Google accounts present a serious risk to employees who use them in the workplace. Google accounts allow you access to Gmail and another interestng feature, your search history. Unfortunately, your Google account does not time-out.
Now imagine you’re at work. You sign-on to your Google account and check your mail and use Google Reader to check some RSS feeds. You are then called away from your desk. You don’t sign-off, afterall, its only Google. Well your collegue drops by and decides to do a search and check his mail. He searches for a prostitute for tomorrow evening and checks his Gmail and finds yours.
Your collegue has now added some interesting entries to your search history and read your mail. My Yahoo presents a similar risk.
This leads me to think of some interesting oportunities that this offers if I set-up virgin Google and My Yahoo accounts and place them on an unattended PC.
Did you know you can streamline your start menu? It’s always amazes me how PC users suffer with a horrible mishmash in the start menu. To sort the entries in the start menu alphabetically, right click on the start button and then on Properties. In the Start Menu tab, click on Customize. This is where you can add or remove items from the Start Menu. It also offers you the opportunity to Sort the menu items alaphabetically when you click on Sort.
Once you click on Sort, click on OK and wait for the PC to work its magic. Click OK again and go to the newly alphabetically arranged start menu. If for some reason a few items don’t sort to where you want them, then Left click and hold the mouse button down while you drag the item to its proper place and just release the mouse button.
If you are looking for pictures of a particular person, then start your search in Google Image Search and the put “&imgtype=face” (without the quotation marks) at the end of the search results URL. This filter will then provide a new results page with only portrait-like pictures.
Try a search on paris. The results will relate to Paris (the City), France, the Eiffel Tower, Paris Hilton, etc.. A search on paris, but with “&imgtype=face” appended to the end, returns results mostly of Paris Hilton and other faces, because they match face results. Now try a search on google. Without the face filter you get screen captures of the Google home page. If you add the face filter parameter to the URL, you get pictures of people and faces related to Google.
I found an interface for the face filter, which does not require you to enter the filter to the URL, that appears to work very well.
While this Google filter works very well, it does not provide every usable picture for the person you are looking for. The picture has to be very much like a portrait to appear in the results of this filter. This is a good tool but it isn’t perfect, but then what is?
Well organized, efficient, and fast, describe the Power User.
To get fast access to files, a Power User will create 3 toolbars to access the most used folders from the desktop or from within applications. These toolbars will appear at the top, left, and right margins of the screen.To create the toolbars just right-click a folder and drag it to the desktop and create a shortcut there. Next drag it to the edge of the using the left mouse button and release the the mouse button and you now have a toolbar. To enlarge it, pass the cursor over the edge until the double arrow appears and drag the edge to to where you need it.
You can add another folder to the toolbar by right-clicking on an unused part of the toolbar and selecting Add a Folder. Now right-click on the toolbar and select Always on Top and Auto-Hide.
Folders with a large number of files or URL’s may occassionally take some time to display their contents. To avoid this problem, orgainize the folder contents into separate sub-folders.
Pipl professes to offer the best people search on the Internet. Type in the first and last name along with the location, if you know it, and off it goes looking in blogs, groups, Google Scholar, Linkedin, Flicker, and more.
It even works, unlike so many speciality search engines. It also presents its findings in an orderly fashion. Of course, you will have to sort-out the person you want from all the other people with the same name.
When you install software it frequently adds features you don’t want. One such feature is loading itself, or some part of itself, at startup. This makes the boot process much too long and unnecessarily ties-up memory resources.
To correct this annoyance click on Start then Run. In the dialog box type msconfig and hit enter. Now select the Start-up tab and uncheck the offending programmes and restart your PC.
You will be confronted by a warning message. Read it carefully. Do not check the box to eliminate it just yet. Got to Start/Run and enter msconfig again. Look at the General tab, you will notice some changes but don’t do anything. Use your PC for a day to be sure everything runs OK and then shut it off normally. When you start it the following day, check the box to eliminate the warning message if everything is working properly.
However, if you experienced problems go to Start/Run and enter msconfig and revise your choices in the Start-up tab or select Normal Stat-up in the General tab.
The top performers are rarely more gifted than the also-rans, but they almost invariably outwork them. Scholars of elite performance speak of a 10-year rule: you have to put in a decade of focused work to master something to bring expert status within reach.
The expert Investigator develops two important cognitive skills. The first is the ability to group details and concepts into easily remembered patterns. Second, the expert also learns to quickly identify which bits of information in a changing situation to store in working memory so that he can use them later. This facilitates a continually updated mental model far more complex than that used by someone less practised, allowing him to see subtler dynamics and deeper relationships.
Finally, most experts have at least one crucial mentor.
Everyone who uses MS Office needs two little extras that make writing reports easier.
The first is a Windows Clipboard extender called Ditto. This saves every item copied to the normal clipboard for easy access in any application, MS or not.
The next indispensible programme is a Dictionary and Thesaurus called WordWeb. This is the easiest to use of all the similar programmes I have tried. Just click on a word and open WordWeb from the QuickLaunch toolbar.
The best feature of these two programmes is the cost — they are free.