The Smorgasbord

This is my review of “hulu.com”, the TV network and movie studio attempt to battle YouTube head to head.

I’ve been working online for 13 years. In that time we’ve seen the rise and fall of Napster, the birth of IM, online chat, and “social networking”. I’ve read that 70% of the country (or more) has a broadband connection. I was appreciating that fact today uploading 200K pictures to one of my web sites. Zing, zing, zing, all 100 of them were uploaded in just a few minutes. What does all this mean? The web is growing up. It’s maturing. It’s also changing how we live our lives, and what we watch and see and do. I was just telling my son the other day that I remember when I was a kid we had one tv in the family room and an antenna rotor. There were 6 channels to watch, the three major networks, one PBS, and two independant channels. In my house today we have a flat screen tv, DVD, VCR, a Wii, and a laptop in the family room. Every bedroom but one has a PC. Every bedroom has a tv and a DVD player. My son’s room has an Xbox 360 and 7 or 8 older classic game consoles. He also has a wireless mp3 player. We have a 3 base telephone set with a Vonage line, and 2 adults and 2 teens in the house have cell phones. The house has wired and wireless broadband throughout. Both of our cars have satellite radio.

In other words – there is no shortage of multimedia distractions in our home. I can’t imagine that we’re much different more or less than millions of other families. What this means is traditional media should be worried…VERY worried. Traditional broadcast media, or what we call “terrestrial tv and radio” – they should be the most worried of all. If cable and satellite tv haven’t already nearly killed them compared to their decades and decades of near total dominance – the web has usurped the rest of. But the web has also hurt traditional print media like newspaper and magazine sales, and it’s also hurt the recording and movie industries. Rather than try and embrace the “information superhighway” nearly all of these forms of “traditional media” have dragged their feet. Since the advent of the Internet has also meant the ease of “digital distrubution” some media have resorted to frivolous lawsuits against private citizens in a vain attempt to scare the public and keep themselves fat and happy. While YouTube is still a big of a mess (as far as copyright infringement and video quality are concerned), the model that has made it so successful is flourishing better than flowers in a manure pile.

I wasn’t surprised when NBC first announced it’s deal with YouTube. It seems like they were the first major network to make a deal with YouTube. Maybe it was that experiment that taugh them it could be done better. It wasn’t long ago I heard NBC was going to create their own online video network. As soon as I heard it I just said “whatever”, figuring that it would about as successful as all the other “video clones” currently sprouting up. And then last week I heard it was live on hulu.com.

Naturally – I had to check it out, and I have to admit I figured in less than 5 minutes I’d chalk it up to be a complete and utter failure.

When I went to hulu.com for the first time the first thing I noticed when browsing around was that multiple networks were participating. Bravo, Sci-Fi, FX, G4, Sony, Sundance, E!, Fox, Universal, NBC, the NBA, USA, WB, 20th Century Fox, the NHL and more had signed on.

In addition major movie studios such as Lionsgate, Metro Golwyn Mayer, and 20th Century Fox had signed on.

Even though it would appear that there are less than 1,000 full pieces of content within the site currently (based on the fact that you can browse them from one or two web pages), I think that the quality of the content indicates there is much, much more to come. Within just a few minutes I found that I could be instantly watching Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Family Guy, The Office, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ice Age, Point Break, Sideways, or Weekend at Bernies. These are major titles, and many current broadcast shows.

For the purposes of this review I chose to watch a movie – “The Big Lebowski”. I should mention that prior to this I had already signed up for a free “account” which you have to do to view content. It was nothing extravagant, just a simple form and then email verification. Which surprised me, because the movie I had chosen to watch was “rated R”.

I mean honestly – I was glad it was so easy to just “start watching”, but who’s to say I really was the appropriate age? They asked my age when I signed up, but both my teens are savvy enough just lie about that – as are the bulk of the web aware youth today. So after the obligatory “intended for mature audiences” screen, the next thing I’m faced with is of course an advertisement.

I was concerned about this at first, but in the scheme of things it’s really not that bad. If you look at this images check out the timeline at the bottom of the pic. The white dots in the timeline are commercials. For this two hour movie there are 11 dots, and added to the one at the beginning that’s 12 commercials for a two hour movie. These are 30 second commercials, and that amounts to 6 minutes of ads for the entire movie. Compare that to 24 minutes of commercials for two hours of television or 15 minutes of previews in the movie theater. All traditional media has always been based solely on this type of advertising model – it makes complete sense to just carry it to to the web. Oh – in addition in this image notice that wherever you move your mouse, the exact timestamp appears, which is handy for moving to any point in the timeline you would like (no you can’t forward past the commercials).

In this next image I show you the menus that appear when you mouse near the edges. At the bottom you’ve got the standard play/pause, timeline, and volume – but there are 4 options on the left and 4 options on the right.

The second from the top right is “Pop Out”, which allows you to watch the movie in it’s own browser window like this (the menu only stays when you mouse near the edge):

The “share” option leads you to a social media sharing menu with options for myspace, facebook, digg, windows live, del.icio.us, reddit, StumbleUpon, or Google Bookmarks. Look at this, major networks and movie studios brazenly asking us to “digg” them!?

Another option they give us is to email it to a friend:

And in an incredible YouTube ripoff moment they give us the ability to “embed” anything. Wow, you can embed a 2 hour movie in your blog? Why yes you can…

There are also options for “full screen” and even one to change the video quality from 360p to 480p. I applaud them for actually stating the quality without the usual “broadband” and “dialup” type options. I tried viewing the movie full screen in 480p, and it wasn’t choppy at all, it instantly buffered, and the quality was pretty good. There wasn’t much I didn’t like about the entire experience. I found that there were sections on the site for just “clips” and another for full length series and feature films. Searching was easy and brought expected results. Play was pretty instant and the entire site seems to be on a pretty good backbone with some pretty good servers and bandwidth. I know wonder that if the free vintage TV series at NBC.com I wrote about a few weeks back also run on this network (or not). I would have to presume “yes” since a search for the A-team on hulu.com brings immediate results.

In synopsis, I have to say that I am very impressed with Hulu and I’m very surprised that the major networks not “get the web” and aren’t yet again trying to screw us. One of the modern “conveniences” that has long since bothered me is the fact that modern media thinks that we (as consumers) are stupid. They blatantly believe they have the ability to charge us over and over and over again for the exact same content. Case and point – I paid full price for the Rolling Stones “Tattoo You” album when it came out when it was released in 1981. Then in about 1985 I bought in on cassette, and again probably about 1995 on CD. If I want to listen to it on my phone, Sprint wants me to buy it again – and even if I do (buy the full song) I have to pay $3.99 just to use “Start Me Up” as a ringtone. To play it on my iPod I have but the album again on iTunes, and for the privilege of listening to those Stones songs on my satellite radio – I have to pay a monthly subscription fee. Sometime in the near future I’ll probably be forced to buy it yet again in an “HD Audio” version. This same example could also have been the movie “The Blues Brothers” which I have now on both VCR and DVD. I’ve yet to try and view it on my iPod or one of our computers. “F” you guys! Don’t you get how sick of this I am? I don’t want to continue to buy “licenses” for the same content on different devices.

While Hulu doesn’t completely address this issue, it’s a start, and I hope that the other major players follow suit. As an online markete the thing I really find hilarious is the fact that major media are just figuring out the web, but the sex industry has been raking in over 300 billion online for many years now with the exact same model (give tons of free content away and sell loads of advertisement). If you want to see if hulu is for you or not – I give to you John Belush in one of my favorite SNL sketches “Samurai Delicatessen”:

Looking for “free online games” that are as good as Xbox live? These browser based games have PC features, and how can you beat free?

So I’m watching “Attack of the Show” the other day and they showed this new site called “InstantAction.com“. They hailed it as “Xbox live for the PC”, and if someone is ballsy enough to make that kind of claim – well, I just have to check it out. When they showed it on t.v. they said it was “social gaming network”. When you get an account, of course you’ll have an “inbox”, a “profile”, and a list of “friends” to play whenever you logon. The service is free (for now), and they have 4 full games that you can play in a web browser. There’s one game coming they showed on tv that’s not on there yet that looked an awful lot like a Metroid Prime ripoff. I don’t care if it’s a ripoff or not, as long as it’s free to play and cool.

So, I went to instantaction.com and created a new account. I logged in for the first time and just picked a random game to try. “Think Tanks” was the first game I checked out. It’s pretty simple, you can “start a game” or “join a game” (and of course play with others). You start with a little “My Party” box on top right where you can in effect “host your own room” and invite friends to play.

I decided to try “single game” – I mean, who wants to get slaughtered by real people the first time they play? I took about 3-4 minutes to download the game on broadband cable the first time, but once you have it – it loads right up. Also – I used Firefox, and it had to install a game launcher “add-on” extension and restart the browser the very first time. There are 12 worlds or “levels” you can play, I just opted for the default level 1 “Medulla Mesa”. When the game started I was impressed with the detail of the terrain. Your player is a short and stout little tank with turret on top. The arrows move you around the level, and your mouse aims the crosshairs of the turret, the mouse button fires. There are 7 other thanks, and you basically roam around the level and shoot at them and take them out before they do you. When you die, you come back after 3 seconds. This fact, and how the other players are shown on the map reminded me sooooo much of Halo it wasn’t funny. There are “powerups” throughout the level. I had a lot of fun playing, but really sucked because of the fact that I was on my laptop. You really need a real mouse and not a touchpad to stand a chance in this game. Here’s a snap of the gameplay action:

So the next game I tried was “Marble Blast” which was of course a blatant ripoff of Marble Mania. Neverless, a fun game in which you navigate your marble through different levels by avoiding pitfalls, jumping, and trying not to fall off ledges and down holes. In this game you have an “individual challege” where you “beat the clock” – or you can do the “realtime multiplayer”, which seems like it would be kind of weird for this kind of game. I guess you race other players when you play that way. If this type of “maze game” is your bag, you’ll love Marble Blast, especially ’cause it free! Here’s a pic of the action when I completed level 1:

The third game I tried was “Cyclomite” – which I don’t really have anything to compare it to. Seems pretty original. You control a wheel in the center of the screen that has spokes, and each half is a different color. From the outer edges of the screen come these “meteorite” things that you have to “intercept” with the wheel. If the color of the meteor matches the color of the “spoke” in the wheel it touches, it is absorbed, otherwise, it “stack” on the edge. If you get the wrong color stacked too high – game stops and you lose. I’m sure there’s more to this game once you get going, but I didn’t play it much longer than to figure out how it worked. Here’s a pic of “Cyclomite” during gameplay:

All in all Instant Action wasn’t a bad experience, and it does say “beta” on their logo. If they think they’re going to build up a community of “free” games and then douse a membership fee on it like gasoline, they’re just doomed for failure. Also – they’re going to have to step it up a bit to be able to compete with Xbox live and online console gaming. They may need to get more servers too, I never did get to play “Screw Jumpers” at all, since it would never fully load. It’s either the most popular game, or it was just bogged down from their mention on G4 TV. In any event, you’ll have some downtime over the holiday weekend – you should check out these “free online games” when you’re at the relatives house with nothing to do! They should work just as well in Internet Explorer if they don’t have Firefox where you’re going….but if they don’t – install it for them!

I was checking my email today and I get my weekly email from NBC. I’m probably stuck getting emails from NBC in the first place because my wife used my email address voting for “Deal or No Deal” last year sometime. Usually just throw the email away without reading it, but the title was “The A-Team is back on NBC.com”. I mis-read that and thought they were “back on NBC” which kind of freaked me out. The first words out of my mouth were “Who’s playing Mr. T? It can’t be….like…Mr. T?” Right there – they got me! They sucked me in, I just had to know. I viewed the email and saw this:

Turns out the are putting old episodes of shows from 25 odd years ago on the NBC.com web site. They must have been targeting people from my demographic this week, because I grew up with most of those shows, like the A-Team, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Miami Vice, and Emergency! They sucked me in even further, I click to see just how good the quality was on these – because let’s face it, who could resist watching an episode of the A-team online?

I was really surprised, when I clicked a got a web page, chose the “A-Team” and when the interface came up I chose an episode and was watching within seconds. I had the ability to choose from any season, any episode. The quality was good the movie was clear, and right away a commercial came up. I thought then that maybe I would be bombarded with commercials the entire time but the message said “very rew interruptions due to Sponsorshp from sprint…”. In fact, in the timeline under the movie I noticed that the “notches” in the line represented when the commercials played. You can’t forward past them, but they are only 30 seconds.

The flash interface that plays the movies works well, and there are “large” and “full screen” options to watch all the TV shows. The full screen option was a little lesser quality, but still completely watchable. Thank you NBC for doing something right. I only wish that the movie studios and record labels would wise up and do the same.

I find a lot of things on the Internet, but today made me realize that it’s been a very long time where I read something that engaged me so much I lost an entire hour before I knew it! I think you’ll love this one….you know those ridiculous Nigerian scam emails you get? There is an entire web site devoted to “baiting” those nigerian scammers and screwing with their heads! Wasting their time and resources so badly that they can’t devote their full resources to scamming others. The post their scambait stores in their entirety on 419eater.com. That in itself is a pretty funny and engaging read. But here’s a scambaiting so good that the scammer is tricked into getting a tattoo!! The story was awesome, you’ll be wanting to tell your friends about it. It was such a finely executed trick – I am very impressed. Check it out, you’ll find it a very worthy read.

I’ve read a lot of articles lately about the Firefox 3 Beta released last month, and most point out the 2 or 3 obvious features that will be coming – like Malware Protection, Web Forgery Protection, and Resumeable Downloading. The first thing that came to my mind was – “that’s it?!”. Going from a major revision like 2 to 3, I knew that there just had to be more exciting features than that! So I give to you –

“The Smorgasbord list of Top 10 New Firefox 3 Features“!!

1. One Click Site Info: Just click the little favicon pic next to the URL in the address bar and see who owns the site — cool!
2. Easier Password Management: Thank god! It’s time to have more than the basic options we’ve had for years. The “dialog” box will be replaced by an info bar.
3. New Download Manager: I’ve been using Firefox for years and I’m really used to it saving everything to the desktop. But I always wondered when they would be making this a bit better. Looks like I’ll get my wish!
4. Tab Scrolling and Quickmenu: I always thought that if I had 3 dozen tabs open the layout could be managed better than a “forever” scroll to the right. A ‘quickmenu’ allowing me to ‘go to end’ or jump quickly would be great. Depending on what will be on this menu – I’m thinking that this will be good for me!
5. Full Page Zoom: I have always lauded the ability to zoom way in and out in a PDF – and now we will finally have that ability in a browser!
6. Improved bookmarks: Some great things here, like one-click bookmarking, you can “tag” your bookmarks to categorize them (vastly improved from “folders”), and a ‘smart places folder’ with your recent bookmarks and tagged pages
7. Location bar auto-complete: I will frequently type in the first few letters of a domain in the address bar to let it complete and quickly go to a site. But NOW, you can type either the first few letters of the web page name, or even the ‘tags’ you used when bookmarking the page. I think that this will prompt people to bookmark a lot more pages just to use this feature. Bookmark your online banking and tag it so you can just type “bank” in the address bar when you want to go to it, very handy!
8. Reliability: This is a behind the scenes one, but if your system of browser crashes, your bookmarks, cookies, preferences, and history is stored in a transactionally secure database format preventing data loss. What does this mean? No more corrupted config files!
9. Web Forgery Protection: Yes, this was already mentioned in other places, but I need to state why it’s cool. Email programs started long ago not displaying images until you click to “load” them because of spammers and phishers using them to entice you to click. Now, forged web pages will do the same and not display content to you – keeping people from being fooled. An awesome feature, you can test it here.
10. Malware Protection: Also already mentioned, but I think this feature will be good because it will keep many people from adding third party plugins and what-not for malware into their browser. I know, it’s not perfect keeping a “blacklist” constantly updated with “bad” web sites, but at least it’s a start – and we can build from there. You can also test this one here

After looking at this list – I think that what is coming in the new Firefox 3 is really something to look forward to!! Now I just have to install it on one of my PC’s to personally test the beta. Have you been testing it? What do you think? Comment now below!

I cannot count the countless hours over the years that I’ve wasted playing stupidly addictive online flash and java games. I swear sometimes that the people that build them implement the same kind of human psychology techniques used in casino slot machines. The games are fun, colorful, they (usually) load pretty quick in a browser, and you can normally play a game in 2-5 minutes or less. Usually, you want to play again (and again, and again) to see if you can do better. Well, leave it to c|Net, they wrote a guide to the 10 Most Addictive Online Flash Games Ever Made. The article is 10 pages, and the reason I wrote this post was because many of the games hit close to home for me, having played them for countless hours. So – I’m going to give you some quick links here to the ones that I enjoyed the most. If you want the full list, just visit that last link I gave to get the full article.

Play Bejeweled
Wow, did I ever waste countless hours on end with this game. Probably one of my all-time favorites. I actually like this game more than I did Tetris back in the day because it seems a bit more fun and fast paced. My favorite type of “puzzle” game.

Play Bowman
This game is a bit more skillful. I can remember spending hours on end with this thing to try and get the perfect shot. Calculating that pefect angle and power combination was extremely difficult.

Play LineRider
This game has a cult following all it’s own. Linerider is insanely addictive, and I’ve previously written many articles about it here on The Smorgasbord.

Play Portal
There is an incredible amount of sophistication built into this game, it reminds me of the old days of the Nintendo.

Yeti Sports
This reminds of a bunch of ‘Snowman’ games I played before. I good one to test your skill level.

There you have it – the 5 online flash or java games I love best (out of c|Net’s list of 10). I’m sure I’m forgetting something that didn’t make their list. Can you remember any that we didn’t? Post your favorite online browser games in the comments now and share with everyone!

Whether you love or hate Madonna, a groundbreaking deal was announced when Madonna signed a $120M deal with “LiveNation” out of L.A. The contract is for 3 CD’s, and they will also promote her concerts, merchandise, and license her name. I don’t know what else they do, but I know Live Nation primarily for it’s concert promotion efforts. It seems like every time I see a new concert announcement (in my area), you see the Live Nation name behind it.

I think this is key, because for years the P2P and torrent rallying cry by many was to “free the music”, because the artists make most of their bank on tour anyway. At least, they seem to get a greater percentage of it. I believe that some of the best artists only make about 20% royalty for their CD sales, and the less ones….well, they probably get much less. Let’s say a “successful” band, artist, or pop star sells 500,000 CD’s. That’s pretty good nowadays. What if the average retail was $16.99, their half million CD sales would equal just about $8.495M (about eight and a half million). Twenty percent of that is about $1.7M. But wait – they probably have to pay their manager, producer, agent, and maybe even a lawyer. We better take 25% off for that, which leaves $1,275,520. Let’s say in this scenario there’s 4 guys in the band, so each one would get $318,812.50.

If that same band went on a 100 date tour with an average of 5,000 people per night (I’m being pretty conservative here), and the tickets were $45, they would gross $22.5M on ticket sales alone. If only 1/2 the people in attendance bought one shirt or memoribilia (again being conservative) that would bring in $6.25 in merchandise revenue, for a total of almost $29M. Let’s say that 50% of the gross has to be paid to promotion, road crew, tour manager, etc. That still leaves $14.375M to be split by the 4 band members = $3.59M each!

Alright – I don’t work in the music industry, and my theoretical numbers may be waaaay off. But if they’re even close, it shows that artists stand to potentially make 10 times more money on tour than from their album sales! So (in my head) I believe that Madonna took the $120M deal because it’s more than she would possibly make from a traditional record company. A couple weeks ago Radiohead gave away their entire album on their web site FOR FREE. This TechCrunch article states Oasis and Jamiroquai and about to do the same. It also makes the bold statement “The deal shows that even for a world famous act, a record company is no longer required in the days of digital downloads and P2P music sharing.“. Is this the new frontier of music – will over major artists and music superstars follow suit?

Has P2P file sharing and Bit Torrent peer to peer networking finally won the battle? Especially now since earlier this year iTunes and other music download services are offering significant music catalogues with no DRM whatsoever?

I would love your comments on this hot topic – share view with everyone now by clicking on the comment link below now!

*UPDATE*

Here’s another article from Wired that describes the current state of the Music industry to a “T”. They’re busy sueing single parents for $222,222.00 in damages (for 12 ‘shared’ songs), while they are screwing the artists out of the lion’s share of the royalties anyway. Unbelievable.

[tags]riaa, music, p2p, download, itunes, drm, madonna[/tags]

According to John Nack’s Blog over at Adobe – Photoshop is going online with a stripped down version called “Photoshop Express”. I think this is a significant branding point for Adobe – if they can tie their service into huge social apps like myspace, facebook, or even a major email service this could be big win for them. At least they understand that this won’t dilute the Photoshop brand – only strengthen it.

[photopress:photoshop_express_screenshot.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

We all use google, and most of us that would consider ourselves “power users” probabaly already know the more popular google ‘shortcuts’ and features. Like you can use google as a calculator and search “8 + 8″ and google will spit back “16″. You can search “100 inches in feet” and google will say “8.3333333 feet”. Google is pretty smart isn’t it? I wrote this guide of advanced google search tips to teach you how to save lots of time and be more productive!

Google Search Shortcuts You should know – but probably don’t

Google Package Tracking

You probably didn’t know though, that you can type in a package tracking number for UPS, Fedex, or United States Postal Service and google will automatically perform the query and the right web site, and give you results on where your package is!! What a time saver – who knew google would track packages? (sorry can’t give an example for this one – I don’t have a package to track!)

Google Vehicle Search

Did you know that you can also type any VIN number in google for any vehicle – and it will give you a carfax vehicle record? Click on the pictured example to try this search example now!

Searching by Price Range Using Google

You can search using a range of numbers. This is a totally brand new one for me…say you want to buy something and you’re willing to play between like amount or another. Like a hard drive, and you want prices between $50 and $100. Your google search would be like this: “seagate 100GB hard drive #$50…$100#”. Just be sure to start and end your range with the # sign and have the 3 dots in the middle. This really helps to get good results on exactly what you are looking for, and in your price range! Click on the picture example below to see this search in action…

Quickly find and search books Using Google

If you looking to buy a book, or find a book – just preface what you’re looking for in your search with the word “book”. For example, search for ‘book unix shell scripting’. Click the pictured example below to see what this looks like. Note I circled in red the options for “Limited Preview” and “Full View”. One is of course looking at part of a book, and full view is when the entire book is available online (for free). For this particular search, there are none available as full view (for free), but it’s good to know that some are. Click the pictured example to see a basic search for a book.

Now click on the first book result. This is really cool – you can see inside the book, the table of contents, a bunch of sample pages…notice my red circle in the bottom right corner where you can “search this book”. Awesome. Just above that you’ll see a list of places you can buy this book. Click the pictured example to see this book search.

The one last thing I wanted to show you (and possibly the coolest), is the link right above the “search this book” box that says “Find this book in a Library”. When you click on that, it figures out your physical location by the IP address on your computer, and finds the closest libraries listed online that may have to book. You can’t beat that. Click the pictured example to see this work live.

How to Use Google as a Phone Book

I use google to look up numbers all the time, and it’s pretty good at it. But I’ve learned that it can be even better. You can use google as a phone book, simply by prefacing your search with either ‘phonebook’, ‘rphonebook’ (residential), or ‘bphonebook’ (business). Click the pictured example below to see this in action!

How to use Google Movie Search

Like other special searches you can do with google – you can also search movies and movie reviews! This is where googles no-nosense clean style comes in handy. I used to look at movie reviews in Yahoo! Movies. But that page is just plagued by ads, garbage, and clutter. Google comes to the rescue again, and all you have do is preface your search with “movie:”. Click on the pictured example below to see this work live…

This is awesome! You get the movies under that name, the year they were made……but wait! There’s more! Click on the title of any movie and you get this example where you can see reviews, the avg review rating, you get frequently mentioned terms (to search by), you can search within the reviews, and you can find theatres by you by zip code! Click the pictured example to view this search now…

Get Historical News with Google News Archive Search

Google News is great for the latest headlines, but what I didn’t know is that google news has an archive you can search…and they have archived news that goes back decades and decades. And once you do a search you can arrange the results in a timeline. This could be very helpful if you’re doing research on just about any topic. Click the pictured example to do this this search…

Look at Dead Tree Catalogs the google web 2.0 way

Google is so big now, there’s just so many things I didn’t know you can do with them now (and I’ve been using google since 1998 – almost 10 years). This is something I simply didn’t know existed. Google has a catalog search, meaning “mail order catalog”. I kinda miss getting catalogs back in the day (some I still get), like Edmund Scientific, and do it yourself electronics catalogs. Google Catalog Search is in “beta”, so your favorite ones might not be available in there yet (but many are). This search is really cool, because they scan the entire catalog in, and you can browse the pages (quickly) as if the catalog were in your hands. You can even browse up to 6 pages at once, and search within a catalog. Click the image below to try the Sharper Image catalog search (6 pages at once)…

Use Google Notebook to organize clips and make notes

This is the last in the series of tips (and perhaps the best). Google has created an extension for the Firefox Web Browser called Notebook that you can download here. This is the firefox extension I’ve been looking for!! I’ve used a few of these clipboard like utilities before, and also ones that were firefox extensions – like ClipMarks. I didn’t like that at all. Notebook (like most google tools) is easy to use, and does exactly what I want. Basically, once installed – you can select text (or pictures), click ‘clip’ and what you selected is saved to your ‘notebook’. But (a feature I always wanted), you can manually add notes and ‘sections’ (categories) as well. I fired it up and added one ‘clip’ (see pic below)…

I was wary about this plugin at first, but then I clicked the “tools” dropdown (from the pic above), and you can click “go to my notebooks homepage”. This is a new part of your ‘google account’. Your google notebook page is where you store you clips, you can setup ‘sections’ to categorize them, and drag and drop arrange them, you make make new notes, you get a rich text editor, you can search your notebooks, you can “share” your notebook with other collaborators, you can share it as a public web page, but most importantly you can “export to google docs”. Woohoo!! This is a major, major time saver for me! Now as I read online and do research I can save all kinds of things for parsing later as I go without the need to have a text editor open. Everything is saved in my google account, and I can walk away and access it from any computer in the world. Out of all the things I learned about google today – THIS was the BEST ONE (for me)!!

How does Google Help You?

In this google tutorial article I keyed in on things I noticed that I never knew about before, things that directly benefited me the most in the ways I work on the web. What didn’t I list that you have learned and can share with me and others? To make this article even better, I would love for you to submit your feedback using the comment links below! If you would like to suggest a new article or guest post – please feel free to use out contact form.

I would also like to tell you about how I came across this information – as it may help you as well. I got all of these golden nuggets of information in a book, brand new for 2007 called The Google Power Tools Bible. This is definitely a very thorough reference of 32+ chapters and over 600+ pages. It covers all kinds of things that I didn’t have time to go into here, like google trends, google desktop, google office, froogle, and tons more! It’s definitely worth the money!

Google Power Tools Bible

If you are reading this article at any URL other than www.smorgasbord.net it has been scraped or stolen. Please Visit The Smorgasbord web site for the authentic version. Copyright 2007, The Smorgasbord, All Rights Reserved.

I came across something I just had to share that has changed the way I work quite a bit. I was doing StumbleUpon one day, and one of the first pages I came across was Portableapps.com. Now I’ve blogged about both Portable Firefox and Portable Opera before. These are web browsers you can install and run directly from your USB memory stick. But Portable Apps is different because it’s basically a menu driven “work suite” for your thumb drive. You download the PortableApps.exe file, and when you run the setup (either full or lightweight version) it actually fully installs working applications on your flash drive. And it can be any kind of external hard drive, memory stick, flash card, thumb drive, etc. It’s going to fully install the applications with no need to change your registry in any way, and no need to place or modify a single file on your computers hard drive. The applications are completely “portable” – you take them with you on the go wherever you take your external drive, card, or stick. Whatever computer you are at, wherever you are – everything is with you every time.This has quite a few advantages if you think about it. Do you have a policy at work where you can’t install any applications at all? Maybe they forced Windows Group Policy on you that won’t even allow it to happen. Can’t access your home email at work? Can’t IM at work? Using a work laptop on a trip? Using an Internet Kiosk? Are you at the Library, or a friend or relatives house? Do you have multiple computers in your house? You get the picture…

This post of part of The Smorgasbord Tech Reviews series!

So, no I’m going to describe how I use Portable Apps and you can apply it to best suit you. First of all, I needed a new thumb drive. You may have one already. I had several, but they were only a few hundred megabytes. I knew I wanted one at least 2GB or more, and I didn’t want to spend more than $20 or $30. I did what I usually do – I looked on Amazon. You could get one on eBay, but I didn’t want to fool around with that this time (waiting or an auction to end). I wanted my drive in a few days. And I didn’t do TigerDirect or NewEgg simply because I didn’t feel like paying $6 shipping on such a low cost item. I went over to The Smorgasbord Store, and I did a search for USB Flash Drive 2GB. Right away I found many in the $20 price range. I picked one I could get free shipping on and place the order.

Three days later I had my new 2GB thumb drive, a good Kingston one with a eyelet for my keychain. I plugged it in and installed the full version of Portable Apps. Once installed, there is an autorun file – so when you plug in the drive to your computer the menu should load automatically, but if it doesn’t just go to “My Computer”, find your thumb drive, open it, and click on “StartPortableApps.exe”.

Now, you’re going to get a menu that looks just like this one:

[photopress:portable_apps.jpg,full,pp_image]

Wow! Your own customizable start menu just for your portable drive! You get many applications pre-intalled (depending on which version you downloaded). You get Firefox, an IM client, the Open Office Suite, and more! Think about what you’ve got here for a minute. You can open and edit just about any version MS Office doc from your drive. You can use your own portable Firefox, take your bookmarks with you wherever you go, save your own password in Firefox Password Manager, you have your own cache, your own Firefox extensions, everywhere you go you have a customized browser just the way you like it! At work, at the Library, at your mom’s house, on any computer in your house – it’s all with you every time! You can IM using any messenger service with GAIM, and you’ll never have to worry about installing YIM, AIM, or MSN again! There is also a built-in backup function on the menu, so you can backup everything on your drive to your main computer anytime you want.

Be Organized: There are links on the menu to “Documents”, “Pictures”, “Video”, “Music” – and each link opens a folder on your drive that you drag and drop stuff into. Wow, you can keep your important docs on the go, pictures from your digital camera, your favorite mp3′s, or video clips! The bigger your external drive, card, or stick – the more stuff you can take with you!

Get More Portable Apps: In my opinion, some of the greatest portable apps you’ll need to add. On the menu, just click “Options” and “Get More Apps”. Download the ones you like, then go back to the menu “Options” and “Add New App”. You can remove apps the same way. Now, I maintain web sites, write code, edit video, audio, and edit graphics as well. So, I downloaded and installed “Notepad++ Portable” (text editor), “Nvu Portable” (web editor), “Gimp Portable” (graphics editor on a par with Photoshop), “Filezilla Portable” (FTP client), “PuTTy Portable” (SSH telnet client), “Audacity Portable” (Audio Editor), “MPlayer Portable” (movie and media player), “VirtualDub Portable” (Video Editor), “Sumatra PDF Portable” (PDF Viewer), “7-Zip Portable” (zip and unzip stuff), “Eraser Portable” (erase files securely), “KeePass Password Safe” (keep an encrypted password db), and last “Toucan” (an advanced backup utility).

Wow! So now, I can do web editing, graphic editing, audio and video editing, I can FTP or telnet, view PDF files, zip and unzip stuff, I can securely store all my password, securely delete files – and EVERY single program is COMPLETELY FREE as is PortableApps itself! You cannot ask for a better bargain!! I want to talk about “Toucan” for a sec too. Portable Apps has a backup function, but with Toucan you can schedule backups, filter out things to backup (just these kinds of files from these folders), you can compare folders, update files newer than a certain date, etc.

OK – that’s my review! I love Portable Apps and I know use it and my new 2GB thumb drive every day! It has saved me tons of time, and everything is with me everywhere I go now! Do you have an app that has saved you time? Do you know of other portable or thumb drive utils? Please, comment now and share with everyone!

Oh – and this is the flash drive I have and installed portable apps on – and I love it!

Kingston Data Traveler II Plus – Migo Edition – USB flash drive – 2 GB ( DTII+M/2GB ) (Retail Package)

oh – and you can get flash drives at very reasonable prices on eBay as well: