As of yesterday, Canadians can use Google’s Map Maker to correct and add details to places in Canada that appear on Google Maps. You can add roads, hiking paths, buildings, businesses and just about any other detail or point of interest that only a local person would know.

Map Maker brings the Wikipedia model the world of online mapping and proves once again that there is order in chaos. People in 188 other countries and regions around the world have had a chance to use Map Maker and the results are amazing. Changes are reviewed by Google staff or other people that are making updates before the general public gets to see them. Learn more about Google Mapmaker and watch timelapse videos of user contributions here.

Get mapping everyone!

Sometimes data just demand to be presented in the form of a table. Besides, there’s something pleasing about lining things up this way and that way; it seems to make whatever is in the table cells clearer and your sense of control firmer.

While creating tables in Word isn’t all that hard, it does require going up to the menu and fishing around for the right buttons to push. If all you want is a series of compartments — cells — for confining a set of thoughts in a single row, you can whip up a table right from the keyboard.

Type the plus sign + followed by a tab and then another plus sign. Repeat as many times as you like to create more cells. When you’re finished, press Return after the last plus sign and presto! a simple table appears. What you see below would create a 5 cell table, for example.

+    +    +    +    +    +

Over the years, Google doodles (adaptations of the standard Google logo) on the Google homepage have generated surprise and interest for people visiting the Google site to do a search. Doodles celebrate events, holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous people.

The concept of the doodle was born in 1998 when Google founders Larry and Sergey played with the corporate logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. A stick figure drawing was placed behind the 2nd “o” in the word, Google and the revised logo was intended as a comical message to Google users that the founders were “out of office.” While the first doodle was relatively simple, the idea of decorating the company logo to celebrate notable events generated a fair bit of interest among Google users.

A year later in 2000, Larry and Sergey asked current webmaster Dennis Hwang, an intern at the time, to produce a doodle for Bastille Day. Pleased with the result, Dennis was then appointed Google’s chief doodler and doodles became a regular occurrence on the Google homepage. (Wish I took art back in high school!)

The doodle team has created over 300 doodles for Google.com in the United States and over 700 have been designed internationally. You can see an archive of Google doodles here.

See this page for more history on the Google doodle.

“Search by Image” is an amazing new search functionality that Google now has. And to be clear, this isn’t the same as Google’s image search (i.e., searching for an image using a string of text).

Search by Image lets you find other occurrences of an image on the web, as well as all sorts of other content from the web that’s related to a specific image. For example, search using a picture of your favourite band and you will see search results that might include similar images, webpages about the band, and even sites that included the same pictures.

I used it yesterday to confirm suspicions that a website referenced by an apparent fraudster was for a non-existent firm. A search using images of the lawyers who supposedly worked at the firm showed me that the photos were stock images that actually appeared on other sites on the web.

How to search by image

Search by Image is compatible with Chrome, Firefox 3.0+, Internet Explorer 8+ and Safari 5.0+. There are four ways to search by image:

• Drag and drop: Drag and drop an image from the web or your computer into the search box on images.google.com
• Upload an image: On images.google.com, click the camera icon, then select “Upload an image.” Select the image you want to use to start your search.
• Copy and paste the URL for an image: Use this if you have an image on the web you’re curious about. Right-click the image to copy the URL. On images.google.com, click the camera icon, and “Paste image URL”.
• Right-click an image on the web: To search by image even faster, download the Chrome or Firefox extension. With the extension installed, simply right-click an image on the web to search Google with that image

.

Search by Image is optimized to work well for content that is reasonably well described on the web. For this reason, you’ll likely get more relevant results for famous landmarks or paintings than you will for your personal images.

How it works

Google uses computer vision techniques to match your image to other images in the Google Images index and additional image collections. From those matches, it generates “best guess” text description of your image, as well as finding other images that have the same content as your search image.

The results page

When you search by image, your results will look different than your normal Images or Web results page. The biggest difference is that your results can include non-image results like webpages that seem relevant to the image that you searched for. The elements of your results page will change depending on your search and on the information that’s most relevant to that search.

Remember to try Search by Image next time you want to find more about a picture or painting.

There are times when a text message gets better attention than an email. And then there are times when you’re not able to text from you phone — for example because you’re at your desk and your phone is… elsewhere. In such cases, you can use your email program to fashion the 160-character message and ship it off to your recipient’s phone.

You only have to know which service your recipient uses (because each service has its own text-as-email address), which is likely to be the case if you’re sending the message to a friend or an office-mate who has a company phone.

In Canada the details are these:

Rogers Wireless: [10-digit phone number]@pcs.rogers.com
Fido: [10-digit phone number]@fido.ca
Telus: [10-digit phone number]@msg.telus.com
Bell Mobility: [10-digit phone number]@txt.bell.ca
Kudo Mobile: [10-digit phone number]@msg.koodomobile.com
MTS: [10-digit phone number]@text.mtsmobility.com
President’s Choice: [10-digit phone number]@txt.bell.ca
Sasktel: [10-digit phone number]@sms.sasktel.com
Solo: [10-digit phone number]@txt.bell.ca
Virgin: [10-digit phone number]@vmobile.ca

And in the US this is what you need to know:

AT&T: [10-digit phone number]@txt.att.net
Qwest: [10-digit phone number]@qwestmp.com
T-Mobile: [10-digit phone number]@tmomail.net
Verizon: [10-digit phone number]@vtext.com
Sprint: [10-digit phone number]@messaging.sprintpcs.com or [10-digit phone number]@pm.sprint.com
Virgin Mobile: [10-digit phone number]@vmobl.com
Nextel: [10-digit phone number]@messaging.nextel.com
Alltel: [10-digit phone number]@message.alltel.com
Metro PCS: [10-digit phone number]@mymetropcs.com
Powertel: [10-digit phone number]@ptel.com
Suncom: [10-digit phone number]@tms.suncom.com
U.S. Cellular: [10-digit phone number]@email.uscc.net
Cingular: [10-digit phone number]@cingularme.com

Remember that you’re limited to 160 characters, so don’t clutter things up with your signature or disclaimer.

Sometimes you will get an email from a client and that will trigger the need to have an in person meeting. This requires the creation of an entry in your calendar. To save time and avoid re-entering all the information in the email, remember that you can create an appointment in your calendar by dragging the e-mail message to the taskbar Calendar icon and dropping it there. All the information from the original email will automatically be transferred to the new calendar entry – no need to retype it. Make any necessary edits and save the meeting entry. This trick works with other types of Outlook items.

Have several tips in draft, but came across (hat tip to Ben Schorr) this really great post on Yahoo’s Upgrade Your Life blog: 5 ways to make an easy-to-remember, ultra-secure password.

This is a must read. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Essential and very practical advice in this post – please read it – I guarantee you will change a bunch of your passwords.

And it closes with a good suggestion for those of us that can’t remember all our passwords: Consider using a password manager like LastPass and 1Password. With a password manager, you’ll use a master password to access the program or app, and it will auto-fill password entry fields for you as you log in around the web. Both these programs are well regarded and come in mobile and desktop versions to help you keep both your computer and phone safely locked down.

If you routinely print two or more kinds of documents, each requiring its own printer settings, you’ve probably found it frustrating to have to re-enter all the printer properties every time you change documents.

There is actually a very simple trick to avoid having to do this. Simply install the same printer two or more times, but with different names and settings.

This way, you simply select the “printer” that has the group of print settings you want each time you print.

To install a printer with new print settings in Windows, go to Start, Settings, Printers, and click the Add Printer icon. Install the printer as you would normally, inserting the driver disk if you have it. When you come to the screen where you name your printer, name it something that differentiates it from your default printer. The name should also remind you of what the special printer settings are. For example, “”HP4landscape””.

When you finish, right-click on your new printer and select Properties. Enter the special print settings for the new printer, and click OK.

Now, when you want to print using the new print settings, you can just select appropriate printer name from your program’s Print dialog box.

PIPEDA and Your Practice: A Privacy Handbook for Lawyers was launched by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at the Canadian Bar Association Canadian Legal Conference and Expo 2011. This handbook explains how the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) relates to the everyday practice of Canadian lawyers in the private sector.

PIPEDA covers the collection, use and disclosure of personal information in the course of commercial activities. Like other organizations in Canada, lawyers and law firms must comply with the requirements of applicable privacy legislation in their jurisdictions. This resource describes best practices in managing the collection, use and disclosure of personal information, responding to requests for access to personal information, and the potential application of PIPEDA. The Handbook covers practical privacy issues that arise in the course of managing a law firm and conducting litigation.

The handbook is available in PDF and HTML formats on the Privacy Commissioner’s website

Lynda.com is one of the best online technology training sites you will find. For just $25 a month, you have access to more than 1,100 online courses on just about every program you would ever want to use. Stop, rewind and replay videos as many times as you want. This is an ideal way to brush up on basic or advanced skills, or to provide help to an eager staff member who just wants to learn more. What a bargain!

• Nicholas on Software Tools for Editing
• Jamie on Software Tools for Editing
• Steve Coughlan on ‘I Hope This E-Mail Finds You Well’
• Lyn on Womxn
• Celia Chandler on Gross Negligence

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