I’ve been using the BlueCoat K9 Web Protection product for some time now.  It’s purpose is to help keep you or your kids from going to inappropriate web sites.  The degree of inapropiateness you disallow is dictated by how you configure the filter and what site categories you allow.

Note that if you have kids, this is a perfect companion for your home computer.  The product is free; all you have to do is register to get your free license key.  Download the  product here:

As you may know your standard anti-virus (AV) software cannot generally protect you from malicious websites.  Although the big names in the AV market have implemented such features in the past, those solutions have gotten so bloated that they pretty much make your computer run like a snail.  That is why I’ve pretty much have given up on most of those solutions and have used a more lightweight solution from AVAST!.  AVG provides a lightweight solution as well, and they’ve recently made public their link scanner–called AVG Linkscanner.

This linkscanner is supposed to protect you from malicious web sites by blocking or informing you of a site’s reputation before you even go there.

You can get an online demo of  AVG Linkscanner here:

I’ve installed it at home.  It’s free; let’s see how it does.

If you are like me, and you’ve been using MS Office product for years, getting used to the way the user interface is setup on MS Office 2007 can be very very difficult.

Fortunately, there are plugins out there to get us that MS Office classis 2003 look. You can download it from here:

This plugin simply shows the classic menu in the Menus tab, and leaves that other tabs in tact.

Some folks are probably aware of this online TV service called hulu.com.  But if you’re like me, you won’t hear about it until someone metions it.  So here it is, I’m mentioning it.

Check it out at http://www.hulu.com.

This is like TV on the WEB.  The best thing about it is that you don’t have to worry about when something is on.  When you’re ready to watch, just select the show and watch!

Your Anti-Virus (AV) software starting to bog down your computer?  I’ve seen and have experienced this personally.  What did I do?  I uninstalled my AV software and installed something more lightweight like avast! Home Edition

Give it a try, I’ve been using it, and I have been very happy with its performance.

Paint.net was suppose to be the replacement to Microsoft’s paint program.  Too bad it didn’t happen, but good for us it is available free of charge!

This program has the most common functions people use of a typical photo/drawing program, and is relatively easy to use.

Get Paint.NET!

If you aren’t much of a computer or Internet user, this might come as news to you.  Google, the biggest search engine on the planet, offers online office applications which gives you collaboration capabilities for word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.  It even gives you the ability to create web forms which you can share for the purpose of taking surveys or polls.

All these are wrapped around a product called Google Docs.