Another Tech Blog

Happy New Year all, let’s hope this year is better than last ;)

• iPhone 3.0 release date - June 17, iPhone 3Gs details released Apple announced at WWDC 2009 that the iPhone 3.0 software will be available to current iPhone users on June 17th.  At the same event Apple announced that the iPhone 3GS will be available for purchase June 19th, 2009 in 16GB and 32 GB models for $199 and $299 respectively.  They......
• 35 best iPhone apps of the year so far AppVee (www.appvee.com) has released their list of the 35 best iPhone apps of the year so far. If you don't know about AppVee, they are awesome. Basically, they look at every (well almost every, they do ignore the nonsense) iPhone app published and winow out the good from bad. They......
• Outlook 2007 tips While I'm on the subject of tips, here are a few tips for Outlook 2007. 1) Stop Outlook from suggesting names in the TO field. This is related to the .nk2 file I blogged about awhile ago.  If you don't like that outlook suggests names for you, then you can......
• Find the physical location of an IP address There are lots of ways to do this, but I have a couple of favorite sites that show you the location and other details about an IP address. Geobytes gives you location information including latitude and longitude, time zone from GMT, country, region, city and a Google map of the......
• Romanticizing Technology I've been thinking a lot lately about why we love and hold on to technology gadgets when they are not necessarily all that great.  I can think of several things I've bought or used at work that were "the next big thing" or just new and cool that turned out......

If you are fighting a virus/malware on your computer, it is best to boot in safe mode before you start removing things and running scans.  If you don’t, it is likely that the malware will likely just re-install itself.  I’m not going to go into a whole tutorial on virus fighting (maybe in a future post) but the basics are as follows:

1) As soon as you notice you are infected, unplug your internet connection or turn off your wireless.  This will prevent the infection from spreading, and will isolate the offending program from its source.

2) Boot into Safe Mode

3) Run your favorite antivirus/anti-malware program.

This post is really about Safe Mode – how do you get there?  There are a couple of ways depending on the operating system you are using.  Here’s the Microsoft Page on the topic.

Windows XP

If XP is the only operating system installed on your computer, boot into Safe Mode with these instructions.

• If the computer is running, shut down Windows, and then turn off the power
• Wait 30 seconds, and then turn the computer on.
• Start tapping the F8 key. The Windows Advanced Options Menu appears. If you begin tapping the F8 key too soon, some computers display a “keyboard error” message.  If this happens, resstart the computer and try again.
• Ensure that the Safe mode option is selected.  If you are trying to clean a machine that is virus laden, choose Safe Mode Without Networking.
• Press Enter. The computer then begins to start in Safe mode.
• When you are finished with all troubleshooting, close all programs and restart the computer as you normally would.

If you don’t want to bother with function keys, you can use the System Configuration Utility method.

• Close all open programs.
• Click Start, Run and type MSCONFIG in the box and click OK
• The System Configuration Utility appears, On the BOOT.INI tab, Check the “/SAFEBOOT” option, and then click OK and Restart your computer when prompted.
• The computer restarts in Safe mode.
• Perform the troubleshooting steps for which you are using Safe Mode.
• When you are finished with troubleshooting in Safe mode, open MSCONFIG again, on the BOOT.INI tab,  uncheck “/SAFEBOOT” and click OK to restart your computer.  THIS STEP IS CRITICAL.  If you don’t change this back, then the computer will continue to boot in Safe Mode until you do.

Windows 7

Safe Mode in Windows 7 is basically the same as XP – use F8 to get to the Safe Mode startup screen.  MSCONFIG is slightly different – Safe Mode is called Safe Boot, but otherwise the process is the same.

• iPhone Tips - 10 things you may not know Here are 10 things you may not know how to do on the iPhone. Web Clips:You can create a short cut to a web page as an icon on your iPhone.  To do this, tap the "+"  when on a web page, then tap "Add to Home Screen."  This will......
• Tesla Model S Tesla's Model S debuted in Manhattan on April 30th.  If only I had $50k that I didn't need, I'd love to pick one of these up.  Electric cars have been around a long time, but Tesla really gets it right.  There is no reason in the world that electric has......
• 10 Windows 7 Tips So far, Windows 7 is the bee's knees.  The more I find out, the more I like, which is saying a lot - with operating systems, it's usually the other way around! Here are a few things that make Windows 7 neat.  Big thanks to Tim Sneath for most of......
• Add more destinations to the "Send To" right click menu There are tons of little tweaks to XP out there that make the GUI more useful.  One of the things I've found is that the default elements of the contextual menus in XP do not always have everything you want in them.  Thankfully, much of these things are customizable. I......
• The Nickname Cache in Outlook - Get to Know your .NK2 file Have you ever wondered where Outlook stores data it uses to auto-complete email addresses when you are typing in the To or Cc field?  Microsoft stores this data in a file with the extension .NK2.  The file is stored in each user's profile in drive:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.  Note......

• How to Fix Up an Information-Overloaded Computer /caption]Sometimes our computers don't quite run like they used to. Like a rusty machine, they aren't as fresh as they were "off the factory line," and if you only bought your computer a year or two, this can be a pretty discouraging fact. But just because your computer is running......
• Fix Windows Registry Error For many people who do not know that their computer has on it, a registry cleaner can be a great idea. Oftentimes, people have computers for a year and two, and then begin to experience slower speeds when they are using it. This is not usually a problem with the......
• Web Marketing That Works by Ben Janke Promoting makes the most critical part of web promotion marketing. Everything starts with web design: a good web site will allow for very extensive strategies of web publicity marketing, whereas a poorly designed one will be an obstacle. Spreading discussion about your business is the very next......
• Changing the Document Map Formatting If you often create or work with long documents, you’ve probably discovered one of Word’s most useful document navigation features: the document map. This is an aspect of the Navigation Window, a pane that appears on the left side of the Word window. When you display it by activating the......
• Remove Malware Catcher Before It Catches You Off Guard There are many reasons why you should make sure that your computer has a quality antispyware application. Your computer could get infected with spyware that is looking to steal your personal information, or adware that spies on your browsing habits and delivers pop-ups. Your computer could also get infected with......

I will summarize here, but the full article by Nick O’Neill from www.allfacebook.com is a great read, and something I wish I had written.  Facebook is a great tool, but in a world where information and identity theft is rampant, you need to know how to protect yourself from, well, yourself.

1) Use Friends lists to group your friends into logical groups.  This allows you to grant different access rights to different groups of people.

2) Remove yourself from Facebook search results.  Like the author, my family is chock full of teachers.  For the most part, they don’t want their students to randomly find their personal information from a Facebook search, but still want to be on Facebook for family and friends.  The solution?  Remove yourself from Facebook search results.  You do this from the “search privacy settings” page.

3) Remove your Facebook self from Google search results.  As you know if you Google yourself (doesn’t everyone do this?) your Facebook profile will come up pretty quickly.  You can remove yourself from Google searches from the “search privacy settings” page – uncheck the “Create a Public Search Listing for me …” check box.

4) Control who sees your tagged photos – You can do this from your profile privacy page.  The cool thing is if you’ve set up your friends groups right, you can allow access to tagged photos by group.  That way the photo of you that you don’t want your boss to see won’t get you fired.

5) Control who sees your photo albums – as with tagged photos, not all pictures are for all eyes.  Check out the Photo Privacy Page.  From there you can control who sees what.  Very handy.

6) Control how your relationship status is displayed in news feeds.  Everyone likes to tout their relationship, but do you really want everyone (boss, business contacts) to know?  Uncheck the “Change relationship status” box on the News Feed and Wall section of your Privacy settings.  This will prevent people from seeing changed to your relationship status in their news feeds.

7) Be sure that applications don’t publish embarrassing news feed posts.  Many applications you sign up for post items to your news feed that are potentially embarrassing.  Be sure that you scan your profile every time you install an application, or better yet, avoid applications completely.

8) Control who sees your contact information.  If you use Facebook for business and for personal contacts, you can control who sees what contact information from you using your Friends Groups.  You can add multiple email address and phone contact items, then edit the custom privacy settings for each to control who sees them.

9) Avoid embarrassing wall posts.   Facebook lets you control not only who posts to your wall, but also who can see those posts.  In the Profile section you can change who posts to your wall by choosing “custom” from the “Wall Posts” drop down.  From there you can use your Friends groups to control who posts and who sees what.

10) Like your hands, keep your friends to yourself.  I love seeing who is friends with my friends, but some people don’t want to share, and in some cases, it’s probably not a good idea to share.  Once again, you can customize who can see your friends list using your friends groups.

There are endless ways to control your privacy on Facebook, but you need to take the time to sort through the settings.  Friends Grouping is a great place to start and ensures that you have separation of your business and personal contacts.  Get to know your privacy settings!!

• Gmail calendar sync to iPhone I've been looking for a way to sync my Google Calendar to my iPhone using the native iPhone calendar app.  Google has come out with (I have no idea when this came out, so I may be late to the party here) a calendar and contacts sync to the iPhone......
• Goolge's newest employees? 200 Goats. I know this is off topic for a Tech blog, but it concerns Google, so please indulge me. According to Google's blog, they are using Goats to mow the grass at their Mountain View headquarters.  "A herder brings about 200 goats and they spend roughly a week with us at......
• Growl for Windows Growl v2.0 beta 18 was recently released for Windows - should you care?  If you are like most people, it is getting harder and harder to keep up with everything happening around you on the web.  Twitter, facebook, email, calendar, IM - the draws on your attention are almost overwhelming. ......
• TweetDeck to manage your Tweets Twitter is taking off like wildfire - you just can't get away from it.  I'm still not a huge buyer of the technology, but as the number of people I follow increases, I've been having a hard time sorting through the posts. Until now. Enter TweetDeck, "A Simple and Fast......
• Firefox keyword search default Nothing gets my blood boiling faster than legitimate software that acts like malware.  Anything you install should, before it changes ANY settings, tell you what it wants to change and ask you if that's what you want to do.   The default browser, for example, is a setting that used to......

• Real Time Dance In my last post I was excited to share the find of real time results showing up on page one in the serp's for the term SEO. Well, as usual Google continues to beat and bang all over the machine and the real time scroll box for that keyword is......
• Top 3 Facebook Apps For Android In this vid I review 3 of the top facebook applications for the android platform. Fbook, Fbabble, and FooBook. Website: www.ihackyourtech.net Twitter www.twitter.com Fbook - Free Features: Update Status, Search friends, Comment status ("like button"), Upload Photo's, View Profile Pages & Picture Albums, Message Notifications in Status Bar. Fbabble......
• 8 Principles for Effectively Maintaining Professional Boundaries as a Service Provider ll solid working relationships need rapport and trust to function well. Certainly as a service provider, it’s your job to make sure your customers feel at ease with approaching you, relating to you and considering your advice. Relationship-building, however, should not come at the expense of your credibility, effectiveness, health......
• Search Engine Optimisation and why you should use it E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimise their rankings in search engines and if you lose your guard, you may......
• If you'd like to learn more about me, then read on, curious readers, read on! This was the week of the meme's. I was tagged by Weight Ladder to do a 6-word memoir. I had actually completed this meme in the past, but no worries. My "profound" words are still there for all to see. ;) JoLynn at The Fit Shack tagged me with a......

Another question I get asked a lot is on Wireless security.  People get very confused by the security options out there, and the industry doesn’t help by adding acronym after acronym.  So what do you do?  The answer is fairly simple – secure your network with WPA!!

There are lots of methods to use to secure your wireless network.  The most common is WEP, but that is being replaced by the newer (and better) WPA protocol.  You can also secure the network by allowing only specific computers on the network.  This is simple to do, and doesn’t require security keys and messy settings.  The problem with it is that the data you send wirelessly is not encrypted.  With WEP and WPA, the data is encrypted.

What are these things anyway?

WEP or Wired Equivalent Privacy (see the Wiki for more info) is an encryption protocol developed in the late 1990’s to secure wireless networks.  It offers 64bit and 128 bit encryption using a key generated by a passphrase you enter, but is easily cracked.  Despite this, there are a ton of people who still use WEP since it is the default protection on many routers.

WPA (WiFi Protected Access) is the next generation encryption algorithm that replaced WEP.  WPA uses 256bit encryption keys, and is far more secure than WEP.  It’s not the be-all-end-all, but is very good.  As with WEP, you have the option of generating a security key using a passphrase so that you don’t have to remember a string of random hex digits.  This is great, BUT you have to be careful about the passphrase you use.  DON’T use things like your pets name, your kid’s name, your street, or anything that can be guessed.

The clear answer is to secure your network with WPA.

BUT – do you have to secure your network at all?  The safe answer is yes.

What happens if you don’t secure your network?  That depends on where you live, how close your neighbors are, and how you secure your computers.  Most wireless routers have a range of 150 feet.  That means that if your neighbors are more than 150 feet away, they will not be able to get on your network unless they are standing outside your house with their laptop.

If you don’t change the default security settings on your computers, chances are that even if someone did get on your network, they wouldn’t be able to do much.  By default settings I mean:

• No shared hard drive locations
• Remote control disabled
• Firewalls up and running on every computer
• Anti-Virus up and running on every computer

Of course, this is not always realistic – I have lots of shared directories, and remote control enabled on my machines because I like to be able to work on any machine from anywhere if I need to.  For that reason, I like to secure the network so that if someone manages to get on they won’t get to my personal files.

The bottom line on security for wireless networks is best practice is to secure your network using WPA.  That said, if you live in a remote area where no one will likely be in range of your wireless, it’s not really necessary, just a good idea.

• iPhone SMS vulnerability IDG News is reporting that Apple is planning an update to fix a vulnerability in the SMS message handler that could be used by an attacker to run code with full access to the device.  According to security research Charlie Miller during a presentation the SkyScan conference, the patch will be......
• 10 Windows 7 Tips So far, Windows 7 is the bee's knees.  The more I find out, the more I like, which is saying a lot - with operating systems, it's usually the other way around! Here are a few things that make Windows 7 neat.  Big thanks to Tim Sneath for most of......
• 10 Facebook Privacy Settings You NEED to Know. I will summarize here, but the full article by Nick O'Neill from www.allfacebook.com is a great read, and something I wish I had written.  Facebook is a great tool, but in a world where information and identity theft is rampant, you need to know how to protect yourself from, well, yourself.......
• Add more destinations to the "Send To" right click menu There are tons of little tweaks to XP out there that make the GUI more useful.  One of the things I've found is that the default elements of the contextual menus in XP do not always have everything you want in them.  Thankfully, much of these things are customizable. I......
• Conflicker - I mean, seriously If you don't already know, conflicker is a worm that exploits a buffer overflow in the windows server service.  The worm is wiley - there are several hundred variants and it is difficult to know how widespread it is.  You can find more info on the Wiki or on the......

• Learning How to Finance Your Future Most of us think about retirement and panic. It can be tough trying to figure out how we’re going to survive and plan for our futures when we’re just trying to make ends meet right now. If you’re strapped for cash at the end of every month, chances are you......
• 100 Quick Tennis Tips pt 1 Here are 100 quick and easy tennis tips to get your game going. We're going to spread this list out over a couple of posts to keep it interesting. Tip #1 - Before you pick up the game of tennis, you should absolutely make sure to consult a physician to......
• Netgear wpn824 Rangemax Netgear wpn824 Rangemax Wireless Router Roam the office with complete security or surf from any couch in the house The Netgear wpn824 Rangemax Wireless Router has made my life allot easier. I get lots of questions from SOHO and SMB techies about how to set up a secure wireless network......
• Understanding Why You Should Want File Encryption Protection If you are on your computer daily, or even weekly, then you most likely have some essential information stored in files on it. Though you may lean toward thinking you are the only person able to read the information on the computer, unfortunately that may not be the case unless......
• Set Up Tips For A Virtual Private Network Many businesses considering a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to cover their internet and database applications share the same set-up concerns. You want to know the most efficient and cost effective approach to get "from here to there". You'll also want to evaluate whether to go with a site-to-site connection......

A couple of recent studies on Twitter and people who tweet point out that over 40% of all tweets fall into the category of “pointless babble”.  Pear Analytics put out a report with these and other interesting findings.  I’m sure it comes as no surprise that 75% of all tweets come from just 5% of people who tweet. 

Sysomos also does research into twitter usage and in their blog report  that 24% of all tweets are bots and other programatic postings.  Not surprising since the top contributors are posting 150 tweets and more a day.  Interestingly, they also put together a list of the top posters who have 5000 or more followers, and less than 50 posts per day.  The assumption is that these are reall posters, not bots.  Chris Brogan tops that list.  Who is he?  He’s a guy that helps businesses use social media.  Practice what you preach I guess.

Lots of other interesting facts.  55% of tweeters are women, 78% are caucasian.  The number of African American twitter users is well above the average for African American internet users.  I have no idea what that says about African American internet users, but there it is. The demographic information on Twitter is from quantcast.  A very cool stat site for websites.

So what does this all mean?  Be careful who you follow, and don’t feel bad about dropping the people who post too much – they are likely just a bot anyway.

• Bypass the Recycle Bin in XP I have a love hate relationship with the Recycle Bin.  When I need it, I'm glad its there, but for the most part it is just a pain in the rear.  Most people forget to empty it (don't we all hate taking out the trash?) and end up with loads......
• Tesla Model S Tesla's Model S debuted in Manhattan on April 30th.  If only I had $50k that I didn't need, I'd love to pick one of these up.  Electric cars have been around a long time, but Tesla really gets it right.  There is no reason in the world that electric has......
• Application Virtualization with ThinApp (formerly Thinstall) I don't know why this is not getting more attention.  VMware and Landesk's Thinstall (now called ThinApp) has been out for close to two years now and I continue to be surprised that it is not more widely adopted. It is a great product that really lives up to the......
• Outlook for the iPhone? eWeek is reporting that a Microsoft Executive, Stephen Elop, while speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo hinted that Microsoft will eventually release a version of the Office suite for mobile devices, specifically the iPhone.  I think this is important for a couple of reasons.  It further emphasizes MS' current move......
• Growl for Windows Growl v2.0 beta 18 was recently released for Windows - should you care?  If you are like most people, it is getting harder and harder to keep up with everything happening around you on the web.  Twitter, facebook, email, calendar, IM - the draws on your attention are almost overwhelming. ......

• @aplusk vs. @CNNbrk vs. @Oprah - "This is like Y3K:" Ashton Kutcher is the New Mainstream Media Ashton Kutcher is officially the first person to reach over one million viewers on his Twitter account.  He's been posting videos to his Ustream TV page throughout the night last night (Thursday night) documenting the victory.  I hadn't been paying much (any!) attention to the whole fiasco, but late Thursday......
• Will frugality ever be ready for prime time? Jim tweeted this question a little while ago (I expanded his text a bit with his permission because I'm not limited to 140 characters here): "Why do people love stories about people paying off thousands in credit card debt? Why is there no love for people who don't have debt......
• Top 3 Social Media Sites Today What YouTube, Twitter and Facebook can do for your business. With the advent of the computer, no greater advancement has taken place in social media marketing than with the three best examples:  Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.  These three programs together have captured the market and made it possible for their......
• Commission Blueprint can help you to know the defition of Online Marketing What do you mean by internet marketing?In case you are not aware about internet marketing, Commission Blueprint, can be a help.In the past few years, everyone has been going on and on about marketing businesses and products online, but what exactly is the definition of internet marketing?Do you think it......
• Dr. Tom V. Morris "Twisdom" More Than Just a Philosophy Book Unless one has been asleep or living on the moon, they know of Twitter. It has evolved into the world's greatest cocktail party, and no one has to clean up afterwards, or even pay the tab. It's the new electronic campfire we sit around to talk and laugh and......

AppVee (www.appvee.com) has released their list of the 35 best iPhone apps of the year so far. If you don’t know about AppVee, they are awesome. Basically, they look at every (well almost every, they do ignore the nonsense) iPhone app published and winow out the good from bad. They seemingly impossibly review more apps that I thought possible, and they do a really good job.

The list of apps they like so far is here.

Notable inclusions are TweetDeck, Skype and Kindle – three of my personal favs.

Thanks AppVee!!

• Gmail calendar sync to iPhone I've been looking for a way to sync my Google Calendar to my iPhone using the native iPhone calendar app.  Google has come out with (I have no idea when this came out, so I may be late to the party here) a calendar and contacts sync to the iPhone......
• Windows 7 - First impressions So far so good - I installed the beta on a couple of laptops in the last month, and so far I like what I see.  It's very much Vista centric, but without the sllllloooooowwwwwness.  Boot time is much improved (under a minute) and there are some added features that......
• iPhone Tips - 10 things you may not know Here are 10 things you may not know how to do on the iPhone. Web Clips:You can create a short cut to a web page as an icon on your iPhone.  To do this, tap the "+"  when on a web page, then tap "Add to Home Screen."  This will......
• Kindle iPhone app After using the Kindle app for iPhone for a few weeks now, I'm totally hooked.  At first, I thought the small screen would be annoying, but I'm really loving this app!!  In my less busy days I used to read a lot.  These days life has taken over and I......
• Open Source Software PBX - ready for prime time? I've been working with a client who needs to replace an aging PBX but is (as is everyone) extremely cost averse.  What are their options? A vendor supported PBX plus desktop phone sets together would probably cost them more than $10k.  Obviously a vendor supported system has losts of advantages from a......

• CNN Money's 21 Dumbest Moments In Business 2008 CNN Money put together a nice slide show of what they think are the dumbest moments of 2008 as they relate to business and the economy. Like most lists, even mine, some were great and others were a stretch. I've picked out a few of my favorites but make sure......
• Tips On Finding A Job In A Recession. Several people I know have already lost their jobs this year, including my brother. He had just lost his previous job at the beginning of the year when this economy really started tanking when he found this current one - which he absolutely loved. But now he is out of......
• Holiday Tipping Guide The spirit of the holidays is about spending time with family and friends, being thankful for the things that we’ve accomplished and the lives we’ve led, and showing appreciation to everyone who has made the year possible. Sometimes the year ends on a high note, as we celebrate the achievements.......
• Weekly Round-Up: Five Cent Nickel I've been writing weekly posts at Five Cent Nickel for the past couple of months. So far, I'm really enjoying it as it's given me an opportunity to write for another audience, learn from Nickel and Matt's writing styl e,and introduced me to some wonderful people. My main focus is......
• Ad List An ad list is generally a list that you build and send outside ads to without any useful content at all. This is the easily the fastest method of list maintenance of all of the above, and despite a major a downer in unsubscription rates, and the challenge of......

While I’m on the subject of tips, here are a few tips for Outlook 2007.

1) Stop Outlook from suggesting names in the TO field.

This is related to the .nk2 file I blogged about awhile ago.  If you don’t like that outlook suggests names for you, then you can turn this off.  Go to Tools, then Options.  From there choose the Preferences tab, then click the e-mail options button.  In the e-mail options dialog, click the Advanced E-mail Options button.  Uncheck the radio button for “Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields”.  Click “ok”.

2) Configure Outlook to NEVER send read receipts.

Personally, I think read receipts are annoying.  Some people love them, and who am I to judge, but I’d prefer to keep when I read your mail to myself, so I turn this “feature” off.  To do this, go to Tools, then Options.  From there choose the Preferences tab, then click the E-mail options button.  In the E-mail options window, choose the “Tracking Options” button.  Look for “Use this option to decide how to respond to requests for read receipts. Only applies to Internet Mail accounts.”   There are a couple of radio buttons – choose “never send a response”.  Click “ok”.

3) Remove the System Tray icon for new email

Another love it or hate it item.  I like this one, but when the system tray gets cluttered, out it goes.  To remove the icon, once again go to Tools, Options and from there choos the Preferences tab.  On the Preferences tab choose the E-mail Options button.  In the E-mail options dialog choose the Advanced E-mail Options button.  Under the “When new items arrive in My Inbox”, uncheck “Show an envelope icon in the notification area”.  Click “ok”.

4) Configure Outlook to empty the deleted items folder when you exit.

This is really helpful if you have limited mailbox space.  Deleted items count toward your mailbox space limits, so you either need to remember to empty your deleted items, or have outlook do it for you when you exit the application.

To configure Outlook to empty deleted items on exit, go to Tools, the Options, then choose the “Other” tab.  Under “General”, check “Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting”.  Click “ok”.  Your sysadmin will love you ;)

5) Add Holidays to your Calendar

Outlook support iCal, so there are thousands of calendars you can add to Outlook.  To add holidays from the default list, go to Tools then Options, then choose the Preferences tab.  In the Calendar section, click the Calendar Options button.  In the Calendar Options window, click the “Add Holidays” button.  Scroll through the resulting list, click the radio button next to the ones you want, then click “ok”.

Just a few things for now.  I’ll add more another time.

• 10 Windows 7 Tips So far, Windows 7 is the bee's knees.  The more I find out, the more I like, which is saying a lot - with operating systems, it's usually the other way around! Here are a few things that make Windows 7 neat.  Big thanks to Tim Sneath for most of......
• Gmail Calendar and Contacts Sync to Outlook You would think this would be easy, right?  Well it is.  Sort of. Google in their infinite wisdom provides an application to sync your Google Calendar to Outlook, but not your contacts.  I hope this on the way, but for now you need to use a third party app to......
• The Nickname Cache in Outlook - Get to Know your .NK2 file Have you ever wondered where Outlook stores data it uses to auto-complete email addresses when you are typing in the To or Cc field?  Microsoft stores this data in a file with the extension .NK2.  The file is stored in each user's profile in drive:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.  Note......
• SVCHOST.exe - What is it and why are there so many of them? I get asked this a lot.  When you run Task Manager in XP and look at the process list, you see tons of svchost.exe processes running.  You can't kill them (you don't really want to) and there's no obvious reason that there are so many of them. What are they? ......
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• Deleting a page from a Workspace The purpose of creating Workspaces is to share information. The purpose of adding pages to a Workspace is to share even more information. It only stands to reason that the more information you have, the larger — and more used — your Workspace is. After setting up all those great......
• Setting Junk E-Mail Options You set Outlook’s filtering and handling of junk e-mail in the Junk E-Mail Options dialog box, as follows: Choose Tools?Options from the main Outlook window to display the Options dialog box. On the Preferences tab, click the Junk E-Mail button. Outlook displays the Junk E-Mail dialog box. If necessary, click......
• Adding Content Bulleted Lists on Design Templates Bulleted lists allow you to clearly display the main points of your presentation on slides. The text boxes on design templates already include bulleted lists. Click the place holder on the slide to begin adding text and press the ENTER key to return to the......
• Page numbers A common use for headers and footers is to display page numbers. To include page numbers in Word 2007, several methods are available—some new, and some old. This section focuses mostly on the new ways because they provide extraordinary ease, flexibility, and variety not found in any previous version of......
• Movie files avi cause desktop crash in vista and windows 7 Stop repeated desktop crashes in windows 7 and vista by disabling thumbnail cache...

So far, Windows 7 is the bee’s knees.  The more I find out, the more I like, which is saying a lot – with operating systems, it’s usually the other way around!

Here are a few things that make Windows 7 neat.  Big thanks to Tim Sneath for most of these.

1) Windows Management – in XP, your choices on what you could do with arranging windows on your screen was somewhat limited.  You could maximize a window to take the whole screen, you could manually shrink it to the size you wanted and move it to the side, iconize it, etc.  In Windows 7, several “docking” features were introduced that make moving things around on your screen really easy.  If you press the Windows key, then the left arrow, the current window will dock to the left side of the screen.  WIN+right arrow will dock to the right, WIN+up arrow will maximize the window, WIN+down arrow will restore the window.  In addition to the WIN shortcuts, you can drag windows to the top to maximize it (double clicking the title bar still works too), or you can drag the window to the left or right to dock the window there.

On a related note, in a multi monitor setup, you can move windows from one screen to the other using WIN+SHIFT+right or left arrow.  Now were talking!

2) Get rid of the noise – Have you ever been working on a document and been annoyed that all of you other open windows are just in the way?  Press WIN-Home in Windows 7 and all windows but the current are minimized.  Press WIN-Home again to restore the windows.

3) Browser load times – This is really an IE8 tip, but I’ll include it here.  If IE is taking a long time to load, it may be because of the add-ons you are running.  Go to Tools/Manage Add Ons and you will see  a list of what IE loads at startup.  The neat thing is if you scroll to the right in the list, you can see the load times for the Add Ons.  This is a great way to see where the bottle necks are.

4) Quick start for taskbar apps – you can use WIN+1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 to quickly go to or start any of the first 5 apps in your taskbar.

5) Look at the desktop – Another helpful feature is WIN-space bar.  This combo lets you look at the desktop and see any icons or widgets you have.  You can also click on the rectangle all the way in the lower right hand corner – this is the old “show desktop” icon.

6) Additional instance of an open application – there are a couple of ways to do this, but by far the fastest is to hold the shift key while left clicking on the taskbar icon.  Way better than going through the start menu again, or right clicking and choosing to open the app.

7) Running with elevated rights.  If you hold CTL-Shift while clicking on a taskbar app, you will bring up a new instance with full administrator rights (assuming your account has permissions).  When Windows 7 is deployed in an enterprise, this will be GREAT.

8) Specialized Window switching – this one I love.  If you are like me, you have tons of windows open all the time.  In XP if you want to switch between windows you can ALT-Tab through them all, or you can click on the taskbar icon and guess which window is the one you want.  In Windows 7, you can essentially Alt-Tab through all of the open windows associated with a specific application without scrolling through every open window.  You do this by holding down the CTL key, then clicking on the taskbar icon for the application you want.  Windows will “scroll” through the open windows as you click the icon.  This is great if you want to scroll through all of your open Outlook windows, for example, but don’t want to run through everything you have open.

9) Move focus the taskbar – this is neat keyboard shortcut.  If you press WIN-T you will move focus to the taskbar.  You can then use the arrow keys to move through your taskbar apps to choose the one you want.  For keyboard shortcut junkies, this is great.

10) Open windows explorer keyboard shortcut – Press WIN+E.  This will open up and explorer window at the Computer Node.  Note that SHFT+click on the explorer icon opens at the Document Library Node.

More to come -

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• SVCHOST.exe - What is it and why are there so many of them? I get asked this a lot.  When you run Task Manager in XP and look at the process list, you see tons of svchost.exe processes running.  You can't kill them (you don't really want to) and there's no obvious reason that there are so many of them. What are they? ......
• Firefox keyword search default Nothing gets my blood boiling faster than legitimate software that acts like malware.  Anything you install should, before it changes ANY settings, tell you what it wants to change and ask you if that's what you want to do.   The default browser, for example, is a setting that used to......
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• Three Essential Windows Mobile Applications Suddenly, the mobile phone industry is inundated with operating systems: iPhone OS, Google Android, Palm WebOS, Symbian, Maemo, BlackBerry, Samsung Bada, and of course, Windows Mobile. Microsoft recently released WinMob 6.5, in a sign that the company has not yet called it quits and is willing to fight it out.......
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• The window replacement story Our house was built in the late 70's. Part of its 70's-fabulous look included a pair of windows that weren't even glass. (They were made from two thin sheets of decorative plastic.) But even the windows that were glass had issues: They were practically falling out of their ugly aluminum......

From the Gmail blog

One of the neat features of Gmail is that you can use it to aggregate all of your email addresses to one inbox.  You add the email addresses to your gmail account, and they connect via POP or IMAP to your other accounts and everything is in one place.  Until this past Thursday, when you replied to a mail that was not to your mail account, Gmail would put your main account in the “Sender” field so that your mail would not be kicked as spam.  What the recipient would see is a message that the mail was send “on behalf of” the intended address “from” your main account.  While this is ok in most instances, if you are trying to mask that Gmail is the tool you are using for all of your mail, then this can be annoying.

Thursday, Google introduced a way to route your mail through the SMTP server of your choice instead of their SMTP servers, so your mail will look like it is comming from the system you choose and the “on behalf of ” messages will go away.  Neat!  If your office allows POP/IMAP and you allows remote SMTP then you are golden.  If not, well then you have to live with the “on behalf of” messages.

• Windows 7 - First impressions So far so good - I installed the beta on a couple of laptops in the last month, and so far I like what I see.  It's very much Vista centric, but without the sllllloooooowwwwwness.  Boot time is much improved (under a minute) and there are some added features that......
• The Nickname Cache in Outlook - Get to Know your .NK2 file Have you ever wondered where Outlook stores data it uses to auto-complete email addresses when you are typing in the To or Cc field?  Microsoft stores this data in a file with the extension .NK2.  The file is stored in each user's profile in drive:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.  Note......
• 10 Windows 7 Tips So far, Windows 7 is the bee's knees.  The more I find out, the more I like, which is saying a lot - with operating systems, it's usually the other way around! Here are a few things that make Windows 7 neat.  Big thanks to Tim Sneath for most of......
• iPhone Cut and Paste!!! It's is about time - Apple just announced that version 3.0 of the iPhone OS will have, among other things, cut and paste.  This has been one of my pet peeves for a long time, and frankly I can't believe it hasn't been done yet.  I don't understand how it......
• I hate viruses Working on a client computer for the last two days that is massively infected.  When they handed the machine to me, there was no firewall, no virus protection and windows updates were way out of sync.  Whoo boy. Windows update was not working at all - one if the viruses......

• Be a Blogger: Tools to Organize Ideas Back next week with the Sunday Conversation.  The following is a guest post from Mrs. Micah. Mrs. Micah writes about personal finances, freelancing, and getting out of debt at MrsMicah.com. She also offers blog consulting services at hire.mrsmicah.com. Previously in the Be a Blogger series, Frugal Dad wrote about capturing......
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• Sending free SMS with GMail Finally a very nice option added to Gmail Labs, at least for U.S. residents. After an attempt made long time ago, now in Gmail it is available the option send SMS for free using the chat. We must enter the mobile number in the chat window on the left......
• Migrating Mail and Contacts from Hotmail to Zimbra For anyone wanting to switch their email address from a free hotmail account to a Zimbra mail account without losing any email the switch can be made quite easily. You'll need a Windows installation and your Hotmail and Zimbra account info to get started. You can also find info on......

Growl v2.0 beta 18 was recently released for Windows – should you care?  If you are like most people, it is getting harder and harder to keep up with everything happening around you on the web.  Twitter, facebook, email, calendar, IM – the draws on your attention are almost overwhelming.  Wouldn’t it be great is there were some tools out there to help with all the noise?  The ability to be automatically notified when things happen would be really useful – enter Growl for Windows.

What is Growl?  In their own words:

Put simply, Growl lets you know when things happen. Files finished downloading, friends came online, new email has arrived – Growl can let you know when any event occurs with a subtle notification. The rest of the time, Growl stays out of your way.

Along with letting you know when things happen, Growl also gives you full control over how you are notified and what action (if any) you want to take in response to the notification. You can choose to be alerted with a visual indicator or an audible alert, both, or neither. You can choose the type of display that is shown, whether the display remains on the screen, the importance of the notification, and even if the notification should be forwarded to another computer. You can have notifications that trigger an email, run a script, launch a program, or are read out loud.

Growl has been available as a MAC application for some time now, so their foray into Windows land is a welcome addition to help you manage your machine. All of you have Windows Update on, right?  Well now you have a tool that you can configure to notify you and/or take action on lots of other things on your machine.

How does it work?  The setup is somewhat manual, but this is a good thing, since the whole point is that Growl is unobtrusive.  Once you install the application, the software sits in your system tray waiting to be told what to do.  You download pluggins from the Growl site for the applications you want.  There are tons of apps there – Firefox, iTunes, Outlook, Gmail, even a system monitor.  You run the setup for the app you want and let Growl do the rest.  What you get is a configurable pop up window for whatever application you choose.

You get configurable reminders for things as they happen – new emails, calendar appointments, what the tune you are playing on iTunes is (they have Pandora too).  New apps are being added all the time, and there is a GNTP library and command line tools that you can use to work with almost any API.

Neat stuff.  Not perfect, but I like it so far.

• Outlook 2007 tips While I'm on the subject of tips, here are a few tips for Outlook 2007. 1) Stop Outlook from suggesting names in the TO field. This is related to the .nk2 file I blogged about awhile ago.  If you don't like that outlook suggests names for you, then you can......
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• Gmail calendar sync to iPhone I've been looking for a way to sync my Google Calendar to my iPhone using the native iPhone calendar app.  Google has come out with (I have no idea when this came out, so I may be late to the party here) a calendar and contacts sync to the iPhone......

• Three Essential Windows Mobile Applications Suddenly, the mobile phone industry is inundated with operating systems: iPhone OS, Google Android, Palm WebOS, Symbian, Maemo, BlackBerry, Samsung Bada, and of course, Windows Mobile. Microsoft recently released WinMob 6.5, in a sign that the company has not yet called it quits and is willing to fight it out.......
• 5 Ways to Stop Wasting Time with Email Being part of the world as we know it sometimes forces one into certain habits.  Our grandfathers would be ashamed, our great-grandfathers would wonder, "wtf is email?"  And yet, many of us - including myself - allow ourselves to be sucked into the trap of email UNproductivity. I'd like to......
• Printing a File With the crisp, vibrant output produced by today’s cheap color printers, who would want a paperless office? Although the Internet and faster computer networks have made electronic transmission a common and accepted means of sharing documents, many circumstances still call for—if not require—that information be shared on paper: Legal documents......
• Error In IE For Quite A While ? - Rid of this Annoying Problem ! One of the most annoying occurrences when doing research on the web is suddenly getting an error in IE for quite a while; you're not only unable to work when that happens, you may not have a clue as to what to do to take care of the problem.......
• Using SANRAD V-Switch as the VSS Hardware Provider for Windows Backups IntroductionMany Microsoft Window applications (like Exchange, MS-SQL, etc) are critical to the daily core functionality for many companies and organizations. Managing the data backup for these applications presents new challenges for system administrators. While there is an ever increasing need for more and more data to be backed up, at......