I have been using Skype for all of my international calling for almost 3 years.  I was coordinating a trip to Europe and discovered that most of my European calls on Skype were around $0.02/minute compared to over a $1/minute from the local telephone company.  When my brother’s family moved to Japan, Skype got even [...]

It has been a few years since I talked about online backup and a break from economic news is probably not a bad thing. An online backup service should have the following features. Require minimal care and feeding. If you have to pay attention to it, it wont happen. Keep previous versions of files that [...]

As people slowly start to migrate to the new Microsoft Office you may start getting files that your current office software doesn’t recognize. Here is the compatibility pack you need to allow your older office software to read the newer formats. Here are some of the new extensions created by the new Word, Powerpoint and [...]

It is time for me to update my Quickbooks license and I thought I would give the new free version of Microsoft’s accounting package a quick spin. Here are some initial impressions. It only wants to import a single year of individual transactions from Quickbooks and will aggregate ones beyond that. It does not export [...]

I have been using the free version of Mozy for the last year now. I had some hiccups while there were still in beta in the spring but since the summer they have been rock solid. They have just released a service with unlimited backup storage for $4.95/mo. If you have a lot of storage, [...]

For those who want to be notified of the latest regulations and the latest thinking in estate planning and asset protection Leimberg has a great “for pay” information service reasonably priced at $24.95/mo. The main subject areas covered are Asset Protection Estate Planning Charitable Planning Employee Benefits and Retirement Plans His sources go from actual [...]

If you have the ability to take pictures and email them with your mobile phone this free service from scanR can turn your phone into a poor man’s scanner.  Having used it a few times, the OCR (optical character recognition) wont work very well unless you have a 2 megapixel camera in your phone (still [...]

To get a quick estimate on how much money or income a reverse mortgage might be able to make available, here are some resources. http://nrmla.edthosting.com/ And here is more information and AARPs own reverse mortgage calculator. Have a great Thanksgiving!

If you take your laptop on travel, or have nightmares about what would happen if someone stole your computer, disk encryption is for you. There are lots of software packages that create encrypted containers (i.e., encrypt only what is in the container).  However, with more and more information being stored in databases and the registry, [...]