Changes
Yahoo Mail, the basis for AT&T’s webmail, has changed its look and increased its storage limits. Although it is not truly unlimited, for most people, the inbox is open to keep all your email. This lets smartphone users, who use IMAP to read their ATT email, not worry any more about filling up their inbox. I still would suggest deleting or move email out of your inbox, just to avoid loosing email below the first page of messages. And, if you use their webmail, now you should be able to preview attachments without having to always download them.
Recover wasted disk space with Windows Update Cleanup. With the recent set of updates from Microsoft for Windows 7 Service Pack 1, Microsoft now will let you clean out no longer needed Update downloads, thus freeing up more disk space. This is part of the Disk Cleanup tool, when you run it, there will be a checkable box for Windows Update Cleanup.
Facebook public posts are now fully searchable using their “wonderful” Graph Search. This might be great for HR departments and banks seeking to determine your credit worthiness, but it means that you have to spend more time again going through your privacy settings. These are accessed through the Privacy Settings menu under the gear icon in the upper right corner of your Facebook window. You may want to spend time reviewing these and if you are seeking guidance for safe settings, you can use your favorite web search engine for something like “Facebook privacy settings guide” to see what you might want to change. It is getting hard to prevent someone from finding your Facebook profile, unless you pretty much don’t friend anyone or don’t share anything with anyone. In other words, if you don’t want someone to find you, drop out of Facebook.
Changes in Google’s Terms of Service, you may have been seeing a notice about this when visiting google.com, could mean your photo, name, or something positive you said about a product, could end up in one of their ads. Changes that go live on November 11th apply especially to those using +1, comments or followings though Google+. At least Google does let you change your Shared Endorsements setting, the location of which you might have to “search” for. And, this would be a good time to check any and all of your Google privacy settings also.
One way to make a to do list more productive is to actually put items on your computer calendar as that pretty much forces you to layout how much time your “appointment” will take. This way, you actually have to estimate the time required for different tasks encouraging you to get more of them done in their true order of importance.