Category: Web

  • A great tool if you’re writing on a deadline

    All righty then. Just fin­ished up a cool con­ver­sa­tion with a dude that I have to meet with later to fig­ure out some stuff. Now, I guess I’ll keep plug­ging away at writ­ing, nay, test­ing Write or Die, a tim­ing and word­count inter­face that helps focus your writ­ing by impos­ing lim­it­a­tions and con­sequences on your writing.…

  • Cool! Online lighting diagram creator — photography

    The fol­low­ing post is a Quick­Hit™ — an art­icle or post I found online and thought was import­ant enough to share dir­ectly with you. Of course, you’ll see my thoughts or opin­ions pre­pen­ded or appen­ded to this post, oth­er­wise I’m just scrap­ing con­tent, and that’s not the intent. I’m look­ing for tools to help me…

  • How to easily install essential applications on a new Windows 7 computer

    It does­n’t mat­ter if you’ve upgraded from Vista or XP, or if you’ve bought a new Win­dows 7 based com­puter, you’re going to need to install some basic and essen­tial applic­a­tions on your new baby. And this awe­some web­site makes it so, SO easy. 4 easy steps: Vis­it the site Select which applic­a­tions you want Press the but­ton to…

  • How to make a Polaroid from any digital image

    Even though Polar­oid instant cam­era and film packs are no longer being made by the Polar­oid Cor­por­a­tion, you can get that same look on your digit­al pho­tos with Rollip.com. Once upon a time you had to manu­ally cre­ate these things in Adobe Pho­toshop or GIMP. Not any more. Basic­ally, Rol­lip takes your image and does some…

  • How to use a webcam as a home security camera

    Over the years as I’ve acquired vari­ous bits of hard­ware, I’ve some­how ended up with a few ‘extra’ web­cams. Not really want­ing them to lan­guish in my parts bin, I figured I’d take a stab at set­ting them up as home secur­ity cam­er­as. And, I wanted to check out what my dogs were up to…

  • A simple and easy way to back up your Google Docs

    If you do a lot of your work on vari­ous com­puters in dif­fer­ent loc­a­tions (as I do), con­veni­ently access­ing your doc­u­ments is important. Though I carry a 2GB USB drive every­where, I actu­ally find it easi­er to use Google Docs and store my work ‘in the Cloud’, so to speak. But, that amorph­ous blob of com­put­ing-stor­age…

  • Reasons why I unfollow someone on Twitter

    Recently I had a great dis­cus­sion on Twit­ter about Unfollowing…a much dis­cussed top­ic of etiquette amongst the Twitterati. One school of thought is that when someone fol­lows you on Twit­ter, it’s prop­er for you to fol­low them back. That’s not my belief though. If that were the case, then it would be impossible for me to…

  • Getting Things Done with Gmail?

    Usu­ally Google Apps for Busi­ness is the last of Googles free online applic­a­tion suites to receive new fea­tures, but ever since Google enabled Google Labs with­in Apps for Busi­ness, new fea­tures are rolled at the same time. Today Gmail received a simple Task List manager: Like many of Google’s enhance­ments, it’s a very simple imple­ment­a­tion —…

  • What to know when changing website hosts

    A couple of weeks ago I found the fol­low­ing in an email from my webhost: Your web host­ing account for bradgrier.com has been deac­tiv­ated (reas­on: site caus­ing per­form­ance problems). Although your web site has been dis­abled, your data may still be avail­able for up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted. After a quick call…

  • Google Chrome: a quick look and how to block ads with Privoxy

    photo cred­it: Randy Zhang Google Chrome is no Fire­fox (yet). For the last week and a bit, off and on,  I’ve been using Google Chrome (Google’s new entry into the browser wars). On the 3 XP-based sys­tems I’ve used it on, I’ve found it to be very fast, very effi­cient, and stable. Pretty good per­form­ance for…

  • I love mashing technology! (freebies)

    Moo + Linked­In = Free Busi­ness Cards I’ve writ­ten before about Moo (cards & stick­ers) and Linked­In (the busi­ness social net­work), but this is the first time I’ve writ­ten about both in the same post. Short story. Moo is let­ting you make 50 of their beau­ti­ful photo-enhanced busi­ness cards for free! It’s really mashup2 Moo itself is…

  • Bag Open. Cat Out. Internet in danger! OpenDNS to the rescue?

    Your ISP may be vulnurable to the Multi-Vendor DNS Issue. Here's how to tell, and a simple fix you can do to protect yourself.