For the longest time Verizon and other wireless customer were at a loss when they lost their phone, got it wet or had it stolen. They would be forced to enter everything back in manually and in order to do so, borrow your friend or family’s phone at the same time. I’ve been a Verizon Wireless customer for three years plus and during that time I have lost and/or damaged a couple of phones, but have been able to recover my contacts due to a handy Get It Now application called “Backup Assistant.” At $4.95/month it was a great service that could automatically sync your contacts on a regular basis.

Just this week Verizon announced that they have added automatic synchronization with the Plaxo Mobile Access service at $4.95/month. Plaxo has the ability to synchronize your contacts with various applications, such as Outlook, Thunderbird, GMail and Yahoo. What this means, is that non smart phone, Verizon, customers can maintain their contacts in their preferred application and it will synchronize to the Plaxo service. You can than set Plaxo to automatically sync to your phone on a regular basis automatically.

More Information:

Before I began using Firefox, I used a IE mod called Avant Browser. Avant was fantastic at the time, it added Tabbed browsing, themes, domain aliases and a little thing called quick searching. If if you are all familiar with Firefox, you are probably familiar with Quick Searching. In my opinion, it eliminates the Search box, which is by default, turned on, in Firefox…Screenshot:

Quick Searching allows you to use the address bar to search virtually any website that has search functionality and you know the proper code. If you look in your bookmarks, you will find a folder called “Quick Searches”. Your quick searches are NOT required to be in this directory however. You can save them anywhere within your Bookmarks. This is where you will find the most difficult part, defining the location. By default Firefox gives you Google, Dictionary.com and Wikipedia, amongst a few others.

The easiest way to modify or add a quick search is to go to Bookmarks>Manage Bookmarks. Once there either click “New Bookmark” or right click on an existing and select “Properties” to change an existing one.
Here is what you’ll see now:

The “Name” is what you will see displayed in your Bookmarks
The “Location” is query code. The %s is required at the end of the code.
The “Keyword” is what you’ll type in the address bar to initialize the search. I like to use one letter, but I don’t think there is a limit as to what you can type. Firefox has “Goog” as their default.

So, for example, if wanted to search for anything on the NFL, I’d type:

As long as there is a space between the “g” and your query, it will work. That’s basically the lowdown on Quick Searching. To help you out, I’ve decided to add some of my Quick Searching Locations for you to add yourself:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=br_ss_hs/103-4029541-0406217?platform=
gurupa&url=index%3Dblended&keywords=%s

Answers

http://www.answers.com/%s

BoxOfficeMojo

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/search/?q=%s

Digg

http://www.digg.com/search?area=all&age=all&sort=new&search-buried=1&s=%s

Download.com

http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?qt=%s

Ebay
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?cgiurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2F
ws%2F&fkr=1&from=R8&satitle=%s

Google Maps

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s

IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s

NewEgg
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?DEPA=0&type=&Description=%s&Submit=
ENE&Ntk=all&N=0&minPrice=&maxPrice=&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

Pricegrabber

http://www.pricegrabber.com/search.php?form_keyword=%s

Weather

http://www.weather.com/weather/local/%s

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

(Please Consult Your Manual for Wireless Router Security Configuration)

Steve Gibson is one the smartest internet Security experts on the web. You can listen to his podcast over at www.twit.tv called Security Now. A weekly show with host Leo Laporte about Security Vulnerabilities, applications and fine tuning. Some of the early episodes they discussed Wireless routers and securing them with various options, with one of the strongest being WPA-PSK.

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I really fell in love with Firefox after forcing myself to use it and some of the wonderful extensions with it. I’ll soon be posting my favorite extensions and instructions on using some of them, but for this post I’m going to show you a wonderful fix to annoying problem with Firefox 1.5.0.6.

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UPDATE: For WordPress Users, there has been a plugin released: WP-Simpleviewer

After spending nearly 10 hours attempting to figure out how to integrate the fantastic Simpleviewer photo gallery into my blog posts….I finally figured out a painless and insanely easy way to do it. So for my first ever official post, I’m going to give you a quick run through.

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