I am sure I am not alone in hating junk mail. Not only is it a waste of paper (that I drop straight in the recycle bin) but the offers are sometimes borderline insulting. While you cannot totally eliminate junk mail, fortunately there are few things you can do to help limit the amount you get. This article on ArsTechnica titled "How to keep junk mail from...

Another online tool that web developers can use to measure site performance is the simple to use Stella. This utility, when provided a URL, measures the time it takes to fetch your DNS records, receive a response from the server and download the full page of content. Overall, this is a good indicator of how fast your site is. One nice feature about Stella is...

Once you get accustomed (or customize) the new Firefox 4 interface, one thing you may notice is the drop down arrow next to the back and forward buttons is missing. This button is very helpful because it allows you to jump back several pages at once without having to click back on each page. This function still exists in Firefox 4 via a right-click on the back...

Hard drives have become big and cheap enough that we really don’t have to worry about file storage space too much anymore. However, if you find your space is becoming sparse or like to keep your disk nice and tidy, a tool which may be helpful is the free utility, Space Sniffer. While there are lots of utilities out there which utilize the proportional...

While browsers continue to get faster and faster at rendering HTML, web developers can always help themselves by making their site optimized for speed. While there are loads of different tools and methods for performing speed tweaks, a very simple resource worth a look is Google’s Page Speed Online. Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page,...

If you have ever been to any kind of technology show or conference, you probably know that stress balls are a very popular giveaway item. However, if you find this insufficient for your stress relief needs, take it out (virtually) on your computer screen with the USB Stress Ball. The USB Stress ball is red blob that fits perfectly in your hand, whether...

If you like to keep a constant eye on key system performance metrics, what could be easier than having them visible directly in your Windows 7 taskbar? This is exactly what the open source utility Taskbar Meters does. This utility embeds icons for the standard indicators: CPU/Memory/Disk IO usage as constantly updating percentage meters alongside other entries...

Strangely, one of the features still missing from the newest release of Internet Explorer is a built-in spell checker. While you can add this functionality via toolbars or various other utilities, if you just want to get integrated spell check in IE9 then check out Speckie: Ever since Internet Explorer was created, it has lacked an essential feature; Real Time...

Amazon has offered video on demand via a rental system for a while, but now they have stepped up to offering unlimited access to their on-demand library via an Amazon Prime subscription. Prime instant videos provide unlimited, commercial-free, instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows at no additional cost with a [current price of] $79 annual Amazon...

If you use Windows Media Center to record TV shows and you want to convert your recordings to another format, check out the free utility MC-TVConverter. MC-TVConverter is a FREE (GPL) GUI (Graphical User Interface) for various commandline video converters. It’s mainly targeted to convert recordings from Microsoft Windows MediaCenter, which introduced the...

You may have seen that a lot of popular sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Hotmail are moving from using HTTPS only for their login pages to using it for their entire site. For some of these sites, it is a user configurable option right now, but ultimately it will be the default method of access over standard HTTP. So that may raise the question to you that if...

If you are a Firefox user, by now you have probably already downloaded or at least heard the latest release, version 4, is now available. There are a myriad of articles out there detailing the changes and improvements, so I am simply going to point you to a cool download visualization tool: Firefox 4 Download Stats. When you view this site, you are a seeing the...

I read an interesting article the other day on Gizmo’s Freeware regarding the undocumented Google search function, AROUND. This function allows you to specify a tolerance of words in between keywords. Usage is simple, just add this function in between your search terms: AROUND(x) [where X is the maximum number of words which can appear between your two...

If you are a Google Chrome user and find that you only need the most basic of PDF viewing capabilities, then why not use the built in PDF reader capabilities of the browser as your default viewer? If this sounds like something you want to give a whirl, take a look at this article which explains exactly how to do it. One thing to keep in mind here is, at the time...

If you are wanting to keep up with all the March Madness Tournament games or simply want to see a game which isn’t being televised in your region, just watch the live stream over the internet. Simply visit the NCAA’s March Madness On-Demand page and launch the viewer. Of course, use this responsibly. Don’t watch it from work or some other place...