The new iTunes 8 comes with a recommendation engine named Genius. If you give it permission to read your music library (which will take a bit of time, depending on how many songs you have), Genius will create playlists for you based on a single song as a seed and recommend songs from the iTunes Music Store. Learn more at Apple and at PC World.
When visitors to my home office see the two large monitors on my desktop, and see the mouse travel seamlessly from one to the other, they are usually amazed to learn that support for multiple monitors is built into Windows. All you need is multiple outputs from your video card, or multiple video cards. To learn more, read Ask Leo’s How Do I Set up a System with More than One Screen?.
Chrome is a new browser from Google, built to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox. Why bother with a new browser if you already have one that works? Google explains that Chrome was built from the ground up to be faster, more secure, more stable and better equipped to handle today’s demanding web-based applications. Learn more with this official Google Chrome comic book.
Your IP address is the logical identification (as opposed to a physical address) of your Internet-connected computer or router. It is a number formatted into 4 octets (or words) separated by periods, such as 184.238.14.180. Your IP address is shared with every website you visit, and frequently included in every email you send. But exactly how much can be learned from that IP address? Usually just your Internet Service Provider, and a general idea of where you are geographically. Your ISP, however, probably has records that tie you to your IP address. To learn more, read Bob Rankin on Does My IP Address Reveal My Location?.
Do you know when and how to use the Blind Carbon Copy feature of your email client? When addressing an email to send to a single recipient, it’s obvious that their address goes in the TO field and yours in the FROM field. But when sending a message to a large list (whether it’s an invitation to a hula party or a business memo), email etiquette suggests that you hide that long list of email addresses. This is when you use BCC for your list of recipients, and put your own email address in both the TO and FROM fields. To learn more about CC and BCC read Russ Harvey’s Proper Email Etiquette.
Have a Microsoft Word problem that is “tying you (and your stomach) in knots?” Allen Wyatt’s Word Tips delivers relief with an archive of tips and answers that cover many different versions of Word for the PC, including: Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2003, and Word 2007. Tips are organized into topic categories, or can be found via the search function.
Despite a common misconception that deleting a computer file (and emptying the Recycle Bin) will completely remove a file from a personal computer, it’s just not true. All the delete button really does is remove the file from the directory listing. But for those times when really, really deleting a file is important, there are a number of software tools that will do the job. Sdelete is one such utility. Nakodari recommends three others at Quick Online Tips .
Are you confused about what social media is, or why it’s being hailed as the next big thing? For starters, try Social Media in Plain English ( http://www.commoncraft.com/socialmedia ) a video from Common Craft that explains social media by telling a simple story about Scoopville, a town that is famous for ice cream. For another stab at the same topic, read Robert Scoble’s What is Social Media?.
When copying files from CD to your hard drive, it’s important to realize that the Windows “Read Only” property will be copied with the file. To enable writing to the file on your local computer, you will need to highlight the file name in Explorer, and right-click to open Properties. Make sure the Read-Only attribute box is unchecked, and then save the modified settings by clicking Apply and OK.
According to an Information Week survey of 4500 computer security professionals, 22% of security breaches were done with “guessed passwords.” This means that the number one thing you can do to improve your security is to use passwords that can not be guessed. For starters, never use any word that appears in your account data, and never use a word that appears in a dictionary. For more password do’s and dont’s, read George Shaffer’s Password Basics).
