Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
Archive for June, 2008
When Doubling Your Microsoft Outlook Email Is A Good Thing
Jun 25th
Do you remember the first time you figured out the internet and got a new email address?
And everytime you checked your inbox, you wished someone sent you some email? Nowadays, it’s the exact opposite. No one I know want more email than they are currently receiving. Forget about SPAM, there’s just too much email going back and forth with varying degrees of importance.Every email header takes up the same amount of space on the screen and you need to spend the same amount of time with each to figure out if it’s SPAM, urgent, non-urgent, completely useless, one of those “REPLY ALL”s that the same people keep sending, etc.
But there’s actually once case where you really want to double your email inbox – exactly double it. Read the rest of this entry »
Imagine If You Could Read 500 Books Every Year
Jun 24th
I just recently read (in The Read Aloud Handbook) the fact that 60% of our adult population in the US doesn’t pick up a single book all year, every year. Less than 40% of adults read a single book in a given year.
Can you believe that 10% of the population reads 80% of the books read…Talk about Pareto Principle in action!
Knowledge is power. And if you can get ahead of 60% of your peers and competitors by gaining the knowledge from some of the best books published each year, then wouldn’t you?
Ah….you don’t have time! Well how about skipping a lot of the fluff in these great books and getting to the core message? Wouldn’t you love to do that? Think Cliff’s Notes for adults. Read the rest of this entry »
60 Hours of WiFi for $1.65/month from Starbucks & AT&T Internet
Jun 17th
Starbucks closed it’s doors the other month nationwide to tinker with it’s classic services and make sure you get a better java house experience every time you walk into their stores.
This month, they’re rolling out one of the details in making sure that happens.
Starbucks has ditched T-Mobile WiFi HotSpot services in exchange for AT&T Internet WiFi services. In fact, most Starbucks in the area have switched over to ATT WiFi already.
Before, you had to pay $20/month for WiFi at Starbucks. But with the “new and improved Starbucks”, this is no longer that case! Here’s the details. . .
Super Tip For Creating Safe + Memorable Passwords for Online Accounts
Jun 16th
It’s amazing how much of our life is online these days.
We have access to so many critical accounts at the touch of our fingertips — but that also means that they can be at the touch of someone else’s fingertips if you are not careful!
Recently, I had my eBay account password compromised somehow. Even though I am pretty careful about phishing schemes, they got me somehow. So I had to reset my account password and grab control of my account again.
That got me thinking about how many different login’s I have with the same password.
Although I use a couple of different passwords that are pretty unique (not the usual passwords using names, or birthdates or anniversaries, etc), I realized that if one of my important account passwords were discovered, they could semi-easily get into several other accounts if they knew where to try.
Do you have the same online login user id + password combination for multiple websites? Like your bank, PayPal, eBay, Gmail or Y!Mail, etc, etc?
Here’s a great tip for creating unique passwords for each and every site you use in a way where you won’t have to keep using tons of post-it notes to remember them all.
Seeing Is Believing
Jun 14th
Computers are a fact of life. They are everywhere and used by everyone…
For example, even my daughter learned how to Shut Down Windows when she was in pre-school and 3 1/2…
Nowadays, you run into situations where you wish you could show someone you know what you’re looking at on your computer screen.
Perhaps this is especially true when you’re trying to troubleshoot some problem that keeps arising, and you just know that your geeky friend can fix it in seconds — only if he saw it first hand since you just cannot describe it in words well enough to get the quick fix secrets.
Introducing live desktop sharing. Long available to IT chipheads and business webcasts/web collaboration from huge companies like WebEx, this quite useful feature is now available to the masses….for free too.
Now, you can instantly and painlessly let someone else see your computer screen as if they had a long monitor cord to your PC connected through the internet. You can let them see what you’re doing on your monitor and they can watch everything that happens.
What To Expect When Traveling To The China Olympic Games This Summer
Jun 3rd
For some of us, travel is a BIG deal. We don’t travel that often and when you do it’s a treat.
For others, it’s no big deal. Air travel is as mundane as taking a taxi across town. The lines, the wait, the layovers, baggage claim, etc. It’s not something to really get hyped up about.
The real excitement is from the actual destination and experiences you have when you get there. Travel used to be a big black box. You’d plan your trip, and read-up on facts about the places you visit to help you survive when you get there – like local currency, food, religion, customs, whether they drive on the left or right side of the road, etc. But nothing you learned pre-trip came anywhere close to the actual experience when you got there.
When paying $3,000+ roundtrip on economy class airfare just to get to the Olympic Games in Beijing China this summer, plus hotels, plus cabs, plus food, plus souviners, etc, you kind of want to know if it’s worth it before you put down that trusty American Express card for the tickets and reservations.
Today, technology and the internet has changed everything relating to travel. You don’t have to deal with people when buying your tickets and plans, and at the same time you can tap the billions of people connected online to really know what you’re getting yourself into before you leave for the airport.
For example, if you have these romantic dreams of visiting China for the Summer Olympics starting on 08/08/08 at 8pm (yes, that’s right), then perhaps you should just check to see if your vision is close to reality. Are you expecting a city that’s hustling and bustling with energy? A place where the billion Chinese hold the future? Are looking to experience the “orient” and culture of the Asian continent?
But what if you found out that the “sometimes crowded beaches” actually looks like this. . . Read the rest of this entry »