Computer and Web Articles

FreeRice is an addicting online vocabulary game with a heart. Every time you guess the correct definition of a word, FreeRice and its sponsors donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program.

Twenty grains of rice may not sound like much, but the more you play, the more rice you donate - and with thousands of online players, the grains of rice add up and become substantial contributions. So improve your vocabulary and help feed the hungry of the word. Visit www.freerice.com.

I just learned this easy little trick a few days ago; I previously had no idea there was any way you could better the visual quality of YouTube videos.

The next time you’re on YouTube and have selected a video to watch (meaning you’re on the video viewing page and not a “choose a video to watch” list page), look up at the URL - also known as the website address - near the top of your scren. It should read www.youtube.com/watch?= and then some funny string of characters, something not unlike “ZbbxA8a_M_s”.

Click your cursor after the last letter in the URL and type in “&fmt=18″, then hit then Enter key on your keyboard. The page will refresh itself and suddenly you’ll be watching a high-quality, clear video instead of one that’s a bit jagged, rotted, and much lower quality. Pretty neat.

• www.orbicule.com — This Belgium-based company is dedicated to the creation of high quality software for Mac OS X. Their main product is called “Undercover” and is a lovely, innovative theft-recovery system that’s enabled Orbicule to recover 96 percent of all their stolen Macs that were connected to the Internet. Cool.
• http://tinyurl.com/38o54z — U-Haul’s Box Exchange “is a messageboard that you can use to trade, sell or buy reusable boxes and moving supplies.” With every reuse of a box, a new box is prevented from entering the cycle.
• http://tinyurl.com/yqpzhn — Available for iGoogle, Netvibes and the Windows Vista sidebar, Activity Tracker is a popular and useful punchclock and time management gadget.
• http://www.booksforafrica.org/ — A nonprofit organization that serves as the largest shipper of donated textbooks to the African continent. Donate money, donate a book, donate to a project, volunteer or just learn more.
• http://drawn.ca — An absolutely fantastic blog and community site for people who love art, illustration, and cartooning.

Install this extension in your Firefox browser and you’ll instantly be able to do some super cool things with your favorite Google applications, including:

• Remove ads from google search results;
• Remove Gmail’s spam folder and invite box;
• Filter out sites that you never ever want to see (ever) again from Google’s search results;
• Remove click tracking;
• Anonymize your Google ID;
• Add favicons in your web search results; and
• Add links to results from other search engines.

Sound like it might be a useful extension for you? Learn more here: http://www.customizegoogle.com.

• www.browzar.com - This alternative browser keeps no history and leaves absolutely no traces about your internet usage on your computer. As a major web-related magazine commented recently, it’s pretty much the ultimate browser for watching porn.
• http://tinyurl.com/2w8f3r - The Paper Mill Store is where I often like to purchase nice papers and envelopes. The company has a great site, and I just recently found this page as I was browsing about; it contains videos showing you how paper is made, how paper sheeting works, how envelopes are manufactured, and how envelopes are printed. If you’ve ever been curious about professional printing or the mysteries of the printing process, take a look.
• http://tinyurl.com/2n3893 - Read this article and you’ll learn how to remove unwanted icons from your PC’s System Tray (that little area in the lower right-hand corner of your screen).
• www.recyclenow.com - This may be the website for England’s national recycling campaign (and not America’s), but the site’s overarching goal is to encourage more people to recycle more things, more often. It’s very well done and provides tons of info that’s just as useful for us Americans as it is for the English.
• www.wakerupper.com - Schedule reminder calls right from your computer. Wakerupper claims that it’s “the web’s easiest telephone reminder tool”. Test drive for free. Remind your kid to do his chores. Escape from boring meetings. Remember to take your medications. Become a beta tester and receive access to additional features such as recurring calls and snooze. And … you guessed it. It’s all for free.

Although you may be tempted to take big, pretty flyers or your professionally-designed advertisements and plop them into your company’s e-mail newsletters, I’d like to strongly suggest that you refrain from the temptation.

Why? Three main reasons.

1. First, your recipients may move on to other e-mails before your image fully loads - meaning that they never see your message.
2. Second, servers are far more likely to reject e-mails containing large images.
3. Third, many e-mail programs (such as Outlook) block images by default; this means that a portion of your recipients would see nothing more than a big broken image (a box with a little red “x” in it Ðjust like what we talked about in the Q and A section this week.)

Question: Hello Erin. Here’s a situation I often encounter when using Internet Explorer that may also be “bugging” some of your readers. On some sites I see a tiny box with a little “x” inside of it, instead of the information I am seeking. Is this a problem with my software compatibility? Can I do something to open the box and release the contents?

Answer: Not to worry; it’s unlikely you’re experiencing software compatibility issues. For one reason or another your browser is simply being stubborn and has decided to hide certain images from you, replacing them with those little red x’s.

There are a several possible causes of this problem, but the great news is that (just about) all of them are easily fixed with one of four simple setting changes.

To view the four methods that’ll likely solve your issue, visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/283807.

• http://www.howjsay.com - Not sure how to pronounce that word? No more excuses. This website provides accurate pronunciations of over 87,700 English words.
• http://www.hiddensalestreasures.com/videos.html - This page contains two short-but-great videos: “Instant Sales Leads” and “Firefox Sizes Web Text”.
• http://www.box.net - Access and share your files online. This means you can work on your files from pretty much any computer you want so long as it has an internet connection.
• http://vectormagic.stanford.edu - I know a lot of people have been waiting for a site like this for a while now. Vector Magic takes your bitmap images and turns them into vector files for you. All online. All free. Wow.
• www.thumbstacks.com - Make and share presentations on the web. For free.

RoboForm is a clever little program that helps you reduce the amount of time you spend filling out web forms and logging on to subscription sites. Remember one master password, and RoboForm remembers the rest.

With RoboForm, completing long registration or checkout forms is a breeze; all you need to do is click on your RoboForm Identity (you can store more than one!) and the program fills in the entire form for you. The program even contains a feature called “Login” which allows you to go to a webpage, fill in a form and submit your information - all with one mouse click.

Interested? RoboForm can be downloaded for free from Download.com here: http://tinyurl.com/3d2wej.