Google announced today, and that announcement was re-broadcast via unofficial Google spokesman Matt Cutts to make sure people actually noticed, that the company had released a long-awaited command line tool for accessing Google.

Well, sort of. If by accessing Google, you mean accessing everything except for the core Google service of search.

Ready made for the “much ado about nothing” files, come the Google Command Line Tool and Google API. Unoriginally titled, GoogleCL, Google Command Line (I guess) is a Python application build using Python gdata libraries in order to make Google Data API calls from a command line. This would be so very important and a great tool for web developers and search engine researchers everywhere, if it only had any functionality at all related to search. Instead, GoogleCL allows you to play with a bunch of the toy Google products and services.

Want to upload a bunch of pictures to Picasa from the command line? Sure, no problem.

Want to create Calendar events from your command line? You can do that too!

Want to read about Southwest airlines rewards credit card? Oh, wait, that’s my thing. Oops.

What about managing contacts from the command line? You bet!

How about posting YouTube videos? Of course.

If it is a tangential side Google service developed in order to show up Microsoft or Apple, then it can be accessed using the Google command line tool.

How About Command Line Search Tool and API?

No! What are you crazy? People would use that to poke holes in the already fragile Google search index and search results rankings by being able to automate tedious processes like checking search ranking positions, whether or not a particular webpage has been indexed or not, and how many incoming links point to a webpage, and where they come from.

Google wants you to like them, and wants you to think that they are the best source of cool, free, open-source tools in the galaxy, but they aren’t dumb. Search makes money. Sure, AdWords brings in the actual dollars, but the only reason anyone bothers is because advertisers know that “everyone” uses Google search regardless of operating system, browser, and in many cases, even location.

The reason everyone uses Google’s search is because it is the best search engine on the Internet. Of course, the entire underpinnings of the company’s search rankings is coming apart at the seems as more and more content publishers seek to manipulate Google’s search rankings for their own benefit. Now that SEO is something that everyone, everywhere, does and pretty much everyone does the same way, the only thing that really matters any more is link count and how close the title tag matches the search. A command line interface might expose that reality to more people (or at least allow it to be proven beyond doubt).

So, enjoy the latest plaything from Google. Just don’t expect it to change your life.

Have a great day.

As a professional freelance writer, I end up using wireless hotspots to work from coffee shops. While, I use a secured network whenever possible, many WiFi hotspots do not have any security enabled because it makes them easier to use. Although it seems like no one would bother, the reality is that wireless access points are easily compromised – even those that do have some form of WEP or WPA security enabled on the wireless access point. Using websites that have secure SSL connections can help keep usernames and passwords secure.

Unfortunately, that does nothing to secure all of those applications on laptops that log-in automatically by remembering usernames and passwords. It is also all too common to be in the middle of something, get in the flow, and end up entering a username and password before even thinking about whether or not there was a HTTPS in the URL.

The only reasonable solution is to setup an encrypted connection that captures all incoming and outgoing network traffic from the laptop so that there can be no mistakes or slips in security. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of options available in this arena. This is especially true for WiFi hotspot security protection that can be setup on the fly without pre-configuring a server somewhere to be waiting for your call.

Hotspot Shield by Anchor Free offers a free VPN connection that provides the fully encrypted security solution needed to safely use WiFi hotspots. However, it is “ad supported” which means that not only will part of your precious laptop screen real estate be eaten up by ads, thereby making your viewable monitor area even smaller, but it also means that your connection ends up being slower because those advertisements are given first priority by the VPN application.

WiFi Guardian Wireless HotSpot Security

I was excited to find WiFi Guardian, a free wireless hotspot VPN encryption program that connects to its own third-party servers to provide network security. Like HotSpot Shield, WiFi Guardian provides complete network interception making by web surfing and email secure as well as closing off the ability to hack in via installed software programs that automatically update.

The best part is that WiFi Guardian comes with a free 3-day trial. After three days, you have to pay $49.95 per year, but even a one-day free trial is good enough to secure your laptop for an impromptu coffee shop office setup. Most other VPN software comes with a specific data limit trial instead. That means that you have to make sure your computer isn’t doing anything behind the scenes that could be eating up your free trial period like downloading CD covers or synchronizing your bookmarks or files.

There is one bizarre thing that concerns me. The VPN application requires you to register a username and password to create an account. No problem there. However, the password field can only contain letters, no numbers or symbols.

What kind of security is that?

The most basic of all security is using strong passwords. Anyone setting up special software for security purposes would already be very familiar with using strong passwords. It begs the question about how seriously the WiFi Guardian developers take security when they not only allow, but require users to setup weak passwords on their accounts.

Needless to say, I will be uninstalling the software after my free trial period is up.

Has anyone else used WiFi Guardian? What have your experiences been like? Would you trust a security company that uses weak passwords?

Leave your answers in the comments, or shoot me an email.

I have been using a Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard for a couple of years now. Over that time, I have slowly taken advantage of all the features and functions built-in to both the keyboard and the mouse.

While the keyboard is your basic enhanced keyboard, it comes with several other buttons and input devices than a more standard keyboard does. Unfortunately, many of these additional buttons are not useful to me. For example, there are 3 search buttons on the left side of the keyboard, each signified by a magnifying glass. One is for web searching, one is for searching on my PC, and the last is for searching pictures.

This is all well and good, but those aren’t the kind of functions that I do often enough to require a specialized button, or even to remember that those buttons are there. In fact, I’m more likely to hit them accidentally with papers or something than to press them on purpose.

Then there are the three buttons in the lower right corner. These buttons are used to make Internet phone calls through your PC either with something like Skype, or Voice Over IP. Either way, I hardly ever do that, so for a long time, those buttons were just dead to me.

Reprogramming Default Logitech Buttons

The power of these buttons comes not necessarily in their default settings, but in the fact that they can be reprogrammed to do almost anything you want them to do instead.

For example, I do a fair amount of watching videos on my computer. A lot of them are training materials that I review and I don’t need to watch every second to get the idea. Using the KMPlayer allows me to skip ahead 5 seconds by using the forward arrow key and backward by using the back arrow key. I can also skip ahead 30 seconds by pressing CTRL+Right Arrow.

The thing is, that isn’t very convenient when you have leaned back and are moving forward and back one handed. I checked in the program options to see if I could set a different, single, keystroke to be the fast forward 30 seconds key. I didn’t come up with anything, but I found something better.

By going into Logitech Setpoint, I can reprogram most of the buttons on my keyboard and mouse to do what I want them to do instead. For example, the green phone button used to make a call has been reprogrammed to be, you guessed it, CTRL+Right Arrow. Now, the key to skip ahead a little is right next to the key to skip ahead a lot. (Anything more and I just mouse click on the slider.)

Uberoptions to the Rescue

There is one other thing that I do all day long. As a freelance writer, I am constantly taking screenshots. Alt+Printscreen plus a screen capturing utility makes this very easy. The only catch is that the PrintScreen button is in the upper right hand corner of my keyboard in the no man’s land between the main keyboard and the numeric keypad.

Finding that key when the keyboard has been pushed back under the monitor stand to allow for a book or other papers to rest in front of my typing fingers is a pain. More than once I have thought I took a screenshot only to realize that I must have hit INSERT or PAUSE/BREAK instead. Sometimes that makes more work for me; sometimes it means that I have lost an important screenshot that I cannot recreate.

I’ve tried a thousand times to program another key, but no dice.

The problem is that pressing the PRINT SCREEN key causes the computer to execute the command. It does NOT cause Setpoint to record that keystroke as my intention.

I posted in the Logitech help forum where someone pointed me to not only the solution to this tiny problem, but a utility that makes my programmable keyboard and mouse EVEN BETTER.

The utility is called Uberoptions and it installs alongside the regular Logitech Setpoint utility. What it does after that is nothing short of brilliant.

Uberoptions adds hundreds of keystrokes and functions that are not available in the basic Setpoint utility to the list of things you can program your keyboard or mouse to do. Normally, certain keys cannot be re-assigned (it varies by model apparently) but many of those keys are easily programmable once Uberoptions is installed.

This alone would make Uberoptions a great recommendation. But, it goes one step further. For some settings, Uberoptions actually allows you to assign functions based upon what program you are using.

For example, the two arrow buttons on the side of my mouse can be set to be Next Email and Previous Email in Outlook while being set to be Page Up and Page Down in my PDF reader and then be set to be Cruise Up and Cruise Down (scroll fast) in Firefox. This, my friends, is gold.

If you have a programmable Logitech keyboard or mouse, I highly recommend you check out Uberoptions Logitech Setpoint Enhancement Utility. It is a free utility that you can download and install as easily as the Setpoint utility itself, and the world of functionality it opens will be well worth it.

Update: Uberoptions now supports not only Print-Screen as a programmable option, but Alt-Print-Screen as well. Now you can set a keyboard or mouse button to capture the active window (which is usually what you want anyway.) Couple this with a utility called Screenshot Captor (set it to not pop up with each screenshot) and you can capture multiple screenshots in a row, quickly and easily.

Regular readers know that I am a professional writer. One of the things that I write on constantly for several different clients is computers and technology. Writing about technology means writing about the Internet, websites, and programs. Writing articles about computer technology that are not boring means writing about new and useful programs, whether online services, or locally installed utilities.

In addition to writing about new utilities, I also am constantly looking for new computer tools that will make me more efficient, more productive, and therefore, more successful, all while earning more money. That, my friends, is a tall order.

The key to finding new software is to keep up on technology by reading several of the numerous resources and websites out there that publish Internet news, computer tips, and review new software programs. This works great for finding new things to write about. However, it isn’t so great for finding a specific new utility or program to do something right now. You either have to remember what was already written about and go looking for it, or you have to wait for someone to hit your particular need on the head.

Like Inigo Mantoya, I hate waiting.

Search for Free Computer Programs and Utilities Effectively

Unfortunately, searching for new software isn’t as easy as just typing what you are looking for into Google. For starters, if you are looking for something that is new to you, or that you are not all that familiar with, you might be searching for all the wrong keywords.  This happened to me last year when I wanted a utility to make may Windows XP computer boot up in a certain order so that I didn’t get error messages about there being no network connection from programs that booted up before the wireless network was ready.

I searched in vain for boot order utilities and various other keywords. The problem was that there are plenty of good, well-known utilities, that REMOVE programs from your startup. I didn’t want to remove these programs, I wanted them to start at boot-time, I just wanted them to do so in an order that made sense.

Finally, a colleague pointed me to a program called Startup Delayer. Then, the light bulb came on. There are plenty of utilities out there that affect how your programs boot by delaying, or otherwise stalling certain ones. This has the effect of altering the boot-up order, but they don’t describe their features as “Change Windows XP boot order.”

Once I had the right keywords, I was set. As it turns out, you can substantially speed up Windows boot time by using a startup delayer. Just like if you double-clicked a dozen program icons at the same time, Windows would try and run them all at once making every program take longer to start up, when Windows boots, it tries running all those programs at the same time. By delaying the programs that don’t affect your routine or the user interface (like those that run in the background) just a few seconds, your computer comes online and is functional faster. You just don’t notice the other processes are still starting up in the background because you can already start typing, or whatever.

The other, more annoying, problem is that there are too many websites out there that do nothing but catalog EVERY program that comes along. That isn’t very helpful when you don’t want to try out 10 utilities, you just want to pick and choose from the best.

Even trying to search for reviews or descriptions is useless because tons of websites don’t do anything other than copy and paste in the software description right from the developer’s webpage. That is hardly objective. There are plenty of other lazy, sneaky, tricky, or downright unethical websites clogging up search results for computer software as well.

So, how to find useful new software fast and easy?

Use the site operator for your searches.

The site operator works by typing site: into your search query followed by the domain name of the website you want to search. This limits your search to only a single domain. Find a handful of trustworthy sites that feature the kind of software you like and you can use those to find your new utility. Then, click near the top left of the results screen where it says More Options. Click on Past Year. That will help limit your searches to the current crop of software and utilities and make sure that rave reviews you are reading are about the current version AND that they are comparing to the most recent versions of competing utilities.

There are plenty of good sites out there. Currently, I use (in no particular order): makeuseof.com, lifehacker.com, and downloadsquad.com. If I would rather browse, I head over to filehippo.com.

Today I need a new replacement clipboard utility. The one I have isn’t very easy to use and hogs a lot of memory, so it is never running when I need it. I want one that keeps more than one entry on the clipboard, though I don’t need it to keep 100, and it I want it to run in a very small amount of memory. Preferably, I want one that doesn’t require the super resource hogging .NET.

So, I’m off to search: clipboard utility site:makeuseof.com then clipboard enhanced site:downloadsquad.com, and so on.

Wish me luck.

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I am undertaking an anti-virus review and firewall review after my current solution started having various system issues and errors that constantly caused them to stop working.

My first test is AVG Anti-Virus which has both a free download version for home users and for pay upgrades to "professional" versions. I started with it because it comes highly recommended among the user community, at least among those who still consider anti-virus software necessary.  There is apparently a growing number of people who question their need, although as a writer who does a lot of articles about various software and utilities that I download from around the Internet (not always from the most friendly of websites), I still feel more comfortable knowing that someone is at least doing a double-check of my computer.

All brand-name virus scanners, and all of the top-rated free anti-virus utilities do a pretty solid job of detecting and eliminating most viruses. The effectiveness tests that often accompany most anti-virus reviews or comparisons generally involve the ability of the software to catch unusual or brand-new viruses. While this is certainly important, for my purposes, an anti-virus program that catches a virus 2 days later than another is good enough.

With that being said, my primary criteria in evaluating both anti-virus and firewall software are ease of use, and most importantly, system resource usage. I have my PC finely tuned to run as fast as possible. I don’t take kindly to system resource hogs. If it bogs down my computer it is gone.

AVG Memory Used Amount

Although imperfect as raw data, the RAM used as "Private Bytes" as shown in Process Explorer from Sysinternals is good enough for comparisons of one program to another. How much memory does AVG use?

I’m not too concerned with how much resources my anti-virus utility uses when running a virus-scan. Generally, I do full scans or even partial scans when I’m not actively using my computer, so I want them to finish as quickly as possible; I don’t care how much RAM or CPU is used.

However, I don’t want my virus software hogging my memory or CPU while I’m trying to get work done with my computer. So, I monitor to see what kind of resources are used by the processes that are "always on" in the background.

That works out to something like 15,000 K to 18,000 K of RAM.  How does that compare to other anti-virus software? I’ll find out as I try them out going forward.

I have all of AVG’s bells and whistles disabled, as well as any Internet scanning or phishing protection not running. Real-time active virus detection is running. Under these conditions, AVG keeps three processes running continuously by default.

1. AVG Watchdog Service
2. AVG Resident Shield Service
3. AVG Tray Monitor

Under normal use on my PC, that is Internet connection on, web browsers open, and maybe something running in the background like a download manager or uTorrent, these processes use the following amounts of RAM memory as measured in private bytes.

• AVG Watchdog uses about 4,500 K of private bytes.
• AVG Resident Shield Services uses between 9,500K and 12,500 K of private bytes
• AVG Tray Monitor uses about 850 K of private bytes.

Keep an eye out for more comprehensive anti-virus reviews of system usage, or save yourself the trouble and grab the Best Hubris RSS Feed.

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I’ve been a fan of RescueTime for a while.  I like the way that it automatically logs what I’m doing, when I’m doing it.

I frequently finish writing up a great article or other project and look up the clock and wonder, “How long did that take me to write?”

The issue is that as a freelance writer, entrepreneur, and business owner, I multi-task, a lot.  Whenever I read some time management guru give advice about focusing on one thing I laugh out loud.  Anyone who has ever run their own start-up knows that breaking your day out into inviolable blocks of scheduled time during which you ignore other tasks and activities is a fantasy.

That means that sometimes, I start an article, and then get a phone call from an important client (Let it go to voicemail the “experts” say. Yeah, right.  The reason I’m their first phone call is because I not only answer the phone, I answer on the first ring.  You don’t get the high paying, emergency, super-short deadline project when it takes you 30 minutes or an hour to get back to them.  By then, they’ve already called six other firms.)

That phone call may lead to six other tasks I have to do, some quickly, and others later.  Some of those tasks may require waiting (like having a call returned) during which time I might work on the article.  The extra tasks may cause the time I am spending writing the article to run into an appointment that I have scheduled, so there is a pause while I go to the meeting, and so on and so forth.

In other words, an article that took from 1:30 PM until 4:20 PM in total, may have only taken me 45 minutes to write all together.  There is no way I would ever be able to find that out without an automated time tracker.

What I like about RescueTime is that it only counts the active application as using my time.  This means I don’t get fake counts because I have Word open in the background.  Also, it stops counting automatically when I stop using my computer so that those 4 minute phone calls don’t end up falsely adding an extra 16 minutes.

But there has always been one thing that really bugs me about RescueTime.  It’s a web enabled Internet application for no reason.  (After reading Tony’s comment below, I am retracting the no reason thing.  There are good reasons.  They just aren’t the ones I have use for.) Sure, if you are collaborating with a team, or if your boss is reviewing how you spend your time, the online thing is great, but if you are a single freelancer working out of your basement office, there is no reason to be sending all that data out into cyberspace.

Sure, they have a privacy policy, and yes, they have security, but as the recent Twitter thing reminded everyone, that isn’t enough.  Besides, it is yet another, no profit, tiny revenues, free-version with a pay-version, company that could go out of business at anytime or get bought out by someone else.  If that happens, all that data may just well be the most valuable asset the company has, and investors and founders looking to get the money back could sell it easily.

Unfortunately, there is no offline, no network, local install version of RescueTime.

Today, I found ManicTime, which is, for my purposes anyway, everything that RescueTime is without the online web-based part.  ManicTime installs locally, doesn’t make me register (and give out my email address), and doesn’t make me log in so that someone, somewhere could find out exactly what I was doing every day for a week, a month, a year, or longer.

I’m still testing, but so far, so good.  It looks like RescueTime will be out and ManicTime will be in.