Technology Tips & Tricks

TechSoup Blog points out some handy tips and tools from the Lifehacker blog. These applications and tips can help you make working life easier and more efficient.

Some tips that have really helped me recently:

--The Firefox TinyUrl extension. If you use TinyUrl often, this can be a huge timesaver, as it allows you to easily create and save TinyUrls from Firefox without having to be at the TinyURL website. You can download the extension here.

--This
Jingcast from Alec Couros that show how to opt out of Facebook's Beacon program

What technology tips or tools do you recommend? Share the tips as that helped you here.

--Megan

One of the most important technology tips I can recommend to everyone:

Backup your essential files on a regular basis!

Simple enough, eh? Yet you'd be surprised how many people don't bother with this!

I use a portable USB flash drive for this purpose...

Yann

Here are a few of my top tips:

You've Googled yourself, right? How about getting an automatic notification every time your name appears on Google? Go to
http://www.google.com/alerts
and enter your search. Select 'web' (unless you also want to search news headlines). You can use any search terms you'd normally use on Google, including advanced searches (e.g., 'robert l weiner' -attorney). It will email you whenever new hits appear. You can also try
http://www.googlealert.com/
which isn't affiliated with Google but uses their search results. And for fun, search for yourself on
http://www.googlism.com/

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You can toggle between open Windows applications by holding down the ALT key and pressing the TAB key. Each time you press TAB you'll cycle to a different application. Release the ALT key when you're on the application you want.

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Thanks to Jenny Council for this one: Tired of typing web addresses out in full? Instead you can just type the main part of the site name (eg 'google') and press Ctl+Enter keys. In most browsers this will automatically put in the 'www.' and '.com' parts of the web address (so it becomes 'www.google.com'). This trick only works with .com addresses.

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Stop mousing around! These Windows keyboard accelerators will help you avoid needless clicks when browsing the web:

ALT + left arrow = Back
ALT + right arrow = Forward
CTRL + R = Reload the current page

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Posting your email address on your web page? Avoid spambots by using the free HTML encoder at
http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html
(Caveat -- there's no guarantee that spammers won't figure out how to crack this some day).

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When you leave your desk you can 'lock' your Windows computer so that no one can use it without your password. If you are using Windows XP, press the Windows logo key (or CTRL+ESC) + L. If you are using Windows 2000, press CTRL + ALT + DELETE and select 'Lock Computer'.

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Have you ever wanted to add a graphic to an existing Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file? Here's how. Note -- you need to have the full version of Acrobat for this -- though it might work with another PDF creation program like PDFCreator or PDF995. You can't do this with the free Acrobat reader.

Insert your graphic into a Word file. Make sure it's the size you want.
Create a PDF from the Word file.
Open the destination PDF (where the graphic should go) and the PDF containing the graphic (the source).
In the source file, click on the Touch Up Object tool (under more tools). Right-click on the graphic and select Copy.
In the destination file, click anywhere and select Paste.
Drag the graphic into place.
You're done.

Robert