Regular readers of this blog know that I have dropped smart phones in various water graves; twice, in the toilet (don’t ask), and once in a swimming pool, and once in Tampa Bay. In each case, I did my best to dry them out, but, alas, they died a terrible death. Now, LifeHacker informs me that I could have dried them in a bowl of rice, which, because of its ability to soak up moisture, can save wet electronics if applied soon enough. Since my accidents, I have been a lot more careful with my smartphones, so I hope I never have to try this one out. However, if it happens to you, keep this one in your pocket just in case.

Testimonial: Rice Resurrects Even the Most Soaked of Gadgets – Cellphones – Lifehacker.

Thanks to Practicing Law in the 21st Century-A Law & Technology Blog, I have been directed to www.feedly.com as a plug-in to FF. This plug-in is a great alternative to Google Reader, and combined with MC can give you flexibility in keeping track of what’s happening out there. Basically it is a place to collate all of your RSS (or similar) feeds.d

Do you (as you should) use Firefox as your browser? If so, you are perhaps used to using tabs for opening multiple windows. I’m told even Explorer does that now. Also, Adobe and my favorite Nitro PDF also use tabs to navigate between documents. Anyway, here is a potential useful tool for your Office programs to set up tabs.

I’m a confirmed WordPerfect user – it’s so much better than Word – but I understand people are forced to use Word.

Check it out: Office Tab.

Office Tab is a small add-on which will bring tabbed browsing to Microsoft Office. Generally every new word document or excel worksheet or powerpoint slide we open opens up in a new window and this occupies a lot of space on taskbar and also its hard to manage all the windows. With this application, you can open any number of tabs in the same Office application window. This makes it easy to manage multiple things you are working on at the same time.

There are some drawbacks. Even when using two screens it’s not possible to view two Word documents at the same time as it is without the tabs. However, if you are using multiple Word documents for reference or to cut and paste to other documents it works fine.

WolframAlpha.

There’s a free download which will allow you to have a widget in your Vista sidebar, or you can add to your Explorer or Firefox

For those absolutely needing an iPhone app here is an alternate – Law on My Phone.

I use PureText to copy parts of text for cut-and-pasting of small parts of a .pdf document. PureText is free. You highlight what text you want to copy and paste, click PT, and it removes all of the formatting and meta-clutter so it is easier to paste and edit into a document. Or you can take a “shot” of a part of the document and insert it as a picture.

Here is a free way to convert the whole .pdf document to a Word or .rtf file which can then be manipulated. (I stopped using Adobe a long time ago, it’s very expensive even for updates, Nitro is a cost-effective alternate to Adobe so you may also want to look into Nitro.)

PDF to Word – it’s free (currently).

Gwabbit.

gwabbit is an Add-in for Microsoft Outlook and the BlackBerry that finds, gwabs and adds contacts from your emails to your Outlook address book with a single mouse click!

Along with PureText, and CiteGenie, gwabbit add-on makes it easier when cutting and pasting certain types of information.

Recent incidents of jurors using new media during cases in civilian courtrooms in the States have led a military judge to rework instructions given to panelists in military courts-martial.

Army Col. Ted Dixon, a military judge who edits the military judges’ benchbook, said he’s not aware of any cases of a servicemember posting information on an ongoing court-martial while serving as a juror, but he’s aware of such events in the civilian world. As a result of cases like these, Dixon said he’s been working on specific language addressing networking phenomena such as Twitter and Facebook that judges would use when instructing troops who sit on court-martial panels. Fellow judges have been providing him feedback and there seems to be a general consensus, he said.

Kent Harris, Stars & Stripes, 21 June 2009.

PhoneTag is a fee based system to receive voicemails as a written email.

While on a business trip to Los Angeles in 2003, James Siminoff was out to dinner with friends. Before they could sit down, William had to sort through a 20 minute backlog of voicemails gathered during a day filled with meetings. Jesse commented to James, “Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just read your voicemail?” At the time, James was working with voice recognition technologies and had a creative idea on how to build a system that would enable people to stop listening to voicemail and READ IT. …and with that, PhoneTag was born.

A person calls and leaves a voicemail. That voicemail is transcribed and then sent, along with a .wav file, to your email.

The fee ranges from about $0.35 for each voicemail up to $30.00 for a flat rate with unlimited voicemails per month. The lower rates have a flat fee and then a cost for each individual voicemail over the flat rate mails.

For me this has value in several ways: I don’t have to use minutes calling to check my voice mail, I don’t have to spend the time calling and checking voicemail, I get a written note of the call which goes into my client notebook, and I have a more permanent record of the call which goes into the case file.

You don’t get charged if the message is “unintelligible,” and the message still gives you the phone number of the person who called.

If you are a Vonage user, Vonage has the same concept. They charge a flat 10 cents per voicemail. So far I have found PhoneTag transcriptions better than Vonage.

JetBytes

tip: Future Lawyer

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If you go to OpenWith.org you will find a host of free programs that may point you to a “reader” program that allows you to open the particular file you are having trouble with.

tip: FutureLawyer.

If you are like me and look at all of the court’s websites everyday, as well as other law related sites, it can take time just to click and open, even if you have them on your bookmarks. With one click Morning Coffee will open all the websites for you. You can do something else like check email, or go get your morning coffee, or in my case (hot) tea, and come back to read your favorite websites.

You can retrieve the plug-in, as well as other useful plug-ins, from Mozilla. Get Morning Coffee here.

You can find suitable scanners, color printers, and of course computers, which can fit within one briefcase. All you need at that point is access to the internet. Internet access in this day and age is pretty easy, even overseas, and even on military bases. The current DoD policy on thumb-drives adds some wrinkles when you need to print out documents on-base, but that’s why you have email.

Today the issue is faxes. With the advent of email, Adobe.pdf software, and similar programs, the transfer of documents is easier and generally cheaper than mail and fax. But there is still a call for you to have a way for a person to fax documents. The benefit of an email based fax “machine” is that you can receive and send faxes while traveling, so long as you can get an internet connection.

I currently use eFax Plus, they use SSL technology which means there is more safety in the transmission of documents via an email based fax. But I am thinking of changing. When I first started with eFax they were among the newest and the best. Now that may not be the case. FaxCompare has an interesting review of internet fax solutions (look at this and you’ll see why I really am thinking of changing).

Thanks to Legal Technology blog for the fax information.

Pure Text (Free-shareware). This little goodie allows you to copy text from the web, for example, and then paste to your document using your font, but without all of the formatting from the original text. If used in conjunction with WordPerfect 12 or WordPerfect X-4, with “reveal codes” set, you can save a lot of time cutting and pasting from all kinds of documents into your motion or brief. It works fine with Word, but Word is so stodgy on changing formatting.

CiteGenie (90 day trial, and then a small fee compared to value in time). This is a plug-in to Firefox, with Explorer on the way. This would be an opportune moment to shift to Firefox as your web-browser. I’m one of those who believe that any browser than Explorer is better. (Note: for those of us in Virginia who get FastCase free through the bar, CiteGenie is not yet compatible). The developer has this to say:

Cutting and pasting when doing legal research using your browser is simple. But having to construct the citation for what you pasted is not so simple. This is especially true with legal citations from sources like Westlaw. You have to stop and copy the case name separately, determine the pinpoint page numbers, and adjust the date and court name format.

So I decided to write a browser plugin that would automatically add a pinpoint citation to the text I copy and paste. Thus CiteGenie™ was born.