Be Smart. Stay Safe.

As I was growing up the biggest rule about the internet was to never give up your address. Your school, your home; nothing was to be disclosed.

That has all changed with the explosion of real-time web services like Twitter and FourSqaure. If used at the same time they could tell your whole life story: Twitter updates what you're doing and Foursquare where you're doing it.

Of course without some sort of perk, updating the world with what you do and where you do it would a little ridiculous. Twitter makes you feel famous with a bunch of followers and Foursquare keeps you frugal with free deals and discounted items.

Even though less people are cautious about giving their location, it is still dangerous. Although those perks and prizes are enticing they're not worth your life.

Stay smart and follow the rules -- even when it's not trendy.

Read more...

I Cleaned Out My Locker.

I have been a part of Lockerz since the end of last summer and I have been a dedicated member. After checking out PTZplace and seeing all of the amazing prizes they had to offer I wanted to start earning as fast as possible. It's actually really mindless. You get 2 ptz for logging in and 2 ptz for answering the Daily Question. As your pointz add up you have one chance a month to redeem them... or at least that's what they want you to think.

With amazing prizes like the MacBook Air, iPod Touches and various games and game systems of course many people are going to join. Lockerz has either failed to realize this or is too cheap to buy servers that can actually handle their traffic. It's nearly impossible to redeem when items fresh out in 10 seconds and it takes your page about a minute to load. You would have to refresh your page at just the right time to have even a slim chance at redeeming your pointz.

All of these problems plus some have pushed me from Lockerz and into the hands of another "redeem your prize" site called SwagBucks. It's a lot more useful and reliable than Lockerz. All you do is use Swagbucks as your primary search engine and as you search you could win 10-100 SwagBucks. After letting your swag add up you can redeem for gift cards, clothes, cameras, mp3 players, and more.

The best part is that you don't have to wait for a restock. You could cash in your SwagBucks at any time; so what are you waiting for? Go get some swag.

Read more...

Beat Your School's Proxy

We do a lot of advanced things in my Technology class so my teacher is always giving free time as a treat for doing so well. We get to surf the web and check our e-mails, it's really fun until I get a screen like this...

It gets me upset when websites like this, or other needed websites are blocked and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. To all of my readers that have the same problem, I have compiled a list of websites that allow you to bypass this filter.

• Learncalculus
• Studyhallhelp
• Proxify
• Mathtunnel
• Ninjaproxy
• The-cloak
• Greenrabbit
• Diyrollercoaster
• Melloyello
• Saselinux

You don't have to change any settings or download any plug-ins, and they're all free which is the best part. You just visit one of these sites and type in the blocked URL and it will bring you to it without any hint of the Websense screen above. Happy Surfing!

Read more...

Blackberry Desktop Manager for Mac

The Blackberry Desktop Manager for Mac was just released Friday of last week. It's the easy way to sync and backup your calendars, contacts, tasks, notes and music... or so they say. The actual program is very user friendly but what it does to your Blackberry is HORRIBLE, or at least what it did to mine.

After a very short installation period, the program asked for me to plug my Blackberry in to verify that I actually have one. As soon as I did, it told me that I don't have the latest software and asked if I would like to download. I answered yes, my first mistake! As soon as i upgraded my software it deleted my browser and everything else that I had involving data. I had to call Verizon to get everything back and it wasn't fun.

To make sure that something like that would never happen again I decided to backup everything that I had on my phone. It was a pretty smart move considering what happened next!

Syncing with my Mac was easy but once again the consequences were not desired. When I pressed the button it told me that I had information that was repetitive on my Mac and Blackberry. It asked if I wanted to erase the information that was on both machines so I pressed yes for all of the options because like anybody else I didn't want anything to be repeating on either my Mac or Blackberry. Once again I made a drastic mistake. This time, instead of erasing all of my internet based applications it erased everything else. My notes, my tasks, my contacts, my calendars and my bookmarks. I called Verizon once again to see what was going on and they said that it's just a glitch that the program is having, that there's nothing that they could do now and it will probably be resolved within a few weeks.

Now this is what I know everybody has been waiting for, the moral of the story: Never EVER download and/or use a new program without checking it out even if it's from a trusted company. Read reviews and watch tutorials on Youtube just don't be one of their unpaid Beta testers.

Read more...