Leaving Reader to Die: How to Import your Google Reader Feeds to RSSOwl

By: Bob Kingsley

Google Reader has been helping its users aggregate and read RSS feeds since 2005. Its ease of use and universal availability has made it a widely used tool for this function. Given its popularity and positioning as a scion of web giant Google, many Reader users may be surprised to find their RSS reader of choice is living on borrowed time. Google has plans in place to shut down its Reader service on July 1^st, 2013.

Connect to a second exchange mailbox in Outlook 2010

Topic: Connect to a second exchange mailbox in Outlook 2010

Adding a second mailbox in Outlook in an exchange environment can be useful for both the network admin or the user needed access to an old employee's messages.

Steps: How to add a second mailbox in Outlook 2010

Click File from the file menu and hover over Info. Choose Account Settings and then Account Settings... again from the drop down menu.

Apple granted design patent for turning pages

Since the announced departure of Apple iOS chief Scott Forstall, much has been written about skeuomorphism -- the practice of designing things to look like their real-world counterparts. Apple has made a heavy practice of it in its software, and now the company has another part of that experience patented in the U.S.
 
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week granted a rather noteworthy design patent for the digital equivalent of the page turn (PDF), that time-honored tradition of flipping pages while looking through a book, a magazine, or other stack of bound paper.

Apple filed for the patent, which was spotted earlier this week by The Register, on December 19, 2011. That's well after the release of Apple's iBooks software, which came out in April 2010 and employs a similar on-screen page-turning mechanism that looks just like the one in the patent drawings.

To be clear, this is a design patent and doesn't actually cover the computational underpinnings of flipping pages virtually. Unlike a utility patent, which would include various claims for things the patent does and does not cover, this type of patent is designed to protect the look and feel of the software in the event of any lawsuits. That's an important difference given any potential legal fight in which this patent could be brought out.

Apple is not the first company to go after the virtual page turn. As part of its now-defunct Courier tablet project, Microsoft applied for -- though has not yet been granted -- a utility patent for the feature in early 2009, something that caused a bit of a stir at the time. Samsung also applied for its own such page turning patent in Europe last October, and Google was granted a design patent near the end of 2010 for page turning on a "communications terminal."

 (via cnet)

How To Fix "The User Profile Service failed the logon" Error

A Windows profile can at times become corrupted, not load, and give this failed logon error.

Here is the simplest solution from Microsoft that has worked every time I've encountered the problem:

Quickly Save Screenshots With PrtScr

Taking screenshots on a Windows OS can be done in many ways. You can use 3^rd party software such as Shutter, Greenshot, or Screenshot Utility. The simplest default way, unfortunately, is to press the PrtScn button on the keyboard, open the Paint program, paste it, and then save it as an image. This is unnecessary and can take a lot of time depending on the amount of screenshots you’re taking. To avoid this hassle and breeze right through your captures, consider using FiaStarta’s program PrtScr.

PrtScr allows dead simple and super quick options for saving screenshots. After install and upon its first run, access the default settings by right-clicking the icon in the taskbar and choosing Show settings.