Open Office REALLY is Better

A few months ago, I wrote an article on OpenOffice, a free office suite comparable to Microsoft's Office software. It contains programs such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation maker, etc...

This week I found myself implementing a spreadsheet for a somewhat complicated electrical engineering problem. It involved writing some computer program code in a language called BASIC, which essentially allows a user to create their own functions. Since the company where I work uses MS Office, I wrote my initial draft of the spreadsheet in Excel.

After a few hours of work, I came across something strange. My new functions were appearing to work correctly, but my final numbers were way off. After hours of debugging with another co-worker, we finally found out that MS Office was not allowing me to use the number pi, even though using pi works just fine when you type it straight into the Excel sheet. Ugh...

Later that week, I decided to re-create the spreadsheet in OpenOffice's Calc (the equivalent of Excel). To my surprise, many of the functions that I had to create myself were already included in OpenOffice! I tried using Pi, and it worked perfectly.

Now, anyone who tells you that OpenOffice is inferior to Microsoft's Office is badly mistaken. I know this from experience in dealing with both of them at a very deep level. If you are still paying hundreds of dollars for MS Office, you're wasting your money. Get OpenOffice for free, tell your friends to get OpenOffice for free, save hundreds of dollars, and support the open standards that OpenOffice provides.

Gmail Features Everyone Should Know

Google's Gmail is by far the best web-based email system to date. In fact, I prefer it to any other email client that is on the market, including programs such as Microsoft's Outlook or Mozilla's Thunderbird. It's quiet design is refreshing, and the threaded conversations keep your inbox nice and tidy. On top of the great design, there are some powerful tools that allow Gmail users to organize and track their email very efficiently. Let's face it, most of you use your email multiple times every day. Isn't it worth a little time learning how to get your Gmail running like a well oiled machine? If you don't have Gmail, you can sign up for a free account if you'd like to try it.

Trick #1: Tracking Your Email with a "+"

When you add a "+sometexthere" to your email address in Gmail, it will still arrive in your inbox. For example, let's say that your email address is bob@gmail.com. Sending an email to bob+doublestamp@gmail.com, or bob+anything@gmail.com will still send the email to bob@gmail.com. Why is this useful? Because you can track where people are getting your email address from.

Next time you go to sign up for something on the internet, add a "+website" to your email address. For example, if you are signing up for ebay, you could sign up using the email bob+ebay@gmail.com. Now, if you start receiving tons of spam, all of which are addressed to "bob+ebay@gmail.com," you will know that ebay shared your information with other companies!

Note: Sometimes websites won't allow you to place a "+" character in your email. If this is the case, use trick #2.

Trick #2: Dots don't matter

Dots in Gmail addresses are ignored. That means that if you send an email to double.stamp@gmail.com, it's the same as sending it to doublestamp@gmail.com or d.oubl.e.st.am.p@gmail.com. This can be handy if the "+" is not allowed by a website to which you are signing up. Instead, you can add dots in certain places, then write down where you put them for a given website. For example, if you sign up for ebay, you could use b.o.b@gmail.com instead of bob@gmail.com. If you start getting spam addressed to b.o.b, then you know that ebay spilled the beans on you.

This trick can be useful to sign up for multiple accounts on the same website, since most will not allow you to use an email address that is already registered in their system.

Trick #3 (not really a trick): Using filters and labels

One of the best things about gmail is the ability to easily create custom filters to organize your incoming email. You can filter your email in almost any way that you can think of. For example, let's say that you would like to redirect any email that has the word "AOL" directly to your trash folder (I hate AOL). You would just go to Settings->Filters->Create New Filter and fill out the form appropriately. On the next page, you just check the box that says "delete it," and your done.

A "label" is exactly that, a label or tag on your emails. You can set up a "label" based on your filter criteria. For example, you could apply the label "family" to any email that arrives from someone in your family. Labels can help you quickly find past emails, and they keep your inbox tidy.

An example: Slammin' that Spam

Time for a real world example of how to use all these gmail features. These instructions will help you set up a spam bustin' system.

1. Set up a "junk email" gmail account. Something like yourname.junk@gmail.com.
2. Set the new junk account to forward all your email to your real account. To do this, go to Settings -> Forwarding and Pop and fill out the box.
3. Set up a FILTER in your real gmail account. In the filter criteria, place your junk email address in the "FROM:" box so that the filter will be applied to any emails forwarded from your junk mail account.
   
4. Next, choose to "Apply a label" and select "New label..."
   
5. Name the label something like "Junk account" or "Bulk mail"
6. Click "Create filter."

Da-duh! You're done. Now, when you sign up for that next website, put in your JUNK email address, and use the "+" or "." trick (as discussed above) to tag the site. If that website sends you an email, you will still receive it in your real email because it will automatically forward. You will see who is responsible for the email by looking at the "+tag" part of the email. If you start getting too much spam in your real email address, all you have to do is either stop the forwarding, or create a filter in the junk mail account! Spaminora!

Clean n' Easy Movie Schedules

If you're still using a newspaper to look up movie schedules, you're probably from somewhere like Naf, Idaho. Oh wait, they don't have movie theaters or newspapers there.

For a more time saving and modern approach, try using the Google "movie" keyword. It's as easy as this:

1. Go to google.com.
2. Type: "movie: zipcode" replacing the word "zipcode" with your actual code.
3. Hit enter.
4. You will see all the movies and times that are available near your location.

The results are clean and easy to read, without any annoying advertisements to distract your eye. Here's an example. You can order the results based on the movie title, theater, movie popularity, and rating. You can also get instant maps to the theaters, or view movie trailers by clicking "trailer" on selected movies.

This is by far the easiest, cleanest, quickest, and betterest way to find the movies you want to see. Wow, computers really are fun and useful.

Remember the Milk

I use a computer for many hours every day, so when an internet tool comes along that helps me organize, I'm psyched. Recently, I have been very impressed with what I find to be the internet's most powerful TO-DO list system: Remember the Milk. As usual, it's completely FREE!

A TO-DO list!? Powerful?!

Yeah. A powerful TO-DO list I tell you.

If your like most people, you have many areas that demands different sized pieces of your time pie. Work, family, exercise, hobbies, and school might make up a typical day for you. Even though these different areas are for the most part disjoint, they still make up YOUR time and YOUR life.

Remember the Milk (RTM) is a system that is capable of organizing all the things that you need to get done. At first glance, it's a TO-DO list. You sign up for an account, create some tasks, and then check them off as you finish. If you stop there, however, you might as well use a piece of paper and a pen. RTM has a very deep feature list that allows you to do almost anything you can imaging with your tasks. Like what?

First off, you can create multiple task lists for the different areas of your life. One for work, one for school, etc. You can assign due dates to each task, and when the day arrives for you to complete your task, it will show up on your "Today" page.

You can also attach locations to all of your tasks. Say, for instance, that you need to drive around town running errands. By attaching addresses to your tasks, you can visually plan out the routes by using the RTM maps feature. Check it out.


One of my favorite features, and what I believe makes RTM so powerful, is the ability to make "smart lists." Smart lists make it possible to dynamically manage your tasks using a search term. For example, let's say that you have many lists and tasks, but only want to view the tasks that are relevant to your car. By creating a smart list, you can have a dynamic list that only displays tasks that have the word "car" in them. The possibilities are endless with this kind of functionality.

If you work with others, you'd probably be interested to know that you can also share/assign tasks with/to other people. A friend of mine runs a fly fishing website called RiverBum, and needs to be able to assign tasks to his staff efficiently. RTM is perfect for this kind of situation.

What if you need to receive a TXT, email, or instant message when a task is approaching? It can do that too! Forgetting that something is due is no longer an issue for you flakes out there. There are many other features which I don't have room to explain here, but RTM has some great documentation and support forums. I would suggest reading their Frequently Asked Questions page to get started.

Since I have been using RTM to manage my tasks, my efficiency in getting things done has definitely improved. Give it a try by clicking here.

Avoid a Meltdown: Back up Your Data!

Here's a true story.

On April 26, 1999, I went to turn on my computer as I had done hundreds of times before. Instead of getting the boot-up screen, all I heard was a short beep. The computer was on, but nothing was appearing on the screen. I turned it off and tried again, but the same thing happened. This wasn't the first time that something wrong had happened on my computer, so I went to work trying to fix the problem. Many hours later, I was completely stumped, but I was sure something really bad had happened.

The next day I heard about a breaking news story from one of my computer geek friends: A computer virus called "Chernobyl" had erupted in a huge number of computers across the world. It remained dormant on a user's system until a special date (April 26, 1999, an anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in Russia), upon which the virus severely damaged the data of the system's hard disk. After reading the news reports, there was no doubt in my mind that I had been a victim of this vandalism. My data was long gone. All my school work, all my personal files, all my programming projects... it was all wiped clean, and I didn't have a backup.

You probably have thousands of irreplaceable photos and documents that could be lost in an instant. How would you feel if tomorrow they were erased completely from your computer? You can lose your data in countless ways, even if you're on a Mac and don't worry so much about viruses. Do you have an adequate backup? Don't be as stupid as I was. If you do not have a backup system, you need to get one immediately.

Ok, so now your scared (as you should be), and want to get your act together by setting up a backup system. How do you do it? I suggest that you invest $65 to $100 on what is called an "external hard drive." This is a hard drive that remains outside of your computer case, and connects to your computer via a USB cable. Once you set it up following the manufacturer's instructions, you can easily copy your sensitive files to the drive. Most drives will come with a backup utility that may allow you to schedule backups of certain files or directories at a particular time.

Another option is to pay for an online storage service such as Mozy, which allows you to upload your data to their company computers. This is nice because your data is safer when stored in two different locations ( If you're house burns down, your computer AND external drive would most likely be burned.) The downside is that it takes a long time to transfer a lot of data across the internet.

It doesn't really matter how you do it, just do it! And do it often.

It's not important for you to backup your entire system. Things like programs can be easily replaced by reinstalling them from a CD or download. The data that is essential to backup are the things that are irreplaceable: photos, personal documents, and anything else that can't be recovered for a price. Data storage nowadays is very cheap, so if you're in doubt about what to backup, play it safe.

Now, don't think that a data disaster won't happen to you. Make sure that you are ready for a catastrophe by creating a backup plan right now. For less than $100 bucks and just a little bit of setup time, you'll be much safer. Is your data worth $100 bucks?

OpenOffice: Save That Ca$h!

Recently, a good friend of mine told me how disappointed he was when budgeting for a new computer. He could afford paying for the computer itself, but was completely overwhelmed when he realized how much he would have to spend on software. A brand new copy of Microsoft's Office 2007 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc...) would have cost him over $300 for the professional version, a program that is NOT included in Windows by default.

So, are you stuck paying a boatload of money for software? Absolutely not.

OpenOffice (OO) is a FREE alternative to Microsoft's office package, and it works very well. It has all the programs that office does, only under different names. For example, the OpenOffice equivalent to Word is called Writer. The Excel equivalent is called Calc. OpenOffice also contains programs for presentations, databases, and charts/drawings. It is even capable of opening/editing/saving documents in Microsoft's proprietary formats. All of the major features of MS Office are available in OpenOffice, and it's completely free (even for commercial use). If a company of 1,000 employees used OO, that would save them over a quarter of a million dollars. Send some of that cash over here!

Ok, Ok. Maybe you are skeptical. How well does OpenOffice really work compared to MS Office? My answer: I, personally, would rather write a document in OO than I would in MS. There are many ways to customize the tools for an individual, and the interface is clean/professional. The annoying glitches that often plague MS documents are gone. Need a PDF of your document? Just click "Export PDF" and you got one. Best of all, OO is free from any proprietary formats, so no one can ever control you or your work. Did I mention it's free? Click here for a list of reviews on OpenOffice.

What you should know about OO

Users should have no problem learning how to use OO if they already know MS Office, because most of the interface is very similar. Some features are placed in other locations, so be patient as you get familiar with OO.

One thing that is still under development in OO is a grammar checker. While this feature is not yet completed, future versions of OO will undoubtedly have it. The spell checker in OO works perfectly.

OpenOffice will do a good job of allowing you to open/edit/save your MS office files, but there may be issues when dealing with documents containing a lot of formatting. For example, if you are using MS Word to create a brochure (why you would use Word for this, I don't know), it may mess up some of the alignment. This is due to the fact that MS Office files are stored in a proprietary format. It's not OpenOffice's fault.

Get OpenOffice

Give it a try. If you don't like it, it was free anyway. I'm sure you will appreciate this product if you give it a fair try. Just click this button:

1-800-GOOG-411

Double Stamp recently published an article about Google’s rising power and domination of the information retrieval industry. This domination is due to providing excellent and free services to the public. Check this one out…

Scenario: You just left your house to attend a friend’s wedding reception at “La Pueblina.” You’ve never been there, so when you discover half way there that you forgot to write down the address, you’re understandably frustrated. You could pull over to a gas station and try to look it up in the phone book, but that takes to much time. You could call someone near a computer and have him/her look it up for you, but that’s even worse. Suddenly, you remember the article that you just read on Double Stamp about Google’s new (free) 411 service. That’s it!

You pull over and dial 1-800-GOOG-411 from your cell phone.

Google: “What city and state?”
You: “Your city, your state.”
Google: “What Business name or category?”
You: “La Pueblina”
Google: “Top 2 results: 1) La Pueblina Reception Hall. 2) La Pueblina Bowling Alley”
You: “One”

Google continues to provide you with the address, telephone number, and other details. You quickly note down the address of La Pueblina, and arrive perfectly in time to your friend’s wedding reception. Excellent.

Next time you find yourself driving in circles, trying to find a particular business or restaurant, give GOOG-411 a try.

Keep Private Data Safe From Web Snoops

The internet is vast web of connections which link personal computers, corporate networks, government servers and foreign organizations. When you connect to a particular website, the data that you enter and receive passes through a number of computers outside of your control. So, what prevents a user on one of those computers from intercepting your data and reading it? Nothing usually, but private data CAN be protected if you use something called "Secure Socket Layers" (SSL). This article isn't intended to explain the details of SSL. It is intended to make sure that you, a user of the internet, know how to determine if your data is safe. You don't have to know how a watch works to read the time.

First, you should never consider your information secure when using a computer that isn't your own. When you load your email, visit a banking site, or load any information that is considered sensitive, that information gets stored into the memory of the computer that you are using. If you're not the owner of that computer, you can't be sure that no one will obtain your sensitive info. It doesn't matter how secure your connection to the web is, your data is still stored locally. If you do not trust the owners of the computer you are using, don't load or enter any sensitive material. Buying something online with your credit card while using a foreign internet cafe computer is a bad idea, as the owners may be recording every keystroke you make.

Now, on to SSL. The concept is really simple: SSL protects your data from potential snoopers by encrypting it before sending. Your browser encodes your sensitive information using encryption, the coded data is sent, and the computer that you are connecting to decodes it. If someone in the middle intercepts your data, they will just see a bunch of gibberish codes. When you connect to a website using the "https://" instead of "http://" prefix, you are telling the browser to protect your data using SSL. The pictures here show a secure connection being made to gmail, so no one can read my email even if they intercept it! If you have a gmail account, just go to https://www.gmail.com instead of http://www.gmail.com if you want to try it yourself. Many other online mail systems carry this feature as well.

If a proper secure connection has been made, you should see a little picture of a lock in the lower right hand corner of your page. Hovering your mouse over the lock will show you the third party organization that has verified the website in question. Companies like IdenTrust and Verisign are common examples of companies that make this verification.

Bottom line... if you don't see https:// in your address bar, and there is no lock in the bottom right hand corner of your screen, don't enter or try to retrieve any sensitive information! Don't pay your bills online, don't do any bank transactions, and don't read sensitive material. However, if you do see the https://, the lock, and you're using a computer you trust, your data is secure.

Now, go practice. Check your bank's account and the sites you use to pay your bills online to make sure they are doing things right. If there's no https and lock, send a complaint. There is no reason that any website dealing with sensitive information should not be using this technology.

I'll trade you 4 IEs for 1 Firefox

If you run Windows it is very possible that you are viewing this page in Internet Explorer, Microsoft's pre-packaged web browser that comes with Windows (often called IE). To be sure, look in the upper left corner of the page. If you see a blue "e" icon, then you're using IE, and this article is intended to help you understand why you should try a different browser: Firefox. Maybe you're just fine with IE, or maybe it seems like too big of a hassle to change. Read on before you blow this off..

First, IE does a terrible job of interpreting web pages. An organization known as the World Wide Web Consortium creates standards on how browsers should display the files that are loaded when you visit a website. When the browsers are made to be compliant with the specifications of this organization, web designers can be assured that their pages will display correctly, no matter which browser is being used. Microsoft has ignored huge portions of these standards in developing IE, thus limiting many of the tools that would be available to web designers. It's kind of like trying to use a Phillips screwdriver on a proprietary screw that doesn't fit. As a web designer myself, I have pulled out my hair (which is why I am somewhat bald) trying to get my web pages to look the way that I intended them in IE. Web designers waste time figuring out how to "hack" their websites into working with IE. As a user, you get a less functional, less efficient browser using IE. Lame...

Secondly, IE is a lot less secure than Firefox. IE is closely built around the foundations Windows, making it much easier for a hacker or malicious user to use web pages to mess with your computer. Firefox, on the other hand, was built as a separate block, making security exploits much more difficult. I can guarantee you that your "spyware" scanner will find much fewer problems if you switch to Firefox.

Now, forget about the problems with IE, what's so great about Firefox itself? Firefox is very efficient; It uses less memory and displays pages very quickly. It has many user options which will allow you to navigate the way that YOU want to navigate. For example, don't you hate it when you click on a link and it opens a whole new window? You can set Firefox to disallow that, or have it open in another "tab" instead of a whole new window. There are all kinds of simple yet powerful options that you can set up in Firefox.



Firefox also has a great architecture for add-ons. Add-ons are little modules that you can install into your browser to make it do new things. For example, you can install an add-on called WeatherFox which will show you your local weather forcast in the corner of your broswer. Want to listen to music right inside your browser? Try FoxyTunes. Maybe you want a tool that will allow you to load photos and web content quickly to your family blog... Firefox has extentions for that too. Here's a page with tons of firefox add-ons that you can explore.

Firefox has a whole slew of security features that you can learn about if you search the web. It's built to last, very slick, and well designed. There is no doubt in my mind that it is the best web browser available today, and I know you'll love it if you try it out. On top of that, it is entirely FREE and always will be. Get it now for free here.

Google: Service or Timebomb?

Whether you realize it or not, a revolution is happening right now. 50 years from now, entire sections of history books will be dedicated to the information revolution which began with the birth of the web. Google has played a key role in triggering this revolution by striving to provide searches for not only web pages, but anything else containing information. Here is Google's official mission statement:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I am a big fan of Google. Gmail is by far my favorite email system, and I am signed up for just about every other google service they provide. As far as search and web applications go, it's hard to find anyone who does a better job than Google, which is why so many people use their services. They have earned their massive user base by providing innovative products for free, and have forced other companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft to reconsider how they do business. They have done so, for the most part, in a respectful and non-manipulative fashion.

With so much information being fed to Google's computer systems, (as well as Microsoft's and Yahoo's) how will these companies manage their increasing power? 15 years from now, every major book, movie, song, magazine, newspaper, and public record will be indexed by a few major search companies. Even the article you are reading right now is hosted on a Google computer. Placing this much informational power behind the trigger of one company is alarming to say the least, and could lead to an atomic political timebomb. With great power comes great responsiblitiy, but will the CEOs and future decision makers have the integrity to resist taking advantage of their overwhelming power? What if a CEO dies, and the company is usurped by the evil board member who has been waiting for his breakthrough into unrighteous dominion? Uh oh...

In the meantime, I'll continue to use my gmail account and check my schedule on my google calendar. I'll keep using blogger to write Double Stamp, and even manage some of my important financial information with their online spreadsheets. I just hope that we can figure out a way to prevent these companies from snagging us like a crocodile snags an unexpecting wildabeast drinking from a desert pool.