British Inside : Family, Technical

Using OpenDNS.com to protect your family

James — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:39:00 GMT

I was a little surprised that someone I talked to last night hadn't heard of this amazing service, and even more surprised that I hadn't blogged about this before.

If you have a router at home - and surely most of my audience does - you need to set it to use OpenDNS.

Do it today. It's free furchrissakes.

There are many reasons why it's a good thing from a technical point of view, being faster to access and faster to update than your current DNS server. But that's not the biggest reason why you should do it.

You have a family? OpenDNS is a beautifully simple way to stop any bad content getting into your house. There is no setup to do on anyone's computer. Since all traffic flows through OpenDNS you use their control panel to literally stop anyone viewing porn, drugs, gambling, even politics(!).

There's nothing they can do to get around it, unless they have admin access to your router. Although I use Vista's parental controls too on my smallest kids, I wouldn't rely on it. This router-level access means that I can't even view this stuff.

Few Google tips

James — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:04:00 GMT

As I find them..

Gmail: I've seen 20-30 good emails caught in spam, so check it often while you train it. Since I don't want to check the same message twice, I mark the spam as read whenever I check it.

Then, to check just the unread spam you can search for in:spam is:unread. Here's a list of other neat search terms.
Google Calendar: If like me you used the Month view, instead try the Custom view set to "Next 4 weeks". It's much better since you don't see all those "old weeks" and the days are bigger so you see more s+.
Adding the US Holidays was easy. Add > Add a public calendar. Here you see the family calendar!

Living in Gworld

James — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:31:00 GMT

Dan asked me to post an update as I explore deeper into the Google forest. I'm now fully committed to Gmail and Google Calendar (why isn't it GCalendar?) and Outlook is now purely an evil tolerated for work purposes only.

And with Rob Howard's tweet this morning about Google Apps for business, perhaps that's only temporary! Go Rob! (lol, while searching for Rob's blog URL, I found that he's already blogged it too)

Gmail

Using Gmail is great - it's everywhere I am, unlike Outlook that tries hard but is never going to be as ubiquitous as a browser. I continue to love labels over folders, i don't miss the heirarchy simply because all mail is there, never deleted and SEARCH ROCKS. It turns out that I was filing things away in folders in Outlook really only so I could find them quickly. If finding them is super quick, that issue goes away.

So labels rule.

Filters rock too - my aim is to keep everything out of my Inbox that isn't urgent. Therefore every time I get an email I think "is this important enough to interrupt me?" and if it isn't I create a filter to move it out of the Inbox and to a label. I can leave it unread or mark it read depending on if I ever *need* to read it. Some emails are just for filing, so I don't even see them. Perfect.

Some I label, but leave in Inbox because they are something I want to deal with today.

Regardless of the filter, the end result is the Archive button. I don't plan on deleting anything. Spam will delete itself. In fact I posted a suggestion to the Gmail team that they should replace the Delete button that is sitting in prime real-estate with a Mark as read button - something that I think is far more useful. I subscribe to a few mailing lists and want to mark as read all the time.

I setup my Gmail as follows. I have two POP3 accounts that I want sucked into Gmail, so I went to Settings > Account > Add another mail account. I entered the POP3 login info and told Gmail to delete the email from the server (by unchecking the "leave a copy" box). That's it. Gmail sucks in my email in a clever way - if you get a lot of email from an account, it checks more often. Quiet accounts it checks less often.

The only other trick I can pass on is the "Send mail as" option. I noticed that some mailing lists only accept mail from a specific email account (others don't seem to care). Plus I use a lot of email aliases (e.g. dell-at-shawthing.com I use with dell, but it's really just an alias for my real POP3 account). It's nice to reply to some people using the aliases they send to, so for my most popular aliases like @coveryourasp.com I set those up under "send mail as".

Just click "Add another email address" and type in the email address. You have to verify it of course. I also check "Reply from the same address the message was sent to" so that most of the time people aren't even aware that I'm using Gmail. If you send to james@britishinside.com, that's who the reply comes from.

Oh, and don't forget to click the Chat tab and move it below the labels.

Google Calendar

I love the calendar too. I like weekends together so I set Monday as start of week.

Setup is much easier - I created a gmail account for my wife too, so she uses calendar as well now. We share our calendars with full privileges ("Make changes AND manage sharing") so she can add to mine and vice versa. Our calendars are not public though. But I see hers and she seems mine - in pink and blue so it's easy to tell what's what.

This morning Tara created more calendars on her account for our kids, and shared those too, so now I see calendars for the kids baseball, softball, teacher conferences, etc. I chose that sandy color for those. It's awesome. We all see everything at once and can search for events easily.

Note that you won't need to invite each other to family events any more! Just put them on the calendar. if you invite your spouse you'll end up with two of them on there, in pink and blue.

Creating events is great too - it's so clever that you can just type "7pm Maisy softball at Alex field" and it picks out the time, description and location automatically. You can choose which calendar you are creating it on.

Wow, I'm kinda pissed actually that this was out here and I was stuck in Outlook all this time. Guys, when you find stuff like this, tell me!

Quickie Updates

James — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 14:26:34 GMT

In the spirit of GTD I have to do a brain dump here every so often. There are a lot of small bloggable items that aren't worth blogging seperately. Here they are:

Many of the Community Server (CS) team had fun at the weekend, myself ncluded, writing CS Modules for a little impromptu contest that ScottW organised. As his IM says this morning "I think I created a monster". 20 entries were submitted! (CS Modules allow you to modify and extend CS using plug-in assemblies - VERY cool)
CS Beta 3 was released. There's a new overview movie to watch, but the product itself has matured an amazing amount in B3. I am actually looking forward to switching my blog to CS 2.0 - and that is saying something to switch from my baby. The new Control Panel Dashboard is very polished. CS 2.0 has grown up.
Wow for Autodesk - check out this quote from Shaan Hurley who recently celebrated his 8th year there: "One nice perk is every four years Autodesk employees get a six week paid sabbatical to go on vacation and come back refreshed and with new energy as two weeks of vacation is not sufficient to get full disengaged IMHO". Absolutely, couldn't agree more.
It's my birthday on Friday. My car and I will be both 42.
Tara couldn't find me a present, so I bought myself a Samsung SCD353 digital video camera. It was brand new but open-box and about to be superceded so I got it for just $199 from Best Buy (reg $299). Crazy money. I'm looking forward to posting some movies here.
Our dog adoption is in the final stages now - our home was visited and checked by a GRRA representative (I've volunteered to be one too) and now our details have been sent out to the foster homes. We await a phone call to setup a visit to see some dogs very soon.
My 11yo daughter Maisy got onto the Honor Roll at Middle School. I wonder if I get a bumper sticker. lol
Talking of cars (I know we weren't but I love my car) I still haven't got my personalized plate (64 CAT) after 10 weeks. Perhaps I should call someone; I'm still driving around on TX plates.
Just starting using OneNote yesterday to do some CMS research. Interesting program, I like the way that you can dump screen captures, web pages, emails etc into your notes. But something makes me wonder if it will replace Outlook as the center of my universe. The way they recommend using it may conflict with the GTD setup I have in Outlook.
TiVo after 2 weeks is still great, BUT I wish there were a more reliable method to change the channel . 1 in 10 programs are not recorded because the channel didn't change. This means that I'm always checking up on it and that makes it a much less enjoyable experience than I expected from the Season Pass feature.

Brain Dump

James — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 12:58:10 GMT

Some very interesting articles came onto my screen over the last few days:

Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far
For card-carrying Geeks only, this article is worth reading on two counts: 1. because Mark is damn impressive and 2. Sony are being very naughty
Diamonds are for never (sic)
A great thought-provoking essay from Anil Dash.

Other things of interest:

With the Dozing Dogs acquisition finalized this morning, Rob Howard sent the official letter to all Dozing Dogs customers.
I'm now testing the GTD add-in for Outlook. I read the book a few years ago, but never formed the habits. I'm giving it another chance with the help of this (so far) great tool.
I've been reminded by others to install my fingerprint reader and OneNote. I've had both for a while (the former using my MVP Bucks and the latter part of the amazing-but-still-unknown Action Pack Subscription) but never used either.
Softball season is over. My daughter's team one the League Championship, but came second in the World Series in a high-stress game. We actually won at one point, only to be told that the Ump had made a mistake and we had to play one more inning. They scored 5 runs in that last inning!
This may be our sweet new fun ride soon. Or this.
House hunting sucks.
- Everywhere that looks nice online sucks in real life
- Everywhere that looks like a dump online is really dreamy (but of course, you don't drive to see those places)
- It sucks that they list 5 bedroom houses as 3 bedroom just because there's no closet in 2 of the bedrooms. I don't care. I want to search for houses that have "5 rooms you could possibly use as bedrooms".
- Just when you find a nice place, another contract is placed upon it.