Archive for May, 2009
How to buy online with confidence
E-retailing has comprehensively changed the landscape for the consumer. Shipping time and costs can still be disadvantages, but if you’re a price conscious consumer, online deals can be extraordinarily good–especially when you’re not under time pressure.
Some of you have probably had bad experiences buying online from disreputable companies. Others of you might be wary going for that “great deal” unless you’ve bought from the seller before. As the internet develops, more resources are being built to equip the consumer with accurate information so that they can buy with confidence. I’ve found the website, Reseller Ratings, to be incredibly helpful for scoping out E-retailers.
Once I know what I’m wanting to buy, I check Price Grabber, Froogle, and Google to find deals. If I find a low price from a website I’ve never heard of before, that’s where Reseller Ratings comes in. On the Reseller Ratings website, I can enter the store’s website address, and it returns helpful info about the company. The store is given a rating on a scale of 1 to 10, and usually there are also reviews from previous customers.
Another option for “hard to find” items is Ebay. However, I usually try to stick with Power Sellers, unless I’m willing to take some additional risk.
What’s the scoop on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari?
The internet has grown dramatically in the last ten years. More likely than not, you weren’t even online in 1999, in the days of Netscape Navigator 4, and Internet Exploder Explorer 5.
As the Internet has grown in significance to our daily lives, the battle for the dominant browser has intensified greatly, and rightly so.
The three most notable browsers that I believe will continue to be on the front lines are: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple’s Safari.
Firefox provides the most add-on functionality at the expense of being slightly slower. The benefit of the add-ons makes this my browser choice for my desktop. Some of my favorite add-ons for Firefox include: Adblock Plus, IE Tab, TwitterFox, WOT (Web Of Trust), and NoScript.
Chrome 2 was just released yesterday, increasing the speed and stability of an already lightweight and fast browser. I use Chrome on my Netbook because of it’s performance, and its minimalistic approach to layout allows me to see more web content on my small 10″ screen.
Safari is extremely fast, has superior out-of-the-box functionality, follows web standards well, and is arguably the best looking, especially if you ask an Apple fan. =D
Having a good browser and knowing how to use it increases your security and efficiency online, and is becoming an increasingly important skill set for everyone.
What’s Twitter, and why should I be using it?
Many of you have probably heard of RSS, a technology that helps people keep up with new blog entries and news articles. RSS works by updating a feed when new content is published. It’s a lot easier to keep up with a single feed than constantly browsing all of your favorites sites to see what’s new.
Even more groundbreaking than RSS, in my opinion, is a rapidly growing service called Twitter. There’s a lot more to Twitter than first meets the eye. Meaningful updates from friends and family are nice, but its ability to quickly feel the pulse of the internet is incredible.
Today when Google went down, I logged into Twitter and noticed by looking at the right sidebar that #googlefail was the most active topic this morning. When I clicked on #googlefail, I was able to see other Twitter users’ updates talking about the failure– updates that were only a few seconds old. Amazing!
So, go ahead and sign up, and when you do, be sure to follow KentComputers!
Two quick tips for protecting your critical data
Benjamin Franklin once said that “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” In a world where hard drives crash, files corrupt, and viruses wreck havoc, we need safeguards for protecting critical data. Here are two quick and easy tips.
1) Work on the web as much as you can so that backups are handled without even needing to think about it. An example would be using webmail, such as GMail, so that your emails are stored somewhere other than just your local hard drive. Using the web has the additional benefit of being able to access your data wherever you are, and on whatever computer happens to be convenient.
2) If you have a lot of documents, pictures, and music, you’re probably going to need to come up with a backup plan for those things. You’ll need a second hard drive where you’ll be copying your data. FBackup is a free application for handling backups and is easy to use. Once you set up a schedule for it, it’ll run your backups in the background automatically.