Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
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Mail Photos As Postcards To Anyone From Your Cellphone For $0.99
Dec 29th
Recently, we reviewed the camera capabilities of the latest and greatest cell phones on the market. Whether you have the 5 megapixel camera onboard the Apple iPhone4 or the slick 12 megapixel cam on the Nokia N8, most people carrying current smartphones can snap photos in a flash at decent quality.
Most of the time, we email the photos right from the phone to friends. But there are times when the photos come out so nice or the event was extra special — so an emailed photo doesn’t really do justice to the memory captured with the cell phone camera.
I’m testing out a new service from CellPhonePostcards.com which creates photo postcards on the fly and mails them via snail mail to anyone in your address book online. Now, I should be able to send a physical postcard to anyone I take a photo with on the spot and they’ll get it within a couple of days — all without licking any stamps.
The service is actually pretty ingenious. You take the photo, and then send the photo via text messaging (MMS) to the service at 77468 (it spells “PRINT” on the phone keypad) and include the hashtag shortcut of the person in your addressbook online, say #KENNY.
The service identifies you via your caller ID and then looks up the person’s address based on the hashtag name you sent. They’ll print the text message message as the postcard message on the back and mail out the photo postcard to your recipient.
All this costs $0.99 per postcard. Given the postage cost of the actual postcard stamp and the going rate for printing out regular photos at the local drugstore like CVS, that means the service costs less than 50 cents for each time you use it. Totally reasonable in my book. The only catch is that you have to pre-pay for bundles of cellphone postcard credits as a 10-pack or more. So $9.90 for 10 postcards at a time. Still, not a bad deal!
Here’s a video that explains the service and how to send a cellphone photo postcard:
UPDATE: Right now, if you sign-up for a new account, they’ll give you 10 free postcard credits – including postage – to try out the service. If you’re going to sign-up, please share a comment below about what you’re expecting or what you find useful or convenient about the service.
Poor Man’s iTunes: How To Download / Extract mp3 Audio From YouTube Videos
Dec 25th
iTunes = Lots Of Choices
There are over 13 million music songs priced at 69¢, 99¢, or $1.29 each on the Apple iTunes store as of 2010. That’s a lot of downloadable music content.
YouTube = Even More
But there’s another source of audio content that some people don’t think about — YouTube. I still use iTunes (or the Amazon mp3 store) for regular music downloads. But I also like to listen to other types of audio content to make good use of my time on my commute, waiting in lines, and other periods of downtime.
YouTube actually has tons of video content that is great even for the audio portion alone — I’m talking about lectures, tutorials, podcasts, interviews, sermons, and speeches. But by having them trapped within a video doesn’t make it as useful when you want to listen to it on the run (and sometimes literally!).
Extract Audio From YouTube Videos
The question is how to get the audio out of a video file on YouTube?
A couple of sites lets you download just the audio within a YouTube video. All you have to do is supply the video url and let them know if you want a regular or high quality version of the audio to be extracted.
Free Download Helpers
Two sites that work well (there are a bunch!) are:
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www.video2mp3.net
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www.vid2mp3.com
After the site does some quick thinking, it supplies you with a download link or even a direct URL to pass along to someone else so they can grab the audio file as well.
There’s over 150 million videos on YouTube supposedly. That’s a whole universe of potential mp3 files to download for you! Enjoy!
One Man’s Trash Is Another’s Treasure: 10 Websites For Swapping Your Stuff
Oct 16th
We learn all about making swaps from our childhood.
Remember when you used to negotiate a trade for baseball cards or any other collector’s items? Heck, we used to swap lunches sometimes — almost nothing was off limits.
But when you grow up, that all changes for some reason. What’s mine is mine, what’s your is yours. We go to great lengths in today’s culture to make sure people know just how much *stuff* we accumulate, unwilling to share it.
Here’s where the Internet is helping to disrupt culture, at least in some corners of the world.
Perhaps it is the economy, perhaps it is the new generation. Perhaps it is the “green” machine that’s making all of notice things like the fact that the average American throws out 68 pounds of clothing each and every year according to Good Housekeeping Magazine. 10 years…that’s 680 lbs of unnecessary death to clothing. 20 years. . . 30 years . . . And it doesn’t apply to just clothes!
The Internet has taken the friction out of making swaps or just plainly giving usable things away for someone else to enjoy it. Here’s a bunch of websites including some Good Housekeeping highlighted in their recent November 2010 issue which you can explore so that those DVDs, you know, the ones you bought in the 90′s…the ones you can admit that you’ll *never* watch again, can be exchanged for a shiny new DVD movie you can watch an upcoming weekend (especially since the Blockbuster store has gone R.I.P.!). Got a book? Exchange it! Got some baby toys or clothes? Swap it!
Here’s a list of 10 websites you can start with to get a (re)newed collection of things. . . Read the rest of this entry »
15 Sites That Help You To Share or Transfer Large Files Over The Internet
Oct 11th
These days, collaboration is a buzz word that is becoming a reality.
Along with collaboration is a nifty term called “file sharing” – it used to be something that sounds easier than it really is.
It used to be you had to put it on a flash drive or burn a CD or DVD to move large files back and forth.
Or if the file was big, but not huge, you could simply attach it to an email and click SEND. But these days, files can grow beyond the 20 MB limit quite easily. And if we’re talking about media files, the 20MB limit is a joke.
But these days, it’s much easier to transfer files back and forth.
Here’s a quick hit list of file sharing services that let you send large files to someone else (or yourself!) over the Internet: Read the rest of this entry »
How To Get Free Access to 3 WiFi Hotspot Networks
Aug 12th
Last time, I blogged about getting access to Comcast’s WiFi hotspot network for free. It’s a little known secret that the marketing department over at the cable internet company hasn’t really pushed for some reason.
But today, I found out that there’s more to the story!
Comcast customers now get free access to two other cable internet wifi networks, completely free…and vice versa.
If you are a Comcast Internet customer like me, all you have to do is log onto one of the three wifi networks: xfinitiwifi, optimumwifi or timewarnercablewifi with your comcast email address and password like you do with your own Comcast wifi network
If you like Free, this is like FREE TIMES THREE.
If you don’t believe me, just look-up the coverage map for Optimum Online’s WiFi network and Time Warner see for yourself!
This is a huge win especially those that live in the tri-state New York City area since each company dominates different geographies around the City. So now when you travel about the region, you are most probably near either a Starbucks or McDonalds — or one of the three major wifi cable company wifi networks — You’re covered!
Check out this quick video that shares the details of the wifi network collaboration, worthy of to be called the real triple-play deal!
QUESTION: IS IT TRUE? DO YOU SEE ANY OF THE THREE WIFI HOTSPOTS IN YOUR AREA? LEAVE A MESSAGE TO SHARE THE RESULTS IN YOUR AREA!
How To Get Free WiFi Hotspot Access If You Are A Comcast Internet Customer
Aug 10th
Ever been out and about wishing you had a wifi connection?
Of course you have!
Instead of trolling for open wifi signals, you might want to consider a more reliable solution. Of course, you could sign-up for Boingo, Wayport or other WiFi networks, but if you are a Comcast Hispeed Internet Customer (randomly branded Xfinity recently to confuse customers as much as possible of course), you might want to check out this option before you go out and spend any more money.
I recently found out that I can get access to a free WiFi hotspot roaming account just because I’m a Comcast customer — and so can you!
In fact, through this largely unpromoted feature of Comcast Internet accounts, you already have it! There’s no need to turn anything on, upgrade or change anything on your account.
If you take a look at the coverage map of NYC and the Tri-State Area, you’ll see that there are TONS of Free WiFi Hotspots available for you to connect to in almost any general vicinity.
Check out the quick video blog update below which I recorded today and uploaded using the free WiFi connection that details how to get free WiFi access across town and while traveling:
Read the rest of this entry »
Free Screen Capture Software That Clicks With Me
Jul 11th
More and more, I’m find the necessity to create screen capture images of my desktop or a portion of a browser window more and more.
Typically, I’ve used the actual “Prt Sc” Print Screen button or the SHIFT+ALT+PRT SC combo to capture just the active window. This puts the screen grab into the clipboard memory.
From there, it’s an easy paste into MS Paint to resize or annotate with arrows, callout boxes, etc before saving it as “screen-URLorPROGRAMNAME.jpg” to use elsewhere – on blogs, twitpic, email, etc.
I’ve used a couple of Windows screen capture apps but none does what I want without cluttering my icon tray and hogging up resources. Recently, I’ve been testing out browser-based apps that do pretty much all I need. . .
One of them is called FireShot Pro and I used it with FireFox:
It’s been an easy-to-use screen capture program that works as a live browser plugin. The free version does most of what I need and even does Read the rest of this entry »
I love tech, gadgets and the web. Hope you pick-up a useful tip or two here today that helps you use technology to your advantage! Better yet, why not share your own expertise in a comment on a post today to help the other readers that land here for answers!