Tech and life

If you spend a lot of time on the move and need to charge your mobile devices, have a look at the Powermonkey-classic charger from power traveller. I’ve just bought one on Amazon (£16 in the UK; about 25 US dollars) as my daughter is about to head out to Africa with a group to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and will be away from conventional charging facilities for at least 5 or 6 days. She needed a portable charging unit capable of charging her mobile phone and mp3 player.

Charging the Powermonkey

Charging the Powermonkey is very straightforward – it comes with a universal mains charger (which works in over 150 countries) with a selection of interchangeable plugs. You can also charge the Powermonkey from a USB port on a PC using a separate retractable USB cable. A red light glows when charging, green when charged.

Charging your devices

The Powermonkey is supplied with a selection of charging tips for various devices but if you can’t find one to suit your device, you can always use your usual charging cable (USB port to device) because crucially there’s a female USB tip for the charger (shown attached in the image above) – so it’s just like charging your device from your PC. Or additional tips for specific devices are available on the power traveller website.

Haven’t tried it out fully yet but the specs say it holds its charge for up to one year and delivers power for 40 hours iPod use, or 96 hours mobile phone use. I read a review on Amazon which said it would charge an iPod twice before it needed charging. Anyway, I’ll update this post when I’ve confirmed how often it can charge up our devices before needing recharging.

By the way, I don’t do paid product reviews, and I’m not being paid for this post. Just blogging about solutions which work for me.

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Imagine this scenario. You’ve just walked into your parent’s house. They’ve just popped out so no-one’s at home but on the living room table is a copy of their Will. They must have been reviewing it. What would you do? Turn round and immediately walk out the door… or have a sneak peak to see what brother Billy and sister Jill have been left… and of course don’t forget yourself!

I know what I’d do – turn round and run a mile for fear of seeing anything. If something is marked Private and Confidential and it’s not for me, I just don’t want to know. Finding out the contents of a confidential letter or what you have or haven’t been left in a Will beforehand could be a horrible experience and better left until the appropriate time. If it’s not meant for me, I would feel really guilty reading its contents and would hate myself for doing it. But I’m sure many would have no qualms about having a look.

My Will is with our solicitor safely locked away from prying eyes. Make sure your parents’ Will is too before it’s too late and you are tested to breaking point!

And of course, if you have any Private and Confidential files on your PC, make sure they are encrypted and password protected. I’ve been using a free program called Axcrypt to encrypt my sensitive files and it’s working fine for me.

So what would you do? Are there any circumstances when it’s okay to look at Private and Confidential information not meant for you and you’re not 007? Let us know in the comments. And cast your vote in the poll below – it’s the first time I’ve tried a poll on this site so I’ll be interested to test it out.

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Image credit: Janielle Beh

I’ve been using MS Word for about 10 years and thought I knew most of its important features, but I didn’t know about the Spike!  I found out about this great feature recently in a blog post on Help Desk Geek. It allows you to quickly rearrange non-contiguous blocks of text or other items in your Word document. Basically, instead of using the simple cut and paste (Ctrl X, Ctrl-V) which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, you can use Word’s in-built Spike feature to ‘multiple cut’ items and then paste them all in order in a single operation.

Let me explain. The Spike allows you to add multiple selections (by cutting, not copying) to Word’s clipboard in the order you want, then to paste them all at once. So for example if you have an unordered list of say references which you want in alphabetical order, you just cut each selection in turn in the order you want using Ctrl-F3. They are added in that order to the Spike. No need to paste items individually, just keep adding your selections to the Spike. When you’ve finished cutting the items, you paste them all at once at your insertion point using Ctrl-Shift-F3.  Everything is pasted in one operation with all the selections in the order in which they were cut.

Try it out and see what you think. Definitely a time saver if you find yourself frequently rearranging selections in Word. And this feature works in all versions of Word from 97 to 2010. These are the main features of Spike but for a full how-to on using it, head over to the Help Desk Geek post. And let us know how you use the Spike in the comments.

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Image credit: quinn.anya

It’s important to monitor how your blog host provider is performing. You may only have one chance to attract a visitor from a search query or a backlink to your blog and if your site is down temporarily for some reason, chances are they may never retry your link and discover your blog. There are a number of free services which will monitor your site and email or SMS you when it’s down, and back online again. I’ve been using the website monitoring service Montastic for about a year now and I’m quite happy with them. The free plan actually lets you monitor up to three sites with an interval down to every 30 minutes. Each site account also includes an RSS feed.

Of course it doesn’t have to be your blog that you monitor, could be any site you’re interested in. The reason I mention this now is because I’ve noticed that of late my blog host Bluehost isn’t providing the uninterrupted service it used to, so I must contact them and find out why. Here’s a snapshot of email alerts I’ve received over the past week from Montastic. You can see that my blog was down for parts of most days.

I have another site with a different host which I’m also monitoring and it isn’t experiencing anything like this sort of downtime so it’s time to put in a ticket with Bluehost.

So I can recommend Montastic, but other free blog monitoring services were reviewed in a Mashable post back in April.

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It’s common knowledge in SEO circles that not posting frequently and regularly will decrease your blog page rank and probably lead to a drop in RSS feed subscribers. What I don’t accept is the advice I’ve occasionally read on some blogs that if you’re suffering from feed overload and looking to prune back your RSS subscriptions, you should unsubscribe from blogs which don’t update frequently and regularly.

As I see it, the most important consideration in unsubscribing should be content. If a blog is offering interesting fresh content, even if on an irregular basis, I would keep my subscription. Having said that, if the blog is clearly stagnating with no posts for the previous 3 or 4 months, I might just drop it, unless the blogger has posted good reasons for taking a break.

Lighten the load

When you think about it, cutting back on blogs which update only occasionally isn’t going to have much effect on your blog overload. What you should be aiming to do is cut the blogs whose content isn’t interesting to you anymore, or the blogs which are pushing out poor content just to achieve a daily post target. In addition, in the tech space there are quite a few blogs which just reblog tech news and press releases. You don’t need this duplication so cut out a few of these. All these are the culprits in overloading your blog feed.

Spare a thought for the blogger

If you’re blogging in your spare time and aren’t a full-time blogger, it certainly isn’t easy to push out good fresh content on a daily basis. I blog in my spare time and put out posts when I can. And good unique blog ideas don’t come daily. In addition, the research which goes into make a good post may take a couple of days in your spare time. I only manage to post at most 3 times a week, but it can be as little as once a fortnight. So far I haven’t put adverts on my blog so I get no monetary reward for blogging. I do it for the enjoyment. So don’t penalize the part-time or occasional blogger who hasn’t taken the step to full-time blogging or perhaps just doesn’t want to.

And if you are a full-time blogger, take a few days off now and again to recharge. You’ll almost certainly return with fresher content and have developed a few ideas in the meantime.

Content is king

This should be the main focus on whether to unsubscribe from a blog feed. If a blogger is pushing out good fresh content which is of interest to you, keep subscribing even if they do post on an irregular basis. And if you do like a post, try and thank them in the blog comments or share their post in your social network. It may be the only reward they get for their efforts.

The case for continuing to subscribe to blogs which don’t update frequently and regularly is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

If you’re new to Tech and Life, please subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up for free email updates at the top right of this page… and have a look through our over 100 archived posts. Thanks for visiting!

It’s really hard to predict how PCs and laptops will evolve over the coming years but with the success of the iPad and the forthcoming launch of a number of tablets including a possible PalmPad from HP, it seems certain that tablets and touchscreen enabled devices are going to play an increasingly important role in our digital lives.

For years now, we’ve had touchpads on laptops and netbooks and most of us have become quite adept at using them. I personally still prefer to plug in a mouse as I find it easier to use. One of the problems with the touchpad is that it’s possible to lightly brush over it when typing and inadvertently move the insertion point in your document. There’s a good recent article on Digital Inspiration about disabling the touchpad when you don’t need it.

But when you think about it, touching a metal pad to move a cursor on a screen is perhaps slightly removed from what we really want to do. How much better to be able to touch a screen and say drag files and folders round. Touchscreens have obviously been around for quite some time now, but the impetus from touchscreen smartphones like the iPhone and now the iPad tablet seems to be pushing us increasingly towards touchscreen devices. I still think the mouse will be with us for some time to come on the desktop PC. Ergonomically, it’s not quite so comfortable to touch a monitor screen on a desk at eye level directly in front of you over long periods but certainly for laptops and netbooks where the screen is much lower, a touchscreen plus keyboard or a full tablet device seem to be the obvious evolution of the interface.

So over the coming years, I think we’re going to see more tablet PCs, touchscreen laptops and touchscreen netbooks. Or perhaps I’m just stating the obvious here. How do you think the user interface will evolve? Would you want a touchscreen on your netbook? Or are you going to move completely to a tablet?

From touchpad to touchscreen: evolution of the interface is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

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Image credit: Anonymous Collective

A recent family bereavement got me thinking. What would happen to this blog and all my online accounts if I died tomorrow? I hadn’t really given it much thought before and I’m sure many of you are in the same boat. It’s hard enough to cope with a family bereavement let alone sit down and try and sort out someone’s online accounts so we really should give our loved ones as much help as we can to cover this unfortunate possibility. As it stands, I’m sure my wife would be completely at a loss to know where to start with my online life. Not surprising really as she doesn’t know which online accounts I have! So let’s have a look and see if there’s anything we can do to help deal with our virtual life in the event of our actual death.

What about your blog?

If you have a blog, have you thought what would happen to it if you died tomorrow? It’s actually an asset you own and I guess the first question is would any of your family want to take it on? Better find out now and if there is someone, you’ll need to be able to get your blog admin details to them somehow after your death. Don’t forget to include domain renewal dates and blog host renewal dates. More about that later. If you’ve monetized your blog through advertising for example, the income from that may be a nice little bonus for your loved ones and that may be another reason for keeping the blog alive. So remember to pass on your PayPal details. They’ll need that to be able to remit the advertising revenue back to the family. On the other hand, if no-one is really interested in carrying on your blog, they may consider selling it to another blogger. After all, a ready-made blog may well suit someone who wants to move into blogging and bypass all the hassle of setting it up and building up traffic. What will happen to your blog when you die is summed up very nicely in this post on Daily Blogging Tips.

What about Facebook?

Your loved ones will have the choice of terminating your account or keeping it in a ‘memorial state’ which removes features like status updates and contact details and lets only confirmed friends view the profile and post comments on it. Discuss this with them. Again, they’ll obviously need your admin details whichever they choose. You may also want to arrange a farewell message to be posted in the event of your death. You could keep that with your log in details as discussed next, but make sure your digital heir knows where to find the details.

Passing on the important details after death

Bear in mind that the terms of service of most online accounts don’t permit passing them on to a ‘new owner’. Each site tends to have its own rules about who can do what should someone pass on, and executors may need to make special requests to close down accounts or access your information. For info on the policies of Yahoo, MySpace, Google and Microsoft when it comes to dealing with the accounts of deceased users, read this Educo blog post or this MakeUseOf post.

If you can pass the accounts on, first you’ll have to identify someone who would be willing to tidy up all the loose ends, probably your spouse or partner. But don’t forget to cover the possibility that you and your partner may die at the same time. If you’ve already made a Will, this may all sound familiar. Of course keeping your online admin details with your Will may be a good solution. But I can hear you say, I change my passwords regularly and add new online accounts all the time, I can’t keep changing these details in my Will. Well, if you use a username/password manager like LastPass, you only have to add your email address and one master password to your Will documents. All you account usernames and passwords are held securely in LastPass. Once your digital heir accesses your LastPass Vault, they can see all your usernames and your passwords. Another possibility I read about recently on MakeUseOf is LogAway which allows you to create a single click log in for hundreds of websites. You will have to change the master password occasionally but this is all that will have to be updated with your Will documents. Of course, you don’t have to keep your details with your Will. Any secure place will do where your spouse, partner or executor can get hold of the details when required. You could also use a service like Death Switch to email your loved one with all the details after you’ve passed away.

There are also online services like Legacy Locker and Entrustet that allow the creation of a will for digital assets. Legacy Locker’s free ‘trial account’ limits you to listing three digital assets and two beneficiaries. Lifehacker have a post on Legacy Locker here and Entrustet here. Entrustet lets you assign an heir to access your accounts when you pass away. It lets you set up unlimited password-protected accounts to be transferred over to a trusted person upon your passing and lets you decide what will happen to each account.

So don’t leave it until it’s too late. You have a great opportunity to make these decisions now. Do yourself and your family a favour and make some backup arrangements to help deal with your online world in the event of your untimely death. Drop a comment below if you have already made these arrangements and you have some advice for us.

What would happen to your online accounts if you died tomorrow is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

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Further reading: Handling computer accounts after death – Rocket Moms

Image credit: Roy’s funeral

Anyone who has used Microsoft Word down the years will be familiar with the keyboard combination Ctrl-F to bring up a search box. Well, all that’s changed in Word 2010. Hitting Ctrl-F now brings up the Navigation pane on the left which is a little different, but I think an improvement – at least once you’ve tried it for a day or two.

So how is it an improvement? Well for me, one annoyance of search and replace in earlier versions of Word was the way the search box would jump around over the document when you clicked the Find Next button often obscuring the search results. Now in Word 2010, the search box is in the Navigation pane in the left panel. Search results are highlighted in the main window as you type your search word. If there are few enough occurrences, a snippet of text containing the words is displayed in the Navigation pane. Clicking on a particular snippet will take you to its location in the document and the words remain highlighted. The Navigation pane can be docked and undocked if you wish by clicking the down arrow to the right of the word Navigation. The pane can also be closed by clicking the cross next to the down arrow.

I was sceptical at first. Is this really an improvement? Well it’s not obscuring the search results any more but it doesn’t seem to be case-sensitive – searching for Table brings up Table and table and words like adjustable which end in table.

No problem. There’s a drop-down box which you can access by clicking the down arrow at the right end of the search box. Select Options here.

Now if you like, you can select Match case and Find whole words only to improve your search results – and if you like you can make this your default search option by clicking the Set As Default button. Incidentally, you can also select Advanced Find (the old style search box) from this drop-down menu.

Okay, so you’ve tried it and you still don’t like the new Navigation pane. Well, you can try remapping the Ctrl-F key combination to the old style search box, now called Advanced Find. I’m indebted to Jay Freedman for instructions on how to do this:

- Right-click the ribbon or Quick Access Toolbar and choose Customize the Ribbon.

- Click the Keyboard shortcut Customize button in the dialog.

- Select the Home Tab category.

- Select the EditFind command.

- Click in the “Press new shortcut key” box and press Ctrl+F (note that the “Currently assigned to” label shows that you’re taking the shortcut away from the NavPaneSearch command, which is what you’d change to if you ever want to restore the default.)

- Click the Assign button and then click Close.

I’ve also discovered another quick way to access this Advanced Find box by adding its icon to the Quick Access Toolbar at the top of your screen. Follow my instructions in an earlier post on the Quick Access Toolbar, but this time you want to go to All Commands and scroll down to Advanced Find (with the binoculars icon), highlight it, then click Add to add this to your Quick Access Toolbar. Now when you click the binoculars icon on the Quick Access Toolbar, as shown in the top screen shot above, the familiar old style search box should appear.

Finally, I should point out that clicking Ctrl-H to bring up the good old Find and Replace box hasn’t changed in Word 2010 – and you can also access Advanced Find by clicking the Find tab at the top of that box. Of course Replace still has that old annoyance of obscuring results just like the old style Find did.

So give searching with the new Word 2010 Navigation pane a good try out first before you revert to old habits… if you must – I think you’ll like it.

The new search feature (Ctrl-F) in Word 2010 is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

If you’re new to Tech and Life, please subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up for free email updates at the top right of this page. Thanks for visiting!