Tech DC – home and office computer support for D.C., Virginia & Maryland
info@techdc.com / 202-568-9986
On today’s Kojo Namdi show on WAMU, the topic was Local Seafood Markets & the Gulf Oil Spill.
Sheila Bowman of the Monteray Bay Aquarium said that they created a Seafood Watch iPhone app for people to easily find what seafoods are considered good and bad from a fish sustainability perspective. It’s a simple program for looking up fish when you are at the restaurant or grocery.
Google added recently the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill to their Crisis Response site. It has overlay maps with satellite images, closures, news, etc.
At Tech DC we occasionally provide remote computer support and take over someone’s desktop to fix a problem. My favorite tool for this is the previously mentioned UltraVNC SingleClick. This requires the remote user to click on an executable to allow me to view their desktop.
A new tool that I started using is Zoho Assist. This is web based remote login software similar to GoToAssist or LogMeIn Rescue, but far more reasonably priced. Unlike UltraVNC SingleClick, Zoho Assist works on PC, Mac, and Linux (SingleClick is PC only) and everything can be setup from a web browser (SingleClick is far more complicated and requires the support person to understand firewalls, port forwarding, and dynamic DNS services). Zoho Assist is free with limited features allowing 5 sessions a month, enough for most people helping a few friends and family. The price for the full service is $12/month.
The person you are supporting has to either click a link in an email you send them or go to join.zoho.com and enter the Session ID for the session you created. Then Java is often automatically installed on the supported computer and the person has to click a series of OKs and Nexts. But overall it is a simple process that you can walk most people though on the phone.
I still recommend UltraVNC SingleClick for advanced support needs for PCs. But for something quick and simple, Zoho Assist is a great service.
Here are the international data plans from AT&T for the iPad 3G introduced yesterday in the US.
Expensive bits.
Google email works with name@gmail.com, but you could also use name@yourcompany.com. To do this, you sign up for Google Apps, which is offered in Standard (Free) and Premier Editions. Go to: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/
There are a couple of ways to do this:
The simplest is to choose “I want to buy a domain” which allows you to buy a domain through Google (which actually uses GoDaddy as the registrar and costs $10/month), which provides you a domain pre-configured to use Google services.
The other method is to use your existing domain or purchase from domain registrar service and assign the MX records to Google. Your DNS Manager or Domain Manager page from your registrar would then look like this:
The second method requires that you also verify that you own the domain by updating the cname record or uploading a file to the domain.
After pointing your MX records to Google, you can get your email by going to:
https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainname.com
..where yourdomainname.com is actually your domain name.
Because that’s a long address, I typically set up a URL pointer so that mail.yourdomainname.com will point to the above address. This is also handled in the DNS management page at your domain registrar. The URL pointing would look like this:
If your registrar’s DNS management system does not allow such a redirect, then you can set up a redirect from your website, for example from yourdomainname.com/mail/.