A few months ago I discovered a feature in one of my favorite graphics applications. The application is Picasa and the new feature is their facial recognition functions.

The Picasa application isn’t really a photo editing tool in my opinion, although it’s got some tools that are nice for the entry-level and home user. What I believe Picasa excels at is organizing and managing your photos and other graphics.
Part of that organization has now become their facial recognition tool. Picasa will start to recognize faces in your photos and then prompt you to tell you who it is. You then tag …read more

I’ve been using a Wenger backpack as my primary computer case for over five years now and have been absolutely satisfied with all of my experience using them on a daily basis. Wenger is the company behind the famous Swiss Army knives.

You realize that a Swiss Army knife prides itself on having what you need, when you need and a quality craftsmanship above all else.
You get all of that same great stuff when you have a computer backpack from Wenger. With computer backpacks, at least in my opinion, it’s all about the different pockets to keep things where you need …read more

I had a bit of a challenging task recently serving as alpha-geek for my extended family. My mother-in-law had gotten the Security Tool virus on her machine and it was doing a great job of keeping her from doing anything productive to remove the offending malware.

The Security Tool malware virus presents itself as a very believable and helpful application. It uses quite a bit of social engineering to make the infected computer’s owner think they should be clicking on approval buttons and icons to let the software do more “help” on their computer.
What makes this even more challenging is that …read more

If you haven’t figured it out just yet, there’s quite a bit of information that can be gained by paying attention to your activity using the network’s micro-blogging  functionality. Finding out more information about your activity on Twitter can help you adjust your activity if necessary, or just identify other areas to work on improving your Twitter citizenship.

Twitter Analyzer provides details about your activity on Twitter. Including who you follow, who re-tweets your messages, what you’re talking about and just how quickly is your Twitter network growing since you’ve been involved?
The Twitter Analyzer tool provides a quick resource to find …read more

I’m starting out a new thing this month. My Apple Apps of the Month post. I promise to at least try out one app for the iPhone/iPod Touch/(soon iPad) and Mac and just post it here to give my own personal takes on the apps. If they’re worth it or not.
This month I’m starting out with two games for iPhone/iPod Touch. I’ve been stressed out this month thus needed a way to unwind and look for something to take my mind off things. Games are the perfect way to do that. I’m not really a hard core gamer I like …read more

There was some significant spammy Twitter activity today on the network. I’ve received a number of tweets throughout the day that were less than what I’d expect from the people I received them from in my followers lists.

As you can read in the screen captures above, it’s the obvious sex and performance subjects of topic that we’re used to receiving in our email Inboxes. The problem now is the increase in activity on the twitter micro-blogging platform.
The two messages I’ve received multiple times today are the following:
hi, i’m 24/female/horny… i have to get off here but message me on …read more

You’re on twitter all day, so why don’t you make it work for you. In fact you can even make it serve you as your own little personal assistant for all those little, but very important things you always seem to forget anyway.

If you follow @timer on twitter, you can send yourself little reminders that are set on a schedule and be notified of that item as you need, when you need it.
With the requirements being straight-forward and simple, you’ve got the flexibility to be pretty creative with the reminders. Don’t count on the service to be absolutely precise though. …read more

If you’re active at all on the location based status update sites like BrightKite or Foursquare, then you’ve more than likely heard about the Please Rob Me website. A good friend let me know about the site and he’s stopped using both sites cold turkey.

The gist of the site is that the folks behind the Please Rob Me site take all the updates from Foursquare and post them together in one place. The idea is that along with telling all our friends where we’re at, we’re also broadcasting to the worldwide public where we’re not at that moment… at …read more

I’m a huge fan of the Olympics. I’ve got my AT&T U-verse DVR setup to record all the coverage that’s being shown on NBC, but sometimes that just doesn’t give me everything I’m looking for. I know I’m an odd-ball, but I actually enjoy watching the curling events and I’ve yet to see any coverage of that on the mainstream channel.

Yesterday I missed the USA vs. Canada hockey game because it was being televised on MSNBC instead of NBC. I’ll probably be talking about my frustration with that in another post I’ll be writing later.
What I discovered today though as …read more

If I had to guess, I’d bet a pretty penny that you’re probably a twitter user right at this minute. You’ve been using it for awhile, you realize it’s helpful and more than other people realize it is.

If you’re reading this and you’re not on twitter, I think the next chance is that you may be involved in business and you’re wondering how you can use twitter and all these other social media tools to improve your business, your personal brand or to just get your message out to more people.
If that’s the case, then you should pick up a …read more