Best of the Web?

This is a link to a site that offers the best of the web! It does link to some pretty interesting sites...a few of them I have featured here! 

Bandwidth Meter

If you have ever wondered if your computer's internet connection was slow you can now check it. I use this service from CNet.

Laptop Battery Life

This is an article about conserving battery life in your laptop. I think most of the suggestions are common sense but I did find a few nuggets such as;

Remember that, unlike older batteries, the now-standard lithium-ion ones
don't need to be fully discharged before you recharge. In fact, frequent full
discharging actually shortens battery life. However, some experts do recommend a
full discharge every 30 charges to preserve the accuracy of the built-in gauge
that tells you how much battery life you have left. The fact is that nobody
wants to be surprised when their laptop, which says it still has 30 per cent of
its power left, up and dies in the middle of a sentence and leaves them
screaming in despair.

Photo Stitch

I have been really busy lately and I have not had a chance to put together much of a blog post. Here is an interesting article about a site that "stitches" together your photos to make a 4D photo.

Back-Up to the web?

Yesterday I had blogged about the idea of backing up with an external hard drive. Another idea is to back up on the web. It is slower because you are backing up through a network connection but it does have an advantage of being off-site so if something happens to your facility your data is safe off-site. Here is an article with some additional details.

Back Up Question

I get this question often, “what should I do to back up my machine?”

My suggestion is to buy a large external hard drive from Best Buy or online. The My Book series from Western Digital are nice but you can use just about any of them. You can get a pretty reasonable price on one that is at least 500 GB. Then the next step is to automate the process. Most of these large drives come with software and you can use that or Windows and Mac have some capabilities built into the OS.

Make sure when you back up that you get your email folders too (many times they are buried in a different directory than your documents) – when you are done setting things up you shouldn’t have to revisit very often. Once the value of your data increases to a certain point you may want to consider rotating with a 2nd hard drive that is located off site. (heaven forbid there is a fire)

FutureMe.Org

This is kind of an interesting site that offers to email your future self a message. You can send it up to 30 years in the future. You decide what you would like to tell you!! Perhaps you want to remind yourself of a goal.

Hard to find 1-800 numbers

This is a nice site for you to bookmark. These are the hard to find 1-800 numbers. I know when I am frustrated I would rather talk to a person than send an email.

New Search Engine.

Google is such a dominating force in the search industry that it seems almost impossible the new contender could enter the fray. I do like this new site www.cuil.com which offers results in an attractive “magazine” like look. The problem is that they aren’t complete enough for you to abandon Google. Does anyone else know of a search engine good enough to replace Google?

Games for the iPhone

No surprise that many of the best new features of the iPhone are the games available in the Application store.

iPhone changes the game

A story about how AT&T and Apple changed the cell phone game with the iPhone.