The first thing you need to do is decide if you need to do anything at all.  This flow chart prepared by The Consumerist tells you what you need to do. To summarize the chart, you don’t need to do anything if:

• You don’t have a television
• You don’t use an antenna to watch TV because you subscribe to cable or satellite service
• Your TV has a digital tuner (new televisions sold after March 1st, 2007 are required to have digital tuners)

That  means that if you use an antenna and have an old television without a digital tuner, you’ll need to get a converter box. Otherwise, you’re fine right now and don’t need to take any action.

Converter boxes are available now from most electronics retailers both on and offline, and you can get $40 coupons to defray the cost.  Consumer Reports has a page with detailed information about the DTV transition, as well as reviews of converter boxes.  Wikipedia has a page all about the DTV transition as well.

One more thing. The broadcasters in your area are already broadcasting in digital, so if you use an antenna and you already have a converter box or a television with a digital tuner, you are probably watching digital channels already.  On June 12th most broadcasters will change frequency.  You may find that some or all of the channels you were watching don’t come in any more.  To overcome this, just have your television or converter box scan for channels again and it will find them.  Mark your calendar.

You can see which stations are broadcasting in your area, and which frequencies they’re on now, and where they’ll be after June 12th, on AntennaWeb.org.

First up, if your Windows PC presents a screen like this photo I found on Ask The Admin when you try to start it up, something isn’t right.  But if you look a bit closer you’ll see that it’s really quite a bit more abnormal than it appears.  Or should I say, abngrmadl?

Start Wandows Ngrmadly

Second, Something Awful took Wolfram Alpha for a spin this week, just like the rest of us, with some humorously informative queries.  Humorous because they start off by asking what portion of the US Gross National Product is represented by the film Ernest Goes to Camp and just get stranger from there, and informative because they illustrate the sort of data sets Wolfram Alpha has access to.  Fair warning: Something Awful contains material of questionable taste and may not always be appropriate for work or children.  There’s nothing too awful in this one, though.  You can read the complete story here.

Ernest Goes to Camp as a percentage of the US Gross National Product

Have a great weekend, everybody!

Mashable has an article today about another predictor of Idol results: Google.  The theory is that you can see who Google users (i.e. everybody) are more interested in based on the number of searches for different contestants.  Mashable looks at the Google statistics for past American Idol contests and makes a good case for the predictive power of the search engine.  This year, if history is any guide, there’s a pretty clear front runner.

Google certainly seems to have the pulse of the people these days, and unlike subject specific tools like Dial Idol, Google is a generic tool.  American Idol isn’t the only contest to be predicted by analyzing search traffic.

We have all this information, and behind that an even larger amount of data.  How do we deal with this?  That’s easy: Google.  We turn to sophisticated search engines that look at all the data we’ve collected and rely on them to give us what we’re looking for.  Google works amazingly well, and even more amazing than that, it somehow produces results in fractions of a second.  It’s almost as if Google knows what you’re going to ask before you ask it.  Google, however, is not perfect.  It can get you information, but it’s up to you to know what to do with it.

Wolfram Alpha contemplates major US Cities

This is where Wolfram Alpha comes in.  The web has been ablaze with talk about Wolfram Alpha since its launch on Friday.  It seems that everywhere I turn, I hear somebody whispering Wolfram Alpha.  What is it?  Nobody really knows yet.

That’s not entirely true.

We do know what it isn’t.  It’s not a search engine.  Sure, it looks like one, but if you go to it expecting to get something Google-like out of it, you’ll be disappointed.  Wolfram Alpha is an information engine.  Under the hood, Wolfram Alpha is powered by historical and live data sets from a wide variety of sources, all hooked together with software called Mathematica, the brain-child of British physicist Stephen Wolfram.  Wolfram believes that computational methods can do more than deal with known physics; he asserts that, by iteration, a computational engine could even discover new physics. (This is a vastly simplified summation of his work.)

Wolfram Alpha is an extension of this thought.  When you pose queries the software looks through its database to figure out what you’re asking about, and then returns information about that subject or subjects.  It also performs computations based on the data.  For example, if you enter “Los Angeles, New York”, it figures out that out that you mean New York City, and displays a variety of data about the two cities, such as population, elevation and current time.  Additionally, it calculates the distance between the two cities, and estimates how long it might take to fly between them.  If you wanted to know more about the population of those cities, “population Los Angeles, New York”  generates a graph with historical population data for both cities.  Wolfram Alpha uses its computational abilities to create new information.  John C. Dvorak calls Wolfram Alpha “the CIA World Factbook combined with a calculator.”

To make the site useful, we must forget our conditioned search engine behavior.  Wolfram Alpha’s information creation capabilities also make it difficult to know what it might be able to come up with in the future, especially as new data sources are entered.  Try it out for yourself, and read more about Wolfram Alpha here:

• Five Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) Than Google
• Wolfram Alpha set for launch, first look unveiled
• Wolfram Alpha is discussed on the latest episode of This Week in Tech, including an interview with Stephen Wolfram

Below is a typical Google search results page. You’re probably already familiar with the options at the top of the screen (”Images,” “Video,” “Maps,” etc.). If not, let me know and I’ll post an article about those, too!

A typical Google search results page, but check out the "Show Options" link.

The new options are hidden behind that link I highlighted in green, just below the Google logo. If you click on “Show Options…” your results page will change slightly to look like this:

A typical Google search results page, with new options in the sidebar on the left.

Largely, what these options–shown in the sidebar on the left side of the page–allow you to do is filter your results based on criteria of your choosing. Want to see only recent results? Click on the “Past week” link and Google will filter out older results. The best way to learn how these options will be useful for you is to simply go play around with them. However, Google has also kindly supplied an introductory video that you can watch for more information:

Enjoy playing with these new options. I think you’ll find them useful. I especially like the Wonder Wheel (essentially a visual version of “Related searches”). I could follow spokes from one wheel to another for ages!

On with the funny!  I’m going to take some time on Fridays to share the best of those things that I’ve found on the nets that have made me laugh.  This week, we have a remix of those Slap-Chop advertisements you may have seen on cable TV complete with auto-tuning a la T-Pain or Kanye West.

If you haven’t seen the original, you can watch it here.

Curious, I went to see what she was talking about. Here is an (edited) shot of the header of that email:

Email header from Outlook, showing the attachment.

Did you notice the generic-looking icon on that attachment? This is the primary clue to what’s wrong with this file: it doesn’t know what program it belongs to.

When I tried to double-click on it, I got this dialog box:

Choose a program to try to open the attachment.

Now, in this case, I already knew it was an Excel file–since my co-worker was sitting right next to me and told me so–but what would you do if you didn’t know? I would try the most likely programs first, such as Excel or Word. You might have an idea based on who sent it and why. If necessary, you could try every program until you find the right one. Eventually, you will find one that works (presuming that you have the necessary application on your computer).

That solves the problem of opening the attachment, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the generic icon. If you don’t fix that, you’ll have to go through the dialog box every time you want to open the file.

The generic icon, by the way, is not the source of the problem but a symptom of it. The real problem is that the file does not have an extension. The file name is “october 2008″ with no “.xls” after it. The extension–the part after the period–is what tells the computer which program to open the file with. Different extensions “belong” to different applications. For instance, “.xls” denotes an Excel file and “.doc” is a Word file. There are many, many possible extensions.

To fix this problem, you should save the attachment to your hard drive. (Generally, you should do this anyway so that you’ll be able to find the document if you want to view it again or make changes to it.) I made a few samples for demonstration:

Here we have two familiar icons, and two generic ones

“Example 1 copy” is actually a duplicate of “Example 1.xls” but because the file name is missing the extension, the icon is generic and under “Type” you can see that Windows can’t identify the file. The file with the Excel icon is described as a “Microsoft Office Excel 97-2003 Worksheet.” Similarly, “Example 2 copy” is a duplicate of “Example 2.doc,” a Word file, also missing its extension. Once I correct the problem by adding the extensions to the duplicate files, my file listing looks like this:

The duplicate files now have extensions, appropriate icons, and descriptions

Ta-da! No more generic icons, and Windows is fully aware of what type of files the duplicates are.

Note: If Windows is not showing you the extensions in your file listings, you can turn that option on in Settings. Adding the missing extension will work even if you do not turn that option on, though. Also, when you change, add, or delete an extension Windows may pop up a warning regarding the change. In this case, you really do want to change (or add) the extension so go ahead and say okay.

Later, in high school and then college, my friends and I were fans of iD Software’s groundbreaking line of first-person video games, starting with Wolfenstein 3D, then Doom, and later the Quake series.  These games spawned communities dedicated to creating additional levels for the games and making other modifications to them.  Various 3rd party level editors for these games appeared, offering CAD style tools that allowed users to design environments that they could virtually walk around in when they were done.  Clumsy recreations of schools and houses were common.  I tried these various programs and found them tedious and difficult to use, and of little practical application.

Fast forward another decade, and what do we find?  Along with astoundingly faster computers, in which hardware 3d acceleration is standard, comes another great program from Google, called SketchUp.  SketchUp was originally developed by @Last Software in Boulder, Colorado, as an easier to use CAD program.  Google purchased @Last in 2004 on the basis of their plug-in for Google Earth.

Now on version 7, for Windows or Mac OS X, SketchUp is indeed easy-to-use CAD software.  Now that I have a bit of practice with it, I find that I can easily take the ideas in my head and “sketch” them as easily as I could on a piece of paper.  Easier, really, because I can achieve accuracy down to 1/16 of an inch, and view my work from any angle.  In a few hours, I modeled what we’d like to do with our backyard.

SketchUp is great for drawing out home improvement projects.

SketchUp works by letting you easily draw lines, and then being smart about how to fill in the surfaces between the lines.  The genius of SketchUp is that it works with you, always trying to anticipate what you mean to be doing, while being flexible enough to not force your hand if it guesses wrong.

I could teach you how to use it, but I don’t think I could do a better job than Aidan Chopra, author of SketchUp For Dummies.  I learned how to use SketchUp by watching the series of videos on his site.  If you’re looking to try SketchUp, download it here, and watch the videos at Chopra’s site.

I have lots of mail. I want to select everything.

The picture above is an annotated excerpt of the Gmail interface.  The pictured area is right above the list of messages in the selected mailbox, near the top of the screen.  Click the “all” link to select all messages in the mailbox.  Every message you can see will get a checkbox next to it and its background will turn gold (or possibly a different color if you’ve selected an alternate theme).  You’ll also see something like this:

That's some, not all. We can do better.

It is really clear here, but that line is easily overlooked because it looks very similar to everything in the mailbox.  The entire center of the interface turns gold and that message blends in.  Click the link indicated and you’ll have everything in the mailbox, even the messages you can’t see.  It will look like this:

That's what I'm talking about.

Now you can easily delete, move or label every message in that mailbox all at once. For my Inbox that would be a 28-fold increase in my productivity.  Score!

VPN stands for virtual private network, and the technology behind it can be very complicated (as you saw if you clicked on that link above) but the concept is actually pretty simple. A VPN allows you to connect securely to an otherwise closed network.

For instance, I work for a very large company and we have an internal network where our company-wide applications and our network-based storage reside. Normally, none of these resources can be accessed from outside the company’s network; if I tried to access it directly from home, for instance, I would not be able to get in.

However, my company has set up a VPN which allows us to connect remotely to our private network. I use a VPN client (a piece of software which handles creating the secure connection) to login to my work network, and suddenly I can do pretty much everything from home that I can do while sitting at my desk in the office. I still do the vast majority of my work in the office, but having the VPN gives me flexibility that I wouldn’t have otherwise. We had an unusually severe snowstorm last December that pretty much shut down the town for 3 or 4 days (hey, we live in Portland–we are NOT prepared for serious snow!). We have employees in many states, though, not just in Portland, so we still had to be able to support them as much as possible. The VPN allowed me and a small team of co-workers (along with 2 employees who live close enough to our building to walk into the office) to process critical checks and to respond to urgent questions, even though most of us couldn’t get to work.

Pretty cool, huh?

The other side of the coin, of course, is that work sometimes follows me home. Doh!

Oh well, I think it’s worth it for the benefits. Every other Monday when we’re processing payroll–and I have to monitor it until it completes–I am nothing but thankful that I can do that from home. It usually finishes shortly before bedtime!