Online help for Valentine’s Day
Here comes Valentine’s Day and big sales in chocolate and greeting cards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But to help make this Valentine’s Day a bit different, I've come up with some online suggestions on how to appreciate and celebrate the holiday in some creative, new ways. A site called Gifts.com is not a bad place to start, with their Love-O-Meter guide that offers Valentine suggestions for every stage of a relationship, from just met to long married. Want some gift ideas? For Valentines’s Day gifts for men, the RomanceStuck site suggests cufflinks with a secret personalized message from you, a photo collage mousepad... ...
How To: Change your Facebook Privacy Settings
If it seems to you that everybody these days is on Facebook, that’s because, well, everyone is. More than 350 million people in fact, enough to make the popular social networking site bigger than most nations. But with Facebook’s massive popularity has come new problems. It happened because of recent privacy changes Facebook made that users may not realize leaves their personal details exposed for the world to see, You may think only your Facebook friends can see your postings, pictures and status updates. But changes Facebook made to its privacy policy in December have left the lives of many people ...
Scamming the Scammers
Despite years of warnings, we still get those scam emails from Nigeria and other far flung places offering us huge sums of money if we’ll help someone claiming to be a banking or political figure smuggle out a fortune. It’s called the 419 scam after a law in Nigeria that prohibits such practices. While the scam continues, it’s produced a counterforce, a group of Internet vigilantes that turns the tables of the fraudsters by… scamming the scammers. The 419 Eater website is a place dedicated to what’s called Scambaiting, or intentionally responding to those 419 scam emails, leading the scammers ...
Twitter tools that will get you followers and organize your tweets
The new year 2010, they say, will be THE year for social networking, led by the hugely popular Twitter service that send out those short, 140-character updates. How to manage those Tweets and get more followers is a major online activity these days. I've found three tools that will help you manage those social networking tasks. Twitter seems to be where all the online buzz is these days. Check out a Twitter popularity measuring site like Twitterholic and you’ll see that it’s all about how many followers you have…many politicians, athletes and celebrities have millions and millions of them… but everyone ...
Online help for keeping those New Year Resolutions
It’s a brand new year and if you are like most Americans, you’ve set some New Year Resolutions for 2010. Experts tell us that year after year, the top three are losing weight, getting in shape and getting organized. Technology and the Internet can help you reach your goals. If you’ve determined to lose weight this year, click on over to Spark People. It’s a free and powerful social networking site dedicated to providing support, advice and, perhaps most importantly online tools to track your nutrition and exercise. A key part is the community. You can plug into Spark Teams with others who ...
Do-it-yourself tech troubleshooting help for broken Christmas gizmos
It’s the week after Christmas and all through the land, one phrase can be heard from those with phone clutched firmly in hand: “Help! It doesn’t work!” These are the days when you don’t want to be working the help desk of an electronics or computer company. Nor do you want to have to call them. You are not going to get through without having to wait a very long time. For these first couple of weeks after Christmas are when all those gleaming, nicely wrapped high tech presents that were so eagerly unopened yesterday are in various stages of assembly or sitting ...
PC Mike’s Gadgets of the Year
It’s the height of the holiday shopping season and every year at this time, I pick my gadgets of the year, the hottest of the tech toys sure to please someone on your gift list. Here’s this year’s picks… Let’s start with the gizmo of the year. For the past couple, it’s been the iPhone. And this year, the new iPhone 3GS still is the king of the smartphones. But… for the first time, there’s now a serious iPhone competitor… and that’s my pick for this year’s gadget of the year… the $199 Droid from Motorola. Available only on the Verizon Wireless network, ...
Review: Five Music Player Systems for the iPhone and iPod
One of the season’s hottest selling gifts this year are gadgets that boost and play music from iPhones. Up until now, they’ve been hard to find, as most just worked with the iPod. But I got my hands on five of the slickest iPhone music players out there. Most also recharge your iPhone/iPod while in the dock or cradle. At $299 is the Yamaha Speaker Dock for iPod and iPhone - the Yamaha PDX-60, which connects to your iPhone or iPod touch or most of the newer iPods either through a dock at the top of the unit, or wirelessly. You slip ...
Will today’s eBook readers soon be obsolete?
Did you catch the notice the other day that Barnes & Nobe's new Nook eBook reader is all sold out for the holiday season and won't be available again till January. Meanwhile, Forrester Research is estimating that 900,000 eBook readers from Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader will be bought and given as gifts between now and Christmas. And online, a Kindle reader for the iPhone is being downloaded briskly. [caption id="attachment_23720" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Amazon's Kindle"][/caption] eBooks have finally come of age. But with three major competitors now, each with their own proprietary formats, and Google purportedly waiting in the wings to bring out ...
Give a personalized photo book for Christmas
Stumped about finding the holiday gift for the person who has everything? Why not use your library of digital photos to make them a custom book that looks as good as those fancy coffee table books but is something so uniquely personal it just might be their favorite gift ever. We all have hundreds of photos. Why not assemble them into a book? A super slick book that takes just minutes. There are lots of services that will do this for you. Users of Apple's iPhoto can easily do it right from the program. Write some descriptive words, drag and drop your ...
Get off the grid with true solar charger for cellphone
I've seen a lot of so called emergency chargers for cellphones and have yet to be impressed. But then I got the Rayport solar powered universal charger and battery backup contraption from an outfit known as Rayvolution. This one, I'll actually carry around in my bag. This one works with 3G phones, including the iPhone, as well as most BlackBerrys, Palm, LG, HTC, Samsung, Nokia and other mobile phones. A lot of the backup universal chargers out there haven't had the circuitry and battery capabilities to handle the power hungry 3G units. This one does. Besides phones, the package includes enough ...
Google Voice: Another reason Google will rule the world
I’m impressed by Google Voice, a new and basically free service that gives you a single phone number that rings all your phones, saves your voicemail online,...
The iPad: Now that the dust has settled
I’ve been doing a lot of radio interviews around the country on the iPad and what it means for personal technology. Click here to hear one I did today with Walt Sorg of WILS in Lansing. My bottom...
$100,000 for an hour with the Apple Tablet
Talk about checkbook journalism. You have to hand it to Valleywag, the gossipy Gawker family’s Silicon Valley tech site. They’re offering a cool hundred grand for an hour of hands-on use if...
Get McAfee off Facebook
If you’ve ever bought a computer with McAfee pre-installed and then tried to get rid of it or disable its incessant barrage of the-sky-is-falling hysterical warnings about viruses and worms, you...
TSA lied: Body scanners CAN store your strip search image and transmit it on the Internet
Whoa! Even George Orwell didn’t envision this. Turns out those body scanners that we’ve been hearing so much about lately do more than show whether we’re packing more than what we should...
Online help for Valentine’s Day
Here comes Valentine’s Day and big sales in chocolate and greeting cards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But to help make this Valentine’s Day a bit different, I’ve come up with some online suggestions on how to appreciate and celebrate the holiday in some creative, new ways. A site called Gifts.com is not a bad place to start, with their Love-O-Meter guide that offers Valentine suggestions for every stage of a...
How To: Change your Facebook Privacy Settings
If it seems to you that everybody these days is on Facebook, that’s because, well, everyone is. More than 350 million people in fact, enough to make the popular social networking site bigger than most nations. But with Facebook’s massive popularity has come new problems. It happened because of recent privacy changes Facebook made that users may not realize leaves their personal details exposed for the world...
Scamming the Scammers
Despite years of warnings, we still get those scam emails from Nigeria and other far flung places offering us huge sums of money if we’ll help someone claiming to be a banking or political figure smuggle out a fortune. It’s called the 419 scam after a law in Nigeria that prohibits such practices. While the scam continues, it’s produced a counterforce, a group of Internet vigilantes that turns the tables...
Twitter tools that will get you followers and organize your tweets
The new year 2010, they say, will be THE year for social networking, led by the hugely popular Twitter service that send out those short, 140-character updates. How to manage those Tweets and get more followers is a major online activity these days. I’ve found three tools that will help you manage those social networking tasks. Twitter seems to be where all the online buzz is these days. Check out a Twitter...
Online help for keeping those New Year Resolutions
It’s a brand new year and if you are like most Americans, you’ve set some New Year Resolutions for 2010. Experts tell us that year after year, the top three are losing weight, getting in shape and getting organized. Technology and the Internet can help you reach your goals. If you’ve determined to lose weight this year, click on over to Spark People. It’s a free and powerful social networking site dedicated...
Do-it-yourself tech troubleshooting help for broken Christmas gizmos
It’s the week after Christmas and all through the land, one phrase can be heard from those with phone clutched firmly in hand: “Help! It doesn’t work!” These are the days when you don’t want to be working the help desk of an electronics or computer company. Nor do you want to have to call them. You are not going to get through without having to wait a very long time. For these first couple of weeks...
Santa Tracker 2009 ready to show route to your rooftop
As excitement builds for Santa’s big day, parents are once again turning to the Internet to help their children anticipate his arrival. Technology will help track those Christmas Eve deliveries from North Pole takeoff to your rooftop. The Santa Tracker goes live Christmas Eve, once again combining the search power of Google and the NORAD missile-tracking people. It all goes live on Christmas Eve, Using data...
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