The Complete Guide to Saving Your Windows System with a Thumb Drive

Top 10 Differences between Windows XP and Windows 7

"Although not all are earth-shattering changes, listed below are the Top 10 differences between Windows XP and Windows 7. Many of these changes may seem like a big deal because you’ve gotten so used to how things work in XP. If you are considering upgrading from XP to Windows 7, be prepared for these changes."

Recover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CD

Safeguard Your Equipment with a Surge Protector

This is a good article, but since surge protectors should be replaced every year or two (the cheaper it is, the more often it needs to be replaced), do what I do: use regular non-surge-protector power strips, and plug them into a good surge block thingy (like this) that plugs directly into the wall. Then every year you just replace the wall thingy, and don't have to replace the more expensive power strips, if you even need a power strip: the linked device turns a 2-plug outlet into a 6-plug outlet.

Idiot users still intentionally opening, clicking on spam

"Internet users are still opening their spam e-mail with abandon and clicking the links and/or opening the attachments within."

Getting Families and Friends Together Again, Virtually

"Researchers engaged in the together anywhere, together anytime (TA2) project seek to make telepresence technology available to households by creating the components needed to build an affordable and easy-to-install in-home telepresence system.

The (un)importance of usage stats

Many of my friends and coworkers place a great deal of importance on web usage stats / web analytics. While the data can be useful, it has always been my opinion that the numbers are very easy to misinterpret. Usage reports provide perfectly accurate data that is very, very difficult to interpret, and should not be used by themselves to make decisions about web sites.

Value: do more hits = bigger value?

Not necessarily.

The Dilbert cartoon web page gets far more hits per day than all of my websites combined get in a year, but the world would be just fine if the Dilbert site went away. Likewise, maybe you have a page that only gets a few hits per month, but the information on it is used by someone to make an important decision.

When I look for something, I often go through several pages to get there, because of:

• wrong guesses by me when navigating a site
• search results that ended up being non-relevant 
• simply clicking through a site to get to what I need (clicking through *to* something causes hits to the site and to pages that are on the way there)

 More hits on a site = users like the site and found it useful?

If I don't give up easily (and I don't, but some people do) I may click through dozens of your pages to find what I'm looking for, even if I never find it and leave unhappy

Page A gets no hits. Why?

• It's useless? probably not, because people don't know that until they hit it. At most it will stop return visits by the same person.
• It's hard to find? If it's misclassified, poorly linked, not in the menu, etc., is this the fault of the page, or the site?
• Its content is not of much use? Maybe to most people, but what if one person visits it and uses the info on it to make a million dollar decision?

Page B gets lots of hits. Does this mean it's a good page?

A page hit does not mean the user liked the page (in the same way that going to a movie doesn't mean you liked the movie). Advertising and previews/trailers get you to movies.

Even repeat visits can't be interpreted as a satisfied user: I have contributed many repeat page hits at microsoft.com and other sites trying to find what I'm looking for, and going back to pages I've already seen because what I need must be there even though I didn't find it the first time; or I was lead back there by a search engine after clicking around the site failed to find it.

My site is getting less or more hits than a year ago, so my site is worth less or more than it was a year ago.

• Has your site changed? (for example, was your site trimmed down by x%?)
• Has your user population changed? (less or more of them than a year ago?)
• Has your site become more well-known, and people are using favorites, shortcuts, links in email and documents, or keywords to get right to what they need instead of browsing in through the front door?
• Did you move/rename something, making it harder to find (especially if you changed the path and broke the aforementioned Favorites/shortcuts/links)? This is one of the things I think web developers don't pay enough attention to: leaving things where they are for sake of those that *already* know where they are; if someone rearranges your grocery store to be more logical, or to fit some bigwig's whim, you're not being very nice to those that already know the layout of the store.
• Did some news announcement cause a peak in user visits? Isn't that more a testament to the power of the media? (Don't movies do well at the box office because of the ad money poured into advertising them? Lots of bad movies have big numbers; seeing a movie doesn't mean the viewer liked it, in the same way that a web page hit doesn't mean that the user found the page useful).

So there's two major themes concerning why it is difficult to tell *anything* with usage stats:

1. a user visit or page hit does not mean they are happy with what they found
2. you can't ascribe value to a hit, because you don't know how valuable the found information is to the user

So what *can* you use stats for?

Well, they can be used in concert with

• survey data (which itself is not especially known for being reliable, and which is more unreliable the longer the survey is); and
• user testing (watching someone trying to perform a task); this is what the pros do, but it's every bit as time-consuming and expensive as you'd imagine it would be

I've found some of the following reports to be somewhat useful (but again, misinterpretation is just as easy to do here):

• single-page visits: which pages do people come to via search result/link/favorite, and then leave?
• entry pages: what pages do people start at?
• exit pages: what is the last page people see before they leave?
• most visited pages

But usually, once I start thinking of ways I might be misinterpreting the data, I end up taking nothing from it.

 

The Technium: Virtual Choir

"Take a look at this virtual choir. It brings 185 voices, all recorded independently at home, and then combined into a virtual choir. Each voice (available on the side of the video) is expert, each face unique; combined they are heavenly." Be sure to full-screen it (the icon of arrows pointing outward)

Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google

"In a recent study of fifth grade students in the Netherlands, most never questioned the credibility of a Web site, even though they had just completed a course on information literacy."

Comodo Time Machine: roll back your PC to a previous state, including every file on every partition

"Comodo Time Machine is a free program that can roll your system back in time, on-demand, to a previous state. It provides the ability to “undo” any kind of undesirable event, such as a virus or malware infestation or any event or events that might have caused your PC to become too cluttered, slow, or unresponsive, by giving you the ability to revert back to a baseline state or to a snapshot of the system taken before the problem started. It also provides the ability to recover any data or files that may have been accidentally deleted, saved-over, or damaged in any way."

Installing the Updated XP Mode which Requires no Hardware Virtualization

The Definitive Guide to Keeping Your PC Up to Date

Google's Matt Cutts explains how search works in layman's terms

Is voice becoming the new text (again)?

"In recent months, however -- despite the pop-culture parodies and the increasing popularity of the text message -- researchers say voice-activated technologies have entered a renaissance of sorts."

Image hosting on the cheap: a look at three free services

Odds Are, It's Wrong

"Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos."

Lifeyo is an incredible content management system for newbies

Free/low cost websites that you can build yourself.

Banish Seven Bad Tech Habits

How to save and share ridiculously large files

Create Polished Mind Maps at Bubbl.us

With discussion of other idea mapping tools in article and comments. (Mind mapping is a catchy, but incorrect, term for what these products do.)

We're so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong

Easily Install Ubuntu Linux with Windows Using the Wubi Installer

DummyImage.com is the Lorem Ipsum of web images

"DummyImage.com is a great time saver for web developers laying out a quick page. It receives arguments in the URL, and returns an image of the exact size, colors, and file format specified. "

Introduction to CSS Web Design

Very, very basic, but a great intro because of that.

SimplyNoise.com - The best free white noise generator on the Internet.

It's true. I like brown noise.

8 HDTV Myths Demystified

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love

Official Google Reader Blog: Follow changes to any website

"Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we're rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don't have their own feed. "

Violent video games make kids hostile?