Tech and life

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.

Photo credit: k40s

So you’ve installed Ubuntu and given it a quick test drive. What next?

For the first in our Useful Links series, I’ve chosen to gather together some recent ‘things to do after installing Ubuntu’ type posts which I’d bookmarked on Delicious. You’ll find there’s a bit of repetition in the tips probably because good ideas get passed on from post to post so that’s probably some kind of recommendation. And yes, it just goes to show how many of this type of post are floating around the net. Anyway, here’s the list:

10 tips for after you install or upgrade Ubuntu – Tombuntu

Top things to do after installing Ubuntu – Jam’s Ubuntu Linux Blog

9 things you need to do/install after installing Ubuntu 9.04 – Make Tech Easier

List of services you can shutdown for better system performance – Noobs on Ubuntu

5 things to do after installing Jaunty – Help for Linux

Ubuntu 9.04 post installation guide – My-Guides.net

19 things to do after installing Ubuntu Linux – eackouye

10 things to do immediately after installing Jaunty – OMG! Ubuntu!

To do list after installing Ubuntu and Linux Alternatives Applications – The Indexer

Five things I do with every Ubuntu installation – Linux Fanatics

10 things to do after installing Ubuntu Linux – Ubuntu Linux Help

How to setup the perfect 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope desktop – ChrisJohnston.org

Hope you find them useful. Any good tips I’ve missed?

When you click on a link in your browser, it will either open in a new tab in your browser or else it will open in the same tab depending how that link has been set up on the web page. Personally, I prefer if a link opens in a new tab. That way I can close that tab when I’ve finished reading there and return to the previous page which is still an open tab in my browser, rather than having to click the back button and reload the page which will take more time.

Turns out you can force a link to open in a new tab by pressing the Control key as you click on the link with your mouse. Or if you have Firefox, just click the mouse scroll button on the link. That’s it. Hope you find that quick tip useful. If you come across a link opening in the same tab give this tip a try and see what you think.

Here’s a couple of sites with great lists of keyboard shortcuts:

Web Browser Keystrokes That Are Good To Know

It Takes only 7 SHORTCUTS to Become a Lightning Fast User

It’s becoming increasing difficult to cut through the noise in Twitter to get to the information you want – particularly as you may typically be following  hundreds or thousands of people now.

I came across a great video tutorial last week by Jesse Newhart and featured on TwiTip on how to use TweetDeck more effectively to keep track of the people you are following. It’s worth having a look at.

But it struck me that one of the simple search principles shown there could equally be applied to the twittersphere as a whole not just who you are following, particularly if you’re looking for interesting links on a particular subject. This in turn may help you to find new people to follow.

So just choose the keywords you want to track and combine these with the keyword http. For example, to see what is currently being posted with the keyword ubuntu, just open a Twitter search client. You could use Twitter search but I’ve chosen TweetGrid as you can simultaneously track a number of search terms with this. Enter your search query like this:

ubuntu AND http

This will bring up all the tweets with the word ubuntu and which also contain a link to a website. In the example, I’ve also had it track tweets with the keyword wordpress and which have web links:

I know it’s really simple but I hope you might find it useful if you’ve been wondering how to search for content or new people to follow on Twitter.

If you have any other quick tips on searching the twittersphere, please drop a comment and if you’ve found this tip useful, please Stumble, Dig, tweet or save on Delicious. The links are below. Thanks.

‘Twitter is a great tool to get your target audience discover you, your blog and the value your blog creates. It helps establish a link between you and your audience in a non-threatening way and can be a great part of your online blog branding and marketing strategy.’ Marko

I thought that was very well put. Here’s a few tips I’ve picked up in the last couple of months working with Twitter. If you haven’t already tried them, I hope you’ll find them useful.

1. Add your name to Twitter directories. Two good directories are Twellow and Just Tweet It. Find the categories that best suit what you tweet about and add yourself there. You can also look in those categories for people to follow.

2. Find people to follow. I use Twubble and Twannabe for this. Twubble checks who your followers are following and picks out people who you may want to follow yourself. Twannabe checks who your nominated Twitter ‘hero’ is following and you are not so you can add them as followers.

3. Follow some of the big names. Follow people like Darren Rowse, Jim Connolly and Chris Brogan. You will probably pick up followers on the back of following these big guns and you may also find they have interesting tweets.

4. Find local people to follow. Use TwitterLocal to find people in your area worth following.

5. Follow these people for tech news. If you’re interested in tech updates, cool websites and applications, follow these: @makeuseof, @guardiantech, @Net_Feed, @Neo_Win. Also @techwatching but this one has frequent updates.

6. Longer tweets. The killer feature of Twitter for me is the 140 character limit. This means your tweet has to be concise. It also means that you can scan tweets from your followers and quickly get the drift. However, if you occasionally need to tweet more that 140 characters, use TwitBlogs or TwitterMail.

7. Post pictures. Use Twitpic to share pictures linked to your tweets.

8. Use TweetDeck or Tweetree as your Twitter client. Both these have advantages over the Twitter website for viewing your tweets, direct messages, etc. The big plus of TweetDeck is that you can define groups of people who are most important to you so you don’t miss any tweets amidst the twitter noise. Be careful not to close the group column though as you will then have to redefine that group when you next reopen TweetDeck. You’ll also have to install Adobe Air to use it. Tweetree is probably my favourite client at the moment. Its key advantages are first you can see photos on Twitpic or Flickr or videos on YouTube directly in the client. Second, shortened links in tweets are shown in full form so you can decide whether to follow that link or not. It doesn’t do groups yet like TweetDeck but I believe that’s in the pipeline from looking at the feedback tab on the Tweetree site.

9. Use BigTweet to tweet direct from a website. If you want to tweet about a good website you’ve found, you can do it directly from BigTweet. You can tweet up to 240 characters with this. It even shortens the website URL.

10. Subscribe to TwiTip. TwiTip is one of the best websites for learning how to use Twitter more effectively. Well worth subscribing to in your RSS reader.

11. Easily change your twitter background. You can improve the background on your Twitter profile and show links to your other social networks using Twitbacks or MyTweetSpace.

12. Check your twitter grade at TwitterGrader. I’ve just made the top 50 in Scotland! You can check anyone’s grade here.

13. Put a twitter counter on your blog sidebar. Go to TwitterCounter and get a Twitter counter badge to add to your sidebar.

14. Put your latest tweets on your blog sidebar. Use TwitStamp to generate a cool image showing your Twitter details and latest tweet in your blog sidebar. Or use the Twitter for WordPress plugin to display your latest tweets on your blog.

15. Build your community. If you follow these tips, they should help you build a good community on Twitter. You don’t have to follow back everyone that follows you. If someone follows you, take a close look at their profile and see if their content is of interest to you. If it’s too far from what interests you, you don’t have to follow them. If they unfollow you because you haven’t followed them, indeed if anyone unfollows you, don’t worry about it. This is all about building communities of friends who want to read your tweets, who you can ask questions of, and who you want to hear from. It’s not really about numbers in my opinion.

I hope you find these tips useful. If there’s any tip or tool you’ve discovered and find essential that I haven’t mentioned, please drop a comment below. Also if you like this post, please share it on Delicious, Digg it, Stumble it or even tweet about it. You can use the ShareThis link just below this post. If you find this post useful, you could also help by linking to it in on your own blog. You can follow me on twitter at @techandlife. Finally, why not subscribe to our RSS feed to have all our posts sent directly to your news reader.

Photo credit: swanksalot