Computer and Web Articles

Sorry PC users, you’re going to have to sit this one out.

Any Mac user running OS X 10.4 or higher can run Slife, the neat new program that lets people visualize and organize their computer activities. When you run Slife on your computer, it notes your interactions with applications like Mail, Safari and iChat, keeps track of the web pages you visit and e-mails you read, etc. and then graphically displays your activity in easy-to-understand visuals.

All this allows you to better understand exactly how and where you spend time on your machine. No more asking where the last few hours went. No more stating “I don’t spend THAT much time chatting with friends during the workday” when you actually have no clue how much time you spend chatting.

If you choose to do so, you can share any or all of your information with friends and family — information such as what sites you spend most of your time on. But then again, now that I think about it … that’s not necessarily the best idea for some people …

Sound interesting? Learn more at www.slifelabs.com.

Gifter is a simple site with a simple premise: Drag and drop one of their shiny gold coins into their virtual wishing well and make a wish. The wishing well is free for anyone to use, and every coin you drop in represents a dollar donated to charity. The site’s ultimate goal is to reach $1,000,000 in charitable donations.

Where does the money come from? Individuals and companies wishing to do more than make a wish can instead sponsor wishes by donating money to a charity of their choice, and every dollar donated sponsors one wish.

Take a moment out of your day to make a wish, won’t you? Visit www.gifter.org, and then tell a friend about the site. Happy wishing.

The PDF Download Firefox extension gives you the freedom to choose exactly what should happen when you come across PDF files on the web.

Install the extension by going here: http://tinyurl.com/4og, and the next time you click a link to a PDF, you’ll be given the choice as to whether you’d like to download the PDF to your computer, open the PDF inside Firefox, open the PDF outside of Firefox, or view it quickly as HTML. Sweet.

For those of you looking to better organize and manage your finances, consider using a helpful online tool called Buxfer. (The site’s tagline is “Track your money. Effortlessly.)

Buxfer (www.buxfer.com) is a simple, easy-to-use, friendly website that helps people keep their finances in order; the site can create reports showing personal and shared expenses, keep track of where money is being spent, and can even keep tabs on who owes you money.

Signing up is quick and easy, requiring nothing more than an e-mail address and password. Once you login to your account, you’re taken to a colorful, easy-to-skim overview panel displaying a pie chart of your expenses, graphs detailing who owes you money and who you owe money to, a grand total of how much you’ve spent in the last 30 days, and access to additional information via navigation links on the left.

Buxfer even lets you report your expenses back to your account in real time via your cell phone. And you guessed it — it’s all free. Undecided? Go take the Quick Tour by clicking the nice big orange button on the site’s homepage to determine if Buxfer would be a useful management tool for you.

So there’s this fellow named Todd Wilbur, and apparently he spends much of his time in the kitchen attempting to clone the recipes of dishes and products made by famous restaurants and companies across the country. Todd has developed “clone recipes” for edibles such as Sara Lee Cheesecake, KFC Fried Chicken, 7-11’s Cherry Slurpee, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers Candy Bar, Taco Bell’s Enchirito, and many, many others.

Todd’s website, TopSecretRecipes.com, “contains scores of original clone recipes, insider secrets and food lore.” Visit his site today and print out recipes for your favorite store-bought and restaurant foods, sign up for e-mail notifications when new recipes are added to the site, or purchase special spices from the online store to achieve that “professional restaurant taste.”

Have fun with this, and if you end up testing out a recipe, drop me an e-mail and let me know how it turns out (because as much as I love tasty food, I’m a disaster in the kitchen).

Looking to decrease the size of a massive PowerPoint presentation? Visit: http://tinyurl.com/yxlw4u.

Would you like to learn how to customize a toolbar in Word? Visit: http://tinyurl.com/36lcuc.

Wish you could figure out how to turn off those darn hyperlinks in Word? (I promise this is very quick and easy to do; it only takes a few clicks of your mouse.) Visit: http://tinyurl.com/2emq4g.

Have you ever found yourself wondering if you could copy data in an Excel cell without having to copy its formatting? Wonder no more and visit: http://tinyurl.com/265vdr.

Amazon.com shoppers, rejoice! JungleCrazy (www.junglecrazy.com) collects and displays the very best deals on Amazon, all in one place.

All products shown on JungleCrazy are at least 70 percent off, and there’s even a one-cent bin. Whether you search by category or aimlessly browse about the site, you’ll likely find an appealing deal or two.

Although Mother’s Day 2007 is still one month away, it can’t hurt to start your gift-hunting for Mom or Grandma a bit early. And after visiting the Totally Out of Hand website (http://www.totallyoutofhand.com), you may not need to do any searching at all.

The concept is simple yet beautiful: you send in your child’s artwork (or perhaps your own from when you were young), and the artist creates a sterling silver custom pin, pendant, earring set or keychain especially for Mom. Gold pieces are also available upon request.

Although I don’t have a child and my mom has more jewelry than any one person should be allowed to own, I found it quite fun to simply browse through the various before/after photos on the site.

The jewelry interpretations of the children’s artwork is truly spot-on, and the showcased kids’ drawings are awesome. I’m especially fond of the lion, bird and Santa on the “and More Pins …” page.

Totally Out of Hand’s items also make wonderful gifts for teachers, friends and fathers (art can be made into cuff links, tie tacks, and tie bars as well).

(Oh, and P.S. If you’re considering ordering an item from this site for Mother’s Day, do so very soon, as this is one of their busiest times of year.)

This website may not save the world, but it certainly does a great job of helping people send the occasional fun and unique e-mail. You see, when you create an e-mail within the message box in the Fuzzmail website (www.fuzzmail.org), all your deletes, edits, pauses, typos, changes, and writeovers are recorded in an ‘e-mail-message-video’ of sorts and sent to your recipient.

This unique manner of letting your e-mail recipients view the creation of your messages is most definitely not something most people would want to utilize regularly.

On the other hand, I can assure you that in addition to allowing for the occasional less-sterile communication, it definitely allows for some creative, funny and crafty messages.

Check out the third example message listed on the site’s Example page to see what I mean … heh heh.