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Happy Friday. As the work week winds to a close, I thought I'd point out another one of my favorite places to get cheap gadgets on the web: Dealhack. (Yes, all the best sites have "hack" in their names these days.) Every day, Dealhack finds dozens of online coupons, codes and rebates...
Among the loads of iPod accessory ideas that are still in the process of being honed to perfection, there are some that still have a ways to go. Doctors aren't regularly using them to check out patient X-rays, for example, and no one seems to have figured out how to replace a Tivo with one of th...
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Vista's new ReadyBoost system allows you to basically add RAM to your PC by taking advantage of any flash drives that are plugged into it. The folks at ExtremeTech have come up with several other ways to speed up your Vista OS by disabling programs that you don...
I recently bought an iPowerPro adapter to charge my laptop on a long plane ride to Asia. I even checked with seatguru.com to make sure my seat had access to the juice, but when I got on the plane, an outlet was nowhere to be found. I was stuck rereading a magazine for 10 hours while softly cursing t...
Your friends use Yahoo and ICQ, but your colleagues use AIM. If your IM programs are getting out of control, you might want to try Trillian, a popular freeware program that manages multiple IMs in one place. More than 30,000,000 folks have already downloaded the program at Download.com. According t...
While I'm not about to get into the merits of different PDAs (at least not right now), the Treo does give its users one advantage that seems to be lacking in other handhelds—the ability to save phone call recordings to their SD cards. CallRec costs $20 and turns the Treo's side button...
As you may have noticed, I'm a fan of Gmail. Has that changed now that Yahoo! Mail has announced that it is offering unlimited storage to users starting in May? Nope. While I may keep a Yahoo! account on standby in case someone comes up with a genius way to use it as an online hard drive (like t...
Microsoft Word, the medium in which almost all of my work is done, is not a particularly user-friendly beast. It crashes on occasion, and it doesn't interact well with documents written on other software. In its standard settings, it tries—often incorrectly—to anticipate my needs, an...
The great thing about trafficking in tips for businesspeople is that inspiration can come from just about anyone. Take this latest tip, courtesy of a comment on another blog that linked to a recent Business Hacks post. A reader of the travelblog Gridskipper who goes by the name AcidReign suggest...
Laptops and liquids don't mix well. I've lost one to a Diet Dr. Pepper and have seen another fried due to a harried late-night combination of Google and Heineken. The two seem to be brought together in the most inopportune places—conference rooms and airplane tray tables come to m...
Staying in foreign countries on business—even in upmarket hotels—often means dealing with radically different ideas about customer service. One thing that I've noticed recently is that in many places in Europe and Asia, hotels require you to put your plastic electronic key into a slo...
One of the few pleasures in life is getting free stuff. When I was younger, that meant filling out applications (for credit cards I didn't want) on the quad in order to get a corporate t-shirt. Now, I watch ads at Salon so I don't have to pay the monthly fee. As it turns out, I'm an amat...
By now, you should have a Gmail account. It's easy to set up, simple to use, and pretty big. You can forward your other accounts to it and use it as an autoreplier when you're out of the office. Because of the large amount of storage space in each account (and the fact that there's...
If you ever have dreams of doing an Office Space-style beat down of your slow, finicky fax machine, consider switching to an online service that lets you scan and send out documents and receive faxes from others in a manageable PDF form. You'll use less paper, plus you'll have a backup of yo...
A giant source of frustration in dealing with most companies is that they have little incentive to provide efficient customer service. In fact, by obscuring their inner workings, they make it that much more difficult for you to complain, much less extract yourself from them as a customer. But there ...
