You really should charge your portable devices every night. This is especially important with smart phones and tablets, that wear out their batteries faster than ordinary mobile phones. Of course, there are days when I forget to do this. On those days, my iGo portable charger is invaluable. I keep it out my keychain and …read more…
Posts contained in the “Local” category:
Most of the software I talk about exists out there in server land, but some of it sits right there on your desktop. I’ll talk about them here.
Using Firefox as an RSS Feed Reader
I’m online a lot: there are probably two dozen or so websites that I read regularly; another fifty or so that I read intermittently, and several hundred that I keep an eye on. Yes, you read that correctly: several hundred. Of course, I don’t have the time or energy to go through each one every …read more…
Using Firefox Add-ons
One of the nice things about using Firefox as a web browser is that it is extensible—you can add things to it that help you do things you otherwise couldn’t. Firefox calls these add-ons. To get to them, go to your “Tools” menu and select “Add-ons”: Or, as the picture suggests, you can also press …read more…
The iTunes Conundrum, part 2
In my first spreadsheet tutorial, I described how I wanted to take this information from iTunes: and calculate the average song length. If you read that tutorial, you know that the average length of each item in my iTunes library (including podcasts) turned out to be 246.9675647 seconds. In this tutorial, we’ll find out how …read more…
The iTunes Conundrum, part 1
There is a lot that you can do with a spreadsheet beyond simple sums and averages. If you are in business or science, you learn these more complicated functions quickly because everyone around you knows about them and uses them, but if you are in another field, they will probably remain a mystery to you. …read more…
OpenOffice
I recently replaced my old Dell Latitude D630 laptop with a bottom-of-the-line Toshiba Satellite C655. I got a lot of use out of the Dell, but I was its fourth owner. Its previous owner was a fourteen-year-old boy, so it’s proven itself to be a tough little machine. The Dell came with a …read more…
MozBackup – Backup or Move your Mozilla Profiles
I recently migrated over to a different laptop (a Toshiba C655), and was faced with the prospect of moving several hundred bookmarks and passwords over from my ancient Dell—a task I was not looking forward to, as I am really pressed for time right now, but can’t be without that information. Fortunately, I found a …read more…
