Category: Tech Tips

Care to know exactly how much you procrastinate by watching Web videos all day? Download a bandwidth meter and you'll learn how much you use in a day, what speeds you actually get (despite what your service provider may claim), and -- if you have metered billing -- when to call it quits. For Windows, check out the now open source NetMeter. (Note: it may not work with Vista.) For Macs, try ...

While iTunes does a solid job of correctly labeling music files that are imported from a commercially made CD, it's pretty lackluster when it comes to identifying music from other sources. For that, there are dozens of third-party file-taggers out there, both free and otherwise. Many, if not most, though, are either unreliable or far too complicated to use. One shining example is beaTunes 2 for ...

Veteran Facebookers will attest to the steady increase of unwanted clutter on the social networking site. If you want to stay connected, but hate wading through the flaky, browser-clogging interface, definitely check out one of the many free phone versions. (The iPhone and Blackberry versions are especially streamlined and stable). And when you're at a computer, check out lite.facebook.com, a ...

There's a lot of confusion about the best way to treat an iPod's battery (e.g., Is it better to charge it often, or to fully empty it? Is it okay to leave it charging when it's full?), so here's the official word. Because the iPod has lithium-ion batteries, it doesn't matter whether you charge it a little bit at a time, or run it down before recharging fully. The battery will last for ...

While it won't work for all Flash videos (such as those from Hulu.com), the site vixy.net lets you quickly and freely download non-DRMed video from sources like YouTube. You can then easily upload the files to a phone or portable media player (e.g., iPod, Zune, etc). Simply copy the URL of the video you want to download, paste it into vixy.net, choose your preferred video format, and hit Start. ...

If you ended up on the losing side of the great HD media wars, then you may have a few obsolete HD-DVD titles sitting on your shelf as a depressing reminder of the perils of being an early adopter. If some of those happen to be Warner Bros. titles, though, you are in luck. For $4.95 per title (up to 25 for a $6.95 shipping fee), you can rip out the cover art of your HD-DVD and turn it in for a ...

If you've started to run out of space on your internal hard drive, or just want the option of taking your entire iTunes library with you between computers, here's how to move your music, TV shows, movies, and the rest to an external hard drive. For Windows PCs, click here for instructions. For Macs, click here for detailed instructions, or here for complete but more straightforward ...

Among the many "secret" keyboard shortcuts on a Mac are a couple that are a boon to the spelling-challenged. To quickly spell-check a word you're typing, begin typing the word and then hit Option+Esc. A list of words will pop up, a la your cell phone's predictive text function. Although it works in most Mac apps, it sadly doesn't in either Office or Firefox. To find the definition of a word, ...

While Apple would prefer that you buy ringtone versions of music you've already purchased, you can still make ringtones for your iPhone using only iTunes and songs that don't have DRM (such as the ones you've ripped from your old CDs). Here's how: Open iTunes, right click (or Control + click) on a song, and select 'Get Info.' Under 'Options,' check the boxes beside 'Start Time' and 'Stop ...

You'd think uninstalling applications, games, and the rest would be as simple as dumping the icon into the recycling bin, but the truth is that computer programs distribute their files all over your PC. While that may not seem like a big deal, after a while those bits and pieces add up and cause conflicts, errors, and registry issues. Check out Revo Uninstaller -- a free, easy-to-use utility ...

All of the major TV networks currently broadcast HD video over the air and in better quality than what you likely receive from your cable/satellite company. And despite any techno-babble you may read, you can receive HD television signals over the air using a regular old TV antenna (as long as your HDTV has a built-in tuner, which most do). To figure out what channels are available in your area, ...

Rather than opening your Palm Pre's Card View function to sort through all of your open apps, you can simply swipe back and forth between running apps. Go to the Launcher and select Screen & Lock. Under the heading 'Advanced Gestures,' slide the Switch Applications option from Off to On. Now, when you have several apps open, you can swipe left across the length of the gesture area to ...

Keep all of your photo, video, audio, and data files up-to-date between your laptop and desktop by using syncing software. If you have a Windows PC, SyncBack is a freeware backup utility that lets you merge or overwrite data between two sources. Mac users who are comfortable using the Terminal may enjoy the free rsync utility, but the rest of us will prefer ChronoSync, a $40 app that lets you ...

Download YouTube, and similarly Flash-based, videos for use on your iPod. Using Firefox, install the free VideoDownloader extension. Then download and install the free Perian codec for Quicktime from Perian.org. Videos ending in .flv will download to your desktop, where you can then open and export them to your iPod using Quicktime. ...

Believe it or not, you can take the pain-in-the-ass out of PDFs. Though most PDFs can't be edited, there is one freebie workaround if you're in a pinch. Go to pdftoword.com, upload your PDF, and enter the format to which you'd like it converted. Within an hour or two, you'll get an e-mail containing a regular old Word or RTF file that you can fully edit. If you're in a hurry, the site offers a ...