I get really excited when it comes to devices that can be used by military personnel or spies.  The Mandylion Password Manager is one such device.  For some reason, I think that my data is more important than it actually is and therefore I must store it accordingly. The manager can  store and generate up to 50 passwords simultaneously with military grade protection.  It is also ultra light and can fit on your keychain so that you can have access to it whenever you need the information.  To get into your "token," you must key in your own unique finger pattern with the keys on the front, making it extra secure.  It also has a "self-destruct" mode in case it falls into the wrong set of hands.

If you're having problems with your iPod, here are some troubleshooting tips to try before taking your iPod back to the store. Some of these tips are available elsewhere, but since I see these problems at our tech support desk all the time, it's worth reprinting.  1. Check to make sure the iPod is not on hold I know this is a simple fix, but with laptops and mp3 players alike I have seen it many times, and it's the first check. The hold switch is on top of the unit - make sure there is no red showing.

I thought this was an amusing story and thought I would share it. It's also a good method for recovering data from a drive with a heat failure. I got a frantic call one day from one of my customers. He is an orthopedic surgeon, and he also lectures on the subject. His main computer at his home had a weird problem. It would run for about 10 minutes, and then freeze. At first, I thought it was some strange virus or mail zombie, but upon closer inspection, I noticed that the drive would begin making strange noises after about 10 minutes. He had some lectures on there that he needed in a day or so. I had an idea.

It appears that the Google PageRank update (or 'export' to be more exact) that has started and stopped a couple of times over the past weeks is picking up momentum again. We are now showing different page ranks for all of our sites across the various datacenters. This article will provide you with some tools to help you dissect what your site's current page rank is, why it is there, and where it's going. A website's page rank helps determine a site's position in Google's search results for any given search term. Page rank is continually updated internally, but this information is only publicly updated every quarter or so. Because high page ranks can mean big advertising business for websites, the public rollouts are highly anticipated, and many tools have been developed to help predict future page rank scores and to recognize updates as soon as they begin. The following is a list of some sites that let you check your current page rank across various datacenters:

Last week I spilled orange juice on my keyboard.  I ended up having to pry each individual key off with a paper clip then clean each key out with a q-tip to get it to work again.  This tells me two things: 1) I am not mature enough to drink juice at my desk, and 2) I need a liquid resistant keyboard.  The folks at Man & Machine sent over their Really Cool Water Resistant Keyboard -  no joke, that is the name of the product. Oh, and it is really cool.  The keyboard is made of 100% silicone rubber.  And although it wasn't the most comfortable, touch sensitive keyboard, it did stand up against my various tests.

Editor’s note: Liz is a tech support person and all-around electro-guru. She’s got all kinds of random fix-it tips running around in her brain, some of which occasionally make it to paper (or pixels in this case). Here are her tips for what to check with your laptop before spending the time and money to bring it to, well, her. 1. Remove the battery and plug it in with an AC adapter. If your laptop works fine with just the AC adapter, it means your battery is bad and you need a new one. I can't tell you how many of these I see a day. You can order a new battery from your retailer or manufacturer. 2. Non-Destructive Restore- to do this, restart your computer and press the F11 key during the bootup process. Select "Non-Destructive System Restore" as the option. If there is no option to do this (such as on Toshiba or Dell notebooks), do not restore the laptop unless you are prepared to lose all your data. It’s always a good idea to back up your important files before doing any kind of restore.

Editor’s note: In a popular article “How-to: Get viruses and slow your PC to a crawl,” Jeff explained exactly what to do in order to catch viruses and otherwise debilitate your machine. We recognize that there are some of you out there who just won't listen. Maybe your desire for those little animated icons is too great or you've got to have the latest Nickelback song but you just can't bring yourself to pay for it (we don't blame you for the latter). Here, Liz suggests a few ways to have your cake and eat it too. For the record, we don't recommend putting your computer at risk. As Jeff's article shows, one wrong click could land your computer in some pretty dire straits.

I have been hearing rumblings around the office lately about OpenOffice, the multilingual, multiplatform, FREE office suite. One of my coworkers was a beta tester for Excel 2007, and had several complaints. He was telling me that everyone should be using OpenOffice anyway, including our company. I was suspicious of his enthusiasm and decided to do a little bit of research to find out the whole story. For those of you who are not familiar with OpenOffice, it is an office suite (like Microsoft Office) that utilizes open source code. Open source means that source code is made public so that any programmer or layperson who can write code can copy, fix or redistribute the open source material. The suite is comprised of Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (multimedia presentations), Draw (graphics), Base (database manipulator), and Math (formulas and equations with graphic user interface).

There are so many things I hear people say at my job that annoy me and make me less apt to help a them. Usually these comments display ignorance and an ineptitude for learning. This makes me shut up, take their money, and move on to the next person. Here is my top 10 list of "annoying things customers say that get them on the tech's bad side."

When you open Microsoft Word, do you find yourself repeating the same ritual? Changing margin sizes, changing to Print view, adding tab settings, setting a default font, etc.? Isn't it annoying? Well, you can set it so don't have to do this every time - just change your normal.dot file. What the heck is that? It’s the default document that Word uses when you start it up. You can customize it any way you want. Here’s what you do: