Hello, I'm Evan. I write about tech from my perspective – that of the average tech geek, sometimes with my lawyer glasses on. You can also find me on Twitter and at my real-life job as a lawyer. MORE ABOUT ME.
Are you on Google+ by now? If not, head on over to our invitations post, and request an invitation. While Google+ puts Facebook to shame in many areas, one feature that it lacks is a tool to search users. You can hack together some attempts to search Google profiles, but that’s about it. At least one site is attempting to fill the void. Find People on Plus is a site geared towards- you guessed it- finding people on Google+.
Have you noticed a decrease in spam in your email inbox recently? I haven’t, but that may be due to Gmail’s excellent spam filters. According to Symantec, though, worldwide spam has decreased 90% in the last year. How? Two of the world’s largest botnets were knocked offline, accounting for much of the reduction. Those botnets controlled millions of infected computers, sending out billions of spam email messages a day. With the botnets out of the picture, spam has fallen dramatically. Here’s how the botnets were taken offline.
One piece of software that Microsoft got right was Windows Live Writer. If you’re a blogger, and don’t want to dig around in HTML (and arguably even if you do), Windows Live Writer is the software that we recommend for your drafting needs. One flaw with Live Writer, though, is that it doesn’t offer a setting to change where your blog posts get saved on your machine. By default, your drafts and recent posts get saved to your user folder, in the \Documents\My Weblog Posts\ directory. What if you want to save your posts elsewhere? You can do this, with a registry hack. Read more
9/20/11 UPDATE: Invites are no longer needed, as Google has opened up Google+ to everyone, as of September 20, 2011. If you’re looking for someone to follow, you can follow Evan Kline or Bobby Travis from 40Tech.
We’re on Google+, and invites seem to be working – at least for now. If you’d like an invite, post your Gmail credentials here. You can mask it to avoid the spambots (for example, yourname[at]gmail.com), or you can use our contact form to get in touch with us (but that might take longer for us to approve). Fill out the comment form with the email address you want to use with G+ (might have to be a Gmail address), along with a request to be added, and we can add you. If there are many requests, we’ll do our best to keep up. There’s no telling how long Google will keep the invites open, so this might not last for long. If you want to thank us, please consider following us on Twitter or Facebook, or subscribing to the RSS feed.
UPDATE: I’ve gotten word that the invite links are once again not working, so I’m closing this thread for now. Invites appear to be open again, so I’m reopening this thread. Add a comment with your address if you want an invite. As long as you add your address to the email field in the form box, I can send you an invitation. Invites might not be instantaneous, though, depending on whether we’re by our computers when you request an invite.
We’ve previously covered how to quickly switch audio sources if you’re on Windows. The tool that we covered comes in handy, for example, if you want to switch your audio and mic input over to your headset to make a Skype call. But what if you’re on a Mac, and want to do the same? A free app, SoundSource, has you covered.
SoundSource can be installed to your menu bar, and from there it is a simple matter of clicking it, and selecting your input or output source from the menu that drops down. SoundSource also lets you adjust volume, and gives you a quick link to sound preferences and MIDI setup.
If you’re constrained for space on your menu bar, you can get much of the same functionality by holding down the option key and then clicking on the Sound icon on your menu bar. You won’t get the granular volume control offered by SoundSource, but you will be able to switch devices. Credit to TUAW for this native OS X tip.
If you find that you’re switching your audio source on a Mac with any regularity, check out SoundSource. The link at the end of this article takes you to the free apps by Rogue Amoeba, the developer. SoundSource is at the bottom of the page.
SoundSource [Rouge Amoeba]
