Submitted for your pleasure are five more useful, unique, and/or downright cool Google Chrome Addons. Enjoy.

Invisible Hand

Shopping in person is difficult enough. Shopping online can be a downright overwhelming experience, particularly given the vast array of choices you’re presented with. Where do you buy from? Which location has the better deals? The amount of comparison you have to do, the amount of time you need to spend researching the best deals…wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t really have to do all of that?

Invisible Hand can help. With support for over 220 retailers in the UK, US, and Germany, and for over 589 major airlines, Invisible Hand is designed to make sure you get the best deal you can possibly find. When you’re on a shopping site examining a product, Invisible Hand will immediately and automatically search for a better deal on your behalf.

Convenient, no?

Opinion Cloud

I probably spend a bit more time reading YouTube comments than I should, and I’m pretty sure there’s a considerably large group that can say the same. Hey, it’s interesting to see what other people are saying about a video – lets me see where my own opinion fits into the public idea of things. Of course, it’d be nice if I didn’t have to spend several hours figuring that out.

That’s where Opinion Cloud comes in. Looking through the often thousands-deep comment thread can take hours, so Opinion Cloud does it for you, creating a ‘cloud’ in which the most oft-expressed sentiments (usually represented as keywords or very short phrases) are the largest. It separates these comments into positive and negative, so you know exactly what’s being said about a video or image from both sides of the fence.

Wishpond

Wondering if a store near you stocks a particular product? With Wishpond, you can find out. Not only that, it also searches out the best deals in your local area. Input a product you’re looking for as a ‘wish’ along with the price you’re looking to purchase it at, and Wishpond will not only alert you when the price drops, it’ll also search out deals on the product in your city and inform you of them. Basically, it makes bargain hunting into a simple, convenient process.

Autopager

This extension fits into the ‘unique, and kinda cool’ category. When you’re surfing the ‘net, Autopager will automatically load the next page of a site when you reach the end of the current page. Pretty much means that instead of clicking ‘next’ to load the next page in an article or web search, you can simply keep on scrolling down. Not bad, nothing particularly amazing either. Still, it’s a nifty little piece of software.

Gojee

Gojee’s one of my personal favorites. In the mood to eat something other than the usual macaroni and cheese crap you eat day in and day out? Enter into Gojee the components you have (for instance, maybe you have rice, cheese, black pepper, butter, and milk) and the addon will search through its massive list of recipes and present you with a meal fit for a king, complete with mouthwatering pictures. All you’ve gotta do is prepare and enjoy.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

5 Chrome Addons: Online Shopping, Cooking, And Clouds.

And, of course, let’s not forget that whole "Search + Your World" nonsense Google is doing. Google is saying to "give it time" and you’ll like it. I don’t, because search should be the easiest thing to do on the internet, with should being the operative word there. Giving anything time just means the interface and results were designed wrong to begin with out of the gate. I shouldn’t have to learn how to search. Gimme a break.

Bing is good, and I do recommend it, but like Google it’s a very "heavy" site. I also like DuckDuckGo, but their interface is something you have to get used to, which you’ll either give a yea or nay to. I ultimately gave it a nay.

I’ve been a diehard Scroogle user for a while now (which is Google search without the crap), but I’ve been yearning for something just a little better. People have been telling me (including several PCMech readers) to try Ixqiuck. I did, but didn’t care for it too much because the search results I was getting really didn’t work out too well for me.

Then I found StartPage.com, which is Ixquick and Google search results put together in a fast, simple layout. That was the winner and I switched over to it immediately.

StartPage.com’s primary claim to fame is that it’s a "private" search engine. Said honestly, I don’t care about that. What I do care about is speed, no extra crap shoved at me and an interface that has search like it used to be years ago (simple, easy, speedy). StartPage.com has all of that, and that’s why I switched to it. It is Ixquick. It is Google. It’s not heavy. It’s just everything I’d want in a search engine, and I do sincerely believe a lot of you out there would like it also.

No, I’m not getting paid by StartPage.com to say any of this. I just like the site that much, because the site brings back search to the way Google used to be years ago before they changed everything into a big pile of suck.

Seriously, try StartPage.com out and do a few searches with it. You’ll love it and will probably even set it as your home page in your browser. I did.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Retro Friday: StartPage.Com – Search Like It Was Meant To Be

1. Battery life has not improved, and in fact has become worse with many newer models

The entire reason why newer phones do not have battery life like the older ones did is because of feature demands.

For example, newer phones have brighter displays; that eats battery life. Newer phones can run more apps; that eats battery life. Newer phones have louder speakers; that eats battery life (as it usually requires a few more tenths of a watt to do it). And, of course, touchscreen phones don’t have nearly the same battery life as featurephones a.k.a. "dumbphones" do.

Battery life is a big deal with your mobile handset. If on average you talk on the phone for maybe 10 to 30 minutes a day and have to charge the thing every 2 days, that’s not good at all.

2. Certain features were removed on newer phones

The best example of this is the lack of ability for newer phones to give you a preview of a text message that’s worth anything.

Many older handsets would show you half of the message as a preview in your message list. If for example the text message was 50 characters in length, you would see 25 characters of the message and who it was from. Many newer phones won’t show you more than 10 characters at the most, and some won’t even show who sent it unless you actually read the full message.

The advantage of the older handsets was that you had enough of a message preview to determine whether you wanted to read the message or discard it. If you discarded it, most of the time you weren’t charged for the message because you never technically read it.

Newer phones purposely made the text preview function extremely limited to force you to read the whole message so that you spend more money on texting.

Busting the myths

Refurbished phones

Most people equate refurbished (or "refurb" for short) as "used". That’s not entirely true. Any electronic that’s been refurbished simply means renovated or renewed.

Used literally means "not new, all original, has wear, no warranty".

Refurbished means "not new, has had parts replaced to fix worn components, has short-term warranty (usually)".

This is more or less the same as when comparing new car to recertified car. "Recertified" for all intents and purposes means "refurbished".

In other words, it is completely OK to buy a refurbished cell phone, as long as the dealer is willing to offer some kind of warranty, even if it’s only 30 days (which is better than nothing).

Antenna range

Some people believe older phones don’t have as much antenna range as newer phones do. This used to be true (when comparing analog to digital mobile handsets), but not any longer.

The range of your mobile handset is more dependent on your location and wireless carrier rather than the actual phone itself. This isn’t always the case as it’s true some phones do simply have poor antenna range, but most of the time the phone is the last thing to blame for any range/signal quality issues.

Lack of feature compatibility on the wireless network

This is something which is both true and not true at the same time.

As far as the ability to talk is concerned, as long as the mobile handset isn’t some ancient 3-watt analog bag phone thing, it will connect to the network and you can place calls as you normally would.

Concerning texting, the only incompatibility you may run into is if someone texts you using MMS, and your particular handset has no MMS capability. But even in that instance, your handset should still be able to retrieve the message and show the text-only portions of it.

Concerning "the G’s" of your phone, be it 2G, 3G, 4G or 4G LTE compatible, the general rule of thumb is that if the handset’s guide states it’s compatible with xG type of network, it is.

The only features of older handsets that absolutely will not work are carrier-specific things that the carrier no longer supports. For example, on certain older Motorola RAZR handsets, there were carrier-specific multimedia features that when new the carrier supported but are now no longer available. You obviously wouldn’t be using those features, so it’s no loss to you not to have them.

Does the carrier care which phone you use as long as it’s compatible with their network?

I’ve never known one that really cared either way what handset you use as long as it’s a compatible-with-their-network phone and you pay the service bill each month.

Some people get confused as to what network compatibility means concerning handsets, so here it is in a nutshell:

You basically have two options with used/refurbished mobile phone handsets. Either you buy one that’s "unlocked", or buy one that’s carrier-specific.

"Unlocked" simply means the phone is compatible with several – but not all – wireless phone networks.

A carrier-specific handset means the phone only works with a specific carrier.

If you go on eBay and search for used handsets, say for Nokia brand, you’ll notice the carrier compatibility list on the left:

How do you activate a used or refurbished phone with your existing phone plan?

It’s literally the luck of the draw whether you’re able to do this hassle-free or not, but I have a few tips that should make the process go a whole lot smoother.

If calling your wireless carrier’s customer service, have pertinent info ready

Turn on the phone, go into the settings menu, get the serial number and any other information that looks like it would need to be required in order to activate the handset BEFORE calling. Having that info at-the-ready will make the activation process go a whole lot faster. In addition, know the make and model of your phone.

The key thing to do while on the phone with customer service is to not ramble and keep it all-business. If you say something like, "Yeah, I just got this great deal on this used phone from eBay…", that is enough of a reason for the customer service rep to discontinue the call for attempting to activate an "unsupported phone" (when in reality it would work just fine). In other words, only say what needs to be said and nothing more. Be pleasant, but don’t be a blabbermouth.

If you have a wireless store for your carrier brand near you, use them instead, but bring relevant paperwork

This is the easier option, as a representative in-person can get the activation done a whole lot faster than you trying it on your own.

However, this process doesn’t come without its own quirks, so to speak. The rep you speak to could go under the assumption you stole the phone even though you bought it, and refuse to support it. The workaround for this is to simply bring along the receipt that proves you paid for it, such as a printed eBay receipt.

Does your carrier offer a self-activation option?

If you’re lucky, your carrier may offer a self-activation option – however I’m going to note up front that this is usually restricted to prepaid phones and not ones with post-paid wireless plans. As to why carriers work that way, I couldn’t tell you because I don’t know.

The way to find out if your carrier has a self-activation option or not is to go to your carrier’s web site and specifically search for "self activate" or "self activation". If your carrier’s web site turns out to be a complete mess that’s difficult to perform a search on, try Google instead. Search for "[your carrier here] self activate" and "[your carrier here] self activation", and you should find the info you were looking for.

Should you purposely buy used or refurbished phones over new?

Ultimately this is dependent on how disgusted you are with the current offerings that are out there for mobile handsets.

If what’s currently being offered bothers you, and I mean really bothers you, older handsets would suit you better for the way you use a mobile phone.

If on the other hand you have an attitude of, "Eh, what’s out there now isn’t, like, great.. but it’s not too bad", stick with what you have.

Or if you have an attitude of, "My phone works fine. It may not have all the features I’d like, but it does the job and I like it", going with an older handset would most likely be a step backwards for you.

"What if I wanted to test a handset, say, for a month? Then I could decide if I wanted to go back to my other handset or not."

This generally isn’t a good idea. Technically, it shouldn’t be a problem to jump to another handset whenever you wanted, but your roadblock here is the wireless carrier itself. If you can deal with the buffoonery that is wireless customer service, then by all means, go for it. If not, stick with what you have.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

The Truth About Buying Used Cell Phones

It’s basically a surrogate Blackberry Messenger that works on all cell phones. It lets you send one another text, audio, and video messages. On top of that, it also features group chat. And it gets better.

The site makes the rather tall claim that it’s completely free, basically throwing the cost of SMS out the window and replacing in favor of something that’s both more advanced and faster. That last bit sounds a touch curious, doesn’t it? After all, why would phone companies allow an app like this to siphon away all that valuable income they extort from their customers? And why would such a service be provided free of charge?

Turns out, it isn’t.

Upon downloading the app, it makes it clear that there’ll be a year-long, free subscription. After that point, the cost will increase to $1.99/year. Peanuts, I know, but still not entirely free. Plus, there’s the fact of how it gets around avoiding text messaging charges. From what I understand, it uses your smartphone’s already existing internet data plan. The one you use for web browsing.

Which, in many cases, isn’t going to be unlimited.

Sure, it’ll be free if you connect your phone to a WiFi connection. If you do that, you’ll be able to chat to your hearts content. Otherwise, I could foresee Whatsapp slowly eating away at your data allowance for a month, eventually nickle-and-diming you into a rather considerable cell phone bill, depending on how much you use it.

As we all know, data plans are rather abhorrently overpriced depending where you live.

Still, it’s a pretty awesome idea, and it definitely beats text messaging, a technology which is, more and more, seeming altogether archaic in today’s cloud-driven world.

You can learn more about Whatsapp by visiting their website.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Free Texting On Your Smartphone With Whatsapp Messenger

Although there’s a bunch of stuff that’s cool about Fx 10, there are 3 in particular that I feel stand out above the rest.

First is actually the release notes page itself. I’ve been waiting for Mozilla to do this a long time to make it very easy to tell me which update/fix applies to what, and now they have. It’s even color-coded. Nice touch. If you’re saying to yourself, “Well, that has nothing to do with the browser.” Yes, it does because it’s informational.

Second is something that will make a lot of people happy, “Most add-ons are now compatible with new versions of Firefox by default”. IT’S ABOUT TIME, MOZILLA. That whole upgrade-and-break-half-my-add-ons-in-the-process was getting really annoying. Fortunately, that’s now been nipped in the bud for the most part, and that’s great. This is the best reason to upgrade to Firefox 10, period.

Third is a real cool tool for developers, “Inspect Element”. Right click anywhere on any web page and you’ll see it as the last choice:

When you do that, you see both this:

(note the speech bubble telling you the CSS rule)

…and this at the bottom of the browser:

Very nice, very easy. Web developers will really like this.

I guess Firefox follows the same Formula Star Trek movies do where only the even-numbered releases are the good ones, because 10 is good.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Firefox 10 Released: 3 Cool Things About It

1. Verbatim 8.5GB 2.4x DVD+R DL 95310 20-pack

First on the list took me by surprise because of the low unit count. Not a 5, 10, 50 or 100-pack, a 20-pack. Ordinarily people stray away from these but in this case, 20 seems to work for most people. Evidently, when people are shopping for dual-layer DVD+R discs with an 8.5GB capacity, 20 is the just-right number people want. It may be that most shoppers consider 20 the best bang for the buck with DVD+R DL discs.

2. Verbatim DVD+R 95098 100-pack

"Aren’t all Verbatim 100-pack DVD+R spindles the same?" No, they’re not. There are many who very specifically seek out the 95098 spindle, meaning not the 97459 and not the 97460. Many people feel that the 95098 is the best DVD+R recordable Verbatim makes. And no there is no price difference between this particular spindle and others by Verbatim; it just happens to be that people like the 95098 the most.

3. Verbatim 700MB 52x CD-R 97458 100-pack

In yet another offering from Verbatim is the tried-and-true CD-R in 97458 flavor. These aren’t exactly easy to find on store shelves, but online people are buying these things up left and right. Why? I really have no idea. I personally bought them so I could have better disc compatibility with older computers I have. Maybe the retro PC crowd is what makes these such a hot seller?

4. TDK DVD+R Model 48521 100-pack

This one is actually very easy to explain as to why it’s popular as it has the most compatibility with both computers and console DVD players. If you’ve ever burned a video disc and it didn’t work in your console, chances are very good that if you use these TDKs, it will. The same applies from PC to PC or PC to Mac and vice versa. When you use the TDKs, there’s no worry whether or not it will work in specific computers, because it will. Worth the extra 5 to 10 bucks to buy this spindle? Absolutely.

5. RiDATA 4.7GB 8x DVD-R Inkjet Printable 50-pack

The reason these sell well is because of their inkjet printer compatibility, and the fact they’re only 8x max-speed-write. And yes, the slower write speed is actually a selling point, because some claim this particular disc has one of the longest life spans for the least amount of money. How long? Up to 3 decades if taken care of properly. But will it actually survive that long? Time will tell. This is an ugly disc in an ugly package, but a darned good product nonetheless.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

The 5 Most-Talked-About Optical Discs

How to Formulate a Sound Backup Strategy

In order to formulate your backup plan, you should consider

• The data you wish to back up.
• The desired output location to store your backups.
• Who administers the backups? Will they need training?
• What software and hardware are required for purchase?
• How frequently backups will run?
• Will staff need training to use backup procedures?

What Data You Need to Backup and How Frequently

The first step is to prioritize the order in which you backup your data. The order in which you backup will be determined by how important a data set is.

• High Priority data such as financial records, accounts, running projects, address books and emails which are absolutely crucial need special attention, backups should be made daily, and tests should be run in order to test the validity of backups.
• Low Priority data such as downloadable software, videos, images and installed applications can be backup up less frequently as they are less urgent and can be replaced without backups.
• Legal Requirements dictate that certain financial records must be backup. They also dictate how data is stored for live use as well as backup archives.

It’s also worth bearing in mind, that data should be backed up according to the frequency of use. There will always be certain files in any organization which change several times every day, and other files that do not change at all (e.g. accounts which change every day should be backed up at the close of business every day).

High Priority Data

A simple test to find out if files qualify as “high priority” is to ask yourself if you could do without the said files. Would you be at a significant loss if you lost your client list, order inquiries, or purchase invoices? Chances are the answer would be a “yes” so they should be regarded as high priority.

Accounts, spreadsheets, and other important data should be organized in logical folders following a descriptive tree structure to facilitate in the backup process.

Emails should be backed up weekly, in case they are hacked or important emails are accidentally deleted. Most email providers will provide POP3 or IMAP connectivity enabling you to download all the emails with a client like Thunderbird to create local backups, other web based email providers will enable you to create backups at source and download the entire archive.

Before backing up emails, it’s wise to clear out spam. This must be done carefully to avoid deleting non-spam emails.

Emails are often overlooked, but can be very useful several years later. They often contain important contacts that you will need to refer to years later, help with auditing, etc.

Lower Priority Data

Any outdated files, images, videos etc which aren’t urgent needs can be permanently deleted from the disk to free up drive space. Necessary files that aren’t crucial, but still help with the functioning should be backed up weekly or monthly.

Legal Compliance

State Laws on data retention requirements as well as data protection are always evolving alongside technological advances. It’s important to look up local laws in regards to data protection, freedom of information, privacy bills and information regulations to find out what your exact legal obligations are on what data to store and how.

Hardware Required for Successful Backups

Hardware required for backups is inexpensive, and in many cases the users will already have the necessary hardware in place to start performing backups.

To begin, users need to roughly work out how much space a typical backup will require. Software like Acronis True Image will compress the backup down to 50-80% of the space it takes up on your drives, however users will need much more space in order to keep 2-3 previous versions of backups in order to create a second safety net in case a more recent backup fails.

• How much capacity does each user folder take up?
• What is the size of their email archive?

Furthermore, data storage requirements tend to grow exponentially over time, so you will need to have 4x more data capacity than you need in order to future proof your hardware.

External Drive Backups

Currently, hard drives are cheap. They typically run on USB 2.0 and firewire connectivity, although firewire is set to be phased out in favor of USB 3.0 which is more accessible and faster than firewire.

Advantages

Cheap to buy, highly compatible and easy to use, frequently come bundled with backup software allowing users to back up straight out of the box.

Disadvantages

Ideal for backing up a single computer, or one computer at a time, these drives tend to use the same technology as internal hard drives, and are prone to data corruption from dropping the devices and from contact with magnetic instruments, although many do have built in magnetic shields.

You can view a list of great deals on external hard drives here.

Network Attached Storage

Network Attached Storage (NAS) are LAN based storage systems which can be connected to via any computer on the network.

Advantages

NAS are simply an extension to the external drive backups discussed earlier. A hard drive is connected directly to the router, instead of an individual computer. It’s inexpensive and enables every user to access the drive. After the drive is mapped on to a terminal, software applications like Acronis can make whole drive backups or individual file/folder backups straight onto the NAS, meanwhile the drive is still accessible by others.

Disadvantages

Can impair network performance when backup is taking place, and leaves the NAS open to accidental deletion by end users. NAS should be an intermediary backup for an IT technician to make more secure archives later.

Online Storage

Online storage has become a viable option to backup large amounts of data, thanks to fast internet connectivity. Online backup services have been largely designed for consumers in mind to store music, documents, and small zip files, however with increasing emphasis on data security and encryption as well as adherence to regulatory bodies, online storage is fast becoming useful for small businesses to store backups on a highly secure offsite server.

Advantages

Free 5GB accounts available with highly regarded services like SugarSync and OpenDrive. Manual services like Skydrive offer 25GB. With the installation of the backup utility, users can begin to automatically backup their files on the fly. For a small price of $5 users can get unlimited backup storage allowance from services like Carbonite.

Disadvantages

Unsuitable for large files, as upload speeds are limited by your Internet connection. Not suitable as main backup source as files and folders of backups and constantly modified and risk of corruption is present. Regulation may also prohibit use of online storage as primary or sole backup method for business related documents.

Administration and Liability

It must be noted that responsibility for making backups ultimately lies with the owner; therefore, owners will need to take adequate measures to create a fail safe backup mechanism. Unfortunately, despite all the promises made by online backup services, if the backups do go wrong, the responsibility still comes down to an owner.

This is why it’s paramount to use a variety of different backup methods. Online backup as well as secure local backups should be performed, and the backup drives should ideally be detached from the network when not in use to prevent accidental deletion.

Scheduled Backups

The technician can elect to create scheduled backups. On a weekly basis the technician will gather all the files and archive them in order to allow the files to be recovered in case the files are lost or deleted.

The backup software will have tools available to test the backup in order to make sure that it works properly. This must always be performed, in order to make sure you have a workable backup with which you can restore your files.

Automated Backups

Software like Norton Ghost allows automation of the backup procedure. The software runs in the memory of each computer and keeps a record of file changes, and then on a daily or weekly basis any additional changes made to the system are updated on the backups. The software can be set up to create daily or weekly backups of the system or just user files.

Windows has its own built in backup program which can be found by typing backup in the search box. Mac users are able to download the backup utility from the Apple website.

However, a commercial backup solution is more preferable due to the flexibility offered. Worthy contenders for the best Windows backup software are Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, and Paragon Drive Backup.

About the author: Abdul Karim is a tech geek and a full time network administrator. In his spare time he writes about online backup services, and enjoys swimming and salsa dancing.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

The Definitive Guide To Creating A Data Backup Strategy

Okay, so there’s this post on Facebook that officially broke over 1 million comments. It’s right here. Is the conversation interesting? Of course not, because this is Facebook we’re talking about.

Now in case you weren’t aware, Facebook’s Oregon data center consumes just as much power as the entire county it’s located in.

Said another way: “Yee-haw! 1 million comments on a post! Cool! But it burned up 28 megawatts to get there! Oh, well.. progress, right?”

Yes, I know it wasn’t just that one post that burned up 28MW, but it probably contributed to a lot of the usage.

Gee, thanks, Facebook.

For those interested, here’s the info on the county Facebook’s Oregon data center is in; it’s located smack dab in the center of the state, and the county population is almost 21,000.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Facebook Post Reaches 1 Million Comments, Requires Power Of Entire County To Do It

Most modern web browsers will dump all your downloads, as in the files you click to download (meaning not the cache) to a specific folder titled Downloads. Windows Vista and 7 to the best of my knowledge have this folder auto-created by the OS itself. Older versions of Windows will usually have a folder called Downloads created under My Documents. Or it could be the situation where you specify your own downloads folder. In any case, it’s most likely true you dump all your downloads to just one folder.

The downloads folder over time will turn into a mess and at times will be difficult to tell one file from the other. The tips below will help you organize that monster into something more manageable.

1. Separate installer files from everything else

Most people only download 4 types of files. Installers, images, video and documents (PDFs, DOCs, etc.)

Documents and multimedia files are easy to navigate through because most if not all of them can be previewed as your viewing the file list if you utilize a thumbnail view.

Installer files on the other hand have no preview function because that’s not the nature of the way they work, so when you download an installer regardless of what it is, all installer files should be sent to a subfolder of Downloads. The easiest way to do this is to create the subfolder Apps, and just put all your installers there.

2. Get in the habit of renaming installer files once downloaded

There is no standard naming convention when it comes to installer files, and if you download apps quite a bit, chances are there’s a bunch of setup.exe files in your downloads folder. You’ll see setup.exe, setup.exe(1), setup.exe(2) and so on. All different apps, different installers.

If the installer file you download doesn’t have a descriptive file name, rename it. Go to your downloads folder, right-click the installer file, select to rename, and give it a descriptive title that you can recognize should you have to come back to it later.

Does renaming a downloaded installer file affect how it installs?

In Windows, no it doesn’t. In most other OSes it doesn’t affect the installer either.

3. Sort by "Date Modified"

The bigger your downloads folder gets, the more sorting by name becomes fairly worthless. After a while it’s just easier to sort by Date Modified, with the most recent downloaded file shown at the top of the file list.

In Windows, the Date Modified column should be enabled by default. If it isn’t, you can right-click anywhere in the column area and enable it:

After that you can click the column to sort. Click the column name until you see a down-arrow next to it, and that will put the latest file at the top of the file list.

4. Put images in the images folder instead of the downloads folder

Images really don’t belong in the downloads folder. In the Windows environment there’s a specific folder dedicated to this task called My Pictures.

To mass-select images in your downloads folder for cut/paste the easy way:

1. Enable the ‘Type’ column (the same way Date Modified is enabled as shown above)
2. Sort by file Type by clicking the column
3. Scroll through your file list and find the images
4. Click the first image, scroll down, hold SHIFT, click the last image, let go of SHIFT
5. Press CTRL+X to cut. The files will then turn slightly transparent, indicating they’re ready to be moved.
6. Navigate to your My Pictures folder, open it, then right click anywhere INSIDE the My Pictures folder and select Paste.

While most images on the internet are in JPG or JPEG format, you may have some stray GIF, PNG and BMP files in your download folder, so be sure to look for those as well.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

4 Ways To Organize Your Cluttered Downloads Folder

Let’s say you’re on YouTube, and you see a video you really like. It’s downright awesome, and you think “Hey, I’d love to put that on my iPod.” Believe it or not, you actually can do that. Some time ago, I stumbled across a very, very useful tool known as the YouTube Downloader. It’s pretty much what’s written on the box. It lets you download YouTube videos and even convert them to mp3 format. Rather awesome, no?

Of course, it goes without saying that the potential for copyright infringement while using this tool is pretty damned high. To that end, I caution anyone who happens to download it: make sure whatever video you’re downloading isn’t copyrighted and that regardless of which video you’re ripping from YouTube, it’s for personal use only.  Chances are, if a video uses a song from a well-known artist or group, that material’s copyrighted. If it’s an original, unique work, you’re probably in the clear.

You can download the YouTube downloader here. Don’t bother purchasing it. The free version works just fine.

Happy listening!

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Watch YouTube Videos Offline With The YouTube Downloader