Tech and life

If you follow as many tech blogs as I do in your RSS reader (currently about 160 tech blogs in my Tech folder), a good number will probably be tech news blogs. When a big tech story breaks, the news can get blogged to death as each site puts up their own post rather than linking to or just tweeting someone else’s story. Understandable really, they all want to meet their daily quota of posts to maintain page visits and pagerank, and don’t want to miss out on big tech news stories.

Tech and Life isn’t a tech news blog. We concentrate more on blogging about useful web apps and services, and tips and tricks for Windows, Linux and WordPress. If I do come across some interesting tech news, I’ll generally tweet a good link, rather than adding yet another post to the blogosphere. Follow us on Twitter at @techandlife. I try and tweet the best 5 or 6 tech links I see each day.

I’ve noticed that Microsoft stories are particularly prone to reblogging. I’m thinking of Windows 7 ‘God Mode’ a few months back – everyone seemed to carry that story. More recently, it’s been Microsoft Fix It Center and just a couple of days ago, the Microsoft/FaceBook Docs.com story. Here’s the 16 posts on Microsoft Fix It Center gathered together in my Google Reader feed

This reblogging can really clog up your feed reader so here’s what you could do. Read the story on one of the bigger blogs like Download Squad, ghacks or Lifehacker, bookmark it if you like, then set up a filter in Google Reader to suppress that story from your feed in future. I’ve blogged about the awesome Google Reader Filter before and using it to filter out stories you just don’t want to appear in your RSS feed. After about a week, the surge over that particular item of tech news will have subsided and you can remove the keyword from your filter.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in following some good tech blogs in your RSS reader, there’s a few good ones there to get you started.

Quick tip: Filter out tech news stories being reblogged to death 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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If you regularly find yourself copying and pasting text from websites or desktop applications then you should really have a look at PureText. When activated, this free utility quickly removes text formatting such as bold, italics, colour, underline, bullets and hyperlinks allowing you to just paste the text. For example, I commonly find myself having to paste portions of information I’ve found online into Word documents but I don’t want all the web formatting to be carried over. Similarly, I sometimes copy sections out of Word files into other applications and I often don’t need all the Word formatting. With PureText installed, once the information has been copied to the Windows clipboard in the usual fashion, I just click the PureText icon in the system tray and paste the text into the new document (or there’s an alternative hotkey combination to paste without the formatting – by default, it’s Windows key + V). Pure Text only removes rich formatting from text and won’t remove carriage returns or tabs.

There are free utilities for just about everything you need to do on your PC. In fact, you could end up downloading way more than you need – and forget they’re there on your PC. But if copying and pasting is something you do regularly then this is one utility you’ll end up using on a regular basis. It only takes up about 3MB of memory.

PureText

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If you carry your data on a USB drive, I’m sure you’re always worried about losing it. Of course you should always take the necessary precautions about protecting the data on it like making sure it’s backed up somewhere safe and encrypting the data on it if necessary. But we don’t always do this and so we might end up losing some valuable information.

You could use Flash Drive Reminder which pops up a reminder when you try and log off Windows without removing your USB drive. Putting the drive on a car key ring might also help you to remember it but if you haven’t done this, what about getting the stick back? Doubtless if lost, some finders would just keep it, look at the data, or delete the encrypted data and reuse the stick, but I’m sure many with good intentions would return it if given the chance.

Well you could use LostDrive and edit the contact details. Or just put a text file in the root directory of the stick with your contact details. You could call the file ‘Read-me-if-you-find-this-USB-stick.txt’. But you mightn’t be happy about putting contact details in there in case the drive falls into the wrong hands.

Well I’ve come across a free service called whspr! which allows you to be contacted by email without giving away any personal details in the text file.

If you fill out the form there they give you a URL which you could put in the text file. Anyone who finds your USB stick hopefully will open the text file. You could put a message thanking them for opening the file and that you’d be most grateful if you could get in touch with the owner by clicking the URL. This would send them to a form at whspr where they can send you an email message. whspr forwards the message to your email address and now you can get in touch with the finder whose email is on the form. The URL lasts for up to 365 days so you have to remember to renew it before then. So set up an email or text reminder with your reminder app, for example Task.fm, to remind you say a week before the URL expires and get a new URL from whspr.

Hopefully, these tips should help you minimize the loss of a USB stick. Have you any tips? Drop a comment below.

Image credit: jatop

I’m constantly going to my file manager throughout the day, opening files from there, moving, copying and renaming. A good file manager has always been important to me, ever since my first experiences with a PC back in the 1980s, well before the dawn of Windows Explorer. I used a program called PC Tools for file management back then and when I moved to the Windows OS I used a file manager called PowerDesk Pro which has seen me right through to Windows XP. On and off, I’ve use Windows Explorer but never really fell in love with it – too many restrictions on what I want to do.

I’ve recently moved to Windows 7, so I looked around for a good free replacement file manager to take over from my aging copy of PowerDesk. As usual, my first port of call was my Diigo bookmarks to check out my ‘file managers’ tag. Had a look at Free Commander and didn’t like it much, then looked at xplorer2 Lite – the free version from zabkat which is fully compatible with Windows 7. I’ve been using it for about 2 months now and found it’s a very able replacement for PowerDesk …and more. I find the free version has all the features I need for just now.

Some of the best features of xplorer2

One of the main features I need in a file manager is a very simple one. When I reopen the program I want it to have remembered which folder I was in when it was shut down – for my work I’m usually going back to the same work folder the next day so the ability to save settings on exit is really useful for me.  xplorer2 can also open multiple tabs as shown above, so you have quick access to a number of essential folders – again I find this a really useful feature. You can display the tabs at the top or the bottom of the window. Hit Ctrl-Ins to open a new tab. And you can rename tabs – right click and choose Rename. You can move or copy files by dragging them onto the tab of the destination folder. But if you don’t like multiple tabs in a window, you can set up quick access to all your favourite folders from the Bookmarks menu. And incidentally, you can set up FTP access for file transfers to your website or server again though your bookmarks. FTP access is explained in this excellent Lifehacker article which also gives a great summary of the program.

Filtering your list of files is easy. In the address bar, just type ‘*.jpg’ to list the jpeg files in that folder, or type ‘e*’ to list all files starting with the letter ‘e’. Incidentally, coloured folders as shown above on my Windows XP set-up isn’t a feature of xplorer2. That feature is from a free utility called Folder Marker Free. Once installed, just right click on a folder and change its colour.

I generally use the single pane interface (plus folder tree) as show above, but you can also have a dual pane set-up which is very handy for copying or moving files. I also like how you can  preview images, videos, pdfs and mp3s within xplorer2 using the Preview button at the top.

Another nice feature is the way it autorefreshes when you plug in an mp3 player or camera and the new drive shows up without having to press F5. PowerDesk didn’t do that.

Setting it up

I have it set up just the way I want it now. If you already use the program or want to try it out, here’s a list of the features I find useful and how to set them up:

1. Save program state on exit: Tools, Options, General tab and check Save program state on exit.
2. For single pane/double pane toggle: Ctrl-O.
3. To force file names ending in a number to list in ascending number order 1, 2, 3…10, 11, 12, rather than 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3… go to Tools, Options, Advanced tab and check Natural number sort.
4. To show folder in tree on left side, go to Tools, Options, Window tab and check Keep synchronized with folder in active view pane.
5. To allow slow double click renaming of files: Tools, Options, Window tab and check Allow slow double click to rename files.
6. To prevent truncation of file names when window is not maximized:  Tools, Options, Window tab and set Max list column width to 150 – although from reading the forums this doesn’t always work.

And there’s a good xplorer2 forum here.

I’ve only just scratched the surface here with the features I find useful.  Give xplorer2 a try and see what you think. You may find yourself quickly won over from Window Explorer.

I’m frequently opening new blank browser tabs in Firefox to load a new website. Well there’s a nice way to get a reminder note in the new browser tab instead of a blank page. First download and install the Firefox add-on NewTabURL and once installed click the Options for that plugin in your browser side bar:

Select the option for URL and key in the URL http://stickyscreen.org. Then in Firefox go to that URL and enter your reminder message.

You don’t have to register with this site to use it. Your sticky reminder is unique to you. According to the website, nobody will see it except you (and whoever you let use your web browser). You can change the reminder as often as you like. The info is stored as a browser cookie. Now any time you open a new tab in Firefox, the StickyScreen website will load showing your reminder before you key your new URL. But if you delete your browser cookies using a PC maintenance program like say CCleaner you will lose the reminder info and will have to rekey it at the StickyScreen website.

Incidentally, as you can see in the Options, if you like, in your new tab you can set NewTabURL to automatically load a URL that’s in your clipboard.

If you haven’t used bookmarklets before, they’re just useful pieces of JavaScript code which you can bookmark and which let you be more productive by simplifying tasks. Installing a bookmarklet is as simple as just dragging the bookmarklet link to your bookmark region or right clicking on the link and bookmarking it. I’ve made a folder for bookmarklets on my browser bar to keep them all together. Here are 15 of the most useful bookmarklets I’ve come across. If you think they may be useful to you, just drag the link at the start of each section across to your bookmark region and try them out.

BigTweet: Lets you share links on Twitter with your followers without leaving the webpage. It automatically shortens the link in the process and captures the title and any highlighted text. Of course you do have to log into your Twitter account through BigTweet to allow it to tweet your link but I’ve had no problem here in the year I’ve been using it. This is possibly the bookmarklet I use the most.

TwitterKeys: A pop-up box gives you symbols which you can copy and paste into your tweets.

Pagezipper: If you’ve ever come across articles split across multiple webpages, this bookmarklet combines them into one long scrollable page. Saves a lot of time clicking and waiting for the next page to load.

Clippable: Reduces all the clutter from a webpage and makes it easier to read. Adverts, sidebars, etc are all removed and you are left with the text and images. There are other bookmarklets which are very similar like Readability.

Printliminator: Lets you select what you want to keep on a webpage before printing the page – you could of course print to a pdf using say doPDF which I’ve blogged about before.

Clip to Evernote: Use this bookmarklet to save a webpage to Evernote, the popular notebook app. I know Evernote has a Webclipper to clip text from webpages or entire webpages, but I find this bookmarklet useful in combination with Clippable mentioned above to just clip the text and images to Evernote and leave the rest of the clutter behind.

Read Later: Save a webpage to your Instapaper account to read later. You have to register with Instapaper to use this.

Save webpage as pdf: Sends a webpage to pdfdownload which converts it to a PDF. You can then download the PDF.

Subscribe with GReader: Quickly subscribe to a blog in Google Reader with this bookmarklet.

Show RSS Feed: Try this bookmarklet if your web browser has trouble detecting the RSS feed associated with a site. It will show you the full contents of that feed and also give you options to subscribe in your favourite newsreader.

Delicious Talk: See how many people have saved a particular page on Delicious and what tags they have used to describe the page.

Map that address: Highlight an address on a webpage and get a map showing its location.

List all Links: Lists all links on a page in a pop-up window.

Translate: Uses Google Translate to display the content of the page in English.

Youtubian: Go to a video on YouTube and click this bookmarklet. The page will reload with the video, a search box on the right, related videos below, and download links for Flash, MPEG, and mobile versions of the video also on the right. Click on the Expand link at the top of the page to revert back to the original YouTube page.

If you want to search for more bookmarklets, there’s a directory at marklets.com and here’s a site with over 100 useful bookmarklets for better productivity.

Hope you find some of these useful. Drop a comment on any I’ve missed that you like.

It happens to us all at some time. We’ve read an interesting web page, bookmarked it and tagged it but when we go back to look for that page in our bookmarks sometime later, we just can’t find that exact page again no matter how hard we try. I hate losing things in the real world and get just as mad when I do the same in the digital world. Still, at least in the digital world we have tools at our disposal to make tracking down web pages easier.

Some people would say that bookmarking on a site like Delicious is an old fashioned way of doing things anyway. Better to just do a search on Google or Twitter. They may be right. I just feel that it’s still helpful to bookmark a useful web page and add it to your info archive of great pages so you can call upon it again to refresh your memory of what was said, for example, to use it as a tutorial for a task or to help write a blog post. The other really important aspect is that many web pages aren’t static and can be altered or deleted at a later date. Adding important web pages to a disk archive can get around this.

I thought I’d go through some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned about bookmarking and managing bookmarks which might help. I’ve bookmarked close to 12000 web pages in the 2 years I’ve been using Delicious, the online bookmarking tool, so I have to have an effective way of searching through them otherwise it’s all pointless. You wouldn’t throw paper willy nilly into a filing cabinet and expect to find a page again quickly. You have to file it in such a way that you know how to retrieve it again. So let’s look at how to try and avoid losing bookmarks.

Vital web pages which you just don’t want to lose… ever!

Web pages can get deleted, updated or otherwise removed from the internet. For example, the recent demise of Yahoo’s Geocities will lead to the deletion of 7.5 million web pages. Bookmarks can also be lost if your bookmarking service suffers a data loss as happened to ma.gnolia back in January this year. For vital pages which you must have a copy of, there are a few things you can do to keep a permanent copy:

1) Clip the web page directly from your browser into an organizer like say Evernote or bookmark the page with a research tool like Diigo which bookmarks the entire web page, unlike Delicious. More about that later. It will now be fully searchable within these apps.

2) Save the web page as a pdf and download it to your hard drive, then make sure to back it up. There are a few ways to do this. First, you could copy the URL of the web page to loopApps (choose add URL and paste the URL). Then click the disk image icon to the left of the pdf name and download it to your PC. The second way would be to install a print-to-pdf utility like doPDF which I’ve talked about before. From within your browser, choose Print from the File menu, then, rather than print to a printer, print to a pdf file. You may want to use a bookmarklet like Printliminator or PrintWhatYouLike to extract just the elements of the web page you want before printing to a pdf. If your web page is in fact split over a number of pages where you have to click ‘Next’ to read the full story, you could use a bookmarklet like PageZipper which automatically merges all the ‘Next’ pages into one page before creating the pdf. Once you have downloaded the pdf of the web page, it’s searchable from within a pdf reader like Foxit Reader, it’s searchable using a desktop search utility like Copernic Desktop Search, or again just add the pdf of the web page to Evernote where it will also be searchable there.

3) Saving a web page as a pdf doesn’t always preserve all the formatting, however saving as an mht file will. Then archive it on your hard disk. Rich Menga of PCMech has explained how to archive web pages using MHT files very clearly together with a video.

4) Use a service like backupURL to save a copy of the website online.

They give you a link to the backed-up website, which you could save in your Delicious bookmarks. I noticed that even if you elect to save a particular web page, it saves the whole website as the links away from that page are still active. Not sure about their claim that the link will last forever though. If it’s really important, I’d still back it up as well using methods just mentioned above.

Your vital web page is no longer online

If you’ve bookmarked a page and it’s no longer online and you hadn’t followed the procedures above to save it or backupURL hasn’t worked for some reason, you may possibly be able to retrieve the page at the Wayback Machine. Using this, you can often find pages that have been removed or deleted from the live web years ago. If you find it, save it using the steps I outlined above.

Save web pages to read later

If you’re in a hurry, have found a great site but haven’t got time to read it straight away and you don’t want to lose it, you could save it to read later using the Firefox extension Read it Later or the Read Later bookmarklet. Once you have time to read the web page, you can then follow the other tips I’ve listed to bookmark it, tag it, clip to Evernote or Diigo or save it as a pdf or mht file.

Using tags effectively to classify and group your bookmarks

Giving your web page a really specific tag can go a long way to tracking down that page again. If I can’t find a web page straight away, at least if I can narrow it down to a specific tag category, I can look through those and hopefully find it. When I first started using Delicious, I assigned pages into really broad categories, eg software, internet, computer, windows, backup, making it really hard to track down specific pages with any of these tags. More recently, I’ve been using hyphenated tag phrases to give pages more specific categories. Using the backup tag as the first example down my Delicious tag list, here’s a screenshot of those tags:

Notice that it’s helpful to put the common word first (backup) then the modifier (eg browser) rather than the other way round. This keeps them all adjacent in the alphabetical tag listing in Delicious. I notice that further down the list I have a category driver-backup which I should change to backup-drivers. Obviously, if you have been using both alternatives interchangeably (eg gmail-backup and backup-gmail), this will surely decrease your chance of quickly finding that elusive missing web page. It’s quite straightforward to sort this out by renaming a tag in Delicious. Go to Tag Options at the top right corner and clicking Rename under Edit Tags, fill in the old tag name and the new tag name and then click Save. Everything with the old tag will be given the new tag.

Another possibility for more effective tagging is to use Facette, a Firefox plugin, to force you to be more specific about how you want to categorize each bookmark. Facette is an enhanced version of the Delicious tagging tool and creates a number of additional tags in your Delicious library.

Searching your bookmarks

You can obviously search your bookmarks in Delicious for lost web pages, but remember that this actually only searches the bookmark title, tags and any notes you inserted in the notes field when you saved the bookmark. However, it may be that the vital things you remember about the page aren’t in the title tags and notes but contained within the content of the web page itself. I heard it put very well on an Evernote podcast as tip of the tongue syndrome – where any one of the little hooks or memories you have in your brain about the web page will hopefully be just enough to track down that lost web page. So to find lost bookmarks, it would be much more useful if you could search the content of the bookmarked web page as well. There are a few services which offer this: first Deligoo, but unfortunately, this Firefox extension is not compatible with the latest versions of Firefox; second Delizzy – but I can’t recommend this as it seems a little buggy – it can take ages to log into your Delicious account and read all your bookmarks. As an alternative, you could export your bookmarks from Delicious to Evernote but unless you’ve actually clipped the pages into Evernote, it will just search the headings of the bookmarks and not the content – at least that’s what I’ve found. If I’m wrong, please let me know and I’ll update this.

Another possibility is bookmarking the web page with Diigo which makes the entire page searchable. David Pierce has written a great post on Diigo at MakeUseOf. As with Evernote you can import all your Delicious bookmarks into Diigo.

Another choice is to build a custom search engine to search the full content of your bookmarks. There’s a great post by Sarah Perez at Read Write Web on building a custom search engine to search your Delicious bookmarks. This involves exporting all your Delicious bookmarks as an html file and importing them to a Posterous blog, then linking a Google Custom Search Engine to this to search the content of your bookmarks. Sarah’s post explains the method very clearly. I’ve tried it and it works well. The only real problem is that it’s a little cumbersome constantly updating the list of bookmarks on your Posterous blog.

So to summarize, the best ways to search the full content of your bookmarks for a lost web page is either with a custom search engine or with Diigo. So far I’m pretty impressed with Diigo.

Hope you’ve found these tips useful in managing your bookmarks and tracking down lost ones. Of course if you have other ways of avoiding lost bookmarks and keeping track of your info archive, please drop a comment. I’d love to hear how you deal with this.

Image credit: Artivex

Frequently, we come across websites or webpages we want to return to or refer to in future. But how best to store these bookmarks or links for future reference? How will we find them again?

Well, we’ve probably all got our own ways of storing this info. I’ll quickly run through mine then point you towards another site which is currently conducting a survey on how we process online information.

I use Google Reader as my main source of information. I’m subscribed to over 200 blogs mostly covering tech and blogging.  I also check out any interesting links posted in Twitter by the people I follow. I star any posts in Reader that I may want to refer to again then tag them with, I hope, a memorable tag, e.g. wordpress-tips, wordpress-plugins, ubuntu-apps, ubuntu-tutorials. Notice, I generally tend to make two-word tag phrases by hyphenating tags. That way I can quickly browse through tag phrases and have more success retrieving information when viewing these categories than more general single word tags like ‘wordpress’ and ‘ubuntu’. I also tend to assign these same tag phrases in Delicious. Yes, the belt-and-braces approach, but my feeling is that I would rather some bookmarking duplication than find that one bookmarking site has disappeared or started charging for access and I lose all my data. Some webpages I definitely want to ensure I keep long term, and so as to avoid any possibility that the website or webpage may disappear for whatever reason, I save these pages to Evernote. Finally, I try to tweet the best 5 to 10 weblinks I’ve found each day. I can make an archive of all my tweets using the methods suggested in a recent post at ReadWriteWeb.

So that’s just one way to do it. Have a look at the survey over at ProductiveWise for lots of other techniques and add your method to the comments there.

In a recent post on tech tips, I listed Firefox as my current browser of choice. I have also been using Google Chrome for the last 6 months or so and am pretty impressed with it. I do find Firefox slow to load and I find that recent Firefox updates still haven’t resolved the RAM issues. On the other hand, Chrome loads quickly and is pretty responsive.

For the last few days, I’ve been finding Google Reader and Google Mail really slow in Firefox, probably as a result of some disk maintenance I did over the weekend. Probably my fault and I should be able to track the problem with time. However, I’ve found that both Google Reader and Google Mail are still really responsive in Chrome – perhaps not surprisingly – they’re all from the same stable so should work well together. So that got me thinking. I wondered just what else I needed Chrome to be able to do so it might be a real alternative to Firefox. Well, really important to me is a Delicious plug-in like Delicious Bookmarks in Firefox so I can bookmark webpages straight to Delicious from Chrome. I also need LastPass integration with Chrome so I can quickly recall passwords and login to websites. I really like LastPass for password management and have blogged about this before.

Well it turns out that although Chrome doesn’t have plug-ins for these features yet, it does have bookmarklets which give the Delicious and LastPass integration I need. I found these two websites which show how to get the functionality I need in Chrome:

How to make a Delicious ‘Plug-in’ for Chrome

Use LastPass in Chrome

Using Chrome, I’ve also solved another problem that I had had with Google Reader that I had assumed was a fault within Reader but turned out to be due to Firefox. I have over 2000 tags and folders in Google Reader. In Firefox, when I went into Settings in Reader and selected Folders and Tags and scrolled down to the end, the listing ended around the ubuntu tag, i.e. way short of the actual end of the list of tags and folders. However, doing the same thing with Chrome as the browser, my complete list of tags and folders was displayed allowing housekeeping like deleting tags, etc right to the end of the complete list which I couldn’t do in Firefox.

How have you got Chrome up to speed? Drop a comment below.

Edit (13 August 2009): Thanks to Scotian whose comment below solved the slow Firefox problem.  It turns out that the latest Skype extension update for Firefox  slows down Google Reader and Google Mail to a crawl. Just uninstalled the extension and everything is fine again in Firefox.

Image credit: brunkfordbraun

I’ve been following the tech scene for about 2 years now since I discovered tech podcasts. Although I had reasonable tech knowledge before this, mostly from browsing tech forums, I found that listening to tech podcasts and subscribing to tech blogs in Google Reader uncovered many tech tips and great advice, and some of the best tips keep coming up again and again. I’ve tried to gather together some of the best that I can remember. If you’re a geek you’ll have heard most before, but for the tech beginner, hopefully there’s some useful advice here. I’ve tried to keep each tip as short and concise as possible. Just use Google to get lots of additional info.

Essentials

1. First and foremost, back up your data regularly. This can’t be stressed enough. Sooner or later, your hard drive will die and you don’t want all your photos, etc to die with it. Back all your data up to an external drive, or to one of a host of free online services like DropBox. If you’ve a lot of data, have a look at Carbonite, a paid service. Better still, image or clone your hard drive regularly onto an external drive using a product like Acronis True Image so you can quickly get back up and running after a disk disaster. I’ve written a how-to on avoiding a disk disaster.

2. Second and also really important, always use secure passwords online: long and with a combination of numbers, letters and symbols, never dictionary words. Don’t use the same password on multiple sites. Use a program like LastPass to manage your passwords. It’s free and will also help with filling out online forms.

3. Have a rescue CD to hand so that if you are caught with a non-booting drive, you can at least try to get your data off. A Knoppix CD or the Ultimate Boot CD may do the trick. And before disaster strikes, make sure your PC will boot off the CD drive when a CD is inserted at boot-up. You may have to change the boot order in the BIOS so that the PC boots off the CD first.

4. Make sure you always have a firewall enabled on your PC.

Hardware

1. If you’re using the default router username and password, change them immediately. The default settings are all commonly known and listed here or here. So anyone with this knowledge can effectively hack into your PC if you have a wireless router and they are in range.

2. Uncheck all unnecessary programs launching at startup. To do this in Windows XP, click on Start, Run and enter msconfig in the box. Then click the Startup tab and uncheck any programs you don’t need at startup. Google any you are not sure of. Or use the excellent free utility CCleaner to disable startup programs. Click the Tools tab on the left then the Startup button. Revo Uninstaller can also disable startup programs through its Autorun Manager.

3. Get as much RAM as you can into your PC, 2GB or more if possible. Use the Crucial System Scanner to check what type of memory you need and how much you can fit.

4. Disable the annoying Caps Lock key. Here’s a short how-to.

5. By all accounts, many PC users, particularly in the US, seem to suffer from dust and dirt clogging up the fans, etc. and causing overheating problems which can damage your PC. It’s well worthwhile unplugging your PC, removing the side panel, taking it outside and carefully blowing out all the dust and dirt before you do permanent damage to your system. If you found a lot of dust, clean it regularly.

6. When using you laptop with the mains cable plugged in, take great care not to strain or loosen the power jack by for example by tugging or tripping over the mains cable. Treat that connection with great care. Once the connection shears from the motherboard you’ll only have hours of battery life left before a trip to your local computer repair shop is needed – and they mightn’t be keen on doing this type of repair.

Software

1. Firefox is a great multi-platform browser, particularly because of the vast amount of extensions which improve the user experience. Don’t load up too many plugins though or you’ll slow it down.

2. Don’t use the bulky Adobe Reader to open pdfs. Lightweight, free Foxit Reader is fine.

3. Thunderbird is a great multi-platform email client.

4. If you haven’t tried Skype, sign up for it. You can make free calls from PC to PC with this. If you both have webcams you can make free video calls – excellent for keeping in touch with friends and family abroad. Our daughter is away at college now and Skype is invaluable for keeping in touch.

5. VLC is a great multi-platform media player. It’ll play virtually anything you throw at it.

6. You don’t have to spend money on commercial software. Products like OpenOffice are really excellent, multi-platform free solutions and suitable for most things you might want to do. You can even open and edit pdfs in OpenOffice Writer.

7. There are many free utilities to convert Word documents to pdfs. I use doPDF which effectively prints your doc to a pdf file.

8. CCleaner is an essential free utility for a Windows PC for deleting temporary files, history, cookies, etc. Use BleachBit on a Linux machine.

9. Use the free utility Recuva to recover deleted files.

10. Revo Uninstaller is a great free utility that does a thorough job of getting rid of installed applications and the junk that they can sometimes leave behind.

11. Two great Windows anti-spyware programs are SUPERAntiSpyware and Malwarebytes. Free AVG is a good antivirus program, but if you’re careful where you go on the net, you may not need any of them – particularly if you’re using a Linux distribution as your OS.

12. Evernote is great for collecting web clippings, etc. Give it a try. Doesn’t support Linux yet though.

Online services

1. GMail is a great spam filter. Route all your email account inboxes through GMail. I’ve been doing this for over a year now and I find it almost never puts genuine mail in the spam folder and is brilliant at filtering out any imported spam emails. In addition, it won’t import any email when it identifies a virus in an attachment. Excellent.

2. If you’re search on Google isn’t getting the results you wanted, try searching for exact keyword phrases by putting your keyword phrase in inverted commas – or use the exact phrase box in Google Advanced Search. I use this a lot so I always have Google Advanced Search loading up in one tab when I launch Firefox.

3. XMarks is great for syncing your browser bookmarks between all your PCs.

Operating systems

1. By all accounts, Windows 7 is going to be a great OS. Upgrade to it when you can.

2. Don’t be afraid to try Linux, particularly Ubuntu if you’re a beginner. Although things are done slightly differently from Windows, it really is well worth trying out and it isn’t hard to use. You may well decide to switch from Windows afterwards. You may be able to use Wine to get some of your favourite Windows programs running on Linux.

General

1. If you have to put your email address on your website, make sure to cloak it so it’s not picked up by spammers. Use a service like HideText to do this. Better still, use a contact form on your webpage.

2. Subscribe to @makeuseof in Twitter for lots of useful info on web applications and services.

3. Subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog!

That’s all I can think of for the moment – I’ll come back and add additional tips when I think of them. Drop a comment if you have a great tech tip to share.

Oh and by the way, if this article has whetted your appetite for tech tips, have a look at David Pogue’s great article (and the comments) for even more useful tips.