Now fixing a BWM is easier than ever:

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/01/30/bmw-augmented-reality/trackback/

One of the most important aspects of my online life is to be able to find what I need in a moment’s notice. The search field found in the upper right hand corner (by default) in Firefox is one of my favorite features. The wonderful thing about it is that you can expand your search options by adding other search engines.

Here is a list of my favorite Firefox search engines, in no particular order. Some come with Firefox while others I needed to download:

• Google - general searching
• Amazon - to find the next great book I plan to read
• Answers.com - general information
• Creative Commons - very useful when looking for blogging resources
• Wikipedia - general knowledge
• Merriam-Webster Dictionary - definitions and spelling
• Stock.XCHNG - awesome free stock photos
• IMDb - checking on the latest movies
• Mininova - finding my (legal) torrents
• YouTube - useful video
• LinkedIn - keeping in touch with my friends and colleagues from around the world
• eBay - when I need to find that hard to find item
• Flickr - nice photos
• Lifehacker -general tips and tricks
• Sourceforge - great opensource software
• Freshmeat Projects - great opensource software

There are tons of other search engines available on the Firefox add-ons website and the Mycroft Project website.

What are your favorite Firefox search engines? Point us in the right direction in the comments.

Update! Suggestions by readers:

• Newegg

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/01/29/favorite-firefox-search-engines/trackback/

If you are running a small office of a couple dozen employees and you have Windows 2003 R2, you can easily centralize your contacts for your entire office along with give everyone the ability to see the company’s corporate calendar without having to install Exchange in your environment.

With Windows 2003 R2, you also have a copy of Sharepoint services. Sharepoint allows you to create workspaces for your different working groups. It is generally designed to work for either relatively large companies or working groups that are widely distributed. But, if you are neither, you have this technology at your disposal and you might as well put it to good use.

By creating a central contacts and calendar in the Sharepoint services, your users can connect to then using Outlook. This way, is is really easy for them to find contact information for anyone in the company or see what is happening on the corporate calendar right from a tool they already use.

You may even want to expand things a bit more and share your own calendar using Sharepoint so that people can see when you are busy or not and allow them to better select meeting times. Or, instead of just putting in company contacts in Sharepoint, you can also put in vendors and clients so that this information is readily available for everyone in the company to use.

One other nice aspect about doing things this way is that it is also useful for the road warrior. Outlook caches a copy of all the contacts and calendar information locally on your hard drive so that when you are on the road with your laptop, all of the contacts and calendars are still available, even though you may not be able to connect with your Sharepoint server.

Now, if you do not have access to a Sharepoint server, you do have some other options, most free or open source.  Here are just a few:

• eGroupware
• phpGroupware
• OpenGroupware.org
• PHProjekt
• horde
• Simple Groupware

What are you using for online collaboration?  Let us know what works and what doesn’t work in the comments.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/01/28/centralized-contacts-and-corporate-calendar-without-exchange/trackback/

While DVDs are relatively small, if you have a large library like I do, it can quickly consume a lot of space. So, I decided to put my entire DVD collection on my home network and get rid of the DVDs altogether. This was a relatively simple process even though it was fairly time consuming. But, in the end, I ended up with a complete set of all my movies which I could watch on demand (read, “I can change disks without getting off the couch!”) that fit nicely on a small home NAS.

Software You Need

I used two pieces of software to put my DVDs on my computer and shrink them down to a size that is useable:

• RipIt4Me - used to make a copy of the DVD to your computer’s hard drive.
• Handbrake - shrinks the movie down to a manageable size. DVDs can use up to 8 GB of disk space. Handbrake will shrink a typical 2 hour movie down to about 750 MB (a saving of about 90%!)

Hardware You May Want

In order to make things truly “on-demand”, you will want a few pieces of hardware. Technically, these are not needed as you could easily store all of your movies on your hard drive and watch them on your computer but it is way better to be able to sit on your couch and watch your movies with nothing more than a remote.

Here is what I have set up:

• Home network (’nuff said!)
• NAS - a home made FreeNAS server fits the bill perfectly as it is easy to set up and lets you use some of your old hardware. When you are building your NAS, make sure that you estimate the correct amount of disk space by multiplying the number of movies you have by 750 MB. If you want to make sure you never lose you movies, double your hard disk space and put in a RAID configuration
• Networked multimedia player - this can be a home made DIY setup such as MythTV or Freevo, or a full blown stand alone device such as the Archos 705 WiFi or the TViX HD M-5100 SH (I have both of these devices and they just rock!)

What To Do

I’m assuming that most of the readers are relatively technical so I’m not going to go into extreme details as to how to do every little step of the process. If there is enough interest, I might create some step by step tutorials at a later date. For now, here are the basic steps:

1. Using RipIt4Me, rip a DVD to your hard drive. You will only need the actual movie, not all of the movies and menus. Make sure that you have enough disk space because this can take up as much as 8GB on your drive.
2. Use Handbrake to now convert the ripped DVD to an Xvid encoded single file. This should reduce the movie size down significantly (about 750 MB). Do not be alarmed if this takes some time to do. It could easily take over an hour to encode the file.
3. Move the movie file to your NAS.
4. Delete the movie files on your hard drive that were created by RipIt4Me and Handbrake (you will need the space later).
5. Point your multimedia player hardware at your NAS. How you do this will vary depending on hardware.
6. Enjoy the show!

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/01/19/make-your-dvds-view-on-demand-and-save-space-too/trackback/

As my wife and I are in the process of packing, we have discovered that there are tons of documents that we have which are in binders.  Binders are great if they are on the shelf or if their contents are being accessed on a regular basis but when you are moving and space is a key factor, they sure become a pain.

We decided to use Chicago screws to save some space. They are flat and allow you to get rid of the extra space that is taken up by partially empty binders, covers, etc.  We figure that we have reduced the amount of space that our documents use by about 60%.

Sorry that this isn’t really a techie post but this was such a cool idea, I needed to share it.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/01/12/archive-documents-with-chicago-screws/trackback/