It’s popular to shorten URLs for posting to Facebook, Twitter, email, instant messengers and so on. Whether it’s ow.ly, TinyURL, bit.ly, goo.gl or whatever the shortened link is, you know one when you see it. The problem with shortened URLs is that some of them point to places where you don’t want to go, including sites that install...

For those of you who have taken the plunge on solid state drives and want to play a bit with the configurable options, take a look at the open source utility, SSD Tweaker. With all the advice online for SSD hard drives it can take hours of research and fiddling to properly setup your SSD drive. Now with this little app you can Tweak Windows 2K/XP/Vista & 7...

If you currently use Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga, WordPress or TypePad as a place where you post blog articles, all of them have the ability to post via a WYSIWYG editor within the service. Some of you may have discovered Windows Live Writer (which works with nearly every blog service that exists) and found it to be a very useful writing...

I ran into the situation recently where I had to run a wi-fi scan due to the fact some other routers near me were using a channel that was getting too choked up with traffic. On attempt to use NetStumbler with my Dell mini 10v, the software simply wouldn’t detect my wi-fi card at all. At this point I was forced to seek out an alternative. It had to be free...

Copy-pasting is probably one of the most common things any computer user does. For Windows users, whenever you copy something it stays in the clipboard for you to paste to other locations. The problem with this is when you copy something else, the clipboard gets erased to make room for the new item you copied. To overcome this limitation, take a look at the...

In 2005 I started using GPS and my first GPS device was a Garmin StreetPilot i3 (I still have it and it still works!) After that I upgraded to the StreetPilot c340, then the StreetPilot c580 and then my current nüvi 270. On a quick check of the Garmin automotive section of their site (I go by there every so often to see the newest offerings) there is not but a...

Over the weekend I was at the Wal-Mart picking up a few things and noticed over in the electronics dept. they had 2GB Sandisk USB sticks on sale. $12.88 a piece. Cheap enough as far as I’m concerned so I bought one. I had 2 purposes for buying the stick.It’s better than the 512MB I have (one can never have too much space). I wanted to try out a...

7-Zip is a file archiving application. Remember WinZIP or PKZIP? Think of 7-Zip like that. This app is not pretty but it sure is easy. In fact, it’s so easy that it sometimes confuses people. When you install it, all you have to do to create a ZIP or 7z file is just right-click a file, a selection of files or a folder, choose 7-Zip from the context menu...

JKDefrag is a file defragmentation utility for Windows. It is free and very ugly-looking but does the job very, very well. When you download this application it doesn’t get any easier as far as ease-of-use is concerned. There is nothing to install. Just double-click the JKDefrag.exe executable file and it starts doing its thing. This will surprise some...