9. August 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

A friend of mine sent me a really neat plug-in for just about all of the main browsers.

It’s called PicLens. What it does, is take images and videos on the web, puts them into categories.  Allows you to search for videos and images. Allows shopping products from Amazon. Keeps you up to date on the news. It does all of this, by putting your screen in a 3D mode, or the appearance of 3d. It may not help you do a lot of work, but it sure does look nice and it’s a pretty neat program to have.

Best part about it, is it’s free.

Download here  http://www.piclens.com/

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25. July 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

I was looking at my bookmarks today, and it dawned on me that I have over 2000 online accounts. I have them all it seems, file storage, photo storage /share, document storage /share, virtual desktops, web portals for different things. Not to mention all the forums I belong to. Do I really need all of these? No, but some how I can’t say no the the webs free sites.

My question, which I will try to answer latter, is which of these accounts can I get rid of? Do I really need 5 photo hosting and sharing sites? etc… My goal is to get rid of some of my bookmarks. The only way I can do that is to transfer all the data to one type of account, and dare I say it, pay for the site? Yes I know you get what you pay for, but so far I have had few problems with any of the free online accounts.

So now do I take 4 years of stuff I have saved and move it, delete it or just don’t log back into those accounts again?
What are your favorites and what ones could you live without?

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22. June 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

Having used this for over a week, it’s very helpful.However as good as it is, it sometimes can be a pain. Of course, part of the problem is me, since I did not read the how too. Today I went back in and fixed the things that I should have set up the first time, and have had no problems so far. It allows you to manage a few different profiles, so if you are into a few different things on the web like I am you can manage those web forms using different profiles, without closing Firefox.
There are some other good web form fills that are really good, however since using this, I think I may uninstall robo, and stick with Sxipper.

Thanks to Adam at Lifehacker who turned me on to this! http://lifehacker.com/

Plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4865

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6. June 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

I wanted to share some great links with everyone. I get asked by the guys from
my gaming community about cool links that can actually do something for you.
While I can’t list them all today, I will add to the list as I have time. Now
one of my favorite sites is LifeHacker. I am a junkie, while I do not comment
much; I do read everything they come out with. Absolutely my favorite site for
learning new things about computers, Iphones, just about any gadget. They are
great. http://lifehacker.com/

F-Secure provides a number of virus removal and
system fixing tools from its ftp site. Virus removal tools are used separately
from F-Secure Anti-Virus and provide cleaning of a specific infection. Fixing
tools perform repair of a system damaged or modified by a specific malicious
program. Most of the tools have additional read me files that should be studied
before usage.http://www.f-secure.com/security_center/malware_removal_tools.html

TweakGuides.com is devoted to providing you with a range of detailed tweak
guides to help you understand and optimize your computer. TweakGuides is a must have bookmark for gamers http://www.tweakguides.com/

Now if you’re a parent you really need to watch
what’s going on when your kids are online.  One great free way to do that is
will K9 Blue Coat® K9 Web Protection is a content filtering solution for your
home computer. Its job is to provide you with a family-safe Internet experience,
where YOU control the Internet content that enters your home. For Windows 2000,
Windows XP or Windows Vista computer.
http://www1.k9webprotection.com/getk9/index.php

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22. May 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

Pretty neat, windows live offers cash back for using their search engine to shop.http://search.live.com/cashback/

How it works is pretty simple, login to your windows live account, (most hotmail accounts are free) do a live search it will bring up the stores with the price, when you click on the store link anything you buy will be eligible for cash back. While I want to know what is eligible, it’s still a neat idea.

Once again I need to give kudos to LifeHacker, if you do not have their site bookmarked you need to. http://lifehacker.com/

While I did not read the fine print, MS says when you hit the $5 mark they will send you the cash

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8. May 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

Digsby! What is it? It’s a cool instant messenger program that works with all of the chat programs. At least all I have tried, which includes; AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts. What I found really helpful, is the small pop up box, lets you respond without having to do much, just move your cursor to the little pop up, respond and your right back doing whatever you were doing. Then there is a cool feature that lets you rename your buddys, so instead of franks99999 you can rename it Frank, or whatever you call that person. Now if thats not enough, which for me it was not, it manages your email accounts as well. You can even respond to an email when the box pops up to tell you that you have an email, if you click on it, You will go right to that email.

Below is the list of features, since I started using this last week I will not stop, its simple to set up, and real easy to use.

http://www.digsby.com/features.php

• One combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts.
• Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows. You can drag tabs out into their own windows for important conversations.
• Rename contacts with an alias so you don’t have to remember buddy names like ‘giantsfan123′.
• If one of your friends has more than one IM account you can combine them into a single merged contact to eliminate duplicate buddies.
• Send your friends SMS messages right from the IM window.
• The InfoBox lets you check everyone’s status message and profile just by moving your mouse down the list.
• Changing your status has never been easier. just one click right on the buddy list!
• Multitask while you chat. Minimize the IM window and you see popups of new IM’s. Best of all, you can reply right from the popup and get back to what you were doing.
• Log conversation history and find the information you need our search-enabled log viewer.
• And so much more.
• Manage your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts right from digsby.
• Get popup notifications when new email arrives. Clicking a popup takes you right to the message with auto-login into webmail accounts.
• The email InfoBox gives you a snapshot of your unread messages with just one click
• Perform actions such as “Mark as Read” or “Report Spam” right from the email InfoBox.
• Send emails to your friends right from the IM window. The email is sent directly from any account digsby is tracking for you.
• Stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace account (other network support coming soon).
• Receive alerts of events such as new friend requests, messages, group invites, etc.
• The social network InfoBox gives you a real time NewsFeed of what your friends are up to. Everything from new photos, to status updates, to upcoming birthdays is just a click away.
• Set your Facebook and Twitter status right from Digs
• Customize digsby with application skins to give it a personal look and feel.
• Change the way your conversations look with themes – everything from simple AIM-style windows to 3D conversation bubbles.
• Complete control over the layout of buddies on the buddy list. Change everything from buddy icon size to whether or not to show a snippet of their away message.
• Sort your buddy list how ever you want! You can organize buddies manually, by status, by service, by name or by log size to place those you communicate with most at the top. You can even choose a secondary sorting method.
• Customizable notification system lets you choose what events you want to be alerted about and how.
• Digsby offers complete synchronization between computers and installations. Everything from the skin you chose to your pre-defined status messages follows you from place to place.
• You can place a widget on your blog, website, or social network profile so you can chat with visitors right from digsby.
• Manage multiple simultaneous file transfers from one simple transfer manager.

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6. May 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

Working on a book? How about a trying to work on a budget for a civic association?

Google apps are by far the best thing on the net for free stuff. The documents that you can share with others are great. Just to name a few: word, spreadsheets, calendars as well as creating your own groups. There are a ton of things that you can get done for yourself and with others. Even if you are using them just for yourself, you can log in and work from any computer. No need to buy Microsoft word or office. www.google.com

If your one of those that has to have word on your computer, don’t pay Microsoft, use Open Office org. It’s a great program, which has just about everything that Microsoft office, except one thing, it’s free!!!!!

http://www.openoffice.org/

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4. May 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

First let me give the credit to the guy who found it. http://lifehacker.com/386526/slipstream-service-pack-3-into-your-windows-xp-installation-cd

I followed the simple directions, and was pleased with the results, no more waiting at the computer to reinstall windows, just pop it in and go. Plus with it stripped of all the stuff I never use, it makes it a cleaner install. If you have not reinstalled Windows is over a years it’s time to do so. I do my computers every 6 months or so. Sure its nice to have an image backup, however nothing beats a clean install. Be sure to back up all of your drivers, or better yet follow the directions giving and have them on the install dick you make for Windows. You may wish to wait till the official SP3 is released.

I enjoy and learn a lot from Lifehacker. Great site, and no I have nothing to do with it.

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2. May 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

Virus are a part of being on line. We all hope that our security software is doing its job. However it never hurts to check.
Some times the anti-virus lets something slip, instead of waiting for something bad to happen I scan my computers once a week.
Windows security .com offers a free Trojan scanner. It’s pretty good, and its free! http://www.windowsecurity.com/trojanscan/
Another good site is  Runscaner http://www.runscanner.net/ There are others Micro Trend is a great site as well.
Of course they are all going to try to sell you something, however getting the scan done is whats important here. Once you find something you can remove it.

There are many anti-virus programs out there, what I use and have been using for a while now is AVG free version. I then will run
a scan such as the one’s above. If you every get stuck on something always remember that Google and the Dog Pile searches are your friend.
There has not been any computer related problems that I have not been able to solve by doing a search.

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