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Del.icio.us is Delicious!
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6.16.2006
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In addition to having one of the most clever domain names (why didn't I think of that?), del.icio.us is an excellent and free online bookmarking tool. Why do we need an online bookmarking tool, you ask? For one, you can access your bookmarks anywhere you are, not just at your home computer. Second, now that we get so get so much news, entertainment, and so much more useful or interesting information from the web, managing bookmarks in your browser can become unwieldy. Until I found del.icio.us, I would email myself the links I wanted to keep to my Gmail account. If I wanted to find a link, I could search my Gmail messages, but talk about clunky.
Del.icio.us makes everything so easy. They walk you through adding little buttons to your links bar that make it a one-click affair to bookmark the site you're currently at or access all of your bookmarks. The real power of del.icio.us comes in when you go to bookmark a site. For every link that you bookmark, you can add as many "tags" describing that link as you want. For example, if you were bookmarking GeekyJock.com, you could add tags such as "technology", "advice", "cool", or "useful". Years from now (or tomorrow) you could search your del.icio.us account for those words (or just click one of the tags) and you'd come right to it. This may not seem like much, but if you've got hundreds of bookmarks, it's a lifesaver.
With del.icio.us, you can even share your bookmarks with the world, or with just your friends and family. It's a neat way to see what people are finding out there in cyberspace.
I'd encourage you to head on over to del.icio.us and create an account. You'll never find yourself saying "I wish I could remember that web site" again.
6.07.2006
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How often does a company actually live up to its advertising slogan? Seriously, does the new AT&T really deliver your world? I'm sure Verizon sometimes stops working for you. I've got to tell you though, Staples really is making things easy. First, take their Easy Rebates. Nobody has an easier rebate process. All you have to do is go to a web site, enter the info from your receipt, and wait for the check to arrive. You don't have to send anything in! And, they're fast. My last Easy Rebate took about three weeks. Why isn't everyone doing this? That's a rhetorical question. Companies make a lot of money on rebate submissions that aren't correctly submitted, submitted late, or aren't submitted at all.
The last item I bought at Staples was a Samsung SCX-4100 laser all-in-one. I'd definitely recommend this machine. It prints and copies in laser black and white and scans in full color. Anyway, I found this thing for $100 minus a $30 Easy Rebate (nobody on the web had it for less than $150). When I got it home, I found that the computer and scanner couldn't communicate. I was told by the Samsung tech support to take it back. So I did. The Staples associate took it back without even asking what was wrong with it. When I explained I already submitted the Easy Rebate, he said "No big deal. We'll just treat it as an even exchange and not run it through the computer." Now THAT was Easy. Cue up the talking red button.
Staples doesn't always have the best prices on technology products, but every once in a while you can find an unbelievable price with an Easy Rebate. When you throw in their great customer service, I'd call them Geeky Jock Approved.
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The Easiest Way to Resize Your Digital Pictures
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6.06.2006
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Everyone has a digital camera these days, yet hardly anyone seems to know how to resize pictures to post on the web or send in an email. Even people that do know how to do it probably don't because it can be a pain. You have to open up your image editing program, choose all the pictures you want to resize, choose the size and quality, choose a location to save to, and finally post it to your blog or send in an email to friends and family. I think I've found the most quick and painless way to resize your digital pics - the Image Resizer PowerToy. The Image Resizer PowerToy is one of several neat little programs for Windows XP that come straight from Microsoft and its programmers. They're basically things that the programmers wished they could have included in the final build of Windows XP, but never made it. Luckily for us, they developed them and offer them for free. TweakUI is another PowerToy that I install on all my computers. It allows you to tweak dozens of annoying Windows settings, like turning off those stupid yellow balloons that pop up from the system tray. Sure, you could edit the registry to make these changes, but this is a much easier (and less geeky) way to do it.
Anyway, back to Image Resizer. You can download it and all of the other PowerToys here. The beauty of Image Resizer is in its simplicity. It's not  a program that you have to run. After you install it, you'll have a new Resize Pictures option when you right-click on an image or group of images. You can then choose to resize your pictures to a small, medium, or large size, or you can choose a custom size. By default, Image Resizer saves the resized pictures in the same folder with small, medium, or large appended to the end of the filename. Your original pictures stay intact. It couldn't be any easier.
If you're posting your pictures to the web or sending in an email, I'd recommend using the small or medium size. If linking to a large picture, the Large (1024 x 768) works great. It fills up the screen without requiring people to scroll horizontally or vertically.
If you are in details view in My Computer or Windows Explorer you can see how big a difference in file size resizing makes. For example, I resized a full-size picture from my 3-megapixel digital camera from 1,240 KB to 73 KB at medium size and 51 KB at small size. That's a 1/17 and 1/24 reduction in file size, respectively! So please, resize your pictures with Image Resizer, and save the rest of us the hassle of downloading your huge pics!
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