Gdovin.net

This is the first of four instalments of my holiday gift guide which will provide mostly technology holiday gift suggestions.

Wii Fit- Wii fit is a Nintendo exercise game for their Wii platform and I find it to be great for the fitness enthusiast in your life or the video gamer who needs to get off World of Warcraft and needs to exercise a bit. The game lets to get a real workout and play a game that is also a lot of fun. As you play, the more time you play, the more exercises you can unlock and use. Wii fit also allows friends to come over and workout on it and try and beat each others high scores!

Flickr Pro- I used to believe Flickr Pro was a waste of money, however, when I started using all of Flickr’s amazing features however, I became very frustrated by the 100 MB monthly upload limit.  Flickr Pro gives you unlimited photo uploads for a mere $25 a month. Flickr Pro also lets you upload up to 90 second video clips and lets you create as many picture sets as you like. This is a perfect present for anyone who like to take pictures and share them.

Adagio Tea Starter Kit- As you all may realized right now, I am very into Adagio teas. Adagio offers high quality teas at affordable prices and one of the coolest things they have is tea starter kits. These kits come with everything you need to start drinking loose leaf tea: a tea pot, 5 samples of a specific type of tea, and a book about teas, all for $20! These items would cost $35 if they were ordered seperatly and is a great way to get people interested in drinking tea. Starter kits have a variety of types of teas  like black, green, herbal and oolong teas. It is amazing for anyone who loves tea or is just getting into teas!

Nintendo Wii- I put this on my gift guide last year but I think it is such a great product and can do so many revolutionary things that I decided that it is wroth it to put it on my list again. It is an amazing game console and is exteremly versatile.

Digital Picture Frame- Anymore, Digital Cameras have been replacing regular film cameras and why bother printing out pictures when you can simply put pictures on a memory card and have a running slide show of your most recent pictures. The frame is $90 and totally worth it.

Last year one of the articles that I found to be the most useful for the entire year was the holiday gift guide that I put together to help advise people on what gadgets were good gif ideas. This year, Gdovin.net is proud to announce that we are going to expand the holiday gift guide to be every Friday starting tomorrow and going until the Friday before Christmas give four gift guides and letting me share even more great gadgets for this holiday season! I look forward to sharing gadget suggestions with everyone throughout the holiday season.

Thanksgiving the the time every year that you look back and think about everything you are grateful for and  to thank people for those gifts. I am very lucky to have a great family, great friends and a great life! I am also very thankful for all you who read my blog you are all the reason I continue to do this everyday and spend a lot of time finding topics to write about and other ideas to build this site. I am very grateful for everyone who reads my articles regularly and would like to promise that this is just the beginning because there is so much more great content on it’s way and I am really excited to share it with you all. Finally,  I would just like to remind everyone of  all the less fortunate people and would like to remind you to try and give to them, whether it be food, money or time.

RSS feeds have made reading news so much easier and simple and now Google Reader can make it even better. Google Reader is basdically a web-based RSS feed reader that allows you to read any feed where ever you can get an internet connection or even offline access through google gears. Another great advantage is it gives you a “river of news” where it shows all the articles from your RSS feeds from oldest to newest. You can also read your article in the same river style by the category. Google Reader also tracks what kind of feeds you like to read and suggests new feeds that they think you would like to subscribe to, along with “Packs” or collections of a certain category of feeds. I love to read google reader feeds it has become a part of my daily life and hope you all consider utilizing another great Google service.

A few days ago, PC Magazine announced that they will no longer produce a printed magazines. I believe that this is for the best and that many other print media companies will do the same. The fact is, that printed media is not worth the effort when people can release internet media like blogs for much less money.

Print media requires so much overhead between the printing costs, shipping costs, cost of buying supplies to print on! All those fees are not needed with online media all you need to do is buy web hosting and pay people to write content and manage the website. That is a major savings and allows anyone (even me) to become a journalist in their own right. In hard economic times like now where money is tight and many companies are on the verge of bankruptcy,  it could save the businesses a lot of money by going web only and eliminating their print operation.

As for the consumer, the biggest advantage is that most online media outlets don’t require you to pay anything, online media relies mainly on advertisement for revenue. In addition, online media lets you read the news anywhere and does not require you to have to hold the media in your own hands. Plus there is no need to have to store or dispose of it because it is all hosted on the internet and you can just close the webpage!

In conclusion, online media is both more cost-effective for the producer and the consumer and is easier to be read. Print media requires too much overhead and unnecessary things that can be avoided by moving to all online media.  I believe that especially now in these tough economic times, many media producers will move to online and do away with the unnecessary print media

Every computer user has important data on their computer that they would be in trouble if they loose in the case of a hardware failure or software crash.  Every computer expert recommends that you should backup all your crucial data to an external device like a external hard drive, thumb drive or optical disk. However, what happens if there is a natural disaster or fire burning down your residence and making your backup totally useless. Plus, you would have to setup backing up even if you have a program, you would have to set it up yourself and pay for the media to put it on. This whole process is a total chore and still is not a perfect backup method.

However, if you sign up for a online backup service, you can set your computer to upload everything as files change and be sure that it is safe even if your residence is destroyed. The two services that I have used are Jungle Disk and Mozy.  Jungle Disk uses Amazon’s S3 service and charges a mere 15 cents per Gigabyte. However there are also some setup fees and uploading speeds also. Mozy on the other hand, has a free account that has 2 GB of free storage, and then an unlimited storage account for only $5/month per computer.  I decided that was the better service because as it backs up, it puts all the data online and secure from harm. The one disadvantage, is that with Jungle Disk you can upload from as many computers and mount the storage as a disk drive on your computer. However, Jungle Disk requires you to buy a backup application for an additional one time fee of $20, however there is a 30 day trial to start you off.

I have replaced localized backups with using Mozy’s unlimited service, and their included applications makes it so easy and I don’t even think about backing up my data but, I know it is safe!  I reccommend everyone using online backup because, the data is always safe and takes no thought or effort!

They are big, they are loud, the take up a lot of space and they are not portable. Desktop computers were the norm in the early days of computing however, now that laptops have become much more powerful and much more affordable, I believe that desktops are no longer necessary. Why would anyone want to have a computer that just sits and keeps all your data but, can’t go with to work or on a vacation. Although desktops can get better specs for gaming and processor speed but, for the vast majority of users notebooks are more useful because it does not require the purchase of an additional monitor and can take all your data with you anywhere you go. For the past four years, my primary computer has been a notebook and there is nothing my notebooks can’t do that I need.  I recommend people considering buying a desktop to think again before buying that because it could be much more convenient to get a notebook.

Anymore, I do not see the need for having office work done on paper or manually, since the dawn of new, more reliable technologies that can make office life simpler and much more productive. Paper can be damaged, lost, stolen and destroyed, while moving digitally, could prevent the problem of if the office burns down, the business goes with it!  Computers have been more utilized in recent years but I believe that in the future, offices will go completely digital and offices would be completely based on computers.

As an example, I will list the general things that offices need and list their digital replacements:

File Cabinets- Computer hard drives, Web Storage, Internal storage server

Paperless offices are great, despite the fear involved by some people who are computer-phobic might be worried but, as long as data is backed up frequently and off-soite all your data will be safe and much easier to access.

Phones- Skype/VOIP

Skype as I have mentioned before is a much more affordable replacement to landlines and could save offices lots of money and calls can be made anywhere in the world!

Messages/Memos- Email

As for internal company messages just move it all to email, Gmail has a great enterprise solution and could be a great replacement

This is just scratching the surface of the paperless office and although it may be scarry, it is worth it for new companies starting up, along with old companies as a system update for the best.

When the most recent release of Windows, Vista, came out in January 2007 the majority of users were underwhelmed to say the least. Usually in operating systems, new release work better than their predacessor, and have more features. However, Vista caused some users who upgraded greif and sometimes was even less useful than their old operating system was.

Vista’s graphical user interface is a definite upgrade from XP, many believe it was copied off of Mac OS I think it is some what similar to Mac OS, but, I think that it has more if it’s own Windows style as well. Vista also requires more computing power in order to support their new features and a lot of machines that were shipped with Vista were not built to optimal specifications to support Vista well. So even with all this, Vista is still slower than XP. Other problems are security and the problems of functionality.

I believe that Vista was a 5 year project that should never be released and is the next Windows ME, as in an operating system that was a total flop. I reccomend any one getting a new to go with the much more relibable and stable Windows XP. I think however, Windows 7 will be a much better OS and could be a good replacement for XP.

People who know me best know that my favorite beverage in the world is tea. I usually drink about 6 cup each day and all of the tea I buy currently,  is from Adagio.com. Adagio sells a lot of loose leaf tea and some tea that comes in bags too although not as much variety is offered. Adagio has starter kits that allow new customers to sample a variety of teas and provides them with everything they need to make it for around $20.

I began ordering about 6 months ago and have enjoyed it a lot. Adagio offers a wide variety of teas and at very affordable prices. Another great part of adagio’s website is there is a social network aspect that lets you define friends and share your favorite teas with your friends to help suggest teas they might be interested in. Also, if you remain a steady customer you get about 10% of the money you spend back in savings in future purchases which helps keep customers coming back.  You also can review teas that you have purchased in both video and text and Adagio also gives savings for that as well. Adagio also allows their customers to make their own custom blends online and allow others to buy these blends and by doing so raising some money for the creator as well. Here are my custom blends please try them they are very good. I really love Adagio tea and I plan to write reviews of my favorite teas in future blog posts because I really love tea and I love Adagio.