Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
Raves
How To Schedule Meetings Without Pulling Your Hair
Apr 1st
“Let’s do lunch sometime…”
“Do you want to grab some coffee soon?”
“When can we get together?”
This happens all the time. And of course, it never happens…for the majority of people you hear this from.
Here’s a neat little web app that’s good at what it does. It is simple and straight-forward. Introducing. . . Doodle.
A cute little, easy-to-remember name too!
Basically, you go to www.Doodle.com and set-up a mini “poll” where you can enter the topic, location, and then as many options as you want – with a label for the day & time. It auto-generates a neat little web-form that your friend or associate can respond to with their best options available.
What I love about Doodle.com is:
- It allows you to ask the receiver about a *more than one* potential meeting times
- It allows the receiver to input *preferences* for each time proposed that’s very easy to do. No more strings of back-up options explained in long, lengthy, sometimes confusing emails (I can do Tuesday from 1-2p and then again from 3-3:30p but if that’s doesn’t work, Wed and Thurs from 10:30-11:30, and Wed only at 4pm-5pm. . .yada yada yada)
- It’s easy and free.
You can probably see how practical this is for setting up your next meeting, group/committee session time, etc. No more hair-pulling stress going back and forth and back and forth between the team members. Hope you can find some good use for Doodle.
Try it, you’ll like it!
Here’s some more reasons why you’ll like it!
- There’s an iPhone app
- You can use doodle from within Facebook, iGoogle, and other places
- Words with Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, iCal, Lotus Notes, Y!Calendar and more.
QUESTION: What group or meeting do you think this service could help out with in the next month?
How To Sync Twitter Tweets With Facebook Status Updates
Feb 22nd
Most of my friends think I live on Facebook and Twitter because they see so many tweets and FB status updates stream across both social media platforms all day every day.
The truth of the matter is that I spend 1/2 the time they think I am on both sites. How?
I have a Facebook-Twitter application which takes anything I tweet and it automatically posts it to my Facebook status immediately. Thus, my Facebook status feed looks well populated throughout the day and week. The truth is that I may not log into Facebook for a week at a time, but it sure looks like I’m over there (another great tip is that you can both read and respond to Facebook posts outside of www.Facebook.com with TweetDeck.
Now whenever I tweet, it will automatically sync my Facebook status update with the same thing!
1) Click on GOODIES at the bottom of any page at www.twitter.com
How To Bulk Unfollow Twitter Snoozers From Your List
Feb 20th
Twittering is a way of life. Either you tweet or you don’t. There’s no half-way in between.
You can’t just log in once in a blue moon and expect others to think you’re part of the Twitterverse community. What other group would embrace you with open arms if you showed up just 3 times in 2010 for example?
Spring is around the corner and that got me thinking of Spring cleaning for my Twitter follow list. It’s time to pare down my follow list to those that I really have a real interest, connection or excuse to follow.
I found a great little web-app at http://www.untweeps.com that lets you identify who on your Twitter follow lists has NOT tweeted in __ days.
Just input the cutoff and you’re ready for a 1-click bulk unfollow.
I filtered my follow list to see who hasn’t showed up in 100 days.
Just like that, my Twitter follow list was pared down by over a 100 people for one of my Twitter accounts.
There’s other bulk unfollow tools that let you see who’s not reciprocating a follow, those that are spammy, etc. But this is the first place I think most people should go when trying to clean out their following list.
What other Twitter UNFOLLOW sites do you use to manage your lists? Please leave a comment below!
Quickest Way To Look Up Movie Listings
Feb 19th
School’s out!
Winter break is here for the kids!
A whole week or two off to fill the kids’ schedules with fun stuff to do if you’re not going away on vacation.
A trip to the movie theater is in order since there are a couple of blockbuster movies that just came out and they pass the litmus test for child-appropriate as well.
Here’s a tip to find out which movies are playing now in your area:
Google has a search built just for movie theaters and listings. You can search by zip code, but movie, or by theater. There are links to reviews as well as listings for future dates so you can plan your movie nights out this weekend.
Just go to http://www.google.com/movies and type in your zip code to start your search!
How To Bulk Submit To Social Bookmarking Sites
Oct 26th
Social media is all the rage these days.
Anyone with a website knows they should be submitting their website pages to the various social bookmarking sites to gain better visibility on the web.
But we’re also talking about a time consuming task to do the repetitive submissions to the top social bookmarking sites like: Digg.com, Propeller, Delicious, Reddit.com, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Mixx, Twitter, Furl.net, etc.
There are completely automated tools that submit in bulk, but sometimes they can be seen as spam. The next best thing to manual hand submissions one at a time is to use a semi-automated tool. . .
SocialPoster.com allows you to set-up the basics first and then go through various filtered lists of social bookmarking sites and quick-click-thru to the posting page with the main data pre-populated for you.
Here’s a video walk-through tutorial of the process of using socialposter.com:
It won’t completely eliminate the time-consuming task of manually submitting to dozens of social bookmark sites, but it certainly will shave off a decent portion of time spent on the task. Moreover, it will help you to consistently submit to the top sites using socialposter.com’s list of sites.
How To Get WiFi-N Signal Strength From WiFI-G or WiFI-B Routers
Aug 24th
Personally, I have wifi-B routers in the house. To extend the coverage, I’ve daisy-chained two of them to increase the footprint of reception. It’s really easy to use a 2nd wireless router to basically act as an extension cord. All you have to do is turn of DHCP and make it into a wireless switch (switches are different than routers, but that’s a different blog post right there).
But I still have areas of the house and backyard deck where the signal strength is a bit weak. So I’ve been monitoring prices for the latest WiFi-N routers of course. The other option is to buy an “extender” or larger antennas – but the price is about the same with option A or option B.  Since what I have set-up basically works for 90% of my needs, I’m in no rush to spend full retail for the upgrade.
I recently heard of a hack that turbo boosts your signal. Here’s an amazingly simple router hack that lets you boost your Wi-Fi signal strength (in truth, it works for 802.11N / G / B / etc) for about $0.25.
The secret is in the parabola. . . check out this video tutorial to see how to create the wifi signal extender in less than 10 minutes:
If you don’t want to risk 10 minutes of your time to make an actual antenna dish, here’s a video that shows all the steps in detail. It’s not that involved in making the wifi extender parabolic reflector from the printable template. Remember all you need is the printed template, aluminum foil, scissors and a glue stick.
Ok, now do you like what you see?
Here’s the link for the printable wifi-extender template:
QUESTION: HOW MANY WIFI DEVICES DO YOU HAVE IN YOUR HOUSE?
How To Send A Fax Via Internet For Free
Jun 25th
There’s tons of free incoming e-fax services out there.
Personally, I have been using k7.net unified messaging lately which gives me free inbound faxes and voicemail.
However when you want to SEND A FAX, that’s a completely different story. This is where the online faxing companies make their money.
TrustFax.com, efax.com, faxaway.com all charge different rates for outbound faxing capabilities – per page, per minute of transmission, monthly fees, etc.
S
ince I don’t send faxes often, the two services I use are www.faxzero.com and now www.myfax.com — as you guessed, both are free faxing services.
But one of these two internet faxing services is the clear winner. Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »
I love tech, gadgets and the web. Hope you pick-up a useful tip or two here today that helps you use technology to your advantage! Better yet, why not share your own expertise in a comment on a post today to help the other readers that land here for answers!