@ScottCate: Scott Cate: Technology

What if you lose your Kindle?

Scott Cate — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:28:00 GMT

I was on a plane yesterday reading my Kindle, and the guy next to me says something like “I used to have a Kindle, but I left it on a plane”, while he was pointing to the Seat-Back Pocket. And another time this week, I saw something on TV about the volunteer staff that work at airports, that have thousands and thousands of found items, that they simply can’t return. Not that they don’t want to, there is just no way to, because there is no Personally Identifiable Information ( also known as P.I.I. ) on them.

Then I started thinking, what if I left my Kindle behind, how would someone return it, assuming that they wanted to? Sharpie? Maybe. Here is a better option. Shown below is the Amazon “Manage Your Devices” screen shot, where you’re allowed to name your Kindle Device. As you can see on the right, I have named Jamie and My Kindles, with both our name, and our Cell phone number, so if someone turns it on, they’ll see the P.I.I. where hopefully they’ll return it.

I thought this was a good enough idea to write about, and hopefully let others know!

Deactivate the Power Button on your Laptop

Scott Cate — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:24:00 GMT

As you see pictured here, the MacBook Air power button is just above the Delete (which really is backspace) button on the MacBook Air keyboard. If you’ve ever seen me type, you know I use the backspace key a lot! Once I accidentally pressed the power button, which wasn’t too painful as it put my machine into Sleep mode. I just closed the lid, opened it again, logged in, and it came back to life.

But then I thought …. What if I was on stage? …. and I had a moment of silence. how bad would that be, and how awkward would it be to explain to the audience what just happened?

So I jumped into power settings, and set the Power button to do nothing. If you’re a presenter, using MacBook hardware, you might consider doing the same? This may be a good idea, no matter what laptop you’re using. To be honest, I 99.9999% of the time, just close the lid, and when I do need to shut down, I do it from the Start Menu anyway. So the button is only representing danger to me.

#Disable #Disable #Disable

A good book gets borrowed: Version Control By Example

Scott Cate — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:35:00 GMT

Eric Sink (@eric_sink on twitter) has written a great book on Version Control Software, titled Version Control By Example. It showed up on my desk again this morning. I say again, because I keep letting people borrow it, and they keep returning it :) I figured with it's popularity, I could record a quick video book review, and post it. So here it is. Great job Eric, it's a great book. Easy ready, very informative, and sometimes funny (if you can be funny in a DVCS book?).

AZ Entrepreneurship Conference 2011

Scott Cate — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:26:00 GMT

2010 was a great building year for EventDay.com. One of our great moments came when we donated services to help the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference. Here is a quick video post, talking about 2010, and trying the help push registration for the 2011 event.

AZEC11.com

Windows 8 Fast Application Switching

Scott Cate — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 20:09:00 GMT

If you don't have a keyboard available on your Windows 8 machine (like my Samgsung Slate when it's not docked) you will benefit from this trick. If you have several (or lots of) applications open, a fast way to switch between them is to swipe in from the left, one-by-one until the application on your back stack surfaces. You can also press the START button and from the start screen, launch the application again. If it's already in the back stack, the application will start with the same state (or at least it should if it's programmed correctly). Or you can .... Control the swipe from left action, and control the specific application you want to bring forward. The video/screen cast was done holding my Samsung Focus running Windows Phone 7, so it's a little shaky, but you'll get the point. Enjoy!

Windows 8 Samsung Slate: Shortcut to Task Manager

Scott Cate — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 23:11:30 GMT

At http://BuildWindows.com we received a really Nice Samsung Slate with Windows 8 developer preview loaded. Playing around with the hard button combinations, I found that holding the Windows Home key, along with pressing the Power Button brings up a quick menu, with access to the Task Manager.

Desktop IE10 vs. Metro IE10 Demo

Scott Cate — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 22:05:10 GMT

There will be some confusion around this, and Video is worth 10,000 words so here it is. IE10 comes in two (or more) flavors. Desktop IE10, and Metro IE10. This quick screencast will show the differences ...

My Telerik Interview on Day 2 of the Build Conference

Scott Cate — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:36:59 GMT

I caught up with Richard Campbell doing Telerik interviews and was able to sit down for a few minutes. It's always fun learning and sharing new technology at conferences. Thank you Telerik for the time you've put into these recordings, and Thank you Richard for setting it all up!

What is Windows 8 Metro?

Scott Cate — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 20:48:00 GMT

What is Windows 8 Metro? In this short 6 minute video, I talk to the differences between Windows 8 Desktop, and Windows 8 Metro Applications. Compatibility is a big issue. Will your current code run in Windows.next, Code named Windows 8? Yes, and I'll tell you how.

Moving to Office365 from Google Apps

Scott Cate — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 22:26:12 GMT

For the last few years, I’ve been using the free Google apps for my email and calendar solutions. I’ve been what I would call a power user on Google Mail – falling in love with the keyboard shortcuts, and the idea of archive over delete, and the conversation view of email. That really sums up my love for Google Mail. Let me dive a little deeper into each one.

Keyboard Shortcuts. I’m sure other web applications have this, but for me, Google Mail was the first application that I could really fully utilize with the keyboard, making my email life fast and efficient.
Archive over delete. 100 years ago (in internet years) I used a hosted exchange account where my maximum account storage was in the meg, not gigs. This meant I had to move email out of my Exchange account, so Google Mail of 6 Gig was attractive. Keep everything, and search for what you need when you need it.
Conversation View. Without a doubt this was the KILLER FEATURE for Google Mail for me. It made life so easy, that the conversation always let you quickly and painlessly see the entire email thread. And not just a buck full of message, the actual conversation. So when Email 2 replies to Email 1, even though the body of Email 1 was included in Email 2, Google Happily hid that for me, so I could just see/read the additive parts of Email 2. This to me is true conversation view.
Life is GOOD GOOD Google.

And here we are today, years and years later. My Google Apps email account is 92% full. Whoa, that’s full. Delete all spam and all trash, and it dropped to 72%. That’s a lot of spam :) that thankfully I never had to see. So my account is almost full. Recently I have started missing Email (from lists and colleagues that have shown me the email sent from their outbox) and meeting Requests have started giving me headaches. Not sure if this is my fault or Google Mail, but the point is, I’m having a pain, and I don’t have a resolution. I can upgrade to Google Pro (or whatever it’s called) for $50/year or look around to see what others have to offer. Let’s have a look. (this was a couple of weeks ago for me, and this post is an update of what I’ve done since).

So I started looking at Office 365. All my devices connect to Google apps as an Exchange account. Google mail acting like exchange so the folders (errrm labels) and contacts and calendars and push email all just work because every device (that I know of) has Exchange built in. So why not just use Exchange? maybe that’s an option, so I start looking at Office 365.

On a regular basis I also use GoToMeeting for screen sharing and conference calls, which I pay $49/mo for. That’s $600/year for screen sharing. Not a lot month to month, but it ads up, and has no added value, other than it’s a great screen sharing platform.

But wait … as I’m looking at Office365 I see that it includes Lync. Lync is probably a lot of things to a lot of people, but for me it’s a GoToMeeting Killer. Meaning I’m canceling my GoToMeeting account, because Lync does everything I need it to. Conference calling, VOIP, and Screen Sharing. I’m sure there are edge cases that I don’t know about, but FOR ME, Lync is magical, and just works. I’ve used it for a dozen or so meetings and it’s perfect.

Office365 also has 25 gig of email. WooHoo, my 5991Meg of email is barely a dent in this new plan.

Oh wait … Snap … Office365 also includes hosted Shapepoint. I’m not sure if we’re going to use it, but it’s there if we need it.

So ….. I’ve done it. I decided, I Signed up, and I switched DNS and as of now …. all our Mail / Calendars / Contacts are hosted on Office365. My 3 main killer Google Mail features are now included as basic features in Outlook.

Keyboard Shortcuts: outlook has them. I can fully navigate the UI with keyboard over mouse.
Archive over Delete. I created a “All Mail” (actually this was imported from my Google Apps and I kept it) folder, and mapped the “Done” button (CTRL+SHIFT+1 is the KB Shortcut) to mark mail as Done, and move it to this “All Mail” folder.
Conversation View: is built into outlook. I can see Sent, All Mail, Inbox, and Even deleted messages as part of a common thread.

So I’m a week into Office365, and online (twitter) I made a joke today that Office365 is to be renamed Office364, because there is a system wide outage. What does this mean for me? Well, with no time to work on Email – I can write a blog post :) in my trusty Live Writer application. Email goes down. The good part about this is I’m not frantically scouring about trying to fix servers. I know that there are very smart people, and probably a lot of them trying to get the email back up and running. And who knows … maybe this is part of a larger outage because internet just went out our office from the local Cable Internet Provider. And FWIW I had plenty of outages when hosting with Google Mail as well. So this is a minor hiccup that I’m not worried about.

In the end, this is a very long blog post saying I’m happy to be trying something new, Office 365 is (so far) doing great …. and hey what do you know. Office365 is back up and running and my inbox just filled up, so I have to get back to work.

Try Office365, I think you’ll like it.

@scottcate