Portable Apps – Can This Be My Future?

Yesterday, when discussing how I plan to survive my next computer crash, I mentioned that I was going to start storing music and photos on thumbdrives (USB Flash drives). Since that time, I’ve come to the conclusion that I *may* be able to run most of what I do from a USB flash drive. I’ve ordered a 2 GB flash drive and when it comes in, I intend to install a bunch of portable apps onto it. ... read more

The ABCs and 123s of Social Networking Sites

Social Networking – What is It? I get asked this fairly often, so I thought I’d give a brief explanation. Social Networking sites are all different in some respects, but they all have some things in common. Common Social Network Characteristics As the name implies, they are “social”, and revolve around a community of users who are all actively participating in some way (rather... read more

My favorite WordPress Widgets and Plugins

After using WordPress for a while now on different sites, I’ve come to the conclusion that WordPress simply rocks. I’m not sure I would ever use anything else for a new site, even a non-blog site. In any case, over time, I’ve used the following WordPress plugins and widgets on some or all of my WordPress sites. Of course, there’s the old standards like Akismet, that no one should... read more

Linux in da house

Well, not yet, but almost. It’s time for this little household to try Linux on one of our desktop machines. I’ve been wanting to play with a nice desktop flavor of Linux for a while, but we finally have a spare machine to use. I want it to be as user-friendly as possible, so I’m going with Freespire. Rather than downloading the 680MB ISO install file (which is free), I decided... read more

Use throwaway email addresses to avoid spam

My main email address received hundreds of spam emails per day. I hate it, but I’m never going to get rid of that address, so that’s just something I have to live with. However, I can start avoiding new spam by using throwaway email addresses and you can too. I tried a few throwaway email services recently, and decided that Tempinbox.com was my favorite. Here’s why. I don’t... read more