AskBillFirst – Non-Tech Speak Technology Blog

Just want to tell you about some of the things I use a lot that I think are kinda cool.

Internet Radio – I like going to http://pandora.com and listening to my favorite music. What’s nice about Pandora is that I can enter an artist I like and it will create a playlist of music from artists similar to the one I named. It also allows me to select different genres to play from. As the songs play, I can “vote” by giving the song a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. If I give it an thumbs-up, then future sets of songs are more likely to have similar musical traits. If I give it a thumbs-down the song will be removed from the play list and future sets of songs are less likely to have similar musical traits. Ultimately what I end up with is a play list of favorite songs. These can’t be downloaded and I can’t rewind but you can skip a song, actually you can skip 6 songs per hour and those songs won’t be played again for at least 4 hours.

Internet surfing safety –WOT – Web of Trust: WOT is a free Internet security addon for your browser. It will keep you safe from online scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and unreliable shopping sites. WOT warns you before you interact with a risky website. It’s easy and it’s free. Pops up and shows either green, yellow or red which lets you know if the site you’re on can be trusted or not.

Giving and Getting – Freecycle: (http://www.freecycle.org/) The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,614 groups with 5,910,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Membership is free. If you have items that you’d like to get rid of, or items you are looking for that others may be getting rid of, join freecycle. You’ll get listings of items that others in your area are getting rid of, or you can post items you’re getting rid of and others will claim them. They’ll contact you and come pick up the item. It’s a great exchange process.

Recording and Uploading Video – The Flip Video Camera – Simple to use, pocket-sized camcorder with one-touch recording and digital zoom. It holds 60 minutes of full VGA-quality video on 2GB of built-in memory; no tapes or additional memory cards required. It has a USB arm that plugs directly into your computer for easy viewing and sharing. It’s built-in software lets you easily e-mail videos, upload to YouTube and AOL, and capture still photos from video. It’s a no-frills camera that does one thing and does it well. When you’re done recording, just plug it into a USB port on your computer and upload the video.

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