.

At it’s most basic level, SpamCop provides a free reporting service where you can paste in the full text of a spam email, including headers, and SpamCop will process it and come up with a list of administrators best positioned to do something about the spam and any websites associated with it.

You can add your own message at the bottom of the page, or just click send to contact the admins about the spam originating from their networks.

When you create an account, SpamCop also generates an e-mail address that you can forward your spam to, and it will automatically perform the same kind of scanning and reporting functions. My results with using the forwarding address have been mixed, but I’ve never had a problem with using the website, provided I report the spam quick enough. Since spammers tend to do hit-and-run type scams, SpamCop won’t accept spam more than two days after you’ve received it. At that point, the trail is considered to be too cold.

But SpamCop does have another way for you to report your spam quickly and easily. Very easily. But this one does cost a little bit of money. For $30 a year, you can get a SpamCop.net e-mail address which is automatically filtered to remove spam. You can either switch over to using this SpamCop.net e-mail address as your primary e-mail, or you can forward your e-mails from your existing provider to your SpamCop.net address and have them forwarded. Spamcop.net provides a standard POP style e-mail account, so you can easily retrieve the messages that make it past the filter with the mail client you already have. But to unlock the real power, just sign into the SpamCop.net webmail.

Messages that fail to make it past the filters end up in a special Held Mail area. Here you can review your messages and determine which ones are real mail, and which ones are spam.

You can look at the individual messages if you need to, as SpamCop examines the contents of the message and only displays the portions that are safe to display. This protects you from messages with virus payloads, and ones with images that “report back” to the server to say that your e-mail address is valid. By default images are suppressed, but you can have SpamCop display them if necessary. If an e-mail appears valid, you can release it, or release it and add it to a whitelist so that e-mails from that source won’t get held again.

And you can always select those messages that are obviously spam and report them.

It doesn’t seem like we will be able to stamp out spam any time soon. Unfortunately, all that is needed for spam to flourish is the desire in a few to victimize their fellow men for monetary gain. In my view this is a problem that is endemic in advertising as a whole. But that is an issue for an editorial, not a review. For those of us who wish to take a stand and fight back against a tide of faceless spammers, SpamCop helps provide the tools.

I’ve gotten to know a lot of geeks over the year, few more geeky than John Wilkerson. He has hosted more podcasts than you can shake a stick at, including the Jesus Geek, the Wired Homeschool, and Compassion 365. He’s into technology for his day job and while he’s an outspoken Christian, even if you’re not a religious person, he’s well worth checking out for his views on the latest tech news or how tos (how poetical).

He’s not as prolific a tweeter as I am, so I think each one counts a bit more. You’re as likely to find the latest funny video or a tip on WordPress as you are to find him conversating with someone. So if you’re looking to follow someone with a kind heart and mad geeking skillz you can do no better than to follow John. You should also really subscribe to his podcasts.

It’s been a while since I’ve recommended a celebrity on #FollowFriday, and this week’s pick is one that has risen to sudden stardom in a very short time. After living a relatively quiet life at the Bronx Zoo, the @BronxZoosCobra set off to discover new territory, and to record his adventures on Twitter. Now you can come join him as he explores the wonders of New York City. Can a simple Cobra make it in the Big Apple? One way to find out!

To be honest, being the Big Apple’s Number 1 ophidian ought to be enough to get you to follow him, despite the relatively short amount of time he’s been tweeting. It is really something to make it to the top in a city as cold blooded as New York City. Of course, he does have a special advantage that most residents of Gotham don’t have: Cobra Venom.

So explore the world with @BronxZoosCobra, and be sure to check your boots, and your bed, before proceeding. After all, it’s warmer in there.

I’m a big fan of programs that do precisely what I need them to do – no more, no less. It seems that the folks at Hog Bay Software are of the same mind, because their free app Plain Text is a great example of just that. I’ve been enjoying my iPhone immensely and one of the things I wanted was a basic text editor. I don’t plan on writing any novels on the micro computer, but the idea of being able to take a few notes here or there appealed to me.

The interface is very simple.

The gear symbol takes you to a very minimalist settings page. There you can change the view, how the list is organized, headings, and orientation lock. That latter setting is important only if you don’t want it to change orientation when you move your iPhone/iPad. You can also set up DropBox synchronization (more on that in a bit) or activate TextExpander, a third party app that lets you enter shorthand

The second icon allows you to create a folder structure and the third creates a new document. Exquisite in its simplicity. You can tell something is a folder by a “greater than” symbol out to the right of it.

Pros – The biggest pro here is this app’s interaction with Dropbox. I’ve become a huge fan of the service (reviewed here by Doc). When you set this up to synchronize with your Dropbox account, it creates a Plain Text folder and stores all of your documents there. You can chose to make it sync on when you edit, launch the app, or open a file or folder. I’ve composed short blog posts and created notes for stories using Plain Text and I can’t tell you how nice it is to just have those text documents waiting for me on any computer that I have Dropbox installed on. Okay, I can tell you, since we’re friends. It’s frickin’ awesome.

One other pro, though a minor one, is that it uses the iPhone’s spell check and auto-correct features. That’s one over on a plain text editor like Notepad.

Cons – The only downside I can find in this little gem is that in order to use the folder structure, you have to create the folder first and then add a new document within that. Once you create a document, you can’t move it into a folder using the iPhone app itself. If you go into Dropbox, you can use that to move things around though.

Plain Text is a free app, so long as you don’t mind an ad at the bottom of the page. I certainly don’t. If you really want to get rid of that it will cost you $4.99. As nice as PlainText is, it’s not worth five bucks to me. That may change if I use it more or if the ads get obnoxious. My experience with this app has been so good, I’m eager to check out other offerings by Hog Bay.

I looked up the word “firebrand” before I started to write this post, because I was pretty sure it fit Allison D. Duncan aka @svallie, but I wanted to make sure. I had visions of butt-kicker and pot-stirrer running in my head. She’s certainly both of those. I’m not sure that troublemaker or revolutionary quite fit though and that turns out to be closer to the actual definition. So while Allison may or may not be a firebrand, she’s definitely worth a follow.

I first learned about her existence by listening to Brand Gamblin’s wonderful podcast novel Tumbler. She narrated it and did a fine job. Over the course of time I added her to my Twitter stream and I’m glad I did. She and I don’t agree on a whole lot, but as I’ve said before, I’m okay with that. She’s smart and doesn’t hold back when she’s convinced she’s right. You can read her opinions about almost anything at her blog. She also has a forthcoming podcast novel.

So that’s your #FF assignment for this week. Stick around. I’ve got a review of Plain Text coming up soon and there’s other goodness to be had around these parts.

You know that person who always seems to be cheerful no matter what is going on? The one that seems to weather the toughest storms because they are just happy to be here? Well, I’m not sure I know that person, but let me introduce you to someone who seems to come awful close. Paulette Jaxton.

@PauletteJaxton is a very talented woman. While her love affair with poetry ended at an early age, she has embraced prose in a big way.  She is the author of the novel The Empress Sword, soon to be coming from Dragon Moon Press. She became a podcaster with the creation of Form Letter Rejection Theatre, and is currently in the process of podcasting her novel at http://empresssword.com/. She has also served as a podcast producer for the Metamor City, and Murder at Avedon Hill podcasts.

If you should choose wisely and follow Paulette on Twitter, you’ll find that she displays a remarkable wit and a genial sense of humor, as well as compassion and genuine caring. She has a delightful positive energy and cheerful demeanor. And it starts my day off right to see the wonderfully creative ways that she says good morning to the world of Twitter every day. She has an exquisite turn of phrase that shows off her creative wordsmithing mind. I think that if you take a look you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Be sure to come back next week for Scotts Follow Friday recommendation. And we should be back with a new review the following Monday. We’re working hard to keep up with the schedule of the blog, but life has been nibbling away at available time like a flock of hungry ducks. Please bear with us. We’re trying to do a lot of stuff at once. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

As spring approaches and the weather gets warmer, parts of the world shift to Daylight Savings Time, and many folks turn their minds towards the things that they can do to get themselves into shape. There are a lot of products out there to help you track your diet or your exercise. Some even track both. Most of these tools require you to know what you’ve done in terms of exercise so that you can record it. Today’s review is for a product that watches you while you exercise, tracks your progress, and give you the data you need to put into your other tracking utilities. We’re looking at Nike’s latest tool to end all tools for runners, Nike+ GPS.

Developed by Nike as part of a joint project with Apple, Nike+ GPS takes advantage of the Location Services built into the iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPod Touch, and presumably all future iThings. Displacing the Nike+ iPod software, Nike+ GPS doesn’t need a sensor hidden in the bottom of a shoe in order to track your progress. Instead it uses Apple’s GPS and Cell Tower tracking technologies from the Location Services toolkit. And while this approach may lead to some unpredictable results on rainy or cloudy days, overall it tends to produce more accurate results than relying on the Nike+ iPod sensor. The current version of Nike+ GPS is 3.0.1, and it is available from the Apple iTunes Store for $1.99.

The software keeps track of the number of individual runs you have taken using a particular device, while Nike’s Nike+ service tracks all the runs a person has made with all their devices. Nike’s core audience are runners, so each exercise is referred to as a “run”, no matter what activity the person is actually engaging in. When testing earlier versions of the software, I sometimes would start a “run” when going to a craft fair, and keep track of how far I walked during the hours of shopping. Nike+ didn’t care if I was running, walking, or idly browsing craft booths. It happily recorded my activity, counted my calories and my distance, and my total time. While the old Nike+ iPod would sometimes end a run if you stood still too long, or if it could no longer find the sensor, Nike+ GPS doesn’t have this problem.

While the software still isn’t perfect, Nike has built off what they’ve learned with the Nike+ iPod software and had made effective use of the iPhone screen. One can tailor your profile to accurately describe your particulars, aiding the software to accurately define your stride and level of effort. While Nike+ starts you out with a generic profile, you can re-calibrate the system as you go to better reflect your personal stride. Most runs can be used for calibration, providing you maintain a reasonably consistent stride through the entire run. Most importantly, to use a run for calibration you must know the exact distance traveled. For best results, I recommend finding a local track that you can use for a calibration run. Nike does not recommend using a treadmill for calibration, although they do claim to support using the Nike+ GPS on a treadmill. I haven’t been able to do any tests of this nature yet, so I can’t really comment one way or the other.

In addition to customizing how the Nike+ GPS calibrates your stride, you can adjust how it measures your distance, tracking your progress in either miles or kilometers, and you can adjust the software’s display so that it is most readable while the iPhone is in your favorite arm band, or however you choose to carry the device during a run.

For those who listen to music during their runs, Nike lets you choose a number of “Powersongs” that can be invoked at a touch of a button to give you an extra boost when you most need it. I haven’t actually played with this feature, as I prefer listening to podcasts as I exercise and working out my mind along with my body.

When starting a run, one selects one of three types, a Basic run, where the Nike+ simply records your progress and lets you go however far or long you want to, or a Time or Distance run, where one sets a goal in terms of a total time or distance traveled, where Nike+ also lets you know when you’ve met your halfway point, and gives you added encouragement when you’re near your goal. Nike+ GPS has optional settings for voice prompts, noting both time and distance traveled. Prompts can be set to remind you of your progress every minute, or every five, 10,  or 15 minutes. Likewise, distance prompts can be set for every quarter, half, or whole mile, or every two miles. Or the regular voice prompts can be turned off, and you can tap a voice feedback button when you want to check on your status.

Nike+ GPS also has social integration with Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to update your status on completing a run. With Facebook, there is also an optional “Cheers” section. What this does is update your Facebook status when you start a run, so that your friends on Facebook can “Like” the fact that you’re exercising, or leave comments. When someone interacts with this status post, the application on Facebook sends a message back to your iPhone, and a pre-recorded cheering audio will play, letting your friends and family cheer you on by proxy. Of course, if this is irritating to you, you can silence the cheers, or turn the function off altogether.

When you start a run, the Nike+ lets you specify if you will be indoors or outdoors, what music you wish to play, and if you want to take advantage of the Cheer facility on this run. For your music, you can choose no music, whatever is currently playing on your device, a particular playlist, or let the system simply shuffle through whatever music is in your iTunes library.

Tap Continue and you move to the main display for your run. This screen will let your start and stop your workout, skip to the next song or re-play the last. It will even let you change your music altogether if you find it doesn’t suit your mood. But for most people what will be more important are the three sets of numbers displayed on the screen. These are your current rate, the elapsed time you’ve been running, and the total distance traveled. For a basic run or a distance run, the distance gets the prime position. If you choose a timed run, time and distance exchange places. To better illustrate this, let’s take a look at a screen shot from a run in progress.

In this view you can check your progress at a glance, or if you can’t afford to glance, tap the Voice Feedback button and get Nike+ to tell you how well you are doing. Or you can tap the little lock icon in the upper right corner and the screen will transform into this.

This screen is better for night running in those areas where you don’t want to be a lit beacon saying “Rob me now! I have valuable electronics on me!” And it also happens to be gentler on your night vision.

When you finish your run, Some kind of inspirational message from a professional athlete will usually play. These can be either encouraging or annoying, depending on your point of view. Unfortunately, this is one function that Nike doesn’t give you the option of turning off. Nike+ will also automatically sync with Nike’s servers, adding the statistics for your new run to the rest of your account, and updating Twitter if you’ve got the Social Media option turned on. For an update to your Facebook Status, it gives you the opportunity to add a few words of your own.

So you’ve completed your run and synced your results. You’re done right? Well, not quite. Nike also gives you the opportunity to tag your run indicating how you feel, the kind of weather you experienced, the type of terrain you traveled over, and any other notes you’d care to add. This can be vary useful if you’re trying to correlate changes in your times and distances to any of these factors. Of course, you don’t have to tag your runs at all if you don’t want to.

But one of the most interesting features that Nike has included also comes into play at this point. This is the Map Tracking feature. It allows you to see your run laid out on a map, and you can see your rate of progress as a color code on the map, letting you review the run and determine where you slowed down and where you achieved your best speeds. This can be very useful for those who habitually run the same paths over and over again, as it visually displays your information so you can better refine your approach to your route and identify the areas where you need to focus on your progress. One can even zoom in to specific areas to get a finer view. Of course, the closer you zoom the more you’ll see the imperfections in the way the Nike+ tracks your progress.

While Nike+ GPS is a very useful tool for runners, walkers, and anyone else who needs a little help recording their exercise, it isn’t perfect. Your accuracy is often at the mercy of atmospheric conditions that might kill cell signals or GPS transmissions coming down from the satellites. If the application crashes in the middle of a run, for whatever reason, it will either terminate or lose the entire run. When the Cheers function was first added, there were problems where the system would play the cheer audio, end the run, but keep playing music through the earbuds. This was fixed in later updates, but it made cheers impossible to use for a time. Nike has also not been quick in responding to some of the user community’s requests for changes. Many users would like to be able to enter data from a treadmill directly into their Nike+ accounts instead of having to use the application. Especially those who go to gyms that are shielded so that the Nike+ can’t get a signal.

But even considering these drawbacks, we have found it to be a useful tool at a reasonable price. Provided, of course, that you’re already using an iPhone. We haven’t really seen anything that comes close to this level of utility and we’re confident that the Nike+ GPS has earned our stamp of approval.

If you had told me that Canada has the Internet much less Twitter just a few years ago I would have said, “What’s twitter?”. I always envisioned Canada as a land of hockey hooligans, polar bears, and pleasant comedians. Sure enough though, they have most if not all of the amenities we do, including my favorite social networking tool.

One thing they have an awful lot of, it seems, are good writers. I have the pleasure of having met and gotten to know one of those over the course of the last year. Today’s #FF is devoted to him, Mike Plested aka @mplested. Mike is many things; scout leader, writer, podcaster, and polar bear wrangler. I know him best through his podcast Get Published where he’s talked about his own writing journey and has interviewed publishers and writers from all over. He’s also podcast his own fiction and it’s well worth checking out.

So why should you follow him? Well if you’re a writer or a small publisher he’s a good guy to get to know. If you’re just looking for a new up and coming author, he’d be a good choice as well. He’s got a new book coming out and following him would be a great way to learn more about that. Being Canadian, Mike’s also got a good sense of humor and he’s very polite so there’s that as well. I mean he’s not the kind of guy who’d take a hit out on someone for making a few jokes.

So there’s your FF for the week. Go forth and be excellent to one another!

Some of you may have heard of @Nuchtchas. Most of you can’t pronounce it. I know I can’t. Fortunately, she’s a good sport about it and she lets us get away with just calling her Nutty. This is good, as you really don’t want to tick off the Podcast Ninja! if you can help it. She’s been known to pack Nerf. Nutty became known as the Podcast Ninja for her talent to get herself onto other people’s podcasts without having a podcast of her own. As the Galley Table Stowaway, I can appreciate that! Of course, now she’s ended that by starting her own podcast, Nutty Bites! To find out more about all things Nutty (all Nutty things?), check out her blog at http://nimlas.org/.

On Twitter, you’ll find that Nutty lives up to her name. She is friendly, crazy, and good-humored, wether the topic of discussion is the latest video game, podcast drama, geeky ramblings, or the next long road trip that her work has sent her on. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to wrangle her husband’s Nerf gun modding secrets out of her, but I’m still trying. But if you do choose to follow @Nuchtchas, take the time to send her an @message and tell her why. She likes it when folks do that, and it is a great way to convince her that you’re a real person, just like @Nuchtchas.

I’m sorry about missing the regularly scheduled review last Monday, folks. A family emergency dominated just about all my time for the past week and Scott didn’t have anything ready to go. And the fact that this happened just after we changed over to the new site didn’t help much as we are still getting used to the new workflow on the back end of things. At this point we’re trying to get back up to speed and hopefully we won’t be missing another post. In some ways, I’m actually kind of proud that we’ve managed to go for over a year with the Nifty Tech Blog before having a bobble like this one. But I’m still dedicated to making sure we don’t have this happen again.

I did want to mention that we’ll be starting a new occasional feature under the category Time Wasters. This will be similar to the Personal Stamp articles, in that we’ll be looking at things that aren’t strictly technology related. Time Wasters features will be focused on leisure pursuits, like movies, books, and games, and will be published as we find things worth commenting on. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

In a previous #FF, the one for Laura the Gypsy Pirate, we mentioned her collaborator David Sobkowiak. I promised a FF for him and I am a big believer in delivering on promises. You’ll note that the avatar he’s currently using is a book cover. That’s because he, like yours truly, is an author and is self publishing stories on Amazon. This one in particular, “Goodnight My Love”, is creepy and very cool. So that’s one reason right there that you should follow him.

In addition to his skills as a writer and a voice actor, David is a fellow conversator in his Twitter usage. People tell me that I use Twitter like an IM client and there’s some validity there. I say it’s social media and if you interact with me I’m gonna interact with you and I look for opportunities to talk to people. David’s the same way. I like to follow people who “get” that this is one of the greatest usages for this particular tool. Is it meant for lengthy discussions like the ones that you’d have at a cafe? No. But you can pack a lot into 140 characters.

So if you want to follow a writer who loves to interact and who is in the midst of trying to get the word out about his excellent fiction I highly recommend Mr. Sobkowiak. And following Laura (you are following her too right?) without following David is a bit like eating peanut butter without jelly. You could, and it would be awesome, but the experience would be lessened somehow.

We’ve transitioned over to our new server! Finally! We haven’t finished all the changes we have in mind, but we’ve gotten enough done that we’re going to move to the new site. Keep an eye out for further changes as we move ahead.

Let us know what you think of the new site. We think it has a lot of promise.

This week’s pick is someone special. I don’t know how I’ve managed to neglect this person for so long. Maybe it is just that when you follow a lot of awesome people, you can’t pick out everyone at once. And so someone who is very deserving of recognition ends up getting passed over far too often. But no longer. I am, of course, talking about the lovely and talented Laura Nicole, aka @LN_Dragonsong. But Laura isn’t just my pick, she is Scott’s pick, too. We both wrote her up at the same time. Thus Laura is our first Double Follow Friday nominee! This article is an amalgamation of what we each wrote.

Scott says, “The number of creative people I’ve met at Balticon is staggering. It’s coming up soon and I hope to be going. There are going to be a metric butt load of new, cool, creative folks there that I’ve yet to meet and if you’re in the Baltimore area the last weekend of May I would encourage you to go. One such person is Laura Nicole aka @LN_Dragonsong. As my age befuddled brain places it, she approached me and told me that she was a fan of my podcast novel Archangel. That showed such incredible taste and good judgment that I knew from that moment she was quality. The more I’ve gotten to know her, the more that’s been proven.”

I have to agree. Laura is a woman of many talents. She is one of the editors of Flying Island Press, as well as being the guest-wrangler and one of the hosts of Flying Island’s podcast, The Galley Table. She is also a quite talented voice actress, and has worked on a number of projects including some work for Broken Sea Audio.  With partner David Sobkowiak (no doubt a future #FollowFriday candidate), Laura runs Scriveners Circle, where they write and produce their own audio drama podcasts, one of the more notable being Prisoners of the Alliance. If you’re curious about what else Laura is up to, you can check out her latest post at GypsyLaura.com.

So, now that you’re suitably impressed with @LN_Dragonsong, do you still wonder why you should follower her on Twitter? No? No. Oh, wait, one guy in the back. There’s always one in every crowd. All right, for you sir, and anyone else who hasn’t been paying attention, I shall explain. Like many of my favorite Tweeps her updates are equal parts sass, snark, and sanguinity. I encourage you to follow her at your earliest convenience and cross her at your peril. Laura is a spitfire. She can be sweet and friendly, and often is, but she also doesn’t take much guff. She plays well, but she also stands her ground, and her creative mind comes up with some of the most interesting threats. Naturally, one shouldn’t just start trying to verbally spar with @LN_Dragonsong. That would be rude. But as you get to know her, you can see her sparring with her friends, or diverting into another creative pastime. Or there could be Mojitos. Then all bets are off.

That is it for today. Go, have a great President’s Day weekend, and come back next week to see Scott’s Follow Friday pick, and maybe a new surprise or two.

[Editor – Sorry for the delay in getting this one out folks. Unfortunately, there is little that you can do when your guts kick you in themselves. Hope you enjoy.]

Ever go off somewhere, to a meeting, or to visit a friend, and realize that you wanted to show something on your computer to someone? Maybe you had your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad along with you, and you checked Dropbox and Evernote and cursed yourself because the file wasn’t in either one, but was safely on your computer at home, just out of reach. Well, if you have iTeleport installed, that file won’t be out of reach anymore. You’ll be able to connect to your home computer, find the file and drop it into Dropbox, e-mail it, or anything else you want!

iTeleport is a product of iTeleport LLC, and both product and company were formerly known as Jaadu. In fact, you can still find Jaadu Remote Desktop for Windows and iTeleport: Jaadu VNC for iPhone/iPad in the iTunes store. Jaadu Remote Desktop for Windows only supports connection to Windows computers from the iPhone or iPod Touch, while iTeleport for iPad, and iTeleport: Jaadu VNC for iPhone/iPad support connections to Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux computers. iTeleport for iPad costs $19.99 on the iTunes store, but only supports the iPad. Jaadu Remote Desktop for Windows runs $24.99, as does iTeleport: Jaadu VNC for iPhone/iPad. But to be honest, we really recommend you spend the extra $5 for iTeleport: Jaadu VNC for iPhone/iPad as it runs on all three iDevices, and connects to any kind of computer. Other than the limitations mentioned above, all three programs have the same function set and look to them. So from here on, we’re just going to refer to any member of the suite as iTeleport.

But to make the whole thing work you do need a little more than just the iTeleport application on your iPhone or iPad. In order for your iDevice and your computer to find each other and communicate securely, they both need to be able to connect to a known server and get the connection information for the other. Some services do this by running their own servers, such as Apple’s Back To My Mac service. The guys at iTeleport decided to take a different tactic. Since Gmail is very popular and easy (and free) to set up an account, they built iTeleport to connect to your Gmail server and sign in to find out which computers are available for connection. In order to get your computer to show up on the listing, you’ll need to download a free piece of software from their site called iTeleport Connect. This tiny piece of software let’s your computer connect to Gmail and leave an “I’m here!” note for iTeleport. Through this little exchange your iDevice can drill through and establish a VNC (Virtual Net Computer) connection with your computer.

If you don’t want to mess with iTeleport Connect, you don’t have to, but if you take that route, you’ll have to set up your own secure VNC server on your computer and manually enter the credentials for that server into iTeleport. This might make things more secure, especially if you don’t trust Google not to look at your account, but it requires a healthy dose of technical know-how. We’re feeling pretty secure using iTeleport.

iTeleport will also detect computers with active VNC clients on the same network, but will only be able to connect to those computers while connected to that particular network. These machines will show up on the Discovered Tab as Discovered Servers. If you’ve connected to them before, they will show up as Local Servers. Here is the view of servers on the Discovered Tab on both the iPhone and iPad.

The Home Tab is a bit of a mis-nomer, as it really contains links to the Help files you need for setting up your phone and computer. Actually, the iTeleport guys have been pretty clever with their help files. You can look up the help for setting up your computer on your mobile device, and for setting up your mobile device on the computer. That way you always have the instructions in front of you.

The Internet tab shows you the computers that you’ve accessed via Gmail and iTeleport Connect. You can see all the computers that you’ve connected to over the net, or just the ones that are currently available. Here is that tab on both the iPhone and iPad.

Naturally, the computers that will show up for you will depend on the names that you choose for your computers and how many you have connected at any time. Once you select a computer to connect to, iTeleport will show the swirling tunnel logo as it connects to your computer.

And once you connect, you’ll see the desktop of your computer.

Once your connected, your screen is acting both as a display, and as a full size trackpad. You can zoom out so that you can see the whole screen, or zoom in to a detail and slide the view window around by moving the mouse around. Since the whole screen is a trackpad, you can control the mouse from anywhere and move it around. Tap to click and otherwise just treat it like a regular trackpad. If you really want to get into the details, you can customize the controls on the home page. To close the connection, just tap the X in the upper left corner. Some controls are available from the gear button in the top menu bar of the window.

These controls can give you better control over how your device works, and how much detail you’re going to pull through the tunnel. If you find response is slow over the net, you can improve performance by reducing the number of colors you’re displaying on your device, and consequently how much data has to move through the net to represent those colors.

If you need to do a click with a command key, such as a shift click, option click, etc., tap the center button on the top menu bar. When you do, you’ll notice four new buttons appear on top of the displayed screen.

These are the symbols Mac OS X uses for Shift, Control, Command, and Option in the keyboard commands on menu items. I suspect that with a Windows machine you’ll get buttons for Control, Alt, and the Windows key, but unfortunately we didn’t have an opportunity to set up a Windows box to test with.

If you need to access Function keys or specific command keys, the next button in the top menu will bring up a special keyboard for that, too.

As you can see, you can have the command keys available at the same time, although a lot of the commands you’re likely to want are already coded into the keys on the keyboard. On the iPhone, due to the limited screen space, this keyboard is broken down into four smaller panels which you can switch between with a swipe. It can be a little difficult peering at your computer through the tiny slot between the keyboard and the top menu, but if you find the key you want, use it, and dismiss the keyboard, you’ll be able to move along fairly quickly.

And of course, if you need to type something, the last button will bring up the classic text keyboard for the device you’re using, letting you compose that e-mail, or make that quick correction.

While it is cool to be able to look at your desktop on your iPad, for most of us, that makes for a smaller screen than usual. Not an easy space to work in if you have to do some fine detail work. Fortunately, iTeleport has a built in zoom function, using the pinching controls built into the iOS. Just center over the area you need a closer look at, and give a two finger spread.

And you’ve got the zoomed in view. You can still mouse around to shift the window of the zoomed in view. There will be a slight lag as the data for the new section of screen is transferred.

iTeleport does a wonderful job of putting your desktop into the palm of your hands. It is fast, and easy to use, and for the most part the controls are very intuitive. It still gives you the flexibility to work the way you want to with a minimum of fuss. There may be some cheaper options for VNC from your mobile device, but we think you’ll be hard pressed to find one much better than iTeleport.

Of course, if you find one, let us know! We’ll want to check it out for ourselves!

Friends and Neighbors, I was in the midst of putting the finishing touches upon today’s review, when I began suffering several bouts of painful gastric distress. It has been very distracting and has eaten up my time this evening. The upshot is that today’s review will be late as I need to get to sleep and hopefully recover from this malady. I will have the review finished and out to you as soon as I am physically able.  I am most sorry for the delay.

Part of me really wants to move to New Zealand. If the footage from Lord of the Rings is any indication it’s positively gorgeous. Add to that the awesome tweeps I’ve met who’re from that blessed island and I simply have to think that it’s got to be as near perfection as any place on Earth. So with that, I want to introduce you to @GraceBridges.

She’s a Kiwi (not the bird or the fruit, simply a moniker for those form NZ), a writer of fiction, and a publisher. I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing her for the Galley Table at Flying Island Press and I can say that she’s sharp and funny in addition to her other skills. So whether you’re looking for another author, publisher, or geek to follow, you can do no better than to hit all three in Grace.

[EDITOR – Have a good weekend everyone. If you celebrate Valentine’s day, spend it with someone you love. I’ll be back here on Monday with a new review for you. This really is a product I think that you’ll love, especially if you have an iPhone or iPad and travel.]

Have you met @TRReed? And yes, that’s not a typo. Or at least, it isn’t OUR typo. If he typoed his Twitter name and never bothered to fix it, that isn’t our fault. Or it could have just been that @treed got there before him, but I digress… Thomas Reed, our @TRReed, is a Math Teacher, compulsive podcast listener, and a proud Texan. He is also the creative mind behind a hilarious series of Bitstrips depicting scenes from the world of Social Media. In the past three years he has created 402 Bitstrips comics based on events in his on-line and off-line life.

@TRReed is one of my favorite co-conspiritors on Twitter. I usually see him in the company of @Mainframe or @Odin1eye and up to no particular good. His sense of humor is often dry and almost always right on target. @TRReed is a good internet citizen and generally fun to read. Give him a look.

I hope everyone has had a good week. I’m glad to say that we have finally found our new host and are in the process of re-building the site on the new host. Unfortunately this is one of those processes where the closer you seem to completion, the more fiddly little details one finds that have to be attended to. With luck, in the next week or two, we’ll be able to announce when we’ll be transitioning to the new site. Until then, we’ll continue to post our regularly scheduled features, so be back next week to see Scott’s pick for Follow Friday, and the following Monday, Valentine’s Day, I’ll have a new review for you. Read it to a geek you love!

A year ago today, the Nifty Tech Blog launched with our first review of Delicious Library. So much has changed in a year. Since that time we’ve published 29 other reviews,  43 Follow Friday recommendations, and 5 editorials. In February 2010, the blog was a one man show, hosted in a corner of my .Mac account space using iWeb. Now Scott Roche has joined the staff, and we’ve had contributions by Odin1Eye and Philippa Ballantine, and a crossover event with Tee Morris’ Bird House Rules. We moved our hosting to Blogger, and thanks to the generous contributions from our readers, we’re getting ready to move to our own servers and to stand up a WordPress version of the Blog.

The year has wrought a lot of changes in me, too. Last year I was just happy to get the blog up and running. Now I’ve got a Podcast of my own in the works, I’ve become a regular on The Galley Table, and I’ve contributed three stories to the Every Photo Tells… podcast. I’m doing voice work for two upcoming projects, and still trying to find time to write on longer projects. I’m also about 100 pounds lighter and in the best shape of my life. I’m insanely busy, but I don’t think I’d change a thing. Well, maybe a day job that pays better and takes fewer hours away from my writing…

And I have you to thank for it. Without the support, the challenges, and even the occasional criticisms, I wouldn’t have  gotten half this far. I’ve learned a lot in this past year, and I thank you for taking your time to follow along. I hope you’ve found a few things in the blog that have helped you in some way. I’m looking forward to seeing what the new year will bring, and I hope everyone will come along for the ride. Thank you again, I couldn’t have done it without you.

My personal philosophy when it comes to anti-viruses is, so long as you follow a few simple rules they shouldn’t be necessary. Most of the big name commercial anti-virus packages are what I call “bloat-ware”. They slow down even the newest computers and in my experience either lull people into a false sense of security or bombard their owners with too many “false positives”. As a result I actually don’t load them on my personal computers as a general rule.

My primary computer is a Mac and I browse with Firefox and while this far from makes me bullet proof as some fanboys would exclaim, it does keep a lot of the viruses that target Windows and Internet Explorer users at bay. I also avoid opening email attachments I’m not expecting or clicking links that I don’t trust. Anti-virus programs are still good tools though and there are situations where I employ them or suggest employing them.

People who aren’t as familiar with computers and ways to minimize your risk should definitely put a good anti-virus to use. There are dozens of programs for the PC to chose from though. In this post I will be looking at a program exclusively for the PC. I recommend that you install the product from AVG called AVG Free.

I know, I know, a free anti-virus program? Yes. It works and in general it does so as well as the big boys. A recent review on CNet gives it four and a half stars. While it will cause your system to boot up a few seconds slower, it doesn’t impact overall performance in comparison to other similar programs.

The thing that impresses me most about their free product is that they use the same scan engine as their paid version. That means that you get the same protection from viruses regardless of the version. They also include a link scanner with the free version. (There is also a version of the link scanner available for the Mac OS.) This product takes a look at links that you might see on sites like Facebook or your favorite search engine and lets you know if they’re safe or not. That’s a lot packed into something free.

There are additional features you can get from AVG for a price. Their full package scans downloads before they hit your computer. That’s a feature available from all paid anti-virus software and one that may be useful for some of you. If you do a lot of downloading from sites you don’t trust then it may be worth your money. It also scans links in chat. Perhaps the most valuable tool you receive for the money though is the customer support. If you run into serious problems that you can’t solve, someone from AVG can connect to your computer and help you.

If you do choose AVG, there are a few things worth remembering.

1) Update. Update. Update. – It is vital to keep both your scan engine and your anti-virus definition files up to date. How to do this varies from program to program, but make sure it’s happening. Most programs will allow you to set them to check for updates automatically.

2) No single anti-virus will protect you one hundred percent. – If you get a virus and the software you have won’t get rid of it, you may have to use something like the AVG Rescue Disk or Vipre Rescue.

3) An infected computer is typically not the computer’s or the software’s fault. – Nine times out of ten when I’ve had to rescue a computer from the clutches of a serious virus they’ve admitted to downloading something questionable. If you avoid installing things like toolbars for you browser or pirated software you will eliminate many risks.

Regardless of what choice you make though, we at the Nifty Tech Blog wish you happy and safe surfing!

There are geeks and then there are geeks like @IndianaJim. I would feel safe in calling him a geek’s geek or perhaps a geek among geeks. I mean come on, his Twitter handle is a tribute to the iconic Harrison Ford character and he produced a fantastic full cast Star Wars audio drama. I don’t know that he’s particularly a techie geek, but we’ve hardly let that stop us before.

I’ve been following Jim for quite some time now. He uses his tweets judiciously and he can usually be found snarking about something SF related while occasionally filling us in on his writing process or the latest episode of his podcasts. He’s also a bit of a sports geek, being a fan of the 49ers (you may also want to follow his tweets here). He’s willing to get into some verbal sparring to from time to time. The thing I like and admire most about Jim is his willingness to call things as he sees them. While he and I may not always agree, I always know where he stands.

Make sure you check out his web page where you can find out more about his podcast projects. Apparently the podcasts will be going on hiatus while he clears up some hosting issues, but he’ll be back. I would also recommend that you keep an eye on Grail Quest Books. Jim is writing a novella that they’ll be publishing in the near future.

There is just something about a woman with her sword in her hand, especially when she knows how to use it. That certain air of danger that lends an extra allure. Enter @VG_Ford, fencer, writer, and scourge of the high seas! Oh, and she writes, too! Val has published two books with Dragon Moon Press: Not your Father’s Horseman, and Dark Moon Seasons. She also writes a variety of short fiction for different venues, and podcasts. You can get some idea of what she does on her blog, http://vg-ford.com/.

While @VG_Ford has the same kind of life ups and downs as everyone else, she is at heart a wonderfully upbeat person. It almost always brightens my day to see her on Twitter and to interact with her. She has an excellent sense of humor and a delightful sense of play. If you don’t already know her, I’d recommend you take the time to introduce yourself to her on Twitter. Just be willing to deal with a little light pillaging.

I still owe everyone a wrap up for the last poll, and for the fundraiser. The short version of it is that we managed to raise enough funds that I was able to make up the difference in the hosting costs. You could say that the last donation came from me. We have secured a new host and we are in the process of transferring the blog over, and that is taking up a lot of time. Most of the data has been moved over, but there have been some difficulties hammering the site template into place. We hope to roll out the new site in February, but we’re pretty sure it won’t happen before Nifty Tech Blog’s one year anniversary on February 1. In the mean time, we’re still working on bringing you new content on schedule. Scott will be back next week with a Follow Friday pick, and on the 31st with a new review. We’ll see you then!

Steve Jobs’ latest medical leave of absence has once again triggered speculation on Apple’s ability to survive without Jobs’ hand firmly on the helm. Media pundits are harking back to the long slow decline of Apple since Jobs was ousted in the mid ’80’s, and wondering if it is likely to happen again if for whatever reason Jobs is unable to return to work. They seem to believe that Apple’s success since Jobs’ return in 1997 is solely due to Jobs’ influence and business acumen. Are they right? Is Jobs’ personality the only thing that is keeping Apple going?

What many of these speculators seem to be forgetting is that Apple in the ’80’s has very little in common with Apple of today. And Steve Jobs is not the same man who was kicked out of his own company 25 years ago. It really helps to remember history before trying to draw conclusions from it.

In 1985, Steve Jobs was a brash young businessman with a string of wild successes at his back. As the management and marketing mind behind Apple Computer, he had created the microcomputer market and his company was currently dominating that market. But the complexities of running a successful corporation were proving to be too much for Jobs. Apple was divided internally as different projects vied for resources. Jobs had brought John Sculley in as the President and CEO the previous year to provide experience in managing a large and diverse corporation. In 1985 Sculley and the board had identified Jobs as the most disruptive force within Apple and ousted him.

The fact is that neither Sculley nor Jobs were the proper leadership for Apple in the 1980’s. Jobs was too much of a hothead, and Sculley had never been in a position of leading a company that needed to actually compete. Sculley had learned a very defensive style of management, of avoiding risks, sitting on existing market dominance, and watching the money roll in. Under Sculley, innovation was effectively squelched as too risky. Research continued to happen, but very little of that research appeared in the market unless it was in reaction to market pressure. Instead of leading the market, Apple was placed in a position of playing catch up.

As for Jobs, Launching NeXT and having it fail in the marketplace was an incredibly valuable learning experience for Jobs. It taught him that being too far ahead of the market was just as deadly as being too far behind, how to build a team, and how to get others to buy into his vision. So the Jobs that came back to Apple was a very different man than the one who left.

Apple today competes in a variety of consumer lines. In some areas they dominate, in others they trail, but the hallmark of the Apple 2011 is that the company doesn’t react to market forces. Apple goes its own way, leading the market instead of reacting to their competition. This is one of the things that differentiates Apple from the rest of the industry and has allowed Apple to have successive record-breaking quarters in the middle of an economic depression that has taken serious toll upon their competition. While Apple may not always have controlling market-share, they have a mind-share vastly out of proportion to their sales. And as long as the rest of the market defines their strategies as “how will we respond to what Apple does?”, they aren’t likely to lose that mental dominance any time soon.

Jobs has also changed over the last 13 years. While some still see Jobs as a superstar of the industry, Steve knows that his success depends on the quality of the team supporting him, and he has put together one of the best teams around. Steve still appears to be the head visionary for Apple, but he has put together a disciplined team that is prepared to follow his guidance until a new visionary for Apple appears.

The real question is if Steve Jobs died tomorrow, would Apple be able to find someone to take over his place creating the company’s vision in the three or so years before they run out of Jobs-directed projects currently in work. Right now it appears that Tim Cook has been well positioned in the wings to assume this position. It remains to be seen if Cook has a vision of his own for Apple, or if he has just been well coached in Steve’s view of the company.

Can someone else knock Apple off the pedestal? Certainly. Apple doesn’t have a lock on innovative technology. Someone else could always develop something that radically changes the path of the industry. But they won’t do that by chasing Apple. For now, Apple has a good crew and a good course. Even if they lose the captain, it doesn’t look like they’re going to sink any time soon.

Normally, here at The Nifty Tech Blog, we try to bring you examples of the best and most useful technology available. If it doesn’t measure up to that yardstick, we just don’t mention it. Or we wait and watch it to see if it manages to rise above the pack and ask for our notice. But sometimes we run into a product that just utterly fails to provide any kind of utility. For those products, we created the category of Craptech. These are the products that are full of so much fail that everyone had best be warned not to waste their money on them. And the first one of these products that we are going to talk about is the Apple iPad Dock.

Some of you may have noticed that in the past a number of Apple products have been featured here. While we find that Apple does make a number of useful products, we aren’t Apple fanboys. A product is one thing. The actions and policies of an entire company is something else. Apple does a lot of things we don’t approve of. And like any other company, they occasionally turn out a bad product.

The Apple iPad Dock is supposed to be a convenient stand where you can mount your iPad for use as a digital picture frame, to recharge, or even to sync to your computer. To live up to this promise, it has to be able to connect easily to your computer or power adapter, it has to hold the iPad stably, and it has to allow the user to easily connect and disconnect the iPad from the stand. And if it did all that, it might manage to justify the $29.99 price tag.

The Dock comes in a small white box, which it very nearly fills. At first glance the Dock appears to be just a small chunk of aluminum, painted white, and with an aluminum flange as a “back support” for the iPad. Closer examination shows that it isn’t a solid chunk of aluminum, although it feels like one. On the back of the Dock is a port for a the iPad connector and a stereo line out jack. On the top in front of the support flange is a male iPad connector. The bottom of the Dock is covered by a rubber base. A hard plastic “pad” runs along the top around the iPad connector to “cushion” your iPad when it is connected. So far, this doesn’t sound too bad, right?

Well, here is where things start falling apart. In order to mount your iPad on the dock you have to remove it from whatever case you may have on it, unless your case is one of the few that is either thin enough to fit the narrow tolerances between the iPad connector and the support flange, or it has a panel that opens up the case to allow the iPad to be docked. Oh, and you did want your iPad to be displayed in portrait mode, right? Because landscape isn’t an option here. So it isn’t as if you could plug it into the Dock and then watch movies on your iPad.

And here is the point where the iPad Dock fails. Let’s say you’ve docked your iPad to let it charge overnight. It’s morning now, and you’re running late. So you’ve grabbed your coffee and tucked your paper under your arm. Now you just need to grab your iPad and head to work. You reach for the iPad…

… and this happens. As heavy as it feels, the Dock is so light that it comes with the iPad when you try to pick it up. Removing the iPad from the Dock requires both hands and a good solid grip. It is actually faster and easier to disconnect a standard docking cable from your iPad than it is to free it from the limpet-like grip of the iPad Dock. It is worse than useless then. Instead of making life easier, it makes it harder. From what I have seen online, many people have managed to create better and more useful docks by fashioning them out of Legos, instead. Don’t waste your money. We certainly wish we hadn’t gotten one.

I blog occasionally in my spare time (explains the infrequency) and so I know how hard it is to put out a blog post that’s timely or funny or interesting on some kind of regular basis. Today I want to introduce you to a blogger that manages to do all of the above, or at least enough of the above to earn a passing grade. @RhodesTer, aka Dave, is a San Francisco based writer who is even now writing about what life’s like as a resident of that fair city. Knowing him there will be enough snark/sass/smartassery mixed in with the commentary to set it apart from other Bay blogs. You can find that blog here.
Dave’s Twitter account is a little slice of what his blog is about. He let’s you know when new posts go up, but he also drops the occasional witticism. He’s also what I’ll call a communicator. When you @ him, in my experience, you’ll always get an @ back even if it’s just him using you as a straight man.

So there you go. You have a new tweeter to follow, a new blog to read, and all that for the low, low price of zero dollars. Have a good weekend and look for new posts and a shiny new non-Blogger website coming your way soon!

This Friday I am paying my respects to @NLowell, a writer, podcaster, and the creator of stories so good, they can only be referred to as podcasting crack. Nathan Lowell is a man who has become a legend in his own time. His prowess at completing projects draws the awe and envy of the podcasting community, and accounts of his exploits continue to grow in the retelling. He once won NaNoWriMo in 15 days, with a goal of 100,000 words. His name has even become a unit of measure to which writers aspire: the Lowell. Instead of uploading a new episode every couple weeks, he uploads them every couple of days, in four and 5 episode chunks. Which is fair, as listeners easily devour at least four chapters a day. He has raised the bar of the straight read to a new standard. And that is just the true stuff! For the latest news on his work, head over to http://solarclipper.com/.

Somehow, when @NLowell isn’t pumping out new novels, or recording them, or doing voice acting for someone else’s novels, he has time for Twitter. Or maybe he Tweets while doing all the rest. Some say that time has no hold over him. I just know that I enjoy Nathan’s dry wit and straightforward, easygoing way. Just about all of his tweeting is conversational, so join in the conversation! I think you’ll be glad you did.

Things are going to be a little quiet here as we try to gear up for the move to the new servers. We’re changing platforms again, so there is some considerable amount of work to do. But Scott will be back next week with another Follow Friday. Until then, have a good one!

In parts one and two of this series I talked to you about the encryption software native to the newer versions of Windows. Contrary to what some would like to believe there are a lot of older versions of Windows still running around out there. There are also a number of operating systems other than those put out by Microsoft that people are fond of. And that’s not counting people that aren’t fond of Vista or Windows 7. So what if you find yourself in this group?
One of the most popular file encryption software packages out there is absolutely free. TrueCrypt, an open-source product of the TrueCrypt Foundation, can do everything BitLocker and BitLocker To Go can do. It also runs on both the Mac and Linux operating systems. The only major drawback to it is, if you forget the password, the data will not be recoverable. Provided you make good use of the tutorial though, TrueCrypt is safe to use and will keep your data as secure as BitLocker.

The main screen is very simple. From here you can create a volume. What’s a volume you might well ask? In computer terms it’s a single accessible storage area. In the case of TrueCrypt this can be anything from a file folder you create, to an entire system drive. For most users it’s likely enough to just create a single file and encrypt that. The wizards and documentation for TrueCrypt make it fairly easy for even beginners to use the software and ensure (as much as it’s possible) to protect their data in just a few minutes.

There are more advanced uses for this software however. You can create hidden volumes, even hiding an entire operating system and creating a dummy operating system as a front. It also has a portable mode, similar to Bitlocker To Go, that allows you to use a file encrypted with TrueCrypt on a computer that doesn’t have the software installed. Encrypted files can also be shared across networks. All of these features make TrueCrypt more than a match for the Microsoft products.

There are a few caveats with this software though. While the documentation is good and the available forums offer you a fair amount of support, this is free software and you have to do your own troubleshooting. TrueCrypt may not be as easy to use for true novices. I would strongly recommend installing this and familiarizing yourself with it using data that you are willing to lose before committing your important documents to it. Finally, as with the Bitlocker program, once you encrypt something, decrypting it is, by design, not easy. If you lose or forget the password consider your data gone.

Encrypting your devices may seem like something straight out of a spy novel. With more and more people filing taxes, banking, and shopping through their computers though, it’s an important step in making sure that only the right people have access to your personal data. The software mentioned here are only a few of the widely available options and are certainly not a guarantee. Still, much like locking your house or car when you leave, any step that can deter a thief or make their job harder is a step worth taking.

Today’s Follow Friday recommendation is @thegearheart. There are people out there who are criminally under followed. Now I realize that not everyone wants a thousand plus follows and I respect that. Still, when you’ve got someone as talented as Alex White running around on Twitter, you’d hope that he’d be a little closer.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “who is Alex White and what is The Gearheart?”

Well I’m glad you asked. @thegearheart is the Twitter account associated with Alex’s podcast of the same name. It’s got elements of noir, steampunk, adventure fiction, and fantasy. Like a lot of works in the podcast fiction universe it not only defies niches it laughs in their faces. This project is not all he does though. He’s also an accomplished artist and has released an album that contains an original score that he wrote and produced.

When it comes to his Twitter feed, Alex and I have a lot in common. He’s a conversationalist. While he uses this feed primarily to release updates about the podcast work, he’s all about the interaction. I think that’s key for any artist who uses social media. Make sure you are more than a commercial for your product.

So, with one more quality tweeter added to your list, make sure that you have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve, however you chose to celebrate it!

This week, I’d like to introduce you to @BrightEyedDyer, a writer, podcaster and podcast editor, and one of the most sought after dyers ever to grace Balticon. Sue Taliaferro, as she is otherwise known, not only dyes yarn, but she is known for creating the most striking color combinations. If you’re into the fiber arts, you can find out more about that side of her by checking out her blog, Dyed Bright Here, or her Etsy store. But the most coveted yarns that she produces are the are the Balticon Limited Edition Colorways. These are special color sets that are each inspired by a specific novel written by one of the authors who frequent Balticon‘s literary track. The sets are released each year at Balticon on Memorial Day weekend.

On Twitter, @BrightEyedDyer discusses many of the events of her daily life which usually involve the trials and tribulations of being a mother with teenagers. But there are times when she waxes philosophical, or makes mention of the writing, recording, or editing that she does for podcasts. She also has respectable geek cred, and can hold her own in discussions about books, movies, and TV. She is also a talented photographer. And every few days, she’ll treat us to some samples of her poetry, in 140 character segments.

On behalf of myself and the rest of the staff here at The Nifty Tech Blog, I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, or whatever other winter holiday you celebrate. We hope that you’ve enjoyed the blog in the past year and that it has helped make your life better in some small way. Our fundraiser is still going on for another week, and if you have had a good year and would care to donate to help us move to a better hosting service in 2011, we would be very grateful. So far we’ve made 30% of our goal. It doesn’t look like we’re going to make that goal, unless we get a number of last minute donations, so we’ve been looking for a less expensive host than the one we originally had in mind. We hope to find a host that will still let us improve the quality of the site, and eliminate some of the pesky advertising, and still fit within the funds we’ve been able to raise.

I will be taking a bit of a vacation next week, but we will still have a Follow Friday next Friday, and the Monday following that we will have the last installment in Scott’s Scrambled Bits series. Happy Holidays, and have a good week!

[This week’s review for The Nifty Tech Blog is a Guest Review by author Philippa Ballantine. Pip is the author of Geist and the co-author of the forthcoming Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel. We are happy to have Pip’s review as part of her Blog Tour promoting the release of Geist.


Some notes not included in Pip’s review: Scrivener is published by Literature & Latte Ltd. and costs $45 . Up until this year, it has been Mac OS only, and developed by Keith Blount. But now Keith is assisted by a number of contributors, and a new Windows version is now in public beta. But enough of me, here’s Pip! Enjoy! – Editor]

Scrivener – by Philippa Ballantine

Scrivener has been my go to application for writing for the last three years. Ever since I got a Mac I’ve been using it. All my writing projects since 2007 have been on it, including Geist and Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences.

It has always been a great programme—and even more when you consider it was developed by one man.

Updates to Scrivener have been regular, but this is the first new edition at least since I started using it in 2007.

Scrivener allows writers to keep everything in their project together—not just their text, but also their research, their plot and their notes. This has always been the strength behind the programme, and why it has never been bested in this author’s opinion.

The new features in Scrivener 2.0 are well thought out, and some of them impressive—but it retains that awesome core of previous versions.

These are some of my favourite improvements.

The Full Screen mode is the best mode to write in. Your words on a black back drop and you can you to widen or shrink the view depending how you like to have it. In the new version you can now use the Inspector to read comments from this mode, rather than having to pop back to the main window constantly. It’s added yet another layer of flexibility to this view.

Compiling is the way to export your text once you are done with it. (I confess wincing on having to send MS Word files to my editor). One new feature under compile is the ability to now export as epub format or for the Kindle. This is a brilliant inclusion that I stood up and danced to see there. Finally at least, I do not have to deal with MS Word to get my epub done. It let’s you manipulate your ebook output in any number of ways- so it is uber flexible. I have yet to use this yet, but it won’t be long.

I have recently become a great fan of DropBox. A cloud based system for sharing and saving files, it has been invaluable—especially as I collaborate with people all over the globe. Also for an author keeping their files safe and secure is a big priority. One just needs to have one instance of losing (or thinking you’ve lost) your work, to teach you that lesson. Scrivener files can now be synced to Dropbox as Rich Text files. If I was collaborating with someone then Scrivener assures us we won’t be writing over each others work, by checking with the external Dropbox file if changes have been made. You can then sync back to your file.

There are a number of little additions that don’t rock my world, but are nice enough to have.

The name generator is a fun little inclusion, though not much use for a fantasy writer. However it does let you generate a number of names from various cultures, and I can see it would be a useful for those outside the speculative fiction genre.

It’s a purely aesthetic thing (at least for me as a novelist), but the introduction of page view is there. Now you can see how your text will look when compiled. It is supposedly included for screenwriters, but I really can’t speak to this.

Another little aesthetic tweak is the ability in Full Screen mode to choose your own background. I still prefer to keep mine black, so that I can focus just on what I am doing.

I am just getting into the Templates mode, but it is a great way of keeping things like character sheets which you will use again and again.

Since I have always been a Scrivener fan, this new version doesn’t need to convert me. However what it has done is give me even more reasons to recommend it to writers.

[Philippa Ballantine is a Fantasy author and podcaster and a former librarian. In the past year, she gave up the glories of Library Science in order to become a full time Author. Her novels Chasing the Bard and Digital Magic are available in print, electronic, and podcast form. Her unpublished novel (or perhaps unprinted?) Weather Child is available in podcast form. Her current podcast effort is the monthly Erotica a la Carte. Pip released her first Mass Market Paperback Geist from Ace in October 2010, and will be releasing her second Mass Market Paperback, along with Co-author Tee Morris, in May 2011 when Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel is published by Harper Voyager. Spectyr, the sequel to Geist, is expected June 2011. In my opinion, not a bad start. Pip is from Wellington, New Zealand, and was previously featured in a Follow Friday segment.


If you’d like to know more about Pip, visit her website: www.pjballantine.com, follow her on Twitter: @philippajane, or check out her Facebook Group page.


If you’d like to be a Guest Blogger for The Nifty Tech Blog, write to us at NiftyTech@NiftyTechBlog.com. Give an example of what you’d like to review and why it should be Nifty Tech. – Editor]

I don’t follow many “corporate” or commercial Twitter accounts. Life’s too short and I have too many real people* to follow. The exceptions I make are… exceptional. Enter Identity Guard, aka @IdentityG. This Twitter account provides its followers with some really solid information on the latest scams and risks that pop up on the internet. They’re very active in social media and have a podcast and blog where you can get additional information.

As consumers who rely on the internet more and more for everything from buying goods and services to keeping in touch with friends it’s good to recognize that there are some bad folks out there who want your information. Having a source of good information like Identity Guard is one weapon, among what should be many, to protect you from those people. So follow @IdentityG and have a good (and safe) weekend!


[Today is the last day for our current poll, so if you haven’t voted, please take a little time and respond. This is likely to be our last poll for a while, so please let your voice be heard.

We are still working on our fund-raising drive so that we can afford to move to a new server and bring you a number of improvements to the site. So far we’ve reached 25% of our goal, and we are very grateful to our donors. We know that some of you would like to donate, but can’t afford to, and others won’t donate for a number of other reasons. For those of you who are still on the fence about donating, let us tell you a little about what we’ve got planned. We’d like to reduce the amount of advertising on the site so we can dedicate more screen space to content. We are also planning on setting up forums where you can talk with other readers and discuss the latest reviews, products you wish we’d review, speculate wildly on future releases, or products you wish someone would produce. We want to create new categories of reviews to cover games and other ways that technology can enhance our lives without necessarily adding to the corporate bottom line. We hope that these are improvements you’d like to see, too.

We’ll be back next Monday with a new review. But on Sunday, December 19th, our Editor, will be launching a new podcast, The Shrinking Man Project, to follow his efforts to lose weight and get into shape. We hope that if you have some time to spare, you’ll check it out and offer your encouragement to this new project. – Editor]

*Note: If you run a corporate blog/Twitter account show some personality and/or give up some really crucial or interesting information.

Welcome back for another Follow Friday! This week I’d like to direct your attention to @Etherius, aka Chris Lester, high school teacher, podcaster, and creator of the Metamor City Podcast, and two time Parsec Award winner. Metamor City is a sci-fi/fantasy anthology set in a world where magic and technology work together. It is a city piled upon itself where skyways held up by magic and anti-grav divide the city into four social levels. Walking the streets of Metamor, you could meet gods, werewolves, vampires, psis, wizards, or even Eli’s own prophet. A place where the citizens can accept an ancient threefold curse and reshape their very bodies, or live out their lives as mere mortal humans. Oh, and there is the occasional elf, too. Chris presides over an open world where he allows others to come in and act out stories in his world. These stories are done as full cast productions and paint a vivid picture of a rich world, and demonstrate how we strive to create our own certainties in a world where anything is subject to change without notice.

Follow @Etherius on twitter, if you’re one of the few who hasn’t done so already, and you’ll be given insight into his creative view of the world. And treated to examples of his creative turn of phrase. Of course, along with this you’ll see the tired, and sometimes exasperated, school teacher. Chris definitely has a fertile mind and interesting viewpoints. Go see for yourself.

That is it for today. We still have a poll in progress, so if you haven’t voted, please take a little time and respond. We are still working on our fund-raising drive so that we can afford to move to a new server and bring you a number of improvements to the site. We understand that times are tough and not everyone can afford to spare a few bucks. If you do have a little extra, we hope that you’ll donate to something that you believe in. We’d be flattered if that happened to be us. Thanks again to those folks who have been generous enough to donate a few dollars, or to bring our site to the attention of their friends. We’ll see you all next week!

Previously on “Scrambled Bits” I told you about how to encrypt your computer’s hard drive using a Windows tool called Bit Locker. It’s fairly straightforward and better yet it’s free. Even more important than encrypting a PC’s hard drive, is encrypting the ubiquitous USB drives that so many people carry in their pockets. It’s easy enough to misplace them and without encryption any stranger can plug one into any PC and read its contents.

Windows 7, in the Enterprise and Ultimate Editions, offers that level of encryption with BitLocker To Go. There are certainly encryption tools independent of any operating systems, as I will talk about in a future installment, but if you do have Windows 7 then using Bit Locker To Go is a good place to start.

Enabling it is as easy as right clicking on the drive you wish to encrypt, choosing to enable it, and following the prompts to create a password and a recovery key. Creating a strong password of at least eight to ten characters using a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters is recommended.

As with Bit Locker, you should be careful to put the recovery key in a secure location, preferably not on your own home PC. If you lose the key and forget the password then the data will be unreadable. A couple of excellent websites to use to store the key off site include Dropbox and Evernote. Strong passwords (stronger than the sites recommend) are encouraged for any website you use as well.

So, since Bit Locker To Go is a Windows 7 only product, does that mean only Windows 7 computers will be able to read it? Not at all. When you set up a drive it installs a reader on an unencrypted part of the drive. This reader will work on any Windows XP or Vista machine. You will only be able to read any of the files though. Making changes or adding files to the drive in an older OS is not possible.

One last thing about using Bit Locker to Go. When you plug the drive in a computer you will have the option to show the password characters as you type them and the option to automatically unlock the drive on that particular computer from then on. It may seem an excess of caution, but I don’t recommend using either of those options. The show password option may be fine at home, but “shoulder surfing” for passwords in public areas is one of many free tools in a hacker’s bag of tricks. As for letting the computer remember your password, it’s good to get in the habit of you remembering your own password. In addition, public computers are prone to key loggers and other spy ware that can make a record of any data input on the PC. Even on your home PC, the password would be stored without being encrypted.

So those are the tools in Windows that will let you take the next step in keeping your data safe. What happens if you don’t have a PC or your machine isn’t new enough to take advantage of BitLocker? In the next and final installment I’ll show you a tool that will let you do the same things for the same low, low price of free and it works in any operating system.

The gentleman to the left is not an aging rock star, at least not in the traditional sense. As the blurb above suggests he is a well rounded individual and one well worth a follow. I got the opportunity to meet Jack (and yes I assume that’s his real name) at BSidesATL, an open source security conference in Atlanta and have been following him since then.

Information security has been an interest of mine for some time, though I’ve only been delving into it in the last year or so in a meaningful way. I’m following more people like Jack thanks to that interest. His tweets are more conversational than informational, similar to my own style, so you won’t be overwhelmed. He has strong opinions on a variety of tech with a focus on InfoSec and his blog is also well worth a read.

If you get an opportunity you should also check out any talks he gives. It looks like he’s a regular guest at the various BSides conferences and other cons around the country.

[Enjoy your weekend and be sure to check back on Monday for Part 2 of Scott’s Scrambled Bits series. We think you’ll like it.

We have now reached 25% of our goal in our hosting fundraiser. Thanks to everyone who has donated and supported us. We really appreciate your support in these tough financial times. If you haven’t donated, we ask you to consider sparing a buck or two to help us continue to bring you The Nifty Tech Blog. And we hope the new year brings good times and prosperity for all our readers. – Editor]

If you thought perhaps I had been detained by the TSA, or hospitalized in a holiday traveling accident, then I am happy to report that I have only been detained by an insane holiday schedule. But it is still Friday, so there is still time for a Follow Friday post! This week I’d like to turn your attention to @SimonPegg, an internationally known character actor and author. Doesn’t sound familiar? Well, maybe you know some of the roles he’s played. Do you remember Tim Bisley from the TV series Spaced? No, too obscure, perhaps? How about Shaun from the 2004 cult classic film Shaun of the Dead? Or maybe you remember him as The Editor from the 2005 season of Doctor Who? Or Benji Dunn from 2006’s Mission: Impossible III? That’s the guy that helped Tom Cruise’s character track down his girlfriend. Or you might have seen him as Nicholas Angel in 2007’s hit comedy Hot Fuzz. But I imagine that most people will recognize him as Scotty from 2009’s re-boot of Star Trek. And in a few days, you’ll have a chance to hear him as the voice of Reepicheep in the upcoming movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Simon also wrote Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz, and a variety of other screenplays over the years. His quirky sense of humor has made him into an icon of British Comedy. You can find more about what Simon is up to at his official website Peggster.net, or via his new iPhone app.

So what is @SimonPegg like on Twitter? Glad you asked! Simon applies that same quirky humor and sends up… well, just about everything! From things he sees while walking his dog, Minnie, to world politics, to show business, or even Twitter itself, Simon expresses himself in a way that is almost certain to bemuse and entertain. His particular turn of phrase will either amuse or confuse. I mean, when was the last time that you heard someone say that he was going to go walk the dog even though he really needs to do a Number 3 himself? If you were following @SimonPegg, the answer would be last Tuesday.

I hope everyone has had a good week, and those persons celebrating Thanksgiving this week have not indulged too much. We’ll be back with another Follow Friday next week, and we should have the next edition of Scott Roche’s Scrabled Bits series, unless his NaNoWriMo effort has him on the ropes. Rest assured we will have a review! We hope you’ve been enjoying the reviews, and hope that you’ll take the time to vote in the current poll. We are still trying to raise funds to be able to move to a better host in 2011, and if you could spare a few dollars to help out, or some time to help spread the word about The Nifty Tech Blog, it would help out a lot! We’ve only managed to raise 10% of our goal so far, so every little bit helps. Until next week, have a good one!

This is a review that has been a long time in coming. For some of you I’m sure it seems like it was too long. But we won’t review something on The Nifty Tech Blog until we have had a chance to work with it for at least a month, so if you’ve been waiting anxiously for this review since we posted the Zoom H1 Unboxing back at the beginning of September, we’re sorry for the wait. We’ve spent that time learning the Zoom H1 thoroughly and determining how it stacks up against other products. We hope that you’ll agree that the wait has been worth it.

First, the basics. The Zoom H1 is made by Sampson Technologies. After a couple of delays this summer, it was released on August 20th and almost immediately sold out. Several resellers found that they couldn’t complete all of their pre-orders until they received their second shipment of units. There are a number of places online that you can buy the Zoom H1, and while the list price is often quoted as being $159.99, it appears to be universally “discounted” to $99. We put discounted in quotes, because the listed price for the Zoom H1 in the original press release from Sampson Tech said $99. To us, the rest of it looks like marketing hyperbole. We bought the H1 along with the H1 Handy Recorder Accessory Package, which has a street price around $25. The H1 is compatible with any computer that can read SD cards or USB drives.

Next, it is important to remember that the H1 is not a microphone. The H1 is a complete recording system. It is incredibly light and portable. The entire unit, with flash card and battery weighs about an ounce and fits easily into a pocket with room to spare. The H1 ships with a AA battery and a 2 GB micro SD card in the box, so you are able to get the unit out of the box, set it up turn it on, and get it running in under 10 minutes. All without even looking at the instructions. Just look at the unboxing video again. I did just that.

The H1 is aimed at providing near professional quality in a package that is simple enough for the average consumer to use easily and effectively. For veterans of Sampson’s previous Handy Recorder line, the H4, H4N, and the H2, the H1 has a few welcome surprises. The H1 only records a single input source. That source is either the built in stereo condenser microphones in the XY configuration at the top of the unit, or an external input that plugs in on the right side of the unit with a 1/8th inch stereo jack. Recording starts and stops with a single press of the big button on the front of the unit, a departure from the H2 and H4, which required a double press of the record button to get things started. Input levels are easily adjusted with the buttons just underneath the input jack, allowing you to adjust the sensitivity of the unit to the level of the sound you’re recording.

If you want to monitor what you’re recording, plug in your favorite set of headphones on the left side of the unit and adjust your output volume with the buttons just underneath it. Or, if you don’t have your headphones with you, you can review recordings you’ve made on the built in speaker on the underside of the unit.

The H1 comes with a 2 GB micro SD card, but can take micro SD cards up to 32 GB in size. The H1 uses the FAT file system and will format the micro SD card appropriately. How much recording time you get out of your SD card depends on what settings you choose. You can record in either MP3 for WAV format and at varying levels of quality. For our testing, we got a 16 GB micro SD card, and when recording in WAV format at 44 Khz and 16 bit sound, that gives us over 24 hours of recording time. And that isn’t the highest quality setting the unit has, just the highest practical one to use.

One selects between MP3 and WAV formats via one of three switches on the back of the unit. The other two switches activate the Lo Cut features, a form of onboard noise reduction, and the Auto Level feature, which adjusts the sensitivity of the mic according to the level of ambient sound in the area. Auto Level is useful when recording in areas where the sound level will rise and fall without warning, such as an airport or a bus terminal. The one issue with the Auto Level is that it tends to adjust the level in steps which you can hear in the playback. The advantage is that you can record audio that progresses from a whisper to a scream and have all of it perfectly understandable without ever overloading the listeners ears. In our tests, we were actually able to hear the sound of air moving through the air ducts from across the room. This unit really has a lot of range.

It is also fairly energy efficient. The H1 comes with a single AA battery, which provides all the power that it needs for 10 hours of recording. If you already carry a few rechargeable AA batteries and a charger, you should be good to go with the H1. If not, you can power the unit with the AC adapter and the USB cable from the accessory kit, or pick up new batteries from your local convenience store.

If all you get is the H1, you will have a few hurdles to overcome. While the unit does have a USB port, it doesn’t come with a USB cable, so if you want to copy your recorded audio to your computer you’ll need some kind of SD card reader. The micro SD card that comes with the unit also comes with a micro SD to SD adapter, so you’re good there. The H1 also lacks a wind screen, so you’ll have to be careful to avoid pops and breathing across the microphones as they will pick it up.

If you pick up the Accessory Pack like we did, it really solves a lot of issues. The accessory pack comes with a small tripod, a Padded shell case that fits just the H1 and a spare SD card, a foam windscreen, the AC adapter, a USB cable, and an item they describe as a mic clip adapter. This is really just a handle with a screw protruding out the top. This fits into the standard camera style tripod fitting on the back of the H1. This lets you aim the H1 pistol style, which could be handy for mounting on a camera or recording a distant audio source. The USB cable and power adapter are worth the price of the kit in my opinion. While the H1 will not recharge a battery through the use of the charger, being able to power up the unit from the computer to copy off sound files or from available wall power when recording, will help preserve your battery life. When the H1 is connected to a computer by the USB cable, it starts up in USB mode, making the micro SD card available to the computer. In this mode you can’t record, unfortunately. If instead of plugging into a computer, you use the USB cable to plug into the AC adapter, you can run the unit from wall power while recording. The windscreen does a great job of cleaning up incidental noise from wind and breathing and ours now pretty much lives on the H1. The tripod is sadly a pretty cheap unit. You will probably be better served by finding an inexpensive camera tripod on your own if you need something like this. The case is a bit of a toss-up. it is nicely made and will go conveniently on your belt, but since it only accommodates the naked H1, we are left wanting space to carry the windscreen as well.

The shape and the size of the H1 make it very tempting to treat it like a normal microphone, and for mobile applications, you can pretty much do that. But it doesn’t work in the studio, since the H1 doesn’t have any sort of digital output for your audio. You can use the analog output from the unit to patch it into a sound board but that would mean that you’re going from analog to digital to analog to mixer to digital in order to get the sound onto your computer. This may work well enough for your particular applications, but it doesn’t really make for accurate sound recording.

And in the end, the real question you have to ask yourself is “What kind of sound recording quality am I getting for my $100 when I buy the H1?” To answer that question, we went and talked to John Taylor Williams, aka @Wryneckstudio, a professional sound engineer and podcaster (http://livingproofbrewcast.com/), and got his help comparing the Zoom H1 against several other professional and consumer grade microphones. To give you an idea of what each of these mics sound like, we recorded parts of our conversation so you can listen to them and judge for yourself. To get the full effect of these audio files, your best bet is to plug in your best set of earphones and listen through them when playing back each file.

We started off with the MXL-991. This is a small diaphragm condenser mic routed through John’s sound board. A condenser microphone uses capacitance changes to convert sound into electrical impulses, or in this case, digital data. Condenser mics are usually very small and can be found in everything from telephones to high end microphones. Condenser mics require a power source in order to record sound. John added an external pop filter to this mic for our recording. This is a professional quality microphone, but if you listen to the audio, you should notice a certain background hum of floor noise, and that the quality of the sound drops off quickly unless the speaker is close to the mic and directly in front of it. Floor noise is the level of sound picked up by a microphone when recording a silent room. Literally it is the sound of silence, and it is different for every microphone. The noise floor is the level of floor noise that a particular microphone picks up. It sounds a little confusing at first, but when we started talking those terms, it quickly makes sense. John describes the 991 as a great podium mic because it will give good sound at a fixed distance, but drops off external noise.

Next up was the MXL-990. This is a large diaphragm condenser mic, with a built in windscreen. The 990 has a very similar level of floor noise, and also tends to drop off quality when the speaker isn’t directly front and center on the mike, although it doesn’t drop off as quickly as the 991. This mic required more gain to get the same results as the 991. This either means the speaker must project more into the mic, or the output level of the mic must be raised in comparison to everything else. Since this mike didn’t drop off as quickly as the 991, it was better for use as a single mic for recording a conversation with two or three people.

Then we tried out an Audio Technica DR-VX1. This is a dynamic microphone. Dynamic microphones use electrical induction to convert sound to electrical impulses, and they work much like a loudspeaker in reverse. These mics are usually tuned to a particular band of sound and are good for stage applications because they don’t feedback as easily. This mic had an odd issue that the floor noise when the stand was on the table was much higher than when it was being held. You can hear the background hum drop away when John picks up the mic. This mic also has a sweet spot very close to the microphone so the speaker pretty much has to address the mic directly, or crank up the gain so high that the floor noise becomes a palpable presence. This mic appears to be more suited for use in studio situations where someone can speak directly into the mic.

We followed that up with an EV-ND Dynamic mic. This was a mic that John had been using for about 15 years and which is still going strong, although somewhat battered about the edges. This mic did have a pronounced background hum that we would have had to remove in post-production had we been using it for any kind of straightforward voice work. In our off-mic conversation, John indicated that he still had use for this mic when recording in more intense environments where the background hum would either be overwhelmed, or where background noise would need to be removed in post anyway.

At this point we broke out John’s Zoom H4 Handy Recorder. The H4 and the H4N have been popular products for Sampson Tech for many years. One advantage that the H4 has is that you can plug in two XLR style microphones as inputs. On the H4, these input will override the onboard condenser microphones, but on the H4N, you can record up to four separate tracks simultaneously, the condensers, the two XLR inputs, and a separate line in input with a standard 1/8 th inch jack. This also makes the H4N a choice unit for field recording where portability and versatility is important. We found the H4 to have rich clear sound and a noise floor that didn’t require any post production correction. John even said that the silence from the H4 was good for using as a base track to create an ambient feel in a more heavily edited and noise-reduced compilation. An excellent recording unit, and a high mark to shoot for.

Now we came to the H1 at last! We started recording with the H1 without using the wind screen and we got the same kind of rich sound that we had gotten from the H4. We noted that the H1 had an even quieter noise floor than the H4. And then we put the wind screen, aka the mic afro, on the H1 and lowered the noise floor even more. We also noted that the H1 gave the best sound for speakers outside of the direct line of focus, making it an ideal unit for recording interviews or small discussion groups. The H1 is somewhat limited in that you can only record from the built in microphones or from the line in port, but some people are looking at that as a feature, allowing them to replace expensive wireless microphone setups with the H1 and an inexpensive lavaliere microphone. When all you need to record is a single source, the H1 does it well.

We took one more swipe a the H1 with the Auto Level function on to show how it would adapt to the available sound level and adjust the sensitivity of the mic. You can hear some of the transitions as the H1 adjusts in this recording. Of course, what got to us was the fact that no matter how loud or how quiet we got, everything was clear and understandable.

Lastly, we rounded things out with the Blue Snowball. The Snowball is a USB mic that connects directly into your computer, so this was the first mic we used (not counting the H4 and H1, which recorded internally) where we recorded audio without going though the mixing board. The Snowball has three condenser mikes inside the ball, and has three settings that determine how they are used. The first is a standard cardioid deployment which gives good sound for a speaker directly in front of the mic. The second is the same deployment with built in noise reduction, which tends to lower the ambient levels across the board for some reason. The last is an omni-directional setting, which provides good sound from any direction. The Snowball provided a decent sound and didn’t have any odd hums in the noise floor, but it did have its own oddities. I had worked with the Snowball previously, and found it difficult to get good audio levels from the Snowball when recording in Garage Band on my Mac. It wasn’t until I tried the Snowball with Skype that I determined that the issue was in Garage Band and not the Snowball. John found that the Snowball had a hollow sound to it. It is a respectable consumer level microphone, but it still didn’t match the quality of sound available with professional mics. We did ramble a bit and go back and forth with the Snowball settings, so this recording is a bit long.

After some analysis of the waveforms of the different audio tests and the quality of the recordings that each one produced, the verdict was that the H1 does indeed deliver professional quality sound at a consumer level price. For the same price as the Snowball, you get a unit that is light, easy to use, has long battery life, and gives superior sound. We found the H1 to be a great value all around. If you need a portable recorder, we think you’ll love the Zoom H1.

Today’s Follow Friday recommendation is Braindouche aka Meredith.

One thing I’ve never understood is following a bunch of people just… like… you. When I cast a tweet into the Grand Canyon of the Internet I don’t just want an echo back. So I follow people like Mer.

While I enjoy what she does with her podcast and she’s a talented web designer, when it comes to why I follow her on Twitter it gets down to her honesty. If I tweet something that’s complete bollocks, she calls me on it. She’s also not afraid to tweet what she’s thinking regardless of how unpopular the opinion might be.

She also has an absolutely absurd sense of humor and is an extreme geek. From me that’s a compliment. So if you find any of that appealing, you should totally follow Mer. If you don’t, well maybe you should follow her anyway. Different is good.