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Adobe BuzzWord Web App Mini Review

Luis — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:24:11 +0000

Adobe BuzzWord is a web application that allows you to write documents similar to Microsoft Word. Of course it doesn’t have all the functionality that MS Word have but at least you can set your mind to writing no matter where you are and whether you are on your computer or not.

I created an account sometime ago but it wasn’t until recently that I decided to give it a try, I’m writing this small review on it now. The menu system is very basic, you can change your font style, the size, and set up bold, italic, and underline text. You can also add colors, and set other parameters like paragraph style, lists, add an image, a table or a comment, these are again very basic functionality.

buzzword

Much like an application you have a simple menus on the top of the screen, other than regular cut, copy, and paste there are very interesting feature like sharing and exporting. The exporting feature is very useful, it allows you to export to MS Word, HTML, Plain text among others, but the most useful to me is the exporting to PDF. I exported this post to several formats and all of them looked great, the PDF looks awesome and is perfect for stuff like resumes so that no one change what you send to them.

The sharing feature is very basic yet useful, let say you are co-writing a document with someone else you can add them to the list of contacts, per document, and have them contribute or correct your work. You can add as many co-writers as you want, copy co-writers list to add it to another document, and remove single co-writers. You have auto-saving options, spell checker and other basic writing tools which makes this web application perfect for the casual writing that need’s collaboration.

To top it off its free and yet we don’t know if it will continue to be free in the future. You can sign up at http://www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/, and start collaborating now with your friends, co-workers, or school buddies.

Bluetooth Mouse for Mac, Revisited.

Luis — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 12:50:54 +0000

On an article published on November 2007 I talked about my favorite mouse, long time has passed and I have changedmouse several times. I finally found one that I like, the Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, and I’m loving this little mice, I picked this one up from OfficeDepot for $30 while on sale about a month ago.

This mouse is lightweight, comes with a pouch for carrying it while on the go, and it doesn’t use as much batteries as other wireless options. The downside is that to make all the buttons work I had to buy a little software called USB Overdrive. Before I dive into details, let me say that this is not my first Microsoft mice and both of them were excellent, this is my second must have from Microsoft, when I get a new MacBook I always install MS Office then get a MS wireless mouse.

I chose this Microsoft mice over Apple’s Bluetooth mighty mouse because of the shape, I have no other complaint on Apple’s hardware, the Apple mouse works great but the shape is a bit odd for my small hands. While some Microsoft mouse are a bit too small for my hands, the Bluetooth 5000 is a perfect fit, it’s been a month since I got it and I’m already used to it.

This mouse has a total of 4 buttons and one scroll wheel, the regular right click and left click, one button for undo or back positioned right behind my right hand thumb, and the scroll wheel button which I use to launch OS X Dashboard. When I first start using it, I the scroll wheel button and the “back or undo” button were not working, this was because there are no drivers for this mouse compatible with OS X. I tried two pieces of software, SteerMouse which didn’t work, and USB Overdrive which worked perfectly.

After installing USB Overdrive the mice is fully functional and one of the nice things about USB Overdrive is that you can program the buttons to work differently with different applications. On iTunes you can set the third button to play/pause, on MS Word you can set it to undo, on Safari you can set it to go back to the pervious page, you get the point. In addition, USB Overdrive can let you take good control of a joystick if you do gaming on your Mac, the software is only $20 and they are working on a 64-bit version for Snow Leopard if you care to know but in the meantime the 32-bit version works fine.

One tip you may want to apply to your Mac if you get this mice, go to System Preference, Bluetooth, Advanced, and disable the option to have the mouse wake your computer from sleep. The reasoning behind this is that if you get both your Notebook and your mice on a back pack and you forget that your mice is on, it will try to wake your computer every time it detects movement. You may think that this is easily solved by turning off your mice, but what if you forget. I rather find myself with no battery on the mice than on my notebook.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask, if you like this post and wish to buy the Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 Mac/Windows mice, use this link to make your purchase on Amazon and help us continue our research. If you have any suggestion for us or for anyone for a different mice alternative, don’t be shy, we are open to all suggestion from our readership, thanks.

iPhone Visual Voicemail Reset

Luis — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:24:42 +0000

I recently moved from a state to another within the Unites States of America and consequently got new numbers with different area code for my iPhone. When you transfer from states AT&T called this a relocation of service and they usually close your account and open a new one. In this process, AT&T reset your account and everything on it causing your voicemail to be reset as well.

After setting up my iPhone I noticed that my visual voicemail was not working on my iPhone 3G, I proceeded to call AT&T and they customer representative that helped me exhausted all possible options on his handbook before he decided to escalate the issue to tech support or whatever the next line of help for voicemail is. They reset my account a couple of times until the lady told me to reset the network settings on my phone and that did the trick.

The path to get to the network setting reset option is Settings>General>Reset>Reset Network Settings, the only thing you loose is any Wi-Fi network settings and its passwords. When you go back to the Visual Voicemail interface you can set it up normally without any issues. At least that worked for me, you should try it while on the phone with AT&T because they have to reset the voicemail as well so you can have a successful set up process.

Other than that, I had no problems transferring the lines, if you are relocating make sure you do a full back up of your iPhone on iTunes in the event your transfer is not as smooth as mine. If you have any questions, leave it on the comments section of this article, you never know if your questions can end up helping others in the community.

Giving Up A Domain Name

Luis — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:41:02 +0000

Some domain names never catch up, often the original idea is replaced by some other idea or by a newer, greatest domain name. In my case, I originally started blogging using LuMenCreativeGroup.com, after sometime of using it I was decided to get a shorter domain name, and I did. I found LwEEs.com, and the other family of domains like LwEEs.net and LwEEs.info, giving me the shortness I wanted in a domain name and the exclusivity of a domain name that describes me (my name is Luis) and that is easy to remember.

Giving up the domain was not an easy decision, after all it was just a small amount of money what I needed to keep it in my portfolio, but I wasn’t using it anymore. I did something that I think was the smart way to do, since the domain had a WordPress installation on it, I decided to install a plugin named “Redirection” on it. One of the great functions of this great plugin is that it gives you a detail report of what pages still have some traffic on your website.

I analyzed the data and only pages on the blog section of the site had links to other pages on my site. This gave me the security I needed to feel sure about deleting the whole site and giving up the domain name. I could have try to sell it, but really, selling is not one of my strongest points, also with such a long domain name, who would have really wanted it. I have never try to sell a site before, how is this done? If you have ever sold a site I would like to hear from you, leave a comment on this post to discuss with the community.

Future Proofing Your Social Media Links

Luis — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:36:29 +0000

I was checking some old links using a handy WordPress plugin called Redirection (you should try it if you are in WordPress) and I found some old links to Pownce. For those of you who don’t know, Pownce was a twitter like website but with far more functionality, it was a Kevin Rose and associates work and while I was enjoying it, not many people did.

As of December 15, 2008, Pownce closed it doors and the guys at Six Apart took over the project but as of today they haven’t do much with it. Which means, the site still down and there’s nothing else to see except a note from the team. Back to the why I’m mentioning this, my site had a link to pownce.com and this is not smart, many networking site are going to be created and will be gone in the next couple of years and I must do something about these links.

One site that I use a lot is twitter, I mention twitter almost on every post, and this practice has to stop as well. I had an idea for a while but it wasn’t until I saw Elliott Back’s website that it hit me, he created a “Social” page with all his social networking links, giving him the option to direct people to this page and no matter how many times the social networks change, that will not affect his links on his posts because ideally the page will always be there.

The “Social” page is a tremendous idea, fascinating, I really love the concept and it doesn’t matter how you work out its implementation, as long as you have one, your links are covered. Elliot has Facebook updates, flickr photos, and other links on this page and it makes his site looks so professional and organized that I, in fact, will be copying his idea.

I’m looking forward to finish my “Social” page and even more, I would love to see a plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily create a page with all your social bookmarks. What is your social networking strategy? Do you have a dedicated page? Or dedicated links on your site? Share your thoughts with the community by leaving your comments on this post, thanks for stopping by.

The Best Job-Search Tip You Will Ever Get

Luis — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:03:10 +0000

I’ve been looking for a job for the last 4 months now, it’s crazy out there, there is way too much people looking for a job and the opportunities are scarce. To add to the frustration, the most popular places to look for a job are full of annoying ads that makes the job search a nightmare. I check everyday these sites looking for a job, jumping through a lot of junk on websites that are suppose to help in your job search, I’m just trying to warn you if you are starting to look at these websites.

The most popular job search website is CareerBuilder.com (Forbes, May 2009) which provides job seekers with great free job seeking tools but at a price. I’m not saying that you should not have advertising on your site, but these guys annoy you at a new level of annoyance. There are ads on every page, when you are creating or updating your profile every other page is an advertising page, the whole page.

I have advertising on my website, look around you can see it, but I don’t consider my ads to be intrusive or of bad taste, also I don’t bait you to click on anything or make you see a whole page ad before reading my content. I don’t split my post in several pages to keep you hanging around, that’s just not my style, I like to serve you with whatever you want an that’s it, you can go. I do have a script for asking people to subscribe to my RSS feed or you can subscribe to my newsletter, or even subscribe to my posts by email, but I don’t remind you every two seconds.

The last example is how these other sites fail, another annoying site is Monster.com, oh boy, you give them your email and you are guarantee to want to get rid of it. You get spam after spam, it is so unprofessional that I had to block them from emailing me, and these guys are number tree in popularity. On the other hand Yahoo HotJobs is not that bad, they do send you some stuff your way but noting as intrusive as the other guys mentioned before.

Yahoo HotJobs is second in popularity and SimplyHired.com and Indeed.com are fourth and fifth in popularity respectively but I haven’t had any experience with the last two. I have learned a lot from these sites and from recruiters too, if you are in an interview with an agency like Kelly or Randstad make sure to ask your recruiter for his/her opinion about your resume. They see hundreds of resume each week and they can tell you what’s good and what’s not.

To conclude I want to give you the best recommendation you can get for searching for a job on any of the above-mentioned sites, create a temporary email account that you can scrap when you are done searching. Trust me, you don’t want the whole wide web to know what your email address is and as soon as you are done searching, wait at least a month and delete the account. The wait time is recommended because you never now if a better option becomes available or if your employer is not what you really want for an employer.

Here is a link to the most popular sites for getting a free email account, and the link to Forbes article about the most popular job seeking sites. If you have any questions, please contact me using the contact form in the “About Me” page on this website. If you enjoyed this article forward it to a friend, subscribe to my blog and if you want, follow me on twitter.

Pirating Music Equals Money Trouble

Luis — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:52:37 +0000

Almost everyone has at some point pirated music in their lifetime, some people do it every day ignoring that they are actually breaking the law. Kids do it all the time, I know of a few that have extensive music libraries from programs like LimeWire, they believe that because they get access via this software, the stuff they have there is free to take.

In the news we have the case of Jamie Thomas defending herself in courts against the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), which is charging her with 24 counts of pirating music over the Internet. When you study Jamie’s case you get into some nasty details of how this mess got to be, allegedly Ms. Thomas had available for download, via a peer-to-peer site, 24 songs that she owned.

Her login name on this peer-to-peer site was the same as her login name used in other social networking sites, and email providers, and this is how the RIAA was able to determine that she was the person committing the crime. I know that by now you should have a bunch of questions, I’ll do my best to explain everything.

The RIAA represents several companies in the music industry business, their main purpose is to protect such companies from the harm of illegal activities, mainly pirating. The common consensus among the blogosphere is that the RIAA is trying to set an example with the Jamie Thomas case by punishing her as bad as they can.

You can read all about this case around the web but the important thing here is to learn from others and prevent this from happening to you. Your children might be getting you in more trouble than what you may think, the first step you should take is to go through your children computer and search for peer-to-peer or file-sharing software. This kind of software can be use for legal distribution of media content but is more than often used for downloading pirated material.

There is a large variety of peer-to-peer or file-sharing software available for download, here are some examples of them, Gnutella, Kazaa, BitTorrent, LimeWire and eDonkey2000. Also you can scan through their music library, if you think that the amount of songs is far more than what you can pay for, they you may be in trouble.

There is no way to hide from being discovered, and while there are some tactics that allows you to try to hide, they are not perfect and one mistake can drive you to bankruptcy. The RIAA is asking the Internet Service Providers (ISP) to help in the investigations of pirating they are conducting, even when they are publicly stating that they will start taking other measurements to combat pirating you should not let your guard down.

The approach that the RIAA is taking now is to ask the ISPs to disconnect anyone from the Internet that is caught pirating any kind of material over the web. This measure is being criticized because what if you share your connection with a pirate unknowingly, and then you are going to suffer the punishment as well. The bottom line is that pirating is a crime and artists are suffering the pain because those who decide to steal music.

What is your take on piracy? What do you think of having your Internet connection down because of someone else pirating music? Have you had any kind of problems with the authorities because of Internet activities? Share your thoughts with us to help other stay out of trouble, don’t forget to follow me on twitter.

dimdim is the World Easiest Web Conference Tool

Luis — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:35:55 +0000

I first heard about dimdim back in December 2008, back then I never put too much thought on this product mainly because I didn’t have a need, but things have changed. dimdim just turned 5.0 and with this new version, dimdim is now better than ever. With dimdim you can host a videoconference on the web, you can share your screen with others, share documents like PowerPoint presentations, etc.

You may be asking yourself what is so special about this software? Well, to start this is not a software based service, you don’t install anything on your computer, everything happens on the web. You just have to set up the conference on your end, using a web tool, and send the invitation, that’s it. You don’t have to install anything on your computer, neither has your invitees, everyone connect using a web portal that it actually works, and if you still have questions you here is a link to a video explaining how to use the service.

With dimdim you don’t have to be an expert to create a good impression on your co-workers or friends, or investors and as if this wasn’t enough you get to host conferences with up to 20 people for free, that’s right, nada, zero, no cost at all. Just follow this link and sign up for your own free dimdim account and you are good to go. The have several levels of service starting from free to $228 a year or $19 a month.

What makes dimdim the best presentation tool, other than being free, is that you have several ways to deliver the idea to your attendees. You can chat with your attendees publicly or privately, it works almost real time video or written. When you add a presentation to the service you have control of the presentation farther than what other services allows you. You can add annotations, signs, arrows, or any type of marks to your presentation to help it stand out.

You may be asking yourself if dimdim is the right tool for you, if you have to work in a collaboration environment, show presentations to an online group, or simply show people what your next big idea is, then yes this is the right tool for you. You have nothing to lose, click on this link to sign up and start enjoying the benefits of a great, secure website that allows you to communicate with others anytime.

If you have had any experience with dimdim or would like to recommend a different alternative, leave a comment on this post. If you have questions, you can email me using my contact form on my About Me page or simply leave your question as a comment on this post, I will try to help as much as I can to help you take advantage of this service. Before I forget, follow me on twitter.

Apple Releases New MacBook Pros

Luis — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:40:25 +0000

Apple had their so long awaited WWDC Keynote on June 8, 2009 where they released new notebooks, a phone, and some software updates. There is so much to be excited but the one thing that makes me go crazy is the new line of notebooks, essentially, Apple transform their lower line of notebooks into professional tools at affordable prices.

I have to talk about this because there is no better time to own an Apple notebook, these new notebooks outperform anything I have seen in the market today and will give you years of joy, but there is more if you buy one of these notebooks today (June 23, 2009) you are eligible to get Snow Leopard, the next update to Mac OS X, for only $9.95 USD via their uptodate program. Everything looks like good news at Cupertino, CA as WWDC ends and leaves everyone with a great taste in their mouth of how the future is shaping to be a great one for Mac users.

Onto the new notebooks, the new MacBook Pro line starts at only $1,199 USD and sports the latest and greatest of updates for small hardware inside a notebook. The processors (CPU) starts at 2.26 GHz which is a nice bump from 2.0 in the previous model, frontside bus is 1,066MHz and you can install up to 8GB of DDR3 Ram on it. Who can’t get excited with these specifications, when on earth you have heard of any other notebook that you can use for professional applications at $1,199 USD.

While all these sound great, it doesn’t end there, you get a beautiful LED display, NVIDIA graphics with 256MB of Shared DDR3 SDRAM, a FireWire 800 port, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, and up to 7 hours of battery life. If you think these are minor specs for a notebook, you are clueless, first off the NVIDIA graphics have been tested and proved to be a real screamer, leaving the need for discreet graphics out of question. The FireWire 800 port is a much needed addition as the FireWire was removed in the previous model, and this FireWire port is backward compatible with FireWire 400 with a special adapter, this is a win-win situation for every fan of the FireWire port.

The computer comes stock with a 160GB hard drive, which is enough for anyone with basic space needs on a notebook. Now the feature that really grabs me is the addition of a SD card reader in the machine, a slot that allegedly you can use to boot your machine. Imagine the possibilities, you could have to OS X loading from an SD card to boot your computer in seconds or you could install Windows on an SD card to dual booth without compromising your primary hard drive. This is the killer feature that has me most excited of all this announcement.

The notebook is not perfect, it has some minor flaws that in no way are a turn off for me, the first one is that the battery is sealed inside the notebook, leaving you the the only option of buying a replacement battery only from Apple or if you choose an approved third party provider you would need to ship your computer to have the battery replaced. The only other flaw I find on this little machines is the adding or changing memory or a new hard drive is harder than before due to the new unibody enclosure.

What makes this 13-inch notebook a pro, you may ask, well you have a FireWire 800 port, a backlit keyboard, and up to 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM. For me these are the right specs for a super machine, especially one that you can travel with it and it only weight 4.5 pounds. I will be selling my Early 2008 MacBook to get this new MacBook Pro and I can’t believe I’m even saying this. What do you think of the these new lineup from Apple? Excited?

JavaScript and Adobe Reader

Luis — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:14:32 +0000

Adobe Reader is the most popular software to read PDF documents and many people have them installed on their computers even without them knowing it. Some time ago, news surfaced about Adobe Reader having a security flaw that allows a hacker to infect computers when they try to read a PDF document. Here is a link to Adobe’s security bulletin where they explain what the flaw is, the best way to protect yourself from any vulnerability is to stay informed.

The security flaw is caused by the ability of Adobe Reader to run JavaScript, if you are worried about this you should know that you don’t need the JavaScript option for most PDF’s to be readable. In fact, I haven’t come across any document that takes useful advantage of JavaScript. If any of my readers know of a good a JavaScript implementation inside a PDF, please send some information to see what is that all about.

Time to protect yourself, other than having a good anti-virus, if you are on a PC, you can disable JavaScript globally in your Adobe Reader software to protect your computer. Head to your preferences pane of the Adobe Reader application and look for the JavaScript option and un-check it. You don’t need JavaScript to use Adobe Reader and while Adobe is saying that they fixed whatever was wrong with the Reader application you never know when the bad guys will have access to another security flaw in the JavaScript module.

A couple additional tips, make sure that your Adobe Reader has the updating function checked, and make sure your anti-virus is up-to-date too. If you have anything to say about this subject feel free to leave a comment on this article, also if you want you can follow me on twitter to stay up-to-date with more tips and tricks.