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**** NewsBytes ****
Emission statement
The letters P.C. could perhaps stand for Pumping CO2. New research by analysts Gartner estimates ICT systems account for around 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, which rivals that of the aviation industry. While the figure combines not only emissions from PCs, servers, fans, telephony, networks, and telecommunications but also the amounts produced during the design and manufacture of the associated equipment, the research firm believes that such level are unsustainable, even when the overall environmental value of IT is taken into account. 'During the next five years, increasing financial, environmental, legislative and risk-related pressures will force IT organisations to get "greener"; that is to say, more environmentally sustainable,' said Simon Mingay, research vice president, Gartner. 'When enough buyers start demanding it and we get beyond the superficial, being "less bad" will no longer be anywhere near acceptable enough. That point will be reached in 2007 and 2008 for some geographies, particularly Europe, with other countries and regions taking longer.'
Google fixes its desktop flaw
A serious vulnerability in the popular Google Desktop software has been put to rights by the search engine giant. The flaw, discovered by security vendor Watchfire earlier this year, could allow remote attackers to access confidential data and gain full control over indexed files of affected PCs, and arose from incorrect coding of the search results from combined local and online searches. Hackers would have had to succeed in tricking a user into clicking on a specially crafted link in an email or within a web site.
How the mouse cursor works
For years, computer beginners thought that the cursor was powered by a tiny mouse inside the plastic casing; some of them still do. Perhaps they're not so far from the truth ... 1-click.jp
Thanks to JP for spotting this award winner.
HP's green computing pointers
A typical PC left switched on 24x7 for one year, will generate the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions of driving 820 miles in an average car. This and other stark pointers are outlined in Hewlett Packard's series of short papers highlighting 5 green steps on making organisations environment-friendly, such as conserving energy, paper and generally implementing up-to-date recycling policies.
"It's easy being green" by HP.
Blogging for charity
A new blog focussing on Gift aid has started up, with early topics covering "When is a gift a Gift?" and how the less obvious departments in an organisation - like IT and Supporter Services - should be contributing to gift aid revenue. The site, sponsored by Blackbaud, is geared towards stimulating debate so dive in (or login) and have your say. www.giftaidblog.com
Babblefish
You're all set for that European holiday. Check the windows, lock the front door. Only one thing left to do - go on a 6-week language course, so you can, er, actually converse with somebody. It's another one of those last minute things that lastminute.com has yet again taken care of, in tandem with coolgorilla.com. No need to buy a phrase book even. Just download hundreds of phrases in French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Greek and Spanish into your phone (Sony Ericssons and Nokias). And if you can't manage the pronunciation to convince the perplexed waiter/taxi driver/receptionist you're a bona fide local, your phone will - just hold out the speaker and let it do the work. A snip at £3 per language. Ora stiamo comunicando! (Or rather we're not). mobile phone phrase book. http://www.coolgorilla.com
Pop down to the Dell shop
Breaking its 22-year tradition of selling via direct sales only, computer builder Dell is to rejig manufacturing and distribution systems to open retail outlets, as in good old high street shops where customers go in and leave with a Dell PC under their arm. An experimental store in Texas aims to combat stores from rivals Apple and Sony, and is reported to be proving successful. Dell says its existing direct sales model (60% of orders via the Internet, 30% by phone) is not compromised since shops will be owned and opened by Dell. The move comes against the background of slowing PC sales in 2006, mass recalls of laptops and market share advances by competitor Hewlett Packard.
UK online shopping spree hits £100bn
Since the dawn of the e-commerce explosion, British shoppers have shelled out £100 billion in online purchases, as recorded by the Interactive Media in Retail Group's IMRG Index, stretching back to April 1995. The figures for April 2007 alone (£3.465 billion) jumped 55% in the Index, worth about the same as London's West End takes in a year. Full report
IT jobs 5-year high
A 5% growth in advertised positions for IT jobs has taken totals to a new, post dot-com 5-year peak, amounting to nearly 123,000 vacancies. Project management skills are also greatly in demand with some salary percentage increases reaching well into double figures, making outsourcing even more attractive to smaller organisations than before. Full article from ComputerWeekly.com
ITQ training
ITQ is a government initiative to improve IT skills, flexibly packaged to suit the needs of your organisation. Such a package is available at Happy Computers, with reports that the new skills aquired gain attendees an average 32 minutes a day with more efficent use of software. New sign-ups may potentially receive free traning depending on skill levels. More information: http://itq.e-skills.com/
*** More NewsBytes ***
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1. Google Desktop - search locally, think globally
The esteemed search engine now delves into your own folders, your emails, web history, tasks - the network even. You may be surprised at what it finds. | ||
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The instant of the web's Big Bang was shortly followed by the realisation that, instead of reading the published tomes of other worthy insitutes, people could start to publish their own knowledge on anything and everything. However, finding all this information out there on the web remained a challenge for at least a decade and was to become the Holy Grail for search engine providers. Competition among engines was fierce with no clear favourite, until that is, virtual upstart Google arrived on the scene with its new search algorithms which more or less wiped the board clean. Now the nouveau-riche novice has become mega-rich mammoth and, has turned its hand, among numerous other side projects, to helping us find out what we already knew, namely, stuff we have written ourselves and stored on the C: drive, or the H: drive or wherever ... if only we could lay our cursor on it. Our capacity to generate and store huge wads of digital info has outstripped the ability of conventional tools, like the Windows search tool, to retrieve those nuggets, at least in any sort of intuitive and speedy fashion. Private investigationsGoogle's Desktop thus fills a crying need. It answers the question: "Where did I put that document?" logically, in context and - thanks to a nifty indexer - nigh on instantaneously. But it goes further. A lot further. You might even want to be afraid. Not content with just gobbling up (or Googling up) ordinary documents, it will peruse your private folders and documents - even password-protected ones if you let it - emails, calendar appointments, to-do lists, previous web sites visited, tasks, PDFs and zipped files. And the same goes for anything on local network that you have access to. 
Setting up Google Desktop preferences: more file types than you can shake a mouse at. The installation gets into gear with an indexing process, which may take several hours depending on how many tens of thousands of files you want this application to scour, but the good news is that this can burble away in the background while you continue working as usual. Then it's done, the results - yes, literally everything from your Desktop downwards - are quite astonishing, both in speed and breadth. It's like going up into the attic and finding a whole load stuff you kind of knew you had, only somebody has laid out on the floor exactly what you wanted - in perfectly neat piles. Charming almost, but a little scary. Eventually a side bar is generated, although this multifaceted search centre can sit anywhere round the edge of the screen. If you chose to index emails, then with just a right-click on the email add-in you can open the last mail received, send it to another email or via Google Talk (their version of VoIP). And all this outside the confines of your email client. 
A series of shortcut keys take you directly to searching the desktop (Ctrl+D) or images (Ctrl+I), news (Ctrl+N), Google maps (Ctrl+P) and so on. Keywords that you searched for - in this example "apple" - are highlighted in bold, just as with Google's Internet brother. Search file preferences are set by browsing to a local address - something like: Live and plugged inAside from specifying file types, there are a further bunch of Google Desktop plug-ins you can add. Any number of news feeds, web clips, the weather here or somewhere else, how hard your PC is working ... all these live gadgets can be slotted into the side dashboard, like a bewildering array of meters. Clicking on any one of them pops out a window - like a sliding drawer - displaying the current info in that gadget. There's definitely an impact on PC performance when you have a full raft Google Desktop plug-ins on the go. This is to be expected when you effectively have a continuous photo slide show running alongside PC performance statistics monitoring and a heap of net activity to fetch all those news updates. But what's the tradeoff? Well, you could save a whole bunch of time looking for things you know you've stored already and gaining new insights into relevant data stored on the office network. Anyway, familiarity soon teaches to whittle down all the bells and whistles in any given software and just keep the bare bones. 
No wonder that Microsoft held off releasing Windows Vista for so long, in order that they could incorporate desktop search technology like Search Explorer and Instant Search that would square up to the rapidly evolving offerings appearing during 2006. Life in the Google blenderThe technology transfer from browser to desktop has not been without its concerns. We are after all running a piece of web-accessible software on our computers and as with many new and developing programs, most have 'imperfections'.Suddenly we get a fleeting vision of how deeply the Internet has pervaded our lives with this dizzying blend of online and offline service. So much so, that we're never quite sure where all this info is hitting us from. Did I really write that bit of text so long ago I can't remember it, or is it from some blog or web site? Perhaps this is the Google Desktop's weak link; we have to start delving to find out the real source of the data on offer. We find ourselves moving towards a state of distrusting what we read until proven otherwise. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, you can't believe everything you read in the 'papers' ... whatever they were. Contacts-IB-
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2. U3: popping up on a stick near you
Memory ain't what it used to be; the USB stick is getting smarter. | ||
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Most PC owners have by now got used to toting some sort memory stick or pen drive around, whether it's for backing up files, transferring documents or sharing music. The one thing they all have in common is that you need some application like Word, Excel or a media player to edit, see, read or listen to the data on the memory stick, and that means depending on a host PC to have the application you want. Suppose for instance that you have prepared slide show on your stick, but when you get to your conference centre (or seminar group or friend's house or whatever), there is no simple slide show software available, at least none that engenders you with confidence to make a good presentation. Or you have a podcast, but there's no iTunes on the PC you are plugging into? 
Along comes U3, a proprietary standard for memory sticks that store their own applications as well as data, and - once unplugged from the host PC - leave no trace that they were ever connected. The beauty of this concept is that the software applications on the host machine can effectively be ignored: all you want out of the PC is its processor, memory and a temporary bit of hard disc space. Why U3?"U3 smart drives" as they have become known, can be manufactured by anyone in any size (typically up to 4GB) and can be plugged into any PC's standard USB port, but the standard has spawned a plethora of applications, compacted down to fit in the smaller memory sizes, and available as freeware, shareware or commercial products. And what does U3 stand for? ”Simplified for You“, ”Smarter about You“ and ”As mobile as You“. Utter marketing naff, eh? Easier to think of it being as what came after USB2. Wrong, but much more memorable. On a typical U3 smart drive, you'll get a small selection of programs like a photo viewer and a password protector, but the idea is to collect your own eclectic bunch, which is simple enough using the Manage U3 Programs menu and the essential Add Programs link to sources like U3 central and Kingston's U3 Center. Free at U3 
Free U3 softwareNow, we're really cooking. Along with our documents, presentations, music, video and all the usual data we carry with us, we can take a whole bunch of our favourite applications too - all on the same tiny stick! That could be OpenOffice.org for documents, your Firefox browser (and all its bookmarks, history etc), a handy text editor Notepad-replacement such as EditPad Lite, Foxit Reader for viewing PDF and filling in forms and a utility like EssentialPIM for calendar, notes and contact storage. There are also 'killer apps' in U3 versions, like multi-standard messaging chat client Trillian, the wildly successful Mozilla Thunderbird email and Skype telephony - yep, you could be emailing and making Internet phone calls from a device the size of a cigarette lighter (remember them?). To secure all your data against loss or theft, there are excellent U3 editions of encryption tools such as Portable Vault Lite. Commercial U3 softwareAll of the above - and a whole stack more - are freeware to boot (pun intended). But straying into the commercial sectors (most of these have trials) reveals mail synchronisers for Outlook, portability agents for Outlook Express and contacts, typing tutors, an eWallet for confidential info, portable anti-spyware and any number of encryption and password protectors. There's even a Concise Oxford English Dictionary with digital recordings of more than 50,000 words; 97MB large, but you won't find a smaller version as a book. 
What's more, most of these small bundles of software come in at under £25, with quite a few bargains less than £15.
There is more than just boring old work applications too. WeatherBug For U3 gets you free live, local weather forecasts and alerts wherever you go and the quirky U3 Oddcast pops up a talking avatar when a U3 smart drive is inserted in your PC. An entire section devoted to games offers Sudoku, poker, racing (Turbo Sliders), 3D space games (Hyperspace Invader) and Chicken Invaders 2, which involves you in the unlikely past-time of saving the solar system from invading chickens! Hey, U3! Don't just stand there, get startedFor newbies who haven't delved into this arena before, the starting point is to get hold of a U3-enabled memory stick. If the worst comes to the worst, you'll only be around £20 down and you will still have a useful storage device that can be used like any other. Lost ... and found!Just when you're beginning to think there must be something they have overlooked, up pops some really clever app that addresses a problem unique to our dear little sticks: we lose them! Find My U3 recovers your lost or stolen U3 device from anywhere in the world if you have registered it while Disk Hero Real-time Remote Backup not only does what it says (backups up your U3 securely to a remote server), but also tracks the use of a stolen U3 drive and informs you where the drive is being used. We really love that idea. And it's a free app too. Plug-n-goSo next time you see the guy opposite on the train has fallen asleep and isn't actually using his laptop, just wake him and and ask if you can plug in your Chicken Invaders. Contacts-IB-
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3. BBC MP3 DIY
The end of the BBC's 4-week trial of audio annotation could see the beginning of a new reign of radio programmes catalogued by its own listeners. | ||
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Most of us are perhaps by now familiar with Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia, - a enormous body of work put together and maintained by thousands of volunteers and experts in their own fields. What is a wiki? Derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick", a wiki is is mid-90s technology that allows visitors to add, remove, and edit content all on the same web site. A collaborative effort then, but not to be confused with Content Management Systems (CMS), since material is open to editing by anyone at anytime.However the find, listen, label project marks the first time that a large corporation has thrown its own doors open to the public and invited them to contribute to annotating BBC broadcasts - comments which the public itself will see, hear and share. How it works - DAB on steroidsYou are presented with an onscreen player, but one where you can place a slider (representing the playhead) and add a text label to enhance other listeners' understanding of the audio stream. Think DAB digital radio text on steroids: a lot more info and all of it edited by keen reviewers who are also listeners. Perhaps "find, listen and label" is the equivalent of comments underneath a blog or postings added to an article on a forum. The general principle is the same: it's about 'audience participation', though in contrast to most performances that embrace this loaded term, you won't get picked out of the front row to be throughly humiliated on stage. Unless you add some comments that are really crass, of course. 
Several interesting aspects become apparent:
This sea change in the manner of documenting an audio library gives new meaning to the phrase "public broadcasting". Obviously there have been concerns about the potential within the relatively unpoliced realms of wiki-ism for abuse, defamatory language, self-promotion and plain mischief, and the BBC hopes that the Annotatable Audio community will be self-moderating in this respect. However the wiki model works extremely well precisely because it is democratic and upholds its own self interest; namely if malevolent individuals try to alter publicly-editable annotations for their own gain or entertainment, the existing network of volunteer editors are alerted and will move swiftly to correct any entries they deem unfit. For example, if you had just spent a few hours reviewing little-known BBC audio recordings of Elgar and some grafitti-styled joker leaps and alters your entry to "What a load of b****cks - heard it all before", you're likely to counter attack with graffiti removal techniques pretty sharpish - along several hundred other Elgar fans. DrawbacksUnlike the BBC's standard streaming player, one inevitably has to load the whole audio clip before hearing anything at all in order for tag editing to take place, otherwise one would have to wait in real time for the exact section of the clip you want to label! So that means a bigger instantaneous hit on bandwidth for listeners, the BBC servers and the Internet in general. What's more, the basic player/editor view makes extensive use of JavaScript and some use of Flash to present the audio track and markers where you want to place your slider control to edit a snippet, so accessibility suffers a bit. Applying the wiki metaphor to time-based media has been a challenge, so the BBC developer boffins have had to restrict interaction to non-overlapping annotations, so it's one time segment at a time folks! This immediately rears the ugly possibility of egotistical editors blocking off large chunks of recordings simply to restrict other comments. Are the limited house rules going to cope with this sort of argey bargey? The project admits to being an exploration of collaborative segmentation of radio programmes, but will listeners flock to start building a body of labelled BBC audio content in the that Wikipedia has mastered so successfully? With just about everyone building their own web site, forum, blog and even TV channel - and all of them inviting us to come and participate - one wonders whether there will be any common communication at all. Is the future prospect only one of fragmentation and diversity. Putting the demo into democracyThe find, listen and label project is certainly a bold and innovative move. Is democracy truly coming to the airwaves? As we read of a survey indicating that 25 out of 41 countries apply state-mandated net filtering to their web sites, this is encouraging news indeed. Contacts
-IB-
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4. Remote control software gadgets
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A bunch of handy remote utilities can be found at this useful site, some commercial, some free. Among these are some neat little software gadgets that will come as a relief to any IT manager with concerns about security threats to their network posed by staff randomly plugging in USB memory keys and CDs with who-knows-what viruses attached! Drive disablers feature heavily among the free downloads, knocking out CD-ROM drives, USB drives and even floppy drives, should you have any still kicking around. All these gadgets have remote access counterparts so that it becomes possible to achieve the immobilisations across the LAN without even leaving your chair. Another pair allows you to reboot Windows NT/2000/XP/20003 machines across your LAN or alternatively prevent an automatic reboot on XP SP2 machines - invaluable to anyone who has returned to a PC that has automatically restarted after an update and lost unsaved work. A purely cosmetic utility cleans up the Add/Remove programs list in Control Panel to remove broken entries. The paid-up version Network Administrator includes most of these and more besides. Other goodies are gadgets to take control of PCs on the LAN (or via the Internet) and a program that creates Exchange profiles automatically to avoid save time with people going through the setup wizard. Contacts-IB-
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5. Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000
Two remotes combined into one, and it's even a mouse too. Ideal for people on the go. | ||
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For those who travel with their computers, laptops can be a blessing (all your work compacted into a portable item) and a curse (fiddly controls). Tapping at the touchpad is frustrating and operating one of those joysticks hidden among the keys is no joy. The next logical step is buy a portable mouse, and then suddenly the nice portable, sleek laptop has started to sprout wires. Add to this kit the power supply, world wide mains adaptors and a laser pointer - for highlighting out the finer details of a Powerpoint presentation - and the kit is beginning to need its own bag and porter. 
A pleasant surprise then to discover we can banish at least one of the wires, and bundle the pointer and mouse into one package: the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. How does a mere mouse achieve this? Turn it over and voila! Flipping the mouse upside-down presents the presentation options; a simple button takes you from mouse mode to presentation mode (from up to 30 feet distant from your laptop) and inhibits normal mouse button operation - and therefore embarrassing presentational hiccups! This unit packs a whole load more goodies too. Its digital ink capabilities allows you to 'draw' over the on-screen presentations - highlighting areas in red and such like - while a simple point and click permits enlargement and editing of detail using the Magnifier. The Instant Viewer function employs the scroll wheel button to instantly display your open windows, then point and click to select one, when there just too many items open at the same time. To make the wireless connection you get a 2.4 GHz mini Bluetooth transceiver for out-of-the-box connectivity. A simple on/off switch turn helps to extend battery life and a useful LED glows red when the battery is running low to prevent getting caught with a dead battery (2x AAA cells). 
Moving out of the workplace and into the home, the wireless Presenter Mouse 8000 can be used as a media remote, say for slideshow presentations and controlling digital entertainment like Media Center from the living room sofa. In addition the media presenter keys, five customisable buttons can be programmed for quick access to media, programs, or everyday files. The Tilt Wheel Technology and 4-way scroll feature turns into a controller for games or just for scrolling both ways in a browser when the content won't fit. It's a lot to fit in small package. Contacts-IB-
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6. Q&A: How to add a distant PC to a KVM switch
Question 
Hi Mark, In our server room, we have two computers hooked together sharing one keyboard and a mouse via one of those KVM switch things. Now we would like to connect a third computer, but it's way over in the corner and I can't find another KVM box that has long cables, aside from the fact more cable spaghetti is not what we want! The third computer has to be in that position next to a particular socket and other leased equipment. Can you suggest a solution? | ||
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Those little boxes that bundle the keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) into one shared facility are dead handy and good value, and it is possible to buy cable extenders for these devices though they never go very further than a few metres and can add to the wiring mess, as you suggest. The trick is to employ the existing Ethernet network to get the keyboard/mouse to 'reach out' to those computers: Belkin's OmniView™ SMB CAT5 KVM Switch and the Adderlink IP are two such examples. However, we're looking at possibly ten times or more investment over your original 2-way switch. 
Fortunately a piece of open source software called Synergy has come to the rescue. It combines the displays of other networked computers on to one using just a single keyboard and mouse, with virtual screens arranged side-by-side, above and below one another, or any combination. You also get a cut-and-paste facility between systems as well as the capability of locking all screens with a single password to prevent unauthorised access - an important feature since you may be operating these computers from another room or another building! Synergy can be a little tricky to set up and does need to be installed on each of the computers to be controlled, but is a real time-saver once you do. It also works works on most operating systems (most versions of Windows up to XP, Mac OS X 10.2 or higher, Linux, Solaris, Irix, etc) as long as they connected via a TCP/IP network, though the Mac version has few limitations on screen savers and cut/paste transfers. The Synergy download is around 1MB in size and was at version 1.3.1 at the time of writing. Contacts-IB-
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7. Quote of the month
A friend was having spam and virus problems with his PC recently and asked me what anti-virus software I would recommend. He didn't seem amused when I said "OS X". (Anonymous) | ||
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-IB-
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Clicks of the Trade - pick up where you left off in Word
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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