Computer Tricks and Secrets

You have been using Google Alerts for keeping track of anything new and interesting on the web around your topics of interest but did you know that there exists a plethoro of other email alerting services that are again very useful and do not cost a penny. Let me just dive right in. Follow your World – The is a Google service that allows you to track satellite images of various locations within Google Maps and Google Earth. You’ll get an email alert each time Google releases new and updated aerial imagery for the various locations that you are tracking. Newsle – The service tracks news websites and alerts you when any of your friends or people in your social network appear in news stories. It analyzes your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts to determine your friends and colleagues. Brook – Your Twitter timeline is a never-ending stream of tweets and sometimes good tweets get lost in the noise. Brooks sends you a daily email digest of the five best tweets from your favorite tweeter...

Ten years ago Facebook was just cresting as the cool new social media site that helped you keep in touch with the people you didn’t actually like in high school. We fed it our thoughts and feelings, shared our meals and locations and our top ten movie lists, kept it up-to-date on our relationship status, political views, favorite links, and personal information — all in the name of staying connected, and all without a thought to our security. But with a decade of questions regarding how Facebook makes money  now answered, and a general understanding of how sharing information online can be dangerous (while the platform constantly updates its security protocol ), we continue to use it anyway, even though many of us are just checking in as ritual and have threatened our exit from Facebook for years. Of course, screen time in moderation is, for the most part, perfectly acceptable, and social media can offer a few genuinely beneficial uses. But before you log in or tap that app on your sma...

This week I have been testing the various online backup services, both paid and free, and here’s a summary of how these service compare against each other. Why use an online backup service? While it is easy to create a  local backup  of your computer, the physical media where you are storing the backups, like the DVDs or external disk, may not be very reliable in the long term. The other disadvantage is that local backups don’t always happen in real-time. It is therefore recommended that you switch to an online backup service – these are inexpensive and will automatically copy your computer’s data over the Internet to a more secure off-site location (aka the data center) in near real-time without your involvement . Which Online Backup Service Should You Use? If you only have a limited amount of data (< 2 GB) on your computer that you want to store in the cloud, any of the following backup services should solve your problem without you having to shell out a penny. All the above onlin...