smart computer use?

Yeah! I’m just testing this out.

Well, it appears to work. I’ve just installed the WP to Twitter plugin and have posted this blog post automatically to Twitter. Great stuff!

This wasn’t the first one I tried. I also tried the Twitter Updater plugin, but it didn’t want to work and I couldn’t get any posts to go to Twitter. Oh well. Not sure what was wrong with it, but who knows.

Good to go! I can definitely recommend the WP to Twitter plugin, based on my own experience. It looks like it has a lot of options and worked on my first try. It uses the Cli.gs url shortening service as well. You’ll need to get an API key to make it work but it’s free to sign up for an account. It only took me about 2 minutes to make an account at Cli.gs and then get an API key.

I had the opportunity to read through a review of the Google Chrome 2.0 Beta over at TG Daily.

Personally, I like using Google Chrome because it is so simple. I tend to run it side-by-side with FireFox and have a certain lineup of sites that I like to view through Chrome just cause it seems so snappy!

From TG Daily:

Historically, moving from a 1.x to 2.0 version suggests a host of new improvements. Sadly in Google’s case, their Chrome 1.0 moving to 2.0 is just a marketing trick like the one we saw three months ago when Google removed the BETA label and proclaimed Chrome to be a finished product. On the bright side, however, 2.0 beta does feature a faster Javascript engine that could be reason enough to upgrade. They’ve also updated the WebKit rendering platform which enables full-page zoom and three other features that will find its audience. The question is: Will this “major” new version, once it comes out of beta, fall on deaf ears?

Certain feelings of disdain are felt through the article, mostly in regards to lack of features and to the strange handling of the Beta label by Google.

Speed is still one of the biggest draws for Google Chrome, and they are stepping this up by introducing a new Javascript engine dubbed “V8″.

Google claims that the first thing you might notice about this new beta is its speed improvement. How true! I’d started out by running beta on a low-end netbook and immediately noticed snappier performance. Google says the new beta performs 25 percent faster on Google’s V8 benchmark (known to be skewed towards Chrome’s V8 engine), and a whopping 35 percent faster on the common Sunspider Javascript benchmark — compared to its current stable version. In addition, the company claims that the browser is nearly twice as fast as the original beta version.

Another new feature that is covered in the review that I really like is the tab dragging and side-by-side capabilities. A quick demonstration:

Slick! I like the looks of that!

The other new features include:

• Full page zoom
• Auto-scrolling
• Auto-forms completion (TG claims it’s half-baked, haha)

One thing that I kinda chuckled about was their comments about the new features not necessarily justifying a new version:

If you’re like me, you’ll be wondering if four new features and a speedier Javascript engine justify the full 2.0 versioning. One would expect the beta version 2.0.169.1 of a browser to pack far more improvements over the current version 1.0.154.48, and if not then to be a 1.1 beta version.

This 2.0 beta simply updates the browser’s V8 Javascript engine, resulting in overall speed gains, and throws in the latest WebKit rendering platform that results in full-page zoom and auto scrolling. On top of that, the company coded two more feature, 1) forms auto-fill and 2) side-by-side view by tab dragging — of which 1) seems half-baked.

Overall, I’m going to be grabbing this 2.0 as soon as I can. I certainly like the speed of Chrome and see the new features as quite nice, even if they might not justify a full 2.0 release. Either way, it’s another browser to play with!

I run into a lot of situations where clients/colleagues/etc. need to know just enough about HTML to use a content management system or to do simple markup for simple web-based tasks.

For these people, they don’t need (or want) to know a ton of HTML and all the intricacies that go along with delving into web site development with HTML/CSS. They just need to be able to bold text, make headings, make lists and other small things. Usually their content management system or whatever other software they are using will take care of the rest of the formatting for them.

But, they do need to know some basics. And they need a reference for the basics.

I like to point them to this: http://werbach.com/barebones/barebones.html

This is a simple guide that outlines the HTML elements. It has the tags and stuff that I show them, so it’s there if they need reference, plus they can dig in and try to use some other HTML tags if needed.

I like this particular guide because it doesn’t go into how to implement a lot of the more advanced tag usage. For that reason, people that know a few HTML basics and need a reference will find it very accessible and non-overwhelming. It’s just a tag reference, so they can find what they can’t remember and not get too distracted by everything else.

I guess you could say that TwitterBerry is probably the simplest app I have on my Blackberry. It’s super simple. I open it, it asks me what I’m doing, I type and send, then I close. It’s simple. In that way, it mimicks it’s web counterpart. The Twitter web site is probably the simplest web site that most Twitter users use on a daily basis. That’s a good thing.

What I really like about TwitterBerry is that I don’t need to use SMS to tweet from my Blackberry. Instead, TwitterBerry works over the data network. That way, all the Twitter stuff on your phone is kept in it’s own app and doesn’t overrun your SMS activites. That was one of the first things I noticed when I started using SMS to tweet. I was using the SMS a lot and my text message communications were being invaded by Twitter related stuff. It was fine I guess but kinda annoying. No longer.

If you use Twitter and you have a Blackberry, I consider TwitterBerry indispensible.

Long story short, this software works really well for me.

I had been looking for a free piece of software to basically sync certain files from one computer hard drive to another, allowing me to back up and sync files automatically on a schedule.

I’ve used other software in the past to achieve this, but had never found one that I liked particularely well. Or, should I say, I had never found one that seemed to work particularly well.

Recently I found Karen’s Replicator.

The Replicator is currently on version 3.6.5 as a write this. It has been updated as recently as Nov 2008 so that’s always a good thing in the world of software! You never know when a favorite piece of software might no longer work or be supported any more!

From the Replicator web site:

Automatically backup files, directories, even entire drives! Karen’s Replicator copies selected files from one drive/folder to another. Source and Destination folders can reside anywhere on your network.

Options include repeated copies at intervals as short as a few minutes, or as long as several months, copy only files that have changed, and the replication of folder and file deletions.

New features allow you to specify which files should not be copied, and also which days a file should be skipped!

Sounds pretty much like what anybody would expect from Backup/Sync software.

Now, to my experience with the software.

I’ve been using it for about 1 month. It’s run great (I’m using Vista) and has not caused me any problems whatsoever. It has been working exactly as advertised. It syncs up my files with a backup on a nightly schedule. When the machine that my files are getting backed up to is not available, the Replicator remembers that and attempts to sync again automatically when able. I like it!

Now I don’t have to worry so much about backing anything up. Really, when you think about it, automating backups is the only way to go. That way you don’t have to think too hard about it and it just happens.