Megabytes

Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine has been upgraded and now includes the internet. Do you remember the cartoon, Peabody and Sherman from the 1960s? In it, a dog named Mr. Peabody and his pet boy, Sherman, traveled throughout history helping major historical events turn out as history books tell us they did. They used one of Mr. Peabody’s inventions, The Wayback Machine.
Fast-forward to 1996, when The Internet Archive was founded to build an Internet library. Librarians are behind the idea of preserving society’s cultural artifacts and providing access to them. Civilization needs memory archives to learn from its successes and failures. The Internet Archive focuses on collections of digital artifacts, including texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages.
My friend and Virtual Assistant, Shane B. told me about The Wayback Machine, as the Internet Archive is called. As you might guess, many web developers and administrative assistants use the archive to look up an old web page. Perhaps your website has undergone 2-3 redesigns in its internet life. Travel back with the Wayback Machine and view its different looks. Or perhaps you want some important data that was removed from one of your web pages. You could find it here.

Just for fun, go to the Wayback Machine and type in “google.com” . Then, click on the very first entry, dated Nov 11, 1998. Wow! Google in Beta!

What could be better than recycling old cell phones? Why, reusing them, of course! Many non-profit organizations are part of a program that pays them for cell phones that are recycled in their name. But wouldn’t it be great if someone else could get some use out of our old phones? After all, it takes a lot of energy to bust up the old phone and sort out the reusable components; plastics and metals.
In my home town of Portland, Oregon, the Women’s Crisis Line accepts your donation of old cell phones. They distribute them to survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Survivors are able to use these cell phones to call 911, allowing immediate help at the touch of a button.
Your city’s domestic violence shelter may have a program like this, too. If not, consider a Senior Center for similar reuse program.
When you upgrade to the latest and greatest cell phone, remember that your “old” phone can still be put to good use.

I was cleaning out one of our “everything-we-don’t-know-what-to-do-with” drawers the other day. We have a lot of unused electronics lying around. CLock radios, film cameras, and cell phones.

Mobile phone manufacturer, Nokia, knows that people would like an easy way to deal with their old phones. More than just an easy way, an environmentally-friendly way; like recycling.

At their website, you can print out a postage-paid label and ship your retired mobile unit to one of their recycling plants. Taking up a bit of room in that “everything” drawer were two different Nokia phones, their handsfree earphones, their chargers, and one owners manual. I’m shipping it all back to Nokia - free of charge.

You are surfing the web one evening, catching up on your blog reading perhaps, when you come across a beautiful image. And you think to yourself, “This image would be perfect to demonstrate my new marketing plan on my company website.” Then you do a simple control-click on the image to save it to your hard drive. So far, no harm done.
But once you take that image and insert it onto a page of your company’s website; if you haven’t gotten permission from the creator of the image; you have broken the law.

This happens more than you may realize, primarily because it is so easy to do. Technology allows us to “grab” imagery and other content from web pages. There is no harm in taking an image from someone’s web page and playing with it in a program like Photoshop – on your own computer.

Copyright protects creative work such as writing, music, photographs, and paintings. If you want to use that beautiful image to visually denote your new marketing plan, obtain permission from the image creator. Even if you attribute the image to its creator, if you publish work on your site without the creator’s permission, you may be held liable for copyright infringement.

Using an email program, technology also allows us to communicate easily and quickly with another person, whether they live on the next street over, or the next continent over. So, protect yourself and ask permission.

Colorzilla is a great little add-on to Firefox that provides color information for the web page you are viewing. It includes an eyedropper and color picker, and now with version 2, the Webpage DOM Color Analyzer and Online Palette Viewer.
Both of these are useful additions to an already handy web developer tool. Quickly find out the hex color code for a particular item on a page. With the Color Analyzer you can find out what CSS rules specify a given color. The Online Palette Viewer allows you to create a color palette based on the colors of the web page.
Here you see the Color Analysis for my blog, Megabytes. When you hover over any color square in the palette at the bottom of the screen, the tool tip provides both RBG and HEX color info. Further, the item(s) on the page which use this color, are highlighted. Click on a color square to see the CSS rules that specify that color.

I recommend installing Alex Sirota’s Colorzilla into Firefox. Oh, and using Firefox - well, that’s a given!