LITTLE ROCK — One of our faithful readers likes to keep everything on his computer rather than use an external storage drive. He says he loses track of what’s on a storage drive. Ah, ha! We have a solution.
Verbatim’s InSight drive comes with a little display window that tells you how much space is left on the drive and has a description of the contents. An example would be a brief description that simply says “Pictures: 2000-2005.” It’s not much but quite helpful, nonetheless. You can read the display screen on the drive whether it is plugged into the computer or not.
The InSight drive is quite small, only slightly larger than an iPhone. The best price we could find was the 320 gigabyte version at Amazon.com for $78. That’s plenty of storage for a good price. The drive has “Nero” backup software already on board.
GETTING PRODUCTIVE
The “to-do” list service at Producteev.com is making us more productive. We can view tasks by deadline, see who assigned them, (It’s always Joy, since Bob carries his tasks in his head.), or view only recently changed items.
You can have tabs across the top of the screen, each for a separate workspace - one for business, personal, etc., and use color labels to group tasks. You can create a “hot” list and set the program to remind you of things. A free utility lets you keep your todo list in a Gmail window while you browse the incoming mail. This thing gets pretty fancy.
But what makes the Producteev different from countless other to-do sites, such as RememberTheMilk.com, is that you can also forward a message to it from e-mail or any instant messaging service, whether on computer or cell phones. AOL, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter all let you send instant messages.
If you receive a message with a task you want to remember, send it to task@producteev.com, with a little code attached and it is added to your list. Producteev explains how to do this, but other features remain something of a mystery. Producteev badly needs a “help” button to figure out all it does and how to do it. Their tech support is very responsive, however. Producteev is free for individuals and up to three users; larger groups and businesses must pay, the charge depending on their numbers.
PRIVATE TRADING
Shares of Facebook, the world’s most popular social website, can be traded even though it isn’t a public company. The place to do that is SecondMarket.com, which provides a market for socalled “illiquid assets.”
Unlisted shares are fairly common. Many companies issue shares to their employees even though the company itself is not publicly listed for trading. The reasons are simple enough: They want to reward accomplishments and provide incentives for the day when the company goes public. Of course, many companies never go public. So what can you do with the shares? It turns out they may be worth something after all.
Shares of Facebook recently traded on SecondMarket for $50 apiece, which with a little arithmetic puts the company’s value at $25 billion. That’s more than Yahoo and 10 times more than AOL. (Facebook’s privately traded shares have doubled since December.)
Such off-market trading tends to be thin and difficult to track. Demand often outpaces supply. Nevertheless, real money changes hands.
JAMMING ON THE IPHONE
A $40 adapter and an app from AgilePartners.com let your iPhone or iPad act as an amplifier for an electric guitar. That’s a lot cheaper than buying a full size amplifier and a heck of a lot lighter. It can inspire spur-of-the-moment concerts. The output can be connected to headphones, speakers or a public address system.
LISTENING TO KEYSTROKES
Doug Tygar and his colleagues at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, have developed a program for listening to keystrokes to decipher what is being typed. Accuracy is 96 percent. This could be good news for spies who know how to activate a computer’s built-in microphone.
The program for doing this can not only distinguish typed letters, it makes educated guesses. For example, if an “h” is typed, it knows that the next letter is most likely to be a vowel. It knows that many words often go together, like “for” and “example.”
INTERNUTS
IfItWasMyHome.com will superimpose the BP oil spill on your neighborhood. This could be the slick that ate Cleveland. It’s bigger than a breadbox.
Bit.ly/99oil is a University of Delaware site that puts the oil spill in your gas tank. There’s a map of the United States showing cities whose cars could have been powered for a year with the oil spilled so far.
MyBankTracker.com shows interest rates for CDs, savings, checking, mortgage, credit cards and home equity lines of credit at more than 1,000 U.S. banks.
THE NUMBERS REPORT
Looked at one way, Latvia has a faster Internet connection than America. So do Moldova, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Slovakia, and Estonia. According to Speedtest’s NetIndex.com, the United States comes in 26th in terms of broadband speed.
But that’s just one way of looking at it. Many Americans surf the Internet on their cell phones, and cell phone speeds are much slower than Wi-Fi, which brings down the average rate.
Among U.S. states, Delaware has the fastest broadband service and Alaska the slowest. On a city level, Berkeley, Calif., has the fastest. But divided by the number of users, New York has the fastest service, according to a report at bit.ly/22oil.
NOTE: Readers can search several years' worth of On Computers columns at oncomp.com. Bob and Joy can be contacted by e-mail at bobschwab@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.
Business, Pages 20 on 06/28/2010