Credit cards are awesome. If you're not using a credit card for every purchase, you should be. Apart from the free benefits that pass many people by -- like automatically doubling your warranty up to an extra year on almost all purchases (including electronics) and refunds on prior purchases in the event of a price drop (remember the first iPhone?) -- credit cards allow you to earn cashback and other rewards. Of course you won't be able to quit your day job, but free money is free money. As long as you have some self control, you can make the system work for you instead of against you.

This post lays out how I run my credit cards. You should first familiarize yourself with the video clip Don't Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford. To make this work, you must never pay any fees and you must never pay any interest. With that in mind, let's get started.read more »

Are you, too, annoyed by how difficult it is to just play DVD video files from your hard drive? Simplify your life by adding "Play DVD with VLC" to the right-click menu of every folder in one easy step! Press Windows Key + R to bring up the Run dialog and enter the following command:

REG ADD "HKCR\Folder\shell\Play DVD with VLC\command" /ve /d "\"%ProgramFiles%\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe\" -f \"dvd://%1\""

That's it! The effects are instant; try right-clicking on a folder now. read more »

If you're like me, you've gotten tired of checking each of your multiple email accounts and have finally decided to have all of your mail forwarded to your main Gmail account. You login to the extraneous accounts and set them to forward to you@gmail.com. You login to Gmail and setup filters based on the To: header so your forwarded mail is automatically colored orange. It sounds like a great plan -- and it is -- until you discover that only some of the forwarded messages are getting labeled. Huh? As it turns out, those mailing list messages are addressed To: mailing.list@school.edu and those viral marketers can't be bothered with the To: header at all, so your filters aren't very effective.

Fear not, however, because there is a simple solution to this problem! This trick works because of plus addressing, a feature in Gmail that allows you to create an unlimited number of email addresses by adding a plus symbol (+) after your username. In other words, all mail sent to you+anything@gmail.com will arrive in your inbox. You can take advantage of this when aggregating your email accounts by having your secondary accounts forward to a unique plus address. For example, set your school email to forward to you+school@gmail.com and set your spam account to forward to you+junk@gmail.com.

Now for the real key: Gmail has a secret "deliveredto:" search operator that will catch all mail arriving at the given email address -- whether or not you were listed in the To: header. In other words, this will even apply to messages from mailing lists and bcc emails. To automatically label you forwarded junk mail, for example, create a new filter and type deliveredto:you+junk@gmail.com in the Has the words textbox. Congratulations, now all of your forwarded email will be automatically labeled! [Update 3/28/08 (thanks Phil): The deliveredto: operator expects you to enter the entire email address, but if you want to filter on just a portion of the email address, you can place it inside of double quotes (for example, deliveredto:"+junk").]


[Update 3/5/08: Wow, what timing! An Official Gmail Blog post about plus address appeared about six hours after this was published. Although plus addressing is nothing new, this is the first time Google has publicly acknowledged its existence on their blog. They didn't mention the real secret to making plus addressing work, though, which is the "deliveredto:" operator.]

As most college students have learned, posters are an easy, non-destructive, and effective way to decorate. In short, they are awesome. Wouldn't it be great if you could get that same poster for almost free, and with the exact picture you wanted? If you have access to a printer, you can! Websites like Block Posters allow you to upload a photo and have it split into printable pages that can be put together to make a wall poster of any size. The following describes how to do the same task the real way -- using Adobe Photoshop -- allowing you to make wall posters with much more control and of higher quality.read more »

Making your own ringtones not only saves you money, but also gives you a small sense of pride, accomplishment, and self-worth.

The easiest way to get ringtones onto your computer is using Bluetooth. Your phone and computer both need to have Bluetooth capabilities for this to work. If your phone doesn't have Bluetooth, you are pretty much out of luck. Make it a point to demand Bluetooth on your next cellphone. [While you may be able to transfer ringtones using a data cable specific to your phone or via WAP/the mobile web with an unlimited data plan, neither of those topics are covered here.]

Don't worry, however, if your computer does not have Bluetooth (most don't). You'll just need something like this Bluetooth USB dongle (only $8.50 with free shipping ). Besides the low price, this specific adapter looks like a good choice because it is compatible with the native Bluetooth stack in Windows. This means that you won't need to worry about any drivers -- just plug the device into any XP or Vista computer and it will magically just work (like a USB flash drive does).read more »