I'm experimenting with some new items on the site such as videos and screen steps. I'm in the early stages, but would like to get feedback if you have several minutes. The first video was done for the Excel VLOOKUP tutorial. It's less than 3 minutes in length and should be able to play on a wide variety of devices. Yes, even those of you who use iPads. If people like these videos and think they help, I'll create more. I'm still getting use to the video software so please bear with some of the timing issues. The video can be found at the end of the article's reference section. The plan is to have these videos appear on the site, but for now, you will see them on our video host.

My bank started offering a useful email alert feature. The problem was Google's email filter kept flagging the alerts as spam. Typically, I find the spam filter in Gmail accurate, but in this case, it repeatedly failed. I thought clicking the Not Spam button or adding my bank to my contact list would add an entry to some whitelist. In these cases, the solution involved creating a simple email filter.

Back in the old internet days, people rarely changed email addresses. Today is a different story with people changing jobs and having multiple email addresses. Sometimes email programs don’t want to let go of the old addresses and keep displaying them for us, which can present problems. This happened to a friend of mine who mistakenly sent an email to a colleague’s old work email address. I’ll skip the embarrassing parts and show you an easy way to remove these stale or unwanted addresses from the Google’s auto-complete list.

For long-time readers, my appreciation for the Fitbit is known. I did my first Fitbit product review two years ago when I bought the first device. At that time, it was one of the early home health monitor services designed for consumers. I gave the first product 4 stars. Recently, the company released a new device called the Fitbit Ultra, which I used in parallel testing with the BodyMedia LINK armband. As with the first version, the product impressed me, but it wasn't perfect.

(Note: this review is 1 long page as opposed to breaking it up like I did for BodyMedia. I'm trying to figure what works best for readers.)

This article represents the first of three health monitoring tools (BodyMedia Media Link armband, FitBit Ultra and Zeo Sleep Manager). Each system was tested for a minimum of 10 weeks. The idea behind this series is that our productivity can be impacted by our lifestyle choices about activity, nutrition and sleep. If one or more of these items is out of balance, we're less likely to be at peak performance. Because of the article length and number of screenshots, I've broken down the BodyMedia review into multiple sections instead of having one exceedingly long page. I will post a PDF version of the entire series when done.

This morning I had an interesting problem. I was visiting Nozbe when I received an error from my DNS provider indicating the site had been blocked for phishing. I have a relationship with Nozbe so I figured this was a glitch with my DNS provider who offers an additional security layer. But I also knew that it would probably take time before the fix was made. In times like these, it's good to have a DNS backup plan.

Have you noticed how much online video is on the web or available for download? At first, it was mainly online tutorials that I saw, but now we've got everything from full college courses to "how to" channels on YouTube. While there’s been an explosion of content, I’m still constrained by my time. I needed find a way to speed things up so I could watch more content in the same time. Below are several free and commercial tools that allow you to speed up your videos.

One bad habit I have is letting my Gmail inbox get too big. I don’t always delete emails as fast as I could. These accrued items tend to be non-urgent items I get on a recurring basis that I haven’t flagged as a priority. Eventually, I reach that tipping point and want to delete these Google emails in mass. There are many ways to delete Gmail items, but here’s one tutorial that requires minimal effort and you can do at your own pace.

This month, I bought a new PC and was reminded how much customization that we can do with Windows 7. The problem is that many of these enhancements aren’t apparent to users. Here are 4 quick tweaks that can improve file access, power options and system performance whether you’re on a netbook, notebook or desktop.