http://www.friedbeef.com Solving Everyday Problems With Simple Technology - Freeware, Productivity, Useful Tips & More Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:28:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Is the web page you want to visit down?  Rather than constantly hitting the refresh button in vain, try Dingitsup - a free service which lets you know via email, twitter, or SMS when it gets back up again.  Now you can go about your daily life in ... http://www.friedbeef.com/how-to-get-notified-if-a-website-goes-back-up-or-down/   Miss a really important soccer game?  Do a quick search on YouTube and you’ll find that it’s really difficult to find quality highlight reels of specific games.  Either you’ll find an older game, or worse – fake videos which don’t display any highlights at all. ... http://www.friedbeef.com/where-to-watch-free-soccer-highlights/ With so many good T-shirt sites on the net like Threadless and BustedTees, it can be hard to lay out your options when you want to buy a new T-shirt.  Teenormous is a free search engine which indexes the web for T-shirts, and allows you to search and filter ... http://www.friedbeef.com/how-to-find-the-perfect-t-shirt/   With the huge holiday shopping period ahead of us, saving has become a particularly hot topic; and with looming economic crisis and undefined gas prices, shipping is the first thing you probably want to save on. So let's look at some useful (and what's more free!) online tools that ... http://www.friedbeef.com/6shipping-tools-for-geeky-online-shoppers/ When you delete a file, and clear out your desktop 'recycle bin', the data isn't really gone - you essentially just 'hide' it, and tell the system that it's OK to write over the data.  This of course means that it's possible in many cases to retrieve the 'permanently ... http://www.friedbeef.com/8-ways-to-permanently-delete-data-without-leaving-any-trace/ Picking a right domain can make or break your blog, or online business (Yes, I realize the irony - This from a guy who has a tech blog called Friedbeef.com).  Here are several tools which will aid you in picking out the absolutely best domain names which are available ... http://www.friedbeef.com/7-creative-ways-to-get-the-perfect-domain-name/   Planning to take a well deserved break anytime soon?  Check out these step-by step tips to make your holiday a better one. 1. How to decide where to go Everyone travels for different reasons.  Tripbase, a free service will generate personalized recommendations on where to go based on what you like.  ... http://www.friedbeef.com/19-indispensable-travel-tips-for-the-tech-savvy/ Wonderful as they may be, one thing about Apple products is that they come up with new revisions of them so quickly, that any purchase you make would probably be obsolete before you know it.  Once that happened, the warm fuzzy feeling of owning a sleek elegant device from ... http://www.friedbeef.com/one-thing-you-must-do-before-you-buy-any-apple-product/   Shortening URLs is a great way to handle long URLs which sometimes break in email, are harder to verbalize in a conversation, and they are difficult, or in some cases near impossible to remember.  While shortening a URL is useful, short URL services like TinyURL have long been used ... http://www.friedbeef.com/4-easy-ways-to-decode-a-tinyurl/ YouTube is slow. Once I hit the 'play' button on a YouTube video, I typically have to wait a pretty long time for the video to load up and play smoothly.  Here's a quick fix for this.  Using the same simultaneous download principles which we've seen for other browser download accelerators, ... http://www.friedbeef.com/how-to-make-youtube-load-faster/   Aside from 'search', Gmail is arguably Google's most successful home-grown product out there.   Gmail may be smaller than Yahoo! Mail and MSN Live Mail (Hotmail), but it's certainly growing faster (doubling its share in the last 1 year), and it's definitely a more polished product.  Now, the Google ... http://www.friedbeef.com/7-incredibly-useful-gmail-labs-features/ With more than a million registered users bookmarking and tagging their favorite sites, del.icio.us has long been one of the best sites to patronize if you're looking to check out what's hot on the web for any given topic.  Here are 3 hand-picked tools which will make ... http://www.friedbeef.com/3-delicious-tools-that-will-make-your-mouth-water/ Most people rarely read manuals when I buy a piece of equipment (who does?), so very often, manuals just get tossed aside and forgotten.  That of course is usually the point in time when you suddenly discover that you need to refer to the manual ... http://www.friedbeef.com/how-to-find-instruction-manuals-to-anything/   Too many songs in iTunes not tagged properly Two weeks ago, I had 8000+ songs, and most of it was quite a mess in iTunes.  Many of them had missing album names, and artist names.  Some had wrong track titles, and most did not have any ... http://www.friedbeef.com/the-best-way-to-clean-up-your-itunes-library/ If you've got a 3G enabled S60 Symbian phone (Nokia N-series & E-Series, Samsung i550 & G810) - It's now possible to instantly transform it into a WiFi hotspot so you can hook up other devices to ride on your mobile 3G connection. JoikuSpot Light is ... http://www.friedbeef.com/how-to-turn-your-phone-into-a-wifi-hotspot/