Archive for March, 2009

“Most Common Passwords“ by Jimmy Ruska is a great article on insecure passwords, which ones are the most common, and how easily they are hacked. Ruska starts off by listing some of the most common passwords he has found. The list starts off with predictable numbers like “123456″ and “123″, followed by “123abc” and similar combinations, [...]

http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/2127

Posting will be sparse over the next two weeks as Of Zen and Computing is off to Ireland for a break. As always, we’re eternally to all our loyal readers and look forward to serving you with more tech knowledge upon our return.

http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/2126

MaxTo is a free, lightweight Windows program that lets you divide your desktop into specific regious for your open programs to occupy. MaxTo aims to increase your efficiency by letting you keep your desktop organized and see more than one program at the same time. MaxTo works by letting you set up boundaries on your desktop. [...]

http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/2108

Computer Repair Utility Kit was a collection of PC diagnostic and repair utilities that could be used to fix my of the common problems experienced by computer users. These problems include slow performance, security threats such as viruses and trojans, and data recovery. Most of these programs can be installed on a portable USB drive. [...]

http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/2101

Twitter is an up-and-coming social networking utility that lets you update your status, telling your contacts and possibly the entire world what you are doing. Posting Twitter updates publicly means: Your updates appear in Twitter’s public timeline — a flowing river of every member’s status. Anyone can see your Twitter updates. Your Twitter updates can be indexed by [...]

http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/1815

“How to Access a Free Yahoo! Mail Account in Mozilla Thunderbird” by Heinz Tschabitscher of About.com is a guide to setting up your Yahoo! Mail account in Thunderbird, an excellent desktop e-mail client from the makers of Firefox. How It Works This About.com tutorial gets your Yahoo! Mail running with Thunderbird by having you install a program [...]

http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/2096

DM Deleter is a JavaScript bookmarklet that gives you the capability to delete your Twitter Direct Messages in bulk. This little tool is easy to install and works with a variety of web browsers. Direct Messages are private Twitter messages between two people. DMs can be deleted one-by-one, but at this time there is no bulk-deletion [...]

http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/2094

“You simply can’t depend on computers” by Raoul Pop is a rant on the tendency of computers to fail at the worst possible moments. What happened Raoul? Joking aside, Raoul is a serious point — computers are far, far from perfect and like all things abide by Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go [...]

http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/2105

If you have a mobile phone powered by the Symbian OS, you can use WMAPlus! to play WMA (Windows Media Audio), MP3, Ogg, AAC, AMR and MID files. The application supports playlists, lets you set WMA files as ring tones and has a skinnable (customizable) interface. WMAPlus! is free for 30 days. After the trial period, [...]

http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/2041

“HOWTO: Quickly Change the Desktop Icon Size in Windows” by Mark Ursino of All Things Marked highlights the fact that changing the size of your desktop icons in Windows Vista is as simple as holding down the Ctrl key and scrolling your mouse wheel.

http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/2025