Your Nerdy Best Friend

Want attendees at your events to hang on the speaker’s every word? Use keywords from the presentation to create custom bingo cards. Attendees listen for the word or term, cross them off then win prizes for five in a row!

I discovered this great site for creating your own cards: Print-Bingo. You can generate up to five pages of cards for free, but it makes sense to pay the whopping $12 for three years of access and unlimited cards.

Five Tips for Making Your Own Bingo Cards:

1. You can choose 1, 2 or 4 cards per page. Yes, it’ll save paper if you put more on a page, but you’ll have to cut all the cards to size.
2. The site generates a PDF document, which I converted to a PowerPoint document (using a free tool). Then I modified the PowerPoint theme so that my cards had my logo and a lot of color.
3. If you’re going to add your logo in the PowerPoint template, leave the center space blank so your logo is front and center.
4. Customize your cards even more by changing “BINGO” to a custom word. I chose “Nerdy.”
5. Watch the size of your fonts during the conversion. Bigger fonts seemed to knock everything out of alignment when I converted to PowerPoint.

Ok, it’s time to have a serious conversation about your computer security. When 6.5 million passwords were hacked at LinkedIn, we all had a wake up call about our passwords and web habits. One of the most common mistakes we make, besides picking passwords that are too easy, is that we use the same password for multiple sites. And if a bad guy has our username and password from one site, he could try the password out on other sites and eventually get to some pretty valuable information.

YUCK!

It’s time to truly take charge of your password and internet security issues. LastPass is a free, cloud-based tool that allows you to create one master password to gain access to all your sites. Further, I love that as soon as you install it, it scrapes all the sites in your browser history to show you just how many you have and how insecure you really are.

I am registered on 121 sites right now, and 81 of those had the same password. Bad, bad nerd! I downloaded LastPass, and I’m slowly working my way through all the sites, changing the passwords and storing them in LastPass, which is accessible in any browser.

It’s a little disconcerting to put everything in LastPass’ hands, but cnet, PCWorld and lifehacker all give it a thumbs up.

My advice: Computer security can’t wait until you have a free afternoon to spare. Make time to make these changes this week so you can rest assured that you’re a little safer online.

Here’s a video overview of LastPass:

LastPass – Password Manager, Form Filler, Password Management.

I created this mockup of a CD for my webinar series in seconds with Online 3DPackage. Just choose a template (such as a book, a box or a CD), and upload your pictures. The site renders your 3D graphic in seconds, and you can download in PNG, JPG or GIF formats. Way cool and free, just like we like it.

Note… the site lets you download the graphics, but they have a lot of unnecessary white space and a watermark. I used Pixlr.com to crop the graphic in seconds.

Watch this 2-minute video for an overview.

Online 3DPackage

I’m excited to announce that my friends at Xobni have made one of my favorite tools even better. Originally an amazing tool for Microsoft Outlook, now Xobni organizes your contacts and more on your smartphones and in Gmail. Here’s an update the company sent me last week:

Not only can you use Xobni with Outlook, but you can also use Xobni with your iPhone, Android or BlackBerry.  Smartr Contacts by Xobni enables you to access all your contacts from any Xobni or Smartr App, when you’re on the go!

With these apps on your phone, you’ll never need to manage your address book again.  Smartr Contacts pulls in all the existing contacts on your phone AND it pulls in information from your email, calendar and social networks. Each contact is not just a name on your phone, but Smartr Contacts imports photos, and recent updates from social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Most importantly, it pulls all the information for a person into one contact–you’ll no longer have six entries for the same person and all these contacts are ranked contacts by those you interact with the most. Each contact profile is complete with all the email addresses and phone numbers for that person and a history of the most recent interactions and emails, and even a list of contacts you share in common.

Lifehacker named Smartr Contacts “The Best Address Book Apps” for both iPhone and Android. 

Click here to get started right away with Smartr Contacts:
Smartr Contacts for iPhone
Smartr Contacts for Android
Smartr Contacts for BlackBerry

Here are some videos if you’d like to see the apps in action:
Smartr Contacts for iPhone

Smartr Contacts for Android

Xobni | Your smarter address book is waiting.

Need a custom cartoon for your marketing? ToonDoo makes it easy — and free! They have hundreds of stock backgrounds, clipart and people, or you can create your own images. My masterpiece (above) took about 45 minutes. You can create online cartoons or buy a high-res version for marketing use. Way cool and super fast.

Nerd Life by askbethz – ToonDoo – Worlds fastest way to create cartoons!.

Ever feel like your project is lost in a sea of emails and missed deadlines? Check out the excerpt from the book “Upgrade to Free: The Best Free and Low-Cost Online Tools and Apps” for an overview of some of the best project management tools, free and paid.

Here’s a quick, easy way to make your resume more appealing so it stands out in a crowd.

Vizualize.me is a free site that lets you connect your LinkedIn profile to an online graphic resume. In seconds, you can have a fun, colorful representation of your skills, experience and education, plus a handy list of your recommendations.

Watch the brief video to see how easy it is to make…

Take your job hunting or networking a step further by turning your Vizualize resume into a t-shirt for about thirty bucks. Clever, clever.

vizualize.me.

My experience as a copywriter revealed to me the secret insecurities that many people have about their writing. Incredibly intelligent people with excellent communication skills would cringe when they handed me a first draft of a piece they wanted me to shape.

With visions of former English teachers in their heads, they fretted about grammar, spelling and word choice, forever concerned that they were making the mistakes that they made when they were in school.

Most of the time, they had nothing to worry about, but a clever, anonymous tool can help restore a writer’s confidence, no matter his level.

Just paste text into a text box at www.PaperRater.com and receive instant feedback about spelling, grammar, word choice and more. It’ll even analyze your sentence structure and vocabulary use to give you an overall grade, just like your English teacher used to give.

Designed to help students improve their writing, this tool is completely free and a little addictive. I ran several of my published pieces through the analysis and was surprised by the little errors I had missed.

Oh, and I ran this post through PaperRater — I earned a “B.” Harumph. Paper Rater Blog Analysis.

Paper Rater: Free Online Grammar Checker, Proofreader and More.

It’s not too late to do something a little special for your Valentine, thanks to these three free tools:

1. Send A Tagxedo Heart
   Get creative with a word art graphic from Tagxedo with key words about the one you love.
   
2. Record an Eyejot Email Video
   Eyejot is a super cool site that lets you create quick video messages to send via email.
   
3.  Customize a Candy Heart
   Use the Candy Heart Generator to create your own message on the classic candy heart!
   

Happy New Year!

If you’re like me (and most of the country), you’re probably making promises to yourself that this year you’ll eat less, move more and work more effectively.

Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard it (and done it) all before. But I just discovered a tool that may help! Experts say it takes 21 days to make or break a habit, and 21habit is a simple tool to help you through it.

You set up a goal to do (or not do) something every day, and every day for 3 weeks you’ll get an email or check in at the website to report on your progress.

A free plan has no real ramifications, but sign up in Committed Mode, and you invest $21 toward your challenge. Every day you succeed, you get a buck back. If you fail (or don’t check in for three days), you lose a buck. Your money will be donated to a list of 21habit charities.

I’m committing to start getting in shape for my marathon (read the very important reason I’m doing it here), so I’ll report back to you in 21 days on my progress!

21habit