Bishop of Technology

We are here to help "ordinary" people understand, acquire, and utilize technology in their personal & business environments.

I have SOME Google Plus invites!

July 7, 8:00pm. Invites are available again (probably temporary). So, if you have met the requirements below, you may get an invite!

I will provide a limited number of invites to REGISTERED USERS. Here is what you have to do to be considered in the contest:

1. You MUST have a Gmail address. (You may create a new – free – account here: mail.google.com
2. Register on this site – using a GMAIL address. (If you are already registered with a different email, you will need to change the address in your profile on this site. If you are unsure about this, leave a message on the CONTACT page)
3. Share this site on one (or more) of the following sites: Facebook, Twitter, or Stumble (one chance to win for each of the three share sites)
4. Follow us on Twitter (@raywaldo) & MENTION my account in a tweet.
5. Leave a comment to this post – and tell me which sites you shared us with and what is good or bad about this site. (Multiple comments or comments not providing the required info will not be considered for the contest.)

Each day, I will select a number of entries and invite them. Visit the Google Plus site and JOIN with your GMail account to see if you won.

Fine print: You must meet and agree with all of Google’s requirements for the use of Google+. I reserve the right to start or stop this promotion at any time or to delete any comments/entries that are deemed inappropriate. Decision of who does or does not get invited is entirely up to me. Neither I, nor this site, will be liable for any use or misuse of the invitations granted.

Google Plus Invite Contest

Bishop of Technology

We are here to help "ordinary" people understand, acquire, and utilize technology in their personal & business environments.

Picasa is a great photo manager.

Overview: Google’s Picasa software is my answer to managing all the digital photos that I have. The software comes in both desktop & online flavors that complement each other. Picasa 3 is the desktop version – available here for Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux (my first choice of operating system). All versions also link to the Picasaweb.com online version. There are third-party applications for web-enabled TVs, DVDs, iPhone, Android and similar devices. No additional application is actually needed for Android devices since an upload function is built into the newer releases of the OS and you can view your photos directly on most Android devices using the Gallery application. A browser is all you need to use PicasaWeb. In this review, I assume that you have already established a Picasa account. If you have not, visit the Google Picasa Accounts Website to sign up – it is FREE.

How to: I will describe how things work on my Linux laptop, Android devices (HTC G2 phone, Viewsonic G-Tablet, & B&N Nook Color – all rooted and running CyanogenMod 7.0.3) and PicasaWeb. I am pretty certain that the Windows and Mac versions operate in a similar manner.

• First, upload your photos:. With my G2 Android phone, I can upload the photos directly to PicasaWeb.com using the Gallery & its “Share” function. However, to save on mobile data usage, and to store everything locally, I prefer to transfer my photos to my computer as the first step. This is much quicker and easier than the 3G (or Edge) connection that I get in this area – and I can group the photos into separate folders on the laptop. So, fire up the Picasa desktop program, connect the camera  (phone or other device) via USB, and (within Picasa) click on Import – select the device – choose which photos to upload (I transfer all and delete from the phone), then chose a location to save and hit “finish”.  This gets the photos on my laptop (and if desired, removed from the camera) and they are included in the Picasa (desktop) program for further management. (Note: Picasa will also search your computer for photos and allow you to manage them from their existing disk locations.)
• Second,  (within the Picasa program) choose all associated photos and “add to album.” If the album exists, just select it – or, create a new album. The photos are not physically moved but (for management purposes) albums “sort” your photos into groups. If you have previously elected that an album should “sync to web” then all new photos which are added to that album will be automatically uploaded to the PicasaWeb site’s album of the same name as the local version – and available for view according to your privacy settings. If you create a new album (on the local computer), then you can just hit the “sync to web” button and the album will be created on the web and all photos in the local copy will be uploaded to the new online album.
• Third, log in to your PicasaWeb account (here) & review your privacy settings. I will not go into detail about all the setup function since Google offers such help already. Click on the gear button (upper right corner of the page) and you will see an option for “Photos settings” or “Photos help.” Click on the settings link and a new page will display. I recommend that you edit ALL settings but you should definitely click on the “Privacy and Permissions” tab. On that page, you can set some important settings. You can even set the licensing and conditions of any reuse. When you have finished with the “Settings” pages, click on the “My Photos” tab (in the top menu). At the top of the page will be a count of your albums and a link to “Edit Visibility.” Click on that link to set the visibility of each individual album (“Public on the Web” means that anyone can view the album; “Anyone With The Link” means that people with whom you share the web address can view the photo; & “Private” restricts access to Google Account users that YOU have specifically authorized.)
• Upload photos directly online. Most new smart phones and many of the newer cameras have web-access built in and allow you to upload your photos directly to PicasaWeb. This is a viable plan for many users but I would highly recommend that you still visit the PicasaWeb.com site and manage your photos directly.

Useability: The real value of Picasa is the ability of making your photos so widely available.

A Picasa photo displayed on my 40" HDTV via my Visio BluRay

• The first level of value is for yourself. My computer, all my Android devices, my HDTV and many other devices ALL have full access to all of my public PicasaWeb photos. You have never seen your photos until you see them in high definition on a large screen HDTV! I can even have a slideshow on my TV. I have all my photos available on my phone – anywhere that I have data connectivity. They display on each device in the Gallery app separated into the albums just as if they were all saved locally on that device. Just think – all your photos on every device – where ever you are!
• Sharing photos may be more important than just keeping them as personal memories. When we are separated from our friends and family by geographic location, we can bring them a bit closer via our shared photos. If you subscribe to a user’s Picasa account (while visiting an account, the right panel, immediately below that person’s name is a link to “follow.” If you have a Picasa account and you click on the “follow” link, the system will send you an email whenever new pictures are added. It is always a great joy to see the pictures of my children who live several hundred miles away. Those pictures are available immediately after they are uploaded.) Also, you can post a link to your photos (or albums) in email, on Facebook, Twitter, or other almost anywhere. Actually, Facebook loads the link and it appears pretty much the same as if you had uploaded the photo to F.B. The difference is that photos uploaded on F.B. are not protected in any way, must be uploaded individually, and can only be viewed on Facebook – only by those with F.B. accounts. The simplest way to post a link is to display the photo or album in your computer’s browser and then copy the address in the browser’s address book. You can then share that link by pasting it in the desired venue.

Review: In summary, I highly recommend Picasa as both a desktop photo manager and an online photo sharing site. All functions are free but the amount of storage is limited to one Gigabyte. That is enough space to store about 500 photos from a 5MP camera. Photos less than 800×600 pixels and videos less than 15 minutes in duration no longer count towards your 1GB quota. If you do need more space, you can purchase 20GB for $5 per year. So far, I have not had to purchase additional storage.

Photo Management

Bishop of Technology

We are here to help "ordinary" people understand, acquire, and utilize technology in their personal & business environments.

How fast a webpage loads *IS* important!

Google gives RayWaldo.com a "GOOD JOB"

We continually work at keeping the load times a short as we can – consistent with providing good appearance and usable data on this site. Our attempts have been validated today with the launch of Google’s PAGE SPEED service (http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/).

Our site received a 70/100 score. This, compared to the 59/100 that the huge tech site techcrunch.com received! (The site apple.com only received a 78/100.)

If you appreciate the quality content and services on this site, please share our link with your friends on Facebook, Twitter & other social networks!

Page Speed

Bishop of Technology

We are here to help "ordinary" people understand, acquire, and utilize technology in their personal & business environments.

Yesterday, Google announced that they will start displaying SOCIAL results more prominently.

I like the idea but there are probably many who will complain about privacy issues. The actual change is (IMHO) insignificant from a privacy perspective. Google will present the same AMOUNT of social data (results from our friends’ Twitter or FaceBook postings) but change the PLACEMENT. The difference is that now, they will display that data intermingled with other results based upon relevancy. Previously, such data was at the end of the list of results.

How do you view these changes? Leave a comment…

Google and Online Privacy

Bishop of Technology

We are here to help "ordinary" people understand, acquire, and utilize technology in their personal & business environments.

Use your Google Calendar on your WordPress Blog

In this article, we will show you how to import your Google Calendar into your WordPress Blog. In  the previous article, you copied data from the settings page of your Google Calendar into a document file. You will now use that data to create the Calendar Page and/or Widget for your blog.

The process involves using a PlugIn to WordPress. The “AmR iCal Events List” plugin does the magic. So, here are the steps to use it:

1. The first thing is to install & activate the AmR iCal plugin
2. Visit the Settings page for the plugin & add any needed info. The only item that normally needs to be changed is the “date localization” – I recommend the “none” option. Press “Update” to save any changes.
3. Visit the Appearance / Widgets page & drag the AmR iCal Widget to the desired sidebar of your theme.
4. Add a Title for the Widget and then SAVE.
5. Visit the home page of your site and assure that the sample events are displayed properly.
6. Revisit the Widget’s Settings & erase the link in the URL field then PASTE the “ICS Address” into the field (The address is found in the document that you saved at the previous article – or from the  Google Calendar Settings.) Be sure to SAVE the widget settings.
7. Return to the home page for your site and assure that YOUR calendar’s events are displayed.
8. You may also add a second calendar by placing it’s ICS address (url) in the field after your own calendar’s url. (Suggestion: include the calendar of your host community.)

That will complete the widget’s function! Enjoy. You can edit the manner that the events are displayed by making slight changes to the configuration. Visit the plugin homepage for instructions.

You may wish to include a PAGE on your site to provide a bigger and more complete display of your events.

1. Visit your site’s dashboard & click on Pages / Add New
2. In the Title field, enter your name for the page. E.g, “Events”
3. In the window, type the open square bracket character and the letters “iCal” followed by a space and the “ICS address” used in the widget above. Add another space and the text, “days=100 events=10" and the close square bracket.
4. The final text entered in the window will look something like:

[ iCal http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/btlcog@gmail.com/public/basic.ics days=100 events=10 ]

(Delete the space after the open bracket and before the close bracket. This is the data for the BLCOG calendar.)

1. Continue from step 4 above, you must revisit the settings for the AmR Widget (Appearance / Widgets) and enter the name of your page (from step 2 above) into the “Calendar Page URL” field. NOTE: only enter the name of the page (e.g., “Events”) and not the entire URL.
2. Save the widget and close
3. Visit your home page and your new “Events” page should be available. Click on it to assure that it works.

As with the Widget, you can edit the manner that the events are displayed by making slight changes to the configuration. Visit the plugin homepage for instructions.

Finally, we can create another page on your blog that displays the calendar much the same as the online Google Calendar page. Here are the steps to do that.

(NOTICE: With the newest version of WordPress, this function does not seem to work. Whenever you press “Save Draft” or “Publish” button, the code disappears and the page will not be displayed. I will return to this article when I find a resolution to the problem. In the mean time, if it works for you, enjoy. If not, just delete the page.)

1. Sign in to the dashboard of your blog & click on PAGE / Create New
2. Enter the Title for the page… e.g.,  Calendar
3. In the editor, click on the HTML tab
4. Copy the “Imbed Code” from the saved document & paste it into the window
5. Click on the VISUAL tab & you should see your Google Calendar in the window
6. Click “Publish” and you are finished.

You should see the page listed when you visit the home page of your site. Click on the Calendar page and it should display.

Calendar 4

Bishop of Technology

We are here to help "ordinary" people understand, acquire, and utilize technology in their personal & business environments.

If your church or organization has a Google Calendar then you need to take it to the next level

The next step is to share your calendar with the people who need to know about the events. Here are the steps to sharing your calendar:

1. Sign in to your calendar.
2. Click on the “Settings” link in the upper right of the page
3. Click on the “Calendars” tab
4. Under the “Sharing” heading, click on the “Share This Calendar“
5. Click on “Make This Calendar Public” and press SAVE  (I told you to get a Gmail account specifically for your organization)
6. Answer YES to the query about “Are you sure?”
7. Under the “Calendar” tab again, click on the email address for your calendar
8. Open a blank text document to paste info into.
9. Copy the address in the “Calendar Name” field and paste it into the document and save the document.
10. Under the “Calendar Details” enter your calendar’s information into the fields if you wish to change anything.
11. In the “Embed This Calender” block, copy the code from the field at the right side and paste it into the document and save again. This code can be included in the HTML code of a web page to display the current calendar.
12. In the “Calendar Address” block, Click on the “ICAL” button and copy the address that is displayed then paste it into your document and save once again.
13. Press the “SAVE” button at the bottom of the page to save any changes made to the page.
14. You may now sign out of your calendar.

Secure the text document that you created. You will use that information to share you calendar.

Calendar 3

Bishop of Technology

We are here to help "ordinary" people understand, acquire, and utilize technology in their personal & business environments.

The GOOGLE CALENDAR reminds us of upcoming events

Google’s online calendar application is free, full-featured and it allows a lot of flexibility in scheduling. You can schedule a 5-minute event if you want. You can schedule recurring events (annual, monthly, weekly and even odd recurrences. You can create an event that occurs monthly, on the same day of the month or, on the same day of the week each month!

Google also allows you to invite others to an event and notes when they RSVP (or don’t). It will send alerts to your email or send a text to your cellphone.

The calendar is also in a format that allows it to be shared with others (you can select whether an event is to be private or shared). You can combine your calendar with other calendars (such as national holidays or another worker or organization). You can even allow others to create or edit events on your calendar if you want. It also syncs with most newer smartphones. This allows you to add or change events even when you are away from your computer.

That is a great combination for a church or business that has a problem with maintaining a central calendar and avoiding scheduling conflicts. It is especially valuable to organizations who want to publish their upcoming events on their web site.

So, how do I create a Google Calendar? If you do not already have a Google account SPECIFICALLY FOR YOUR CHURCH OR ORGANIZATION, then visit Google and get started… HERE. Note, you can sign up for a Google account using your existing (non-gmail) email address but I STRONGLY urge you to sign up for a GMAIL account in the name of your organization. It will provide many additional services.

After you have created an account, sign in at google.com/calendar and the site will walk you through the basics. Be sure to visit the SETTINGS link (upper right corner of the page) and review all of the options available to you.

Then go to the next article in this series…

Calendar 2

Bishop of Technology

We are here to help "ordinary" people understand, acquire, and utilize technology in their personal & business environments.

It seems that I have been writing a good bit lately about the Google. And before anyone asks…. I am NOT employed by Google in any way. I do not receive any special privileges from them and, other than via their great search engine, they do not even know my name. I only recommend the company and its products because I use them and like them.

Google just seems to be a FUN & active company. Also, it appears to me that (from an end user’s perspective) that they are one of the most innovative companies around. And the really neat thing is that most of what they are doing is open sourced and free to use.

I am a real fan of open source software. I have converted to Ubuntu Linux in support of the open source concept. (And, because Ubuntu is one of the most secure operating systems around – AND it has a great interface that rivals anything from the Apple or Microsoft worlds.)

I just read an article written by Don Dodge who evidently was a fairly major player at Microsoft. But, he was one of 5000 that they company just laid off. However, his skills landed him a great position at – you guess it – Google. (Read the entire article here.) He writes about the comparisons of all the MS stuff to the similar Google product. It is refreshing to see the difference – and of course (as a new Google employee, we would understand his bias), Google wins!

At any rate, since I was writing about Google so much, I decided to create a series to link the articles together. This article will be the first in the series – even though it was written AFTER some of the others, it is logically the first so that is where it goes. There will be dialog boxes either on the right side or below each post to help you move to the next article in the series.

Enjoy.

Google and New Technologies

Bishop of Technology

We are here to help "ordinary" people understand, acquire, and utilize technology in their personal & business environments.

I finally got an INVITE to the Google Wave party!

The Google Wave app is in the early stages of Beta testing but my initial reaction is VERY positive! I plan to offer some suggestions in a few days – after I have had some time to feel out the possibilities.

MAYBE Google will offer me some invites to share. Come back often to see if I have an invite for you.

Ray

Here is the test wave. Unfortunately, unless you have a GoogleWave account, you will not be able to participate (sorry).

———-

[wave id="googlewave.com!w%252BNNcffj32C" color="black" bgcolor="transparent" font="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" font_size="14" width="560" height="420" server="https://wave.google.com/wave/"]

———-

If you have a GW account and still cannot sign in and use the wave, leave a comment below to tell me about it.

Google Wave

Bishop of Technology

We are here to help "ordinary" people understand, acquire, and utilize technology in their personal & business environments.

FREE CONTEST: Win a Google Voice Invite!

Contest is closed: Winner was Fitzah – Congratulations to Fitz!

——————————-

I have been in on Google Voice (GV) since before Google bought it. (It was originally called GrandCentral.) It is a great application. I am amazed that it is totally FREE!

Some of the most significant features:

• You get a free phone number in almost any USA area code
• You can select which literal phone(s) lines (can be cell or land lines) will ring when a call comes in on your GV number (several phones can be set to ring simultaneously)
• You can have your voice mail transcribed and sent to you in email (with an attachment of an MP3 of the recording)
• You can make unlimited free calls to any other number in the USA
• You can publish a WIDGET (on your website, etc) that allows others to call you for FREE (see my link on this site here.)
• You can even have separate responses for different callers (answer one, give recording 1 to another & give recording x,y or z to a third number)
• You can choose which lines ring or whether to answer (or reject callers) based on the time of day

Update (Oct 27, 2009): You can now use Google Voice with your existing mobile phone number! This enables you to get transcribed Voice Mail sent to your email account – without having your callers use a new phone number. Check it out here: http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-voice-with-your-existing-number.html

There are several additional features but these are sufficient for the moment. For more, check this video:

The problem for most people is that GV is still in CLOSED BETA and you can only get it if you have an invitation.

Well I have an INVITE that I will provide to one fortunate user of this site!

RULES FOR THE CONTEST:

• You must reside in the USA (sorry but Google Voice does not work elsewhere)
• You must leave a QUALIFIED COMMENT to this article. The comment must give your best reason why I should give the INVITE to you (make it humorous or technical but it must be G-rated!)
• You must provide a working email address so that I can contact you.
• Only ONE qualified comment per person. If I discover that a single person has used multiple email accounts to leave comments, then ALL comments by that individual will be disqualified. If you leave out some info in a comment and want to correct it, just ask (in the new comment) that the old comment be deleted.
• Your comment must be saved on this site prior to 3AM (Central Time), Thursday, October 29th, 2009.
• Additional Entries: You can have up to THREE entries in the contest if you follow the next two steps:

1. Send a TWEET LINKING to this post using the hash #RayW (if I find this tweet, it will add one more entry in your name)
2. Post about this contest on your FACEBOOK page with a LINK to this page. If you do and send me an friend request, this will also add an additional entry in your name.)

• The winner will be selected by random drawing and the winner will be announced here later on the 29th. The decision of the judge (me) is final and there is no recourse for debate.
• NOTICE: YOU MUST CHECK BACK HERE TO SEE IF YOU ARE THE WINNER. IF THE WINNER HAS NOT CLAIMED HIS OR HER PRIZE BY 3AM (CENTRAL TIME) ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1st, 2009, THEY WILL BE DISQUALIFIED AND A NEW WINNER SELECTED.

Google Voice Invite Contest