Take A Pitcure And Get $10 From Google

A post caught my eye this morning during my coffee and feed reader bonding session. A blog named SavingAdvice shares that Google will pay you for simply taking pictures of businesses around your house and verifying their location. This is in an effort to continually add content to Google Maps.

To me, this is a decent amount of money for the simple sounding task:

"As a Google Business Referral Representative, you'll visit local businesses to collect information (such as hours of operation, types of payment accepted, etc.) for Google Maps, and tell them about Google Maps and Google AdWords. You'll also take a few digital photos of the business that will appear on the Google Maps listing along with the business information. After the visit, you submit the business' info and photo(s) to Google through your Local Business Referrals Center, and we'll pay you up to $10 for each listing that is approved by Google and verified by the business.

All you need to be a successful Business Referral Representative is a passion for helping local businesses succeed, a love for the Internet (some knowledge of Google is great, too), and access to a computer and a digital camera."

Sounds simple enough. I mean, I am not quitting my day job but I'd believe that on a Saturday morning walk I could knock out a few dozen of these. You can click the image to sign up or see the link below for the FAQ.

http://www.google.com/local/referral/signUpRep

Live Traffic Displayed On Google Maps

Being as directionally challenged as a kindergartener, I spend a ton of time on Google Maps. Today they added a feature that is sure to save a ton of time - live traffic indicators.

If you are going to be trekking through a major city (currently 30 are active) you'd be crazy not to take a look.

They have had this availability on mobile devices for a while. If you missed it, you can download the mobile version here.

Check If Your ISP provider is servicing you with correct bill

This Software is a net usage monitor which monitors your internet usage

Every Internet user looks out for a better plan which can suffice his need for surfing. So many plans, so many choices…

But do you ever track what you paid was right ? I found this great tool which is free and I had been testing it for a day and it’s really awesome.

Bitemeter II is a bandwidth and Internet connection speed monitoring utility which ensures you get speed and bandwidth as promised my your ISP and you do not exceed your monthly limit.

Features :

1. A remote web interface through which you can monitor your connection speed anywhere on the network using any browser.

2.ISP restriction. This feature can be used if you have a data upload and download limit.It automatically triggers and alarm before some percent(which can be set by you) and lets you make sure you don’t exceed the data limit.

3.A bandwidth calculator which allows you to calculate how much time will be taken to download a particular size, depending on your bandwidth.

Now you can find out correctly whether your ISP is charging you correctly or now. Moreover you can keep an eye on the network, if it is shared and you can see when its being used.

If you have any questions, anything which is wrong or something you find not mentioned feel free to leave a comment. I would be glad to know more about it from your experience. So what are you waiting for, download it and tell me what’s your experience!

How To Quickly Backup Files To Email

If you’ve ever wanted a simpler solution to backing up your files online - this article is for you.

I currently use Gmail as a quick and dirty online backup solution where what I typically what I do is : Login to Gmail, attach the file, and then I email it to myself.

While quick, this is still a 3 step process… So here’s how to get it down to one move!

‘Backup to Email’ (BTE) is a great piece freeware which simplifies everything. Just right click any file or folder, and select ‘Backup to Email’. That’s it!

One thing I love about BTE is that it’s incredibly intuitive. Here are some examples.

• If you choose to upload a folder, the folder will be automatically zipped and backed up.
• No limit on file / folder size. Files/folders larger than 10MB will automatically be split to slices of 10MB, so your email can cope. When you download the split files, you can easily join them up again with a feature that comes with BTE.
• Easily manage of multiple email accounts to backup to
• If the connection is disconnected at the middle of a file transfer, it initiates an auto-retry every 2 minutes

Looks like my quick and dirty backup solution just got quicker, but cleaner!

Bonus tip #1: Configure a Yahoo email account as your default backup account. While Gmail currently offers more than 4.7Gigs of storage space, Yahoo Mail now offers unlimited space.

Bonus tip #2: Setup email filters to automatically steer all your backups into a folder so it does not clog up your inbox. Here are the instructions on how to do it for Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

How To Copy Files Faster And Easier

If you want to supercharge the simple act of copying and pasting - Teracopy is just the piece of freeware for you.

Here are 5 key features that stand out the most to me:

1. Copy files faster - Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives
2. Pause and resume file transfers - Pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and continue with a single click
3. Error testing - It allows you to run comparison tests on any copy you make, to ensure its integrity
4. Error recovery - In case of copy error, TeraCopy will try several times and in the worse case just skips the file, not terminating the entire transfer. It also shows failed file transfers and lets you fix the problem and recopy only problem files.
5. Windows Explorer Integration - TeraCopy can completely replace Explorer copy, paste and move functions, allowing you to seamlessly work with files as usual.

The one thing I really love about this program is that I don’t have to make a special effort to use it. Too many programs are spoiled by the fact that you have to change your workflow to accommodate it. With Teracopy, everything is business as usual, and it just adds its functionality in the background.

There’s a pro version available with a few extra features - but the free version itself is already spectacular.

How To Automate Turning Off Your Computer

Leaving your computer on overnight is usually the easiest option when you need the computer to perform a task that takes quite a long time to complete (e.g. Downloading large files, ripping DVDs, etc.)

It is however, neither energy efficient nor an environmentally friendly option to take.

WinOff is an excellent piece of freeware which very simply shuts down your computer after a defined time so you don’t need to wait till the morning to attend to your PC.

3 things I like most about WinOff

1. It’s flexible. You don’t HAVE to shut it down. You can also schedule it to - restart, log off, suspend, hibernate or just lock the computer.
2. You get to see the last thing that happened before shutdown. There’s an option for capture a screenshot of the desktop right before the shutdown. With this, you can see if everything turned out OK before the PC shut itself down
3. It’s free. Need I say more?

Google + Firefox = Free Music Downloads

There’s a lot you can do with Google if you can take advantage of it’s advanced search features.

Expanding on this tip which shows you how to find music in open directories, here’s a step-by-step walkthrough on how to use Firefox Smart Keyword searches to speed up the process.

All you need to do is:

1. Create a bookmark in Firefox
2. Use the URLs in this text file as the bookmark location in your Firefox bookmarks (like in the pic above)
3. Assign a keyword to it - eg. music
4. Type the keyword (eg. music) followed by the search term (eg. beatles) directly into the address bar (NOT the search box). For example… type in music beatles , and Google will search open directories for Beatles music files that you can download.
5. 

6. You can modify the code in the text file to change file extensions, which opens a whole window for you. For example, you can even change it to PDF and DOC to look to e-books, or AVI and MPG to look for movies.

   By the way, I’m assuming you already own the media you will be downloading …

   Bonus Tips:

7. The feature above only works for Firefox. If you’re NOT on Firefox yet, try it now
8. If you want to create basic smart keywords to search any web page, here’s how.
9. Here’s a useful advanced features cheat sheet from Google
10. If you don’t find the files on Google, you can try the best bittorrent search engine ever.

Send Text Messages Freely Using Google

I am all over Google and most of their offerings but I never knew about this. A Google page that allows you to send free text messages. Pretty simple looking form too (although I'd recommend reviewing the Privacy policy).

Apparently, this is a function of the Google Toolbar, thus the reason the URL is http://toolbar.google.com/send/sms/index.php.

By going directly to http://www.google.com/sendtophone, you will notice an error.

By the way better to be careful, google may charge the cell phone owners depending on the message

Stretch Your Laptop Battery Size

Now this is good, legit, proven advice from a seasoned traveler. A lot of times you read these tips and they are put together by people that understand the theory but have never really used them in practice.

Here are the tips LIVEdigitally lists to keep your laptop battery kicking longer:

· Brightness

· Don't use external devices

· Single Tasking

· Keep it cool

· Kill unused services

· No Hibernating Do Hibernate, Do not suspend

· Tweak the settings

· Choose Wisely

· Watch the hard drive

· Be Prepared

Quick Way To Check Your Bandwidth

This post will be a shorty since we are just pointing you to quick little utility that is good to know about.

Speedtest is a very cool way to test out your bandwidth. Simply go to Speedtest.net and select the location you want to test against

Guyz Here Are My Results

List Of Sites To Download Music Legally

A-Z sites to download music legally

It wasn't that long ago that downloading music from the internet looked like it would finally ruin some of the mainstream recording companies. Napster (the old version) and the music download software Kazaa were gaining in popularity, and notoriety. Every country with interests in copyright wanted them shut down and every week a new article would appear concerning a new legal battle.

That was then, this is now. Napster is now just another music downloading site among the plethora.

So, in an age where music, video and any other media is virtually on demand how do we go about obtaining it legally. For starters, if it's mainstream and popular and you can get if for free - chances are that it's probably not legal. Secondly, if you don't have to agree to the site's registration agreement then it's most likely that the media has been copied.

Having said that, there are many sites which do offer free music and video that don't require payment or registration. However, these usually offer less well-known bands or genre's which are not popular such as indie, folk and world music.

To erase any doubt, I decided to compile a list of sites where you can download music legally. Some are global while others are restricted to certain countries. I hope it's a benefit to you.

A

AOL Music
Artist Direct
Audio Candy
AudioLunchbox

B

Besonic
Bigpond Music - [Australia]
Big Noise Music
Bleep
Buy Music

C

Cats Music
Compact Disc World
Connect
Corner Band
Corner CD

D

DMusic
Dimple's Music
Domino Records

E

eMusic
Epitonic - [Free but not mainstream]
Exitos Musical

F

Face the Music
Full Audio
FYE

G

Gallery Of Sound
Garage Band
Gig America

H

HMV

I

Independent Record
Instavid
Intomusic.co.uk
iTunes Music Store
Iuma

J

[Comment below if you know one]

K

[Comment below if you know one]

L

Latin Noise
LimeWire2006
Liquid Audio

M

Mainstreet Music
Matador Records
MIRA Coalition
MusicMatch
Musicnet - [AOL]
Music Now
Music Rebellion

N

Napster
Netscape Music
New World Record

O

OD2 - [UK]

P

People Sound

Q

Quonset Hut

R

Rasputin Music
Record and Tape Traders
Rhapsody - [Real]

S

Sam Goody
Spinnery
Spiral Frog
Streamwaves

T

Top Hits Music
Tower Records

U

[Comment below if you know one]

V

Virgin
VitaminIC

W

Windows Media
Wippett- [UK]

X

[Comment below if you know one]

Y

Yahoo! Music unlimited

Z

[Comment below if you know one]

Tips For Improving Camera Phone Photos

Digital Photography School is out with it's latest installment. These tips are something I can totally appreciate because a lot of times I don't have a real camera handy when the kids are being cute. 99% of the time, I whip out the cell phone camera and take a picture that is ridiculously bad.

Here are 2 of the 13 to get you started.

· Well lit subjects - The better lit your subject is the clearer your image is likely to be. If possible shoot outside or turn on lights when shooting inside. Be aware that different lights impact the color in your images differently. Experiment with White Balance to rectify this (see below). Some cameras come with a built in flash or light - this can really lift a shot and add clarity to it, even if you’re shooting outside. If your camera doesn’t have a flash or light you should avoid shooting into bright lights as you’ll end up with subjects that are silhouetted.

· Get Close - One of the most common mistakes with camera phone images is that their subject ends up being a tiny, unrecognizable object in the distance. Camera phone images tend to be smallish due to low resolution - so fill up your view finder with your subject to save having to zoom in on the subject in editing it later (which decreases quality even more). Having said this, getting too close on some model camera phones creates distortion of either fisheye effect or lack of focus due to poor macro ability.

Share Your Content And Get Paid

Have creativity skills? Post it to eefoof. eefoof is a community driven site that combines the features of Youtube, Google Video, Image Shack etc., but instead of those companies getting rich off of your content, eefoof pays you based on the # of hits it receives.

Today, you are able to submit video, audio, flash, or an image. If you have content that was hot on Youtube, you may consider posting it to eefoof to collect a little cash.

eefoof.com is a community driven website built around one principal rule: the authors of Internet content should be paid for their work and not have it exploited for others' gain. With other sites, signing a sponsorship contract means you lose the ownership of your content. Not here. We will send you a percentage of our site revenue via an electronic transfer each month, depending on how well your content has performed. For every unique view your work gets, you will earn money. eefoof will never redistribute your work for profit. We're also artists, and we want what's best for our users.

DWTips solves a problem that has plagued everyone at some point. By tweaking a couple of settings you can totally speed up the process of opening Adobe Acrobat files. I think we all just go used to the long delay and eventually learned to live with it but when you have to open 5-10 PDFs per day, it certainly tests your patience when it takes 30 seconds to open.

Every time you run Adobe Acrobat up to 20 plugins are loaded unnecessarily - most users do not need even a fraction of them!

To disable unneeded plugins and make them optional instead, follow these instructions:

1. Install the latest version of Adobe Acrobat - you can get it here
2. Browse to the plugins folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\plug_ins
3. Create a new folder named Optional
4. Move all files from the plug_ins folder to Optional, except EWH32.api, print*.api, and Search*.api

Google Launches Blog Search By Date

This was actually said by Google.

Today we launched a new feature on Google Blog Search that lets you narrow your search by date. Using this feature, you can track blog posts on your favorite topics according to when those items were posted. We've also incorporated some improvements in search quality that should make your blog-search experience even better.

Ever since Google Blog Search launched, we've noticed that the universe of blogs has truly exploded--our index is doubling every six months. Perhaps even more striking, though, is that there's no one region in the world that leads the growth of blogs. Self-publishing clearly has global appeal, and blogging makes it easy for everyone on the web to share their voices and connect. True, there continues to be blog spam (and we continue to fight it), but our blog search reveals the great range and quality of ideas and writing out there.

Take it for a spin and let us know what you think.

Live Search - A Faster Way To Search

Pretty cool search site that Yahoo happens to own. Livesearch is a product that analyzes your search in real-time and instantly provides Web results with alternate search queries as you type. These suggested queries are based on what other people have searched for.

How To: Use GMail as your mail server for Rails 2.0!

If you’re trying to set up ActionMailer with Google’s SMTP server, you may be running into some issues. In this post I explain a way to get ActionMailer chugging away with google!

Google provides a set of tools for your domain absolutely free. It’s called Google Apps¹. One of my favorite tools to take advantage of is: GMail for your domain. Some reasons to use their mail server:

1. Reduces load on your server (You no longer need a mailer daemon)
2. Reduces storage consumption on your server
3. It’s free
4. Google is reliable

An Attempt

When most people try to get gmail to work as their mail server with ActionMailer, they try something like this:

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {

    :address  => "smtp.gmail.com",

    :port  => 465,

    :user_name  => "do_not_reply@domain.com",

    :password  => "some_password",

    :authentication  => :login

  }

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work as Gmail requires some funky security tunneling to authenticate ( TLS ). However, a plugin that was released by Marc Chung², SMTP_TLS, solves the issue. This plugin was made for Rails 2.0.

Grab it

Download it to get started:

  cd /your_rails_app/vendor/plugins

  svn export https://openrain.com/opensource/public/rails/plugins/action_mailer_tls action_mailer_tls

For some reason, script/plugin install doesn’t work. I solved the issue by doing a svn export.

smtp_gmail.rb

Great, now add the file smptp_gmail.rb to your config/initializers folder and put the following in it:

require "smtp_tls"

  mailer_config = File.open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/mailer.yml")

  mailer_options = YAML.load(mailer_config)

  ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = mailer_options

Mailer.YML

In your config folder, create a file named “mailer.yml” and put the required information in it:

  ---

    :address: smtp.gmail.com

    :port: 587

    :user_name: your_gmail_username@yourdomain.com

    :password: your_gmail_username_password

    :authentication: :plain

After that, you should be gold!

Thanks to Marc for his hard work on releasing a very helpful plugin!

1. Google Apps [↩]
2. marc [dot] chung [at] openrain [dot] com [↩]

AppleScripts for iTunes

AppleScript is the hidden “glue” language that binds software on the Mac together and allows for unparalleled interaction between apps. When built into a program, it allows anyone with the right tools to automate nearly any function of the appication. In fact, it’s what Apple’s Automator is built upon, making AppleScript more accessible to end users who don’t want to know or care about things like variables and loops. Where Automator is as easy as drag-and-drop, programming AppleScript can be complicated (perhaps more so for seasoned programmers).

Doug Adams, however, is an AppleScript wizard, and his huge library of scripts covers all kinds of Mac applications. Of particular interest are his iTunes scripts. He offers dozens upon dozens of cool and useful ready-to-run code samples that do all kinds of tricks with iTunes, including managing playlists, embedding and exporting album artwork, finding and replacing text in track names, and tons more. For getting more out of your Mac and iTunes, check out Doug’s AppleScripts library.

How To Clean Your PC

ow that we all know how much bacteria resides on your keyboard, it's probably about time that we cleaned it along with our monitor and PC. Sure, we all probably wipe the monitor occasionally but that is where most people, including me, stop.

Rick Broida of Lifehacker and CNET fame wrote up a good tutorial that explains the this often neglected task.

"Dust balls can dramatically impede the airflow inside your PC, raising case temperature to dangerous levels, but a nest of cables can also have the same effect. (They also simply get in the way, making it difficult to quickly replace and install components.)"

Here is what he covers:

· Why you need a clean PC

· Computer Cleaning Supplies

· How to Clean a Keyboard

· Monitor Cleaning Tips

· Clean your Computer's fans

· Computer Cleaning No-No's

· Get better Airflow in your PC

Over 250 Microsoft Office Templates

Is it me or do we just not spend enough time rummaging through the Microsoft website? I personally thought this was a good find because I absolutely hate creating documents from scratch if I don't have to.

Courtesy of Microsoft, these category headings basically contain over 250 free Microsoft Office Templates that you can use at will.

Have fun, save time...

· Address books

· Analysis worksheets

· Advertisements

· Announcements

· Applications

· Banners

· Balance sheets

· Bills of sale

· Binder inserts

· Bookmarks

· Books

· Bylaws, policies, and rules

· Calculators

· Case inserts

· Catalogs

· Charts

· Coupons

· Dividers

· E-mails

· Estimates

· Evaluations

· Forecasts

· Games

· Identification cards

· Instructions

· Itineraries

· Job descriptions

· Journals

· Ledgers

· Logs

· Menus

· Maps

· Name and place cards

· Note cards

· Notes

· OneNote notebooks

· OneNote pages

· OneNote sections

· Outlines

· Paper folding projects

· Papers

· Petitions

· Posters

· Press releases

· Programs

· Proposals

· Quizzes and tests

· Quotes

· Recipes

· Records

· Reply cards

· Scorecards

· Sign-in and sign-up sheets

· Signs

· Stickers

· Surveys

· Tags

· Tickets

· Tournament brackets

· Trackers

· Wills

· With compliments cards

· Other templates