Snail Mail My Email is a website that will take your email, write it out, and send it to your chosen recipient. For free. That’s right — all you have to do to finish your thank-you notes is to send an email to snailmailmyemail@gmail.com and you’re done.

"Get other people to write your thank-you notes" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Tech and was originally posted on July 27, 2011. Copyright ®2011 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Do you find yourself forgetting passwords for various sites you have joined across the net? Lastpass helps you to securely manage your passwords across all of your computers (or other devices) so that you never have to remember them again. Plugins integrate with different browsers and mobile devices, and there’s also an option for filling out forms.

"Passwords: How To Avoid Forgetting Them With Last Pass" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Tech and was originally posted on July 15, 2011. Copyright ®2011 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Do you find yourself doing the same things over and over again in Photoshop? If you’re like me, you are constantly making the same basic changes to photographs or photo files over and over again, and if you want to save a ton of time, you can record an action in Photoshop to automatically process photographs that are similar.

Most of us think of actions in Photoshop as the things that allow us to make our photographs prettier. But they also have a practical application: for example, I often use stock photographs for my posts. These nearly always have to be resized for my blog — I download them at the 400 pixels x 267 pixels size, and then they need to be changed into 560 pixels x 373 pixels to fit into my blog’s layout. Instead of doing this manually every time, I recorded an action to speed up the process. Here’s how I did it.

First, go to the Window menu in Photoshop, and highlight “Actions.”

Second, when the Actions window appears, click on the little button in the top right-hand corner that looks like an inverted triangle to get another menu to appear.

Third, choose “New Action” on the menu that appears.

Name the action by typing in a name in the menu that appears.

Now, go about doing what you want the action to do, in my case, this is a one-step resizing action, but you can add as many steps as you like.

To stop recording the Action, click on the button at the bottom of the Actions menu that is square.

Now, every time you need to edit a photo in this particular way, you have a quick method of doing it. I have a set of these actions for various different kinds of tasks, and it saves me tons of time when I’m uploading photos.

"Photoshop Actions: How To Make Them" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Tech and was originally posted on July 13, 2011. Copyright ®2011 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Here’s a few quick tech/life tips that I’ve come across recently. Most of them are fairly low-tech to employ, but they still should solve some of your day-to-day tech issues.

1. Use 867-5309 as your grocery rewards card number.

I found this tip on Parent Hacks last week and thought I’d share it here for anyone who missed it because it is genius! If you go to the grocery store and forget your rewards card (or if you’re at any store where you don’t have a rewards card, but they use phone numbers in lieu of cards) type in “867-5309″ to the keypad. Apparently, there’s always somebody who has signed up using that 80s song to protect their identity.

2. Get better seats on airplanes that don’t have a large frequent flyer club.

The site Seat Guru allows you to figure out which seats are best on any given airplane before you buy your tickets. However, if you use a large airline, chances are that they will be giving these seats out to the members of their frequent flyer club before you can book them. To avoid this, use smaller carriers (e.g. Jet Blue, Virgin) who have not (yet) adopted the practice. (Via Lifehacker.)

3. Remove personal information from photographs before sharing on social media.

Did you know that when you take a picture with a digital camera, particularly with a smartphone, there is often information carried in the file along with it? The information is usually things like the date the picture was taken, or the type of camera, but some phones will also store your GPS location by default. For somebody who really wants to find out information on you, this could lead to them finding your address or phone number, depending on what you’ve stored, where, and when.

If you want to remove this kind of stuff before sharing things on the web, you can do so in Windows as follows:

1. Select the photo in Explorer;
2. Right-click on the file;
3. Choose “details” tab;
4. Click on link that says “Remove Properties and Personal Information”

Mac users, download the Smallmage app, which cleans everything off so it’s safe to share everywhere. More instructions and details are available in this tutorial.

"Quick Tip Solutions Of Varying Tech Levels" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Tech and was originally posted on July 11, 2011. Copyright ®2011 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

The Animal Font app for the iPhone allows you to write out an email message in animal-shaped balloons.

Kinda hard to read, but cute.

(Via Swiss Miss via Spoon-Tamago)

"Animal Balloon Typography App" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Tech and was originally posted on July 07, 2011. Copyright ®2011 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

I’m not a fan of Facebook personally, but I know many, many people are; for those of you who want to check your Facebook feed at work without your boss knowing, there’s a website called Hardly Working that might be of interest. If you go to the site and give it access to your Facebook account, it will convert your feed into a spreadsheet that passes for an average Excel spreadsheet. (Via Lifehacker.)

"How To Mess Around On Facebook Without Your Boss Knowing" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Tech and was originally posted on July 05, 2011. Copyright ®2011 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Did you know that there is a default setting in Gmail that allows Google to gather information about which social networks you belong to? Me either. Apparently, what it does is look for keywords that suggest a social network, and when it finds one, it will suggest that you use Gmail to manage it. Seems innocent enough, but if you use Gmail to manage all of your social networks, then that means that Google will have access to all of the information you use within those services — including all of that crap you shouldn’t really be posting on Facebook. Here’s how to turn it off.

1. Go into Gmail and click on “Settings” in upper right corner of screen.

2. Select the “Accounts and Import” tab; then choose “Other Google Account Settings” at the top of the list.

3. Select “Connected accounts: view and manage your accounts from other services.

4. Uncheck the checkbox at the end of the page.

[Tip via Gawker via Business Insider.]

"How To Turn Off Gmail Spying" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Tech and was originally posted on May 16, 2011. Copyright ®2011 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

My sister-in-law forwarded me some information on a Facebook setting that you might not know about: this one affects which updates show up in your News Feed. I had been under the impression that the News Feed was based on an elaborate algorithm that determined what content you were most likely to want to see — apparently it’s not really all that elaborate, though. The News Feed is curated by default to include only updates/photos/comments from the users with whom you have recently interacted, or interacted with heavily for the few weeks leading up to the change in Facebook’s design. The problem with this is (if you’re like me), there may be people out there with whom you haven’t recently interacted, but from whom you DO want to hear, even if it’s sporadically.

To fix this, you can go to the News Feed home page and click on the “Most Recent” title on the right of the News Feed.

A drop-down menu will appear; select “edit options.”

When the pop up appears, you have a choice of showing posts from all of your friends or only those with whom you’ve recently interacted. Choose all friends, and then if there’s somebody who is particularly annoying, you can edit them out in the box below that.

This will ensure that you are getting all of the updates you want on your own page. What it won’t do is make sure everyone else is seeing your updates. The only way to do that is to notify them of this change, or forward information through this informational Facebook page.

"Another Annoying Facebook Setting You Might Need To Change" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Tech and was originally posted on April 26, 2011. Copyright ®2011 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

The Readlines App takes recent headlines from your Google Reader list and streams them to your desktop as a sort of screen saver kind of deal. It’s like Trickle, but with Google Reader headlines instead of tweets. Cool! (Via Cult of Mac.)

"Readlines App Streams RSS Headlines As A Screen Saver" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Tech and was originally posted on February 16, 2011. Copyright ®2011 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

I’ve just recently installed the Facebook Comments plugin for WordPress at ABDPBT. The plugin allows users to comment on your blog using their Facebook profile, as well as “like” or post those comments to their own profile pages. You can download it here, and there is some troubleshooting advice here. (Note: it doesn’t play nicely with any of the Simple Facebook connect plugins, so you’ll need to deactivate those if you want to use this one.)

I’ve made no secret that I’m not much of a fan of Facebook, but it is immensely popular, and plugins like these help your readers by not requiring them to enter a name and URL every time they read. I’m hoping it will be a hit here.

"Facebook Comments Plugin For WordPress" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Tech and was originally posted on February 11, 2011. Copyright ®2011 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.