Whether you consider yourself a computer novice or an IT professional, chances are that your parents have asked you to help with a computer problem at some point. It makes perfect sense, your parents shouldn’t be spending money on costly (and often horrendously inefficient) computer technicians when you know perfectly well yourself how to set up the internet or make that Word document cooperate.
The downside, of course, is that you’re constantly on call…and even more frustrating is that while fixing a problem may be simple for you, it grows much more complicated when you need to relay instructions through another person.
Fortunately, there’s a way to skip having to describe when to left-click and when to right-click (while not being able to see the screen yourself) and that solution is LogMeIn.
Continue reading ‘LogMeIn: Fix Your Parents’ Computers’
Want to see how popular your last name is around the world? This handy site lets you type in your last name, and it’ll show you how many people per million have the same last name in each country around the world, it’s fun for a little bit but worth checking out.
http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames/Main.aspx
Want to do a more advanced name search? Forget just googling someone’s name, try Pipl. It’s a search engine specifically for people that goes beyond Facebook and Google to give you more comprehensive results.
http://pipl.com/
There was a fair bit of interest in the post on flourescent bulbs, so I thought I’d mention a couple other easy ways to Go Green. Not only does this help the environment, but it saves you quite a bit of money as well.
Continue reading ‘Top 5 Ways To Be Green (and save money doing it)’
Over the past year or two, there’s been a shift in how people find TV Shows and Movies to watch on their computer. Typically, downloading through torrents or file sharing programs was the preferred option. However, besides the legal risks, this was also a pretty slow process.
Recently however, the shift has been to watching such movies via websites that stream the content. With this method, you don’t need to download anything and you can start watching your content immediately.
Here are some of my favorite websites for viewing television shows or movies online:
Continue reading ‘Best Websites for TV Shows & Movies’
By simply using your computer over time it will begin to slow down. You will install/uninstall programs and, as time passes, the left behind fragments will start to add up. Whether it is just a slight slowdown, a dramatic loss of performance, or even just errors when trying to do certain things on your computer, it can be quite annoying.
Fortunately, there’s a free (naturally) application that I use to help me fix all those problems.
Continue reading ‘How To: Keep Your Computer Running Smoothly’
Over the past few years, the movement to go “green” has dramatically spread. While this cause decidedly makes sense from a long-term global perspective, it also makes immediate financial sense as well. One quick example, is switching from your standard light bulbs to energy-saving bulbs.
For example, lets say you use three 75-watt light bulbs and live in Washington, DC. By simply switching those three bulbs over you would save, over the life of your new bulbs, $91.02 AND prevent 1,484 pounds of CO2.
Curious to see how much you could save by switching? Try it out yourself with a bulb savings calculator.
Have you ever wondered if there is an easier way to find discounts for online purchases? Well fortunately, there is! Instead of browsing through pages of clearance items, or just purchasing items at face value, there are some secret tools that let you browse websites like Amazon for discounts.
Here’s how it works, all you do is enter a category (such as Electronics) and then a range for the discounts (such as discounted from 50%-99%) off. You can also enter specific keywords. Hit search, and see what comes up!
In the above example, it came up with items such as a $12 2GB Flashdrive, a $150 mobile GPS Navigator, etc…
Check it out yourself at http://deallocker.com/tool/secret-amazon-discount/
Google Maps has just added a new (beta) option to change your directions from driving to walking. After entering your starting and ending points, you can now click a button that changes them to walking directions. It’ll cool to see how they expand this feature in the future. It appears that they estimate your walking speed per mile at 19 minutes.
gMaps also added a relatively scary warning telling you to “use caution when walking in unfamilar areas” but we’ll see how long that stays there.
Facebook is planning on launching its new design within the next week. Some of you will get to see it before others as they slowly roll it out. However, you can all check out how your profile will look in advance.
First, log into facebook normally. Then, in the address bar, type http://www.new.facebook.com/ exactly like it looks and hit enter.
What do you think? Personally, I think it looks great…the new wall will take a bit to get used to but makes more sense. This is going to be rough for the spread of applications as not too many people are going to check out the “boxes” page every time but maybe that’s a good thing.
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