You think the things that you do online are between you and your computer. Not so. Your cyber-privacy is constantly being chipped away: by your Internet provider, your cellphone carrier and lawmakers. Before you post to a social-media site or browse the Internet for that report you’re compiling on pedophiles, keep in mind how your actions online are anything but private.

At issue is the struggle to protect privacy rights while fighting the online theft of American intellectual property.

Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives shelved its proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA (H.R. 3261). The legislation’s surface intent seemed sound: It would have given holders of music, films, books and other intellectual property copyrighted in the United States some teeth to stop its illegal distribution, even if that property was stored in an offshore server. But the bill required such sweeping enforcement that Google communications director Bob Boorstin said, “YouTube would just go dark immediately.” If you were caught unwittingly posting a video of your niece singing along with the latest Taylor Swift tune, you could be blocked from Facebook and by your Internet provider and you’d have the burden of proving your innocence. ...Keep On Reading!

By: Andrea Eldridge.

Now that I have a newborn in the house, the last thing I have time for is weeding through an email inbox filled with offers for 30 percent off at a store I bought one thing from three years ago, or daily newsletters from an online magazine touting ways to make my life more creative. I don’t have time to shower, let alone bake sweet potato muffins.

Thankfully, there are some easy ways to make my email more of a tool and less hassle, with very little work from me.

Most email providers have an integrated spam filter, and many have additional plug-ins you can install that will use a variety of means to filter out what it deems to be spam. Unfortunately, junk messages often slip through while legitimate messages are relegated to your spam folder. ...Keep On Reading!

Before I joined the ranks of happily married mommies, I was a single girl once. After college, I learned that anyone who held to not dating from their pool of coworkers had a relatively narrow field of potential mate options. Bar hopping requires fending off drunken advances and getting set up by your friends involves a lot of baggage: “what do you mean you didn’t like my favorite cousin Melvin?”

These days, online dating allows singles to cyber-meet before committing to a face-to-face, a great way to get a hint of compatibility before giving out your phone number. If this Valentine’s Day finds you considering the blind date your Great Aunt Edna wants to set you up on, read on for tips to safely explore the world of online dating sites.

According to www.datingsitesreviews.com, of the 54 million singles in the United States, 5.5 million of them use dating services. However, the Internet can be a scary place for the unprepared. It’s good to be reasonably skeptical about a profile that sounds too good to be true.
According to a study led by Catalina L. Toma, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about 81 percent of daters misrepresent their height, weight or age in their profiles. The good news is that the lies are typically not extreme, as no one wants to have to explain a 10-year age difference between reality and their profile when you finally meet in person. Most commonly people shave a couple years off their age and a few pounds off their weight. ...Keep On Reading!

Itunes U: A new kind of learning, for a new generation:

The day my husband handed his iPad to our 2-year-old, I cringed, fearful of the $700 device’s imminent destruction and of introducing technology at perhaps far too young an age. But after seeing how quickly he picked up easy lessons on colors, matching and numbers from his first interactions with “Monkey Preschool Lunchbox” (a 99-cent app), I swallowed my protests.

Anecdotal evidence aside, recent studies have shown that working with a touch-screen tablet and an interactive learning application can improve test scores of students of varying ages.

In January, textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt released findings of a yearlong pilot program in which students at a California middle school were given iPads with the HMH Fuse algebra app. The study found that over 78 percent of HMH Fuse users scored at “proficient” or “advanced” levels on last spring’s California Standards Tests, compared with only 59 percent of their textbook-using peers.” ...Keep On Reading!

By: Andrea Eldridge
As a mom and a CEO (of Nerds On Call Computer Repair), I understand wanting to get the most out of every minute of every day. As much as I love tech, I’m not going to waste time that I could be spending planning my kids’ birthday parties on figuring out confusing apps or programs. There are precious few minutes in the day as it is, and technology should help you to make the most of them. To help you join the ranks of the tech-efficient, I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite time-saving apps and tools. Download a few of these, and you’ll be able to go shopping, wait on hold, juggle, and bake little Janie’s birthday cake all at the same time! (Well, maybe not juggle…)

1. Gas Buddy: With gas quickly approaching $5 a gallon, fueling up the minivan can be a huge part of any road trip budget. ...Keep On Reading!

I’ve been dragging my heels about adopting Timeline, the Facebook profile introduced in September. I haven’t wanted to accept that my comfy, familiar profile will soon be gone for good. But there’s no delaying anymore: Facebook announced last week that “over the next few weeks, everyone will get Timeline.”

Instead of waiting for Timeline to be sprung on you, I’d suggest that you jump in now and spend a few hours on www.facebook.com/about/timeline. Watch the tutorial video. Then click the “Get Timeline” button to get started, which I find preferable to logging in one day to a different layout.

Timeline makes sense. It aims to present your life in chronology, compiling your manual entries and status updates, threading them with photos and videos. Think of it as a huge digital photo album chronicling your life, with all the things you’ve posted to Facebook over the years. Your “News Feed” remains unchanged, so you can see your friends’ status updates just as you’re used to. ...Keep On Reading!

-HAPPY VALENTINES DAY FROM NERDS ON CALL

I’ll admit it: I’ve never been much of a romantic.I love spending time with my hubby, going out to dinner and a movie, or just curling up on the couch to watch a movie together, but I’ve never been very creative in thinking up ideas to “spice things up.”

This Valentine’s Day, I resolved to use my tech resources to think outside the box. Here are some places you can go for ideas to put a little fire into your relationship.

The Dating Divas

My first stop was a visit to “The Dating Divas“. Their motto is, “strengthening marriages, one date at a time,” and that’s exactly what they aim to help you do.

Each Monday, the Divas offer a completely planned “date night” suggestion that you can put into action the next weekend. A tour through the “Date Night” tab revealed ideas that spanned from simple to intricate, and can accommodate just about any budget and energy level. Throughout the week they post creative, inexpensive and innovative ideas for romance with your spouse, from planning family outings to ideas to spice up your more intimate moments. ...Keep On Reading!

THE BEST FROM CES 2012

Every January, thousands of industry professionals and gadget-lovers flock to Las Vegas for the nerd Mecca, the Consumer Electronics Show. The recent gathering showcased tech toys slated to hit the market in the coming year, providing a shopping list for those who are first in line for everything new and cool, and more of a wish list for the rest of us.

ULTRABOOKS.

Among the highlights was the “ultrabook,” a super-thin and lightweight notebook that’s bigger and more functional than a tablet, but more portable than a traditional laptop. Every major manufacturer had its models, but my favorite was the Dell XPS13.

HP’s Envy 14 Spectre is flashier, with its scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass case and a starting price of $1,399. But the Dell — due out in late February with a rumored $1,000 price tag — is more accessible to the mainstream buyer. Boasting a 13-inch screen, 4GB of RAM and an Intel i5 or i7 processor, it weighs less than three pounds and sports a cool backlit keyboard. A Gorilla Glass screen and carbon fiber shell promise durability and heat resistance, so you can actually use the machine on your lap without burning a hole through your jeans. As with most ultrabooks, its small footprint means you lose some ports: It has no slots for an HDMI cable or SD card, just those for USB, mini display and 3.5mm audio cables. ...Keep On Reading!

A new year is a great time to explore new goals or recommit to ones you’ve had for a while. My ongoing goal is to use technology to make my life easier, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in what I’m used to and not explore new tools. Managing my finances is one area where I’ve only halfheartedly taken advantage of the advances in the digital age to simplify. With the arrival of kiddo No. 2, this year I’ve resolved to make my life easier by finally exploring more ways to take care of my banking online.

I know, I know, this seems really basic for a girl who professes to be a Nerd Chick, but I’ve actually never set up online bill pay with my bank. I still write checks, put stamps on envelopes and send payments through the mail. My mom has pointed out that this is downright archaic.

Setting Up Online Bill Pay: Knowing that taking care of a toddler and a newborn will make this process even more cumbersome, I finally sat down to see what my bank had to offer in electronic bill pay. First, I found out that the service is free — score! All I had to do was enter payee information, ...Keep On Reading!

Think of your web browser as your window into Internet, web pages and applications. Which browser should you choose, and what security measures should you take to protect your view?

The most popular browsers are Microsoft’s Windows Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Foxfire. Internet Explorer — preinstalled on all Windows machines — dominates with 40 percent of all users. But Chrome is coming on strong, according to StatCounter, a global web analytics company. It reports that among those browsers’ latest versions, Chrome 15 edged past Internet Explorer 8 during November’s final week, taking 23.6 percent of the worldwide market compared with IE’s 23.5 percent. ...Keep On Reading!

This year, we have a renewed dedication to using technology to make my life easier. With precious few minutes to waste in the day, it seems like certain technological “advances” actually cause me to waste more time than they save. Here are some great resources to turn the tables and have your tech tools work for you again.

1: It’s impossible is for me to keep track of my phone. I can actually have it in my hand while I’m looking for it. Even though I realize I’m an extreme case, everyone has misplaced a phone between the couch cushions or under the seat in the car at some point or another. If you don’t have another phone handy to call your waylaid device, there are sites that will call your phone for you.

As awesome as this service sounds, I guard my cellphone number like it’s the direct line to Santa, so the idea of handing it over to a website and trusting that it won’t end up on some telemarketer’s list makes me cringe. Instead, I installed the free Google Voice plug-in that allows me to make calls (even video chat) from my Gmail account to any phone number, all for free. I log in to my Gmail and click the Chat drop down on the left and can choose the “Call Phone” option to ring my wayward cell. ...Keep On Reading!