I highly recommend Good Sync for backing up your data to an external drive. The program lets you compare two locations (e.g. your internal hard disk and your external disk) and then decide the direction of the backup. I usually do a one-way backup from my hard disk to the...
Continue reading...Tech Support
Decrapify Your Computer
New computers often come with a whole bunch of extra crap installed. It can be hard to figure out what programs you should keep and what you should delete. And I imagine that a lot of computer owners are not likely to delete anything, thinking that the software must be...
Continue reading...Cool Computing
The Local Cooling website wants us to contribute to the prevention of further climate change by monitoring the power settings on our computers: More than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy is wasted because many of us simply forget to shut down our computers when we’re not using them. If we...
Continue reading...How to Stop Embedding Linguistic Data in Your Word Documents
Some versions of Microsoft Word come with a very annoying “bug” that causes the following error message to show up almost every time you try to save a document. “The document was saved, but data for speech recognition was lost because there was not enough space to store it. Be...
Continue reading...My Eyes, My Eyes!
The people who designed this site… …are going to protect us if anything happens to Japan. (Please click on the image so you can go to the site and get the full effect. I can’t really describe all that flashing and animation in words. I am actually tempted to take...
Continue reading...Test Your Website in Various Browsers
One of the problems with designing websites is that there so many internet browsers available, it is really hard to make sure that your site looks the same in all of them. Generally, if your site is well-designed, it should at least “work” in most of them, but even that...
Continue reading...Microsoft PowerToys
I happened upon Microsoft Power Toys in my wanderings today. These applications will give you control of some small things on your computer that may make a big difference to your working experience. I recommend testing out the ClearType Tuner, the Tweak UI application (UI means user interface), and the...
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