December 3, 2008 • 25 mins
In this episode the Techstuff crew reviews the browsers, software and other applications they use to research podcasts and articles. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast for a behind-the-scenes look at the tech writers' tool chest.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi there,
welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polette. I'm
an editor How Stuff Works. Sitting next to me, as usual,
(00:20):
is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey, folks, and today we
were going to tinker around with some some ideas. Yes,
basically the tools we use to get our jobs done here, right,
and so we're talking about things that make our lives
a little easier when we're trying to research, right, publish articles,
even research things for the podcast, Um and uh, I
(00:43):
just thought maybe it'd be interesting for you guys to
hear kind of a collection of the stuff that that
we rely on on a regular basis. That's true. Now
we should probably start with, um, the easy stuff. Okay, sure,
Microsoft Office, Yes, we use Microsoft Office extensively, so Word
and Excel in particular, not so much with the power
point power Point yeah, not really a power point company, Yeah,
(01:06):
but word we we I type up all my articles
and Word and I send them over to the Pallette
who then eviscerates them and makes them better. And Excel.
We used to track things like our our article assignments
and things like that. If our meta information is put
into an Excel spreadsheet which is converted into common to
limited file, which sounds it's just as exciting as it sounds. People. Um.
(01:31):
And then that's the funny thing about this. You know,
you don't really think about office as being that big
a deal, but you know it's taken a lot of
refinement over the years. And yeah, you know, I'm I'm
a Mac person generally, I was an Immiga person before that,
so I kind of I kind of came weight to
the Windows thing. I didn't even start using Windows until
pretty much skipped over three, which I'm told I didn't
(01:52):
really miss much. Well, yeah, I reluctantly started with Windows three.
So I actually came from a perfect background. So Correl,
you know, that was my that was my background. So
when I switched over to word, I was it was
kicking and screaming. But these days, you know, I've actually
gotten very much used to the way word works, and
it's it's pretty much impossible to find any place other
(02:13):
than I think a few legal firms still used word perfect,
but it's still very popular and legal, and but I
like Office. For the next part, I tried open Office,
which is an alternative from Sun. It's free, um open
source stuff, and it's got the entire suite of tools,
including some of the ones that Microsoft charges extra for.
(02:34):
Very nice, but you know, sort of lower key if
you will. They don't have a lot of the bells
and whistles. Um. Same thing with like Google Docs. I've
used Google Docs once or twice for some some small projects.
But um, you know, for a way to really uh,
to be to be really integrated in the office, you
pretty much have to work work with a Microsoft Office
(02:56):
and of course Outlook as well. Yeah, that's very important
tool for us for coordinating our meetings and calendars and
things of that nature. Moving away from that basic sweet
what browser do you use or browsers most often anyway? Um?
Jonathan likes to pick on me because I champion some
(03:19):
browsers he doesn't particularly like. By and large, I use
Firefox um are content management system. Uh sort of has
a problem with Firefox three, So I'm basically using Firefox too.
But if you really want to know all this stuff,
I use UM, believe it or not. I do use
Google Chrome on occasion, but I like to try different
stuff because not only do I like to talk about it,
(03:41):
but I also kind of I'm I'm a sort of
a beta junkie. Yeah. So I've got a copy of
Opera on my my computer. I've also got Safari for Windows. Um,
I have Chrome on there somewhere. I even have Flock,
which is another offshoot of my the Mozilla suite of software.
I do have a question for you. Do you have
(04:02):
Safari on there on purpose? No, I actually do. I
like so far. I was just wondering if you didn't
accidentally install it when you were updating iTunes or something,
even though there's a giant security hole in it. Yes,
I do have a copy of Safari on there, and
I think it's sort of It's sort of weird because
I think all of these different browsers have stuff that
nobody else has. Yeah, there's their little bits and pieces.
(04:24):
You know, they're plug ins buying larger Y use Firefox
and Firefox three is really speedy. There's no giant memory
league like there is in two. But um, you know,
I do like to play around with the other ones
just to see what they're like. Opera is a really
nifty browser I think has been overlooked for the longest time. Unfortunately,
(04:45):
UM and it uh, you know, it's just sort of
gone by the wayside. And we also use Internet Explorer
on occasion we don't want to know and there are
times when I've found the Internet Explorer is is the
the best browser to ow to a certain web page,
and occasionally we do use that. I rely on Firefox
(05:05):
for most of my work. I love Chrome, but I
use Firefox because, like you said, the plug ins are
very useful, and we can talk a little bit about
some of the plug ins we use, uh for work.
But then Chrome just doesn't have that functionality yet, and
I stress yet when it does have it. But by Firefox.
(05:26):
Now I'm kidding. I really enjoy Firefox as well, but
I always have both open. I mean, there's no time
you're gonna come by my desk and not see that.
I'm you know, I'm always gonna have a Chrome window
open and a Firefox window open with multiple tabs in each.
And um, so let's talk about some of the plug
ins for Firefox that help us. UM. I use. There's
(05:47):
most of the ones I use. Collett's the one who
introduced me to them, but Pillette, being the beta junkie
he is, tends to adopt, use it, abandon and move on.
May I tend to find one and I'm I'm sticking
with this one because it does exactly what I needed
to do. So, for instance, I use a Zotero, which
is one that you recommended to me, like very much.
(06:10):
It's a it's a sort of a bookmarking indexing kind
of plug in where you can, um, you can bookmark
a site and it even includes site information when you
when you bookmarket so it tells you when you access
the site, which is important citation information exactly, yes, website
c I t e. Thank you. I appreciate the clarification.
(06:34):
U hit me, Yeah, affair. But now the it is
very useful because, as as uh one of the writers here,
one of the things I have to do when I'm
citing a source is I have to say when I
looked at that source. Because being the Internet, things don't
stay the same all the time. People can go back
(06:54):
and change stuff. It's not like a book. When a
book comes out, you know you have to wait till
a new edition of that book comes out before you
see any changes. But on a website. You could theoretically
cite something and then the next day the author says,
oh crap, I didn't mean to do that, and go
back and change it, and then it doesn't say what
it said when you read it. So that never happens
with us. No, of course not. So what we do
(07:18):
is we we list when we've looked at a site,
so that way you can say, well, it didn't say this. Well,
you know, if you go into a say like the
Internet archive, you can tell that it did say that
once upon a time. So that's one of the ones
I use. Do you have any plug ins that you
want to talk about, I'm just gonna add to that. Okay,
sure that you may say, well, you know, when I
(07:40):
was a student, I used end note. What's the big
deal about staro? Well, unlike EndNote? So taro is free.
It is completely free and it's beautiful. You can save
entire copies of a web page or you can just
save a link. You can make folders, you can tag things. Um.
It's very very useful if you're trying to say, you know,
you can put stuff in a out your podcast and
(08:01):
say okay wait podcast um, and then it'll bring up
all the different citations you use for that. So it's
it's pretty nifty in that regard. Um, let's see plug ins,
plug ins, plug ins. How about DGO, d I, I
g OE, yep, yep. It's um, it's pretty nifty. It's
got a toolbar and it's very like delicious in some ways.
(08:22):
You can save copies of links, you know, a giant
list of bookmarks. It's a social bookmarking tool. Um. But
the toolbar the reason I use I use both of them.
The reason I use dgo UM actually for an earlier
podcast we recorded a few minutes ago. It's got a
highlighter tool so you can highlight stuff and actually, if
you make it public, other people can go on the
(08:43):
web page and see. As long as you have the
dgo plug in installed, you can actually see the stuff
that other people have highlighted are marked up um, which
can or may not be useful depending on what it
is they've marked up in why um, But yeah, I
mean you've got you've got that of available to you,
and you can go back and look at your notes
and say, oh I bookmark this then, and hey, look
(09:04):
I know highlighted this and made some notes on it.
So you can have annotations on a web page, which
is very very useful. Um. I also use ever note.
Yeah that's one of the ones that you you embraced
and then abandoned. Correct. Yeah, except I'm actually looking at
my notes now on every note came back to the fold. Yeah,
(09:25):
I had a problem in which some of my notes
were deleted. I did a fresh install before I did this,
so i'm and and everything's there, so so hopefully it'll
stay up. Yeah. I haven't had a problem with it yet.
But yeah, some people did have problems with it, and
I think you even heard back from someone using another tool.
Will get to in a minute, but um, yeah, every
note allows you to to to either bookmark an entire
(09:49):
page and inside another inside every note, which you can
access offline. You don't have to be online to access
every note. Um. Or you can highlight a section of
a web page, can just save that, so if there's
a particular paragraph you want to to refer to later,
you can do that. It's also it's very useful when
you're doing stuff like um the podcast preparation, really because
(10:11):
you can you can highlight sections of text and say,
all right, well, this is something that you want to
talk about this, but you don't want to have the
whole website up when you're when you're going through the podcast,
because it's too hard to find the information you're looking for.
You can also make notes, you can highlight, you can
change text size. UM you can. It's also really really
useful for screenshots. I found um and because if you
(10:33):
do a screenshot while every note is open, you can
you can uh dictate the parameters of your screenshot so
you don't have to use it doesn't take a shot
of the entire screen. You can you get the little
borders that you can um size appropriately and take a
shot of just the part of the screen you want,
which saves time later on when you're editing photos. That's ah,
that's very useful for uh. Firefox that use a plug
(10:57):
in called screen Grab, same sort of thing, does the
same thing. It's you know, within the web window. Um. Yeah.
So and then one other Firefox plug in, I can
talk about fox Marks, which is the synchronized bookmarks application
where if you're if you're you we're using multiple machines,
(11:17):
you know that it's difficult if you know, like you
might bookmark something on one machine and then you're on
another machine and you realize that it's you don't have
the bookmark on that one, it's on your other computer.
That can you get really frustrating. So fox Marks is
a way where you create a little, you know, kind
of a bookmark account and you can synchronize bookmarks across
multiple machines and access them from wherever you happen to
(11:38):
be at the time. You know, you can also do
that with Google Browser Sync. Yes, and Opera also offers
a feature like that too. I was just talking about
the Firefox plug in. I'm the one who has all
the anti very various anti such and such biases like
(11:58):
anti mac bias and all that, right that doesn't actually exist. UM,
let's talk about a few of the other tools I'm not.
Do you have any other Firefox ones you wanted to
talk about? No, I do have a web tool, so
if we want to go to web, let's UM. I
have something installed on my web host that I use. UM,
(12:20):
and I'd be willing to bet the very few of
our listeners have ever heard of it. It's called Tasks
junior UM. It's made by a company called crowd Favorite
used to be King designed. Alex King came out with
this a long time ago, and there's a pro version,
uh paid version, and then this version, which is very
very downscaled. It doesn't have the same feature set um.
(12:42):
But what it is is tasks. Okay, so it's a
it's a to do list, which is pretty simple, except
the reason I like this particular program over things like
remember the Milk, um, which is also pretty cool, um
or to do dot um dot com. Think I have
to go look um now that I've said that. So anyway,
(13:05):
the thing that makes Tasks Junior better than something like
Remember the Milk, which is also pretty cool, is that
Tasks Junior allows you to install subtasks. So, for example,
I'm editing one of Jonathan's articles and I have to
send it to a co editor, and I have to
write metaphor it, and I have to upload images for it.
I can put the giant title in there. I could say,
(13:28):
you know how the Amazon kindle works, and I could say, okay,
make sure you edit the article, make sure you give
it to the co editor, make sure you put it
in the dropbox for someone else for the for the
publisher to pick up and publish. And I can check
off those individual tasks under the heading of the main task. UM.
So that's an especially useful thing because stuff like Outlook
(13:49):
that's got the it's got a tasks list, but you
don't have the ability to do subtasks, so they're all individually,
you know, loose in there. UM which is UH, which
is okay, and I'm pretty sure of the crowd. Favorite
actually offers a hosting service where you can sign up
to do that. But if you get tasks junior um,
which is essentially donation where you have to install it
(14:10):
on your own server, and it's it's fairly easy to do,
but it's really nifty stuff. UM. I use a couple
of web based UH applications occasionally. UM. There was a
time where I had a little bit of I was
going through a transition on computers UM and UH because
yours kept dying. I wasn't going to go into that. Yeah. Yeah,
(14:31):
I'm the tech guy who kills laptops, so I'm on
my fourth one here and UH. But one of the
issues is that when I get a new laptop, I
wouldn't necessarily have all the software on it that I
would need to do my job. And because most of
our software we're working on licenses, it would mean that
we have to get a new license for that machine
so that we could run it legally. Right, one of
(14:54):
those being Photoshop when we that's one of the big
programs we used to edit art here and um or
at least one of the ones. I use Photoshop Elements,
really Photoshop Elements, Yeah, I should be should be specific,
but um, when I didn't have Photoshop Elements, I at
least still had access to Photoshop Express, which is a
web based photo editing software. Um, and it's really limited. Yeah,
(15:19):
you can't do nearly as much on Photoshop Express as
you could with Elements or some other uh computer desktop
based uh photo editing software. But I could do enough
where I could at least make it less of a
task for Polette to to to edit and upload to
the articles. UM. Fortunately, I know have Photoshop Elements on
(15:42):
this computer, so I don't have to worry about anymore.
But that was that was definitely useful. Yep. Um see,
I'm trying to think of other desktopy software. Well, I
use uh, we can talk about maybe the I am
software we use because I I use Digsby. I know
you don't you don't you Digsby do you? Oh? Here's
another situation in which I have run through a gamut
(16:05):
of stuff. I'm a trillion fan. Yeah. UM. I used
digsby for a while. It is a free and open
source UH chat client. It offers a lot of functions
that others don't like Google Talk and Facebook Chat and
my Space chat as well as it can you can
link it so that you can check your You can
(16:26):
keep a running tab on on your email accounts so Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, mail,
um it. You can see what the you know when
new messages come in. You can actually see the indications
for that without having to go to those websites. You
can even delete messages from your desktop without going to
those websites. That's also very handy and UH. For a
(16:49):
while I used Pigeon p I d G I n UM, which,
as many of you know, I'm sure is UH. A
Pigeon is a sort of a mishmash of two language
is together to form a third. Well. This is an
open source I AM Multi i AM protocol client UM,
sort of like a d M for the Mac. Pigeon
(17:11):
is is available for a Lennox and Windows and it's UH.
It's got a lot of the same capabilities, although it's
really I am based. It's really not a male thing.
I'm a bobber. Well. The other thing about Digsby that
the other useful thing for me is that it allows
me to check my Twitter accounts. Yes, and Twitter is
another one of those tools that we use quite a bit,
(17:32):
and it's uh. I use it to follow a lot
of other tech journalists so I can keep up with
tech news as it's being broken. Um and occasionally I
send out a little Twitter messages as well, so you
can always track me down on Twitter and find out,
you know, when I'm complaining about someone making popcorn in
the office, because those are the kind of really important
(17:56):
messages I tend to send out. Yeah yeah, For a while,
I was signing up for a lot of those, um yeah,
but every seems like every single day would send me
another email saying hey, look at this, and I'm like,
what are you doing to me? I'm I already belonged
to like fifty social networks. I can't I can't join anymore.
Yeah yeah, Well then you got um Twitter and you
(18:18):
have ji q or hi q. I've never heard anywhere
announced that clerk pounds quippy cork identica. I belong to
so many of these, and they're basically, um, yeah you
said the right one, okay. Um, so yeah, there are
pounds plexo. Yeah yeah, I was gonna say, did you
(18:39):
see a pounds? Um? There are tons and tons of these,
And there are services like ping dot fm that allow
you to broadcast one tweet to all these different services
every time, or you know, you can blog to other
services like Blogger and Tumbler and WordPress all the time.
I don't use I don't use most of those in
(19:01):
my day to day work. No Twitter, but I used
I have used Ping to write to post to those
different things. Um. And and friend feed, which is sort
of a reverse of those, where you know, you can
have all those post to your friend feed and then
people can comment to that, which is kind of cool. Um.
And those are tools we used to network with other
(19:22):
tech people or you know, people who have interesting contents content. Um. Yeah, Readers.
I've used Google Reader. I also used NewsGator. I actually
meant people who read our website. That's also cool. Yeah,
I use Google Reader as well. UM. Now I meant
that we could use those two to readers people. Let's
(19:45):
move on to readers, because I use Google Reader as well.
As actually gonna mention I Google. I occasionally use that
to check a billion RSS feeds at one time. Um,
that's very useful. Whenever we want to see what's hot
in tech or what's the latest news, you can you
can check many for RSS feeds all at the same time.
And uh and yeah, it's very handy. Yeah. I like
(20:05):
a NewsGator because it uh, you know a lot of
people have a remembrance of when they weren't all that
uh friendly, they had some issues with um, but now
they're now they're totally above board. Now they offer RSS stuff. UM,
you know, you can go online or you can They
(20:26):
actually bought two different clients. The one for Windows is
called feed Demon, it was very very popular client, and
the one for Mac is net Newswire, which was a
very very very popular client among Mac users. Um. And
one of the cool things about NewsGator is that if
you use one of those desktop clients, you can set
it to sync with the web or you know, so
(20:47):
you can read I can catch up with tech news
at home, and it knows which articles I've read, so
I won't go back and go oh man, I have
to go through all these again. I've already looked at these. Well,
you know, that's one of the advantages is to using
the at instead. And one of the other things I
wanted to talk about was job which is inbox spelled backwards.
(21:08):
It's for for uh Microsoft Outlook. Yeah. I had this briefly,
but I was having some issues. It was causing my
outlook to crash and it was probably because it was
interfering with some other program that I also happened to
have on my computer. It's not I don't mean to
say that jobny itself was defective. I think it was
just not playing well with so many of the other
(21:29):
plugins that I already have. Well, each of us has
a cocktail of software. It's different from everyone else, and
sometimes it gets a little poisonous. That's the problem. But
what it does is it's really neat. It indexes your email.
It can tell you who's the most popular person, tells
you when you're most likely to get a response based
on the analysis of that email. You can look up
a word and it won't pull it up. You can
(21:50):
look for different attachments and will help you find them
five hours now. Expect a response from Strickland in five hours. Um, well,
I have only one other one left, Google Desktop. I
have Google Desktop on. It helps me search my computer
for files if I've somehow managed to misplace them, which
(22:10):
has happened on occasion, sometimes too great personal distress, but
it also is very useful again in Outlook, UM I
can search. I can use Google Desktop to search my
my Outlook for specific keywords or phrases, which comes very handy, like,
for instance, I'm planning a trip to the Consumer Electronic
Showcase later on actually at the beginning of next year,
(22:32):
and this way I can quickly search through all the
emails from ce S for something specific, Like I was saying,
there was that one from Pioneer, and I can search
Pioneer ce S and it'll pull it up really quickly,
So that's very handy in my case. That was my
last one. All right, Well, my last one is UH
as a tool called dropbox, and this is a plug
(22:53):
in you can install for Mac or Windows. And this
is another one of those home and work things. That's
pretty neat because UH unlike services like box dot net,
which I like very much, they offer. Both of these
services offer free hosting for your junk UM you know,
sound files or pictures or documents. UM and it's great
(23:15):
because it's online and in the cloud, and you can
you know, store stuff there. Well, you know that's that's cool.
And you know, if you upgrade, you can start storing
giant stuff. You can even collaborate with other people. But
what makes drop box different is that this plug in
on your computer actually makes a folder pop up on
your desktop or in your documents folder. So not only
(23:39):
do you can you store stuff there, but you can
actually drag and drop. Um. And so now I can
save documents. I don't like hauling my laptop everywhere I go,
so if I have something I just want to take
a look at, I can put it in my drop box,
go look at it at home, and then you know,
save any changes I make there. And it's you know,
drag and drop or save and Microsoft are directly to
(24:00):
the dropbox rather than having to save it and then
upload it through the web interface. Um. But on the
other hand, and box dot Net offers a uh an
iPhone app which is pretty cool too. You can actually
access stuff there. And Live Mesh is something from Microsoft
that I'm starting to play with. Athough there's no Mac
client yet, it does offer you the opportunity to two
(24:23):
save stuff in a similar way where you've got the
plug in and it's integrated with your desktop. So that's
a lot of tools. You know, I thought, you know,
when we first talked about this, we were both like,
I don't know if we have enough to talk about it. Yeah,
we had way more than we thought. And then there's
you know, pen and paper what anyway you lost me? Yeah?
I know. It's that stone age technology. And we have
(24:45):
articles on many, many, many of these tools that we've
talked about, such as how Twitter works, we have HOLP,
Firefox works. You can find all of those right now
at how stuff works dot com and we'll talk to
you again. Really sick for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com. Let
us know what you think. Send an email to podcast
(25:08):
at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by
the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi there,
welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polette. I'm
an editor How Stuff Works. Sitting next to me, as usual,
(00:20):
is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey, folks, and today we
were going to tinker around with some some ideas. Yes,
basically the tools we use to get our jobs done here, right,
and so we're talking about things that make our lives
a little easier when we're trying to research, right, publish articles,
even research things for the podcast, Um and uh, I
(00:43):
just thought maybe it'd be interesting for you guys to
hear kind of a collection of the stuff that that
we rely on on a regular basis. That's true. Now
we should probably start with, um, the easy stuff. Okay, sure,
Microsoft Office, Yes, we use Microsoft Office extensively, so Word
and Excel in particular, not so much with the power
point power Point yeah, not really a power point company, Yeah,
(01:06):
but word we we I type up all my articles
and Word and I send them over to the Pallette
who then eviscerates them and makes them better. And Excel.
We used to track things like our our article assignments
and things like that. If our meta information is put
into an Excel spreadsheet which is converted into common to
limited file, which sounds it's just as exciting as it sounds. People. Um.
(01:31):
And then that's the funny thing about this. You know,
you don't really think about office as being that big
a deal, but you know it's taken a lot of
refinement over the years. And yeah, you know, I'm I'm
a Mac person generally, I was an Immiga person before that,
so I kind of I kind of came weight to
the Windows thing. I didn't even start using Windows until
pretty much skipped over three, which I'm told I didn't
(01:52):
really miss much. Well, yeah, I reluctantly started with Windows three.
So I actually came from a perfect background. So Correl,
you know, that was my that was my background. So
when I switched over to word, I was it was
kicking and screaming. But these days, you know, I've actually
gotten very much used to the way word works, and
it's it's pretty much impossible to find any place other
(02:13):
than I think a few legal firms still used word perfect,
but it's still very popular and legal, and but I
like Office. For the next part, I tried open Office,
which is an alternative from Sun. It's free, um open
source stuff, and it's got the entire suite of tools,
including some of the ones that Microsoft charges extra for.
(02:34):
Very nice, but you know, sort of lower key if
you will. They don't have a lot of the bells
and whistles. Um. Same thing with like Google Docs. I've
used Google Docs once or twice for some some small projects.
But um, you know, for a way to really uh,
to be to be really integrated in the office, you
pretty much have to work work with a Microsoft Office
(02:56):
and of course Outlook as well. Yeah, that's very important
tool for us for coordinating our meetings and calendars and
things of that nature. Moving away from that basic sweet
what browser do you use or browsers most often anyway? Um?
Jonathan likes to pick on me because I champion some
(03:19):
browsers he doesn't particularly like. By and large, I use
Firefox um are content management system. Uh sort of has
a problem with Firefox three, So I'm basically using Firefox too.
But if you really want to know all this stuff,
I use UM, believe it or not. I do use
Google Chrome on occasion, but I like to try different
stuff because not only do I like to talk about it,
(03:41):
but I also kind of I'm I'm a sort of
a beta junkie. Yeah. So I've got a copy of
Opera on my my computer. I've also got Safari for Windows. Um,
I have Chrome on there somewhere. I even have Flock,
which is another offshoot of my the Mozilla suite of software.
I do have a question for you. Do you have
(04:02):
Safari on there on purpose? No, I actually do. I
like so far. I was just wondering if you didn't
accidentally install it when you were updating iTunes or something,
even though there's a giant security hole in it. Yes,
I do have a copy of Safari on there, and
I think it's sort of It's sort of weird because
I think all of these different browsers have stuff that
nobody else has. Yeah, there's their little bits and pieces.
(04:24):
You know, they're plug ins buying larger Y use Firefox
and Firefox three is really speedy. There's no giant memory
league like there is in two. But um, you know,
I do like to play around with the other ones
just to see what they're like. Opera is a really
nifty browser I think has been overlooked for the longest time. Unfortunately,
(04:45):
UM and it uh, you know, it's just sort of
gone by the wayside. And we also use Internet Explorer
on occasion we don't want to know and there are
times when I've found the Internet Explorer is is the
the best browser to ow to a certain web page,
and occasionally we do use that. I rely on Firefox
(05:05):
for most of my work. I love Chrome, but I
use Firefox because, like you said, the plug ins are
very useful, and we can talk a little bit about
some of the plug ins we use, uh for work.
But then Chrome just doesn't have that functionality yet, and
I stress yet when it does have it. But by Firefox.
(05:26):
Now I'm kidding. I really enjoy Firefox as well, but
I always have both open. I mean, there's no time
you're gonna come by my desk and not see that.
I'm you know, I'm always gonna have a Chrome window
open and a Firefox window open with multiple tabs in each.
And um, so let's talk about some of the plug
ins for Firefox that help us. UM. I use. There's
(05:47):
most of the ones I use. Collett's the one who
introduced me to them, but Pillette, being the beta junkie
he is, tends to adopt, use it, abandon and move on.
May I tend to find one and I'm I'm sticking
with this one because it does exactly what I needed
to do. So, for instance, I use a Zotero, which
is one that you recommended to me, like very much.
(06:10):
It's a it's a sort of a bookmarking indexing kind
of plug in where you can, um, you can bookmark
a site and it even includes site information when you
when you bookmarket so it tells you when you access
the site, which is important citation information exactly, yes, website
c I t e. Thank you. I appreciate the clarification.
(06:34):
U hit me, Yeah, affair. But now the it is
very useful because, as as uh one of the writers here,
one of the things I have to do when I'm
citing a source is I have to say when I
looked at that source. Because being the Internet, things don't
stay the same all the time. People can go back
(06:54):
and change stuff. It's not like a book. When a
book comes out, you know you have to wait till
a new edition of that book comes out before you
see any changes. But on a website. You could theoretically
cite something and then the next day the author says,
oh crap, I didn't mean to do that, and go
back and change it, and then it doesn't say what
it said when you read it. So that never happens
with us. No, of course not. So what we do
(07:18):
is we we list when we've looked at a site,
so that way you can say, well, it didn't say this. Well,
you know, if you go into a say like the
Internet archive, you can tell that it did say that
once upon a time. So that's one of the ones
I use. Do you have any plug ins that you
want to talk about, I'm just gonna add to that. Okay,
sure that you may say, well, you know, when I
(07:40):
was a student, I used end note. What's the big
deal about staro? Well, unlike EndNote? So taro is free.
It is completely free and it's beautiful. You can save
entire copies of a web page or you can just
save a link. You can make folders, you can tag things. Um.
It's very very useful if you're trying to say, you know,
you can put stuff in a out your podcast and
(08:01):
say okay wait podcast um, and then it'll bring up
all the different citations you use for that. So it's
it's pretty nifty in that regard. Um, let's see plug ins,
plug ins, plug ins. How about DGO, d I, I
g OE, yep, yep. It's um, it's pretty nifty. It's
got a toolbar and it's very like delicious in some ways.
(08:22):
You can save copies of links, you know, a giant
list of bookmarks. It's a social bookmarking tool. Um. But
the toolbar the reason I use I use both of them.
The reason I use dgo UM actually for an earlier
podcast we recorded a few minutes ago. It's got a
highlighter tool so you can highlight stuff and actually, if
you make it public, other people can go on the
(08:43):
web page and see. As long as you have the
dgo plug in installed, you can actually see the stuff
that other people have highlighted are marked up um, which
can or may not be useful depending on what it
is they've marked up in why um, But yeah, I
mean you've got you've got that of available to you,
and you can go back and look at your notes
and say, oh I bookmark this then, and hey, look
(09:04):
I know highlighted this and made some notes on it.
So you can have annotations on a web page, which
is very very useful. Um. I also use ever note.
Yeah that's one of the ones that you you embraced
and then abandoned. Correct. Yeah, except I'm actually looking at
my notes now on every note came back to the fold. Yeah,
(09:25):
I had a problem in which some of my notes
were deleted. I did a fresh install before I did this,
so i'm and and everything's there, so so hopefully it'll
stay up. Yeah. I haven't had a problem with it yet.
But yeah, some people did have problems with it, and
I think you even heard back from someone using another tool.
Will get to in a minute, but um, yeah, every
note allows you to to to either bookmark an entire
(09:49):
page and inside another inside every note, which you can
access offline. You don't have to be online to access
every note. Um. Or you can highlight a section of
a web page, can just save that, so if there's
a particular paragraph you want to to refer to later,
you can do that. It's also it's very useful when
you're doing stuff like um the podcast preparation, really because
(10:11):
you can you can highlight sections of text and say,
all right, well, this is something that you want to
talk about this, but you don't want to have the
whole website up when you're when you're going through the podcast,
because it's too hard to find the information you're looking for.
You can also make notes, you can highlight, you can
change text size. UM you can. It's also really really
useful for screenshots. I found um and because if you
(10:33):
do a screenshot while every note is open, you can
you can uh dictate the parameters of your screenshot so
you don't have to use it doesn't take a shot
of the entire screen. You can you get the little
borders that you can um size appropriately and take a
shot of just the part of the screen you want,
which saves time later on when you're editing photos. That's ah,
that's very useful for uh. Firefox that use a plug
(10:57):
in called screen Grab, same sort of thing, does the
same thing. It's you know, within the web window. Um. Yeah.
So and then one other Firefox plug in, I can
talk about fox Marks, which is the synchronized bookmarks application
where if you're if you're you we're using multiple machines,
(11:17):
you know that it's difficult if you know, like you
might bookmark something on one machine and then you're on
another machine and you realize that it's you don't have
the bookmark on that one, it's on your other computer.
That can you get really frustrating. So fox Marks is
a way where you create a little, you know, kind
of a bookmark account and you can synchronize bookmarks across
multiple machines and access them from wherever you happen to
(11:38):
be at the time. You know, you can also do
that with Google Browser Sync. Yes, and Opera also offers
a feature like that too. I was just talking about
the Firefox plug in. I'm the one who has all
the anti very various anti such and such biases like
(11:58):
anti mac bias and all that, right that doesn't actually exist. UM,
let's talk about a few of the other tools I'm not.
Do you have any other Firefox ones you wanted to
talk about? No, I do have a web tool, so
if we want to go to web, let's UM. I
have something installed on my web host that I use. UM,
(12:20):
and I'd be willing to bet the very few of
our listeners have ever heard of it. It's called Tasks
junior UM. It's made by a company called crowd Favorite
used to be King designed. Alex King came out with
this a long time ago, and there's a pro version,
uh paid version, and then this version, which is very
very downscaled. It doesn't have the same feature set um.
(12:42):
But what it is is tasks. Okay, so it's a
it's a to do list, which is pretty simple, except
the reason I like this particular program over things like
remember the Milk, um, which is also pretty cool, um
or to do dot um dot com. Think I have
to go look um now that I've said that. So anyway,
(13:05):
the thing that makes Tasks Junior better than something like
Remember the Milk, which is also pretty cool, is that
Tasks Junior allows you to install subtasks. So, for example,
I'm editing one of Jonathan's articles and I have to
send it to a co editor, and I have to
write metaphor it, and I have to upload images for it.
I can put the giant title in there. I could say,
(13:28):
you know how the Amazon kindle works, and I could say, okay,
make sure you edit the article, make sure you give
it to the co editor, make sure you put it
in the dropbox for someone else for the for the
publisher to pick up and publish. And I can check
off those individual tasks under the heading of the main task. UM.
So that's an especially useful thing because stuff like Outlook
(13:49):
that's got the it's got a tasks list, but you
don't have the ability to do subtasks, so they're all individually,
you know, loose in there. UM which is UH, which
is okay, and I'm pretty sure of the crowd. Favorite
actually offers a hosting service where you can sign up
to do that. But if you get tasks junior um,
which is essentially donation where you have to install it
(14:10):
on your own server, and it's it's fairly easy to do,
but it's really nifty stuff. UM. I use a couple
of web based UH applications occasionally. UM. There was a
time where I had a little bit of I was
going through a transition on computers UM and UH because
yours kept dying. I wasn't going to go into that. Yeah. Yeah,
(14:31):
I'm the tech guy who kills laptops, so I'm on
my fourth one here and UH. But one of the
issues is that when I get a new laptop, I
wouldn't necessarily have all the software on it that I
would need to do my job. And because most of
our software we're working on licenses, it would mean that
we have to get a new license for that machine
so that we could run it legally. Right, one of
(14:54):
those being Photoshop when we that's one of the big
programs we used to edit art here and um or
at least one of the ones. I use Photoshop Elements,
really Photoshop Elements, Yeah, I should be should be specific,
but um, when I didn't have Photoshop Elements, I at
least still had access to Photoshop Express, which is a
web based photo editing software. Um, and it's really limited. Yeah,
(15:19):
you can't do nearly as much on Photoshop Express as
you could with Elements or some other uh computer desktop
based uh photo editing software. But I could do enough
where I could at least make it less of a
task for Polette to to to edit and upload to
the articles. UM. Fortunately, I know have Photoshop Elements on
(15:42):
this computer, so I don't have to worry about anymore.
But that was that was definitely useful. Yep. Um see,
I'm trying to think of other desktopy software. Well, I
use uh, we can talk about maybe the I am
software we use because I I use Digsby. I know
you don't you don't you Digsby do you? Oh? Here's
another situation in which I have run through a gamut
(16:05):
of stuff. I'm a trillion fan. Yeah. UM. I used
digsby for a while. It is a free and open
source UH chat client. It offers a lot of functions
that others don't like Google Talk and Facebook Chat and
my Space chat as well as it can you can
link it so that you can check your You can
(16:26):
keep a running tab on on your email accounts so Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, mail,
um it. You can see what the you know when
new messages come in. You can actually see the indications
for that without having to go to those websites. You
can even delete messages from your desktop without going to
those websites. That's also very handy and UH. For a
(16:49):
while I used Pigeon p I d G I n UM, which,
as many of you know, I'm sure is UH. A
Pigeon is a sort of a mishmash of two language
is together to form a third. Well. This is an
open source I AM Multi i AM protocol client UM,
sort of like a d M for the Mac. Pigeon
(17:11):
is is available for a Lennox and Windows and it's UH.
It's got a lot of the same capabilities, although it's
really I am based. It's really not a male thing.
I'm a bobber. Well. The other thing about Digsby that
the other useful thing for me is that it allows
me to check my Twitter accounts. Yes, and Twitter is
another one of those tools that we use quite a bit,
(17:32):
and it's uh. I use it to follow a lot
of other tech journalists so I can keep up with
tech news as it's being broken. Um and occasionally I
send out a little Twitter messages as well, so you
can always track me down on Twitter and find out,
you know, when I'm complaining about someone making popcorn in
the office, because those are the kind of really important
(17:56):
messages I tend to send out. Yeah yeah, For a while,
I was signing up for a lot of those, um yeah,
but every seems like every single day would send me
another email saying hey, look at this, and I'm like,
what are you doing to me? I'm I already belonged
to like fifty social networks. I can't I can't join anymore.
Yeah yeah, Well then you got um Twitter and you
(18:18):
have ji q or hi q. I've never heard anywhere
announced that clerk pounds quippy cork identica. I belong to
so many of these, and they're basically, um, yeah you
said the right one, okay. Um, so yeah, there are
pounds plexo. Yeah yeah, I was gonna say, did you
(18:39):
see a pounds? Um? There are tons and tons of these,
And there are services like ping dot fm that allow
you to broadcast one tweet to all these different services
every time, or you know, you can blog to other
services like Blogger and Tumbler and WordPress all the time.
I don't use I don't use most of those in
(19:01):
my day to day work. No Twitter, but I used
I have used Ping to write to post to those
different things. Um. And and friend feed, which is sort
of a reverse of those, where you know, you can
have all those post to your friend feed and then
people can comment to that, which is kind of cool. Um.
And those are tools we used to network with other
(19:22):
tech people or you know, people who have interesting contents content. Um. Yeah, Readers.
I've used Google Reader. I also used NewsGator. I actually
meant people who read our website. That's also cool. Yeah,
I use Google Reader as well. UM. Now I meant
that we could use those two to readers people. Let's
(19:45):
move on to readers, because I use Google Reader as well.
As actually gonna mention I Google. I occasionally use that
to check a billion RSS feeds at one time. Um,
that's very useful. Whenever we want to see what's hot
in tech or what's the latest news, you can you
can check many for RSS feeds all at the same time.
And uh and yeah, it's very handy. Yeah. I like
(20:05):
a NewsGator because it uh, you know a lot of
people have a remembrance of when they weren't all that
uh friendly, they had some issues with um, but now
they're now they're totally above board. Now they offer RSS stuff. UM,
you know, you can go online or you can They
(20:26):
actually bought two different clients. The one for Windows is
called feed Demon, it was very very popular client, and
the one for Mac is net Newswire, which was a
very very very popular client among Mac users. Um. And
one of the cool things about NewsGator is that if
you use one of those desktop clients, you can set
it to sync with the web or you know, so
(20:47):
you can read I can catch up with tech news
at home, and it knows which articles I've read, so
I won't go back and go oh man, I have
to go through all these again. I've already looked at these. Well,
you know, that's one of the advantages is to using
the at instead. And one of the other things I
wanted to talk about was job which is inbox spelled backwards.
(21:08):
It's for for uh Microsoft Outlook. Yeah. I had this briefly,
but I was having some issues. It was causing my
outlook to crash and it was probably because it was
interfering with some other program that I also happened to
have on my computer. It's not I don't mean to
say that jobny itself was defective. I think it was
just not playing well with so many of the other
(21:29):
plugins that I already have. Well, each of us has
a cocktail of software. It's different from everyone else, and
sometimes it gets a little poisonous. That's the problem. But
what it does is it's really neat. It indexes your email.
It can tell you who's the most popular person, tells
you when you're most likely to get a response based
on the analysis of that email. You can look up
a word and it won't pull it up. You can
(21:50):
look for different attachments and will help you find them
five hours now. Expect a response from Strickland in five hours. Um, well,
I have only one other one left, Google Desktop. I
have Google Desktop on. It helps me search my computer
for files if I've somehow managed to misplace them, which
(22:10):
has happened on occasion, sometimes too great personal distress, but
it also is very useful again in Outlook, UM I
can search. I can use Google Desktop to search my
my Outlook for specific keywords or phrases, which comes very handy, like,
for instance, I'm planning a trip to the Consumer Electronic
Showcase later on actually at the beginning of next year,
(22:32):
and this way I can quickly search through all the
emails from ce S for something specific, Like I was saying,
there was that one from Pioneer, and I can search
Pioneer ce S and it'll pull it up really quickly,
So that's very handy in my case. That was my
last one. All right, Well, my last one is UH
as a tool called dropbox, and this is a plug
(22:53):
in you can install for Mac or Windows. And this
is another one of those home and work things. That's
pretty neat because UH unlike services like box dot net,
which I like very much, they offer. Both of these
services offer free hosting for your junk UM you know,
sound files or pictures or documents. UM and it's great
(23:15):
because it's online and in the cloud, and you can
you know, store stuff there. Well, you know that's that's cool.
And you know, if you upgrade, you can start storing
giant stuff. You can even collaborate with other people. But
what makes drop box different is that this plug in
on your computer actually makes a folder pop up on
your desktop or in your documents folder. So not only
(23:39):
do you can you store stuff there, but you can
actually drag and drop. Um. And so now I can
save documents. I don't like hauling my laptop everywhere I go,
so if I have something I just want to take
a look at, I can put it in my drop box,
go look at it at home, and then you know,
save any changes I make there. And it's you know,
drag and drop or save and Microsoft are directly to
(24:00):
the dropbox rather than having to save it and then
upload it through the web interface. Um. But on the
other hand, and box dot Net offers a uh an
iPhone app which is pretty cool too. You can actually
access stuff there. And Live Mesh is something from Microsoft
that I'm starting to play with. Athough there's no Mac
client yet, it does offer you the opportunity to two
(24:23):
save stuff in a similar way where you've got the
plug in and it's integrated with your desktop. So that's
a lot of tools. You know, I thought, you know,
when we first talked about this, we were both like,
I don't know if we have enough to talk about it. Yeah,
we had way more than we thought. And then there's
you know, pen and paper what anyway you lost me? Yeah?
I know. It's that stone age technology. And we have
(24:45):
articles on many, many, many of these tools that we've
talked about, such as how Twitter works, we have HOLP,
Firefox works. You can find all of those right now
at how stuff works dot com and we'll talk to
you again. Really sick for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com. Let
us know what you think. Send an email to podcast
(25:08):
at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by
the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
TechStuff News
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Karah Preiss
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