There has never been an easy way to check if your Internet browser, Flash and Java versions are all up to date on your computer…until now. Do I Need to Update.com is an easy to way to check, and then upgrade to the latest versions of these softwares.
April 1st came and went without much happening in terms of the infamous Conficker virus, but that doesn’t mean the threat is over. It’s easy to see if you’re infected, as well as protect yourself. Go ahead and watch this video to view the simple process.
As some of you may have noticed, the “Most Popular” list on the Woopid home page is now filled with Office 2007 videos (and not even cool ones). Why is this happening? Starting in late February, Microsoft started listing Woopid videos in their Office.Microsoft.com website search. So in other words, when you search for something like “horizontal lines in word”, a Woopid video is the first result and when clicked, the user is taken to Woopid. Seeing as how Microsoft has a traffic rank of 14, this results in quite a few people coming to these Office videos on Woopid.
Keep checking out the Woopid Blog for cool videos that may not make it into the most popular list quiet yet. Also, don’t forget to check out the Bundles page, or the Library for other popular videos.
Mac only: If your desktop is covered with files and your downloads folder filled with the latest downloads (…starting from 2003), than Hazel is for you. Hazel is a great program which monitors specified folders and carries out automated actions based of a set of rules. Check out the Hazel intro video for a better idea on what Hazel can do for you. Check out the complete Hazel Bundle here.
Personally, I love the subtle alerts sounds that Macs play by default. Others, either don’t like them, or find it doesn’t get their attention all the time. In this video we take a look at how to find free sounds on the Internet, download them, and use them in Mail and iChat.
A free, simple program, “Free Disk Analyzer” allows you to easily find the largest files and folders in any given directory. Extremely helpful for identifying where your hard drive space is going. Check out how to use it here. Sometimes the results are very surprising…
If you use an AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule as your wireless router, and frequently loose connection, you may want to try enabling “Interference Robustness“. Enabling this feature may slow down network performance a bit, but it’s worth it if your connection is frequently dropping (and how many large file transfers do you make over the network anyway?).
For Mac OSX: Stop any application from appearing in the dock! Many applications where you would want this functionality already allow you to do this in their preferences, but sometimes, there are applications that don’t offer the “hide icon” feature. In my case, I have an Apple USB 56k Modem hooked up to my Mac, and using a program called “Call Wall”, all phone calls that come in are displayed as Growl notifications. I love it, but could do without the application taking up Dock space. I fired up Dock Dodger, dragged in Call Wall, and now I’m all set. Call Wall now runs, but without any dock icon.
Growl is a great system wide notification system for OS X, and while some IM clients support Growl natively, others need a little help. iChat is one of those applications – once you start using Growl with iChat, it’s hard to stop. Instead of having to stop what you’re doing to see what your buddy is saying, the messages appear as Growl notifications. By installing a free program called “Chax”, you can enable various types of iChat Growl notifications, among various other helpful features. Check it out here.
Today I was working on an Excel workbook in which I had to ensure two columns of numbers always equaled each other. For a while I kept taking breaks, creating a quick SUM formula to see if they add up, and if they didn’t, go in and try to find where I messed up. All of a sudden it hit me, why had I forgotten a simple, yet great feature of Excel, the “Watch Window”? Simply put, the Watch Window is a little window that appears on top of your workbook, and displays cells you’ve selected.
In my situation, I set up a formula which always added up all the numbers in my two columns, and then set up a Watch Window. Now, as I input data, I can constantly make sure that each column is equal. Watch it here.
