The batteries can overhead, “posing a fire and burn hazard”.

If you have an HP laptop you should review the list and, if your model is on the list, contact HP for a full replacement.

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook – a great graph that shows how much of your profile is public from 2005-2010 (http://bit.ly/94EIIr)

Click on the years, shown on the right, to see the difference.

And here’s a great article by Jeff Jarvis that I think hits the nail on the head as to the difference between “A public”, and “THE public”.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/05/08/confusing-a-public-with-the-public/

We want to share ourselves with the public, but we want to choose who that public is. This is what is being taken away by Facebook.

IF you haven’t already done so, you should review your personal information on Facebook and remove anything you are not comfortable for everyone on the Internet to know about you.

Add wireless synchronization of your email, calendar, tasks and memos to you Small Business with Blackberry’s Enterprise Server Express. No more syncing by cable to your desktop every time you leave the office,  now your Outlook and Blackberry will always be in sync, wherever you are.

To enjoy this free software you will need to be running a Microsoft Exchange Mail Server or the Microsoft Small Business Server. You’ll also need to be on a data plan with your phone provider.

Management of up to 75 Blackberry phones is now consolidated and security can be enabled for all phones – including the ability to disable a phone should it become lost or stolen. there are advanced data and phone controls for security and ease of use and real-time collaboration features for shared tasks, and calendars. It doesn’t matter which provider you are with, Shaw, Telus, or Rogers will all work with this software.

What are you missing from the full version? Internal corporate messaging and phone PBX integration,  neither of which is a big deal for Small Businesses. You’ll still have full access to Blackberry Messenger, Yahoo, Google, and others.

Foreverwarm knows Blackberry Servers, call us to see what you need to do to implement this software.

To learn more or download the software, here’s the Blackberry Enterprise Server page.

Most of you have probably heard about “cloud computing” – where the applications and services are available through the Internet, not installed locally.

Google Apps is one of the best known services available in this space. Google Apps offers email, shared documents (spreadsheets, drawings, presentations), shared calendar, and groups.

At $50 per user, per year it is significantly cheaper than Microsoft or other licensing.

ZDNet has an interesting article that discusses the City of Los Angelos moving to Google Apps, their cost savings on a large scale, and some of their reasons for the move.

Think about it – do you really need all your applications locally? Could you collaborate better with partners and even customers if at least some of your data was shared? In an office of 25 staff you’d spend $1,250 on licensing rather than $8,125 for Microsoft.

What stops you from moving to cloud-based computing?

The setup is not difficult, the instructions here are for Gmail, Telus, Shaw, and Rogers. Take a little time and be able to stay in touch!

Note: These instructions are for personal email only, running OS 3.0 on the iPhone. (Synchronize email with your work or Microsoft Exchange server)

How to get Gmail on your iPhone or iPod Touch

1. Make sure you’ve enabled IMAP in your main Gmail settings
2. On your iPhone or iPod touch’s home screen, tap Settings
3. Tap Mail
4. Tap Add Account…
5. Tap Other (don’t use the “Gmail” option)
6. Tap Add Mail Account
7. Enter your account information, being sure to use your full Gmail address (or full Google Apps email address)



8. Tap Save
9. For Incoming Mail Server:
   1. Host Name is ‘imap.gmail.com’
   1. User Name is your full Gmail address, including ‘@gmail.com’ (or full Google Apps email address)
10. For Outgoing Mail Server:
    1. Host Name is ‘smtp.gmail.com’
    2. User Name is your full Gmail address, including ‘@gmail.com’ (or full Google Apps email address)
11. Tap Save

How to get Shawmail on your iPhone or iPod Touch

1. On your iPhone or iPod touch’s home screen, tap Settings
2. Tap Mail
3. Tap Add Account…
4. Tap Other
5. Tap Add Mail Account
6. Enter your account information
7. Tap Save
8. Incoming Mail Server:  (find your mail server here you must have the correct city code)
9. Outgoing Mail Server:  (same as above)
10. Tap Save

How to get Rogers email on your iPhone or iPod Touch

1. On your iPhone or iPod touch’s home screen, tap Settings
2. Tap Mail
3. Tap Add Account…
4. Tap Other
5. Tap Add Mail Account
6. Enter your account information
7. Tap Save
8. Incoming Mail Server: pop.broadband.rogers.com
9. Outgoing Mail Server: smtp.broadband.rogers.com
10. Tap Save

How to get Telus email on your iPhone or iPod Touch

1. On your iPhone or iPod touch’s home screen, tap Settings
2. Tap Mail
3. Tap Add Account…
4. Tap Other
5. Tap Add Mail Account
6. Enter your account information
7. Tap Save
8. Incoming Mail Server: pop.telus.net or (IMAP) imap.telus.net
9. Outgoing Mail Server:smtp.telus.net
10. Tap Save

The new app is available for download here and works with Blackberry Contacts, Calendar, and Messaging. It will also be available on the Blackberry App World application on your smartphone.

The application currently supports: Blackberry Tour, Blackberry Bold, Blackberry Curve (OS 4.3.0 or higher)

There are six modules:

• Network Updates. View and share crucial business intelligence and updates with your network.  Perfect for those spare moments between meetings.
• Search. Search across over 60 million global professionals, and get the answer back in seconds. We’ve implemented a unified search across both your direct connections and the entire LinkedIn network.
• Connections. LinkedIn is your address book in the cloud.  Get quick access to any of your connections to get their up-to-date profile information, and the ability to send them a message immediately.
• Invitations. Why wait to get back to your desk? Accept outstanding invitations immediately.
• Messages. Messaging is one of the reasons that BlackBerry owners love their devices, and we’ve worked hard to integrate your LinkedIn Inbox.
• Reconnect. You can’t leverage your network if you don’t build it.  This module brings suggestions for new connections to you anytime.  Now you can build your network from anywhere, in seconds.

Here’s screenshots copied from the LinkedIn blog:

More details are available from Chad Whitney, Product Manager

LinkedIn also has an iPhone application

Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Philipp Weinmann lured the target iPhone to a rigged Web site and exfiltrated the SMS database in about 20 seconds. (full article here) and Charlie Miller, who I’ve talked about before, hacks Safari again.

Interesting that hackers appear to be so focused on the Apple products now.

What your thoughts about Apple’s security measures?

“Your job search is a process. Actually, it is a multi-process, with many concurrent processes (based on multiple employer contacts) taking place at the same time.” (College Grad Job Hunter by Brian Krueger)


Learn how to use Outlook 2007′s Tasks, Calendar, and Contacts to organize and stay in control of your job search multi-processes.

Try it now! View the first 5 pages

We will show you how to:

• Separate your job emails from your regular emails
• Separate your potential employer contacts from your friends and  relatives
• Use Calendar to schedule important job search activities
• Use Outlook Tasks to easily manage and review your job searching To Do’s

US$14.95

Searching for a Job is time consuming, with lots of little activities that hopefully culminate into an interview and offer. You’ve gone to a lot of work to seek out potential employers, replying to ads, pushing out resumes. Don’t let all that good activity turn into a missed job opportunity because you missed a follow-up date or appointment.

Stay on top of potential employer communications, be able to quickly scan and review what needs to be done next and done today. Confidently prioritize your job search tasks because you will know what is more important.

This 20 page guide offers a process to keep track of all your job opportunity activities, all in one place, Outlook 2007.

This e-Book is available online, right now, for US$14.95. You can begin getting in control of your job search today.

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”
- Milton Berle

IT Consulting when it is just you, is a tough business. As the owner/technician you gave it a good run but it just didn’t work out. Maybe you just couldn’t get enough clients, or just not making enough, or maybe you’re moving on to something else. But now it’s time to call it quits.

What are you going to do with your clients?

Foreverwarm Consulting may be interested to acquire your book of business.

If you are in the GVRD; Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Poco area (that’s British Columbia, Canada, folks) – we may be interested!

Call us and let’s have a conversation.

We can be creative on the transition and your interests. We  will provide a high quality of service to your clients with a focus on “Peace of Mind”. Our sweet spot is small businesses of 5 – 25 computers.

See what we do at: www.foreverwarm.com

Call us: 604-715-5107 (cell)

[This is a companion article to: How to use AppleTV with Windows]

Now that you’ve got your AppleTV configured and running, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to play any one of your personal DVD’s through it? Selecting them from My Movies is so much simpler than finding and then loading up the DVD.

How to prepare your DVD for AppleTV

AppleTV will not play DVD’s directly, they must be reformatted to a compatible file format.

Note: A DVD optimized for AppleTV will not play on your iPhone or iPod Touch unless you use Handbrake’s “Universal” preset.

DVD43

Windows will not allow you to copy a DVD by default so use DVD43, a DVD dycrpyter, which bypasses most encryption techniques and allows a file copy. The first step is to allocate some hard disk space, maybe using an external drive. Count on 2-3Gb per movie. Next you’ll want to copy the DVD to this hard disk. Once DVD43 is installed it sits in your Task Tray as a little yellow smiley face .

When you insert a DVD into your computer it will try to process it.

And if everything is good you’ll see the happy face .

Now if you open My Computer you will be able to see and copy the contents of your DVD. You only need to copy the VIDEO_TS folder, which may take 15-30 minutes. Create a temporary folder on your hard drive for the DVD copy, which can be deleted once the conversion is done.

HandBrake

Once the disk is on the hard drive we use HandBrake to convert the file from DVD format to MP4. Handbrake is easy to use as it has a preset configuration for AppleTV.  It is available for both OSX and Windows. You can use Handbrake’s default preset with little noticeable difference, however we have the disk space so we try to get the best quality we can within Apple’s 4Gb file size limitation by tweaking the parameters on the video tab, Target Size = 3800

A Handbrake conversion can easily take an hour, so add three or four movies to the Handbrake queue and let let them run overnight.

Once a DVD is in MP4 format, open up iTunes and select movies, then select File, Add File to Library and select your converted file. The movie will appear on the right and if iTunes can find the album artwork it will show up.

Adding Album Artwork

More often than not iTunes will not find Album Artwork for your movies so you will have to go get your own. To do this  use CDCovers. Find your DVD and copy the picture to your movies drive. You may want to create a folder for this called MovieCovers. Then from within iTunes, right-click on the movie and select Get Info. Move to the Artwork tab and click Add. Select your album artwork and now it will show up both within iTunes and on your AppleTV

Adding Movie Comments

Another nice feature is to add comments to your movie. Comments show up under the DVD Jacket on the AppleTV. To add these comments go to the list view in iTunes and add your text to the Comments column. You can sometimes get good movie text from the Internet Movie Database IMDB.com.

Selecting Movies on the AppleTV

Once your movie is showing within iTunes you can now view it through the AppleTV by selecting it from the My Movies menu option.

Sit back, grab the popcorn and enjoy!