Tech Blog

A transcript of an interview I did with viral video pro Billy Reid to help you understand viral videos and how you can use YouTube to market yourself and make money. Read more...

Anyone notice that Twitter had a wee problem with hackers last night? Okay, technically it was their DNS records that were compromised and not Twitter itself, but the effect was the same—Twitter went down and a very non-Twitter message was posted in its place. Given that the hack didn't involve the DNS system, but rather Twitter's account on the service, it's time again to talk about best practices for not getting hacked and some advice on what to do if your GMail account is hacked. Read more...

Ok, that's a bit over the top, I'll admit, but believe it or not, a spreadsheet certainly did help me out this holiday season, by helping me and my family stay organized as we worked through our holiday gift list, figuring out who is going to get what this year...especially if we're in different households or different parts of the country. Read more...

I'm a big believer in not reinventing the wheel, so I try to look for existing solutions to questions or problems I'm having. One of the best sources I know is LifeHacker and as luck would have it, they've just posted their list of the best how-tos of 2009. Sure you might not need all of the how-tos, but I'm pretty sure you'll be able to use at least a couple of them. Read more...

This morning (one of) the big stories on the tech wires is that Google is offering their own DNS services—Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Public DNS—which is part of their efforts to speed up the web (along with giving site owners tools to speed up the load times of their sites). Google provides good, easy to follow, directions on the Google Public DNS page—Using Google Public DNS. So, Google is making it easy to switch to their DNS, should you? Maybe so. Read more...

I "follow" something like 6800+ people on Twitter. I say "follow" in quotes because I honestly can't read all those tweets. There is just no way. For a long time I've been grouping the people I follow using TweetDeck, now Twitter has started to unveil its own groups feature to users (Twitter groups hasn't been rolled out to all users as yet)—Essential: 8 Things to Consider Before Using Twitter Lists - Twitter Lists; Limitations, bugs, impact, and brilliance - scobleizer's posterous—and I think most folks are cautiously optimistic about this new tool. Read more...

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I certainly hope you're not spending your time on the computer, unless you're looking for help cooking the perfect turkey. Technology to the rescue! Here are some great online resources for you to roast the perfect poultry for dinner. Read more...

It's Saturday morning. It's 11 AM. I've been up for 3 hours. This is wrong. It's the price I pay when my fiancée has to teach teenagers how to sing show tunes in the morning before we want to go somewhere later. Since I feel like I should have been just about an hour out of bed rather than three, it got me to wonder about what charges up your morning routine? Well, your tech morning routine. Read more...

Yesterday I showed you making my Hackintosh—What if you had an Apple Netbook? Part 1: If you build it, will it purr?—today I spent some time making it a useable machine. Well mostly useable. Because this wee machine wasn't intended to run this much OS so it's having a few issues keeping up. Read more...

Or "How I learned to stop worrying and love my wall." Wall mounting your flat panel gives it a super slick look - but if you've just spent all your liquidity on the latest display then you might find this creative application of incongruous components to be a great way to enjoy your TV and your connectables. Read more...

I think it's pretty safe to say that everyone writing on this blog is a geek and I'm pretty sure we do most of our own tech support. Some of us (me for example) have actually been front-line tech support people, but geek or not you too do a lot of your own tech support. Frankly it isn't very hard, tech support people don't have chips implanted in themselves to give them special power over electronic devices, all of us have just learned some simple tricks over the years that help us solve problems. Read more...

Mac users, question for you--How often do you use the option key? Not too often? Yeah, me too, well until Snow Leopard because I've learned that this oft overlooked key unlocks a wealth of features and nice touches in the OS. Seriously. The best part is that once you start trying option-click extras, you just won't want to stop. For the longest time the only thing I really used the option key for was to type accented letters and other special characters, but lo and behold there is a lot more to the option key than just making special characters. Read more...

Now that most of us have laptops or netbooks, I thought some tips for getting the most out of your battery might be in order. You know how all laptop makers claim you can get hours and hours of battery life and you never seem to be able to? I’m betting those estimates are based on running a system with so little going on that it couldn’t tell you what time it is, in the real world however we need to get stuff done so here are some real world tips for getting the most out of your battery life. Read more...

School is starting next week, or started already for some folks, and one of the open questions I have is whether taking notes on a computer is better than old-fashioned paper. Truth be told, I'm on the fence about this my self. Here are my thoughts on pros and cons of taking notes on a laptop. Read more...

One of the cool new features of Snow Leopard is supposed to be that you can drag a file to an icon in the Dock, then that apps windows will appear and you can drop the file onto that window. I thought awesome! So instead of having to arrange all my windows around to, say, upload files to my servers or email something to someone I can just drag and drop them! Well I tried it this morning with CyberDuck and it didn't work. Hrm, must be CyberDuck! Can't be me! Yeah, right. Read more...