Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

My daughter asked me how to install Gmail Notifier on her new PC at school.  Doing a little research, I made the following suggestions:

1. You can download and install gmail notifier.  It’s here.  While google does not indicate it will work with Vista, browsing the web, you can see several people who indicate it does.
2. You can download and install google talk as this page suggests.  Google talk is a chat application.  I find it unnecessry since I can chat on the google page.  Why have an extra application taking up system resources?
3. You can install pidgin as your IM client.  Pidgin affords you ability to use multiple chat platforms including google talk.  It also gives you alerts when email arrives.  If you’re going to use AIM or MSN Messenger or Yahoo IM, you might as well install pidgin.  It’s here.  I’ve been using it for years and like it better than Trillian.

Any other suggestions?

I want my bookmarks at work to be the same as the ones at home and on my laptop. Generally you can synchronize these things with Yahoo! Toolbar or Google Toolbar.  But I hate toolbars. They are redundant.  They take up viewing space.  They cause redundancies.  They populate your screen with useless information.  And they tend to be redundant.  They waste system resources.  Did I mention redundancies?

Yet toolbars can bring value to the table in this: You can use them to sync bookmarks on one computer with another.

Well, today I found a way to sync bookmarks without a toolbar. It’s found at www.foxmarks.com.  It keeps the bookmarks on my laptop synced with those at my office.

Try it.  Just install the add-on in FireFox.  Use the wizard to get an account and upload your bookmarks.  Then the next time you install it on a different machine, your bookmarks will be there too.

Synchronized Bookmarks without a toolbar!  Love it.

Several years ago I bought PocketBreeze from sbsh.  It sold for about $20.  I used it for so long that I began to think it was part of the operating system on my iPAQ HX-4700.  Moving to a PDA phone (Samsung SCH-i760) I was reintroduced to the Microsoft Today Screen.  Ugh.  I had mistakenly thought that MS would do something to make that screen more useful, but — hey — they are MS.

Tonight, to my delight, I learned that sbsh has a policy that if you own any of their products (with registration code) you can download the latest version, provided it’s not a whole new edition.  My version was 5.0.n and the newest version (three years later) was 5.4.n.  So I downloaded, installed, input my email address and registration code, and it works great.

And guess what!  Unlike MS, in the past three years sbsh has actually enhanced their product, increasing usability.  Wow!  What a smart company.

Thanks,  sbsh!