The Best Souvenir Ever
Lego Man + Promotional Marketing = Awesome!
My daughter recently went on a road trip with her mother to Minnesota to visit some of their family. What’s a teenage girl in Minnesota to do (especially during winter)?
Yep, you guessed it, Mall of America.
My daughter and I have had a hobby of picking up little trinkets wherever we each travel.
At the mall, she was looking for a good souvenir for me. When she stumbled into the Lego Store and found the ultimate souvenir. Or so she thought. She picked me up a Lego scuba diver man on a key chain. It reminder her of one of the Lego sets that we played with when she was little. Then, she saw that you can buy bricks with custom text printed on them.
She picked on up for me with the VitaminCM.com engraved into it. I love that kid.
The site now has a new mascot.
Get Your Own
Getting the Most Out of Your Software with Third Party Add Ons
Six Part Series on Extending Your Favorite Software with Add Ons
GOAL: Provide a list of add ons to help you turbo charge some of your most commonly used applications.
Even though many of the applications on my computer are great, I always feel like there are just a few things missing. Fortunately, a lot of frequently used applications allow third party Add Ons, Plugins, and Extensions to fill some of the voids left by the manufacturers.
Put your applications on some serious performance enhancing drugs that won’t get detected on any test.
We’ll wring every last drop of juice out of the following applications:
- Microsoft Outlook
- Mozilla ThunderBird
- Skype VOIP Software
- Apple iTunes
- Mozilla Firefox
- The Best of the Rest
What I will be covering for each application:
Carry A Computer in your Pocket
Bring Your Favorite Software, Files, and Settings with You
GOAL: Provide a list of Portable Applications that you can run on any PC and feel like you never left home.
Do you use multiple computers on a regular basis? Do you go from home, to work, to friends, and relative’s houses where you can never guarantee that the applications that you need are available? Well, you need a USB flash drive loaded with Portable Applications.
You can load numerous free and useful applications onto a USB drive and take a solid computing environment that can be used on any PC on the road. I used to get frustrated when I visited my parents or in-laws houses, because their computers were not set up with what I needed to waste time get things done. Now, I just pull out my portable computing environment get to work.
Awesome Adobe Acrobat Alternatives that Will Make Love to your Computer
Keep the PDFs, Lose the AcroCrap
Goal: Provide a list of FREE applications that will allow you to do everything you want with PDFs while avoiding the annoying, expensive problems of Adobe Acrobat.
The Portable Document Format (PDF) is great for a number of reasons however; Adobe Acrobat (the de facto standard application) is a horrendous piece of garbage. The Acrobat Reader (Free) is painfully slow to open, has more bugs than a porch light, and love to crash browsers. The Acrobat Writer (Standard $299 or Professional $449) applications are ridiculously expensive.
Here is a list of applications that will let you get the most out of the PDF format with none of the issues:
You can use this combination of free applications to do just about everything that you would ever want from Adobe Acrobat.
- Open and Read PDF files
- Create PDF files from any document or application on your computer
- Edit PDFs by converting them into Microsoft Word documents
- Merge Multiple PFDs into a single file
- Stop PDFs from crashing your browser
- Not spend hundreds of dollars
24 Web Services to Help You Get Things Done
Get Things Done Using These Web Base Applications
As a follow up to my previous 32 Free Applications that I Could Not Live Without article, I decided to list several web based applications and services that I also love. So many of the things that you used to do on your desktop can now be done on the web. This allows you to bring your apps from home, to work, to your friend’s houses. If you’re willing to sacrifice a few features (very few actually) you can do just about anything on the web these days. Here are some of my favorites.