Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service?  Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress. These are the opening lines from a Library of Congress Blog post. We have all heard stories of how people doing not so smart things and sharing them with the world have had repercussions,...

Many people like to use mouse gestures as shortcuts for performing common browser tasks such as the back or refresh functions. So for those of you who want to shortcut your URL keystrokes, check out the Firefox add-on URL Alias. Using this add-on, you can provide a few keystrokes as a way to ‘fill in the blanks’ on a template URL. Their download page...

A common tool that network and system admins make use of is the “ping” command which is a very simple and effective way to verify a machine is available on the network (firewall rules depending of course). So if you find yourself having to ping multiple machines at once, a very useful tool is Nirsoft’s PingInfoView. PingInfoView is a small...

Unless you record demo/training material often, most likely you do not have a screen recording program. Note that this is different than a simple screenshot program as your actions and audio are captured and then embedded into a video file. If you ever have the need for something like this, then check out ScreenToaster which offers:Register & use it...

Have you ever ordered something from Amazon which totals $23 with the shipping charges tacking on another $5? Since Amazon gives free shipping on orders $25 and over, you are actually better off here ordering an item under the shipping amount and getting the free shipping (plus the extra item). In a recent post I read on Lifehacker, a tool which makes this easy...

For those of you who make use of Skype’s ability to make and receive calls to/from any phone (via your Skype Online Number), a feature which had been missing for far too long is now available: caller ID. Previously, whenever you would call from your Skype number, a random phone number would appear on the recipients caller ID instead of your Skype Online...

Over the weekend, I saw a pretty interesting article regarding building your own Home Theater PC (HTPC) which is virtually silent. So how quiet is the Phantom? 20 dB or less typically, but if that means nothing to you, put a different way, sitting on the couch 6 feet away, its probably less audible than the person next to you breathing. The article details all...

Have you ever opened a file, made changes and then instead of selecting “Save As” you hit Ctrl+S or select “Save” and your changes are lost? Admittedly, I have done this several times. Thankfully, there is a simple trick which works most the time: the undo function. After saving over the existing file, first you save the document in...

You may have seen a recent news blurp that President Obama’s Twitter account was recently hacked. This was accomplished by the “hacker” guessing the forgot password questions. If you think about it, these questions are usually “what is your favorite food?”, “what street did you grow up on?”, “what was your high...

Everyone knows what a phone book and web search engine are, but if you were to combine them, you would end up with something like Spokeo: Spokeo is a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books, social networks, marketing lists, business sites, and other public sources. Most of this data is publicly available on the...