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...

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...

Your contacts are often scattered across multiple email accounts and social sites. For instance, you may have switched to Gmail but some of your contacts may still be stored in the old address books of Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. Then there are places like Facebook and LinkedIn that store personal and professional details of your contacts (including profile pictures) but fetching this information into your main address book is often a tricky thing. Use Google Contacts as a Unified Address Book If you find it a hassle to maintain multiple address books, a possible solution is that you consolidate them all into a single cloud-based service like  Google Contacts . Here are some ideas on how you may go about doing this: Step 1: Bring all address books into Google Contacts Go to  Gmail Settings  and click the “Import Mail and Contacts” button to bring all the existing contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Google Apps, and your other email accounts into Google Contacts. Next download your a...

Microsoft paid close attention to personalization in Windows 7, and shipped it with a gorgeous collection of desktop backgrounds and themes. Windows 7 also makes it easy for users to create their own personalized themes and then share it with other Windows 7 users. If you are still using an older version of Windows (like Windows XP or Vista), you don’t have to feel left behind because, with some simple tricks, you can enjoy all or part of what these Windows 7 themes have to offer. How to Use Windows 7 Themes on XP or Vista First, launch the official  Windows 7 themes  directory and download some of the themes you like to your Windows XP or Vista desktop. These files have a unique .themepack extension which is just another zip format containing all of the elements of a theme including the background images, Aero glass colors, sounds, cursors, icons, screen savers, etc. To use these files on an older version of Windows, you first need to extract them as only Windows 7 can natively unders...