It's News to Me

For a long time, at least since December of 2004, I've been searching for a tool that will permit me to record both sides of a Skype call. Finally, I've found it.

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The title of this post might be the headline if the Knoxville News Sentinel chose to cover the August 23rd meeting at 7:00 PM in South Knoxville of the nascent Knox Bloggers group.  Bloggers, after all, are a solitary breed, eschewing as they do associating even with editors, so the secondary goal of determining whether to meet on a monthly basis is a bit like skiing uphill.  Still the first gathering could prove interesting enough to warrant a return engagement.  It, I suppose, remains to be seen.

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One of the things I was going to catch you up on was OpenDNS that I began using on August 6, 2006, to speed up my connection.  Tonight, I noticed that Paul Stamatiou has explained it for me, so I won't have to try to duplicate that.  He gives an excellent explanation of what it is and how you might benefit from it in this post.  Check it out.

technorati tags:OpenDNS

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I mentioned in yesterday's post that I've been a busy little beaver on the web lately and that I was due to write some catch up posts.  Well, this is the first of those catch ups, and in it I want to introduce you to Schtuff.com.  This free web resource gives you 200 Mb of storage in which you can create up to three «spaces» where you can build a wiki for projects you may be involved with.  Each space is essentially a separate wiki, so you could devote each to a different project or area of interest.  You are permitted to make such projects private, as I have done with the one I am working on and then invite selected individuals to work with you on it, or public so that anyone can see it but only those who join can edit anything.  There are other similar sites such as Jotspot, which looks a little slicker and has a very nice video tour (link at the bottom of the Jotspot page), but I chose Schtuff, and I am quite satisfied with that choice. 

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Thanks to my friend, Shannon, I now have another computer (I still have the old one too), and the new one is running Ubuntu 6.06.  So my absence from posting for a while is at least in part because I have been on  «educational leave.»  If the truth be known, I've been quite busy on the Internet lately learning a lot of different things, but I just haven't been posting here.  So I am due for some serious «catch up» posts in the next few days, because I've been exploring some things that were very interesting, at least to me.

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Today Daryl announced his tentative plans for the next Knoxville area Flock users meetup one night next week when he said:

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The Barbershop Harmony Society (formerly known as the S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A., Inc.) holds its annual convention each year during the week of the Fourth of July.  This year that convention is being held in Indianapolis, IN. 

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After reading Tom Simpson's post about Handy Backup, I downloaded it for the 30 day free trial period and put it through its paces.  After only 5 days of that evaluation period, I have determined that it meets my needs quite nicely.  I was able to set it up and backup my data to my web hosting service without any problem.  Afterwards, I tested whether I was able to restore the backup to my own computer, and I was.  Being able to restore, is, of course, an essential function. 

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For the last several days, I've been evaluating several new pieces of software.  As I mentioned in my Lessons Learned post on the 22nd, I needed to explore an automatic backup program that gave me an option for offsite backup.  The next day, Tom Simpson posted a piece called «Backups Should Be Automatic» that was, at least in part, a response to my post.  In it, he recommended a backup program that he had found recently called Handy Backup.  It provides the features that I need.  It can be set up to be automated, and it provides the option of backing up with FTP to some remote location, among other options.  It also provides the ability to backup to DVD, but since I don't have a DVD burner on this computer, that option doesn't do me much good.  Though you can backup to CD and though the program is smart enough to span multiple CDs if your backup is too large to fit on just one, that option, while viable for me, entails attending the backup so that you can swap the CDs when one fills up and another is needed.  Better than not backing up at all, of course, but not ideal.  So I am choosing to experiment with the FTP option to backup to my hosting service's servers.

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Given that many of us now have the ability to capture video with digital cameras or camcorders, a problem of how to share them has arisen because such files tend to be very large.

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