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