Computer and Web Articles

Here’s a question for all my fellow Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 users: do you visit the same websites each day, perhaps each morning or each evening when you first log on to the web? If you answered yes, then I’d like to tell you how ridiculously easy it is to tell Firefox and IE7 that you’d like to set not just one site, but multiple sites as your homepage.

Here’s all you need to do. First, open all of the websites you’d like to set as your “homepages” in different tabs. When you’re done, simply go to Tools, then Options (in IE7 this is called Internet Options), and in the Startup section of the box that opens up, click Use Current Pages. That’s it! Go on, test it out. Close your browser and reopen it, and watch as all the websites you set as your homepages load at once.

VideoJug.com is filled to the brim with How-To videos. No more reading lengthy articles or manuals when you want to learn something; just head over to www.videojug.com, search the site for videos on just about any topic, then sit back and relax while you absorb your new knowledge.

Take a look around and you’ll find How-Tos on topics including food, health, beauty, relationships, pets, and leisure. Here are some recently-posted videos I saw listed: how to juggle, how to throw a card through a window, how to get out of a car without showing your knickers, how to create a smoky-eye effect, how to give a great handshake, how to give a homie handshake, how to make sushi rice, how to take care of a bruise, how to walk in high heels, and how to vacuum stairs perfectly.

As an added bonus, there’s a section containing older historical films from the 1930s through the 1960s. I found most of these to be exceptionally interesting, especially the ones covering World War II.

Other than the videos in the “Made By You” section, the videos on VideoJug are acted out and produced by the actual VideoJug team. While I’ve found the acting and presentation quality of many of the videos to be a bit of a letdown, I’ve consistently found the content quality to be solid and useful.

So you’ve heard that Windows Vista is the latest operating system from Microsoft. You’re curious what it looks like, what it does, and how it might be better than Windows XP. Wonder no more. You can go right ahead and take a test drive of Windows Vista without downloading anything onto your computer. Take a look here: www.windowsvistatestdrive.com.

For any of you using Spoke.com (a business networking website), beware! Using their free service requires downloading a toolbar that will be installed into your browser. Once installed, the toolbar actually copies all the information from your e-mail address book and saves it into the Spoke.com database for Spoke’s own use.

Basically, Spoke.com steals the names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mails of everyone in your address book and then sells them for a nice little profit to direct marketing companies.

Horrible stuff. Stay away from Spoke.com.

I signed up for the neatest service last month. It’s called GreenDimes (www.greendimes.com) and I’m loving it.

You see, I purchased two or three items from catalogs last year, and in doing so I ended up on about half a billion direct mail and catalog lists. During the holidays, my PO Box became so ridiculously stuffed with catalogs, I found myself regularly using both hands to tug and pull all my mail out.

I received catalogs for wines, catalogs for slippers, catalogs for Pottery Barn, catalogs for gift baskets, catalogs for office supplies, more catalogs for Pottery Barn, etc. I didn’t want any of them.

And then … I found GreenDimes! GreenDimes takes care of reducing your junk mail and unsubscribing you from various catalog lists. For $36/year (or $360 for a forever membership), GreenDimes will take your name off major direct mail lists, keep you from ending back on those lists, reduce unsolicited credit card and insurance offers, reduce your risk of identity theft, unsubscribe you from all your unwanted catalogs, and then they’ll go ahead and plant 12 trees for you. Sweet.

While you enjoy the wonders of receiving low-to-no junk mail, GreenDimes saves thousands of gallons of water, saves and plants thousands of trees, and stops thousands of pounds of junk mail each month. Everyone wins (except the catalog companies - but I have a hunch they’ll be all right.)

If you’re looking for more control and more options when it comes to renaming files and folders all at once, consider using “The Rename.”

It’s sure to come in handy for all you professional and amateur photographers who take many, many photos at once. Learn more here: tinyurl.com/68gcv.

So you returned from your Florida vacation and dropped all your digital photos onto your computer. All’s great … except all the photos have names like “DSC00077.JPG”. No one could possibly have enough free time to sit down and manually rename every single file, either. What to do?

Rename them in bulk. (This is SO cool. Thank you CNet!!!)

Assuming you’re using Windows XP, open the folder where all your photos are located, select View from the menu at the top, then select Thumbnails. Now hit Ctrl + A to select all the photos in your folder.

Okey dokey, so far so good. Next, right-click that first photo and select Rename from the menu that appears. The filename for that photo becomes highlighted, meaning you can give it a more descriptive name, like DisneyWorld-Trip. Once you’ve typed in your new name, press the Enter key on your keyboard - and sit back and relax as your computer automatically applies that name with a sequential number to every single photo in your folder. Awesome!

Did you make a New Year’s resolution? I didn’t … so I guess I can’t provide you with a humorous anecdote here about how I no longer have the drive to keep working on it.

If you, however, could use just a tiny bit more motivation to help you stay on track with your resolution(s), I’ve found the perfect little site for you.

Called “31 left,” this site asks you to simply name your resolution - and then name a donation amount and a charity. The site will send you one follow-up e-mail in February to see how you’re doing. If all’s well, congratulations. If you’ve slipped, they’ll ask you to donate that dollar amount to the charity you named (they’ll even provide you with a direct link).

It’s quite fun to look through the other resolutions people have made, and to see how much they’re pledging to donate to charity if they don’t quite succeed.

As I’m a sucker for both personal development and donating to charities, I just couldn’t resist sharing this site; take a look: www.31left.com.

I’ll admit, it is rather easy to forget the importance of writing good subject lines in your e-mails. How many times have you quickly typed “hi” or “!!!!” (or worse, nothing at all) into the subject line of an e-mail you’ve sent off? My guess is that you’ve probably done this several times in the last few days.

“Erin, I’m finding it a pain to scan through our e-mail correspondence, mainly due to non-descript e-mail subjects like “question.” Be a star and try and make them more descriptive like “Website XYZ Javascript rework.” Then, I can spot them easier in our rapidly expanding list of e-mails.”

Not only was this e-mail a great reminder, it was a loud wakeup call pointing out that I’d become lazy - and my laziness was negatively affecting others. Don’t become lazy. Title your e-mails; your recipients will thank you for that small extra bit of effort.