Every so often retailers run specials where they give away something for one reason or another. For example, Starbucks gave away a free coffee on election day to those who voted. It is hard to keep up with these giveaways as usually you only hear about them through the grapevine. So to take a break from the norm, I thought I would pass along an article which...

As you probably know, Facebook has been in the news recently being hammered for their apparent lack of concern regarding user privacy. While Facebook is responding to these issues, it raises the question: would you use a Facebook alternative where your data is controlled by you? Such a task is the goal of an in-progress open source project named Diaspora. The...

As a way to make pages load quicker in your browser, many sites utilize a paging method (next/previous page, jump to page X, etc.). This makes sense from both a server side (decreased bandwidth usage) and the client side (increase load time), but it requires user intervention to load the next page. Firefox users who want to have this content automatically...

Something I do quite a bit is email links to interesting articles I come across to people I think would find it interesting. While you can manually copy and paste the URL and paste it into an email, I use the built in browser function:Firefox: Right click on the page and select “Send Link”. Internet Explorer: From the Page menu, select “Send...

If your browser of choice is Internet Explorer 8 and you use Gmail as your email client, it makes sense to integrate the two. Using the Gmail Accelerator, a new option is added when you right click on links and/or highlighted text which reads “Send to Gmail”. This function does exactly what you would expect:Creates a new Gmail message Sets the...

If you run a website and have to tweak DNS records every now and then, you probably know that the changes can take up to several days to go through the entire internet. While this can be inconvenient, it is especially annoying if you want the changes to go through for you immediately. If you are using OpenDNS, you can force this change to go through almost...

One thing I have been pleasantly surprised with lately when the need to contact support for one thing or another comes up, is the usefulness of the “live chat” with a support rep. I have used both Dell and our business ISP’s several times and been able to quickly resolve my issues. The wait time is usually only a few minutes and you don’t...

Gmail users utilizing the web interface who would like to give their interface a new look each day should play around with the Themes available in the settings. While this is not a new feature of Gmail, applying a theme other than one of the simple “color only” ones usually changes quite regularly. For example, I am currently using the Planets theme...

Yesterday I wrote about an new Sysinternal’s tool, so it is only fitting that today I write about a new tool released by Nirsoft, RouterPassView: Most modern routers allow you to backup the configuration of the router into a file, and then restore the configuration from the file when it’s needed. The backup file of the router usually contains...

It is no secret that I absolute love the Windows Sysinternals tools which give you great insight into the operating system. This week another tool was added to the suite which breaks down physical RAM usage, RAMMap: Have you ever wondered exactly how Windows is assigning physical memory, how much file data is cached in RAM, or how much RAM is used by the kernel...