Easy Tech Tips: Scribd, VCFs, Battery care, App Summo, Google Alerts

Scribd: Share your PDFs – Scribd is a online service where you can upload your PDFs or ebooks to share with your friends and followers. The site stores your pdfs and displays them in a browser. You can track how many times a PDF has been viewed and downloaded. You can make your PDFs private just for storage. Learn more at http://www.scribd.com/.

Attach VCF to email signature – This tip is for Mac users who use Mail. You can export a .vcf file and share it in your email signature. Other iPhone users can simply touch the .vcf and save it as a complete contact. Use the program Mail to set up your signature. Open Address Book and create a new card with your information. Export the single vcard to your desktop, then drag and drop it into the signature window.

Freerice - Build your Vocab – Work on your vocabulary and contribute to the World Food Programme at the same time by playing a word trivia game on freerice.com. You don’t need to register to play. When you get one wrong, it tells you the right answer. As you continue playing, any that you miss cycle back through to reinforce the words’ meanings into your memory. This site has been around for a while and is a great way to pass time.

Care for your Batteries – Lithium Ion batteries have an average number of cycles to run through before they loose their ability to keep a charge. Taking proper care of your battery in your computer to help it last. If you plan to store any device for more than a month, make sure the battery has a 50 percent charge. Storing a battery at full or no charge can result in a shorter battery life. Here are some tips to optimize a battery while in use: Turn down the brightness of your screen/display. Turn off any wi-fi or ethernet connections as well when they are not in use. Close any applications that do not need to be open. If you use Bluetooth, make sure it is turned off as often as possible. Plug your laptop into an outlet when you watch movies rather than cause continuous stress on the battery.

AppSumo: Daily Deals for Geeks – Sign up for daily email blasts, or follow their Facebook and Twitter feeds, for great web deals. There are so many fantastic apps and products out there to improve your workflow, so AppSumo can help keep you up to date with what's available on the web. Also, some apps go on sale for FREE for a 24 hour period! So let AppSumo keep you in the know.

Send an email privately – If you’re concerned about the privacy of the email addresses when you need to send an email to a list of people, use the bbc: field instead of the to: field to send your email. The bbc: addresses will only be visible to the sender and the receiver. Be considerate when sending mail to a list of people who may not want their contact information shared to other recipients of your mail.

Sign up for Google Alerts – You can sign up for daily Google email alerts for when there is any new content that Google has found on a certain subject. First, go to google.com. From there, you can type in any keywords that you want to track, and filter the results by type: news, blog, video and others. Your search query could be your name in quotations, your company or something that interests you. The more specific the query, the better. You do not want to sign up for a simple keyword like “Aiken”! The e-mailed results will fill your inbox unless you narrow the search. Set yours up at http://www.google.com/alerts.

Send your tech tips to webteam@aikenstandard.com.

Look for more tech tips on the comics page of the Aiken Standard Monday through Saturday, or in the Technology section of aikenstandard.com/technology.