Nearly 200,000 people a day are buying Android phones. If you are one of them, here is a useful roundup of Android apps from Lifehacker. If you start by installing AppBrain’s Fast Web Install you can download and install multiple apps from the online list at the same time.
Have you discovered the free ebooks and magazine available at Google Books yet? Although their My Library interface is functional, now there’s a graphical interface for Windows desktop that’s much more visual, and a lot more fun to use. GooReader is free application for searching, downloading and reading Google Books. A premium version is available for $20 that supports PDF creation.
Aardvark is a crowdsourcing platform for asking and answering questions, that was recently acquired by Google. When a question is received, Aardvark finds the perfect person to answer it by looking through your social connections, and others who have a knowledge of or an interest in the topic you’ve asked about. Although you can ask Aardvark anything, and most questions are answered within five minutes, popular topics include travel tips, product recommendations, local services, and restaurant suggestions.
Togetherville is a kid-safe social networking site for pre-teens where parents control the friends list for their children. The site include games, art activities, videos, and educational quizzes, and has no links to external sites. If a parent administrator chooses to do so, content from Togetherville can be shared in the parent’s Facebook stream, and parents can add their own Facebook friends to their child’s Togetherville account. Registration is free, but Togetherville currency costs real money, and can be used to buy virtual gifts or games.
Online book reviews are available at many sites. But which ones do readers like most? Lifehacker polled their audience to come up with a list of Five Best Book Recommendation Services. In no particular order, they are Shelfari, LibraryThing, Amazon, GoodReads, and GetGlue. I use Amazon, because I am a Kindle user, but Lifehacker’s readers prefer GoodReads.
Sooner or later it’s bound to happen. One of your Facebook friends thinks that photo of you is just so hilarious. They’ve uploaded it and tagged you. And now it’s there for all your friends to see. You, however, don’t think the photo is all that great. In fact, you hate the photo and wish there was some way to unlink it from your Facebook profile. And there is. You can untag yourself in any Facebook
photo with these simple steps. First, follow the link in the email notification that you probably received when you were tagged. Or else, simply traverse to the photo through your profile. Now look in the lower left-hand corner for the phrase “In this photo.” You will see a list of all tagged Facebook members, including yourself. And next to your name will be a “remove tag” link to click. That’s all
there is to it.
Behavioral advertising is online advertising based on your history of online activity. For example, if you visit an online shoe vendor, as you travel around the Internet, you might notice ads from that vendor appearing on unrelated, third party sites. This “trick” is accomplished by small cookie files that are stored on your computer by your browser. To opt-out of behavioral advertising (often called “remarketing”) the National Advertising Initiative provides a resource where you can see which advertising networks have placed cookies on your computer, and gives you the opportunity to opt out of seeing any more targeted ads from those ad networks.
Many sites that support secure transmission via HTTPS, still don’t offer encryption as a default, or sometimes they combine pages with both secure and insecure items. HTTPS Everywhere, a new Firefox plugin, makes it easier for Firefox users to always use the secure version of a number of popular sites. This is useful for those surfing in public hotspots, where an insecure site (using HTTP vs HTTPS) is visible to sniffers. The free plugin currently works for Facebook, Twitter, Paypal, Google Search and half a dozen other popular sites.
If you’ve ever considered buying a domain name for the primary purpose of creating a custom email address such as your-name@your-domain.com, this tutorial from Ask Leo! is just what you need. In it, Leo Notenboom explains domain registration, email forwarding, and using a free email service (such as Gmail) with your custom domain.
Lifehacker recently announced their annual list of best Windows downloads. And this year, they packaged them all into a single download package with an auto-installer that will install exactly the programs you want, while you raid the refrigerator. The utilities include a few of my must-haves, such as Pidgin (a universal instant messaging tool), Dropbox (free cloud storage) and Mozy (free cloud backup service). To read about each tool, or to download the Lifehacker Pack 2010 for Windows 7, click here: http://lifehacker.com/5548767/lifehacker-pack-2010-our-list-of-essential-windows-downloads.
