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The world is abuzz about the pending iPad and it’s pre-orders. Everyone is talking about the Microsoft Courier. You love your iPhone/Droid/Blackberry. You constantly search around for bigger, better devices that will do almost everything in the world. In this “buy-buy-buy” haze, have you forgotten the love for your laptop?
A laptop is a versatile tool. When people talk about user experience on new gadgets, they distract people from an important point – you already know how to use a laptop. A laptop can fit in a small bag and go anywhere you want it to. It’s never as flashy or as impressive as one of these new gadgets, but are you just paying for the flashiness? The status? Aren’t we over that in this country?
Over the past few years of developing into the Nerd that you see before you today, I learned how to push a laptop to do almost anything. It boasts an impressive array of features that we’ve all forgotten about. Today, I want to remind you of all the things your laptop can do, and hopefully inspire some of you to hang on to that relic instead of swiping that credit card for another gadget purchase, or dipping into your hard-earned savings. But first, here are the specs on my laptop, so that you know I’m not talking about some super-laptop that you can’t afford:
This is a dual-core, 1.60GHz Toshiba Satellite laptop with 1.5GB of RAM. It has an 80GB hard drive. I bought it with Vista and downgraded to XP about a year and a half later. This setup cost me about $700 when I bought it in 2007, and a quick search on Newegg.com pops up a computer with twice as much memory and a hard drive FOUR times as large as mine for under $400. Honestly, this computer blows mine out of the water, and it cost almost half as much as I paid for mine.
So here’s the list, in absolutely no particular order. I sat down and jotted down all the things I can use my laptop for, so this is a “stream of consciousness”-type list. A quick editor’s note: I’m not dumb. This list assumes moderate maintenance (i.e., running CCleaner about once a week, having a free antivirus application running at all times), Windows XP (though you don’t need XP for most of this stuff), and a decent internet connection.
It’s the flashiest feature of them all right now – read books on a screen! The iPad will have books! Well, you don’t need to buy a new gadget for this necessarily. Barnes And Noble and Amazon both offer free software for reading books on your computer, so if you want to buy ebooks, go right ahead! Better yet, visit Project Guternberg and download over 100,000 free ebooks from the public domain if you want.
This is probably the feature I use the least, since you can’t compare the ease on the eyes of a book compared to an LCD screen. This is one place I think the iPad will fail, and why, if you’re a heavy reader, I actually would recommend getting a dedicated e-reader. The e-ink technology is much, much easier on the eyes.
I’ve written at length about how you can use your computer as your television, and even hook it up to your TV. But also, for quick show-watching on the go, just visit a site like Hulu. I subscribe to a lot of shows within Hulu and they post to my queue the morning after they air. So, all I need to do is log in, go to my queue, and click “Play”. Boom.
If you’re looking to watch live sports, start getting to know TVAnts and StreamTorrent. Plus, this method ensures that you get out-of-market games, too.
You hardcore gamers looking to play graphics-intensive games will probably want a powerful desktop, but laptops can handle quite a bit too. Plus, if you’re a casual gamer (like myself), you are just looking for simple games to pass the time, in which case, there are plenty of great gaming sites out there like this one.
Miss college? Want to learn a new skill? There are lots of great places online to see and hear lectures and lessons taught by fine professors from all over the country. Looking for something a little more fun? Learn guitar (see link above) or build something cool at Instructables. There are endless possibilities for what you can learn through your laptop.
When I go to my grandmother’s house, looking through pictures involves emptying a cabinet full of old albums and sitting at the kitchen table while everyone crowds around them and tries to see what’s going on. Nowadays, all those pictures (and more!) can be stored on your laptop. Back them up to a site like Picasa (my favorite) and tag, organize, and share them with everyone forever.
Bonus tip: set your screensaver to pull pictures from the folder on your computer where you keep all your photos, and your monitor becomes an instant digital photo frame when not in use.
Talk radio, comedy stations, music of all types and genres – internet radio is fantastic. Set up a Pandora station for customized listening goodness, or listen to hundreds of live radio stations on iheartradio.com. Take it with you.
The local version of the previous tip. Imagine: no CD towers to buy, no cases to spend half an hour opening. Download music from iTunes or Zune Marketplace or Amazon. Store them on your computer (and back them up, of course). Rip your current CD collection and then pack away those discs in a bin somewhere. You can listen to any music at any time, anywhere. It’s a beautiful thing.
It doesn’t matter if you are biking, running, or driving a car – sometimes you just need directions. Now, you can type in any location or address into sites like Google Maps or MapQuest and you know exactly how to get anywhere. You no longer have a need for a big paper map that takes up half the front of the car. Just search, print, and move on.
If you want a laugh, look at my notes from high school and college: they’re messy and smudged (I’m a lefty), completely disorganized, and a total failure. Today, with services like Evernote, you can organize and tag your notes, and they won’t be smudged or unreadable. Heck, you can even just use a word processor to get the job done if you want. Just pull your laptop out of its bag and get to typing.
Remember how embarrassing it was to go to a bookstore or a library and pick up one of those stupid “For Dummies” books? Now, you don’t need them. I’m amazed they’re still on the shelves at all. There is no longer an excuse for not knowing something. You can Google it, you can Bing it, you can even Ask Jeeves if you want. Get your plumbing/cooking/health questions answered just by typing your question into a search engine. For facts (mostly accurate), hit up Wikipedia.
I use Google Calendar, but you can use whatever you want. All the things going on in your life can be chronicled, and you can have reminders sent to you straight from your calendar. Stop missing those anniversaries/birthdays/whatever.
My mom kept an address book for years. When I needed a phone number, I needed to go to the closet, pull it out, flip to the section with the first letter of their last name, navigate through old, crossed-out addresses and skim through until I found what I was looking for. Now? I just sit at my laptop, open up Google Contacts, and use the search box to find the entry with the person I’m looking for. You can use Outlook or something else if you want. But have a backup of all your contacts, and you can search them easily at any time.
Hop on Weather.com and enter in your zip code at the top of the page – severe weather warnings, detailed forecasts of the next couple of days, and extended 10-day forecasts all come up. You can watch the live radar if you want. Do this stuff for monitoring the weather of your next vacation destination. Turn off the Weather Channel and put down the newspaper.
Ever notice how you don’t see presentations done with big poster boards anymore? That’s because you just need to load that PowerPoint presentation and plug your laptop into a projector. It looks slicker, makes you look good, and was easy to do with your laptop.
Wave “bye-bye” to adding and subtracting errors. A complete money management system can be had on any laptop. Need to share it with your husband/wife? Use a free online service like ClearCheckbook or share a Google Doc. The math and tracking is done for you – all you need to do is enter in those transactions.
VoIP technology continues to advance. I run a Skype phone line with a little headset for business. Want to video chat with somebody like you see in the movies? Get a cheap little webcam and you can all you want. I used to video chat weekly with my then-girlfriend while she was in Taiwan. You can now talk to somebody and see them, regardless of where they are. Powerful stuff.
High school reunions are becoming obsolete with sites like Facebook. We all know what we are doing, all the time. That’s lame sometimes, but it comes in handy. For example, I have friends all over the country, and I can stay a part of their lives through my communications on Facebook. When done correctly, Facebook can enhance your personal relationships, and you can share joys, sorrows, and laughs with people every day.
Here’s where the fun starts! Do you miss the Super Nintendo? How about classic Nintendo? Sega Genesis? Hop over to your favorite search engine and type in “SNES emulators” to find a program that will play old Super Nintendo games. Download it, then search for “SNES roms” to find and download the games. Plug in a USB controller and you’ll feel like you’re 8 years old all over again!
Whether you do it in an RSS feed reader or you just visit a site like CNN or MSN, the headlines are always updating and keep you in the loop at all times. Hit up ESPN for live scores of all of your games. Then, cancel your newspaper subscription. I mean, like, NOW.
When I cook, I just put the laptop on the kitchen counter. I don’t need a shelf of cookbooks (although I do still have a few). You can store recipes in Evernote or use a service like Supercook to manage your inventory of recipes. It makes your cooking life a lot easier, and you never have to remember which recipe book that breaded chicken recipe was in.
DailyMile lets you map and save your runs. DailyBurn allows you the ability to track any type of workout, and even track your nutrition levels. You don’t need to keep a paper notebook or print out a spreadsheet. Type it in, submit it, and move on with your life. Slick, slick, slick.
Build a website, run a blog, connect on Facebook/Twitter, design brochures, write copy… the list goes on. Take notes during your meetings with clients. A laptop computer offers the flexibility to work anywhere you choose, provided your business can pay those bills. A laptop, in my opinion, is an absolutely essential tool for business-building today.
I remember back in 2000 when I first learned how to burn a CD. It took forever. Now, I use CDBurnerXP, but you can use just about anything. Put those home movies on a DVD. Make that mix CD for your friend (or that girl you like). It only takes a couple of minutes, and you can do it right from your laptop.
XBox Media Center, now on the original XBox, PCs, Macs, and Linux machines. All your movies and music on any TV in your house, from your computer.
Again, another invention that I am shocked is still on shelves: the portable DVD player. Instead, play this stuff on your laptop when sitting on the plane or when you’re supposed to be paying attention in class. Chances are, your laptop can handle any kind of DVD, too.
Google Tasks or Remember The Milk, or about a dozen others. Ditch the paper to-do list and type it up in your laptop. Want to keep it simpler? Open up a little Notepad document and bang out your list.
I’ve always been a big fan of WebMD, but there are other ways to get medical questions answered, too. This is not a substitute for a doctor’s visit, of course, but it can help you diagnose minor situations instead of paying that co-pay to be told those lumps on your throat are just leftover food scraps. [Note: this is not a good tip for hypochondriacs.]
Want to buy anything? Put your shoes down. Stay in your pajamas. Open up your laptop and get to Amazon. Search for whatever you want, and they’ll have it. Oh, and it’ll be cheaper, too.
Okay, so some of these are obvious, but it helps to have them here. Your laptop is a remarkably strong piece of technology. I would think twice before you ditch it to use some fancy-looking thing that only does two or three things on this list.
What do you use your laptop for?
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Google Chrome is one of those programs that has been around for a while, but when you first tried it, you weren’t that crazy about it. It was somewhat buggy, it didn’t have any type of customization available, and you couldn’t block ads. As much as I wanted to make the switch (being the Google nutjob that I am), I couldn’t do it without a few features that just weren’t available:
1. I needed ads blocked. Period. Even most of them would be sufficient.
2. Add-ons. I want to be able to customize it.
3. A way to integrate my Google Bookmarks so that I can use them like regular bookmarks.
Then one day a couple months ago, I heard that extensions were finally hitting the mainstream. Google Chrome Extensions were a great idea, but you needed to download Chromium, which was the “guinea pig” version of Chrome (which means it doesn’t always work properly), and you had to do a lot of nerdy command-line work to get it up and running. It wasn’t pretty. Once one-click extension support came around, it was time to dive back in.
Now, a few months later, I couldn’t be happier.
Hey, Firefox is a great product. Go ahead and download it if you’d like. It’s stable and it’s popular. But Firefox is very prone to bloatedness. After a while, it takes forever to load Firefox. Chrome just pops right up. It just feels light. Check out the screencast I took below of a comparison between a Firefox start and a Chrome start and you will see what I mean. The little box that pops up in the middle is Launchy, which is my application launcher. In layman’s terms, the box pops up and I start typing the name of the program. When the box disappears, that means I hit “enter” and the application is starting. First I try opening Firefox, then Chrome. Check it out:
If you time it, Firefox takes a full 7 seconds to load up for use, and Chrome takes about 1/2 a second – that means Chrome, in this situation, is 14 times faster loading!
Interested yet? Here are my full reasons why you should give Chrome a chance:
Okay, okay – enough gushing. Time to get into the nuts-and-bolts: how do you set this thing up? Remember – it needs to do all the stuff that my awesome Firefox setup could do.
This is easily the most complicated part of the process, but it’s not that hard, really. Without a true contender to the ad-blocking throne, the best way to do it, in my experience, has been through a program called Privoxy. There’s a 7-step process to it that is awesomely-simplified in this post by Lifehacker and Geekzone. Just follow it, step-by-step, and you’re done. Bada bing.
Remember from my Firefox setup, I make full use of bookmarklets – little bookmarks that can do some awesome things in your Bookmarks Toolbar. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to open up a Firefox window next to your Chrome window and literally drag your bookmarklets from Firefox and drop them into the Chrome toolbar. If you don’t have that, here are links to my bookmarklets and what they do. Instead of clicking on the link, just drag it up to your Bookmarks Toolbar:
Like Firefox plugins, these add-ons help you further customize your browsing experience. There are plenty out there, so feel free to browse around. Here are mine:
No complicated Greasemonkey stuff. Just click “Install” on these bad boys:
Am I preaching to the choir? Do you already use Chrome? What are your favorite extensions/scripts? Why should we encourage more Chrome usage? If you’re a diehard Firefox user and you’re not convinced, tell us why. If you’re an Internet Explorer advocate, seek help immediately – we cannot help you here.
Is there anything more frustrating than the local radio? Never is this more evident than at Christmastime. In Milwaukee, the only two Christmas songs available are that “Canon In D” thing with the boys’ choir, and “All I Want For Christmas Is You” by freaking Mariah Carey. Yes sir, nothing gets me in the spirit like Mariah Carey. Ugh.
I love Christmas music, but this was killing me. Even better, at nighttime when they might play a few different ones, we have an annoying DJ named Delilah who intersperses each song with over-the-top mushiness and “inspirational” messages. Pandora came to the rescue, and here I am, still using it more and more.
Pandora Radio is a little web application where you tell the service an artist you like and it plays music by that artist and others like it. You can give the ol’ thumbs-up or thumbs-down to songs, and it will adjust your playlist accordingly. The more you rate, the better it gets at picking music you’ll like. You can even add more artists to a radio station for variety and even better chances of getting music you like. For music lovers like me, this service is a Godsend, as it is free and easy to use, and it helps me discover new music. But why else is it so great?
You can make as many stations as you want in Pandora. So I can make a country station if I want by just adding a few country artists I like. As you can see above, I added a Rockapella station to listen to a cappella covers of songs any time I want (I never said I was cool). What about Christmastime? Pandora had a couple Christmas stations created, and you can create stations with your favorite artists singing holiday songs, too. Bye-bye, Mariah, hello Straight No Chaser!
My biggest beef with local radio is the commercials. First, they take commercial breaks like every five minutes. We have a station here called FM 106.1, which is an all-country station, and they actually advertise the “No-Talk Triple-Play” where they play, wait for it… THREE whole songs in a row! WOW. And I think there’s something written in the laws of radio that every station has to take commercial breaks at the exact same time. It bothers me. A lot. If I’m in the car for 10 minutes, I don’t want to listen to commercials for 8 of those minutes.
Yes, I love my Zune with all my heart. But what about the days when I just want to sit back and let somebody else pick the music for me? That’s why Pandora comes in handy. When I’m in the car, some days I’ll just plug the adapter into my Blackberry and let Pandora entertain me. Most are hits, there are a few misses occasionally, but it’s nice to have a variety without dealing with all the crap of local radio. I even get (a limited number of) skips (per hour) that I can use for songs that drive me nuts.
Is there anything more pointless than the radio DJ anymore? I understand if you are on talk radio. For example, I’m a huge fan of Dave Ramsey’s radio show. But in those situations, I want to hear the guy talk, not play music. Delilah kills me. At Christmastime, I was listening to a local station during the day while I ran some errands, and they decided to spend 10 minutes in an interview with Ray Romano. *siiiiiiiiggghhhhhh*… With Pandora, it’s computer-generated and analyzed. I don’t have to listen to anybody explain any garbage to me about anything. I don’t have to listen to people winning money and big giveaways. I just get the music.
If you’ve got a pair of headphones, you can listen to Pandora anytime. First, it runs in a web browser, so if you are near a computer, just plug the ol’ headphones in and start listening. Or, if you’re at home, crank up the speakers! As you can see above, it’s available on almost any type of smartphone. I use the Blackberry app myself, and I love it. Plug that bad boy into the cassette adapter or FM transmitter, and it feels like you’re just listening to regular radio. [Bonus feature: when you get a call or a text, it pauses the station for you to take care of it, and then unpauses when you’re done automatically. Cool!]
Have other needs? Well, some boombox-type devices support Pandora music, and Pioneer has announced plans to bring Pandora to more cars in 2010. In addition, I have recently discovered Jamcast, which streams your audio to different supported devices, including my XBox 360 (see link for full list of supported devices, including PS3 and various DVD players), so that I can play Pandora on my computer and listen to it in my living room on my TV. Slick!
Yup. There’s no better argument than this one. It doesn’t cost a dime. You can pay for it if you’d like, and Pandora One offers some nice features, too. But if you want to stick with free, there’s nothing stopping you. The limitations aren’t ridiculous like some services out there, and you can still enjoy it fully.
Yeah, Pandora isn’t big news to anybody who’s been online for the past few years. But if you’re not all that tech-savvy, this can be a great new discovery for you. Check it out today!
If you are on Twitter and not following musician John Mayer, you’re doing it all wrong. Mayer continues to have some of the funniest tweets, but last night he had a beautifully-done series of tweets on how stupid the 2000s decade was as it draws to a close. Here’s a screenshot of the tweets:
Now, they are in reverse-chronological order, so they start at the bottom. Also, please try to ignore the side picture of him wearing a t-shirt with a plunging neckline and looking deep into your eyes. Unless you’re a lady, because I think that’s what he’s going for. What’s your view on the 2000s?
It was one of the biggest games of the season. Any season, really. Any time my Green Bay Packers are dueling with the Chicago Bears, it is must-see television. Regardless of standings and divisions, the Packers-Bears rivalry is fierce. And to be honest, it was bigger than usual, because the Packers are trying to push their way into the playoffs. Every win counts.
At my church, we were having a pot-luck lunch. I was eating a little shredded beef and watching Ryan Grant take it to the house on the first Packer play of the game. We were having fun, and the Packers were winning.
Then I had to go to work.
I sat in the car at the office parking lot while listening to the last precious few minutes of the game that I could hear. I didn’t have a radio at work, so this would be it. After this, it was going to be word-of-mouth.
Thank God for Google.
My computer at work blocks just about everything: email, Twitter, Facebook, ESPN, whatever. But it doesn’t block Google, and I can’t think of a workplace that would. So, when I want to keep up with a game, I type the team name in the search box, and the first result on Google’s results page is a scoreboard with a game clock. I just hit “refresh” every time I check in to see the score, and I’m okay.
This game was different, though, as the Packers were up 13-0 when I left the car. After a few refreshes, it was 14-13, Bears. I was stunned. I had no idea what was going on; who was in? Who wasn’t in? Did anybody get hurt? Did we give up a big play? WHAT?!?
Then I saw a little box that was updating with Twitter results down the page. It wasn’t blocked because it was google.com, not twitter.com! I moved to the options section (see above picture) and clicked “Updates”. Up came a scrolling, constantly-updating commentary on the game from the Twitter universe.
There’s no game on as I write this, so you’ll have to imagine it.
It was beautiful. I could just keep checking, and any big play was commented on by plenty of people! It was like having a crowdsourced play-by-play of the game (and the Pack won, too!). I could see when somebody missed a field goal, when Jay Cutler threw an interception (or two), or any big defensive stand.
If you’re at work and you want to keep track of the big game, just search for the team name on Google and click “Updates”. Then you can see what the world is talking about as it happens.
This has other great implications, too:
Anything you can search Twitter for, you can use this for. Obviously, you want to work hard and make sure you’re getting things done, too. But if you can’t miss the big news or game, Google’s new real-time search is a killer way to do it quickly and easily.
