Friedbeef’s Tech

By default all MS-Office applications will remember the last location you saved or attached a file from. This may be useful feature, but what if you have a few commonly used directories? Isn’t it a drag switching between them?

How to setup a one click solution to get to your favourite directories:

1. Select the directory you want to access quickly
2. Tools - Add to my places
3. The shortcut to that directory now appears on your sidebar and you can get to it instantly!

A Few Things to Note:

• You can reorder the items on the sidebar if you want with a right click
• This tip only seems to work with MS-Office applications.
• An alternative workaround you can use for other applications, is to create shortcuts to your directories and place them on your desktop.

If you liked this tip: You might want to learn about other ways to save time in Outlook.

This post is part of the ‘How-To’ group writing project.

[tags]outlook, email, productivity [/tags]

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TMNet Streamyx has organised the formation of structured independent user groups to act as a focused voice to push the company in the right direction.

On the surface, it looks like a cheap marketing ploy, and exploiting users to fix customer relations for them, but look at it this way…

In a country where a single company has a monopolistic stranglehold on broadband, hopping over to another ISP just isn’t an option for most us here in Malaysia. As a result, when TMNet makes mistakes and fails, we the Malaysian consumer ultimately suffer. So until a proper competitor rises up, user groups may be the next best conduit for continuous improvement.

I was at the inaugural Klang Valley TMNet user group meeting yesterday and somehow got elected as an EXCO member. Among the key people elected were uber-blogger Jeff Ooi as president, and broadband reform advocate Josh Lim as his deputy. Also worth noting was that Malaysia’s newly appointed country rep for Google is one the EXCO members as well. Here are a few snippets from the night:

Semi-Random Facts & Figures

• 13% of users use 72% of the bandwidth load, with the bulk of traffic expectedly coming from P2P services.
• Streamyx is operating at 75% capacity
• There is a planned expansion of 17 GB to 21 GB of total ISP bandwidth to take place by year end.
• 81% of all email sent to Streamyx emails are spam and there was an acknowledgement by management that TMNet’s ISP spam filter just isn’t up to mark yet. There were comments about genuine emails getting marked as spam and getting blocked.

Marketing Digital Content in Malaysia
In a quick conversation with Shah Ibrahim, General Manager of Content & Digital homes, I learnt:

• They are now launching music downloads for RM3 (USD$0.81).
• It will disappointingly be in WMA format, which means it won’t play on an Ipod.
• Ipod compatible AAC formats coming are soon, no planned date as yet.
• Everything sadly will be fully DRMed and come with a 3 time transfer limit for your files.
• They were turned down by Itunes to set up a store because they had too little potential volume.

Reviving Blue Hyypo
I also took the chance to have a quick talk with Amit who is heading up Blue Hyypo, TMNet’s content portal, and we bounced a few ideas of each other, among which:

• Making RSS more accessible to the general public. Push their content via feeds, and have a simple feed reader built in. A lot of Blue Hyypo visitors are oblivious to RSS, and if they can tap into this user base, it would help more people use and understand RSS, help them save time, and also encourage visitor loyalty.
• Enabling dynamic RSS feeds or email alerts to be created from search terms for local news. The one thing I love about GoogleNews is that you can subscribe to a feed created around your search terms. For example, if I search for ‘fitness’, and subscribed to it, anytime the word ‘fitness’ came up in the news, my feed reader would pick it up, it would get emailed to me at the end of the day. We have access to a lot of local news which doesn’t get picked up by the Googlenews radar yet, and it would be good to fill the gap.
• Driving Firefox through Blue Hyppo. That’s a great way to save internet newbies from pop-ups and inadvertently installing spyware, which also means a better browsing experience for users and a higher satisfaction rate for customers. The move would also the gain respect of local techies, and get mileage from the Mozilla community on a global level.

User Group Forum
A public user group forum which all Streamyx users can join has been setup, so feel free to start contributing to the cause.

At the end of the day…

Whether or not this will lead to any solid improvements and actions from TMNet is yet to be seen, but from what I’ve seen so far, it does look encouraging and worth investing a little of our time in…

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

[tags] tmnet, broadband, malaysia internet provider, isp [/tags]

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The Internet has fast become a melting pot of culture and music, and a place where sites like Aurgasm can thrive.

Aurgasm is a world music blog which showcases music from around the globe, letting you tune in to songs which you would probably never have given a chance.

From Cuba and France, all the way to the heartlands of Africa, Aurgasm lets you stream, and even download the music that you like, legally and for free, in MP3 format.

It makes a great source of varied quality musical content. (You do of course have the option to purchase any of the albums on the site.)

If you like discovering new grooves, you can also try Pandora, which discovers music according to your tastes.

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