February 2002

Know a geek? Need to send him (or her) a card? Send a Geek e-Card! Cards for any geek occasion are here: sympathy for a dead PC, congratulations on a new computer, or just Keep On Geekin'.

Useful Bookmarks is just what it says: a compact but potent collection of links to useful sites, spanning everything from cooking to spirituality to web development. Think of it as a condensed Yahoo.

Denial… Anger… Bargaining… Depression… Acceptance. Those are the five stages of grief, and they apply as much to losing your precious data as they do to anything else. But you can stave off that grief – just visit Dataloss.org and find out how to back up your data against the inevitable.

The Belarc Advisor tells you what hardware and software is installed in your Windows PC. Crucial Technologies is offering a free copy of the Advisor to help you understand what memory upgrades you can purchase from them.

Worried about using your credit card number online? Check out the recent PCWorld article entitled Wily Tricks to Thwart E-Thieves. Steve Bass discusses single-use credit card numbers and points you toward resources to protect your credit record and your Social Security number.

Web sites often provide interactivity to their users by means of online forms. If your web programming skills aren't quite up to creating the programs to process form data, let Response-O-Matic do the dirty work for you. Create your form and have Response-O-Matic parse the data and return it to you in an email, while displaying a "Thank You" to your user. This free service is advertiser-supported, or you can opt for an ad-free paid service.

The Macintosh operating system sports a feature that Windows has never duplicated: an integrated, fully functional scripting language. AppleScript allows the savvy Mac user to automate almost any kind of task, from cleaning up wayward files to managing a website. MacScripter carries news, discussion, and contributed scripts for the AppleScript maven.

Get Wizmo, the Windows Gizmo, and you'll have a handy little Swiss Army tool for your Windows PC. It handles shutdown chores, controls audio volume, and provides a simple but highly configurable screen saver. The best part, of course, is that it is entirely free.

Remember flipbooks? They live on the web now, at Post-It Theater. Mark Sinclair draws each brief animation on Post-It Notes by hand, then scans them into his computer and adds it to this online collection.

The Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) file is the lingua franca of computers. Any document that has been transformed into an Acrobat PDF can be read by any other computer – without the program that originally created the document! But Acrobat is a tad expensive for the casual user. The article Make Your Own PDF Files explains how to create PDF files on a Windows PC using only freeware utilities.

If you've got more ideas for your website than money to finance, check out the article Web Hosting for Under Ten Bucks. All the web hosting options listed are either free, or cost less than ten dollars per month.

Chess is one of the world's oldest games, and indisputably one of the most popular. With PostCardChess you can play a game of chess by email, on your schedule. Each turn, a player will receive an email containing a link to the current board, where she can enter a new move and send it to her opponent. You can also play a game against the site's computer opponent, try your hand at solving chess problems, or visit the bookstore.

Audio recordings made over a century ago are available at Tinfoil.com. Many were recorded by the famous stage and singing stars of the day. There is even a recording of the inventor of the phonograph, Thomas Edison, reminiscing about his invention. You can also find information on collecting these rare recordings, listen to a new recording every month, or purchase collections of early recordings on CD.

Housekeeping is just as important on your Windows PC as it is in your home. Use Chris Free Software Cleaner to find installed programs that may be taking up more hard drive space than they are worth. Sort by name, size, or date of installation, and uninstall what you don't need any longer.

Sometimes, cheaper is better. If you have the most rudimentary of mechanical skills, and a yen to do it yourself, you can build your own PC for hundreds less than you'll spend on a brand-name box. Fred Langa's article In Praise Of White-Box PCs tells you why and how.