Where is Klaus?

My SmugMug site is up and running

Just a short note that I finally got my SmugMug site customized. It's actually fairly straight forward if one has the patience to read through "Help" carefully. In my book, SmugMug is a fantastic tool to present your pictures online in the best possible way.

Remember the Milk: Great online todo task manager

I know, you have probably already tried a number of todo managers and have enough trouble to operate your current one, be it iCal or Entourage, let alone trying a new one. However,  "Remember the Milk" (RTM) deserves a moment of your attention. Conceived as a Web 2.0 on-line do-do-list by two Aussie developers (Emily Boyd and Omar Kilani) and a stuffed monkey, RTM is simple to operate and offers a number of features which will enhance your productivity:

• receive reminder via email, instant messenger (AIM) or SMS
• Share and publish (great if you work in a small office or want to share the workload at home...)
• add task by email and send task with other users to share
• iCalendar and Google Calendar integration, Atom and RSS support

I have used it for the last few days and have become an enthusiast. Give it a try. Coming home from shopping "without the milk" will be a thing of the past. Equally, you no longer have to smear your tasks on the palm of your hand or on random scraps of paper - RTM will do it much more elegantly. And, since its online, Mac and PC users are equally welcome to use it.

Google Earth - New for the Mac

I know, for the PC world Google Earth has been around for a few months already and got raving reviews. The wait for Mac users ended last week, when during Macworld in San Francisco Google issued a version "for the rest of us" . My advice: postpone the download beyond your productive working hours. Otherwise, you will spend the rest of the day roaming the world to discover your favorite spots courtesy of Google. Why not start by planning your next backpack hike to the Schwarzsee area in Switzerland.  Awesome stuff.

Podner 1.01 - re-encoding DVDs for iPod video

Probably by now most of the lucky new iPod (Video) owners have found a way to re-encode their movies and tv shows to the 320x240 format allowed only. Quicktime Pro will do the job just fine, but it costs $29.95 and since it encodes in double pass H.264, it takes forever.

Enter Podner, a "one-trick-pony", whose only aim in life is to move your video clips from incompatible formats  to the very few which iPod (or iTunes for that matter) support. It also moves the re-encoded clip to your iTunes music folder and adding it to the iTunes library. I tested Podner by converting a 500+ MB DivX video file with 2  rather extreme options the software offers: H.264 double pass and MPEG 4, medium quality. The result in terms of time required is dramatic, with the former option it took 18 hours on my G4 1.2 Ghz Cube but only one hour with the latter. The differences in quality, however, will only matter if you want to watch the movie in iTunes , where the MPEG 4 version  is clearly inferior. I have not yet tried the single-pass H.264 option, which may be the best overall compromise re. time and quality. Check out Podner, at US$ 9.95 it is a great  "one-trick-pony" to get some of your video material ready for that next intercontinental plane ride in a cinch. Very easy to use! Or simply to move your video collection to iTunes and its playlist format we all have so much gotten used to.

 

gada.be - great new metasearch engine

Chris Pirillo, the legendary tech guru, blogger (c:/pirillo.exe) and pod-caster (Chris Pirillo Show) has gone live with an awesome new meta-search engine named gada.be which really rocks.

Wiki defines meta-search engine "a search engine that sends user requests to several search engines and/or databases and returns the results from each one. They allow users to enter their search criteria only one time and access several search engines simultaneously. Since it is hard to catalog the entire web, the idea is that by searching multiple search engines you are able to search more of the web in less time and do it with only one click". Software such as "Metacrawler" come to mind. It was quite popular before "Google" came to rule the search engine market.

With new search engines and resource bases appearing almost on a weekly basis, metasearch engines are an ever more useful tool. Instead of having to approach Google, its specialized platforms such as Google Blog Search, Technorati or Yahoo Blog Search one at a time, "gada.be" searches in some 100 plus data bases and presents the results fast and clean, separating the results by source.

This can be particularly useful if you want do the search on a slow hand-held device (Treo, PSP or dial-up mobile) with net access where the normal "googling" drives you crazy. With "gada-be" you only have to put in the search term right into the URL (web address). Say you wanted to find a "costa smeralda villa" to rent for your next summer holidays, the URL  would read as follows: "http://costa.smeralda.villa.gada.be" (without the ", of course). I have successfully tried it out and was quite happy to have the website for our house in Sardinia - Casa La Maddalena - pop up on the first go. Give it a try!

You can use dashes or dots to separate your words. Dashes imply that you're searching for both of the words (together or apart), whereas a dot implies that you're searching for a term. This way, you can carry the URL with you wherever you go (or link to it) and the results will remain intact. You can even combine them, dashes and dots, in the URL. http://technology-cool.stuff.gada.be/ would yeild results akin to: technology AND "cool stuff". But of course, you can also go to the gada.be webpage and use their search box. You can even subscribe to gada.be results in RSS. Really cool.

It's tough to be an associate!

With the summer heat here in Sardinia finally making room for the occasional early morning fog or even showers - its mid-October by now! - it seems high time for me to catch up with what's happening in cyberspace and, even more importantly, tend to my abandoned blog. Surfing the web is a lot less exciting than persueing the "perfect wave", but I have to admit it works as a pretty good substitute during the long winter months.

I began my journey by checking the latest edition of Time Magazine's 50 coolest websites - category "blogs" - to see what was in and what was out. Needless to say I stumbled on a few gems that I would like to share with you in my next few posts.

Having worked and often fought during my professional life with in-house lawyers and outside law firms I particularly enjoyed Anonymous Lawyer a humorist blog about every day life in a fictitious US law firm. The above referenced episode on how this FIRM treats its associates, however, is by no means exclusive to law firms but should ring a bell for investment banks and other large financial institutions on either side of the Atlantic. The author of the blog is doing a great job at not taking himself too seriously which makes good fun to read.

And for those regularly suffering at the opposite side  of the negotiating table, the author's assessment that being a lawyer, boils down to "fooling clients into believing [we] have some real expertise and using fear and manipulation to extort excessive hourly fees" will applaud wholeheartedly. A must read for attorneys and investment bankers who take themselves too seriously.

Where is my book?

If traveling light is as much an obsession to you as it is to me but you never depart home without loading your bag with a minimum of  three books to survive that never-ending transatlantic flight, I have got the perfect solution for easing your "schlepping" experience and starting an exciting book hunt: bookcrossing.com. Next time you arrive jet-lagged and bleary eyed at JFK airport, lighten your baggage on the spot and set your read books free to be picked up by the next reader. But not without registering it beforehand at "bookcrossing.com" and labeling it so that you will later be able to follow the adventures of your "message in the bottle". Ron Hornbaker from Lake Winnebago, Missouri designed and launched this website in 2001 which today has 400'000+ members and over 2m books registered, a seemingly happy community of bookworms all asking the question: "where is my book"? The "raison-d'etre" and philosophy of this fun site is best described by its authors below. Why then "schlepping" your books around once you have finished reading them? Start Bookcrossing today! And who knows, if you are lucky you might pick up another "abandoned" BookCrossing specie in the arrival lounge at JFK.....

                                                            

Keeping Tabs on the Net

Haven't you been looking for a tool to help you in keep tags or labels on interesting on-line articles or websites. Of course, you have bookmarked your favorite sites bringing some order into your web information universe. And, by subscribing to RSS feeds of you preferred sites and using an aggregator of your choice (e.g. Ranchero software's Netnewswire or Safari for Mac users) you get regular updates from your favorite sites. Wouldn't it be great if in addition to bringing order into your own bookmarks you could benefit from bookmarks or tags created by other users in the net. Check out del.icio.us and you won't have to look any further.

Del.icio.us not only manages your bookmarks on their server for free (accessible from any computer on the net) but it also lets you track and share the tags of 200'000+ subscribers of  Del.icio.us. Thus the power  of  del.icio.us  stems from  the clicking keyboards of  its  many members. This can provide interesting insights for business, particularly for advertiser in analyzing trends. And, doesn't it solve the problem of most voracious web-readers who regularly can't find again the interesting stuff they discovered on the net? Time to get your bookmarks on-line!