Windows Live Writer is without question the best blogging tool there is. It’s so good that even Mac users like it. If there were ever a killer app for blogging, Windows Live Writer is it. WLW is free and part of the Windows Live suite of applications; it can be downloaded from http://download.live.com. It will run on versions of Windows from XP to the...

Whenever you create an email or a forum post, one of the required fields is a subject which tells the readers the content of the respective message. So it is important that any replies are relevant to the subject. If you have a question or want to start a conversation on something different, start a new email or forum thread with a new subject. I notice this...

Developers and power users usually find themselves with a “hodge podge” collection of tools and utilities. If this sounds like you, then a suite you might be interested in is Gizmo Central which brings together lots of utilities into a single package, including:Advanced Themes Full VHD mounting (Dynamic, fixed, & differencing) ISO, BIN, CUE,...

Modern webmail providers like Hotmail and Gmail essentially tell you "store it and forget it", meaning to push all your email in there, don’t worry about it and it will be A-OK. Well.. whether it’s really A-OK is up for debate. Let’s say your in the situation where you’re using a mail client and want to transfer several thousand...

If you see this message, your browser doesn’t support the HTML5 video tag. Use Firefox 3.5+, Opera 10 or Google Chrome to see the video here. (If you can see the above video, rate its performance by leaving a comment below. Was the video smooth or stuttered? Was the audio clear or muffled?) One of the cooler things about HTML5 is the video tag, which...

As you know, April Fools Day is only a few days away. While this is a popular day for pranksters and web sites to publish bogus news, it is also a popular day for trojans (malware which waits for a certain condition) to launch. While the odds are your system will be fine, to make your system as ready as it can be for any “unexpected” events here are...

Unfortunately there are still some poor fools (yes, fools) out there are still using Windows 2000 at home. In the corporate environment I can understand why people use Win2k, but at home there’s just no excuse. You should be using Windows 7 or Linux at home. But I digress. Officially, Microsoft will be ending support for Windows 2000 on July 13, 2010. To...

Over the course of the weekend the not-so sweet smell of a burning circuit board started coming out of my PC, so I did what anybody else would do, I mashed the power button and shut the computer off immediately. When the choice comes between having your PC become a literal fiery mess or have a corrupted OS from an improper shutdown, which to go with is fairly...

If you ever are given a text file which you need to pretty up (for example when importing into a program/database), there are a lot of common manipulations you might need to perform. If you do not already have a tool for this job, then a handy resource is Goformat.com. With Goformat, you can perform the following actions straight from their...

For those of us who use a laptop, there is no doubt that one of the most important components is the battery. If the battery completely dies you can always plug the system into the wall to use it, but that defeats the purpose of a laptop. Therefore, it is essential to take good care of your battery and a program which can help is the appropriately named utility:...

I had the opportunity to check out the next version of Windows Live Mail, that being Wave 4, a.k.a. Build 15:…and here’s my take on it. The ribbon interface There are many that say the ribbon interface is one of the worst things Microsoft has ever done, but, the one thing the naysayers always forget to mention is that any clickable function...

Mac users who make use of VLC media player and are tired of the cone icon can easily give it a face lift with the MacRabbit VLC Makeover Kit. Setup is easy enough:Find your copy of VLC in Finder Right- or control-click it and select “Show Package Contents” Navigate to Contents > Resources Drag all the icons from the downloaded disk image to the...

An interesting article I read today titled ‘Millions continue to click on spam‘ provides some good insight into why we continue to get so much spam. This article is well worth the brief read, but here are some points of interest: Even though over 80% of email users are aware of the existence of bots, tens of millions respond to spam in ways that...

Most new laptops come shipped with an HDD from 160GB to 320GB in size. This is small compared to a new desktop, most of which ship with a 500GB HDD or greater. If you want the big-big space in your laptop, it’s available. However it’s probably true you can’t use the largest size. More on that in a moment. In the big-big range for 2.5-inch HDDs...

The need to convert text to speech is probably more common than you think. It is useful for applications such as automated systems, custom programs and sometimes is just fun to play with. With that said, if you ever have the need to do this, an application which can make this process easy is SayIt. AnalogX SayIt gives your computer a synthesized voice to rival...

For a while now it’s been true that laptops are outselling desktop computers. Netbooks are largely responsible for the increase in sales, and as such have driven the price of standard-sized laptops down. What’s the cheapest you can get? Around $400 to to $499 new. The $500 price barrier was broken a while ago and we can now buy laptops at unheard of...

We all know that Apple is pretty, shall we say, protective about the Iphone. Remember when they denied Google Voice purely because it would help competition? Similarly, Apple has never let a competing browser to Safari onto the device. Opera, however, is calling them out. Opera has submitted Opera Mini to the Apple App Store, but they did it with style. They not...

Last year, I wrote a tip regarding Penzu which is a free online journal. This differs from a blog as all entries are private by default so you can write what is on your mind without having to stuff the book under the mattress when you are done. Since my last tip, the site has added quite a fit of features including:Integration with Flickr Easily share entries...

Four months ago we were given an opportunity to preview the new design of MSN.com. I personally gave it the thumbs up because it was my opinion that the new design was modernized in all the right ways. The old design was very "Web 1.0" and I considered it good that it was ditched for something more streamlined and useful. The new MSN.com design has now...

The past week, I ran a couple of tips which pointed out ways to automatically update or notify you of updates to programs on your system. Of course, everyone has their own method of applying updates to programs on their system, so when do you install updates to applications? Do you install the new version as soon as you know when they are available? when they...