Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

From our 7,000+ feed subscribers I’m surprised to see that over 600 of those readers are still using the rather simple Firefox Live Bookmarks to keep up on the news. I’ve always found the Live Bookmarks system to be overly simple since the only part of the feed that is made available is the title of the article. I guess the simplicity is what draws the users in though.

For all of the Live Bookmark users out there we’ve found an extension that will make your feed reading just a tad bit better. The Feed Sidebar extension will add a new sidebar that will grab all of the Live Bookmarks that you are currently subscribed to. As you sift through the multiple feed items there will be a summary displayed in the lower half of the sidebar. Here are some of the nifty features:

• You can mark some or all of the entries as read
• Refresh the feeds on demand
• Specify the interval that the feeds will be refreshed at
• Open all unread articles in new tabs
• Adjust how many days worth of data is shown for each feed
• Double-click on a feed item to mark it as read and open it in the browser

Hopefully all of the Firefox Live Bookmarks users out there will put this extension to good use!

Feed Sidebar Firefox Extension

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

And yet, more Vista news! I’m sure in the next several days, there will continue to be more Vista news and announcements. Yesterday, on the Windows Vista Blog, they announced that any computer running Windows Vista can go to a North American T-Mobile HotSpot from January 30^th until April 30^th for free, “blazing-fast broadband” Internet. While the official start date of this offer is January 30^th, the launch of Vista, it actually goes live on Friday the 26^th.

So, where can you find T-Mobile’s hot spots? In the United States they have 8.324 locations.  They include Starbucks, Borders bookstores, FedEx Kinko’s locations, select Hyatt Hotels and resorts, airports, and the airline clubs of American, Delta, United and US Airways.

You can find additional information at http://www.skysurprise.com which appears to be the official site for this program.  T-Mobile also has a HotSpot location finder, so that you can find a location closest to you. That site can be found here. This is around a $30 value per month, and not a bad PR move by Microsoft.  Hey, it’s free, no complaining here!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

Apple touts their Time Machine feature in OS X as a breakthrough automatic backup system, but they’re not the only ones that offer such a thing.  Believe it or not, Windows Vista has a feature that is much like Time Machine, except I’d like to think that it’s better. I’ll explain…

–Apple’s Time Machine Defined–

Since we are going to be explaining how Vista can do exactly what Time Machine can, I thought we should start by explaining what Time Machine is for those of you who are unfamiliar.  Apple defines it as:

Time Machine is the breakthrough automatic backup that’s built right into Mac OS X. It keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac — digital photos, music, movies, TV shows, and documents. Now, if you ever have the need, you can easily go back in time to recover anything.

The big downside here is that you have to have an external drive connected to your Mac to be able to use this feature.  Once you have the external drive connected, it will do it automatically for you.

Vista’s Previous Versions Feature

We’ve mentioned little known features in Vista before before, and there are several. One of them is “Previous Versions” which essentially does what Time Machine does on a Mac except you don’t need an external hard drive connected. That’s what makes it great! The only thing it’s missing is a snazzy interface.  It’s a bare-bones feature, and creating a easy-on-the-eyes interface clearly wasn’t a top priority for Microsoft like it was for Apple. Additionally, keep in mind that this feature is available only in Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise versions of Vista.

Previous Versions are accessed by right clicking on any document or folder (yes, even whole folders are backed-up) and then clicking on “Restore Previous Versions.”  Previous versions come from shadow copies, which are saved automatically to your hard drive. If you need a refresher on what a shadow copy is, reference this article.

A list of archived copies will be displayed in the “Previous Versions” tab, and they’re all sorted by date. Remember, these were all done automatically — without the need of an external drive. Retrieving the archived copies is simple, and you have a few different options for doing so. They include:

• Copy – copy the entire folder and paste it on your desktop or wherever else you’d like to
• Browse – Open the folder to see what’s in it
• Restore – This will replace any existing copy that you have on your computer.

This feature is perfect for any files or folders you may have accidentally deleted or changed. Below you’ll see a screenshot of the “Previous Versions” tab for a folder on my computer containing music from the B-52′s:

Backup and Restore Center

While the Previous Versions feature is great, there are other options included with Vista that will help you keep backup files and restore them if necessary.  To access the Backup and Restore Center, click on the start menu and type “Backup and Restore Center” into the search box and hit enter.

Depending on the version of Vista that you have, you can do various things in the Backup and Restore Center.  One of the nicest features is the option to “Back up files.” Like Time Machine, this does require an external drive of some sort whether it be a hard drive, USB drive, or an optical drive. Clicking on it will pull up a box where you can choose which files types you want to backup.  The screenshot below shows you what this looks like:

Once you select the types of files you want backed-up, you can decide how often you want a backup created as shown below:

For those of you running Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise editions, you can do the following:

• Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore – this is a comprehensive, image-based backup tool that will “help you out of a tight spot if you need to recover your entire system.” It can be accessed from inside Windows Vista- or even from the Windows Vista installation CD should your computer have issues with starting up normally

Wrapping it up

To me, the Previous Versions Feature is something that Microsoft should have offered with Vista Home Premium.  Because they don’t offer it with Home Premium, they should at least talk it up as an incentive for buying Ultimate because it’s a great feature to have.  What I like about it best is that you do not need an external hard drive connected (like Apple’s Time Machine) to make use of it.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Microsoft will be addressing a lot of privacy issues in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, which will be released to the public soon. The new version of the browser will include a private browsing mode called InPrivate, and when it’s enabled cookies aren’t stored, history isn’t recorded, and a lot of your other data is never saved. For people who work on public computers this kind of feature can offer a little piece of mind.

One other handy feature that will be included is the ability to clear out all of your history, passwords, cookies, and more for all websites except those located in your favorites. That means clearing out all of your cookies won’t cause you to have to login again to the sites that reside in your bookmarks.

The last thing that I wanted to point out is a feature they’re calling InPrivate Subscriptions. Here’s how the IE8 team describes this feature:

Under the covers, InPrivate Subscriptions are simply RSS feeds of Regular Expressions that specify sub-downloads to block or allow. Anyone can publish an InPrivate Subscription on their website, just as they can offer an Accelerator or Web Slice on their website.

Essentially with InPrivate Subscriptions users will be able to subscribe to lists of sites that should be blocked. Anyone can create their own list, and then publish it on their own site to share with the world. Content including images, scripts, and CSS files can all be blocked using InPrivate Subscriptions. While it may not be the intended use I’m sure there will be plenty of these subscriptions created to block advertisements from around the web.

So what do you think? Is Internet Explorer 8 shaping up to be a great browser? Here’s a rather lengthy interview (38 minutes) with some of the managers from the Internet Explorer team outlining how some of the new features will work.

[via IE8 Blog] Thanks Claus!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 11, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows; Mac
As you may recall sLife is a free application that you can use to monitor which applications you use on a regular basis, and then graph the usage on a pretty chart. Previously sLife 2.0 application was only available for Mac users, but after four months the Windows version has also been released.

Most of the features available in the Mac version are also available for the Windows version. This includes things like setting goals, managing activities, viewing computer usage according to application/document/website, and more. Here’s a quick overview of the primary features:

• 5 visualizations to help you understand and manage your computer time and productivity: Day View, Applications View, Web & Documents View, Activities View and Goals View.
• Activities let you group computer interactions according to a criteria that you define. You can call an activity anything that you want such as ‘Checking email’ or ‘Consulting for client A’. As an example, imagine that you create an activity called ‘Reading news’ and associate it with the web page titles ‘New York Times’ and ‘Google News’. Every time that you visit the web page of the New York Times or Google News, Slife will associate the visit with the ‘Reading news’ activity and track time against it.
• Create a goal to help you spend less time performing an activity (i.e. ‘Watching YouTube videos’), or to motivate you to make more efficient use of your time.
• You can easily disable all activity logging in Slife without quitting the app by going into “Private Mode”. To do so, look for the Slife menu icon in the system tray, right-click on it and select the “Private Mode” item.

If you’ve been looking for a good way to track your computer usage I’d say sLife is about as good as it gets for the price… free! It’s like having your own personal stalker.

Get sLife for Windows or Mac

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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