Many web sites today will, without doubt, run some bogus story right on cue for April Fool’s Day. I am going to remove myself from the pranks and instead just provide a few simple links which point out some pranks which have been played in the past:Google’s April Fool’s Day history Other well known pranks PCMech 2009 April Fool’s...

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,...

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...

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:...

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...

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...

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...