Attention Hotmail and MSN users: itt’s time to change your password. According to Neowin, an anonymous hacker posted thousands of Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail usernames and passwords. The first list of over 10,000 accounts only includes account names that start with the letters A and B, but there was a hint that there could be more lists.
On October 1, 100,000 lucky users got an invitation to preview Google’s new real-time communication platform: Google Wave. It combines email, instant messaging, chat, project management and social networking in a client that sits within the browser. To learn more, read Mashable’s guide or watch Google’s video .
Email experts advise against using your email inbox as storage and instead suggest frequently cleaning it out and storing old messages in archive folders instead. For Gmail users, here’s a filter that will move all messages older than a certain date to your archive. Click “Create a Filter” and in “Has the words” enter “before:2009/07/01″. Now choose “Next.” Check “Skip the Inbox” and the box that says “Also apply this to the conversations below.” Now click “Create Filter.” Of course, you can change the filter to use any date of your choice, in the format “before:YYYY/MM/DD”.
Wikipedia is a collaboratively-edited encyclopedia, but only a small percentage of visitors ever contribute by editing an article. To learn how, start with this overview from Gina Trapani or the official Wikipedia Tutorial And if you think that the tutorial itself needs improvement, feel free to jump in and add your own two cents.
Although Google creates wonderful, free products that so many of us love and use, from a purely information management viewpoint, we should all be a bit more concerned with data portability. And Google agrees! The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose one goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of various Google products. Learn more at The Data Liberation Front.
Apple released Snow Leopard (a Mac operating system upgrade) last week to mostly mellow reviews. Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal said ” If you’re happy with Leopard, there’s no reason to rush out and get Snow Leopard.” Wired Magazine said “If you upgrade to Snow Leopard today, it’s not going to change your life.” Snow Leopard’s most interesting feature seems to be its small footprint. By upgrading you’ll likely free up 7 gigs of hard drive space.
Cable clutter is the bane of the modern desk. This tip from the Closet Entrepreneur offers instruction on how to use a simple daisy chain (or chain sinnet) to tame stray cables and power cords. The article includes a video that shows a slightly different method for long extension cords.
Speedcine is an index of about 13,000 full-length movies you can legally watch online. Some of the sites it links to offer free movies, such as Hulu and Fancast , while others charge, such as Amazon’s Video on Demand. While still in beta, Speedcine warns that not all movies are listed in the alphabetic index on the front page; some can only be found by title search.
Free Wi-Fi hotspots can usually be found at public libraries, Barnes & Noble and McDonald’s. But there is no reason to limit yourself to these well-known spots. In her “Definitive Guide to Finding Free Wi-Fi” Gina Trapini lists free tools for Windows, Mac and smartphones for finding public hotspots wherever you may roam.
