Hardly a day goes by without a call or direct mail piece from a charitable organization wanting money. All sound like worthy causes, but how can you really know if your money is being put to good use? The answer is to check out the Better Business Bureau, which has a list of charities and a variety of information that you can use to determine if you’d like to support the cause. Not only can you learn more about the organization, its services and history, but you can see what percentage of monies are used towards the cause, and whether or not it meets the BBB’s Standards of Charity Accountability. The BBB offers a resource library with information on make the most of your charity giving and if you’ve had a problem with a charity you can file a complaint.


To learn more, visit the Better Business Bureau’s Charity information.

If you’re a news junkie wanting up-to-the-minute news on your favorite topics, you need to check out Topicfire. While your regular RSS feeds provide you with current news, Topicfire delivers news in real time.

Simply choose the topics you want current news on:

Then check the news! You’ll hear a little bleep, each time your news feed is updated. Or subscribe to your topic-feed’s Twitter or Facebook feeds.

It happens to everyone. You’re traveling in parts unknown, when someone in the car needs a bathroom. Looking at the car window you see only trees or fields; no sign of a bathroom. But now you have help. Over at SitorSquat.com you can enter a location and find the nearest public bathroom. It even offers bathroom updates (open or closed) and ratings – sit or squat.

If you don’t have a network on the road, you can get the mobile app for iPhone/iTouch, Blackberry, and android phones. Or you can send an SMS text message “sitorsquat” to DOTCOM (368266).

For those who love public bathrooms, there is even a community filled mostly with bathroom humor.

One of the best ways to get a discount is to buy in bulk. With that idea in mind, Groupon has created a site in which people can get big discounts by buying in a group. The best part is that Groupon finds the deals and puts together the group. When members see a deal they want to take advantage of, they “buy” in. If enough people indicate they want in as well, members are billed and sent a Groupon. Business are guaranteed a minimum of customers while the customers get a great deal. Its a win-win.

The types of deals you’ll find vary and include things like $20 for $50 worth of groceries, $20 for a $40 meal at a restaurant, and $45 for $100 worth of apparel.

The downside is that Groupon is only available in 52 major cities throughout the U.S. If you don’t live near a major city, you’re out of luck. However, Groupon does take suggestions and indicates that it will target cities that it receives the most inquiries about.

To learn more, visit Groupon

Journaling is a great way to express thoughts, feelings, concerns, worries, anger…and all those other things that you want to get out but don’t want others to see. The problem is that journal books and blogging aren’t necessarily secure. But Penzu offers a free web-based journaling option that is safe and secure from prying eyes.

Entries made with Penzu are automatically saved and kept private. If you’d like to share your entry with others, you have the option to do that as well. Penzu allows you to add pictures and works with Flickr as well.

A paid version offers even greater security, journal customization, and the ability to past-date entries.

To learn more or to start journaling, visit Penzu.

Its been done with hairstyles and now with cosmetic surgery. You can now upload a “before” photo and see the results (“after”) of cosmetic procedures by visiting Liftmagic.com. Simply upload a photo from your computer, and then use sliding buttons to show various types of changes from brow lifts, lip augmentation, wrinkle removing, neck lift and more. You can email or share your results with others as well.

Visit Liftmagic.com to test it out yourself.

Most of the time we’re working to make sure we don’t accidentally lose information or get a virus that wipes out the computer. But there are times in which you want to erase a hard drive. Perhaps you’re selling or giving your computer away and don’t want traces of your files left on it. If you watch any forensic science show, you know that simply deleting a file isn’t enough to get it off the hard drive. But using a free resources such as DBAN can wipe the drive clean.

When you download DBAN you need to burn the file to a CD and then use the CD like a boot disk. You can learn more and get your free copy at DBAN.org

“If your food and wine adventures are more about the journey than the destination, Behind the Burner is the perfect place to explore your culinary desires.” From BehindTheBurner.

BehindtheBurner.com offers advice, tricks and secrets from the country’s top chefs. Learn about the chefs’ and restaurateurs, watch videos of chef’s cooking signature foods (I liked the chocolate french toast by Chef Peyard – Chocolate Epiphany), and read articles on everything from wine and travel, to how-to and health. Plus you can get great recipes.

If cooking (and eating) is your life, be sure to visit BehindtheBurner.com.

Tired of unwanted mail cluttering up your mail box and your trash can? You can stop unwanted junk mail and catalogs by contacting the Direct Marketing Association. Visit DMAChoice.org where you can indicate what mail you’d like to receive and what mail you don’t. You can eliminate mail by category (credit offers, catalogs, magazines offers, etc) or by specific companies.

Give your mailbox a make over, visit DMAChoice.org

Several years ago my daughter was online searching the web for pictures of kittens. Apparently our kid-safe protocols weren’t set and she ended up finding sites that didn’t have kittens in the feline sense of the word. After getting over the shock and resetting the parent controls, we felt better, but still wondered what kinds of other searches would result in questionnable content. With all the tricks that some web people use to dupe search engines and secure protocols, we couldn’t trust that our kids were 100% safe.

Recently I discovered KidRex a kid-safe search engine. Using Google’s Custom Search and Safe Search, as well as checking sites against its own database of inappropriate sites, KidRex strives to offer kids a safe place to find information on the Internet. KidRex says that it filters to remove sexual content, but it doesn’t indicate if it also screens for violence, hate, etc. It admits that the engine isn’t 100% safe as some sites may slip through the filters. To that end it provides a way to submit information about inappropriate sites to its database for future exclusion.

The search page is much like Google’s in that there is very little but the search box on the page. With a crayon picture of a dinosaur its geared towards young children. Because of that and because filters aren’t 100%, parents will still want to screen what their children are finding online. But its a good starting point to keeping children safe from inappropriate material.

To learn more visit KidRex.com