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In this video, I walk through the new features of FriendFeed which where announced on 04/06/2009.  This new version, which is in beta, has completely changed the way we use FriendFeed.  When you first log in, you’ll notice the site is in real-time.  What does that mean?  It means that updates are displayed as they are posted in a constant river of information.  FriendFeed also added direct messaging, keyboard shortcuts, cross posting, and my favorite: Filters.  In this video, I show some of my favorite filters that I’ve created and their results.  I encourage you to try to the FriendFeed beta, and if you do, follow me at:  http://friendfeed.com/bwana.  Enjoy!

In this video, I give a walkthrough of Socialmedian.  For more information, read my blog post at bwana.org.

In this video, I talk about privacy, specifically privacy surrounding your email and files on your computer.  This topic was suggested by jrblaze of the Bwana.TV community.  Security is hot topic when it comes to data on your computer.  An older solution from the 90s which I used to protect my data is called PGP.  PGP was a commercial software package which had a very good reputation.  The Gnu foundation took the notion of PGP and created a free version called GnuPG.  All of the functionality found in PGP is available for you today, absolutely free.  GnuPG may be a bit intimidating on the surface if you don’t understand PKI or encryption techniques, but after a bit of education, you’ll be a semi-expert.  To utilize GnuPG for webmail, I highly recommend and demonstrate FireGPG which is a Firefox extension to sign and encrypt email messages from webmail clients.   You’ll find my public key here:   http://www.bwana.org/gpg-pubkey.txt .  Enjoy.

In this video, I talk about applying advanced formatting techniques to your email signature using Wisestamp.  Wisestamp is a Firefox plugin that currently supports webmail clients such as Hotmail, AOL Webmail, Gmail, and Yahoo.  With Wisestamp, you are empowered to embed images, bold text, italicize text, and apply web colors to your email signature.  If you use instant messenger clients and/or social networks, Wisestamp will embed these IDs in your email signature with snazzy icons next to them.  It really looks sharp.  If you use webmail, and are bored with your current signature, give Wisestamp a try.

In this video, I give an overview of Alltop.  This continues the previous conversation I had about reading news from the web without having the deal with RSS.  Alltop gathers news from various sources from around the web without the knowledge of RSS.  It is inspired by old news aggregators of the 90s that categorized web content for you rather than indexing the web. (Yahoo, Lycos, etc)  Alltop took the look of Popurls which lists multiple sites on the same page in a tabular format.  In this video, I demonstrate the new, revamped interface of Alltop and also some of the ways to utilize it to get your news fix.  Enjoy.

In this video, I discuss a must have piece of software for Mac OS X, called Fluid. (or Fluid.app)  I’ve been using Fluid for quite some time now but oddly enough, I’ve not talked about it before.  Fluid provides Site Specific Browsers (SSB) for your favorite web applications.  If you are a big user of Google Mail, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or Pandora then you could definitely benefit from Fluid.app.  Fluid also supports MenuExtra SSBs which means you can run tiny web sites from your system-wide menu bar in Mac OS X.  This is perfect for mobile versions of websites if you wish to have a quick peek at self updating information.  (Twitter, Digg, Identi.ca, etc).  You can download Fluid.app absolutely free at http://www.fluidapp.com/.  Enjoy!

In this video, I talk about the VLC media player.  I’ve been using this player for quite some time as a primary means of playing video that I download from the world wide web.  One the biggest benefits of using the VLC media player is that you don’t have to worry about video formats and codecs.  In my experience, VLC media player has done an excellent job with format and codec support right out of the box.  In this video, I demonstrate some of the new features of version 0.9.2 which includes an overhauled interface, new video filters, new audio filters, and playback support of Youtube videos.  If you have not tried VLC media player, I highly recommend you visit http://www.videolan.org and downoad it today.  It’s absolutely free for Windows, Mac OS X (UNIX), and Linux.

In this video, I talk about an exciting service that gives you great statistics for your website. The downloadable application for Windows, Mac, and Linux gives you a Star Trek like dashboard for your website visitors. Woopra is free, but it takes some time to get your website approved for the system. Once approved, you get a live view of what’s happening on your website as well as statistics and analytical information regarding visitor behavior. If you host a website on the internet, then Woopra is almost a must have, especially since it’s free! Enjoy!

In this video, I give my first impressions of the fresh, new web browser, Google Chrome.  Chrome was developed by Google in order to improve performance of web applications.  They have rewritten underlining code for javascript to improve speeds.  Apple and Mozilla are also developing similar technologies as well.  My first impressions are fairly positive.  Some nifty features that I really liked were the Task Manager which allows you to view each tab as a process, and then view its cpu, memory, and network consumption.  If you navigate to about:memory in Google Chrome, it gives you a great overview of system resources for Google Chrome AND other open browsers such as Firefox.  I have run into some problems which I kind of expected from a “beta” product.  For example, if you navigate to a youtube.com video and make it full screen, it will crash the flash plugin.  Since Google has been sensitive to browser crashes, these type of crashes won’t bring down the entire browser.  Simple refreshes will bring back flash on open tabs.  Neat.  There are a wealth of other features that are available but these are the ones that stood out to me after half a day of light usage.  Enjoy!

In this video, I talk about the popular Mac OS X software, Geektool.  It provides embedding of scripts, images, and files on your desktop.  It’s very similar to Dashboard but uses a lot less resources and is much more “geeky”.  I’ve been using Geektool for quite a while since I’m a UNIX guy at heart and love to write scripts.  Since Geektool allows you embed output of scripts, I have a weather forecast script, top cpu programs, and top memory programs right on my desktop.  Since it is Hurricane season, I have also embedded the latest tracking maps right on my desktop.  This gives me a quick view of where these storms are headed without actually navigating to various websites.  Geektool is only limited by your imagination and I highly recommend you give it a try if you run Mac OS X.  On Windows, you can do similar things with Samurize and on Linux, there’s roottail and a bunch of others that I can’t think of right now   Google is your friend!  Enjoy!