Got My Invite For Google Voice – PURE WIN!

A few days ago on the 7th I finally got the all coveted email invite from Google to use their Google Voice service! I signed up for it about a year ago when I first heard of it from one of my college instructors.

First off the bat, users cannot give out invitations themselves at this time. At least, I can’t find that option anywhere when I login. So please don’t ask me for an invite. If I could give them out, I would totally do it in the form of a contest!

So I logged in for the first time, and it immediately asked me to enter the area code for the number I wanted, then it asked to enter a four letter word to see if it was available. I entered 619 for San Diego, and TECH because I am into techy stuff. Bam! It gave me about eight available numbers all with the TECH extension. If you jokers want to give me a call you can now reach me at (619) 630-TECH!

Once logged in, the interface is rather familiar. It resembles Gmail in a lot of ways, which is good because it makes using it pretty intuitive. Here is a screen shot of it:

I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far I like it a lot. Here is a list of my favorite features and why:

• Free nationwide calling – My cell phone reception at home sucks, but I am only paying for local service on my home phone. Now, with Google Voice, I can call long distance on my home phone without being charged
• Online text messaging – I can send SMS text messages from within Google voice, and it shows up on the recipients phone with my Google voice number. When they reply back it goes to my cell phone. When I reply on my cell it still keeps the Google Voice number on the recipient’s end.
• Free voice to text – When users leave a voice message, if you enable this feature, the messages automatically get transcribed to text format. Now I don’t have to call my voicemail box, I can just read it in an email. This feature still isn’t 100% yet, but it’s good enough.
• One number – Now I have one, simple to remember number that I can give out to everyone, and they can reach me no matter where I am.

Now, there are many more features, but so far the ones above are what I have used, and what I like. For a full list of features click on this link: (Google Voice Features)

Do you have a Google Voice account yet? What are your favorite features? What don’t you like about it? Let us know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: google,voice,invite,invitation

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Time for a Twitter cleanup?

I woke up this morning, and did what I usually do. I grabbed my Blackberry to check my emails and Twitter. What? You don’t do that too?

Anyway, so I am scrolling through the updates of the people I am following and it is just one spam post after another. I can’t hardly read the updates from those who I am interested in. Every friggin’ post was from a spammer!

This problem all stemmed from playing with a couple of autofollow services I tried out. I am always testing out new things, so I figured why not? The idea of the autofollow tools is that you automatically follow people based on keywords in the hopes that they will follow you back. Honestly, this doesn’t work out so good. Most of the people you end up autofollowing are themselves autofollowers, and most autofollowers are spammers.

Well, I couldn’t remember all of the services I tried out, so the only way I could think of to stop autofollowing people was to change my password on Twitter. Bam! No more autofollowing! Okay, so now I am following 750 people compared to the 450 that are following me back. Time for a little Twitter cleanup!

I found a pretty awesome tool that can help you with this. It is called Mutuality, and it lets you to do one of three cool things in bulk:

• Unfollow all who do not follow you back
• Unfollow all
• Follow all who follow you

I decided to use the first option to do some bulk cleanup. Amazingly with this tool I went from about 750 people I was following down to 165. After that, manual cleanup was easy.

Is it time for you to do a Twitter cleanup? Did you try various autofollow services? Know of other cool Twitter cleanup tools? Let us know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: twitter,cleanup,bulk,unfollow,remove

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Short URL Service… With Ninjas!

I know what you are all probably saying, “Why do we need another shorten URL service?” The answer is simple, you can never have enough! That is a fact!

Besides that, how many of them out there have Ninjas? Not too many! How can you possibly want to post a short URL on Twitter, or Facebook without the help of Ninjas? You wouldn’t!

So what am I really getting at here? I am introducing you to my personal alternative to TinyURL, and it is called NinjURL.us! Use it for all of your small URL needs! Take really long web addresses and turn them into something useful and small!

Do you want to make your own TinyURL like service? You can use the free PHP script I used. It is called Broken Script! All you need is a hosting service that supports PHP and MySQL, or build your own LAMP server.

The next time you are posting a long URL on Twitter, a forum, or something like that, why not give NinjURL.us a try?

Technorati Tags: ninjurl,ninja,tinyurl,shorten,url,service,alternative

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Bauer-Power Episode 11

I hope you all had a great Independence day weekend! You know I did! Fortunately for me, my company gave use a three day weekend, and I took full advantage of it!

On Friday the 3rd, Sundance and I got together to do Episode 11 of Bauer-Power. In this episode we discuss epic geek battles. In that segment we try to determine who would win between the following:

• The Borg vs Cybermen
• Worf vs Saren
• Anakin Skywalker vs Sylar

Who do you think would win? Let us know your picks and the reasons why in the comments!

After we discuss that, we decided to Go Office Space on an Acer! As you all know, I don’t like Acer very much. Well, we got our hands on an Acer LCD monitor and decided to beat the living hell out of it!

When we were done taking out our aggressions on the poor defenseless monitor, we decided to introduce you to my new short URL service, NinjURL.us! (More on that tomorrow!)

Without further ado, here is Episode 11 of Bauer-Power! This time filmed with my Kodak Zi6!

So what did you think? Any recommendations, suggestions, hate mail? Hit us up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: bauer-power,episode,11,geek,battles,pwnage,ninja url

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We have a winner! Enjoy your Linux Computer!

It has been a long month. I have been waiting for this very moment to let you all know who was the lucky winner of June's contest to win a free Bauer-Power Linux Computer! There was one in there that I didn't think I would be able to deliver due to some possible legal restrictions and what not, but in the end I made everything legit and I was able to see this to the end!

Okay, so who won right? Well, the winner is the very lucky...

...@barnett1949

You have until Monday at 12:00PM pacific time to DM me with your shipping address so I can get this machine out to ya!

To all of you who played, thank you very much! I really like doing these twitter contests, and I hope you do too.

Technorati Tags: contest, winner

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Free Open Source Photo Gallery

My wife is an amateur photographer. She has been aspiring to go pro, and perhaps start making a little money on the side. She frequently has people asking her to take their family photos, wedding pictures, baby pictures, school pictures etc. Most of the time, she does this as a favor to friends and family, but eventually she wants to branch out.

One of the things she said she wanted to get her foot in the door, and to provide potential clients with samples of her work was an online photo gallery. I decided i would put my skills of finding cool free software to use, and decided to look into an Open Source solution for her!

What I found was a little PHP based photo gallery that ties to a MySQL back end. What’s that smell? Smells like an Ubuntu LAMP server! Well, in my case I went with a free hosting service that I wrote about a few months ago called 000webhost. Anyhoo, that is neither here nor there.

The free gallery is called Coppermine, and setup is a snap! Just create your MySQL database, username, password etc, then upload the Coppermine files to your web server. Then you browse to your website’s URL and follow the installation wizard. It really can’t be any simpler.

I plan in the future to do a number of video segments showing users how easy it is to setup some of these free PHP sites, and I plan on using Coppermine as an example.

Here is the URL to the site I setup for my wife (http://momentsbefore.com). It is still under construction, and she hasn’t uploaded any photos yet. There is one picture, but that is only because I uploaded it to show my wife how easy it is to use.

Speaking of my wife’s photography, here are some samples of her work:

Like many other free PHP CMS/website scripts out there, there are lots of free Coppermine templates available so you can put some customizing touches on your gallery. Just do a Google search for Free Coppermine Themes.

Do any of you out there dabble in photography? Do you use Coppermine? Do you use something else? If so, post your photo gallery URL’s in the comments!

Technorati Tags: coppermine,free,php,website,photo,gallery,mysql,easy,open source

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How To Redirect To Exchange 2007 OWA in IIS 7 and Windows Server 2008

My company just setup our first Exchange 2007 cluster, and are getting ready to migrate our users over from Exchange 2003. Before we do that, we want to make sure everything is working correctly, and almost seamlessly to our users.

With that includes making the access to OWA (Outlook Web Access) in Exchange 2007 idiot proof. By default, there are two things that make idiot proofing difficult. For one, like most companies we set our OWA to require SSL. For two, the URL for OWA is https://servername/owa. No biggie right? Just tell the users to use that URL. Well, that won’t work too well for our users. We want to just tell them to go to “webmail” and have it work.

So here is what we did:

• In IIS 7, I clicked on the Default Website
• I clicked on Error Pages
• I clicked on 403, and selected Edit
• I clicked on the Respond with a 302 Redirect radio button, and inserted the URL to OWA:

• Done!

Now our users don’t have to type in HTTP or HTTPS, they can just open up a browser, type the server name/address in and automatically end up in the right place!

Has your company moved to Exchange 2007 yet? Have any problems with the migration? Did it go smoothly? How do you like Exchange 2007? Let me know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: exchange 2007,iis,owa,redirect,windows server 2008

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