Saturday, June 22, 2013

Save Ink, Time and MONEY with PrintWhatYouLike.com

If your office is cluttered with printed pages and you are tired of the costs and hassle of replacing ink and toner, I have a website for you! While many of us have used things such as the Firefox “Print Selection” menu option or various browser extensions, the website PrintWhatYouLike.com makes printing information from websites better than ever.

With their bookmarklet (found here), you can click and edit the content of a webpage live, right there as you view it. Print just the content you want and eliminate colorful logos and images that you don’t need to save. The site also offers a Chrome extension, that is a little faster than the browser bookmarklet in some ways, but otherwise this is a great tool for saving money (and space) with your website printouts.

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Another great use of PrintWhatYouLike.com: removing ads from your printed pages, and if you do the free signup process, you can track how much money you’ve saved in ink, copy sets of changes from one page to others, and clip together snippets of multiple sites into a single document for printing.

This is a two-thumbs-up website, I urge you to check them out if printing is something you regularly do!

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Another Website - SolveYourTech

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This is a handy site for interesting solutions to tech problems. Give it a look-see and let me know your favorite articles!

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Want to Move Your Delicious.com Bookmarks to Google?

Greetings Techies,

I’ve used delicious.com so long that I managed to get my first name as the URL. Since then, Delicious was bought by Yahoo and undergone several cycles of transformations.

With Google bookmarks, you can copy all of your old Delicious bookmarks to somewhere that is more likely to stay in place.

You can import Delicious bookmarks to Google using this link.

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Monday, June 3, 2013

Tech Education on the Cheap - Free Courses Online

UPDATE: someone sent me this link http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-to-quickly-improve-your-technical-skills-without-spending-a-dime/ - it is a fantastic resource - thank you anonymous!

If you want a career in technology, especially one that pays very well, you’ll often hear how important a college education is. Let me explain what a fallacy that is.

First, most people with college degrees in technology have been trained by professors who haven’t dealt with current coding platforms in a long time. When I was in college they were still teaching Fortran and similar languages that you almost never see in a job listing. The only remotely useful language courses were COBOL, macro assembler and compiler design, but even those courses were more about learning processes for designing applications than anything else. Many computer science undergraduate programs don’t even require a compiler design course set. If you can’t write something to parse and tokenize instructions into machine language, you probably aren’t going to understand many aspects of writing tight code.

Now, taking that complaining to another level, the cost of an education at even a state college is ridiculous now. You’re likely to owe more money for your degree than you’ll earn in your first year out of college. On the other hand, if you had been programming for a few years (during high school) in even the crappy languages that many in the industry like to mock like Visual Basic and got a basic introduction to SQL or even Crystal Reports, you could be in the workforce earning $30/hour in just about any major city in the country.

It’s because of these things that I highly recommend people use books and online courses to learn tech skills.

I often hear things from people like, “but I can’t really learn on my own from books…” -- guess what, if you can’t manage your time well on your own and are unable to motivate yourself to learn, I definitely would never hire you for a job, ever. If you go to a bootcamp to get certified as a developer in anything outside of Oracle, I’m not interested, and neither are most employers. At the same time, if you go to interview for a job and they won’t give you a shot if you can demonstrate your knowledge (most contracting/consulting companies use test software to see how much you know), you shouldn’t work for those companies. Any company that is more concerned with you fitting into a special slot with specific rules about what degree you have is likely too large to move with the times and is probably full of idiots. Here are some examples of idiot management teams: a large hotel chain I once worked for used to require degrees for low-level management positions in the hotel part of the business. Of course in the tech side, we did our own hiring and got the best of the best based on skills, not paper. You could see the difference in results. More time was spent explaining basic tech concepts to the degreed VPs in the hotel chain than developing code and as a result, the company slowly (but surely) failed in many ways. Another company with a similar policy was a large financial services business and another was a large retailer that at one time was the largest in the USA.

So, do yourself a favor - learn to manage your time wisely. Develop the necessary skills to learn on your own. I’m going to list some great training sites and preferred skills that can be useful in almost any high paying job in the technology sector. Don’t be afraid to try a training course and fail.

  • Codecademy is a place to start if you want to become a software developer
  • coursera is a great site with training in areas including, but not limited to, technology
  • Labnol has a ton of “How-to Guides” that are short and easy to follow. A perfect place to pick up essential skills, with topics covering the Internet, using your computer and all aspects of technology
  • Coda 2, a fantastic tool for developing websites on Macs offers online books for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP.
  • The OpenCourseWare Consortium is another great place with tons of courses in many subjects.
  • SQLCourse.com is great if you want to learn the most useful database language of them all.

Please share your favorites in the comments below.

A few final words:

Avoid private tech schools and bootcamps except for Oracle-certification ones. This is because the Oracle requirements to operate a bootcamp are detailed and exhaustive so you will benefit from the training. Those of us in the business who have to hire people for tech work or consult with others who do generally dislike the quick training programs for MCSD or other similar Microsoft certifications. The bootcamps generally promise the people who spend big money to go through the courses in terms of the skills they will gain and the money they will earn. Also horrible: certain highly advertised colleges, universities and “institutes” that charge as much as $50,000 for their 2-year programs. The training is inferior at best and mostly useless at worst. You are better off going to a local public trade school than one of these overpriced scam schools that leave you in debt without any distinguishing skills for a career in game design or video editing (hint hint, I think you know which places I mean). Also useless: those local tech schools that somehow qualify for government-based financial aid.

Want to learn something really useful? Go for SQL. It’s applicable to most database platforms with slight variations in syntax. A free programming language called LiveCode is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.