Three Interesting Life Add-ons

Read It Later

You know how you can star an article in your RSS feed reader so you can remember to come back and read it later? Ever wish you could do that with a web page you found? Oh sure, you could Bookmark it into a special folder and come back and read it later. But let’s face it, Bookmarks are kind of a pain in the neck. What if you had a way to “star” certain non-RSS pages so you could remember to read them when you had more time? Here’s a Firefox add-on that will allow you to do just that: Read It Later.

LifeLock

My husband and I had a scare this weekend. We thought our checking account had been compromised to the tune of $500. (Turns out it was a bank error on the labeling of the transaction. Whew!) But between Saturday when we discovered it and Monday morning when I was finally able to talk to the bank, we sweated a great deal. My Dad told me about a service he uses to prevent this type of scenario even occurring. Maybe you’ve seen or heard the ads with the company’s CEO giving out his social security number to everyone because he’s so confident in his service? It’s called LifeLock. Now, I can’t vouch for it because we haven’t signed up for it. Who knows, maybe it’s bunk. After all, , it’s a bit tough to prove a negative. [You know the old joke. "Why are you wearing red tennis shoes?" "To keep the elephants away." "How do you know it works?" "See any elephants??"] Still, I thought I would pass it along in case others have the same issues or fears. We are definitely considering doing it.

Twitter

Lastly, Twitter. Being a Gen-Xer, when I first heard about Twitter, I rolled my eyes and said, in a cranky-old-lady voice, “Those crazy whippersnappers!” I figured it was something the Gen-Yers would like and I would find no use for. When I saw fellow bloggers exchanging Twitter IDs on Blog Azeroth, though, I became intrigued so last week I started fiddling with it. It’s actually pretty fun when you have some people following you and vice versa. (And probably no fun at all if you don’t have anyone on your reading list.) I hooked it into my Google Desktop sidebar and it’s even more fun for me that way because it’s always up. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s like IM + microblogging + Chat + status bar updates + reply-to-all emails. Add those together, taking bits from each, and you’ve got Twitter. Just try it to see if you’ll like it. Follow my “tweet” (I believe that’s the word, god I am so unhip) and see what you think.

Back to gaming on the next blog post.