Chances are your phone is set up to not accept calls that do not have caller ID. But every so often you get a call from a number from an area code you’ve never seen before. Of course, you don’t answer it, but you’re left wondering, "Who was that?"

Most of the time it’s a marketing call, but it is important to find out who called so you can contact the appropriate people to opt out of the marketing.

There are two sites you can use to get this information, 800Notes and whocalled.us.

I find 800Notes to be the better of the two.

To note, if you want to submit a report of your own for one of these odd calls, type in the number at the top and fill out the comment form at the bottom. No registration is required.

Everyone hates unsolicited phone calls. Simply put, they are to the telephone as spam is to email. With upfront appologies to any readers who may be telemarketers, they are extremely annoying and a complete waste of time and besides that, who actually buys anything from an unsolicited call?

To combat the never ending barage of calls, we now have the National Do Not Call Registry (in the US at least). You probably already know about it, you submit your number it is off limits to telemarketers who are required by law to honor your request. The only thing is registration is not permanent, you have to re-register your number every year.

So this tip is just a reminder to resubscribe your number in the event your registration is expired. After all, you don’t want to start getting any more calls do you?

Unless you use your dial-up modem for faxing or internet you probably don’t have much use for it. However there are some good software titles to make it useful again.

PhoneTray is a product (and yes there’s a free version on that site) that will show Caller ID and also has the ability to "zap" telemarketer calls as well.

Telemarketing blocker more or less does the same job as PhoneTray does.

Using Windows Vista? Not to worry, there’s Vista Caller-ID software – and it’s free.

For those of you out there that don’t have a dial-up modem but are interested in using it per the methods above, there are USB 2.0 compliant hardware modems you can purchase like this one (and you’ll be amazed at how small they are).