Common Craft is a classic favorite site that shows you how things work visually. I thought this might be an appropriate introductory video since everybody seems to be all-a-Twitter these days...

Check out many of their popular videos on preparing an emergency kit, electing a US president, Twitter, blogs, phishing scams, RSS, podcasts, social networking, wikis, investing money, CFL light bulbs, et cetera all 'in plain english.'

Bored, poor, and sick of waiting around for your favorite tv shows to come on? Well now it's time to check out Hulu.com. Not familiar with Hulu? It's a wonderful service sponsored by NBC and ABC. They play tons of movies and tv shows old and new. Well recently they released a desktop version of their website that works almost exactly like a tv guide channel on digital tv.

Hulu desktop can even be controlled by an Apple remote! It's well worth a quick download. You can log in under your username, subscribe to shows, watch them as they are released... it's wonderful!

Flock is a browser that's built on Mozilla, so it feels just like Firefox... just with a social twist. I've recently been having browser woes, so I thought I'd give this browser a try! The thing that sets it apart from all other browsers is that is connects you with all of your social websites such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Gmail, et cetera without actually having to go to those websites! For instance, if you want to update your Twitter feed, you can just hit the twitter icon and post your newest tweet. You want to see what your friends are up to? Hit the Facebook icon and check out your friends' recent updates!

Flock has all your standard browser features also of course such as tabbed browsing, themes, rss reading, it also has some other features built in that most browsers don't, such as support for Delicious bookmarking and email notification out of the box.

This nifty browser is available no matter what operating system you use, OS X, Windows, or Linux! :) so give it a spin and stay connected with all your friends and social services with much less effort!

Syncing your daily routines can not only be kinda cool, but it will definitely help you out when you can’t access your computer. I’ll highlight some of the best places to get you started and on your way toward a life where you can access your information no matter where you are! Oh, and the best part is that these services are all free!

The first of four main services I’m going to highlight is the simplest: Delicious social bookmarking. This is a free service that lets you first put all your current bookmarks online for easy access anywhere, then once you’ve done that You’re ready to start using Delicious for what it was really designed for. This service is widely popular and has plugins for every major browser that make this new way of bookmarking as simple as your usual command-D or “New Bookmark” button. Here’s how it works, you bookmark a site with Delicious and you can add tags to the site to help you remember what type of content it had, then you can search those tags later on to find some bookmark you made years ago to find that perfect italian restaurant in Little Italy, San Diego. The next fun part about Delicious is now you have your bookmarks online so you can easily access them anywhere, not only that you can add bookmarks to Delicious from any computer, even if it’s not yours and even if it doesn’t have a plugin installed!

Next up is Evernote! This is a note taking and bookmarking application that lets you organize information for a project, or even just keep a list of wines in your cellar. Your Evernote notes can include text, pictures, links, whole web pages, pretty much anything you want to save for later. The saved notes can be accessed on your local computer, online, or on your iPhone.

Dropbox is as simple as it gets for syncing files across computers anywhere in the world! You literally just sign up online, download the application, and then you are all set to go. Put any files you want to sync across to another computer or just backup online. Simple and easy!

Last but most definitely not least is Google. Google apps are easy to use because if you have a Google account, you already have free and easy access to all of the services they offer. The list of services they offer is out of control, they offer everything from calendars to a photo sharing resource Google has a wide gamut of choices of awesome and helpful applications that can all be used anywhere and saved right to your account online for access anywhere.... for free!

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How nice would it be to have your calendars with you wherever you go? The iPhone and iPod Touch help out with that a lot, but sometimes you just want to work with your schedule on a real computer. Say you’re at your friend’s house and you need to check what time your appointment is tomorrow, but you don’t have your computer with you? If you use Apple’s built in iCal you have no reason to not sync with Google Calendar!

Things you’ll need:
• OS X 10.5
• iCal calendars
• a Google account
• Google Collaboration sync tool for iCal

Okay, first things first. You probably have calendars already in your iCal, so we need to export those and import them to Google Calendars. To do this select the calendar you would like to export (you have to export and import one calendar at a time unfortunately...) then go to File and “Export...”

Save each calendar to the desktop then head on over to Google Calendar. First thing we need to do is make the same number of calendars in Google Calendars as you want to import. To do this click “Create” on the left side:

Then once, you’ve made your new empty calendars, you’re ready to import. On the bottom of your current calendars you will see a link to “Add” the select “Import Calendar.”

Select each calendar individually and import them to the corresponding calendar you just made.

Now just go back to your Google Calendar page to see all of your calendars imported to Google! Now that the hardest part is over, lets get the syncing part set up! Download the Google Collaboration sync tool for iCal. Just open the application and plug in your Google name and password and select “Add to iCal.”

Just delete your original Calendars so you don’t have doubles of all your events, and you’re all done!

Now whenever you edit, add or delete anything on your calendars they will automatically update both on your computer and on Google Calendars. If you’re in a place with no available internet, no worries, the next time your computer sees a connection it will update!

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It’s the end of the day and you’re tired. You want to do a bit of research but you don’t want to deal with all the stress of reading a lot, say no more. Try out Wikipedia Simple English, it uses simpler words originally intended for those who don’t speak much English.

So you’ve got yourself a nice dSLR, but you find yourself still using it on Auto mode all the time. This is a common thing for beginner photographers, but if you’re interested, there’s a whole world of incredible photography beyond the standard point and shoot method of our parents’ time. The two photos below show the difference between just turning on your camera and hitting the shutter button (left)... and using the aperture priority function and an external flash placed behind the subject (right).

Notice the flatness and lack of shadows on the coins in the left photo when the flash is pointed directly at them. Now look at the right photo and take note that when we place the flash behind the coins we get much more natural lighting leaving us with shadows that help define the coin faces. Also when we use the aperture priority function to focus in properly we get great depth and definition of the coins!

This is a lighting technique that every professional photographer utilizes to give the subject a ‘natural light’ look by not eliminating all shadows, but actually creating them. This helps us recognize the fine details in the photo.

How do you take your flash and put it elsewhere you might ask? Well, this process is easy and pretty cheap! You must have following three things to utilize this technique yourself:
• a camera that has a sync cable jack (or you can buy a hot shoe to sync cable adapter for $9.95 dollars at Adorama)
• an external flash (any old flash will work just fine, if you don’t have one, this external flash is really great!)
• a pc sync cable

All you have to do now is connect the flash to your camera with the sync cable, turn your camera on to any of the priority modes (Program Auto, Shutter, Aperture, or Manual), and shoot!

I decided to make my own hot shoe connector and cable to save some money. To do this I soldered a hot shoe connector together with a piece of pc board and some resistor wire. Then I opened up my external flash and soldered the wires that lead to the terminals on the hot shoe connector, then I put ethernet jacks at each end so I can just use any standard ethernet cable to connect my camera to my flash!

An additional perk to making my own cable is that now I have a cheap and extendable cable since we all have spare ethernet cables laying around!

Want to learn more? Check out the Strobist blog, it’s an amazing resource that I’m still learning from all the time! For more examples check me out on Flickr!

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