Computer and Web Articles

To quickly edit a To-Do task in your Basecamp account, hover over the task and press “e” on your keyboard. Nice.

Have you been lazy? Perhaps it just slipped your mind. Regardless, here are some reminders that might give you the nudge you need to take action.

• Everyone: Be honest. When was the last time you cleaned your keyboard? Have you at least taken it outside, held it upside down, and given it a good shake lately? (Eeewww.)
• Website owners: When was the last time you ran a spellcheck on your website? What about a check for broken links?
• Everyone: When was the last time you backed up your data? If you’re not backing up on a regular basis, have you recently asked yourself if you’re willing to lose everything on your computer?
• PC users: Have you defragmented your computer lately?
• Mac Users: Have you cleaned out your cache within the last month? (Visit http://tinyurl.com/495nsn4 if you answered No.)
• Everyone: Have you recently run a program (like Spybot S & D) to check for spyware and other undesirables that sneak into computers over time?
• Website owners: Have you given your site’s statistics a good hard look within the last few months? Do you know how people are using your site, if visitors are running into any major problems when using your site, or…if your site actually has any visitors?

I’d say we’ve found a keeper.

www.ManyBooks.net is a genuine treasure trove for eBook lovers (and avid readers in general). The site offers a whopping 29,000 eBooks for download, is easy to browse, and is filled with reviews by fellow readers.

“Yeah, sure.” you’re thinking. “That’s lovely. But why would I use ManyBooks.net instead of Amazon?”

My response: You might consider an occasional visit because you can download every single book from ManyBooks.net for free. Every single one.

When downloading a book, simply choose the file format you prefer: .pdf, .pdf for large print, .epub, .pdb, iPod notes (in a .zip file), .rb, .prc, .azw (yep, for your Kindle!), etc. That’s all there is to it—really.

Enjoy…

This blog post has been moved to a new location:

To read the full post, visit: “We All Satisfice”

Perhaps you tweeted something you really shouldn’t have. Perhaps you publicly replied to someone when you wanted to Direct Message them. Woops.

Not to worry. Contrary to what you may have thought, you can delete your tweets! And thankfully, it’s a very quick and simple process.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Sign in to your Twitter account.
2. Click the “Profile” link up top in the navigation.
3. Find the tweet you sent that you’d like to delete.
4. Move your cursor over the tweet so it’s highlighted. You’ll notice a small trashcan appears in the lower right-hand corner of the tweet’s box.
5. Click the trashcan.

Then, of course, go and brush your shoulders off. All done.

Just a friendly reminder: You’re not going to achieve different search results by fiddling around with your capitalization. Google is going to show you the same results whether you search for “boggis bunce bean” or “Boggis Bunce Bean”.

So go ahead and keep capitalizing letters in the manner that’s most natural to you (YES, EVEN IF YOU LIKE TO SHOUT). Just remember that you need not waste time trying different variations of lowercase and capital letters, as you’ll keep seeing the same results each and every time.

Look out Skype. Google’s trying to take over your part of the world, too.

Call your friend who’s sitting at home. Call your sister who’s out and about on her cell. Call your co-worker on his computer while he’s working at the office. Call them all from Gmail. It’s easy. Just download and install the Gmail Voice & Video Chat plugin right here: http://www.google.com/chat/voice/.

And here’s the sweetest part of it all: calls to the U.S. and Canada are actually free until the end of 2010 (and calls to other countries start at 2 cents per minute).

If you’d like to see Google’s clever illustrated video promoting the service, visit: http://tinyurl.com/2dgsxay (Though as the highest-rated commenter on the YouTube page so appropriately noted, “Cavemen at 1000BC? Someone skipped history class.“)

Make your YouTube  videos work harder for you. Create video product listings that link directly to your site’s shopping cart. Create music video links that take people directly to the iTunes store. Or add a link in your videos that simply takes people straight to your blog.

All the tasks above are very straightforward when you use the right tool. And in this case, all you need is a little tool called LinkedTube. Check out the official LinkedTube page (with the 3:19 intro video) here: http://www.linkedtube.com and, if you’d like to read through some people’s comments on, thoughts about, and experiences using LinkedTube, have a look at Tiffany Dow’s blog post here: http://tinyurl.com/2b4jd35.

Remember United Yellow Pages and those fake Yellow Pages United invoices they sent out to millions of business owners? Remember how, though those invoices were designed to look authentic, they contained a line of print reading “This is not an invoice”? Or perhaps you, like me, even received some of these fake invoices and remember them clearly.

Apparently the company made over $425 million from 2004 – 2008 from these fake invoices and was charged with fraud in July, despite the arguments of their defense lawyers that the wording contained in those documents denied any connection to telephone companies.

What United Yellow Pages did was admittedly quite low, but the question remains: is it truly fraud if the company included “This is not an invoice” in not-so-fine-print on their not-so-real invoices?  Is it okay for businesses to make money from their efforts of blatantly tricking consumers? Or do people have the responsibility in being thorough when it comes to reading fine print?

View the story covering the fraud charges here: http://tinyurl.com/2fwqxjk or view a more detailed story including the defense attorney’s explanation of why mail fraud was not committed here: http://tinyurl.com/36kj3w9.  For the stories of business owners who lost their money to Yellow Pages United, simply Google something along the lines of “Yellow Pages United” scam (note the quotation marks around Yellow Pages United).