There is just a crapload of good stuff in today’s Pile. Let’s dig in!

The (Practical) nerdy stuff

• The Hassle-Free Guide to Ripping Your Blu-Ray Collection [Lifehacker] – I’m a huge fan of digitizing DVDs and storing them on a secure, backed-up hard drive. I’m actually in the process of doing this again. But I had no firm instructions on backing up Blu-Rays. Here you go. This one went into my Evernote, and it should go into yours, too!
• Use Google Maps’ Starred Locations To Find Your Car [Lifehacker] – Most Blackberries, iPhones, Androids, and others have GPS capabilities now. This would work really well with my Blackberry Curve when parking in big, confusing parking lots. Slick idea!
• Why You’re Hooked On Email, and 5 Ways To Stop [Dumb Little Man] – One of the most glorious days of my life was when I stopped getting pop-up notifications of my e-mails. That’s just one way to cut down on this time-suck.
• How to Return Facebook’s Privacy Settings to What You Signed Up For [Lifehacker] – Facebook is getting very close to jumping the shark with me. How about you?
• The Realities Of Dropping Cable [The Simple Dollar] – It just makes me happy to see other people doing the same.
• The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events [Lifehacker] – TV shows, movies, concerts, events, birthdays, money, cell phone minutes, job hunting… yeah, you need this.
• Clean Up Your Photo Collection With Free Tools [Lifehacker] – Geez, a lot of Lifehacker articles, as usual! I’m also a big proponent of digitizing your photo collection (again, to a backed-up, secure hard drive). Make it easier and more awesome with this guide.

A ridiculously giant pile of money articles

• A Cheapskate’s Advice on Affording Anything You Want [Lifehacker] – Personal finance takes thought. Not a whole lot of it, but some.
• Think the iPad Will Save You Money on Magazines? Think Again! [Wise Bread] – I held my first iPad the other day. It’s very nice and very slick. But it’s a toy. An incredibly expensive toy. Those that think it will save you money are fooling themselves.
• Three Passive Barriers I Use to Counter Consumerism [Get Rich Slowly] – A short video from Adam Baker demonstrates how to keep control of your spending mentally.
• 5 Ways To Save Money With Online Banks [Christian Personal Finance] – I’m a huge fan of my checking account with ING Direct, and this is a great list for those considering it.
• My Checklist to Financial Freedom [Christian Personal Finance] – Again, personal finance is not complicated. It just takes time and a little thought.
• Calling BS on 5% Rewards Advertising [Wise Bread] – This is a great, well-researched article that blows open the idea that you are getting 5% cash back on your credit card.
• How Large Should Your Emergency Fund Really Be? [Christian Personal Finance] – It’s an interesting debate, and there are plenty of arguments. However, what’s most important is that you have one.
• Looking The Wrong Way [The Simple Dollar] – An interesting view: we have a hard time fighting debt because we can’t actually see it or use it.
• Debt Consolidation and The "Orbital of Stupid" [The Simple Dollar] – Here’s what debt consolidators say: “Give us your money and we’ll manage it for you. You don’t have to change a thing.” But smart people know that the only way you will beat debt is by changing up your lifestyle and socking money at it. Knock off the consolidation. It doesn’t work.

Health: Physical, Mental, Social. It’s all important

• Anyone Can Spend Less for Food [Wise Bread] – I learned this on my own. Food, at its core, is not expensive. Processed food is what kills your budget.
• How to Improve Your Social Life: 6 of my Favorite Timeless Tips [The Positivity Blog] – I’m a firm believer that everyone should actively work on their social lives. Continue working hard to be a better friend.
• Newsflash: There Is No Magic Bullet [Dumb Little Man] – Easily my favorite post of the past couple of weeks. I struggle with this sometimes. It’s crucial to understand that any measure of success will take time and sacrifice. You’ll get there. So will I.
• How to Reboot Your Sleep Cycle and Get The Rest You Deserve [Lifehacker] – I’ve been caught countless times in webs of insomnia. This is a great article to get you back on track if you do the same.
• 10 Essential Kitchen Items for The Healthy Cook [Cheap Healthy Good] – Cooking healthy, like personal finance, doesn’t take a whole lot.
• Slow Down and Enjoy Relationships [Zen Habits] – Facebook, Twitter, texting, etc. It’s time we start savoring our relationships instead of passing them by en route to somewhere else.
• 6 Reasons Why People Don’t Change, and What to Do About That [The Positivity Blog] – You want to change, but “can’t”, right? Yes, you can. Try these.
• Is The News Making You Sick? [Simple. Organized. Life] – I hate the news. I never watch it. Crime rates are down and the economy is on the mend. All you see on the news are tragedies, murders, kidnappings, and doom. Turn it off and get your news on your own. You’re better off.
• The Cost of Negativity [The Simple Dollar] – You’re losing time and money by being a cranky old butt. Knock it off and find some solutions.
• 7 Must Read Life Lessons From Abraham Lincoln [Dumb Little Man] – Smart guy, that Abe.
• Discipline Outdoes IQ in the Long Run [Lifehacker] – You think you just got a bad break? Get down to business and quit whining, and you can go places.
• 4 Ways to Spend Time With Kids When You Have No Time [Stepcase Lifehack] – Another great parenting article for struggling parents in the modern age.
• 11 Reasons Why You Aren’t Getting Results [Stepcase Lifehack] – Feel like you’re spinning your wheels in the mud? There might be a reason why.
• What Is Manliness? [The Art of Manliness] – Hint: it’s not abs.
• Finding The Fire: Nine Things I Do To Make Each Day Great [The Simple Dollar] – You have more control over your day than you realize.
• Top 10 Ways To Upgrade Your Morning Routine [Lifehacker] – Are you getting up, limping along, sucking down coffee, and sitting at your computer? Get moving and jumpstart your day.
• 7 Harsh Truths That Will Improve Your Health [Dumb Little Man] – My favorite? “#1. Nobody is responsible for your health but you.”

That’s it! Enjoy – and feel free to share your favorites in the comments below!

The world is abuzz about the pending iPad and it’s pre-orders. Everyone is talking about the Microsoft Courier. You love your iPhone/Droid/Blackberry. You constantly search around for bigger, better devices that will do almost everything in the world. In this “buy-buy-buy” haze, have you forgotten the love for your laptop?

A laptop is a versatile tool. When people talk about user experience on new gadgets, they distract people from an important point – you already know how to use a laptop. A laptop can fit in a small bag and go anywhere you want it to. It’s never as flashy or as impressive as one of these new gadgets, but are you just paying for the flashiness? The status? Aren’t we over that in this country?

Over the past few years of developing into the Nerd that you see before you today, I learned how to push a laptop to do almost anything. It boasts an impressive array of features that we’ve all forgotten about. Today, I want to remind you of all the things your laptop can do, and hopefully inspire some of you to hang on to that relic instead of swiping that credit card for another gadget purchase, or dipping into your hard-earned savings. But first, here are the specs on my laptop, so that you know I’m not talking about some super-laptop that you can’t afford:

This is a dual-core, 1.60GHz Toshiba Satellite laptop with 1.5GB of RAM. It has an 80GB hard drive. I bought it with Vista and downgraded to XP about a year and a half later. This setup cost me about $700 when I bought it in 2007, and a quick search on Newegg.com pops up a computer with twice as much memory and a hard drive FOUR times as large as mine for under $400. Honestly, this computer blows mine out of the water, and it cost almost half as much as I paid for mine.

So here’s the list, in absolutely no particular order. I sat down and jotted down all the things I can use my laptop for, so this is a “stream of consciousness”-type list. A quick editor’s note: I’m not dumb. This list assumes moderate maintenance (i.e., running CCleaner about once a week, having a free antivirus application running at all times), Windows XP (though you don’t need XP for most of this stuff), and a decent internet connection.

1. An e-reader

It’s the flashiest feature of them all right now – read books on a screen! The iPad will have books! Well, you don’t need to buy a new gadget for this necessarily. Barnes And Noble and Amazon both offer free software for reading books on your computer, so if you want to buy ebooks, go right ahead! Better yet, visit Project Guternberg and download over 100,000 free ebooks from the public domain if you want.

This is probably the feature I use the least, since you can’t compare the ease on the eyes of a book compared to an LCD screen. This is one place I think the iPad will fail, and why, if you’re a heavy reader, I actually would recommend getting a dedicated e-reader. The e-ink technology is much, much easier on the eyes.

2. A portable television

I’ve written at length about how you can use your computer as your television, and even hook it up to your TV. But also, for quick show-watching on the go, just visit a site like Hulu. I subscribe to a lot of shows within Hulu and they post to my queue the morning after they air. So, all I need to do is log in, go to my queue, and click “Play”. Boom.

If you’re looking to watch live sports, start getting to know TVAnts and StreamTorrent. Plus, this method ensures that you get out-of-market games, too.

3. A pretty good gaming machine

You hardcore gamers looking to play graphics-intensive games will probably want a powerful desktop, but laptops can handle quite a bit too. Plus, if you’re a casual gamer (like myself), you are just looking for simple games to pass the time, in which case, there are plenty of great gaming sites out there like this one.

4. Your new teacher

Miss college? Want to learn a new skill? There are lots of great places online to see and hear lectures and lessons taught by fine professors from all over the country. Looking for something a little more fun? Learn guitar (see link above) or build something cool at Instructables. There are endless possibilities for what you can learn through your laptop.

5. Your complete photo album

When I go to my grandmother’s house, looking through pictures involves emptying a cabinet full of old albums and sitting at the kitchen table while everyone crowds around them and tries to see what’s going on. Nowadays, all those pictures (and more!) can be stored on your laptop. Back them up to a site like Picasa (my favorite) and tag, organize, and share them with everyone forever.

Bonus tip: set your screensaver to pull pictures from the folder on your computer where you keep all your photos, and your monitor becomes an instant digital photo frame when not in use.

6. Your radio

Talk radio, comedy stations, music of all types and genres – internet radio is fantastic. Set up a Pandora station for customized listening goodness, or listen to hundreds of live radio stations on iheartradio.com. Take it with you.

7. Your complete music library

The local version of the previous tip. Imagine: no CD towers to buy, no cases to spend half an hour opening. Download music from iTunes or Zune Marketplace or Amazon. Store them on your computer (and back them up, of course). Rip your current CD collection and then pack away those discs in a bin somewhere. You can listen to any music at any time, anywhere. It’s a beautiful thing.

8. Your map command center

It doesn’t matter if you are biking, running, or driving a car – sometimes you just need directions. Now, you can type in any location or address into sites like Google Maps or MapQuest and you know exactly how to get anywhere. You no longer have a need for a big paper map that takes up half the front of the car. Just search, print, and move on.

9. Note-taker and organizer

If you want a laugh, look at my notes from high school and college: they’re messy and smudged (I’m a lefty), completely disorganized, and a total failure. Today, with services like Evernote, you can organize and tag your notes, and they won’t be smudged or unreadable. Heck, you can even just use a word processor to get the job done if you want. Just pull your laptop out of its bag and get to typing.

10. Complete database of knowledge, regardless of usefulness

Remember how embarrassing it was to go to a bookstore or a library and pick up one of those stupid “For Dummies” books? Now, you don’t need them. I’m amazed they’re still on the shelves at all. There is no longer an excuse for not knowing something. You can Google it, you can Bing it, you can even Ask Jeeves if you want. Get your plumbing/cooking/health questions answered just by typing your question into a search engine. For facts (mostly accurate), hit up Wikipedia.

11. Your calendar of events

I use Google Calendar, but you can use whatever you want. All the things going on in your life can be chronicled, and you can have reminders sent to you straight from your calendar. Stop missing those anniversaries/birthdays/whatever.

12. An address book

My mom kept an address book for years. When I needed a phone number, I needed to go to the closet, pull it out, flip to the section with the first letter of their last name, navigate through old, crossed-out addresses and skim through until I found what I was looking for. Now? I just sit at my laptop, open up Google Contacts, and use the search box to find the entry with the person I’m looking for. You can use Outlook or something else if you want. But have a backup of all your contacts, and you can search them easily at any time.

13. Your weather station

Hop on Weather.com and enter in your zip code at the top of the page – severe weather warnings, detailed forecasts of the next couple of days, and extended 10-day forecasts all come up. You can watch the live radar if you want. Do this stuff for monitoring the weather of your next vacation destination. Turn off the Weather Channel and put down the newspaper.

14. Your professional presentation tool

Ever notice how you don’t see presentations done with big poster boards anymore? That’s because you just need to load that PowerPoint presentation and plug your laptop into a projector. It looks slicker, makes you look good, and was easy to do with your laptop.

15. Your new checkbook

Wave “bye-bye” to adding and subtracting errors. A complete money management system can be had on any laptop. Need to share it with your husband/wife? Use a free online service like ClearCheckbook or share a Google Doc. The math and tracking is done for you – all you need to do is enter in those transactions.

16. Call anybody, anytime – even by video

VoIP technology continues to advance. I run a Skype phone line with a little headset for business. Want to video chat with somebody like you see in the movies? Get a cheap little webcam and you can all you want. I used to video chat weekly with my then-girlfriend while she was in Taiwan. You can now talk to somebody and see them, regardless of where they are. Powerful stuff.

17. Keep in touch with all of your friends, all the time

High school reunions are becoming obsolete with sites like Facebook. We all know what we are doing, all the time. That’s lame sometimes, but it comes in handy. For example, I have friends all over the country, and I can stay a part of their lives through my communications on Facebook. When done correctly, Facebook can enhance your personal relationships, and you can share joys, sorrows, and laughs with people every day.

18. A retro gaming system

Here’s where the fun starts! Do you miss the Super Nintendo? How about classic Nintendo? Sega Genesis? Hop over to your favorite search engine and type in “SNES emulators” to find a program that will play old Super Nintendo games. Download it, then search for “SNES roms” to find and download the games. Plug in a USB controller and you’ll feel like you’re 8 years old all over again!

19. Sports/News Central

Whether you do it in an RSS feed reader or you just visit a site like CNN or MSN, the headlines are always updating and keep you in the loop at all times. Hit up ESPN for live scores of all of your games. Then, cancel your newspaper subscription. I mean, like, NOW.

20. Your recipe database

When I cook, I just put the laptop on the kitchen counter. I don’t need a shelf of cookbooks (although I do still have a few). You can store recipes in Evernote or use a service like Supercook to manage your inventory of recipes. It makes your cooking life a lot easier, and you never have to remember which recipe book that breaded chicken recipe was in.

21. Track your workouts

DailyMile lets you map and save your runs. DailyBurn allows you the ability to track any type of workout, and even track your nutrition levels. You don’t need to keep a paper notebook or print out a spreadsheet. Type it in, submit it, and move on with your life. Slick, slick, slick.

22. Business-builder

Build a website, run a blog, connect on Facebook/Twitter, design brochures, write copy… the list goes on. Take notes during your meetings with clients. A laptop computer offers the flexibility to work anywhere you choose, provided your business can pay those bills. A laptop, in my opinion, is an absolutely essential tool for business-building today.

23. Create CDs and DVDs

I remember back in 2000 when I first learned how to burn a CD. It took forever. Now, I use CDBurnerXP, but you can use just about anything. Put those home movies on a DVD. Make that mix CD for your friend (or that girl you like). It only takes a couple of minutes, and you can do it right from your laptop.

24. Stream home media anywhere in the house

XBox Media Center, now on the original XBox, PCs, Macs, and Linux machines. All your movies and music on any TV in your house, from your computer.

25. Portable CD/DVD player

Again, another invention that I am shocked is still on shelves: the portable DVD player. Instead, play this stuff on your laptop when sitting on the plane or when you’re supposed to be paying attention in class. Chances are, your laptop can handle any kind of DVD, too.

26. Your to-do list

Google Tasks or Remember The Milk, or about a dozen others. Ditch the paper to-do list and type it up in your laptop. Want to keep it simpler? Open up a little Notepad document and bang out your list.

27. The answers to your minor medical questions

I’ve always been a big fan of WebMD, but there are other ways to get medical questions answered, too. This is not a substitute for a doctor’s visit, of course, but it can help you diagnose minor situations instead of paying that co-pay to be told those lumps on your throat are just leftover food scraps. [Note: this is not a good tip for hypochondriacs.]

28. Your shopping mall, all the time

Want to buy anything? Put your shoes down. Stay in your pajamas. Open up your laptop and get to Amazon. Search for whatever you want, and they’ll have it. Oh, and it’ll be cheaper, too.

Okay, so some of these are obvious, but it helps to have them here. Your laptop is a remarkably strong piece of technology. I would think twice before you ditch it to use some fancy-looking thing that only does two or three things on this list.

What do you use your laptop for?

Google Chrome is one of those programs that has been around for a while, but when you first tried it, you weren’t that crazy about it. It was somewhat buggy, it didn’t have any type of customization available, and you couldn’t block ads. As much as I wanted to make the switch (being the Google nutjob that I am), I couldn’t do it without a few features that just weren’t available:

1. I needed ads blocked. Period. Even most of them would be sufficient.

2. Add-ons. I want to be able to customize it.

3. A way to integrate my Google Bookmarks so that I can use them like regular bookmarks.

Then one day a couple months ago, I heard that extensions were finally hitting the mainstream. Google Chrome Extensions were a great idea, but you needed to download Chromium, which was the “guinea pig” version of Chrome (which means it doesn’t always work properly), and you had to do a lot of nerdy command-line work to get it up and running. It wasn’t pretty. Once one-click extension support came around, it was time to dive back in.

Now, a few months later, I couldn’t be happier.

Why Switch From Firefox?

Hey, Firefox is a great product. Go ahead and download it if you’d like. It’s stable and it’s popular. But Firefox is very prone to bloatedness. After a while, it takes forever to load Firefox. Chrome just pops right up. It just feels light. Check out the screencast I took below of a comparison between a Firefox start and a Chrome start and you will see what I mean. The little box that pops up in the middle is Launchy, which is my application launcher. In layman’s terms, the box pops up and I start typing the name of the program. When the box disappears, that means I hit “enter” and the application is starting. First I try opening Firefox, then Chrome. Check it out:

If you time it, Firefox takes a full 7 seconds to load up for use, and Chrome takes about 1/2 a second – that means Chrome, in this situation, is 14 times faster loading!

Interested yet? Here are my full reasons why you should give Chrome a chance:

1. Speed. See the above video.
2. Full script support without any extra extensions. One of the best plugins for Firefox is Greasemonkey, which allows you to install “scripts” that will modify a particular website for you. For example, I have a script installed that makes my Google Calendar go full-screen without any sidebars by hitting the “F12” button. But working through Greasemonkey is a little abstract for the average user. In Chrome, you can just go to a site like UserScripts.org, find one you like and click “Install”. Chrome does the rest – and if you like wasting time on Facebook with Mafia Wars and FarmVille, they have tons of scripts to make it a more awesome experience for you (if you’re into that sort of thing).
3. No restart necessary. Want to install an extension? Go for it. It’ll just show up. You don’t have to interrupt your entire browsing session to install one script or extension. They’ll just be there for you.
4. Speaking of no restarts, the whole application won’t crash on you. Say you are in Firefox and you have a problem with a website that causes your browser to close. That sucks. Now you have to restart and possibly “restore” your session. In Chrome, only that tab closes out on you. So if you have a bunch of open tabs, they don’t depend on each other – minimizing the interruption.
5. More screen real estate – look at sites, not toolbars. I had to install plugins and customize Firefox to get as much screen as possible for browsing. Chrome’s got it all set up already. In fact, it doesn’t have a bottom toolbar, giving you even more room for surfing.
6. Turn web pages into applications. Sometimes I just want to open up straight to Gmail. I browse to my Gmail, then click the little page icon in the upper-right corner and click “Create application shortcuts…”. I can put a shortcut on my desktop, in my Quick Launch, and/or in my Start Menu. It will go straight to that site in a full window, just like an application (i.e., no address bar, etc.). I have that set up with Hootsuite as well.

Okay, okay – enough gushing. Time to get into the nuts-and-bolts: how do you set this thing up? Remember – it needs to do all the stuff that my awesome Firefox setup could do.

After installing Chrome, you need to block some ads

This is easily the most complicated part of the process, but it’s not that hard, really. Without a true contender to the ad-blocking throne, the best way to do it, in my experience, has been through a program called Privoxy. There’s a 7-step process to it that is awesomely-simplified in this post by Lifehacker and Geekzone. Just follow it, step-by-step, and you’re done. Bada bing.

Throw on your bookmarklets

Remember from my Firefox setup, I make full use of bookmarklets – little bookmarks that can do some awesome things in your Bookmarks Toolbar. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to open up a Firefox window next to your Chrome window and literally drag your bookmarklets from Firefox and drop them into the Chrome toolbar. If you don’t have that, here are links to my bookmarklets and what they do. Instead of clicking on the link, just drag it up to your Bookmarks Toolbar:

• StumbleUpon Toolbar – All the fun of StumbleUpon with none of the bloated toolbar taking up space.
• GmailThis! – Like a page/article and want to quickly email it to your buddy? Click this icon and a new “Compose Email” window will pop up with the site title in the subject line and a link to the page in the body. Very handy!
• Subscribe in Google Reader – If I find a new blog, I can just click this button and it will automatically open up Google Reader and subscribe to it for me.
• The Hootlet – If you use Hootsuite to share stuff on Facebook and Twitter, clicking this will automatically open a new “hoot” with the title and shortened link to the site. GREAT for link sharing on Twitter!
• Lifehacker Random – The latest addition to my bookmarklets: Lifehacker just put out this button to go to any random article from their vast archives. What a great site.
• Readability – After setting this one up, you can just click it and it will clear your webpage of anything except the article text and pictures. Very useful with Evernote (I’ll be doing an article on that one soon).

Get some sweet extensions

Like Firefox plugins, these add-ons help you further customize your browsing experience. There are plenty out there, so feel free to browse around. Here are mine:

• GBX – Google Bookmarks For Chrome – This is a third-party extension that inserts my Google Bookmarks into the bookmarks toolbar to work like any bookmarks on a browser. Probably my favorite extension, just because I never think about it.
• Evernote Web Clipper – Like a page/article and want to save it for later? Just click this button and it will save it and set up a new note in your Evernote for you.
• Google Docs – One-click access to your most recent Google Docs, which is great if you just want to open up one quick document (or create a new one right away).

• Handy Google Shortcuts – If you like Google like I do, you use a lot of their products. This is a nice drop-down box of Google products (customizable, too) so that you can go straight to your Gmail, Reader, YouTube, or any of your favorite Google stuff.

Take it to the next level with scripts

No complicated Greasemonkey stuff. Just click “Install” on these bad boys:

• Facebook Fixer – There’s not enough room to fit all its features in here, which is why I wrote a full post on it a while back.
• Facebook Purity – Don’t care what quizzes people took? Annoyed by FarmVille announcements? God bless you. Hide them all with this script.
• Remove Facebook Ads – Privoxy doesn’t catch these. It does as promised.
• GooglePreview – Adds a little screenshot of each web site in the Google search results. Helps you figure out where you’re headed before you click on it.
• Google Images Enlarger – When doing an image search, this allows you to mouse-over the thumbnail and see a full-size picture without having to click through to the site. Very handy and a big time saver!

Your turn

Am I preaching to the choir? Do you already use Chrome? What are your favorite extensions/scripts? Why should we encourage more Chrome usage? If you’re a diehard Firefox user and you’re not convinced, tell us why. If you’re an Internet Explorer advocate, seek help immediately – we cannot help you here.

So Gmail is down again today for some of us. Let the onslaught of angry tweets begin:

Gmail contacts have been down for hours now… Why am I starting to feel like Google is slowly turning into Microsoft…

the deal with Gmail is: give up your life, gain awesome apps. this morning i’ve fulfilled my side… but now i wait

Thanks Gmail…. just another reason to have a Hotmail account!

Okay, so it’s easy to bag on Google for this and make you regret your decision to switch to Gmail in the first place. I mean, heck, what good is email if you can’t use it, right? Well, I don’t get too mad about it for a few reasons:

Reason #1: Nothing is 100% reliable. Nothing. Ever.

The “what if it goes down” attitude needs to be applied to just about every form of communication. Your cell phone can fall in the toilet. Your internet connection can go down. Mail sometimes gets lost. Your electricity can go out right in the middle of a Packer game (happened over the weekend – neighbors’ kid plowed a 4-wheeler into the electrical box and knocked out the power for the entire block). Your car can break down. The plane you’re in may need an emergency landing. The sun can be blocked by clouds all day, etc.

I could go on and on. The truth is, you always need a backup plan for everything in life. If you are running your life through Gmail (and you should!), you need to have a backup plan for when it goes down periodically. If you are putting all your eggs in the Gmail basket and not backing that up somewhere, you only have yourself to blame if your day goes off the tracks because of a little outage.

Reason #2: Outages are generally pretty short.

A few hours feels like decades in today’s “gotta-have-everything-NOW” world. But in the grand scheme, it’s not so bad. If your computer dies and you use Outlook for your email, it can be days before you get your email back up, and even then, you might not get your mail back, which leads me to…

Reason #3: I haven’t lost my mail or anything.

Even if Gmail goes down for a while, when it’s back up – you don’t notice much of a difference. Email that was sent to you in the meantime is still there. Email that you’ve kept is still there. If you’re storing all your email on your home computer, you run the risk of losing all of it when that computer goes down. Google keeps your mail backed up in several places that are in different locations. If something happens to one of your databases, they can just switch to one of the backups and you’re fine.

Reason #4: There are almost always different ways to get your Gmail during an outage.

If you open up a Web browser, type in “http://mail.google.com”, and you can’t access your mail, you’re not completely out of luck. While not always the case, many times there are several ways you can access your Gmail in the event of an outage and not ruin your entire day:

Your smartphone. Google Sync can push your email, contacts, and calendar to your phone, if you have the capabilities. My Windows Mobile phone can pull email from Google into its own email program. It may not always be the most convenient, but it’s something.

Microsoft Outlook. As much as I hate bloated, overpriced Microsoft products, Outlook is on a lot of computers. You can set up Outlook to grab your Gmail, and, like today’s outage, you won’t miss a beat.

Mozilla Thunderbird. I don’t have Outlook, and many of you don’t, either. Mozilla Thunderbird comes from the same company that makes Firefox, so  you know it’s good. It’s like a free version of Outlook. As you can expect, then, you can set it up to pull your Gmail, and it works the same way. It has an Account Wizard, so you just have to tell them you use Gmail, enter in your information, and it will automatically set it up for you.

Set up Gmail’s Offline Access feature. Lifehacker has a great article on setting this up, but it basically allows you to access your Gmail whether Gmail is up or not, and whether or not you have a working internet connection.

A little preparation goes a long way…

You know there’s going to be outages. Everything online has outages (Twitter, anyone? Facebook?). If you rely on this stuff, take a few steps to ensure that it won’t ruin your life. It’ll take five minutes. I understand that a company at Google’s level needs to be more reliable, but I’m not about ready to throw it under the bus yet. As long as I know there are ways to keep using it, I’ll keep using Gmail.

The internet is awesome. There’s no denying it. What was once a breeding ground for dorks everywhere has turned into a social gathering place for millions of people of all ages. What happened? What caused those changes? What made the internet so gosh-darn inviting for so many people? Let’s start at the top.

The Early Internet

The internet of the mid-‘90s was something else. Dominated by *shudder* America Online, the Web browser was the afterthought, because AOL wanted to be its own gathering place for people with common interests. If you wanted to hop on the internet, you likely went through AOL at the time (50 hours for FREE!). Here’s what you wound up getting:

I hope you like text!

Computers and servers weren’t as far along back then. We’re talking the days of processors in the MEGABYTES (and hey, if you don’t know what that means, just ignore it and move on to the next sentence. I’m trying to say “They were SLOW”). So as a result, once you got past the header of a web page, the rest was usually text. And I’m talking about all-the-same-font kinda text. Sure, they tried to mix it up with underlining some words or maybe making some words bold, but in the end, it was just flat-out boring. You were there to read, and pretty much nothing else. Graphic designers hadn’t started on the concept of “Web design” just yet.

Forums and chat rooms? We got ‘em!

If you wanted to interact with other people on the internet, you did it through forums and chat rooms.

Forums were, initially, the only thing on the internet. And they were called “bulletin boards”. You and other people that generally resembled the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons would go on there and wax intellectually about the latest episode of The X-Files or something. It was a place to share opinions with a bunch of people who won’t listen to you, not unlike many forums of today (I guess not everything’s changed).

Chat rooms were a whole ‘nother beast. They were real-time, and generally useless. You went into a chat room to really just insult each other and marvel at who you were talking with, or who they were pretending to be, anyway. You’d go into a chat room, type “hi everyone a/s/l”, and then get bombarded with people saying stuff like “hi there! 19/f/Honolulu”. Riveting. Regardless of the fact that the person was probably 29/m/Detroit, there was zero point in any conversation in chat rooms. You didn’t go there to communicate with people you knew. You were there to, again, talk about the latest episode of The X-Files, or watch people lob insults at other people.

Really… really crappy web pages in general.

When I was 12 years old, I thought it would be awesome to have a web page. With sites like GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod offering free web pages, I thought it would be the coolest thing ever. So I put together a web page about pro wrestling (I was cool), with some of the pre-loaded backgrounds and stuff from GeoCities, and I had myself a web page! I cannot stress to you enough how useless this web page was and what little value it had to other people. I was 12. I had nothing to talk about.

And I wasn’t alone. That was the bulk of the internet at the time – a bunch of kids who knew nothing about stuff like “graphic design”, “HTML”, or “being interesting”.

The Turning Point

Thankfully for all of us, the internet changed for the better. But it wasn’t immediate:

Napster pulls music sharing out of IRC

The first CD I ever burned was through my oldest brother’s computer in late 1999, using music I found through his IRC client. Internet Relay Chat was the first way to get music, and it was the most tedious, mind-numbing process around. You went in to a music-sharing community, had to request a song, and wait for somebody to respond by sending you the file. It was clunky, slow, and generally awful. But I was able to put together a CD of my own mix. It was a huge moment!

Once Napster hit the scene in 1999, all bets were off. Napster was, at that time, easy to use and a lot quicker. You were still waiting 20 minutes to an hour per song, but the interface was something you could conceivably understand. You now had a logical reason to own a computer hooked up to the internet.

“I’m on the phone with you AND I’m on the internet! How cool is this?!?”

Ah, dial-up internet. When you wanted to hop online, you first had to sit through this (click "play" and then shudder a little). The biggest problem with sitting around on the internet? You were tying up the phone line! Unless you were rich and had a second phone line, you were paying per minute on dial-up, and you couldn’t make calls in the meantime.

Broadband changed all of that. First, it set up an entirely separate connection for your computer’s modem. Instead of paying per minute, you had a continuous connection to the internet at a flat rate. Then, it was about 87 billion times faster (approximately). Now you could sit on the phone with somebody and talk about the web page you’re looking at! Wicked!

Today: So much awesomeness for so many people.

The stage was set: file sharing, legal or not, was on the rise. Computers were getting faster. You had a continuous connection to the internet. It was time for things to boom. And boom it did. Here are the things that make the internet of today the most awesome thing since… um, the last awesome thing that happened:

Search engines help you find stuff quicker than anything else ever created.

It started with Yahoo!, and then Google perfected it. Heck, even Bing has it down pretty good. As more and more people were connecting to the internet, more information was being shared. For you to find that information, you need a search engine. While Google has become the Kleenex of search engines (how many people ask for a “tissue”, anyway?), several companies out there all make it dead simple to find whatever you need, and especially stuff you don’t need. Whenever somebody is looking for an answer to something, what do you tell them to do? “Google it.”

For example, I dropped my cell phone in the toilet yesterday. No, I wasn’t texting while doing my business. It literally flew out of my shorts pocket and square into the toilet – nothing but net. In the old days, I would worry that my phone was ruined forever, and that I needed to shell out another $200 to get another phone (phone insurance? peh.). But I hopped on Google and typed in “cell phone in toilet”, and got about 5-6 different strategies for drying out your phone, along with endless testimonials from people saying their phone works as good as new.

[Side note: if you ever drop your phone in the toilet, pull it out immediately, take out the battery, clean the thing, then throw it in the oven at 150 degrees for an hour or so. Dries the sucker right up and you’re back in business.]

Online shopping means freaking cheap prices.

So many people resisted it for so long out of fear for their credit card numbers, but as secure transactions rose, internet shopping became hotter. Amazon is the de facto place to get just about anything. Struggling to find whole, fresh rabbits for dinner at the supermarket? Amazon’s got it. Thinking about getting a little romantic on your next camping trip? Get your tips from this great book! She won’t get intimate because your back hair is thicker than Sasquatch fur? Amazon to the rescue! 

On top of all that great stuff, sites like eBay and Craigslist make it easy for you to get top-dollar for that antique peach de-fuzzer that you’ve had in your family for generations. Instead of trying to unload it at a garage sale, you can snap a picture of it, put it on eBay, and get $475.24 for it. On the flip side, your search for antique peach de-fuzzers is over. [Note: here's what a search for "peach de-fuzzer" turns up.]

BitTorrent: Making Napster Look Like Tape-Recording-Off-The-Radio Since 2001

Peer-to-peer file sharing has certainly evolved since the days of Napster. Your Limewire, your Ares, your BearShare, KaZaa, and WinMX are almost all but dead at this point. BitTorrent allows you to not just download from the person who posted the file, but from everybody else who’s downloading it or has downloaded it before. You know what that means? That means the latest album to hit the shelves can be downloaded inside of a minute. The latest episode of The Office (premiering tonight!) can be on your computer within 20 minutes of it hitting the Web, and under 2-3 minutes the next morning.

This is not a discussion of the legalities of BitTorrent use. The point is, downloading from the Web has completely turned the corner and become near-instant. Add to that the legal methods like iTunes or my Zune Pass subscription (so awesome and so few people use it!), and music is everywhere these days.

Streaming stuff lets you watch “FAIL” videos without clogging up your computer, and makes cable TV obsolete

We all know parents and grandparents who have no idea what they’re doing on the computer. You wonder why their computer is so slow, then you find a “Downloads” folder with over 350GB of videos that somebody emailed them ranging from a guy setting himself on fire while wearing a banana suit to that stupid dancing baby from Ally McBeal. You know why? Because in the old days, when you wanted to watch a video from the internet or listen to an audio clip, you had to download it. The first video I ever saw that was from the internet was the music video for “Buddy Holly” by Weezer.

Once YouTube rolled in, streaming video became easier than ever. In fact, you can even embed the stuff right into web pages, so now you can watch all those great videos I just mentioned quickly, without having to put anything on your hard drive. Observe:

[Warning: before you hit “play”, the first video is the banana one, then there are like, ten other examples, many of which are riddled with profanity, a naked butt, and hundreds of idiots whose parents were too busy to teach them not to do stupid stuff like this.]

And for cable TV becoming obsolete, I submit the following examples: Hulu, network television websites, and Surf The Channel. I rest my case.

Wikipedia answers your endless questions about Small Wonder

I discovered Wikipedia as a giant time-suck a couple years ago, and I love it. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is generated and monitored (for the most part) by its users. While it can be edited to reflect false information, it does cite most of its sources and also allows you to check out random information about little-known stuff. Wikipedia is one of the most influential sites when discussing the power of collaborative thinking. It also is really useful when you didn’t read the novel you were supposed to write a paper on for your class on 19th-century British Literature.

And if you are wondering about the reference to Small Wonder in the heading there, click here to check out Wikipedia’s entry on this ‘80s television series featuring a little robot girl.

WordPress and RSS syndication make everybody an author, for better or for worse

Obviously The Practical Nerd would be an example of “for better”, but WordPress made it insanely easy for anybody to start a real web site, and customize it in a way that people would actually want to look at it and read it. There are literally millions of blogs on the internet right now, and many – not all, but many – of them offer some interesting and useful advice. In the old days, you had to go get a book based on newspaper book reviews for this stuff. Now, you can just Google it and find a blog that caters to your interests. Done and done.

In addition, the development of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds offer a method of subscribing to a web site’s content without having to check in on it every day or every couple of hours. It saves many people time and energy.

Mozilla Firefox lets you control how you want your browser to look and act

Remember Netscape Navigator? Ugh. Ugly, slow, and clunky. Internet Explorer? A little better, but slow and behind the times. Enter Mozilla Firefox. Firefox lets you add plug-ins and install different “skins” for your Web browser. There are an infinite number of ways you can alter Firefox and make it work the way you want it to. As I previously wrote, plug-ins and add-ons make Firefox the best browser around, in my opinion. They let you create the experience you want for your internet surfing (do people still “surf” the internet, anyway?).

Social media breaks the mold of how to share your life with your friends and family

When I took my last trip to Taiwan, I took about 300 pictures over the course of two weeks. In the old days, if I had done that, I would have to get home, develop all that film, and then get together with everyone I wanted to show the pictures to. Instead, in a hotel room in Los Angeles on the way home, I plugged my camera into my laptop, uploaded all of the pictures to Facebook, added captions, and sent everybody an email with a link to the album. People saw my pictures before I even got home.

Facebook and MySpace let you keep in endless touch with your friends. Flickr and Google Picasa allow you the opportunity to bring pictures to anyone you want. YouTube makes showing people that video of your kid doped up on laughing gas a cinch. Twitter lets you do any of those things to anyone who’s on Twitter, as easy as possible. All these things are now going real-time, too. Scheduling with your family or friends can be easily done with a shared Google Calendar, and you can get reminders of anything sent to you via text or email from Google Calendar or Remember The Milk, or just about anything that helps you organize and schedule your life.

Knowledge that you want to share with others is easier, too. There are bookmarklets and plug-ins that make sharing as easy as clicking a button. If I find an interesting political article that I want my friends to see, I can click a button that says “Share on Facebook” that will do just that. If I see a cool game or blog post about personal finance that I think is useful for the general public, I can click “Tweet This” and it will go to all my Twitter followers. Knowledge and information is being spread quicker than it ever has in the history of the world. Word-of-mouth can go across states, countries, and the entire globe in seconds, instead of years.

“Dude, I just met Hugh Jackman!” “No way, I don’t believe you.” “Okay, well check out the picture I just sent you!”

Mobile computing is taking instant communication to unheard-of levels. And if that Bill Curtis guy from those “get the internet anywhere” commercials are any indication, you can send and receive anything at anytime, anywhere. You can snap a picture on your phone and send it to your Facebook account, or email it to your buddy, or send it directly to someone via MMS. Everybody is with everybody, all the time.

Mobile computing also has lots of business implications as well. Entrepreneurship continues to rise as people can take their laptops anywhere and log onto their Google Apps to write up a document or edit a spreadsheet. The big, envious symbol of a successful blogger is somebody with a laptop on the beach, sipping a drink with an umbrella in it. While that’s not every blogger (and certainly not me!), it can be done. Computers have gone from the size of warehouses to the something that fits in your pocket. All the coolest things you can do on the internet can be done on your phone.

The internet isn’t just a meeting place anymore. It’s a method of delivering an endless stream of content, knowledge, and anecdotes of your life to the people you care about. It’s no longer necessary to get emails with “Fwd: fwd: fwd: FWD: Fwd:” at the beginning of them. It’s no longer necessary to sit and wait for downloads. The internet has made computing easy and fun for anyone. It has a purpose now. That’s why it’s so awesome.

What makes the internet awesome for you? Share with us in the comments!

Good grief, how did I miss this one?

As I began to build my business over a year and a half ago, I determined that, by working from home, I needed a strong cell phone to take with me when I needed to hit the road. For example, if I’m stuck getting my oil changed in the middle of the day, I would like access to my email and so forth so that I can keep working. I purchased a lovely green Moto Q with the accompanying data plan. At the time, I was using Vista with Microsoft Outlook (I never said I was a smart one), and the Windows Mobile-enabled phone allowed me to sync up with my contacts, send and receive emails, and manage my calendar.

It was a mess.

Everything on the phone felt bulky, and I had to clear the email out every day, because every time somebody sent me an email, a copy was downloaded to my computer and another copy was downloaded to my phone. I got notifications on both machines, and I hated it. When I made the switch to Gmail for my email management needs (the standard-bearer for email these days) and got rid of Outlook and Vista altogether, I used my web browser on the phone to access email, calendar items, etc. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was lightweight and it got the job done.

Flash forward to last week: my buddy gets a brand-new cell phone and is going crazy loading it up with all sorts of new doodads and what-nots. Then he asks me if I’ve ever heard of Google Sync, because he just set up a Gmail address. I didn’t at first, but upon further research, I found the website for Google Sync. Google Sync links your phone to your Google account – you can manage your calendar and your contacts database on either your computer or your phone, and Google will sync the two machines together automatically, without hooking your phone up to your computer. This is cloud computing as its finest.

I strongly recommend you set up Google Sync on your phone, and here’s why:

It’s insanely easy to set up.

Easy is what Google does. When you click the link to go to the Google Sync website, it gives you a step-by-step guide to setting it up on your phone. No muss, no fuss. Set it once, and reap the benefits forever.

You don’t have to install anything.

Google Sync uses Microsoft Exchange technology. In other words, you already have all the necessary software to use it. Google’s instructions walked me through just a couple of steps and then it synced it all together for me immediately. No bulk.

You can easily manage everything on-the-go.

In the last few months, I’ve had to set up various meetings while away from my computer. So when somebody asked me if I was free a certain day, or wanted to set up a meeting at some point, I had to pull out my phone, open Internet Explorer, let it load, go to Google Calendar, then browse to the date that we were discussing – and Google Calendar’s mobile site isn’t the greatest. Now, because it automatically syncs up with my phone’s built-in calendar, managing my appointments is near-instant. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Keep your contacts all in one neat, tidy place.

As I was growing up, my mother kept an address book. When we needed to look up somebody’s address, we went into the closet and hunted for the address in this book. When somebody’s address changed, my mom had to cross it out in the book and write it somewhere else. With Google Contacts, you can fill in as many different fields as you want – phone numbers, addresses, birthdays, etc. – and have it clean, easy, and searchable. Changing information is a snap, and you obviously don’t have to deal with pages and pages of crossed-out names.

Additionally, now you carry your entire address book in your pocket at all times. Pretty handy!

Can you say “backup”?

I’ve touted the praises of online backup solutions and why you need them once before, and this falls right in there. How many times have you seen a new Facebook group along the lines of “Steve Idiotface lost his phone – I need your numbers again!” No more. When you get a new phone, just re-set up Google Sync on it, and your contacts will be restored, along with all your appointments and dates to remember.

I’m in love with Google Sync, and I’m pretty disappointed in myself. I’m a Google nut, and you’d think I would have had that one figured out already. Check out Google Sync right now, or if you are using it already, share your thoughts in the comments!

As an avid Google maniac, I love Google Calendar. In fact, of all the things that Google does, I think Calendar is probably the single best application it came up with. With Google Calendar, you can set up multiple sub-calendars (mine: personal stuff, work appointments, blog topics, bills, Brewers schedule) and choose if you want to view them all at once on one calendar, or click around to just see the ones you are looking for. You can set up both email reminders or text message reminders, and you can share calendars (my girlfriend and I share our personal calendars with each other, so we know how to make plans). Best of all: it's free.

So I was incredibly pleased to see the above blog post in my RSS subscriber this morning from The Simple Dollar. My favorite tip is one I already use:

1. Keep track of bill due dates
This is perhaps the most obvious use of using a calendar for personal finance. When you know a bill’s due date, add it to your calendar, then pay the bill when you see it’s coming close to its due date. So, for example, our mortgage payment is due on the 28th of each month, so on my calendar, on the 28th of each month, there’s a note that our mortgage payment is due. It helps me keep track of our payments.

How can I do this? It’s simple. Log onto Google Calendar. First, I recommend creating a new calendar specifically for bill due dates if you haven’t already – this makes it easy to highlight them. Then, click on the day the bill is due, create a new event, and add the appropriate information – the amount and the type of bill, at the very least. If this bill recurs on a regular basis, make the bill a repeating event. You might also want to add an event reminder so you’re emailed a few days in advance of the bill due date.

Free from Broke offers a nice visual guide to adding a bill due date to your calendar.

Some tips can be used with any calendar application (or even a paper calendar *gasp*!), but they work incredibly well with Google Calendar. Check it out!

Posted via email from tommeitner’s posterous

If you make a habit of touring various productivity blogs on our fair Internet, you know who David Allen is. Allen wrote Getting Things Done, a guide to increasing your productivity and organizing your life. While I prefer to adapt principles from various productivity systems and integrate it all into something personally for me, I am a firm believer in Allen’s main principle behind GTD: empty your head.

Do you ever find yourself laying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering when you were going to fall asleep? Are you thinking to yourself, I was just exhausted half an hour ago – why am I wide awake now? Most people will tell you to get up and watch television or read a book until you are tired again. They’re right, but why not prevent the situation from happening altogether? I used to habitually lay in the dark at night while my mind raced. Fortunately, I’ve been able to put together a “system” of my own for emptying my head throughout the day and allowing me to kick back and relax when I need it most.

The main benefit to all of this is that you stop pressuring your brain. We’re all imperfect, and we all forget stuff. That’s why you might be sitting up at night thinking about something important. Your brain is afraid that you will forget it. By getting these things out of your head, you give your brain a break (regardless of how big of a jerk it can be to you). So, here are a few ways you can help yourself relax:

Keep a calendar.

Yeah, yeah. This is not a revolutionary concept. But there is a catch: put the most mundane things on it. If there is something in your life with a date attached, put it on your calendar. And better yet, use Google Calendar. Using Google Calendar allows you to set up multiple calendars and the service can send you emails or even text messages to remind you of upcoming events, if you wish. My Google calendar contains the following (all separate calendars):

• My personal schedule
• My work projects
• My blog post schedule
• My girlfriend’s schedule
• Holidays
• The Milwaukee Brewers schedule
• Bills due

That’s a lot, but they all overlay into one neat and tidy calendar that I can glance at to see all the upcoming events and information that I need. If you want to use a desktop calendar, go for it. Love your Microsoft Outlook? I don’t quite understand you, but knock yourself out! The point is: having things written out somewhere will relieve your brain of trying to remember what’s happening next.

Make a “To-Do List” every evening before you go to bed.

To the right, you will see my current to-do list, courtesy of Gmail Tasks. It’s nothing fancy – it’s a list of things that need to be done, with a checkbox to mark them off as I complete them. Easy as pie.

Every night, think about the next day’s events. As you think of them, create a new item in your to-do list. It automatically makes your day more organized. You can also arrange them in order of execution – which I do – and it makes your day that much more reasonable. A to-do list allows you to focus on doing one thing at a time, and doing it well. This removes the stress of How am I going to get this done?!? from your life.

There are a variety of different ways you can keep to-do lists. If you are already a Gmail user, just go to “Settings” and the “Labs” tab. Enable Tasks in Gmail, and you’re all set. You can manage your tasks on the road, too, if you have an internet-enabled smartphone. Even if you don’t, you can use a service like Txtful, where you can send your tasks to Gmail through text messages. Many GTD fanatics swear by Remember The Milk, which is another task list creator (also available via Txtful). A good whiteboard is an easy way to do this. Or you can go all old-school on us with a notepad and pen. Whatever way works for you!

Have a notepad or two on hand, especially next to your bed!

I keep two notepads: one next to my desk, and one on my nightstand. For the one next to my desk, I use it whenever I need to quickly jot down something (a phone number or a quick note), or even to brainstorm something quickly. While I love Evernote for my note-taking, I use a notepad for quick, disposable notes. The one next to my bed is for the occasional night when I still am not sleeping well. In fact, I get many blog post ideas laying in bed at night. If that happens, I flip on my bedlight, grab the notepad, and take a few notes. That way, my brain doesn’t try to keep writing it while I’m trying to fall asleep.

That’s how the idea for this post came about, actually.

Make some time for journal writing.

“Aren’t journals and diaries for teenage girls?”

Sure, but they can be incredibly useful for adults. Our stresses don’t just come from practical problems – we have our emotional needs too! And bottling up our feelings only puts more on our shoulders. Commit some time every day to write a few feelings down. Your notes can be as long and intense as you want. Put down a few lines if you want, or cover eight pages. Just get something down. It’s incredibly therapeutic, and it’s great for your emotional health.

Do it with a nice little journal, or use any of the five best journaling tools as determined by Lifehacker readers.

As you can tell here, the point is to set yourself up with a system that YOU are comfortable with. You want it to be a pleasant experience, and a system that you are going to actually use. Doubt me? Give it a try for a week – you might be surprised at how much better you can handle your stresses.

Do you have your own secret tips or tricks for keeping your brain stress-free? Share them in the comments!

One of the hallmarks of being a Practical Nerd is the ability to legally get the most functionality out of your computer without having to pay an arm and a leg. But there are so many people I talk to out there that have no clue about most of these options. Therefore, I am begging you to share this article with everyone you know! It needs to be spread around. There are a few great benefits that come with using these Practical Nerd Alternatives:

• You will literally save hundreds of dollars in most cases.
• About 98% of the general public will still retain all the functionality that they need, if not more.
• You will, in most cases, be able to jump right into the program and know how to use it easily.
• All of these options are perfectly fine to use, even if you are sharing files with someone who is using a more bloated program.
• When these programs get updated with new features – you get them, without having to buy a whole new piece of software!

1. Your office program (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.).

Cooler People: Microsoft Office.

Practical Nerds: Open Office, or Google Documents.

Why?: Microsoft Office is the standard-bearer in office products. Everybody has them, and they do fine work. But in 2007, Microsoft Office started messing around with what worked – they added a “ribbon” interface at the top, which looked really cool. The problem is, people who start using it have NO idea how to find anything! In addition, we all know Microsoft Office is freaking expensive. According to Microsoft’s web site, the retail price for Microsoft Office Standard is $399.95! Yup, and this is a suite of programs that does NOT come with Windows.

Open Office replaces your Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint, while also having a handful of programs of their own. Functionality is simple, but loaded with plenty of features. You can use it to open Office documents – even those created in Office 2007, which Office 2003 can NOT do – and save in those same formats. So, if you need to swap files back and forth with someone using Office, there’s no problem!

Google Documents is a suite of office products online – you do all your work in a web browser. Google Docs is much simpler than Open Office, but still has a host of features that make it comparable for most word processing and spreadsheet needs. It also has the ability to create forms that will then supply data for a spreadsheet automatically, and it has Presentation, which replaces your PowerPoint. All files are hosted online, so it is an automatic backup solution as well. Like Open Office, Google Docs also handles all Office files as well.

2. Your web browser.

Cooler People: Internet Explorer.

Practical Nerds: Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.

Why?: Internet Explorer is junk. It takes up way too much resources and slows your computer down. Most of IE’s features over the last few years have been in response to other web browsers’ features that have proven to be very popular.

I’m a Firefox man, and I’m proud of it. You can customize Firefox to handle all of your web browsing needs and then some. It is a powerhouse, and it has a wizard on its official website to walk you through customizing it to your liking.

Google Chrome is a new kid here on the market, and I know plenty of people who really enjoy it. If a web site causes Chrome to crash, it only crashes the open tab, not the entire browser. It is also simple and clean, allowing you to fill the page with websites rather than toolbars.

3. Your antivirus protection.

Cooler People: Symantec, Norton.

Practical Nerds: AVG, Avira Antivirus, Avast!, Panda Cloud Antivirus

Why?: Because antivirus protection should be free. If you are paying for antivirus protection, it is an absolute waste of your money. Use any of the free solutions above and you will be more than protected. Plus, check out The Practical Nerd’s hands-on review of Panda Cloud Antivirus.

4. In-depth photo editing.

Cooler People: Adobe Photoshop.

Practical Nerds: GIMP.

Why?: Photoshop has become the Kleenex of photo manipulation. If somebody has edited a photo, we say they “Photoshopped” it. It is the biggest thing going – and it costs $699. GIMP is free, and it is powerful. It does just about anything the average person would need. If you are used to Photoshop, try GIMPshop, which is a version of GIMP designed to function very similarly to Photoshop for an easy transition.

5. Your note-taking.

Cooler People: Microsoft OneNote.

Practical Nerds: Evernote.

Why?: OneNote is a powerful program and is a great way to hold all your notes – but it costs $99.95. In my experience with OneNote, backing up your notebooks is a big hassle: when I did, in fact, backup my system before I reinstalled Windows, I could not restore my OneNote backup for anything, and there is very little information online to help out with that. So I lost my notes anyway.

Evernote has both a desktop client and an online note-taking platform for you. They sync automatically, so your notes are always backed up and accessible anywhere. Evernote has plenty of great features, and yes, it is free.

6. Burning CDs and DVDs.

Cooler People: Nero or Roxio.

Practical Nerds: DVDStyler and CDBurnerXP.

Why?: How lame is it that you have to spend a couple hundred bucks on software to use something that came with your computer? Why is this not integrated with any software that comes with your computer? CDBurnerXP handles any CD or DVD burning that you want to throw at it. Want cool menus on your DVD? Use DVDStyler. They are both dead-simple to use and make burning any discs a snap.

7. Playing back music and movies.

Cooler People: Windows Media Player.

Practical Nerds: KMPlayer.

Why?: KMPlayer is my newest discovery, and it might be my favorite. Windows Media Player, while free, is fairly confusing to the average user. If you don’t have the right codecs or something is goofy, it won’t play your video. KMPlayer comes with every codec under the sun, and it plays music, movie files, DVDs, VCDs, you name it – “out of the box”, meaning it just works. Install it and then just use it. It’s slick-looking, and it can handle whatever you want to throw at it. Many people online will tell you to use VLC Player for this, but I find VLC to be just a bit confusing for the average user, and it did not always work properly on my XP machine. KMPlayer does, every time.

8. Handling all of your emails and scheduling.

Cooler People: Microsoft Outlook.

Practical Nerds: Gmail and Google Calendar.

Why?: Outlook is also in the Microsoft Office suite, meaning we’re already talking about paying hundreds of dollars just to use it. Gmail allows you to organize all of your email accounts in one place, enables you to search deeply through all of your emails, and you can download a notifier to sit in your system tray to let you know when you have new mail, just like Outlook. Plus, Gmail stores everything online, so you free up a LARGE amount of space on your computer! Gmail also has a new feature called Gmail Offline, which allows you to work on your email offline and sync it up with your Gmail account when you restore internet access. It’s all free, and there are more features than I can even talk about here – I plan to put together a user’s guide to Gmail in the near future.

Google Calendar allows any type of color-coding, will automatically email or text you reminders of events (if you want it to), imports any number of calendars, and you can even share calendars with other people (handy for families that need to work off of one calendar). And like Gmail, Google Calendar stores everything online, which means it is accessible anywhere.

9. Handling your finances.

Cooler People: Microsoft Money, or Quicken.

Practical Nerds: Spreadsheets (both Open Office and Google Docs have checkbook templates online), Mint, Thrive, ClearCheckbook, many others.

Why?: Is it ironic that money management programs cost so much? Microsoft Money costs $59.99, and it has a ridiculous number of features that nobody is ever going to use. Quicken is $39.99 and is pretty much the same. Also, a new version comes out for both and you are stuck with outdated software.

One of my more anticipated posts in the next week or so will be how to manage your money for free and get all the functionality you would use out of Money or Quicken. By combining a spreadsheet with an online account aggregator like Mint or Thrive, you get all the reports you need, plus extra (and useful!) features that only online offerings present. But in brief, spreadsheets allow a neat, safe way to track your expenses while the program does the math for you. Plus, it saves paper, if you are into that sort of thing.

Whew! That’s a lot of different options! But as you can see, mainstream, well-known programs are not always the best options for you. You’ve just been using them because everyone else has. Now you can drop those bulky programs and still do everything you are used to doing! Do you disagree with any of these choices? Do you use a different option not listed here? Sound off in the comments! Let’s hear it!

I know, I know. Firefox isn’t the only web browser around. Many of you Cooler People are enjoying the simplicity of Google Chrome or the “can’t-uninstall-it-so-might-as-well-use-it” goodness of Internet Explorer. But Firefox is the browser with the most useful and practical plug-ins on the scene right now. How do you get them? All you need to do is go to their installation pages (linked here for your convenience), click “Add to Firefox”, and let it do the rest. Then you will be prompted to restart Firefox to complete the installation. They are easy to install, and easy to use. Here are 5 of them that are worth consideration:

Google Image Relinker with Mouseover & Greasemonkey: Google Image Search is fun and useful, but boy, does it need an overhaul! How frustrating is it to go through the process? First you have to enter the search term, then click on a tiny picture that you can barely see, then you have to go through the site it’s from, or click again on the image at the top, only to find out that it’s still too tiny, or not what you were looking for at all!

This add-on changes all of that! With Google Image Relinker with Mouseover, you can just wave your pointer over the tiny image and get a large, immediate pop-up of the picture for viewing. Even better than that, clicking on the image takes you straight to the image itself, for you to do what you wish with it. This thing saves you a billion years of your life searching for just the right image, and makes those lazy-day, time-killing Google Image Searches much more enjoyable.

How to get it: This one is a special situation, in that you need Greasemonkey to pull it off. Click on the link above and follow the instructions to install Greasemonkey. Then go to the link for the Image Relinker and install it. Then do your own search for “monkeys”.

GCal Popup: If you are an avid Google fan like me, you enjoy the practical capabilities of Google Calendar. But for quick access, this add-on can’t be beat. GCal Popup places a small calendar icon in your status bar at the bottom of Firefox. Click on the tiny calendar, and your Google Calendar opens up right inside your current tab. It has full functionality, so if you need to add/delete/edit an event on your calendar quickly and easily, GCal Popup is the way to go.

Adblock Plus: Take a poll of any internet user about what they hate, and chances are intruding advertisements are the main problem. Google AdSense has made it easy enough for anyone to simply throw a couple ads up on a site and make a few pennies. But man, are they annoying! With this add-on, you can kiss all those ads goodbye. Just by installing it, it removes all the advertisements from a web page – leaving you with a much more pleasant (and faster loading!) web site.

Download Statusbar: You want to download the latest Eminem video (hey, we’re not here to judge), and you click the “download” button. Now you get a pop-up window with your download status and time remaining. If you want to check back on it, you have to click on that window. No more! The Download Statusbar inserts that information on the bottom of your Firefox window. Now you can monitor the progress of your download without having to leave the page you’re on. Just hover your mouse pointer over the download to get additional information. Slick and simple.

StumbleUpon: OK, this one is more for entertainment than anything else. One of the first add-ons I ever tried on Firefox, StumbleUpon allows you to truly surf around on the internet based on your interests. Visit random pages and judge their content, and you will get focused suggestions for stuff you might enjoy. While a productivity killer if anything, StumbleUpon is a great way to mindlessly relax and enjoy interesting content from all over the web.

Those are some that I really enjoy – but what about you? Share your favorite Firefox extensions in the comments!