Archive for the ‘E-tips’ Category

When is the last time you backed up your data? If your computer was stolen or dropped or a virus hit it……. Nuf said.

I use Mozy to automatically back up my data to an offsite server. I also back up locally to a hard drive, but that wouldn’t help in case of fire or flood. Even a virus could eat away those files.

Mozy offers a free 2 gb account or 4.95/month for unlimited. It only needs a high speed internet connection.

Mozy Unlimited Backup

Do you know what people are saying about you on the internet? Google Alerts will notify you anytime someone posts a blog or review about you so you can keep tabs on what’s being said about you and where your name is being dropped.

Think of Google Alerts as a customized automatic Google Search that delivers the search results to you in your email inbox anytime something new hits the internet.

Google Alerts are also helpful when you’re trying to keep up with certain topics, news, or people.

This is very helpful for musicians to keep track of reviews and places their album is featured.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Scan your passport, important documents, prescriptions and photos of your instrument and equipment in case they are stolen.

Then email them to someone (you can contact easily by the internet) staying home so that if you lose your documents you can have them emailed to you (or your embassy – or the authorities) to make it easier to get replacements.

If you have a secure file server with your website, you can also upload the files there for retrieval by you. I also read where you can upload the images to a free account on Flickr and then set it as “private” (not sure how secure this is.)

Most people know that the last digit of a barcode is a “check digit” used by the scanner to check whether it read the barcode correctly. It does this by adding up and multiplying the numbers it gets from the bars. The secret formula for the last digit is: