News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
FaxZero is a free service that allows one to fax PDF and Word documents via the internet. The number and size of free faxes is limited, and they put an advertisement on the cover sheet, but it’s still a pretty good deal for people like me who don’t have easy access to a fax machine.
Link: http://faxzero.com/
(via Lifehacker)
The linked site gives away one free commercial software program every day. You have to download and install the software on the same day or else it won’t work. Don’t expect stuff like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office, but in the few days I’ve been monitoring the site I’ve seen some decent programs.
Link: http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
This site has an autorun file that tells someone how to return your lost USB drive. When they plug in the drive, the AutoPlay window will display a “Help! I’m Lost” option, which gives ownership/contact information that you specify. I suggest skipping the technical stuff in the article and just downloading the zip file at the end.
PDF Pad has printable PDF files of calendars, graph paper, etc. It’s useful if you just need a few sheets and don’t want to purchase a whole tablet. It has some pretty unusual items too, like Smith charts and staff paper.
Let’s discuss sending large attachments via email. It’s very easy, in these days of broadband internet access, to forget that some people still have dial-up—in which case they have to wait and wait for their email to download, all the while hoping the connection stays up and doesn’t time out. It’s just plain annoying. (I once received a spam email with an 11MB attachment. It would’ve taken me over an hour to download, and I finally dealt with it by just deleting the mail spool file on my server.) Alternatively, sometimes an email server is configured to reject attachments above a certain size, in which case it’s not possible to send the attachment. There is a better way…
I resolve this matter by uploading the file to my web site and sending an email with a link. For those who don’t have personal domains, the linked article lists free services that let you upload a large file for others to download.
UPDATE: Kim Komando has locked down this particular article, so here is an alternate link that gives the same information. (Thanks to Josh.)
Kim Komando, America’s hottest looking geek, has provided detailed information about the various recalls related to Sony’s defective laptop batteries. While the odds of your battery catching fire are low, it’s probably a good idea to participate in the recall if you qualify.
Rather than throwing away broken stuff, consider sending it back to the manufacturer and asking for a replacement. The worst they can do is say, “No,” and the success rate is surprisingly high.
ThePCSpy ran some performance tests to determine how much various programs slowed down the Windows boot process.
I never use the Caps Lock key, and every so often I’d hit it accidentally. So I physically removed it from keyboard—end of problem. But the linked article has a Windows registry script that converts the Caps Lock key to a Ctrl key. Additionally, Sysinternals has a freeware utility that essentially does the same thing.
According to the linked article, if every U.S. household replaced one regular 60-watt lightbulb with an equivalent compact fluorescent (CFL), the resulting energy savings could power a city of 1.5 million people (which is about the population of the Denver metro area where I live). Along this same line, Wal*Mart is trying to sell one CFL to each of its 100 million customers. (Note that there are about 110 million households in the US, which correlates nicely with the 100 million CFLs that Wal*Mart is trying to sell.) This is a good thing, and I encourage you to spread the word. First thing I do whenever I move into a new place is to replace all the conventional bulbs with CFLs.
The linked article gives instructions on how to electrolytically remove rust from metal objects. The emphasis in the article is on hand tools, but the process will work on pretty much anything made out of ferrous metal, provided it can fit into a 5-gallon bucket. Apparently this method works quite well.
The US government has created a comprehensive, online repository of all federal forms. Appropriately enough, they’re located at forms.gov.
