Bnpositive's Blog

Following in my recent pattern of covering websites that are resources or may interest travelers. The Chokti website provides another social network type site to get more people excited about travelling and sharing their stories with others when they get back home.

Chokti website

There’s an interesting bit of information to all of this that makes the Chokti website unique from it’s counterparts.

Most sites related to travel seem to focus too much on the process of travelling itself.

If you think about it, that’s the purpose of most sites, but that’s not really the main purpose of the Chokti website. Here are some of the bullet points that makes Chokti different.

• Promote the joy and excitement of learning about people and places. From your own neighborhood to the farthest reaches of the globe.
• Provide users with an easy and simple way of sharing their pearls of individual and collective knowledge from one person to the next.
• Give users immediate and pertinent results, through the Geotagging of all media content related to a physical place in the countries and territories we service.
• Allow users easy access to up-to-the-minute, relevant information through the latest internet-based technologies.

Get out there! Go somewhere and share your experiences about the people and places you see and not just the boring details of where you’ve been. Join the rest of the people around the world that love what you’re doing as well.

Share it at www.chokti.com

I’ve written about my dislike of Apple software a variety of times before. You see my experience with dealing with and trying to remove Apple software has been more akin to the feelings I have when trying to get rid of malware or other unwanted software on computers. The challenge now is that I’ve gotten Apple off of my computer but now they’ve teamed with Facebook to get it back on my computer with Quicktime.

Quicktime Install on Facebook

I’m not sure what bothers me more in this situation. I understand that Quicktime is a popular plug-in and many people have no problem with the application.

My bigger frustration is that I have to continually tell Facebook and my Firefox browser that I’m not interested in the plugin and I’m NOT GOING TO “Install Missing Plugins”.

Does anyone know if there’s some way to force the browser or Facebook to remember my preference here? I’d love to know if you do. It gets old continually trying to take care of this issue.

If you’re into juggling, then you may recognize the name of Jason Garfield. He is perhaps the greatest juggler on the planet. If you don’t know who Jason Garfield is then get a load of his loads of talent.

There’s a new mobile netbook in town and this one has a little bit of an additional component up it’s tiny sleeves to make it even that much more interesting. The Gdium Netbook from EMTEC has everything you’d except from the smaller form factor with some additional features that may make it even more appealing to other uses.

Gdium Netbooks from EMTEC

The Gdium has the smaller form factor, light-weight and a 10″ screen that displays 1024×600 resolution. It’s also completely based on open source software. What makes the Gdium unique though is that it also comes with the G-key to allow users to travel in more lightly with all of their information in tact.

Unique to the Gdium is the G-Key, a bootable USB key on which the Linux operating system, applications and personal data are stored. The G-Key allows each user to store their personal information and preferences securely, without leaving a trace on the computer.

I like this idea, but I’ll be honest I’m still not sure if the ultra-light, super-portable computer is something really for me. I don’t travel a lot anymore, and when I do it’s usually just to be onsite with clients. The work I’m doing onsite is development work and web site and application design. I need a full-size screen, I usually carry around a 2nd monitor (which I’d like to replace with this), a portable 320GB hard drive, and my Logitech VX Nano notebook mouse. Travelling light really isn’t a big deal for me.

My other challenge is keeping things synchronized. I’m too the point now where I do just about everything on my single laptop and have forgotten about trying to synchronize anything with my personal desktop or sometimes even the server at the office. The G-key is interesting solution though. I could work on my computer as normal, but if I ever needed to travel without it, I could pull the key and boot-up on another machine with no problems and feel like I was working on “my” machine.

What do you think?

Here’s a sweet video of a guy doing the Star Wars theme beatbox style. The camera angle adds to the visual, but it’s too bad the overall quality of the video isn’t any better. Made me think of  Blake Lewis a bit from American Idol fame, what ever really happened to him?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tv416Vw7mk]

My first computer when I was a kid was a TRS-80. Cassette deck for saving my programs and everything! My first Windows machine was a Toshiba Infinia I purchased after college in ’96 while living in Nashville. I believe the Infinia was the greatest computer design ever. At the time, it was the only tower and monitor combo that was black and not the ugly beige box.

Toshiba Infinia Desktop from Toshiba website

I’ve still got the tower and the CRT. I just dumped off three other old CRT’s at Best Buy to take advantage of their recycling program. I just can’t ditch the Infinia monitor though. My original goal was to rebuild my own machine as a living room computer/media center. The immediate goal now is to figure out how I can reuse this monitor.

My first thought was to hope that the AT&T U-verse box had a monitor out option. It doesn’t, so now I’m wondering if there’s an adapter that will let me use the monitor as a display and accept input from S-Video or RCA outputs.

Anyone have an idea of how that could be done?

If you’ve been using your computer for very long you’ve probably experienced the time where you’re sitting in front of it and think, “This use to be so much quicker back in the day.” What happened? Things get clogged up and mucked up and sometimes you just need a couple of tweaks to get a bit more pep in your system’s step.

Windows XP Pro Prefetch Folder

One of those tweaks you can do is to delete your prefetch files and this has been said to improve your reboot time. What the prefetch routine does is look at the applications you use and creates pointer index files to the files those applications will need so that Windows can access them and start-up those programs quickly.

There’s a bit of a debate on if this is actually a tweak worth doing or not. In my opinion it does help. The slower prefetch experience Ed Bott noticed is due (in my opinion) that upon the first reboot of the system the prefetch files are getting rebuilt and identified as needed. I don’t think you’ll see the immediate effects until the following reboots.

It’s also my opinion that this helps because you may have started programs months ago that you no longer use and Windows is wasting resources in identifying where those programs and files are located to boot up quicker.

If you’re interested in seeing if this will work for your needs, you can follow these instructions for emptying your Prefetch folder on your Windows XP machine.

What’s been your experience with refreshing your prefetch files?

I found out about a new website this evening called MyTego. I thought about covering it as a post on Uncover the Internet, but figured it was more about computers and your favorite tech devices than it being about a cool website. You see, there’s something about being proud of your tech and gadgets, but there’s also something to be said about making your own mark with the tech you’re using.

My laptop, minus a few current stickers

The MyTego website let’s you create your own custom cover or skin to make your laptop, or iPhone, or iPod, Xbox 360 or cell phone uniquely your own. Their website has an extremely easy to use interface for letting you upload your own graphic or just creating a custom look right from the site.

I created my own MyTego earlier this evening and ordered it. It took me less than 5 minutes because I already had the graphic I wanted to use ready. Just edited the size a little bit for it to come out right, but within minutes my order was in the system and working on getting shipped to me in the next 14 days.

myTego is the world leader in customized skins for portable electronics, with the unique Tego Skin, the only product that you design entirely by yourself, with your own custom images and designs. A TEGO is a skin covering that fits over all of your gadgets. Make a Tego skin for your cell phone, a skin for your mobile phone, a skin for your laptop, a skin for your playstation, a skin for your nintendo wii, a skin for your xbox, a skin for your ipod, a skin for your macbook and powerbook, a skin for your Rock Band, a skin for your Guitar Hero. Yes, now you can Tego Skin the WORLD!

You can get an idea for what’s possible by visiting the MyTego website or their flickr page for examples of what others have done.

Once I get my custom MyTego in the mail, I’ll do a follow-up post and show everyone what I did and let you know what the rest of my experience was with MyTego.

Let’s just throw it out there. I’m on the computer all the time. Luckily the vast majority of the time I’m on the computer I’m also enjoying connectivity to these here Internet pipes. I have a startup routine that I will get my computer all setup and start Firefox and a variety of my tabs will open. Some of these tabs are ongoing applications like my various webmail accounts, but others are merely there for start-up as a welcome to my day. One of those tabs is my Startlike.com page for The Great Outdoors.

My Startlike - The Great Outdoors homepage

Every morning I’m greeted with a beautiful photo of the great outdoors.

With my family’s enjoyment of camping, this continues to keep me in the mood of enjoying the earth around me whenever possible.

The webpage is very helpful with resources too though. It’s well designed and you can customize it to depict your own favorite scenes instead of the great outdoors. Scenes like: golfing (also beautiful), diving, space, exotic escapes and skiing.

As you can see from my screen shot, there are a few different areas I’d like to highlight on the site.

1. Various boxes on the photo are active. You can hover your mouse over the box and read information about the photo or other related resources.
2. Social networking tools are built in to visit sites like Facebook, share links, join discussions about the photo and share your own photos.
3. An easy Google search is available on the page that allows you to search a variety of Google resources quickly.
4. An option to change your preferred photo theme as I share previously.

If you’ve been looking for a way to freshen up your start page on your browser and want to include some helpful tools and resources at the same time, give Startlike a try.

I’ve been playing around with the Destroy Twitter client today and overall have been enjoying the experience. I had looked at it before but decided against it because they couldn’t do multiple account names like I have in twhirl.  The interface change to Destroy Twitter to get me to really try it again was the addition of groups management.

Destroy Twitter twitter client interface

The interface changes and user-interface is really slick. It’s developed on the Adobe Air platform, like twhirl, so it’s a very light installation package. Destroy Twitter still doesn’t have multi-account ability and the interface for adding individuals to groups could be improved to make it easier as well.

One of the features that’s really great though is the auto-complete feature for the people you’re following. As soon as I start typing @ for a username, a mini dialog box appears and starts limiting the followers that match the characters I begin typing.

Quickly accessing your stream of follower updates, or replies, or direct messages are all very easy and the display panels elegantly slide into view from various sections of the application.

I’ve still got twhirl installed to manage my other twitter accounts until Destroy Twitter catches up on that function. Then I’ll love it completely and probably uninstall twhirl. That is unless twhirl develops something to put it back in front of the others.

I spent around seven years in the travel industry as a corporate travel agent and somewhat quickly moved into being a technology manager for travel services. One of my responsibilities over those years was to design and manage internal travel websites for our corporate clients. The website shared information about preferred vendors for air, car rental and hotel information as well as travel policy and the other normal stuff.

TravBuddy website homepage

One thing I quickly realized in my experience with travel was that I didn’t have any desire to do leisure travel (although I always did dream or planning and organizing independent travel excursions to Africa for safaris and the like). Finding out information about destinations that you’re interested can be a challenge, and usually the best advice you get is when you can talk to someone that’s been there. I just helped a friend who had questions about their upcoming Disney trip to celebrate their daughter’s birthday.

The TravBuddy website has combined the best of sharing travel information and destination reviews with the tools and feature set of the current social networking sites that seem to be springing up everywhere. This is a great marriage of content and function in my opinion.

TravBuddy is a site for people who love to explore the world around them. You can use TravBuddy to find travel buddies, record travel experiences in travel blogs, or share travel tips with travel reviews.

No matter where you are exploring, we hope this site will make it easy and fun for you to chronicle your experiences, both past and present. We hope that it will also be an invaluable resource for keeping in contact with family and friends, and for making new friends from all around the world.

If you don’t already have an account, you can register for free or take a tour to learn more about the site.

– The TravBuddy Team

Now my only problem is figuring out how to get more time and money to actually travel around more than I do now, which is pretty much non-existent. The one thing I never took advantage of while in travel was actually traveling that much. However, the benefits aren’t exactly what you’ve probably heard or expect.

There’s an area of Facebook that I believe really needs to be addressed for a variety of reasons. As you begin finding old friends from high school, connecting with extended family members as they begin using Facebook, and maybe even start connecting with clients and co-workers, there’s an issue of who gets notified of your updates when you have them.

If you imagine all the different groups of your contacts as an extending circle of influence similar to what would be shown in the image below.

Facebook Circles of Contacts

Let’s think about your closest friends or family being the center circle, and extend from there the groups of people you have less contact or influence with in your personal life.

You may want to send an update to your friends and family, that’s not seen or available to your old high school friends, or perhaps more importantly those clients and co-workers that you’ve found on Facebook.

As far as I know, there’s no way to accomplish this currently on Facebook. In some instances your circles may not nicely overlap.

It’s this occasion where I think you should have the ability uncheck different groups of your friends to not be informed of an update or be able to see it as visible. By default all of your updates would go to everyone as the functionality exists now.

But on those occasions where you would like to exclude certain groups, you could uncheck their group for being included in the update. Also, if an update was marked private in one of these instances, any response by that group of friends would also only be viewable by the people you’ve identified as being able to see that update. So someone’s response to your “private” update should not appear on their wall.