Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
Free Screen Capture Software That Clicks With Me
Jul 11th
More and more, I’m find the necessity to create screen capture images of my desktop or a portion of a browser window more and more.
Typically, I’ve used the actual “Prt Sc” Print Screen button or the SHIFT+ALT+PRT SC combo to capture just the active window. This puts the screen grab into the clipboard memory.
From there, it’s an easy paste into MS Paint to resize or annotate with arrows, callout boxes, etc before saving it as “screen-URLorPROGRAMNAME.jpg” to use elsewhere – on blogs, twitpic, email, etc.
I’ve used a couple of Windows screen capture apps but none does what I want without cluttering my icon tray and hogging up resources. Recently, I’ve been testing out browser-based apps that do pretty much all I need. . .
One of them is called FireShot Pro and I used it with FireFox:
It’s been an easy-to-use screen capture program that works as a live browser plugin. The free version does most of what I need and even does Read the rest of this entry »
DEAL ALERT: Free Custom URL Registration + Email Account
May 26th
You know you should get a custom website address and email account.
Stop letting Gmail and Yahoo!Mail take over your identity.
It’s time you buy your own URL and then start using that for your email correspondence . . . For $0.00!
The world’s largest webhost, 1and1 Internet is giving away free URL registrations (worth about $8-10) for the first year. And included in their URL service is free 2GB email accounts.
Even if you “buy” a new domain for $0.00 and then transfer after the waiting period to your own webhost, this is a great promotion to take them up on: 
http://bit.ly/freeurlregistration
DIY Passport Photos for $0.19
May 22nd
If time flies when you’re having fun, I must be having a heck of a time.
It’s been 10 years already, and now it’s time to renew my passport.
In the past you would go to a photo booth or a local pharmacy photo center and get a passport photo made up for 10 bucks or so for the duplicate photos you need to submit with your US Passport Application at the USPS post office or through the mail.
But these days, you don’t have to cough up that much money to get the photos done with all the digital magic we have available at our fingertips.
Here’s how I got my required duplicate passport photos created and printed for a mere $0.19. You can too!
First, I got out my digital camera and computer and went to work (well, it wasn’t really much work at all actually).
While in the past I used manual online passport photo generators to create the photo image, this time, I relied on a fully automated face-detection enabled website to properly crop the headshots for me.
IDphoto4You.com does it all. Just upload a decent headshot with enough background to play with and it automatically crops the photo and creates a single 4×6 photo file for you to download and bring to the photo store. They even have options so that you can have it sent online to get printed quickly for you as well.
I opted not to print out the photo at home on my photo printer and instead wanted a “real” photo that came out of a photo processing machine at Walgreens. $0.19 and the single 4×6 has the required two copies of the photo on one photo sheet.
It won’t be long till I get my passport back I hope – or at least track. . .
QUESTION: HOW MANY COUNTRIES HAVE YOU TRAVELED TO IN TOTAL?
How To Transfer Big Files To Co-workers, Friends, Family Via Email
May 15th
These days, sending big files to other people via email (or even yourself!) is becoming more and more common.
Any video file, or those huge 12-15 megapixel photos of the kids’ soccer game, etc sometimes exceed the email attachment limits of your email provider.
Most of the popular web-mail email services like Gmail, Yahoo!Mail, and AOL all have file size limits of 25 MB or so for attachments. This means that you may have to send multiple emails, each with the various files you want to send, or you may even be prevented from sending the file at all if it is a large file. Video files typically encounter problems when trying to send through email.
So what can you do besides invoking snail mail? or waiting to hand over a CD or DVD the next time you see the other person?
There are free services online that let you upload files, and then simply send a download link that are live for a limited period of time – many times just a week or less, giving the recipient enough time to retrieve the file before the file become unavailable. Although there are services which let you transfer files via peer-to-peer, so that you don’t have to upload and leave your file in the hands of someone else, most people will want to use web-based services which temporarily hold onto your file until the recipient grabs it at their own convenience.
One of the services I’ve recently been using has an upper limit of 1 GB of file size, deletes the file after 5 days, allows up to 20 downloads of the file and is free. . . Read the rest of this entry »
When Geek is Cool
Apr 27th
Imagine having to go to a Math class the last day right before vacation. . .
Would you be paying attention?
Or would you be thinking of all the fun stuff you’re about to do during break?
And especially if it was MATH class. . .
Well, here’s one case where skipping class might have meant you missed out on something worth the time. Imagine if this teacher spent this much energy for the last day of class, how would his lectures be throughout the semester? I bet they would be worth every minute.
Don’t you wish your math teachers were as cool as this guy in this video clip below?
QUESTION: DID YOU HAVE ANY TEACHERS THAT HAD A SENSE OF HUMOR?
Add to the conversation and add you comment below!
How To Enlarge Your Field Of Vision: Multi-Monitor Set-Ups
Apr 20th
As HDTV flatscreen TV’s get bigger and bigger, so do computer monitors.
As of April, 2010, Samsung makes the largest LCD computer monitor at 46″ in size. . . But you can enjoy the benefits without paying $48,000 that is required to buy a big fat computer LCD monitor display!
If you have more than one monitor, that will work too.
It’s one of the best ways to increase productivity (and your geek factor) – chances are you have an extra monitor lying around in the back closet somewhere – it doesn’t even have to be a flat-screen monitor to add value either.
Setting up a multi-screen computer monitor set-up is easy. Windows and Mac have built-in tools to extend your desktop to more than your main screen.
But sometimes it’s better and easier to use 3rd party tools. Lifehacker to the rescue with their roundup of 5 multi-monitor management tools for the pc (actually it should be 4 since the include Windows 7 as one of them):
Of course there are bunch of other utilities out there to use, but the first two above do offer freebie versions which may work for what you need. And the other two made the list for good reasons too.
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!