As some of you may have experienced, sending mail from your email program might not work when you are using public WiFi networking hot spots, such as those in hotels or coffee shops. This is usually due to port restrictions on the network, put in place to prevent anonymous users from using the network to send SPAM or attack other network systems.

Unfortunately, sending and replying to mail is often one of the most-used features when you are on the road. So what are you to do? You could always use the web mail access provided by most ISPs or use web-based services such as Gmail or Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail.com). Of course, this can be cumbersome when you simply want to reply to email you receive.

So, in my own laptop setup, I have done the following:

• Set up a free Gmail account
• Configure a new email account in your email program
• For this new account, set the Reply-To address to your standard email account, i.e. me@mydomain.com

Now, when I am confronted with an error when I try to send mail, I can change the outgoing email account to my Gmail account and, since Gmail uses different, usually unblocked ports, the mail will be sent. Also, by setting the Reply-To address, any replies will automatically be re-directed back to my standard email account. This allows me to work in my normal fashion, even when the local network puts roadblocks in my way.

Gmail recently added IMAP services to their offering, so now it is even easier to send and receive email while you are on the road.
For more great information on Gmail, check out fellow Friends in Tech member, The Gmail Podcast, hosted by Chuck Tomasi.

As you may, or may not, know, one of the things we try to do with the Friends in Tech site is highlight not just the techie aspects of our members through their various podcasts and blogs, but also showcase them as regular people as well. People with a variety of interests, hobbies, and projects that are not part of the normal FiT world.

In that regard, over the next few weeks, or months as time allows, we’re going to be putting together some “mashups”. Basically, these are mashed together RSS feeds of other online projects that we are involved in that you can subscribe to and keep track of what the various Friends in Tech members are doing in one place. The first of these is FiT Photography.

FiT Photography was an obvious choice for the first of these projects because so many of us have an interest in photography. Most of us have Flickr or Zoomr accounts, if not a seperate photo blog, to use as part of the mashup, and thus it was just a matter of finding a good mashup tool, and putting them all together.

The tool I used to create the aggregate feed was xFruits. It is a very powerful tool for doing a lot of different things with RSS feeds, I highly recommend checking it out. Then I am routing that finished product through FeedBurner, which gives us even more power to use the feed in a variety of ways, if we decide to, or to gauge what sort of interest there is in the topic, which will help us decide what more we might want to do with it going forward.
Anyway, if you’re interested in subscribing to the feed, you can locate it here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/FitPhotography

When you are as much of a bibliophile as my family, it can be a trial to manage all the books you have checked out and those you have on hold, waiting to be delivered to your local library. Add to this a spouse who is engaged in the final stages of a Ph.D and you have the makings of an organizational nightmare. This is what makes it such a lucky chance that I discovered Library Elf a year or so ago.

Library Elf, in cooperation with hundreds of libraries across the US, Canada Australia, New Zealand and the UK, allows you to collect information for each card you manage and combine it into one, easy-to-use, interface. If your library is included in their list of compatible library systems, you can enter your library card numbers and login information. Then, regardless of the online services your library provides, you gain automated web and email notifications of due dates and books on hold. Library Elf also provides RSS feeds, if you prefer to receive your notifications that way.

If you have a family-full of library accounts to manage, Library Elf can help to make your life a bit easier and also save you some money on late fees.