life, and a little more

Three New Gmail Themes

Sep 04

metalman777software, tech email, gmail, google, tech, themes, web No Comments

I’ve been using Gmail for very long time now.   It was to my great delight when the Gmail team introduced Themes for my favorite web based email client.

Today I noticed three more new themes in my settings area.

Orca’s Island is the first new theme.  It is a little drab and boring.  I doubt if I’ll use it.

High Score is very colorful retro theme that harkens back to the day of Super Mario Bros.

The last new theme is entitled Turf.  And yes, it is grass!

Ubiquity and Wisestamp – Firefox Essentials

Feb 10

metalman777software, tech, www firefox, gmail, tech, ubiquity, web, wisestamp No Comments

No, I’m not talking in another language.  Ubiquity and Wisestamp are two plugins for Mozilla Firefox that I have been playing with this week.

If you have ever used Quicksilver or Butler or Launchbar for the Mac, then you will be familiar with Ubiquity right away.  For those of you who are even further confused, just watch the video below:

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/1561578]

Ubiquity really does make your web browsing so much easier, especially if you use a laptop with no mouse.  I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and it is so easy to find something from the internet and send it to a friend via email or twitter.

Download it, play with it, and comment back and let me know how you like it.

Wisestamp is a very cool plugin that allows you to insert html signatures into your gmail, aol mail, hotmail, or yahoo mail account.

My custom signature is above, but you can customize it however you want!  If a custom, linkable signature for your email is something you want, then Wisestamp is something you must try.  Again, free software doesn’t cost you anything to try!

My Worst Nightmare Come True

Oct 25

metalman777Life, apple, tech hard drive failure, help!, tech No Comments

Anybody who knows me knows how much I love, love, love music.  Over the years I’ve acquired a massive music library, filling a 300 gigabyte hard drive full of mp3s and concert videos.  I moved everything onto an external drive a while back, just so all my beloved files would be safe.

Well, this weekend I had to move my computer desk so the carpet guys could lay some new carpet.  I took everything apart carefully, storing all my cords and external drives (I have two) in a place where no damage could come to them.

The carpet guys came and went and I get back to the task of putting my computer back together.  I plug in both my external drives and see that only one of them is turning on.  I start to get very nervous.  One drive is my backup drive for Leopard’s Time Machine, the other is my beloved iTunes Library hard drive.

Please God, please let the Time Machine drive be the one not working!!!  PUH-LEASE!!

Well, either God is just laughing or He is crying with me as it is my iTunes Library drive that won’t turn on.

I’m a little resourceful.  I go to a local computer store and buy a new external casing, hoping the controller board is just bad on the Maxtor casing it came in.  I get everything installed….and power it up….and nothing….

CRAP!! So now I’m at a loss.  Please, if anyone has any ideas, please let me know what to do!  The drive won’t power on at all and I hear data recover costs an arm and a leg.  Google searching hasn’t yielded any good results as of yet.

I have been known to pirate an album or two, but I’ve also legally bought an amazing amount of music.  Will Apple let me re-download it?

HELP!

Hellotxt.com – Cross Platform Greatness

Jul 25

metalman777Uncategorized, tech, www hellotxt.com, internet, status, tech, web 2.0 No Comments

WARNING: the following blog contains explicit tech talk and anyone not interested in geeky web 2.0 conversations (read: my wife) might just skip this edition of life, and a little more.

Try as I might, I just can not consolidate my online life into just one place.  I’m spread out all over the place.  Check out the sidebar to the right to see most of my online communities!

More and more I’m using this WordPress blog as my central web location, with all the aforementioned websites pointing here.  There have been some useful tools that let the Web 2.0 crowd interact with one another.  I’ve been using Facebook’s Twitter application to update my Facebook status from Twitter (as I can’t access Facebook at work, but can access Twitter).  I’ve been looking for something similar for Myspace.  Can’t access that website from work either!  What, my bosses actually want me to work?

So I finally stumbled upon hellotxt.com. It is a pretty useful tool if you are spread out all over the web like me.

To the right you can see all of the Web 2.0 services that Hellotxt works with.  Truthfully I hadn’t even heard of most ‘em!

Once you enter all of your information for all of your accounts you are presented with a text box to input your updates into.  I haven’t played with the picture or video feature, but it is nice to know that it is there if you need it.

Type in your update and it automatically sends it to the services you have selected.

Another nice feature of Hellotxt.com is the Social Time Line.  You can view all of your friends updates right in the Hellotxt framework.  Everything is centralized!  Facebook is not supported yet, but according to the website, it is coming soon.

Of course, Hellotxt wouldn’t be complete without the ability to send in updates via text messaging from your cell phone.  I only have a work cell with no ability to text, so I won’t be using this service.

All in all, hellotxt.com will be helping me out a lot. I’m just glad I can consolidate a little bit!

An Open Blog To Apple Computers

Apr 14

metalman777apple, tech apple, computers, tech No Comments

C’mon Apple! You aren’t Microsoft! Let’s get it together so the windoze lackeys can’t give us a hard time! This error looks like it is right out of Windows XP! We fanboys just can’t take it!!

Google Reader's Unintended Consequence

Apr 03

metalman777Life, tech, www google, rss, tech, web No Comments

I’ve been a voracious reader since the time I could hold a book. I love books – how the feel and how they look, and if I had a sense of smell, I’m sure I’d love that about them too.

Ask my kids. We’ve told them since they were little. They are not allowed to not like reading. Reading is the stuff of life!

So you can imagine my horror as I find myself not reading so many books as of late! I’m reading the same amount, but it just isn’t in book form. I blame Google. It’s all their fault.

They invented Google Reader, a place where I can collect all the news and info I want into one single place to read. I’ve never been a news junkie, but it turns out I just never had the technology to cater to my needs!

Google Reader is an RSS collector. I can find a blog or news feed that I really like and import that content into Google Reader. Now instead of having to check that blog or news feed every day, Google Reader automatically updates that blog or news feed for me. Everything is in one place!

Above you see the blue graphic of all the different categories of news and info that I personally subscribe too. (No cracks on the Battlestar Galactica Cindy!! I’m in touch with my inner nerd and I’m proud of it! Dwight Schrute was right in loving this show!!) Within each of those folders are sub folders of the individual feeds.

Being the Apple fan boy that I am, we’ll start with that folder. I subscribe to eight different blogs that all deal with Apple. You can see that some of those feeds are in bold and have a parenthesized number after it. Those are feeds that have items I have not read yet. The other entries that are not in bold have all been read. The number in parenthesis is how many new articles there are. These feeds update as soon as the author writes a new article, so I can have real time news at my fingertips. Below you will see another graphic of the actual news part of Google reader. This is the pane that actually displays the content of each feed.

Inside the apple-stuff folder are listed all my feeds. I can easily scroll through them using the “j” key on my keyboard. It makes reading a lot of news manageable!