Brewing over in the Google labs is a new method for viewing current and dated news. 
The project is called Google News Timeline and it displays information chronologically in a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can select sources such as the AP, New York Times, Fox Sports or even magazines. I did a search for Popular Science and magazine covers for every issue popped up in the timline. Another interesting feature is the ability to go back in time and see what the big stories were, I put in my birth year and saw some interesting facts from the day I was born. Go check it out and let me know what you think.
Google News Timline can be found on the web at http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com
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.
The internet is an amazing source of information 
for just about any topic that you can conceive. Search engines have been able to provide links to data for years now and new innovations such as Wolfram Alpha are increasing our ability to obtain knowledge online. However, sometimes the internet does fail us and answers to tough questions can be hard to find. Even if you do find an answer you can never be sure just how accurate it is, anyone with a computer and internet connection can post information to the internet.
For example: My wife and I have a washing machine that would not drain. The warranty was expired and due to our new zealous attitude about not spending money I decided to try and fix it myself. The first think I did was hit google and then yahoo and it seemed that I was going to have to buy a new pump but that was not 100% clear. I then remembered reading a post over on Get Rich Slowly and that led me to JustAnswer. After signing up I was talking back and forth with an expert and he actually had the idea to check the inside of the pump for a sock. Thirty minutes later I had the pump in my hand and sure enough one of my sons tiny socks was jammed inside the pump. Total repair cost was $10, the amount I offered the experts to handle my dilemma.
JustAnswer is a community of experts that offer advice or knowledge on a varity of subjects ranging from taxes to car repair. The process is very simple. Ask a question, create an account, determine how much you want to spend and then wait for an answer. In our case the expert requested more information and one of the questions was whether we washed small items or had a child in the house. The website claims the process can take minutes to a few hours. We had an acceptable answer within 5 minutes.
If you would like to give JustAnswer a try they can be found on the web at http://www.justanswer.com
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