The Internet has become one of the fastest growing vehicles for online marketing and sales, and the proliferation of video clips on the web makes it extremely easy for companies to get their messages across to consumers. The explosive growth of online video has many companies scrambling to find a high quality, yet affordable video hosting service.

Sites such as one offering Best Buy Coupons make it easy for consumers to get great deals on the things they want and need, and by placing short, informative videos on their sales pages companies can assist prospective buyers with making an informed choice when choosing a product to purchase.  If “a picture is worth a thousand words”, a video is worth a million!

If you’re searching for a simple and affordable way to use video on your website, Viddler online video for business is a great place to start. Video is the online marketing tool of our day. Give it a try and you just might be amazed at how it boosts your bottom line!

You have no doubt seen computers with pretty photos displayed as their desktop backgrounds, and you might be wondering how to do the same on your own PC with a favorite picture. Well, it’s really so simple that even a caveman could do it (sorry GEICO)…

Simply right-click on the photo you wish to use as your desktop background image, then click “Set as Background“ on the menu that pops up. That’s it, you’re done. From this moment forward (at least until you change it) you’ll see little Fluffy smiling back at you every time you sit down to use your computer!

When Amazon released its Kindle ebook reader, few among us realized just how popular it would soon turn out to be. The Kindle even exceeded Amazon’s own expectations by becoming the best selling product on the entire site.

And another amazing milestone was set just last year: Ebooks outsold hard copy books on Amazon for the very first time in 2009! Following up on that success, Amazon has now announced the second generation of the now-famous Kindle.

The Kindle DX with Gobal Wireless builds upon the features that made its successor so popular by increasing the size of the screen from 6 inches to 9.7. It also boasts enough storage to hold up to 3,500 books and the ability to download content wirelessly in over 100 countries.

Ebooks are the wave of the future and the Kindle appears to be the ebook reader of choice. Click here to learn more about the Kindle DX with Gobal Wireless on the Amazon website.

Like most other businesses, restaurants are struggling to attract customers these days. One solution many of them are now implementing is providing free Wi-Fi connections for their customers. And why not? Providing a wireless high-speed Internet connection costs very little for the restaurant to install and maintain, yet the tactic has already proven itself as a great way to lure in more customers during a down economy.

In most any big city a laptop user already has a  number of free wireless access points from which to choose, and even in a small town it’s usually pretty easy to find at least a couple of them. By adding one in-house, restaurants can offer their customers the opportunity to access the web while sitting in a comfy chair, hopefully while also enjoying a meal.

Some municipalities are currently installing their own city-wide Wi-Fi connection points, and access is often completely free for residents and visitors alike. But until town-wide Wi-Fi rolls out nationwide (it’ll be a while), your best bet for a free ride on the web is likely to be the restaurant located just down the road.

For the youngsters among us who had the luxury of growing up in the wonderful age of the USB port, here is a little trip down the narrow, winding road of the “RS232 Standard”. Back in the early days of computing most printers, terminals, modems and such were connected via RS232 serial ports. Now these connections were a far cry from “Plug-N-Play” (it was actually more like “Plug-N-Pray”), and getting them to work was often an exercise in mind-numbing trial and error which resulted more often than not in a powerful fit of frustration.

First of all, the RS232 “Standard” was anything but. RS232 was an 8 bit protocol, and some pieces of equipment were designed to use all 8 bits for data with no consideration of “parity” while others used 7 data bits with one parity bit. Oh, and the parity could be either even or odd, adding yet another variable into the almost unsolvable riddle which was coaxing two serial devices to “speak” to one another.

Even worse, some peripherals were designed to be DTE (Data Terminal Equipment) while others were DCE (Data Communications Equipment), each of which used an RS232 cable that was wired differently from the other. Some devices had a male RS232 connector while others used a female. And as if all of that wasn’t confusing enough, some used 25 pin connectors while others used connectors with 9 pins. Of course most computer users were bald back then (yes, even the women), and it’s easy to understand why. They simply had no hair left on their heads after they got through yanking it all out in frustration every time they needed to hook up a new piece of hardware!

Some peripherals came with a pretty decent pin diagram for the connectors and cables as well as a set of instructions for getting the thing going, but not all of them. And if you lost “the book”, you were on your own should you ever need to hook the device up to something else.

Contrast all of that nonsense with the ease and simplicity of connecting a USB device and you can see that today’s generation of computer geeks has it rather easy. Sometimes I’ll sit and wax nostalgic about the good ole days of computing, then memories of wresting with an RS232 serial device will pop into my head. Talk about ruining a thoroughly enjoyable reminiscence!

Solid State Drives are arguably the most important innovations in computer hardware since the introduction of optical drives, but they have always had two issues preventing them from challenging hard disk drives as the mass storage device of choice for home and small business computers: very high prices per gigabyte and low maximum storage capacities. But now a company from Taiwan called OCZ Technology has smashed the capacity barrier into pieces by releasing an SSD that can store an entire terabyte of data (that’s 1,000 gigabytes)!

Don’t expect to buy one for your home PC just yet unless you have a pretty sizable bank account however. The retail price on this little jewel is a whopping $3,300, which is about $3,200 more than a hard disk drive of the same size. But still, the sheer capacity of this thing has completely crumbled one of the SSD’s two primary barriers to mass adoption, and as with all things electronic we can expect the price to fall dramatically as other companies design, build and sell competing products in the not-so-distant future.

I believe that in a relatively short period of time the hard disk drive will go the way of the floppy, supplanted by massive, yet affordable solid state drives that are much faster and much more durable than the best hard drives on the market today. More information on the OCZ Colossus 1TB Solid State Drive can be found here.

Note: Thanks to my brother Glen for the heads-up!

If you’re like me, you don’t use the Control Panel  in Windows often enough to remember how to navigate to it in a hurry. If so, there is a fast and easy way to open the Control Panel whenever you need it without having to click through all the menus to get there:

1 – Click “Start”, then “Run”.

2 - In the dialog box, type the word control and press the “Enter” key.

Walla, you now have the Control Panel open on your desktop. With a little practice you’ll soon be able to open this rarely used, yet vitally important utility in just a few seconds.