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Welcome to June's newsletter.
Some useful websites and programs!
This month I would like to share a number of free applications and some interesting websites.
Telefonica's Free Answer Phone - How To Use It
AVG 8.0 Anti Virus & Adaware 2008
Portable Applications
Outlook Mail Add-on and Lifehacker
Clusty - New Search Engine
But before I get into those I thought it might be helpful to explain how to use the Telefonica answer service and how to change it to English. Also, how to retrieve your messages when you are away.
Telefonica's Answer phone
Anyone with a Telefonica phone line will have a free answer phone but not everyone will know how to use it or get the most out of it. Your messages are stored by Telefonica (not on your phone) so you need to Telefonica to retrieve your messages.
To retrieve your messages, simply lift the handset and listen to the dial tone until it stops. You will then hear a woman's voice telling you all about your messages so let's first change her to English:
- Lift hand set and wait (or press Mensajes if you have the big Telefonica phone)
- After the message ends press 1
- After the next message ends press 4
- Now enter the PIN code (default 0000)
- After the next message ends press 3
- After the next message ends press 1
- After the next message press 1 to confirm and hang up
You now have an English answer phone and if you listen to the messages you will know how to use it.
One last point, if you dial " *92# " it will tell you the number of the last person who dialled just like 1571 back in the UK.
Finally, If the default PIN of 0000 doesn’t work you will need to phone the helpline number 1004 and ask the operator to reset the PIN. This can happen if you have taken the line over from the previous owner and they set the PIN to something other than the default.
To hear your messages when you are away:
1. When the welcome message ends press *
2. Enter your PIN
AVG 8 and Adaware 2008
AVG is a free anti-virus tool that I recommend and a new version has been released:
AVG 8 Download Follow this link to download the latest version.
 Similarly, Adware has brought out the latest version of its free anti-adware program Ad-aware 2008: ad_aware_free. Again, follow the link to download it.
For other free software see my Malware Protection page.
Carry your Software on your Memory Stick
www.portableapps.com
This is a nice little application that you might like to try if you often find yourself away from your computer and wanting to run your own programmes configured the way you like.
Convenient
Now you can carry your favourite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer. All this without leaving any personal data behind on the new computer.
Open
PortableApps.com provides a truly open platform that works with any hardware you like (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc). It's open source built around an open format that any hardware vendor or software developer can use.
Free
The Portable Apps Suite™ is free. It contains no spyware. There are no advertisements. It isn't a limited or trial version. There is no additional hardware or software to buy. You don't even have to give out your email address. It's 100% free to use, free to copy and free to share.
Two Sites in One: Great Site with a link to a great add-on for Outlook
If you follow this link to LifeHacker - xobni it takes you to a page describing a great add-on to help you work with your emails in Outlook.
Microsoft Outlook plug-in Xobni (pronounced "zob-nee") is now available to the public for immediate download. Previously in invite-only beta, Xobni adds email analytics, better contact cards, fast search, threaded conversations, and more to your Outlook inbox. The NY Times explains one way Xobni makes your inbox more of a social network of connected contacts:
Xobni recognizes that if an executive sends a copy to someone else on each message he or she sends, it might be to an assistant or another colleague. When someone using Xobni searches for that executive in Outlook, the second person is listed as well.
I have found this invaluable over the last few months and thought I ought to share it with you all. I recently received a call from a client who I had visited it some months ago and they were amazed at my power of recall when I almost instantly remembered the details of their computer and its problems. Well, the secret's out: no memory - just Xobni!
While you are on the Life Hacker site, have a look around and I'm sure you'll want to bookmark it (save as favourite in Internet explorer). This site has been featured a couple of times on the BBC Click program.
Clusty - A New Concept in Search Engines
www.clusty.com
Clusty is a whole new way to search the web.
Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This "metasearch" approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom.
But what really makes Clusty unique is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, our search engine groups similar results together into clusters. Clusters help you see your search results by topic so you can zero in on exactly what you’re looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items. When was the last time you went to the third or fourth page of the search results? Rather than scrolling through page after page, the clusters help you find results you may have missed or that were buried deep in the ranked list.
And with a name like Clusty, it’s gotta be good!
Final Word
As always, I encourage anyone with a comment, suggestion, question, idea, criticism or inspiration to contact me at
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.
Please also see The Inland Magazine Computer Problems Forum if you have a specific IT problem.
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