TIVO - Peace in TV Remote Land

Anybody with a family and cable TV is likely familiar with the “battle for the remote”. Until Tivo the only solution was to place multiple TV’s in different rooms throughout the house, and each family member can then watch their favourite show in isolation, without a family battle. Perhaps this is why the modern family unit is so screwed up, but I won’t get into that. Probably the best solution is to throw your TV out the window and actually talk to each other, but if TV has entrenched itself in your life, then perhaps you should consider Tivo.

A friend of ours was telling us about her Tivo, which I hadn’t really known much about until a few days ago, but this is an interesting device. Tivo is yet another “set-top box”, and it takes up where the venerable VCR left off, and does what a DVD player simply cannot do – record TV shows. However Tivo has taken TV recording to a higher level – with Tivo you can watch a TV show in real time, pause the action while you take a phone call, record another program or even several programs at the same time, and fast-forward through commercials. Tivo also has an idiot-proof on-screen guide which also incorporates a search engine, allowing you to search for your favorite programs by genre, actor name, show name, director name etc. You can also refine your programming so that, for example, you can specify that you only want to watch first-run programs, never repeats. Tivo has partnered with TV Guide, so that you never have to thumb through a paper copy again. All TV Guide’s listings are available through the Tivo interface up to two weeks in advance, so you can set your Tivo unit to record anything you want that is available on TV Guide. With the Season’s Pass feature, you get your favorite series to record for its duration, giving you the power to go beyond TV Guide’s two week ahead limitations. As a Soprano’s fan myself, this would have been a great thing to have last year, as I always wanted to watch it but couldn’t because the language wasn’t appropriate for our nine-year-old. I wound up missing most of the final season last year because of this.

Another cool feature of Tivo is the ability to join your computer network. This means that you can connect Tivo to any of your household computers and use it to view photos or play music that resides on one or all of your PC’s; now you can show your photo collection on your TV, or play your MP3 music collection over your Hi Fi system. I have never actually tried Tivo, but I am already convinced that I cannot live without it.

Microsoft has done what it does best and stolen the Tivo concept by introducing a new version of Windows XP, called Windows Media Center Edition, which does exactly the same thing as Tivo and even trumps Tivo with a few tricks of its own. By adding a computer with Windows MCE to your entertainment system, you can actually burn recorded programs onto a DVD, and you can run the computer on your TV if you want to. It’s a neat trick, but I wonder if it’s really necessary, as anybody with Tivo will have a computer anyway.

The whole secret to all of this is the ubiquitous availability of Hard-Disk storage. Hard-disks are so big and so cheap, that they can be used to record many hours of TV, something only dreamed of even five years ago. For more information on the Tivo phenomenon, visit www.tivo.com.

Tips for Organizing Your Digital Photos

Since acquiring my first digital camera three years ago, and a further two digital cameras since then (not counting the one in my cell phone), I have taken close to 6000 pictures. Since I no longer have to worry about film processing costs for “dud” pictures, I have become very experimental and snap-happy. My color multifunction inkjet printer cost around $200, and it prints absolutely amazing color photos. I now have at my disposal all the equipment necessary to take unlimited photos, without paying any penalty for over-exposed, out-of-focus, or just boring photos, and I can print the photos I want to keep, right in the comfort of my own home.

Ironically, I still don’t have any picture albums or framed photos in my house – all my pictures, duds included, are all stored on my home computer, my laptop, or my Nurturing Loving Partner’s computer. Additionally, probably two thirds of all the pictures that I have religiously moved to my computers are worthless to me in terms of sentimental or artistic value. This week I decided to take control of this situation and start weeding out all the bad and uninteresting photos from my collections, and make prints of the photos that I really like so I can start making scrap-books. This laborious exercise has taught me a few things for the future, and so I am passing along what I have learned for the benefit of those just embarking on their digital photography adventures.

The first thing I have learned is that it would have been much easier to organize my photos if I deleted the bad ones right away, before moving them to the computer. Deleting 4000 photos out of 6000 (two thirds of all my photos) is a lot of work and very time-consuming! The bad photos take up a lot of hard-drive space, and as they are deleted one by one, my hard-disk becomes more and more fragmented. Lesson? Delete bad photos the same day you take them. Delete them right off the camera if you know the photo you have just taken is no good. It will save you a lot of time when you start your scrap-booking project.

The second thing I learned is to get a card-reader for your computer. A card reader offers many advantages over connecting your camera to your computer, namely, you don’t deplete the batteries on your camera as you transfer photos, you don’t need to load any additional software, you can view and delete before transferring, and you can readily grab the great photos from your friend’s camera which has a different card type. Card readers are a must-have accessory, and cost about $35.

Weeding through 6000 photos is difficult enough, but without good organizing software, it is more like a nightmare. Using standard Windows folders to view and sort is so cumbersome, you might just give up on the whole project and your photos will be imprisoned in your computer forever. Google’s free Picasa software is a great solution to this problem, and it makes organizing fun and easy. It also offers an easy to use red-eye tool for on-the-fly editing. For more difficult editing tasks, you might think you need to spend several hundred dollars on Photoshop – but you don’t. PhotoPlus 6 by Serif Software is free, it will work for practically all your advanced editing needs, and it’s easier to use.

Now - go take some pictures - lots of pictures!

Mass Emailing for Marketing Your Business

Mass-emailing campaigns are a legitimate way to market a product or a newsletter, but with the massive, chronic problem of spam, mass-mailings have gotten a bad name. These days, the way legitimate companies do mass-mailings is to send their message only to subscribers who have voluntarily signed up, or “opted in” for the service. To do this, marketers had to purchase expensive, complicated mass-mailing programs, and tie up their own computers to do the mailing. It was always a big hassle, and with programs like Outlook, all the subscribers get is a plain text message, which is not especially eye-grabbing.

Many people who attempt an email campaign try to use Outlook or Outlook Express to send out the message, by cc’ing everybody in his address book. In most cases the email hosting company will block the campaign because it has been identified as a mass-mailing, which these days has the reputation of being a BAD THING (because of spam), and mail-hosting companies don’t allow it. In addition to this, Outlook-type programs aren’t very good at mass-mailings, because they only offer rudimentary tools, and are extremely complex to use for this purpose.

As with so many things computer-related these days, the process has undergone a good deal of refinement, and products are getting not only better but also cheaper. Fortunately for companies wishing to send out product announcements or newsletters to their database of customers, the process of sending out a mass-mailing is now very simple to do, and also very cheap.

A friend of mine, who is always on the lookout for ways to market his company and send his customers offers and newsletters, turned my attention the other day to company called Vertical Response (http://www.verticalresponse.com/). This product is truly amazing; it makes the process of designing and sending mass-emails so easy and fast that anybody can do it. Once subscribed, the mailer uses a control panel in his web-browser that takes the user through the process of designing the message, importing the email addresses from the company database or address book, creating subscriber lists, and using templates of previous campaigns as the basis for the next one, eliminating most of the work of starting from scratch each time. All campaigns are saved and can be repeated at will, or slightly modified and sent to a different subscriber list. All the templates include an opt-out offer, which cannot be omitted, allowing the subscriber to unsubscribe at any time. The pre-designed templates are excellent; the finished results are HTML formatted, and include all the elements of a well-designed web-page, including graphic images, background designs, etc.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of Vertical Response’s product is the outstanding statistical reporting that it provides. Once a campaign has been sent out, the marketer can then see how successful his campaign has been by viewing a web-stats page that will provide accurate percentage information about how many mails are successfully sent, opened, unsubscribed or bounced. If the campaign contains links, the stats will report the percentage of click-throughs.

Companies like Vertical Response are extremely cautious that this system does not get abused by spammers, and therefore include a very legal disclaimer about the product being misused, so don’t try to use this as a spam weapon. The law will bite you if you do. Vertical Response has a “no tolerance spam policy”, and complies with the CAN-SPAM act.

However if you need to reach your customer base with a legitimate, important message on a regular basis, Vertical Response is the best thing going.

Basic Steps Setting Up Your Wireless Router

Wireless routers are cheap and plentiful these days, and they are becoming commonplace in households and offices that have high speed internet. These gadgets allow people to distribute their high speed internet throughout their houses or offices, to as many PC’s as they wish, without the need for wires. They have been steadily improving in quality and declining in price in recent years, and from my experience they seem to work pretty reliably. Wireless routers can also be used to network PCs together so that files and printers can be shared without the need to run wires through walls, which is an expensive proposition. Most new notebook computers have wireless capability built-in, and desktop PC’s can have wireless cards added for about $50, so with the addition of a wireless router for around $80, wireless networks have become a tidy networking solution for buildings that do not have Ethernet wiring already integrated.

I have noticed that many people don’t bother to do any configuration with these devices. Out of the box wireless routers do not have any security turned on, and they will work with minimal configuration. Once turned on, wireless routers broadcast up to 200 feet or more, and anybody with a laptop can connect to an un-configured router without the owner’s permission and “borrow” the owner’s internet connection. This is generally a harmless crime, and most people will never know that someone is “borrowing” their internet connection. But bigger problems can occur by not securing your wireless router.

If the “borrower” is a music downloader, there is the risk that he will exceed the maximum bandwidth specified by many internet providers, such as Whooshnet. Once this bandwidth allowance has been exceeded, the provider may turn the high speed connection to a low speed one. Usually there is no warning when this occurs, you will just notice that one day your internet connection speed has reduced to a crawl for no apparent reason.

Another danger that can arise by not configuring your wireless router as secure is that your sensitive data can often be accessed, changed, infected or deleted by the uninvited poacher. As identity theft becomes a bigger threat to all of us, this is Not A Good Thing. There is generally no danger if the computers on the network have individual firewalls turned on, such as the Windows firewall that comes with Windows XP service pack 2, but many businesses turn off their software firewalls to enable file and printer sharing. Wireless routers themselves do provide firewall protection, but only from people on the “outside”. People connecting to your unsecured router are actually on the “inside” of your network, and often have free access to your shared network resources, if your software-based firewalls have been turned off.

The first step to a properly configured wireless network is to set a new password on the router’s configuration menu, and then the next step is to turn on encryption so that any would-be user must enter a 10 or 26 digit WEP or WPA hexadecimal code before they can access the network. This is a very simple procedure and takes less than five minutes to configure. I urge anybody who is considering purchasing a wireless router to thoroughly read the instructions or hire a pro before turning it on, or you will be opening yourself up to some unwanted visitors who may wreak havoc with your valuable personal data.