Today’s Photoshop tip from Melissa Clifton is for fans of pop artist Andy Warhol. Her Andy-Warhol-Up Your Photographs is a tutorial for beginner to intermediate Photoshop users who want to turn a plain photograph into a colorful piece of art.
The blogosphere has been all a twitter lately about the rise in popularity in searches for “how to delete my Facebook account.” Here’s one such rant from ReadWriteWeb. If you also want to leave the iconic king of social networking, here are detailed instructions from Leo Notenboom of Ask Leo on how to delete your Facebook account.
One of the conveniences of modern browsers is the URL suggestions that appear from your browser history as you type URLs into your address bar. But what if one of those historical URLs is incorrect? There is a way to delete a single URL without deleting all your history. In Firefox, it is simple. In your address bar drop down, highlight the errant URL, and press Shift+Delete. In Internet Explorer, you’ll need to edit the Windows registry. Learn how from Raymond.cc.
Srwright, a reader at Lifehacker.com submitted this tip for keeping your online accounts extra secure. Instead of answering standard security questions such as “What is your mother’s maiden name?” you can answer a secret alternative question that you create based on one of the words or phrases in the real question. For example, using the word “maiden”, you might answer the secret question “What is your favorite Iron Maiden album?” Or using the word “mother” you might answer, “What is your mother’s nickname?”
WordPress is an excellent blogging platform. Its popularity, however, makes it a frequent target of hackers trying to gain access to blogs for nefarious purposes. Choosing a secure admin password is just one thing you can do to foil them. Learn about the others at these WordPress security articles from Mashable, WPSHOUT, and Wordprezzie.
The use of Facebook’s new social plugins and its Open Graph initiative grew from an initial base of seventy-five partner sites, to use on over 50,000 websites in just one week. The ability for users to declare that they “Like” a site and tell all their Facebook friends about it, has not only been a huge success, but it has also provoked some government scrutiny over privacy. Last week Senator Charles Schumer of New York wrote an open letter to the FTC, suggesting that federal privacy guidelines be set for all social networking sites. Learn more about why the Senator doesn’t “Like” Facebook’s new features at Mashable.
As a user of both Mac and PC computers, I had struggled for years to find a password manager that was truly mobile across platforms and locations. The best solution for me, so far, has been Roboform Online, which is a free account that works with their Roboform Pro software ($29.95). Roboform Online (and associated Javascript bookmarklet) not only works with PC, Mac, and browsers including Chrome, Opera, and Safari, but also with iPhones and Android Phones.
According to tech wizard Leo Notenboom, “a new twist” on hackers comprising Hotmail accounts has left some users with unauthorized (and poorly written) ads in all of their outgoing messages. Notenboom explains that the culprit is a default email signature created by the hacker. Learn how to change your Hotmail email signature in his article: “Why do messages I compose in Hotmail now start with an ad that looks like it’s from me?“.
Cormac Herley, a principal researcher for Microsoft Research, has concluded that mandatory periodic password changes, required by some organizations and websites, are not worth the time it takes to make the changes and remember the new passcodes. To read more about his conclusions, read “Please Do Not Change Your Password” from the Boston Globe. “It’s not that Herley believes we should give up on protecting our computers from being hijacked or corrupted simply because safety measures consume time. The problem, he said, is that users are being asked to take too many steps, and more are constantly being added as new threats emerge or evolve.”
“If you invited me to try and crack your password, how many guesses would it take before I got it?”, asks blogger and Internet standards expert John Pozadzides. The top ten list of common passwords includes your city, college, football team, your birthday, your partner’s name, or your pet’s name, perhaps followed by a zero or one. Learn how to choose better passwords by avoiding these common traps. Read more at Lifehacker.
