Pete & Jay's Tip O Da "Day"

Want to try out that new Facebook app? Sure you do! Afraid of what it is going to post on your wall? Sure you are! So next time you don't want to risk it, just set the app's post to only by seen by yourself by selecting "Only Me" in the app authorization dialog:

For non-advanced Excel users like myself, I always find the need to merge the text from two columns into one. For example, the first and last names are in separate columns but I want them to be in one. While there is no "Merge Columns" command, it is actually pretty easy to do with a simple formula. Step 1: Create a new column where you wanted your merged data to be Step 2: Enter a formula like this: =B1&" "&C1 B1 is where the first name is. C1 is where the last name is, and " " means you want a space between them. The & does the merging.

If you use a Lexmark black and white laser printer, you can improve the quality of the grays in your prints by going into the printer driver settings and turning PictureGrade on. Why it is not turned on by default is another question entirely.

I never thought I’d be writing this. But 19 year old Abraham Biggs committed suicide on Nov 21st with his webcam rolling live on the internet and it wasn’t immediately reported because the viewers thought it was a hoax. By the time the police got there it was too late. What’s even more unbelievable is this kid has had a history of suicide attempts and he even talked about doing it on the forums prior to the event. The so called moderators on the website where the video was posted on for hours must have been understaffed. But let me lay it out. If someone talks about killing themselves never assume it’s a joke. It’s better to be safe than sorry. I had to notify my ISP in my high school days when someone IMed me saying they were going to kill theirself. The police showed up at his house and I never regretted it. As long as you're not calling 911 over a Subway sandwich you can't get in trouble for false reports. I didn’t even get my homework done that night because I was trying ...

I have a computer at work and one at home, but there is always something on one machine you need on the other. It will happen, and it will be involvement when it happens. Two handy free solutions have recently made themselves know to me. If you have a Mac, sync your addressbook with Yahoo! you don't even need a Yahoo! email account, Sync your address book with Yahoo!. They provide simple step by step instructions For Mac or PC users, or if you use both. Dropbox is the most elegant solution for keeping files in sync on all your machines at once. It even makes sharing files and photos incredibly easy. Everything synced in the background, super quick and responsive. All its nifty features are laid out in a video over at getdropbox.com . Dropbox is in private beta right now, but we have invites. Drop us a comment and we'll invite you to join (if we still have any invites left by the time you read this)

Internet browsers have a feature that allow you to find a word on the page. You go to the Edit Menu -> Find on this Page or Ctrl+F on your keyboard. (Sorry, don't know the Mac shortcut - my guess is Command+F). Anyway, it will search through the page to find the word and by clicking next, you can see all the occurrences on that page. This may be an obvious tip for some, but I didn't learn it until a couple years ago and it is quite helpful. Bonus tip that I learned from The Office : You can use the Find and Replace (also Edit Menu) in Word Processing programs. Every time you have a word, you can change it to another word. In the show, Michael (aka Detective Michael Scarn) replaced "Dwight" with "Samuel L. Chang" (idiot sidekick).

If, when using Blogger, you are publishing a post and continually get the message, "Your blog is taking longer than expected to publish. Click here to continue to wait," it actually means that it has published your blog, contrary to whatever it may lead you to believe.

If you're unfortunate enough to be relegated to use a PC, check to make sure you've upgraded to WinXP Service Pack 2 before you attempt to connect to any wireless routers made in the last decade. If you have not, you'll have to figure out what the heck a "network key" is instead of a wireless password. Silly Windows.

If you have more than 2GB of data to backup and don't want to continue paying a monthly fee, we at TodD labs discovered something that might be of interest to you. Brought to you by Dreamhost , a leading web hosting company, they offer "Files Forever." This service is great if you already have a hosting account because you pay a one-time fee of $0.01 per 4MB. So, if you're having to store tons of large files in perpetuity, you simply upload them, tell Dreamhost where they are, and pay your one-time fee. You never pay monthly for it, just once and done!

The type geeks out there, know there is a difference between different quote marks, such as ", “ and ”. The latter two are proper typographically, the first is just what they invented for the type writer. Word and other programs will automatically use their “smart quote” feature to convert a boring quote into open or closed quotes. But what if the program your using isn't smart enough. On a Mac just his Option-[ for open double quotes, and Option-Shift-[ for close double quotes. Use Option-] and Option-Sift-] for single quotes. To do it in HTML use ‘ ’ “ and ” for ‘ ’ “ ” respectfully. On Windows, it is Alt+0145, Alt+0146, Alt+0147 and Alt+0148. Thanks to P22's Tip of the Month , Mountain Dragon's HTML Entities Examples , Tip sheet on special characters Dave M. and Citizen Grim.

So everyday when you sit down at your computer, there may be a few web sites that you always visit. They have just become part of your daily ritual. May be you have them organized under your bookmarks, but sometimes what you really are looking for is buried under lots of links. Depending and your usage there may be a better solution. Check out Only2Clicks , that service gives you some big ol icons of the sites you visit often. Set it as your homepage and as soon as you launch your browser you're just a click or two away from your most used sites. Maybe even more accurately, you don't need to go to those websites you just need the information off of them. Such as sports scores, stocks, headlines and the weather. Try iGoogle , I use this service and has enough customization for most uses. If you really want to go all out, and need data from a wider range of sites try Netvibes . Happy Browsing~

For those who care, I learned a valuable bit of CSS glory from a competing media firm under my own roof. Thanks, Fowler ! When working with background images and colors within a DIV, you may want to have a DIV contain a background image that does not repeat, and then a background color to the remaining area where content overflows the image area. I had always had some issues doing this, so Fowler clarified it all for me. There are two ways you can do it properly, and then an incorrect way (which I had been using.) Proper Way #1 background: #fff url(img/myimage.jpg); Proper Way #2 background-color: #fff; background-image: url(image.jpg); Improper Way background-color: #fff; background: url(image.jpg);

This one happened by accident! Have you ever been working in a program on your Mac that has multiple columns you can sort by (like Mail, iTunes, etc.?) Sometimes you'll encounter data in one of these columns that is WAY too long for the width you have set for that column. For example, someone sends you an email where the subject contains more data than most people put in the entire message. For example, check out this iTunes store list. Notice how the album column isn't wide enough for the content? I used to DRAG the column header over to resize, and then I discovered, accidentally, that double clicking on the column header (directly between the columns) will elongate (I hate that word) the column to fit the content! It's amazing--give it a try!

Here is a good little article explaining how hackers crack passwords and then offers tips to make a password that is easy to remember yet hard to crack. Read the article at Baekdal.com A couple of tips I will add to that as you create passwords. 1. Never type a password you mind loosing on an protected Wi-Fi network. It is amazingly easy to grab a password that is flying over the air unencrypted. 2. Don't use the same password for secure and unsecure sites. If it is a little, no name operation, who knows how secure his sever is. Or if the web address starts with "http://" who cares how secure their server is, cause the password could get nabbed along the way. Look for "https://" at the beginning of your web address to avoid this. 3. Beyond what they mention in the article, one of my favorite ways to create a memorable yet secure password is to use a phrase and use the first letters off of the words. Such as "I like working at Creative Group in Wilmore, Kent...

When buying computer speakers, since it is near impossible to fine reviews on cheap speakers, you have to find other means of evaluating the quality of the devices. Here is our basic guide, just look for the LED color on the front of one of the speakers: Red LED: These speakers are alright Greed LED: Better than red, but still not your best buy Blue LED: Buy these ones, Blue LED are always a sign of quality products. Thanks Dave

If you're an iChat user with a lot of buddies, you may notice that your buddy list quickly occupies a lot of your screen's real estate. If you're looking to make your buddy window a bit more svelte, make your buddy list the active window, then go to View and uncheck "Show Buddy Pictures." You'll be surprised at how much you really don't care what your friends' buddy icons are.

If your budget is too limited for the high-end models , but you still need a computer for a very specific purpose , Popular Science has step-by-step instructions on how to build your own for only $72 . I was gonna save up for a couple months to build my next computer , but now I learn that I'm already there! While you're at it, you can build your own lightsaber for only $11.20!

Even though it's not officially supported, Final Cut Pro will run on a MacBook (non-Pro). Color and Motion won't though, but who uses those anyway. Hello $1100 mobile edit bay!

Right here on Tip of the Day, thanks to Fowler , we have all the information you ever wanted on how Google ranks pages!

So yea have an iPod, and there is always the struggle on how to listen to it in your car. The iTrip and other FM transmitters are a popular "solution". As with many other in-quote solutions out there, it doesn't always work. The biggest trick is to find an empty station, that is surrounded by other empty stations. That gives you something to do on a boring Sunday, but its not exactly fun. Belkin has come to the rescue with their new web tool my best FM stations . Just punch in your zip and you've got a great starting point to finding a clear station!