During these times things run through my head, either because I’m purposely thinking about a project, or randomly (more likely!). When I need to remember a thought, especially in the car, I just speed dial 9 to reach reQall, and say what I was thinking.

reQall turns my spoken words into text that shows up in my email, where I can manage it. Or, you can have reQall call you back in the office, or back to my cell phone as text or voice, or a myriad of other options.

Did I say the basic service is FREE?? I love reQall and usually call it 3-4 times a day with thoughts, ideas, and to-dos.

The Background of reQall

reQall is based on memory research done by Sunil Vemuri at the MIT Media Lab in the early 2000s. Vemuri’s research focused on how mobile technology could be used to help people capture their daily experiences and then efficiently catalog that information so that it could be retrieved and used at a later time. The first version of the reQall application became available in January, 2007, when it was launched at the DEMO 07 conference and won a DEMOgod award.

In March 2009, the company introduced a new version of reQall that includes a patent-pending “Memory Jogger” that analyzes various aspects of the user’s current situation (time, location and upcoming calendar events) to provide a dynamically updated display of relevant to-dos and notes. The Memory Jogger proactively provides contextually-relevant reminders rather than relying on the user to seek information by accessing a static to-do list or calendar.

reQall. Try it at www.reQall.com

Use video chat to give a video tour of a new home to friends, introduce a baby to relatives, keep in touch with traveling loved ones… the list goes on. Here is a simple way that any grandmother (or even YOU!) can use to get started with Google video chat on her own.

This video, along with a printable guide, can be accessed at google.com/chat/grandma. Feel free to share this link with your grandma—or grandpa—or, well, anyone who wants to video chat to help get them up and running.

Just click the “View” link at the bottom of a Gmail message and the viewer will take it from there. If you decide you want to edit the file, clicking “Edit online” will open it in Google Docs, or you can download it to your desktop from there.

Google has also introduced rich text signatures into Gmail. Now you can change the colors or font size of your signature, or insert images and links right in Gmail — without any additional plugins, scripts or other workarounds.

Gmail users now are able to format text, add bullets, numbering, indenting and alignment your email signature. You can also insert images and hyperlinks into your personal signatures, adding a little creativity and flair.

The next time you log in and visit the Settings page, you’ll see a rich text editor in the signature section. Here, you can customize your signature by adding pretty formatting, links, and images — or decide to leave things nice and simple.

While some argue that these features should’ve been introduced long ago, it’s nice to finally be able to create a personal signature that has a business card-like look to it. As of now, the mobile version still only supports plain text signatures.

More information is available at the Gmail Blog.

OpenOffice  is the leading open-source office software suite  for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages  and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Mostly, I find the tools that I need in OpenOffice are readily available. . . but sometimes I’m stymied about how to do something that I used to do often in Microsoft Office.

Now, I’ve found a website that has over 70 videos on how to use OpenOffice. From “How to use a bar chart to represent data” to “How to create 3-D graphics”. In a couple minutes, almost any question I have about OpenOffice can be answered, with a video that shows me exactly how to do it.

Protect and Build Your Online Reputation
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The Fix for PDF Downloads in Firefox

There is an addon (of course!) designed to solve this problem. Download and install PDF Download 2.2.0.2 or more recent.

Use PDF Download to do whatever you like with PDF files on the Web. Regain control of them and eliminate browser problems, view PDFs directly in Firefox as HTML, and use the all-new Web-to-PDF toolbar to save and share Web pages as high-quality PDF files.

Configuring PDF Downloads

You need to set a couple thing in the Option dialogue for this addon to work properly. Go to Tools |  Addons and select the Download PDF addon. On the Genral tab, select Open PDF. Then on the Opening PDF tab, select “Use OS default viewer”. Now your PDFs will download and open in your default PDF viewer. In my case, this is Foxit Reader.

This addon works great! And no more freezing!