3 Ways You Can Preserve Your Online Presence While In Jail

Prisons are by no means fun places. The world in which you live narrows down to just a few small acres of barbed wire and concrete. You’re isolated from those you love. Phone calls are expensive, short and monitored by those in control. There’s also no internet. Horrible. I’ve never been to prison myself, but entrepreneur and blogger Alvin Tan found himself behind bars. He recently managed to offend the religious sensibilities of the conservative Muslim country of Malaysia by posting a photo of himself and his girlfriend tucking into a pork dish on Facebook, which he captioned with “Happy...

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Going Back To School? Save Money On A New Computer With 7 Secret Tips

Computer prices drop in September. But even in a land of plenty, getting the best deals requires a strategy and planning. I approach seasonal sales using a seven-part multi-spectrum approach: Alerts on price drops. Browser extensions. Aggressive price matching. Rebates and rebate tracking. Coupon stacking. Discounted gift card stacking. IFTTT’s recipe database. All of these methods will save you money. But together, these will save more than any would individually. So, let’s look into them one-by-one. Alerts on Price Drops Getting the latest alerts on sales takes work. Hunting for a specific item can mean refreshing a page several times...

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Bite The Entrepreneurial Bug By Taking 7 Free Online Courses On How To Start A Business

In any 21st century job, the work is hard and the hours are long. Thankfully, there’s a secret mantra revealed to the truly courageous – if you are not in a perfect job; create one for yourself. That’s where you stop swimming with the current and dare to go against it. Without a life jacket. From the cubicle cave you get to dunk yourself in the choppy waters of entrepreneurship. The work is hard and the hours are long. The reward – being the master of your own destiny. A couple of years back; I mentioned ten websites where you...

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TimeWarp Redirects Distractions, Keeping You Focused [Chrome]

Automatically teleport yourself to a productive site every time you try to visit a site you know you shouldn’t. TimeWarp may be simple, but it’s effective at reminding you to stop procrastinating – sometimes so subtly you’ll forget you even wanted a distraction. “I’m going to get this done,” you tell yourself, and that was the first lie. “I just want to look at Facebook for five minutes,” you tell yourself, and that was the second. Scrolling through the feeds you notice that someone is wrong about a political issue – and is wrong. “Well, I need to respond to...

Read the full article: TimeWarp Redirects Distractions, Keeping You Focused [Chrome]

TimeWarp Redirects Distractions, Keeping You Focused [Chrome]

Automatically teleport yourself to a productive site every time you try to visit a site you know you shouldn’t. TimeWarp may be simple, but it’s effective at reminding you to stop procrastinating – sometimes so subtly you’ll forget you even wanted a distraction. “I’m going to get this done,” you tell yourself, and that was the first lie. “I just want to look at Facebook for five minutes,” you tell yourself, and that was the second. Scrolling through the feeds you notice that someone is wrong about a political issue – and is wrong. “Well, I need to respond to...

Read the full article: TimeWarp Redirects Distractions, Keeping You Focused [Chrome]

Linux Archive Managers Compared: Ark vs. File Roller

Whenever you download any large files or collection of files, they will more than likely be contained in archive files. These archive files can be in various different formats, including .zip, .tar, and .bz2. The default archive managers for Linux, File Roller and Ark, are great programs that can read and edit these kinds of files, but are they identical? Archive managers may seem pretty simple at first glance, but they could potentially offer a lot more than you think. I compared these two based on their interface, ease of use, functionality, and the amount of supported archive types. Ark...

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4 of the Best Personal Wikis to Keep You Organized

Organization is a big buzz word these days, especially because there’s so much going on at any given time what with our smartphones, our tablets, our laptops, computers, and everything else. It can be difficult to stay focused, to keep all of your ducks in line, and to make sure you don’t forget any important tasks or appointments. Most people tackle this problem through gratuitous use of note-taking apps and to-do lists, but I submit to you a different solution: the personal wiki. After Wikipedia took the world by storm, the concept of the wiki has been applied to many...

Read the full article: 4 of the Best Personal Wikis to Keep You Organized

4 of the Best Personal Wikis to Keep You Organized

Organization is a big buzz word these days, especially because there’s so much going on at any given time what with our smartphones, our tablets, our laptops, computers, and everything else. It can be difficult to stay focused, to keep all of your ducks in line, and to make sure you don’t forget any important tasks or appointments. Most people tackle this problem through gratuitous use of note-taking apps and to-do lists, but I submit to you a different solution: the personal wiki. After Wikipedia took the world by storm, the concept of the wiki has been applied to many...

Read the full article: 4 of the Best Personal Wikis to Keep You Organized

4 of the Best Personal Wikis to Keep You Organized

Organization is a big buzz word these days, especially because there’s so much going on at any given time what with our smartphones, our tablets, our laptops, computers, and everything else. It can be difficult to stay focused, to keep all of your ducks in line, and to make sure you don’t forget any important tasks or appointments. Most people tackle this problem through gratuitous use of note-taking apps and to-do lists, but I submit to you a different solution: the personal wiki. After Wikipedia took the world by storm, the concept of the wiki has been applied to many...

Read the full article: 4 of the Best Personal Wikis to Keep You Organized

How To Create Macrium Reflect Bootable Rescue CD/USB

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In one of our previous posts, we showed you how to easily install Macrium Reflect Free edition in your Windows. After installing Reflect, it’s always a good idea to create the rescue media so that you can backup and restore from a bootable media. You can use the rescue media to restore your drive images [...]

Personalize Google Search Results With Information From Gmail, Google Calendar or Google Plus [Updates]

In an effort to give us instant answers, Google Search is rolling out a feature that allows it to tap into your Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Plus account. This feature is best illustrated with an example. Let’s say you are trying to find out when a package will arrive. Earlier, you would need to dig up the tracking number from your inbox and then process the query. The Google Search update will now help you save time because it does the digging for you when you query it with a — “When will my package arrive?” Google Search connects...

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Automate Your Hard Drive Organization With UltraDefrag

Defragging is one of those things – like doing the dishes or picking up the clothes off the floor – that you know you should get around to doing, but for some reason it’s so very difficult to find the time to do. There’s no doubt that it’s important. Tina explained why defragging is still important in her review of three useful defrag tools. Yet, still it’s one of those things that’s so easy to keep procrastinating about. Why is that? The truth is that defragging just isn’t part of the regular scheduled “cleaning” for most users, even many of...

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YouTube's New Playlist Player

YouTube has a new interface for embedded playlists. Most people only embed videos, but you can also embed playlists.



The updated player has 2 buttons that show the playlist videos overlaid on top of the currently playing video. You can only scroll using the player's scrollbar, there's no support for keyboard shortcuts or mouse wheels. Click one of the videos from the list and the player still displays the list: you need to click one of the 2 playlist buttons to hide the list.



The playlist player has a "play all" button (don't click, it's just a screenshot).

Here's a YouTube playlist that shows how to use the new Google Maps:

{ Thanks, Michel. }

7 Tips To Get A Great Deal Selling Your Unused Domain Name

Domain Name buying and selling is one of those things that many people don’t even realize is an activity that goes on, yet there are a surprising number of entrepreneurs out there that are making a tidy profit from domains within that online marketplace. All you have to do is browse the list of top 100 domain name sales on DN Journal to realize just how much money is at stake here. Domain names can sell for anything from a few hundred dollars, to tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. There are even sales in the hundreds of...

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Varies With Device

This post varies with device. It can't be displayed because there are so many devices and each one is different.



This paragraph varies with device. It's just a placeholder for a paragraph that should have revealed a lot of useful information. Unfortunately there are so many devices and they have different characteristics, so it's hard to write a paragraph that encompasses their complexity.



This screenshot varies with device. It should show some important information about the Google+ app for Android, but it doesn't because there are multiple Google+ APKs and each one is different.

On a more serious note, there are many Google Play apps that show the uninformative "varies with device". The size of the app varies with device, the current version varies with device and so is the required Android version. That's because Google Play allows developers to upload multiple APKs for the same app:

Multiple APK support is a feature on Google Play that allows you to publish different APKs for your application that are each targeted to different device configurations. Each APK is a complete and independent version of your application, but they share the same application listing on Google Play and must share the same package name and be signed with the same release key. Android applications usually run on most compatible devices with a single APK, by supplying alternative resources for different configurations (for example, different layouts for different screen sizes) and the Android system selects the appropriate resources for the device at runtime. In a few cases, however, a single APK is unable to support all device configurations, because alternative resources make the APK file too big (greater than 50MB) or other technical challenges prevent a single APK from working on all devices.

Even though Google doesn't encourage developers to use this feature, most Google apps use it: Google+, Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search, Google Play Books, Google Play Movies & TV, Google Translate.



Since Google knows which devices are associated with your Google account, it could show a drop-down that lets you select one of your devices and show the appropriate information. For example, you have a Nexus 7 running Android 4.3 and a Galaxy S3 running Android 4.1. Select one of the devices and replace "varies with device" with something more useful.

Google+ Maps Current Locations

Here's a cool Google+ feature: mouse over the "currently in" location at the top of a Google+ profile that uses location sharing and something magic will happen: the cover photo will be replaced by a static map that shows that location.



Here's an example of Google+ profile where you can try this feature.

The latest version of the Google+ app for Android added a few new features, including better location sharing. "Starting today you can share your pinpoint or city-level location with others (if you want), and you can do so on a circle-by-circle basis. For example: you can share your pinpoint location with family, and your city-level location with co-workers. You can also use circles to filter who appears on your Locations map."



{ spotted by Jérôme Flipo }

How To Broadcast Live With A Green Screen

I’ve already showed you the basics of green screen videography with pre-recorded footage in iMovie or Premiere, so you could superimpose yourself onto any video or background. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could use this green screen effect for a live broadcast – like on Google Hangouts, or Skype? “Yes indeed it would be, James” – is the answer you’re looking for there, and you’re in luck because I’ve been having a go at doing that very same thing. Read on to join the cool kids club as we play with live green screen broadcasting on Mac or Windows....

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View Google Drive Photos in Google+

Google Drive is supposed to be the service that stores all your files and lets you access them from any device. It's supposed to be, but it's not. There are other Google services that are better suited for storing some of your files: Google+ Photos for storing photos, YouTube for sharing videos, Google Play Music for uploading music.



If you happen to store photos and videos in Google Drive, you can now add them to Google+ Photos. Just visit this page and click "Show Drive photos in Google+".

Click the "albums" section and you'll see some albums with a Google Drive icon: they're from Google Drive. For some reason, Google+ displayed only a few of my Google Drive photos and videos, not all of them.

"If you store photos in your Google Drive, you can also choose to view each folder as an album in Google+. Only you will be able to see them in your library until you choose to share them. If you have Auto Awesome or Auto Enhance turned on, then those features will be applied to your photo album but your original drive files will remain intact. After you enable the feature, folders containing JPG, GIF, WebP, RAW or video files will be viewable from your Google+ photo library and each Drive folder will become a different album marked with the Google Drive icon. Only you will be able to see them in your library until you choose to share them." explains Google.



To enable or disable this feature, you can go to the Google+ settings page, find the Photos section and check or uncheck "Show Drive photos in your photo library". To remove a Drive album from Google, open the album in Google, click the drop-down next to "Share" and then click "remove album" (the album will only be removed from Google+, not from Google Drive).

There are many limitations: "This feature is not available for Google Apps accounts. Screenshots, icons, thumbnails, and other images may not be viewable using this feature. You cannot tag, +1, edit, or comment on Drive photos. To enable these features, share the photo first. Sharing a photo will create and post a copy of the photo - your original Drive photo will remain intact and your circles will not gain access to your Drive."



I don't think that the new feature is a good idea. Why not store all your photos in Google Drive and use Google+ Photos as an application that can manage photos and display them in interesting ways? This way, you would no longer have to deal with the old Picasa Web limitations (1000 photos/album, limited sharing, no sub-albums) and you could access all your photos in both Google Drive and Google+ Photos.

10 Fictional Characters That Are Insanely Popular On Facebook

Lots of people like to “Like” things. I am of course referring to the Facebook Like, which has become a simple shortcut to stamping your approval on something. Whether it’s an interesting update, a pithy comment, a brand, a website, a movie, an album, or a game, Facebook users the world over are addicted to clicking “Like” all over the social network to publicly state their personal tastes. MakeUseOf has a very popular Facebook Page, and the most popular Facebook Pages are owned by celebrities. Having already detailed the most popular comedians on Facebook and the most popular musicians on...

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