LANcom Technology Blog

MakeUseOf.com has a great article today about search engines that help the environment, so we thought we’d let you know about some of the best ones here on this blog.

1. Forestle – Forestle is a search engine powered by Yahoo search that uses the ad revenue generated by searches to protect endangered rainforests. The money goes to The Nature Conservancy’s adopt a acre programme and it’s estimated that by using Forestle for all your searching you could be saving about 100 square meters of rain forest a year.
   To visit the Forestle site click here.
2. Znout – Znout is powered by Google and stands for Zero Negative OUTput. Znout is CO2 neutral because it uses revenue from ads to purchase renewable energy certificates (similar to carbon credits).
   To visit Znout click here.
3. ClimateGift – ClimateGift is a search engine that allows you to choose an environmental organisation and they will then donate 50% of the ad revenue generated to that organisation. ClimateGift also allows you to personalise your homepage similar to iGoogle.
   To visit ClimateGift click here.
4. Ecocho – Ecocho is another search engine powered by Yahoo. Based in Australia Ecocho donates the money it makes from ads towards growing trees in New South Wales. They estimate that for every 1000 searches made they will grow 2 trees.
   To visit the Ecocho site click here.

To learn about more green search engines from MakeUseOf.com click here

Gmail has recently released a new feature to Gmail labs called Undo Send, which allows you to stop a message from being sent for up to 5 seconds after you have clicked the send button.

If you have ever sent an email and then realised a second later it was to the wrong person then you’ll know just how useful this feature could be.

When you have the Undo Send feature enabled this box will be displayed near the top of your screen for the first 5 seconds after you have sent a message. 

To enable Undo Send in your Gmail account:

1. Go to Settings (Top right of screen)
2. Then go to the Labs tab and scroll down till you find Undo Send and select Enable
3. Then click Save Changes

Today Microsoft released its latest internet browser, Internet Explorer 8. The final version is now available for download in 25 languages for Windows Vista, XP, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

IE8 sports a number of new features including: InPrivate Browsing, Accelerators, Web Slices, and Tab groups.

To learn more about IE8 from the Microsoft website click here.

Previous posts on this topic
Want to know what new features are coming in Internet Explorer 8?
Want to know what new features are coming in Internet Explorer 8? Part 2

Dell has just released a new laptop line called Adamo which is even thinner than the MacBook Air. The Adamo laptop has a uniform thickness of just 0.65 inch, while the Macbook Air is 0.76 inch at its thickest point.

The Adamo features a 13.4 inch HD wide screen display, a full sized laptop keyboard with backlighting, three USB ports, and has a battery life of 5+ hours. It has an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.2GHz processor, a 128GB Solid State Drive, and comes with 2GB of RAM.

To learn more about the Adamo laptop line click here.

According to Adobe there are over 500 million PDF documents on the web today, so to help you get the most out of your PDFs here’s a quick list of free online PDF tools.

1. HTML to PDF converter – This is a really quick and easy tool which can turn any webpage into a PDF. All you have to do is enter in the URL of the page and click Make PDF. To visit this site click here.

    

2. Convert PDFs – This site allows you to convert PDF files to Word, Html, or an image file. There is a small downside to this tool, when you convert a PDF to Word it results in a larger file size than a usual Word doc. To visit this site click here.

    

3. Merge PDFs - MergePDF.net allows you to merge up to 10 PDF files together. To learn more about MergePDF.net click here.

    

4. Edit PDFs – PDFvue is a site that lets you edit PDF files in a number of ways. You can add text boxes (great for filling out PDF forms), Hyperlinks, and sticky notes and then download your edited PDF. PDFvue is best for editing shorter documents because long PDFs may take awhile to load and process. To visit the PDFvue site click here. To learn how to use this tool visit the Quick Start Guide

Want to save time when using Gmail? If you use Gmail regularly then learning just a few keyboard shortcuts could save you a lot of time in the long run.

To turn on keyboard shortcuts for Gmail:

1. Click on Settings in the top right of your screen
2. Under the General settings tab go to Keyboard shortcuts and select Keyboard shortcuts on.
3. Then click Save Changes at the bottom of your screen.

Here are keyboard shortcuts for some of the most common actions

To learn even more keyboard shortcuts from Gmail support click here.

Lovely Charts is an online tool that allows you to create great looking flow charts, sitemaps, network diagrams, people diagrams and wireframes. Here are a few examples of what you can do with Lovely Charts.

So what’s great about Lovely Charts?

1. It’s free, all you need is an email address to register
2. It’s really easy to use. Click here to watch the Lovely Charts screencast, which shows you everything you need to know.
3. You can save charts online so you can add to them later or export your charts as JPEG or PNG image files.

To visit the Lovely Charts site and try it out for yourself click here.

The ‘Things to think about before you move’ report is now available for download from the LANcom Library.

This report provides a general guide of what you need to consider, from an IT point of view, before you move. It covers all the things you need to think about while choosing a future location as well as a move checklist.

To visit the LANcom Library and download this report click here.

If you would like us to send you out a free hardcopy of this report please contact Owen Redmond at OwenR@lancom.co.nz