the lencurrie life » google

What Would You Do If You Lost Your Email?

lencurrie — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 15:47:52 +0000

There was recent scare for a number of Gmail users (not myself) in which they turned on their computers and signed on to their email and it treated them like they were a new user. The worst part? All their emails and preferences were gone!

Now, Google has remedied the situation and restored service to those users – but for some reason this bothered me a little bit. I don’t think I would be a happy camper if I lost all my emails from the past 5 years or so. I love my Gmail account personally.

So, I found a great solution which I’m running as we speak. It’s called “Mailstore” – and my favorite site Lifehacker referred it to me. Basically it’s a mail backup program. Pick the location of your backup (in my case it’s a directory in my 2TB backup hard drive called “GmailBackup”) and then login via the GUI to Gmail and start the archiving!

The best part about this setup is that since it’s on my backup drive, it will also get backed up to the web using Crashplan. Beauty! Cost me nothing to get my Gmail backed up.

Download Mailstore

Is the NHL heading to YouTube?

lencurrie — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 20:43:41 +0000

I noticed an article the other day stating that Google was in talk with the NHL and NBA in an effort to bring their broadcasts to YouTube.

My initial thoughts? I would have to say that my if I was hooked up to an ekg machine when I read that you’d see a pretty excited heart beat going across the screen. That would be excellent!

But then I started to think about the fact that they already have live streaming available via their own nhl.com gamecenter. I know this, as I am a customer! I have a free subscription when I subscribe to the NHL Center Ice pacakge via Bell satellite.

Starting to think though.. if we’re gettin FiberOp here in PEI soon – could that not be the new gateway to all my services? Skype? Netflix? Youtube? Torrents? *ahem* We could hypothetically see the end of cable bills altogether? Or at least the local ones and we’d end up paying the bigger companies… hmmm.

Unfortunately – the NHL flat our denied the claim they were in talks, and the person (Gautam Anand) for Google mentioned that the report was directed “for Asia Pacific” markets perhaps.

We’ll just have to see..

Google Calendar – Why I Use It Everyday

lencurrie — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:50:26 +0000

I pride myself on being a fairly organized person, and when I find something that helps me remember things (I think I’m losing my short term memory… wait.. what was I saying?) and keep things in on handy place, I use it.. a lot. Google Calendar is one of these things.

If you don’t have a google account – go get one.. right now. You don’t have to use Gmail (but why not??) but you do have to have a google account to sign in and create and subscribe to calendars. Before I go any further, let me tell you about what I use Google Calendars for:

Budget

I have a calendar called “Money” which I use to put in all my bills and income sources, when they come out, when they’re due, how much, etc. For example.. every 2nd Friday I have a ‘Payday’ event.. Every 1st of the month I have a ‘Student Loan Payments’ event.. “Mortgage Payments” on a monthly basis. This is absolutely great for budgeting as I have everything in my calendar – so I can see what bills have to be paid between paydays so then I know how much I have leftover for loan payments, golfing, etc..etc. This is by far my favorite use.

Personal

I’m a pretty busy guy, always seem to be coming and going and doing all sorts of different things. I use the “Len Currie” calendar to mark things like “change contacts”, and “attend PEI TweetUp”, “Vacation Days”, “Wine Show”.. etc.. it’s my most changed calendar and the one I look at most often. Just to know if I’ve got anything on the go this weekend or not.

Business

I have a “Photography” calendar which is crucial obviously to making sure I don’t double-book photography sessions and to see what’s coming up. I also use it to mark down any payments I’ve received and from whom which is great for deposits, etc.

Birthdays

I actually have 2 sets of calendars for birthdays. One is for ‘Family’ which I have all important birthdays to remember in my family. I also have a ‘Facebook Birthdays’ calendar which is pretty cluttered up so I don’t show it often (you can hide or show any calendars in GCal) but it’s great for knowing who’s having a birthday each day from your Facebook Friends. I got this from FBCal (google it if you’d like to use it).

Weather

I don’t know why I keep this one, but I guess it doesn’t hurt anything as I used to use this public calendar as it show you the weather forecast for the coming 3 days. I now use the weather application on my blackberry but since I’m in Google Calendar so much, it’s useful to see it right there with everything else.

Grocery Challenge

Ok I really only call this one “Grocery” but I have a separate calendar which I use to record all the groceries we buy on a monthly basis. This I just started to do, but it’s great since I can share the calendar with Liz and my roommate and we can find out where we did the shopping, and how much we have left. $30.00 – Sobeys for example would be an event from last Saturday.

Other Uses

I have another few calendars as well, one is for Auto Maintenance. I want to keep my car as up to date with maintenance as it should be – so I mark down yearly maintenance, monthly, etc. I subscribe also to the Tampa Bay Lightning calendar so I know when they’re playing and who they’re playing.

As you can see, there are a LOT of uses for Google Calendar I’m still finding uses for it all the time. It sync up to mobile devices (my blackberry) which is excellent as well as you can set up reminders and alarms so that I don’t miss out on anything. It’s really nice to be able to go to one spot to find out if you’re able to attend that meeting, show, book a client, etc.. Obviously GCal isn’t the only way to keep organized as I know a lot of people that use things like the and are very good at using that while driving, etc so that they can take hands free notes, but personally I wouldn’t go out and buy something like that no matter how good the sale was, I’ll just stick to my Google Calendar.. hell, it’s free!

UPDATE

And just as I was posting this today – I realized I added yet another calendar.. a ‘cleaning chores’ calendar. Things that I usually don’t do as often as I should – things like ‘clean out the refrigerator’, ‘clean the windows’, ‘change the air exchange filter’, etc.. Auto maintenance is yet another one that I have in there.. its’ all about reminders people!!

Google Rules… But .. hmmm.. maybe not.

lencurrie — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:02:23 +0000

I love Google products.. I admit it. Gmail changed the way I use email. Chrome is a fast as hell browser which is constantly being upgraded. But after watching this video, I’m wondering if they’re going to far.

Google does want to do.. EVERYTHING.

New Google Street View For PEI – Time Waster to the Extreme!

lencurrie — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:15:32 +0000

Anyone want a Guardian?

I love google street view..unfortunately I’m trying to figure out what time they drove by my house cuz I only see my roommates car in the driveway and not mine or Liz’s! Oh well, looks like it was REALLY nice out that day, so it’s good to see all the flowers and everything in full bloom Have I mentioned that I miss summer a lot??

Home Sweet Home

I can’t wait to see what cool pictures people drum up as the street view car went through all the streets of PEI. My buddy and I were checking it out briefly this morning, and it appears that they pretty much travelled the ENTIRE ISLAND! That’s amazing.. (and time consuming and tedious!) Can you imagine having that job?? Wow.

Happy Tuesday people.. say a little prayer for my pup this morning whom is going through Surgery #2 in less than a month to repair his other knee.

Google Books – Old Magazines = Cool!

lencurrie — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:45:43 +0000

So I’m surfing through the ‘net trying to keep my mind occupied and not on the fact that my Hunter is at the AVC alone in the dark likely (shit that didn’t work).. anyhow, and I came across a link to Google Books.

This is the first link that I came across here was from Popular Mechanics and I must say that it was pretty interesting (well, other than the first ad I noticed was for a blackhead extractor of some sort that looked like a dirty needle). Anyhow.. the magazine was from 1944 – for the grand sum of $0.25. I actually scrolled through almost the entire magazine, and what I noticed was that it was almost entirely war-written. Something about the war, or something referring to an area of the war, etc.etc. It was certainly interesting.

So now I’m going through to see what other books they got there… may I suggest if you have a few minutes.. you do the same

Making The Move To PicasaWeb (Google) From Flickr (Yahoo!)

lencurrie — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:13:14 +0000

Being the budding photographer that I am, I’m constantly looking at the best way to organize, share, backup and just basically improve the workflow of my side-photography business.

That said, I can tell you that the two programs I use the most for most of these things are 1) Photoshop and 2) Picasa.

Photoshop is pretty self explanatory, I’ve been using it for over 15 years or so, and I don’t proclaim myself to be a professional by any standard – but I can certainly handle my way around it and know most of the functions quite well. I’m not going to talk about Photoshop today however, this post is going to be about Picasa.

I absolutely LOVE Picasa.

Collections and then sub-folders, great for organizing!

There are many reasons why I love Picasa, so I’m going to go into a few of them. The first reason that I love Picasa (of many) is the organization capabilities. It allows me to drag and drop and organize groups of pictures into collections and sets – very similar to what Flickr can do online, however this I can do on my desktop (much faster!). To give you an example of how I use it: let’s say I do a wedding photoshoot.. I will import all the pictures into a folder or set, let’s say ‘Wedding Shots – 12/02/2009′. Now these are untouched, and a lot of them are not going to be used. Over a cup of coffee usually the morning after – Liz and I will go through and pick out our favorites and ‘star’ them, then once done. We’ll select all our starred photos and put these in a new folder called ‘Wedding Shots – 12/02-2009 – Favorites’. Once we have our favorites, then it’s time to touch them up. Once again we create a new folder called ‘Wedding Shots – 12/02/2009 – Final’ and that’s where we’d store the final touched up shots. The best part is that we’d keep them all in a collection called ‘Wedding Shots - 12/02/2009′ or something like that so as to have all 3 versions organized in one spot. VERY convenient.

Buttons and buttons.. one-clicks for all things simple.

The second reason that I love Picasa is it’s ability to be programmed by other developers, almost like it’s “open source”. Someone out there created a ‘button’ for Picasa which adds a one click ability to launch the photos I choose for editing in Photoshop without ever leaving or launching it seperately. It’s a very small feature, but one which I find infinitely useful.

I’m going to keep going here – the integration and ability to open you favorite email editor and send photos via email (and also resize to your liking very easily) is a great feature even for rookies to use. Ha, just as I typed this I realized that my brother uses this feature all the time.. prooving my point!

Some of the simple editing features

The editing features of Picasa are ALSO great for rookies and quick touchups for experts too. Cropping and a number of simple edits are very handy.

Facial recognition! I can’t believe the software that’s on the backend of Picasa, but it actually recognizes faces that you have in the pictures and asks you to confirm if the system has it right or not. Very cool feature and something which I’m not sure how much use I’d get out of it, but cool none-the-less.

Auto-import. I can set this to sync up with any folder on my computer, and anytime a picture is put in that folder – it imports it into Picasa.

I think I’ll wrap up by highlighting what I find are the dealbreakers for me with regards to migrating from Flickr to PicasaWeb. First – upload speed… I’m not sure why, but for some reason the upload speeds to Flickr are horribly slow from any computer I try including my work connection. PicasaWeb is much faster to upload to. Second – integration with Picasa; this really can’t be understated as it’s very important. I can do a number of things with the integration, but the two ways I use it mostly is to share folders quickly (upload and share via online interface) and to sync. Sync is something I just started doing, but by ‘syncing’ up the photos in a folder on my computer to the online PicasaWeb folder, I always have the latest version available online for me to work on or share. I’m going to find this incredibly useful once I go from the basic free version to more paid space.

The sync button - set it and forget it

Paid space is something that they just reduced which is what brought it to my attention. Here is how it breaks down in USD:

20 GB – $5/yr
80 GB – $20/yr
200 GB – $50/yr
400 GB – $100/yr
1 TB – $256/yr
2 TB – $512/yr
4 TB – $1024/yr
8 TB – $2048/yr
16 TB – $4096/yr

Now with Flickr (which wins in this comparison), I had unlimited space for $25 USD a year. However with all the features I just laid out, I don’t mind paying another $15 a year (200 gigs) to have an online storage solution tightly integrated with my favorite picture organizer. Of course, that 200 gigs is shared with Gmail.. but even still.. what am I at.. 2gigs or something for about 6 years of use of Gmail? I can’t see that being a problem.

I should also mention that I of course have to download all the files from Flickr to import to Picasa, which I’m in the process of doing right now. I’m using a java program called FlickrEdit which is downloading all my images (in their original form) to my USB drive as we speak. What’s great about this program is that it divides the pictures into the sets I had organized on Flickr. My action plan is to then sync those up with PicasaWeb and then organize the rest of my photos as well. The one drawback I have about PicasaWeb is the lack of ‘Collections’.. meaning that I can’t have a Collection called “Pets” and then have a number of Folders within that.. such as “Hunter and Bella”, “Maya”, “Family Pets”, etc.. at least I don’t think I can as of yet.. we’ll see.

Free Long Distance Business Calls – Is There Anything Google ISN’T Doing?

lencurrie — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:29:48 +0000

Found at Canada’s Freebies Site, this would be awesome when you’re travelling and looking for your hotel, or whatever really.

Here’s a number worth putting in your speed dials.

1-800-goog411. (a.k.a. 1-800-466-4411)

This is an awesome service from Google, and it’s free — great when you are on the road.

Don’t waste your money on information calls and don’t waste your time manually dialing the number.

I am driving along in my car and I need to call the golf course but I don’t know the number.
I hit the speed dial that I have programmed in (800-goog411), for information.
The voice at the other end says, “City & Province.”
I say, ” Calgary , Alberta “
He says, “Business, Name or Type of Service.”
I say, “Firewheel Golf Course.”
He says, “Connecting” and Firewheel answers the phone.
How great is that? This is nationwide and Google provides the service absolutely free!
No “Information” charge, and no long distance charge.

Click here for more details on 1-800-GOOG411 Canada

No more Kijiji Charlottetown..

lencurrie — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:01:30 +0000

But on the bright side, we now have Kijiji Prince Edward Island!

Hmm.. is that a plus? I really don’t know.. seems that if I find something that I want in Alberton, it may be hard to get it on a timely basis.. however I suppose the fact that it’s pretty much the same as UsedPei.com now in that it covers the entire Island, it may not be a bad thing..

They’ve done it all across Canada actually..

“You might have noticed some changes in the Kijiji city sites recently. This page is designed to help you understand why things have changed and what has changed. It is also for us to collect feedback on what you think of the changes.

First of all – The why… We made these changes because we listened to you, the Kijiji community. Although we previously covered all major Canadian cities, we heard from users like you that they wanted Kijiji in their home towns and areas as well. In order to make sure that we were serving every Canadian, we have expanded Kijiji to cover all of Canada, making us the only truly Canadian online classifieds site.

Now, the what… We’ve expanded Kijiji to cover over 140 different cities and regions in Canada. We’ve done this several ways: First, we’ve expanded some cities to cover a larger region with more cities. We’ve also grouped certain cities together to form a larger region. (If this happened to your Kijiji site, please keep in mind that you can still search in a smaller region by using the Location links on the left hand side). And finally, we’ve launched new cities in areas that previously did not have a Kijiji site.”

Well that’s all fine and good for me, it really doesn’t matter I don’t think, perhaps it opens up ads to a broader audience? Who knows.

While we’re at it.. check out my latest two ads.. 1. Goalie Pads for Beer , and 2. Fenced in Area for Beagles wanted!

If you see the google car.. HIDE!!

lencurrie — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:43:32 +0000

CBC news reports:

Google capturing Charlottetown streets

Google Car Capturing Data for "Street View"

The internet giant Google is roaming the streets of Charlottetown this week, capturing images for its Street View feature.

Street View shows ground-level pictures of streets, allowing users to take a virtual walk through neighbourhoods, and is available through Google maps for many locations around the world.

But not for Canada. Canada’s privacy commissioner has issues with Street View, because any person or car who happens to be on the street when the Google photo car passes is included in the internet pictures.

Google says it’s working with the privacy commissioner on a solution and the Street View service for Canada will be launched soon.

I really don’t know how I feel about Google’s Street View.. I really don’t see it as that useful yet… Hmm.. wouldn’t mind seeing some of that gear on the Google Car though.. now that would be cool.. i’m sure they got crazy alarm systems though. Oh Well.