Today I was at my grandparents house and my grandpa was telling me how relieved he was that he was going to be able to switch from Earthlink to Comcast as his ISP(internet service provider.) It seems like a simple task to me but the problem wasn’t simply changing ISP’s, it was the fact that they had been using the same Earthlink email address for 15 years. They were finally able to make the change due to Earthlink allowing my grandparents to keep their email addresses for $3/month. How nice of Earthlink.
Many of you probably know/used to be/are AOL users that were in the same boat. I personally believe that you should NEVER use an email address that has been issued by your ISP. Using an ISP’s email address will either keep you locked into using them for service or force you to get a new address when you leave.
Okay, so what should you do? My personal email is handled by Gmail. Gmail is a great free service that is ad supported. Yahoo and Hotmail are also good services that I use. These are all large companies that will most likely continue to support email for years to come. The downside to using these services is the loss of privacy. To varying degrees these companies are keeping tabs on not only who you correspond with but what is in each email you send and receive. I have no problem with this, in Gmail it allows me to see ads that I may actually have an interest in rather than random advertising being displayed.
Solution Number Two: Get your own domain name and email hosting. This sounds expensive but you can do it for less than $20 a year. This option guarantees that no matter what happens, you are in charge of your email and your privacy.
If you are thinking about getting a free web based email account my favorite service is Google followed by Yahoo and then Hotmail. For a custom domain, you should take a look at GoDaddy. If you want to throw in a website with that domain name I recommend Hostgator.
I have several friends living in foreign countries and even though I have an engineering degree I still can’t wrap my mind around what time it is or even what day it is in those countries. Luckily, Windows has a useful option tucked away in the date and time settings menu.
To get started “left click” on the clock in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. Then select “Change date and time settings…”
Next go to the “Additional Clocks” tab. Click on “Show this clock” and then set the time zone. You can also apply a custom name to this clock. Click “Apply” and then “Ok.”
You should now have a secondary clock/date when you hover over the time.
At our previous apartment we were forced to use one power provider and that company enjoyed billing us at about 17.1 cents per kWh which made for some very expensive electricity bills. Recently though, we moved into our first home and we were able to shop around and find a much lower rate. Currently we are paying 10.2 cents per kWh and that is a significant reduction from what our previous provider was charging. In order to find the lowest rate you could pull out the phone book and start calling the different providers or you can head over to a site like http://www.powertochoose.org and instantly see a list of providers in your area and what they are currently charging.
Most states have a website such as the one above, be careful though, there are several sites operating as middle men for companies and they tack on a fee to provide you with a list. Take ten minutes and do a google/bing/yahoo search and see what you come up with.
What if you could connect to the internet and be warned about sites that may harm your computer, or block site categories such as illegal gaming, porn, or “time wasters”? What if you could also block individual websites, view usage reports, and connect to websites faster? Well, a free service does exist that does all the above and more.
OpenDNS is a service that routes all the DNS requests from your network instead of using the service that your ISP provides. Setup is very easy to do and can be accomplished in less than 5 minutes.
To get started go to www.opendns.com and register for a free account. This is very simple and straightforward, the second step is the most complex part of this process.
After you have registered you need to log into your router and change the Static DNS 1 and Static DNS 2 to the ip addresses provided which are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. Save your new settings and you are done. During the sign up process you can review instructions on how to do this with your specific router.
You may find that some sites you visit are now being blocked but you can easily go into the Dashboard at the opendns.com site and make changes until you find a good balance.
OpenDNS can be found on the web at http://www.opendns.com/
Anytime you connect your digital camera to your computer and download the images you get a list of files that are made up of numbers and letters that tell you nothing about the pictures you have taken. In Windows you can easily rename all of these files in less than 10 seconds.
In the folder that your images have been downloaded to you will see a list like this.
The next thing you want to do is select all the pictures. You can select all the files by holding down the left mouse button and dragging a window over all the files.
Once the pictures have been selected hit the F2 key on your keyboard. You will see that all the files are no longer selected and the first file is ready to be renamed. In this case we had a few pictures from a baseball game so we named the first picture “baseball” and hit Enter. All the pictures after the first one were named baseball plus 2, 3, 4 and so on automatically.
We just used image files as an example but you can use this for any type of files that you need to manage.
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