CHRISdotTODD

Where I live, basic service is about $25 a month; long distance is extra. That's a guaranteed minimum $300 a year if I don't make any long distance calls. I decided to do something about that -- I got setup with Skype . If you're in the US or Canada, all long-distance is free after a one-time $30 fee ( SkypeOut: Skype Unlimited ). In addition, to get an incoming number ( SkypeIn ), I only paid $38 for a year of service, which includes voice mail . You can get your incoming number to have any area code -- so if you have friends or family that have to pay long distance charges to call you, you can get a phone number in their area code. My final expense was an inexpensive Skype phone , $35. So for $103, I have local and long distance for a year. In addition, with just the basic free Skype service, you can talk Skype-to-Skype for no cost. Many Podcasters, such as Leo Laporte , use this service to record guests on their shows; which is cheaper and yields better quality than if

Excel is a great program to manipulate your data, perform what-ifs, and graphically display results. But it's not straight forward when you want to know the which Quarter certain activity took place. Fortunately, with a simple formula you can determine the Quarter. =ROUNDUP(MONTH(A1)/3,0) Roundup can be a useful function in other applications as well. The last parameter (0 in this example) is used to change the rounding level. A positive number will add decimal places, while a negative number will round left of the decimal (i.e. -1 rounds to 10s and -2 rounds to 100s).

I recently had a list of items that I wanted to grab from a web page drop-down list. Of course you can't copy a drop-down list, but... you can view the source and get the list. The problem though is, "how do you remove the option tags and the value?" As you may have guessed by the title, you can do it with Word. Here's a sample taken from News.com : Copy the list and paste it into Word. Open the Find and Replace dialog (Edit | Replace... or Ctrl + H). Click the More button and check Use wildcards . Here's the trick, as you need to use special characters. First, paste the string you want to remove in the Find what: field. For each greater than and less than character, place a backslash before it, i.e. < becomes \< . Replace the contents of the value field with an asterisk. Validate Word will be able to find the code by clicking the Find Next button -- the code should now be highlighted. Go to the Replace with: field and enter ^p . This will replace your

Do you ever have the experience where your typing away, say in Word, and another program pops-up and takes focus, forcing you to click back on the program you were working in? This happens the most to me when a new IM conversation begins in Trillian . It's not a problem once the conversation is going, just for new ones. Where there are a couple of work-arounds to prevent this from happening. Perhaps the easiest is to get Microsoft's Tweak UI to disable it. Look for Focus in the General section of Tweak UI. You can also do this through a registry setting: Start the Registry Editor: Go to Start | Run and enter regedit [Enter] Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER | Control Panel | Desktop Go to the Edit menu and select New > DWORD value Name the DWORD value "ForegroundLockTimeout" Assign a value of 30d40 Close the Registry Editor While your in the Registry Editor, you can also set how many times the Window seeking your attention flashes in your taskbar. This is another setting

In Amber McArthur's new position at CityTV, she has produced a lot of interesting material including her blog, Inside Popnology . Here she interviews Andrew Clement, Professor of Information Studies at the University of Toronto on the subject of Net Neutrality.

From my home, I can pickup several wireless signals, with about half unsecured. I have been using one of these connections, instead of paying Comcast's high prices. While connecting my desktop with my laptop (to transfer some files), I noticed from the laptop that I could see this neighbors computer. I decided, what the heck, I'll click on it and see if it is open. Well, I got challenged (which you would think is good), but I tried Windows XP default password for the Admin account and I got in. I suspect more people do not understand that they are not secure than being ignorant that they should be secure. Because people are assuming they are secure, their systems get left open to make easy access without any real hacker tools. If you're reading this, and are not sure about your computer security, I highly suggest you check your system out or have a technical friend help. Check the following: If you have wireless, at a minimum use WPA . You may also consider MAC ID filtering

Do you ever get frustrated by having to always press F8 when you want to boot into Safe Mode or the Command Prompt? With a simple modification to your boot.ini, you can add those options to the boot menu. Here's a typical boot.ini (located at c:\): [boot loader] timeout=3 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Media Center Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons This boot.ini will prompt with: Windows XP Media Center Edition Microsoft Windows Recovery Console Add the following three lines under [operating systems] to get Safe Mode , Safe Mode with Networking , and Safe Mode with the Command Prompt : multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Safe Mode" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /safeboot:minimal multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Safe Mode with Network" /noexecute=optin /f

I recently was on vacation and was reminded how much I like Google's Picasa to manage my digital photos. Each night as I returned from my activities, I inserted my memory card into my laptop, launched Picasa, and had it load my new photos into a folder unique for that day. Occasionally I took a few additional sunset photos, and common to camera memory cards, when loading I ended up with duplicate file names. Picasa handles this for me by automatically renaming the new files as they were saved to my laptop. Once the photos were on my laptop, it was very easy to take care of basic photo editing -- perfect for most of us non-Photoshop experts. For example, removing red-eye is simple; I can also sharpen photos; and of course rotation is a single click. Once my edits are complete, Picasa will save my original, so that I can always go back to it later. Once I finished my edits, I viewed all the photos from the day using the slide show feature. And when I was happy with what I saw, it wa

Recently I was asked how to add a new Download Action to Firefox. In other words, how can I get Firefox to always use the same program and open a file from the web without having to save it first each time. I scratched my head for a minute and then thought, "this is easy, just click Tools | Options , and then the Content tab ." I found out I could only manage them here, not add. After being perplex for a while, I realized it is actually very easy. Download the file type (e.g. PowerPoint), select the Open with radio button, select the application you want to open it with , and (here's the hard part) check the box next to Do this automatically for files like this from now on . Now you can go back to the Content tab in the Options menu if you want to remove or change the file association. Ahh, such an easy solution to any easy problem.

Recently I took a class where the instructor could not get one of his DVDs to play for the class. This particular DVD was a custom compilation made by his organization. The error I saw when trying it on my laptop was that it was blocky and played fast. Another person tried it and got a black screen. I search Google on "free DVD codecs" and found a codec to that worked . Once installed, it still did not play with my default player, but it did play with the player installed with the codec -- the Media Player Classic. Because this first codec worked, I did not try the other downloads. I tried this one first because the file size was the smallest. So if you find that you still have trouble, try one of the other links within the first result ( Codec Pack All in 1 or K-Lite Mega Codec ).