BORED WITH YOUR Windows 7 themes? Check out this collection of 24 fantastic designs from the users at DeviantArt. My favorites of the pack are "Clean Green", "Skull", "Aero Diamond" and "Natural."
A CLASS ACTION suit was filed against Apple in December over privacy issues. If you downloaded any Apple apps between 12/01/2008 and last December, you may be in the class. The plaintiff alleges that applications for iPhones and iPads transmitted users’ personal information to advertising networks without their consent. Additional named defendants include: Pandora, Paper Toss, the Weather Channel and Dictionary.com. The case title is Lalo v. Apple (Docket #10-5878, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California). You can follow the progress of this case on Justia. Other sources: Bloomburg article, KTXL Fox40 News.
SOMETHING NEW FROM NERO .... "Nero Kwik Media is the NEW and EASY media management software for managing all your photos, music, videos, and data. And best of all, it's FREE!" It appears to me that the basic program is free and you can add "apps" to it that allow specialized advanced functions such as burning discs or playing back video. To learn more about this software, click here.
I MENTIONED MY favorite archive program WinRAR in another post recently. Now if you buy WinRAR, you can get Panda Cloud Anti-Virus Professional for free. What a deal! I even like the free version of Panda Cloud Anti-Virus and use it on some of secondary computers. It's lightweight, fast and seems to do a good job at providing basic virus and spyware protection.
FACEBOOK IS BECOMING an important trial tool for trial attorneys to detect bias' and predict sympathy of potential jury members. Jury consultations claim the popular social networking site permits greater insight into an individual than traditional jury questionnaires. Joseph Rice of Jury Research Institute told Bloomburg, "“Social media has given us an incredible tool, because it’s something jurors voluntarily engage in, and they post information about their activities or affiliations or hobbies,” Rice said. That reveals “their life experience or attitude that may have an impact on how they view the facts of the case.” To read the full article, click here. A similar recent article from the Wall Street Journal tells the same store. "[Trial attorneys] consider what potential jurors watch on television, their interests and hobbies, and how religious they are." Read the full WSJ article here.
I'VE USED IT now daily for five years, and in my experience, the reliability of Gmail is incredible. Nonetheless, sometimes even the best Internet services can encounter a glitch and your data in the cloud could be lost. In February of this year, about 500,000 Gmail users discovered their accounts were reset, and years of e-mail, related file attachments and chat logs appeared to be gone forever. The outage reportedly was caused by a software upgrade. The good news is that Google keeps multiple back-up copies of users' e-mail in multiple data centers plus offline tapes and was eventually able to restore most if not all of the data that appeared lost. Nonetheless, this surely was an inconvenience for Gmail users who could not access their e-mail during this time.
If these kind of problems make you nervous, you may wish to create your own back-up copy of your Google Gmail. If you already have a desktop e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook 2010, Apple Mail orMozilla Thunderbird (free) this may be the easiest way. Simply sign into Gmail and click the "gear" icon in the upper-right corner next to your screen name. Then choose choose "Mail settings", and then select the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab. Enable "POP" for all mail and tell Gmail to keep a copy in your inbox. Be careful, if you forget this last step, after you download your mail onto your desktop, your online inbox will be empty! The next step is to configure your e-mail client to interface properly with Gmail. The steps vary depending on the software you are using, but Google provides step-by-step instructions for several popular clients. The process for Thunderbird is practically automatic once you supply your user name and password. If this back-up solution doesn't appeal to you, I'll be discussing some other options in future posts.
If these kind of problems make you nervous, you may wish to create your own back-up copy of your Google Gmail. If you already have a desktop e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook 2010, Apple Mail orMozilla Thunderbird (free) this may be the easiest way. Simply sign into Gmail and click the "gear" icon in the upper-right corner next to your screen name. Then choose choose "Mail settings", and then select the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab. Enable "POP" for all mail and tell Gmail to keep a copy in your inbox. Be careful, if you forget this last step, after you download your mail onto your desktop, your online inbox will be empty! The next step is to configure your e-mail client to interface properly with Gmail. The steps vary depending on the software you are using, but Google provides step-by-step instructions for several popular clients. The process for Thunderbird is practically automatic once you supply your user name and password. If this back-up solution doesn't appeal to you, I'll be discussing some other options in future posts.
DO YOU NEED a good witness preparation letter for clients scheduled to take a deposition? The Lawyerist is selling one for $5. Get it here.
WHAT'S THE CATCH? Tech savvy readers should know, if it seems to good to be true, that is, when the price is too low relative to the feature set, there's always a catch! This weekend Fry's Electronics advertised a 1GB voice recorder by Olympus (Model DP-10) for just $29. It looked super easy to use due to it's big screen and control set that mimicked micro-cassette recorders. According to the Olympus press release, "Individuals looking for simplicity will be pleased with the look, feel and function of the DP-10. About the size of a deck of cards, the DP-10 fits neatly in the palm of your hand. The size of the LCD screen is impressive at 1.78 inches wide, and features a large, easy-to-read font ... Recording in high-quality WMA format, the DP-10 boasts 63 hours of battery life. Set to LP mode, the device can record for more than 131 consecutive hours." According to most user reviews, the audio quality is quite good! Wow, sounds pretty good for $29, so what's the catch?
The catch here is, there's no easy way to transfer the recordings to your computer! This audio recorder totally lacks the ability to quickly transfer audio files to a computer via USB, PC connection or removable media. The only way it can be done is by connecting the unit to your computer's audio in jack and re-recording the files with audio recording software such as Audicity! This is a serious pain, time-waster and will likely result in a loss of quality. No thanks Olympus, I know the DP-10 was supposed to be a “microcassette successor" but that's too much like a microcassette (which suffered from the exact same issue). In case anyone is wondering, these recorders are handy to record interviews and MCLE presentations.
The catch here is, there's no easy way to transfer the recordings to your computer! This audio recorder totally lacks the ability to quickly transfer audio files to a computer via USB, PC connection or removable media. The only way it can be done is by connecting the unit to your computer's audio in jack and re-recording the files with audio recording software such as Audicity! This is a serious pain, time-waster and will likely result in a loss of quality. No thanks Olympus, I know the DP-10 was supposed to be a “microcassette successor" but that's too much like a microcassette (which suffered from the exact same issue). In case anyone is wondering, these recorders are handy to record interviews and MCLE presentations.
I hope everyone has a great summer!
-- Michael
