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FEMA/Michael Raphael

When a disaster hits, don’t think you can just grab some cans from your pantry and go. You may not have time. Next up on our list for disaster preparedness during National Preparedness Month: the emergency supply kit.

Many disasters happen with little or no warning. Earthquakes and tornadoes pop up without any advance notice. Even for those emergencies that offer some warning, such as snowstorms and hurricanes, it is so much easier to pick up your two bins of supplies and head out, rather than scurry around the house trying to gather everything you need at the last minute. Whether you evacuate or stay: Easier=quicker=saves lives.

72-Hour Kit

The emergency supply kit is 72-hours worth of supplies to keep your family safe and alive — from food and water, to an emergency radio and flashlights, to even a tent and extra clothing — set aside and gathered in one, easy to access place. You can find lists and suggestions for a standard supply kit at redcross.org, ready.gov, and many other places. There are also a few apps that seem handy. One Android app that looks promising is the Emergency Kit Organizer. You can use the checklists in this app while you shop to keep track of your purchases; it also stores expiration dates and reminders so that the supplies in your kit will still be usable when you need them. Depending on where you live, there may also be more targeted apps available, such as the Hurricane Web App developed for Flor more »

September is National Preparedness Month in the U.S., a month dedicated to encouraging Americans to take steps toward becoming prepared for emergencies and disasters of all kinds. Every location in the U.S. is prone to some sort of disaster, yet only 57% of Americans say they’ve taken steps to prepare. And among that 57%, most of them are only partially prepared.

The importance of preparedness is near and dear to me, and I want to do my part to encourage everyone to take the few, simple steps to become prepared: Make a Plan, Get a Kit, and Be Informed. In a true disaster, you’ll likely be waiting awhile for rescuers to come to your aid. Your family may be separated. You may need to survive on your own, without electricity or most modern conveniences for 3 days or more.

In keeping with the topic of this blog, it also happens that there are quite a number of technology tools that can help. For today, we’ll focus on the first step: Make a Plan.

If your “plan” is to grab a few things out of the cupboard and “wing it,” you are in trouble. You and your family need to know where to go, how to meet up, and how you’ll let one another know you’re safe. Start with the planning tool at Ready.gov: http://ready.adcouncil.org/beprepared/fep/index.jsp. This site walks you through the steps to gather information for your plan.

Once your plan is set, work with family members to determine the “how,” that is, how you will get in touch with them to let them know you are safe, how you will get back together, or how you will execute an evacuation. Here’s where technology really kicks in.

While good old fashioned phone calls are first on the list, it may end up that the best way to get in contact is text messaging. During a disaster, the technology infrastructure may take a beating, but if there’s mobile service available, a text message is more likely to make it to the recipient than a call. more »

Start watching shows at home, then send them to your iPhone or iPad – very cool. Do this and much more with Apple TV.

The race for your living room is on! Google, Amazon and now Apple are scrambling to marry web and TV, which will make for some great new applications. We wrote an article a while ago about how the new generation of “Smart TVs” are going to change how we experience home entertainment. This week, Apple is throwing its hat officially into the ring by announcing a new, much cooler, version of their Apple TV.

The announcement came with relatively little fanfare; Apple bundled the announcement with new versions of its iPod Touch and the announcement of Ping, their new social network offering that they describe as Facebook meets Twitter for Music. Never-the-less, it marks a significant step forward for Apple into the TV market. Once describing Apple TV as a “hobby,” Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple, now is looking to ramp up Apple’s TV muscle. At the moment, Apple is mostly positioning Apple TV as a television and movie rental device. Smaller, cheaper and much more powerful than it’s predecessor, Apple TV has some great features, including:

• Get your Netflix through Apple TV -  Apple and Netflix have teamed up to deliver movies to your home. For $8.99 a month, you can watch unlimited movies and TV shows. You have full controls over the movies, so pause, fast forward and rewind to your heart’s content — sure beats snail mail (although you can still get Netflix via post, if you’d like)…
• Download and rent movies on demand – You can also dial up TV episodes and movies A-La-Carte via iTunes. They even give you some handy tools to track episodes you love, see how many episodes you haven’t had a chance to watch yet, and even see reviews via Rotten Tomatoes.
• Send your shows (in progress) to iPhone or iPad – On the run? Can’t finish that episode? No sweat. Use Apple’s new service, called AirPlay, to send your show to your iPhone or iPad and continue watching where you left off. We actually predicted this one (we called it “Grab and Flick” – although our idea has a cool interface).
• Use your iPhone/iPad as a remote control – Apple TV comes with a remote, but you can use your iPhone or iPad  to surf, tap and “flick” through flicks….
• HD included – All Apple TV offerings are also available in HD
• Wirelessly stream stuff from your Mac laptop to your TV – Beam digital content to your TV–without any cords.
• Bring the Internet to your TV – Apple TV lets you pull content from the Internet into your TV. Watch YouTube, Flickr and listen to Internet radio right from your home entertainment system.

AppleTV slimmed down its price tag to $99 to help get it on your console. This should help them get a foothold in the market, not to mention sending a message that they are serious about TV. Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Rodman & Renshaw LLC, agrees by saying “longer term, I do think they have more ambitions in the living room.”

The SmartTV market is starting to heat up and I’m on the edge of my seat…

The Real Cookie Monsters

Your computer needs a diet. It used to just load up on cookies every time you hit a website. Now it’s gobbling up super-cookies and “PIE,” allowing companies to track your web movements and making you more vulnerable to cyber threats. What the heck is a super-cookie? How could anything named PIE be bad? Let’s start at the beginning…

Cookies have been around a while. They are small text files automatically put on your computer that contain tags (string of code) to identify you as a unique user. Inside these files, all sorts of information is stored, such as which pages you visited, when you last visited, and any voluntary information you gave the site. The site that gave you the cookie has complimentary file with the same tag ID.  That way, it knows who you are when you come back. There is a nice write up about cookies on WiseGEEK, if you want to know more.

Cookies can be very convenient. If you ever went back to a site where you put in a password and it “remembered” you, that happened because of a cookie. Website preferences, online shopping carts and wish lists are all possible because of cookies. Cookies, however, have other functions. Websites collect cookies to gain information about usage. They track things like traffic flow, page popularity and how long visitors stay on a site. This information is usually anonymous and aggregated. Some say the major reason for cookies is advertising. They allow websites to track how many people come to the site and click on ads, which is how they get paid.

Where things start to get scary is when the marketers start getting involved. When you visit a website, it triggers past logs of your actions and calls up information about your surfing habits. It also associates  any volunteered information about you (name, address, phone number) with that log. These “profiles” hold a lot of marketing value, since they can show what you like, where you go, and what you purchase on a site. Some advertisers place ads on many of the most popular websites and then pass your cookie information across the web. Tracking you across multiple sites provides them much more data about your preferences and habits. They then can serve you more targeted advertisements and make more money. As creepy as it sounds, this is a 100% legal business practice. However, cookie profile information can be hacked to reveal your personal data. Identity thieves and hackers can then use this information to mimic you online. more »

Have you ever enjoyed a good meal, only to find out in the news a few days later that the spinach salad that you enjoyed might have been contaminated with an unsavory food-borne pathogen? Or that your hamburger just might have been recalled? It’s happening more and more, and although we are far from fully safeguarding our food supply system, the government has at least started to bring updated food safety information to the public.

Recently, the USDA, CDC, FDA and a few others pooled their resources to launch Foodsafety.gov, a one-stop resource for information on food recalls and alerts, along with a wealth of information on keeping food safe and healthy in your own kitchen. The site includes information on food storage, food allergy and intolerance, food poisoning information (yuck) and more.

For handy web tools, Foodsafety.gov provides you several downloadable widgets and feeds with up to the minute recall information and the latest food safety tips. You’ll be amazed at how much stuff is recalled everyday. Hmm…now that I think about it…maybe I don’t need that hamburger after all.

When most of us need to find something on the web, we pop onto Google, type in our search, pull out our deep-water waders and slog through pages of results. Bing and Yahoo! search engines aren’t much better. Sure, they try to give you ideas up front, and even have buttons to switch to specific searches for news, images, and video. But, I still finding myself cranking through pages of links. DeeperWeb can help.

DeeperWeb is a Google-powered project aimed at making searches more efficient. The basic issue with current web searches is that you get a big bucket of links, with all the different kinds of searches mixed together. DeeperWeb gives you the main results, but also creates a window frame on the right that organizes results into convenient categories:

• DeeperCloud: This is a very handy way to quickly refine your search. It is a “tag cloud” of terms that are related to your search. It shows other terms people have used in conjunction with your terms. Terms that appear larger are more often used. Click on a term and add it to your search string. You can even run a search that restricts a term. Just hover over the term in the term cloud and click on the negative “-” symbol. This will run your search and remove any results with that term (great if you keep hitting on some unrelated topics).
• Answer Search: Scans all the answer engines (e.g. wiki answers, yahoo answers, answers.com) to show you what kind of questions people have posed (and had answered) about your search
• Metric Search: Returns searches chalked full of stats and data related to your search
• News Search: Scans headlines and news sources for your search
• Research Search: Digs through the scholarly journals and publications for your search (want a site dedicated to scholarly searches? Check out our write up about Google Scholar)
• Wikipedia Search: Returns results from wikipedia related to your search criteria
• Blogs Search: Scans blogs for relevant topics

DeeperWeb works as an extension for FireFox and an add-on for other browsers (note: the add-on for other browsers integrates DeeperWeb with a the Google search bar on your browser). You can also run a search directly from the DeeperWeb search page.

Having search results sliced, diced and organized by type saves a ton of time. Use DeeperWeb to supercharge your searching and put away your search engine hip-waders.

I’ve been trying to find a web-based video-conferencing service that I can use to chat with about 5 people simultaneously. For free. I’ve narrowed it down to three options, but they each have their drawbacks.

TinyChat
TinyChat uses a browser-based flash client to share your “broadcast” with up to 11 other people. You can password-protect this, in theory, but I have not been able to get it to work in any way except a randomly-generated unprotected chat. It also can’t handle multiple people talking at once, and is a little cranky about microphone feeds. In theory the Twitter chatrooms work better, but most of my interlocutors aren’t on Twitter and don’t want to be.

Openmeetings
Openmeetings is a Google purchase, and it’s pretty robust for a free product. It’s also not for the technophobic. You can use their demo servers (which are in Germany), their Facebook application, or build your own server to host it. That last option is the best, but I don’t want to go through all that when I can just use Skype.

Skype
Definitely the go-to for video chat, Skype’s beta version offers multi-party conferencing. As usual with Skype, the user interface is extremely easy. So far I haven’t noticed any degradation of voice or video quality with additional participants. The one drawback here is that it’s PC only, and a couple folks I want to include in my conferences have Macs, but once it’s cross-platform and in full release, we’ll have a winner!

A few weeks ago we wrote about Evernote, an all-in-one note taking and information collecting software that neatly corrals all your fleeting thoughts. Evernote now has a way for you to access a bunch of apps that work nicely with its core software. Called “The Evernote Trunk” (appropriate, since Evernote’s logo is an elephant), it’s kind of an app store “light.” You click on an icon in your software and you’re taken to a full list of applications, organized into categories and easily searched. The applications are created by third party developers who have all sort of handy apps, widgets and gadgets that work with Evernote. Right now, Evernote only lists and links to these apps, but according to ReadWriteWeb, they will eventually turn it into a full blown app store, where you can purchase and download apps right from the Trunk.

What can you get with The Evernote Trunk?

The Trunk has all sorts of apps and gadgets, split into mobile, desktop, and hardware categories

• Business receipt scanning
• Voice transcriptions
• To-do list management
• PDF management and markup
• Team information sharing and white boarding

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote states, “Our vision has never changed: Evernote is here to help people remember everything.” With The Evernote Trunk, they want to make sure we don’t forget it…

Wikipedia’s Book Creator tool is useful for all sorts of things. At base, it’s a social bookmarking tool for your picks from the millions of articles on Wikipedia, but it also allows you to compile your own reference manual, for example, or research library.

The ability to make your book into a PDF and print it is nice. I am a little dubious about that, because that will freeze the information in time, but if you need access to the info when you’re off the grid, this is very nice to have.

With the 2010 Hurricane season well underway, it’s time again to make sure that we all stay safe and well-prepped for whatever comes our way.  Are you prepared for hurricanes, severe storms, blisteringly hot weather? Or for that matter, snowstorms, hailstorms, tornados, and even man-made emergency events? Most of us are not, and yet these events happen every day.

The fact is, what happened to Dorothy could happen to you. Fortunately for tech-lovers, many groups, including state and federal agencies, non-profit organizations and others are turning, more and more, to technology as a way to get the word out on all things emergency: from mobile apps, to RSS, to text alerts and more. There’s still much to be done to better coordinate and inform the public during emergencies, but here’s a smattering of what’s available now: more »

I hate doing searches. This is because I usually spend a ton of time searching through junk to find the one nugget I need. Don’t get me wrong, search engines have done a lot to help you filter out the junk you don’t want. Still, I inevitably get lost on “Los Links!.”

Google Scholar helps cut through some of that clutter. It is part of Google Labs (a sort of playground where Google let’s users play with tools that they are still building). Google Scholar is a subset of the Google universe that delivers just articles and books published in reputable journals. What you won’t find in Google Scholar are newspaper articles, magazine articles and popular websites. It basically gets you to the source material meat of topics, so you can quickly beef up your research on a topic.

It’s built for academics, but it’s more than just a homework helper. I use it to do all kinds of research – from client projects, to industry research, to family debates. Some of the info seems like you need several PHD’s to understand it, but I’d rather search through information that’s too deep than the flubber links I get in most normal searches.

Be aware that these are academics, so a lot of the links lead to places where you need to pay for information. Still, there is plenty of free info, and there are some  very handy features:

• Filter by year – You can set parameters to return results since a particular year – handy for finding the latest stuff.
• Filter by type – Google Scholar covers articles, patents, legal opinions and several other kinds of source materials. You can weed out some of those in your searches.
• Advanced Search – You can get really specific (such as subject areas and states).
• Download link – When there is a PDF or other download they have a convenient link next to the search result.
• Related articles – Want to see more results like the listed article? Just click on the link.
• Versions Link – These articles often get published in several places. With a click, you can see all the places it has been listed.
• Cited – This is a new function. Basically, it lists where an article has been cited in other works – useful if you’re trying to find related work or see how people are using the information.

The bottom line is that Google Scholar is a quick way to make you look smart. It isn’t the end-all and be-all of searches, but can be a handy way of boosting your research, sales call, project or argument.

Remember MIT’s Sixth Sense interface concept? The same folks now have a prototype of a way to use a mouse with your computer…without the mouse.

This would be great for business travel (or any travel really) when you want to take a laptop but don’t want to pack any more peripherals than you have to.

As someone who destroys mouses (gaming) or avoids them when possible (I use a stylus at home), I could really go for this. Check out the video demonstration.

So I finally got rid of my old Blackberry last week.  I had been planning on doing so for a while, but kept putting off the change – primarily for financial reasons. Smartphones aren’t cheap. But after spending a week with my new Motorola Droid, I am not sure why I waited so long.

Now I know what you’re thinking – “Mr. Early Adopter” just got a Droid?  It’s true, I’m a little behind the curve on this one.  Yes, I know the Droid X is coming out in a matter of weeks, and that newer and better phones like the Droid Incredible and HTC Evo 4G are already on the market. But, in these challenging financial times, I couldn’t justify the outlay of $400 for both my wife and I to get the “latest and greatest” in Android smartphone technology – especially when Verizon gave me two droids for $100. more »

Ring! Buzz! Crash! Bang! Dad!!!!

My life seems to be in a perpetual state of motion…or more appropriately – a perpetual state of commotion. There always seems to be a background buzz of things to finish, people to call, project fires to put out, kids to put to bed, or messes to clean up. As soon as I get a chance to sit down to read something, there’s a ring, buzz, cry or tap on my shoulder (with a five year old, I need to look out for the occasional body slam). I never get the chance to read something straight through, and I always forget what I was reading by the time I get back. I tried to bookmark articles, but that just gets way too cumbersome. Solution – Read It Later.

Read It Later is a free application that lets you create a personal reading list that you can read either online, or download articles and read them when you’re not hooked into the web. It works both with web browsers and on mobile devices. After you create an account (just a user name and password), you can synchronize all browsers and mobile devices – so you have one reading list no matter where you are. For example, if I see something I want to read when surfing on my computer, I can mark it for my reading list and view it on my iPhone when I’m waiting for my car to be done…or on the commute…or any of the million other times that I have a pocket of time to kill. more »

Ever forget a great idea because you didn’t write down? Or open up a Word document to write a quick note? Ever want to capture a web page, but don’t want to add another bookmark to your browser? Then you should look into Evernote.

Evernote is a handy little application that helps you capture all things noteworthy. Evernote receives just about anything you want to throw into notes: Text, photos, images, video, e-mails, web pages, thoughts, dreams (well, maybe not the last two). You then can file and tag these notes to call up later. The interface is pretty simple. You can create “notebooks” to file things and also quickly add tags to them; within a couple of clicks you can find anything you squirreled away. I’ve used everything from Microsoft Word to Sticky Notes on a Mac to do this, and Evernote is a million times easier.

The real power behind Evernote is its ability to be ever-present. Evernote works on PCs and Macs. You can get add a handy Evernote tool to any browser. (It’s an add-on for Firefox and Chrome, and it is automatically added to Safari and Internet Explorer when you download the software.) There are apps for most smart phones, and you even get a special e-mail address so you can forward important e-mails right to Evernote. This makes it very easy to start adding things to your notebooks. Out at a store? Take a quick picture of that shirt you want, and send it to Evernote. Browsing the web? Shoot Evernote that article you want to save. On E-mail? Forward that airline tick-it confirmation e-mail. Evernote exists in the haze of the Internet cloud, so all these locations are synchronized. That way, you can pull up your notes from anywhere, on almost any device (phone, computer, tablet, etc.). Another cool twist is that Evernote, converts most images that contain text, so printed and handwritten text inside your images become searchable. This comes in handy if you do things like take pictures of business cards and send them to Evernote.

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Data presentation and processing is quickly becoming the mainstay of your desktop computer.

As soon as Blackberry made e-mail easier to process in your hand, the stock of a desktop tower started to decline. Today mobile devices and their applications have made causal web browsing easier in your hand than on your desk.

However, there are some browser-based applications that can really punch-up the entertainment and business value of your clunky laptop/desktop. Cooliris is one such app that makes your CPU tower cool again.

Compatible with Firefox, Safari, IE, and Chrome, Cooliris is a web-page preview and picture display applet for your web browser. The picture service of Cooliris aggregates pictures in an easy-to-flip through interface called the “3D Wall”. Pictures and videos are ordered and scattered across your screen so that you can see all (or most of) the pictures/videos at once. Then just by pushing the arrow keys on your keyboard left or right, your screen comes alive with a rush of images flying by like a railway express train.

The pictures can originate from a simple Google search in the “Images” category, a set of images on a social networking site (like Facebook), or pull from the images saved on your hard drive.

The web page preview feature of Cooliris allows users to see connected web pages without navigating to the web address. If a user “hovers” her/his cursor over a hyperlink, a small blue box with a magnifying glass appears. A user need only move their mouse arrow onto this blue box and a fully functional preview of the attached web page appears in an embedded window. This feature is particularly helpful if you are a heavy wiki user and just want to see other pages at a glance.

For business users, this presentation technique can be used for graphical data or a set of PowerPoint charts that you want to show in a different way. This is sometimes a “one trick pony”, but can have a dramatic effect in the boardroom. Casual users will find the picture feature fun and a helpful way to see voluminous Facebook picture albums.

You can download Cooliris here. Enjoy!

Web pages have turned into a kind of freakish carnival. There are brightly colored banners, whiz-bang advertisement, links-o-million and sometimes even dancing aliens. All these elements fight each other for your attention, drowning out the meat of the content you came to read. You can’t really blame them. Websites make money off their advertisements, and over the past several years there has been an advertising “arms race”  to get your attention. If you want more info about web advertising and its impacts on society, check out this PDF .

You can, however, block all the unnecessary junk out with a handy bookmarklet called Readability (if you’re not sure what a bookmarlet is, check out our entry about bookmarklets). Readability was created by Arc90 and it basically wipes out everything except the core content of the page. You can have it display like a newspaper (my favorite) or choose from a few other display options.

To get the Readability bookmarklet, just go to its web page, select your display options, and then drag the “Readability” button into your bookmarks. Then, whenever you are on a web page that you want to clean up, just select the Readability bookmarklet. Note: Readability is intended for individual articles, not home pages (e.g., CNN’s or ESPN’s main page). You’ll likely get an error message if you try it on a home page.

Readability gives you the option to print or to e-mail the article. If you print, it keeps the article nice and clean. If you e-mail it, just the link is sent, so the recipient would need the Readability bookmarklet in order to clean up the view. Readability also works great with Evernote (we will do a full writeup on Evernote later).

You can also check out our wiki for a complete listing of cool tools.

Happy reading.

Bookmarklets are handy little programs (called applets) that help you manipulate any web page you are currently visiting. Bookmarklets get their name because they are listed in your bookmarks. When you are on a web page and you want to use a bookmarklet, you just select it from your bookmarks. Poof! The boomarklet starts doing its magic to your current page.

Why is this cool?

You can do some very cool things with bookmarklets, like translate the page into another language or strip out all the junk (advertisements, flash, dancing aliens – whatever) and just read the text.  You can also extract and send data from the page and even run specialized searches of selected text on the page.

Where do I get them?

For the most part, bookmarklets are scattered across the Internet. There are, however, a few places that are collecting bookmarklets in a single, easy directory. One is Marklets.com. This site sorts bookmarklets by highest rated, newest, and featured. It also has some good FAQs and instructions.

We will be testing and reviewing useful bookmarklets on this blog. We will also tag all of these “bookmarklets” (on the right sidebar) so you can quickly get to a list of useful bookmarklets.

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