If your like me and many others all over the internet, you have multiple email accounts possibly one for friends/family, one for spam mail, and another you’ve had for years.  Well wouldn’t you like to view them all in one place?

If you have Office for Mac 2008 version you can respond to and have at your finger tips one place to see all your mail from multiple sources.  I’m only talking about Office 2008 Mac, but you could be doing this with other email clients such as thunderbird.

Settings for GMAIL

First inside of your gmail account you have to let GMAIL know that you want to be able to view your mail from other sources.  In the top right corner you will see what looks like a gear next to your name, click the gear icon and you get a drop down, click on “Mail Settings”.

Once inside of Settings, click on the heading labled “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” make sure to “Enable IMAP” here is where the process gets tricky.

Gmail changed the default settings ports that IMAP is associated with,so when you set up your client make sure to use SSL authentication.

• IMAP Server: imap.gmail.com
• SSL:yes
• PORT: 993

• SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com
• SSL: yes
• PORT: 465 or 587

Make sure to use your full gmail address “emailname@gmail.com”, then your password and things should work well.  If you still have a problem I have attached some links that helped me out.

Configuring other mail clients (gmail, google link)

Outlook 2007 mail client (gmail, google link)

The month of February 2011 I decided to run a month long blogging series dedicated to Black’s in Technology.  I decided to showcase a host of African American inventors.  The Idea came from a friend of mine Wayne Sutton who runs SocialWayne.com he came up with an idea a couple of years ago for 28daysofdiversity.com.  Well following in his footsteps I decided to copy his idea, but with different flair.  I decided that most African American’s don’t get the opportunity to be highlighted in our everyday lives, but they are just as important as any Inventor.

I thought about doing this last year but for what ever the reason I didn’t do it, and I wanted to jump on this opportunity for 2011.  I will say that it’s easy to blog about something that your passionate about, but when it comes to a blogging series, and no less about people who may have passed away and your research is limited, that’s a different story.  Your writing from stories all over the internet some factual and some fake, you can’t get the word from the horses mouth so to say.  It takes some time to get your information togeather, you need to approach the task as an overall achievement up front.

Here are a couple of my tips for how to address a month long series in blogging, or just a series in blogging over all.

• Creating the concept is easy, but you must be ready to write it down, even if it’s not going to make it to publish (your ideas are important, don’t loose them because you thought it was not important)
• Come up with the number of post or days up front, this helps you know how many post you will be publishing, and your not brainstorming every night looking to add more and more post that will drag your series out.
• Have your days mapped out, so you know who your going to talk about and on what day (This does not mean you have to write all your information up front)  You do need to know who’s coming next so you can be prepared
• If your doing research and it seems your not getting anywhere, make sure to use the advance search capabilities of Google (I know other search engines exsist, but this one just seems to give me what I want the way I want it) i.e. images, blogs, video, and more.
• I just wanted to give a couple of tips for how to create a series in blogging on a topic or subject.

I hope my tips are helpful I know there are other sources that have probably put out information like this, add that to your list of current reads on “Creating a blogging series”

TBTR

Facebook…Facebook…Facebook…  I mean what more can you say about the Social Media darling with over 400 Million registered users.  While the light has been shining bright for Facebook there seems to be a new back lash of users who are either deleting their account, or limiting what they say and do on the social site.

I’m not one to speak too much about one website or the other, but at first Facebook was trying real hard to be the top social site on the internet and they have done it for sure.  What is the cost they had to pay to obtain that elusive status?  As of recent there have been reports of privacy concerns and other things that has Facebook under the microscope from the casual user to the seasoned Social Media Junkie.

I ran across an article on the NYDailyNews.com titled “Step-by-step tips to protect your Facebook infomation from ending up on other sites” please take a look at this article if your unsure about how your privacy settings are administered.  I think you might just be amazed at how much infomation your really exposing to the world.

TBTR

Password Leak

As many of you may have heard about the Hotmail Password leak that occurred early this week.  The administrator of Pastebin.com has written a sweet and simple blog post.  He has removed the names and email addresses, but as a last effort to tell the community how to fix this issue he says

please don’t ask if your name was on the list. I have no way of knowing. Just change your password.

Sounds simple but as the administrator those of us who are admins know the truth.  If your the admin of a domain or a site, your “GOD” meaning you can see everything and anything you want.  At larger companies they take many precautions to ensure that only 1 person really has the full access to the system, but regulations are in place to police that person in the system.  Remember when things like this happen, just change your password and move on, don’t worry about it any more than that.

P.S. Any system can be cracked no matter how good a password you have but I would upgrade to a different email system be it Google, Yahoo, or your own domain email.

TBTR

Why on April 1 would you open or launch your signature product?  I guess the buzz you create could carry you into the next year, or people could take it as a joke and over look you all together.  RIM the makers of the Blackberry Smart phones have launched what they hope is the defect o home for bb users.

The Blackberry App World ( I guess they didn’t use store because Apple would probably sue) is now open for business.  When I got in this morning I saw the buzz and decided to jump on the bandwagon.  I went to the signature page with my Blackberry www.blackberry.com/appworld/download to download the icon OTA (over the airwaves) but I had and issue just like Larry Dignan said in his post “First impressions and a weird IE requirement.” so I turned to the blackberry desktop software.  I had to download the app this way.  It worked perfect and I was able to get in the application.

Put more of your life on your BlackBerry smartphone! Download BlackBerry App World for free to load up your BlackBerry smartphone with games, social networking, online shopping, personal productivity, organization tools and other fun and functional apps. It’s your world – bring more of it with you with BlackBerry App World!

While most of the featured applications we probably all have on your Blackberries as an out of the box application.  I did some research inside of the app world and found a lot of apps I never knew existed.  During the coming weeks and days we will review some applications and give our take on the success or failure of the Blackberry App World.

BlackBerry App World is a free download. To purchase applications from BlackBerry App World, a PayPal account is required.

Application makers can also take the time to create new apps, and place them in the app world just like on apples itunes app store.  This is opening up the devices to innovation from small programmers, and also opens them up like apple to foolish applications that do nothing but charge money for access.  Lets sit back and watch the paint dry, or you can get involved if your an avid Blackberry user.

I plan to get involved, just wait an see

Leave us comments

TBTR

How many passwords do you enter on a daily basis? If you answered more than 4 you need SuperGenPass. SuperGenPass is a password generator but not in the normal sense. Normally with password generators you have to install a program. That puts another software program on your computer and that takes up precious system resources. Installing a program means when you want to use it you have to find the program, start the program, and use the program that’s time consuming.

SuperGenPass allows you to remember just one password (your “master password”), which is used to generate unique, complex passwords for the Web sites you visit.

The great thing about SuperGenPass is you don’t install any software on your computer. Remember when I reviewed Password safe & Any Password here each one of those programs had to be installed on your computer.

SuperGenPass uses MD5, a one-way hash algorithm, which means that no one can determine your master password from your generated passwords.

As we know the biggest problem on the internet now days is keeping up with every single new site we join and keeping up with that password. You could do what most people do and that is to create one to two password that you use all over the internet. In other words you use that for your email, bank account, and even your computer logon password.

Nothing is ever transmitted by SuperGenPass, and your passwords are not stored anywhere.

We all know this is not the smartest thing to do, you see if a hacker gets a hold of just one password, they could potentially have access to your whole internet life. Trying to keep up with all the different passwords is the issue here and SuperGenPass lets you use one Master Password and that generates the passwords for each site.

Don’t worry SuperGenPass does not save passwords to your computer it’s a bookmark that you save to your browser.

See the video I created to show you how this works:

More about how it works

Link to SuperGenPass Website

Enjoy,

TBTR

Just a couple of nights ago I was taking a picture with my blackberry, I usually post these pictures to twitpic. Twitpic is a picture service that post to your twitter account from your cell phone, since there had not really been any other services that let me post once to multiple sites. I started thinking wouldn’t it be nice to be able to post to a picture service that can post to not only my twitter account by all my other micro blogging sites? Well I found such a service it’s called Pikchur and this service lets me post to all of my sites with one email.

Pikchur is a simple service that updates your social networks / micro-blogging platforms with pictures!

Supported platforms are:

• Plurk
• Pownce
• tumblr
• Jauiku
• Facebook
• Friendfeed
• Identi.ca
• Twitter
• and Rejaw

Now that you know how many services Pikchur can post to now I’ll walk you through some of the process of setting it up.

Send your piks via phone, mms, email or upload

1. You have to first login to one of your micro blogging sites on the Pikchur website I choose my twitter account.
2. Next you have to configure your posting email address.
3. The system tells you to create a PIN which will go at the end of the email address just before the @ symbol (this PIN is very important so do not make it simple) ( In my opinion the PIN needs to be more than 4 numbers, but that is all Pikchur will allow in the PIN section at this time)
   

After this process you have some settings you can configure

• Additional settings such as Triggers, and Status messages

All and all I tried the system out and it worked perfect from upload but when I tried to email from my blackberry it never showed up, I’ll have to fix that soon or try and figure out the reason why it didn’t work.

Overall Pikchur has a great idea with a lot of potential.

Enjoy,

TBTR

Imagine a program that many of the top podcasters use on a daily basis. When you want to record, mix, and master your recordings use Audacity. Audacity is a FREE Open Source software for recording and editing sound.

With Audacity you can:

• Record Live Audio
• Convert tapes & records into digital files
• See a massive list of features here

Audacity runs on:

• Linux
• Os X
• Windows (from 98 to Vista)

Personally I use Audacity to record & edit my podcast for TheBlackTechReport. I absolutely love this program the ease of use and shear horsepower of this program is internationally known. A great plus to using Audacity is the great community input and resources created by the developers and users of audacity.

5 Audacity resources:

• File Management Tips
• Navigation Tips
• Podcasting with Audacity (full resources)
• Noise Removal
• Official Audacity User Manual

Remember with any program it might take a little time getting used to it, but don’t let that scare you I wanna see you using this wonderful program.

Enjoy,

TBTR

We all need email in today’s world for a host of reasons.  To communicate with staff, friends, and family not in that order.  Since email is so important I wanted to bring to the table a product that will help you out with your everyday emails.  If your a PC user then your probably familiar with Outlook Express, and Outlook.  Outlook Express was created as a free email client included in your computer build.  Outlook Express has been around for a long time and gone through various revision I think we are up to Version 6 at this time.

If your smart or wealthy you probably upgraded to Outlook which was created on the same platform as Outlook Express but with the intent of the business user in mind.  When this happened many people said Outlook Express would die and by all accounts in my opinion it has.  Microsoft has done no active updates to Outlook Express in years thus leaving another dinosaur in the dust.  While we could argue the point of weather Outlook or Outlook Express is a good product we will save that for another post.

The Open source movement has created great products in my opinion Thunderbird from Mozilla.org is one of the best email clients I’ve used.  Since today is Download Wednesday I just had to bring Thunderbird into the picture Thunderbird has won numerous awards and we have to remember the product is FREE.

Thunderbird provides you with a fast robust email client that can not only hand emails but RSS feeds, and newsgroups all in this one product.  While I like to personally keep all those in separate programs I have to commend Mozilla.org for including this sort of as a one stop shop.

I have created two screencast that show you the process from downloading the product, to install, and the configuration or setup.

Video 1: Download, and Install

Video 2: Configuration

More information about Thunderbird features here and Thunderbird download link.

Popular Thunderbird addons listed under this article on Makeuseof.com

Enjoy and leave comments.

TBTR

This post might get a little technical please forgive me a head of time for showing my full geekyness.

Wireless routers get older and older every day, if you were an early adopter of WiFi technology. The price and headache you paid in the early days is now a thing of the past. All good things must come to an end or end of life cycle in geek terms.

Most wireless routers were made with the future in mind by way of something called a firmware update.

What is firmware? According to wikipedia.org firmware is a computer program that is embedded in a hardware device. It can also be provided on flash memory or as a binary image file. This can be uploaded onto existing old or new hardware by a user.

Usually this gives the device new code that can fix issues (software bugs), add features, or totally change a device to do new, different and exciting things.

New is what happens when you install Tomato Firmaware on your old Linksys WRT54G, GL, GS, Buffalo WHR-G54S/WHR-HP-G54 and other Broadcom based routers.

Routers that are known to work with Tomato:

• Linksys WRT54G v1-v4, WRT54GS v1-v4, WRT54GL v1.x, WRTSL54GS (no USB support)
• Buffalo WHR-G54S, WHR-HP-G54, WZR-G54, WBR2-G54, WBR-G54, WZR-HP-G54, WZR-RS-G54, WZR-RS-G54HP, WVR-G54-NF, WHR2-A54-G54, WHR3-AG54
• Asus WL500G Premium (no USB support), WL500GE
• Sparklan WX6615GT, Fuji RT390W, Microsoft MN-700

This will not work on Linksys WRT54G/GS v5 or newer WRT54G/GS routers.

Your probably asking yourself why do I need this? Well the truth is you don’t need this at all. The reason why we talk about this today is to let you know that if you have an old wireless router mentioned above, and it’s crashing or your always having to reboot the unit. You don’t have to toss it you can update the unit and turn it into a super router.

With any firmware updates you run the risk of bricking your unit just be sure you can afford to do this before ever doing a unlicensed firmware update.

Other programs that do the same thing listed here:

• DD-WRT
• FreeWRT
• HyperWRT Thibor
• OpenWRT
• Tarifa
• X-Wrt

Have Fun.

TBTR

While I love technology I decided when the iphone came out not to even think about spending that kind of money to be what I called a “BETA tester”. If you were one of the lucky ones who was able to plop down the money then great for you, but I gotta ask how does it feel to pay Apple to test the iphone?

Fast Forward to last weeks introduction of the 3G iphone cost lower, but not really it’s hidden. Now I will not call the new iphone users “BETA testers” but I will say I envy you all and wish I could buy one but that’s a whole nother story.

Now to the problem yesterday I sent a co-worker here who has a new 3G iphone the corporate wifi key he wanted to connect with his new iphone. This wifi has the longest wireless key I have ever created about 63 characters and symbols long. Today I get an email from the users saying the key is wrong. I advised him it’s not wrong and if he paste and copy correctly he will then be able to use said wifi.

This is when I got the shocker…. he said he can’t copy and paste with the iphone. I was like WTF you got to be kidding me dude that’s some Bullshit. So I took a stroll down to his desk to see what the hell is wrong with this guy and I was about to caulk this up as another person with money that does not know how to use technology.

But to my surprise when I got there he was right I tried everything in the world to get this thing to copy and paste, well in the end it did not work. I guess this does not work because of the interface they use to make the screen touchable. To me I think they could have figured out a way to do it, but whateva.

While looking up how to cut and paste on the iphone I came across this video which shows you how this could work if they figured out a way to do it at Apple.

iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich on Vimeo.

I guess when you pay all that money they have to figure out a way to keep you pissed off waiting for the next update release in hopes of new features.

You would think that something so simple would already be built into the iphone, oh well.

Just for shits and giggles lets assume your out somewhere ladies and you see a hot guy with an iphone, tell him if he can cut, copy, and paste on his iphone you will go home with him no questions asked and do all the things he likes… Then when he has racked his brain and figured out he can’t do it say, I’m going over to the guy with the blackberry curve cause he can cut, copy and paste…

Disclaimer one day they will figure it out and when they do, don’t blame me if you didn’t get the memo and your still using the above joke, the joke will be on you, or maybe not…

TBTR

Everyday I learn something new on this thing they call the internet. I wanted to make a couple of tweaks to this blog by adding some graphics and badges.

Badges are used by bloggers to showcase the different social networks they are on with your screen name so others can join or follow you. I was having the hardest time trying to find some for twitter so to my trusted resource google.

While searching google I am no longer surprised at what I find or the quality of the items. I came across a website called randaclay.com which to my amazement had just posted FREE use twitter badges on April 21, 2008. Here is what they look like and a link to them.

(Please do not link directly to these images, I did not show you all of the images on my site.)

http://randaclay.com/freebies/free-twitter-graphics/

I just wanna say thank you to Randa of randaclay.com you saved me a lot of time. Cause trying to come up with a good twitter badge with my Photo Shop skills, might have taken me days. This is a nice way of getting your name out there give it away and they will come another lesson learned today.

TBTR

Do you check multiple websites such as news sites, health sites, community sites and others on a daily, even hourly basis? The answer for me is indeed yes I could even go further, and sometimes say I check certain sites by the minute although that just shows my OCD boredom. Do you ever ask yourself “there has to be a better way?” Let me tell you a secret there truly is a better way, start looking for RSS feeds on those sites it just makes your life a lot easier.

What is RSS?
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a Web feed format used to publish frequently updated content such as blogs, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. RSS documents contain a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner. RSS essentially is a specially formed XML document that can be displayed in a pretty readable format by RSS reader programs.

So what is XML?
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own elements. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured data across different information systems, particularly via the Internet.

How is all this going to help me?
Well the truth of the matter is that RSS feeds will help to eliminate your need to check websites for updates or the latest headlines. In my opinion this helps you out in the long run with being able to access one program to view all your data about the latest headlines and stories. This does not eliminate you viewing the websites that you always view but think about how much time it will save you when you open a program and all the latest stories are right in front of you.

Now that I have told you what RSS and XML are you need to know how to view them. In order to view the RSS feeds you need a computer feed reader or aggregator (program).

For a list of reader programs click here

How will you know the website you visit frequently is using RSS feeds?
You have probably seen the icon for RSS feeds and not even paid it any mind. The icon shown here (small) (Large) this icon is universal. When you see these icons you should be able to click on the icon or the words next to the icon. This will start the RSS feed program you choose to install from the link above. Sometimes you will need to copy and paste the RSS Feed URL which will look something like this http://www.theblacktechreport.com/?feed=rss

In closing RSS feeds help you sift through all the junk to get right to the point of the matter the infomation you need right now. There are so many reader programs out there that I suggest you download and try a veriety of them before you choose. Personally I was using feedreader for a long time but have switched over to google/reader recently with great success. I have looked at my stats to see what programs are downloading my feeds personally and the majority over 50% comes from people who use google reader that speaks volumes to me.

If in the end I have confused you beyond belief view this video that expalines RSS. Enjoy

Take your time and leave comments.

TBTR

I use itunes to purchase new music and to import my old cds on occasion. Well lately I have been wanting to concentrate on things at my computer weather its surfing the internet, blogging, or writing technical documents at work. Today I was sitting around and decided to look up white noise which is sort of noise canceling music. In itunes there are many tracks to choose from I will say that I never thought in a million years that I would purchase something like this but I did. In fact I purchased a track called “brown noise”. There were two versions one runs for 60 minutes and the other runs for 4 minutes. I started the track and then started to blog but noticed that at the end of the track the sound would always fade just enough to notice and throw my concentration off right before the track would repeat. I then decided to look around and saw a post from someone on how to stop this annoying thing from happening. Making this change to the track in itunes lets you loop the track to keep the brown noise playing for hours on end.

Here is where I share with you how to:

1. Right click the track, and click “get info”
2. Click options
3. If the track is showing for example 4:00 minutes in the stop time area and you notice the fade out starts at oh lets say 3:55 minutes change the time of the track in this window to 3:30 minutes. You could change it to 3:54 but that might be to close to the end and you might get some of the fade out.
4. Now set the track to loop by choosing to repeat the track and there you have it. Not only will it loop for hours on end but you also only paid $.99 for the short track instead of the $9.99 for the 60 minute version.

TBTR has helped save you $9.00 that could go towards a starbucks chi tea or soon a full gallon of gas.

TBTR