Use Facial Recognition to log on to your computer

Yes, it is possible and more importantly, free!  Try KeyLemon.  This clever biometric tool uses your webcam to scan your face each time you log into Windows.  Once you have been identified, you're logged straight into Windows without having to touch your keyboard.  The process is fast and completely automatic.  The software is incredibly simple to set up and use, and the free version of Keylemon has all the features you need to keep your data safe.  I owned the paid version and can verify that it works, very well. 

50GB of free online storage with Mega

Another cloud storage site has popped up, with 50GB of free storage.  There is no restrictions on the size of files you'd like to upload to the service.  The best part of the deal is that Mega is the Fort Knox of the file uploaders.  Mega uses AES 128 bit encryption, alongside with 2048 bit RSA keys to maintain the anonymity of files both stored on and shared via the service.    Strong piece of advice...do not lose your password, or you are out of luck, Mega cannot help you retrieve it.  I've signed up and it works pretty well, even an IOS app!  Sign up here.

Yes, you can download Wikipedia...all of Wikipedia.. Part Two

An open source application automates the process of downloading and displaying all of Wikipedia on your desktop, a large task that takes more than a day to complete.

Dubbed Xowa, the software displays an offline copy of 4.4 million Wikipedia articles with full HTML formatting intact. You can even set up additional wikis, like Wiktionary or Wikquote, and navigate between them while offline. For example, you could "Click on 'Look up this word in Wiktionary' and instantly view the page in Wiktionary."

Xowa has been around for a while with support for "Simple Wikipedia," which has just a fraction of the full collaborative dictionary. It was updated yesterday with support for the entire English language-version of Wikipedia.

The SourceForge project page describes:

English Wikipedia has a lot of data. There are 13.9+ million pages with 20.0+ GB of text, as well as 3.7+ million thumbnails.

Setting all this up on your computer will not be a quick process... The import itself will require 80GB of disk space and five hours processing time for the text version. If you want images as well, the numbers increase to 100GB of disk space and 30 hours of processing time. However, when you are done, you will have a complete, recent copy of English Wikipedia with images that can fit on a 128GB SD card.

Although at least 80GB of disk space is used during setup, the wiki files end up being reduced to 25GB after the deletion of a 45GB temporary file and other cleanup.

Besides wiki data dumps and images from the Wikimedia Foundation, Xowa primarily consists of XUL Runner, a Firefox runtime environment; Java; and SWT, the Standard Widget Toolkit for Java.

If you want a download and setup that won't take an entire day, the Xowa developers recommend starting with Simple Wikipedia. "Simple Wikipedia has 184,000 pages and 90,000 images," Xowa writes. "The text version uses 200MB and sets up in five minutes. With images, this expands to 2GB and 30 minutes of downloading time. Simple Wikipedia is a reasonably accurate simulation of English Wikipedia—just much smaller."

Your Xowa-powered offline wiki, simple or not, can run on Windows, Linux, or OS X and can be updated any time from Wikimedia's database backups.

Do yourself a favor...AVOID Black Friday deals..

Somewhere between the turkey and the eggnog, someone in your family is almost certainly going to mention their plans to pick up a cheap tablet or TV set. Or maybe someone will bring up the nearest mall electronics store’s “amazing” deals on HDMI cables. The holidays are no time to slack on the year-round battle that comes from being more tech-savvy than other members of the family; in fact, the end of the year requires extra vigilance to stop those nearest and dearest to you from letting the consumer electronics manufacturer/retailer train take them for an unholy ride. Without our help, family members can all too easily spend too much of their money on bad, outdated, or overpriced products.

Quite simply, most deals are not really great deals.  Most of the "doorbuster" deals are cheap for a reason, nobody would buy them during the rest of the year.  Remember, you get what you paid for.  If it is cheap, chances are in a couple of months, you will be upset when it starts to fail.  Don't be...it was cheap for a reason. 

Avoid any tablet under $150 or that you have never heard of.  If you do not, please do not call me to help troubleshoot it. 

But no cable or accessory at ANY store.  If you want a cheap price on a good product, check out monoprice.com for your cable needs.  Top quality, better price.

DO NOT TRUST THE "PRICE CUT" listed in the store circular.  Quite simply, just because a store says it is $200 off does not mean they are telling the truth.  Often, the sale price is the actual regular price, you just do not realize it. 

You could exhaust yourself debunking every electronics deal your you and your family goes after, but education is your best weapon. A few basic principles go a long way: namely, doing your Internet research and comparison shopping on online outlets, where there are often identical products for similar prices. Below are a few good references for information and comparison:

• Newegg, for cheap computer components
• Monoprice, for cheap cables and networking items
• Nextag, for viewing price histories of various products
• Amazon, slightly more of a crapshoot for electronics, but it can have good sales
• The Wirecutter, for readable guides and clear-cut picks for the best of different product categories

If nothing else, appeal to emotion: instead of waking up in the dark, waiting in the cold, and trying not to rain blows upon your fellow shoppers, wouldn’t it be so much nicer to wake up early Black Friday, get some Thanksgiving leftovers and eggnog, and then crawl back to bed and buy things online?  It's actually cheaper there. 

Google rolls out extension for hands-free search in Chrome

Google has brought the Moto X's excellent hands-free voice control feature to the desktop. With the Google Voice Search Hotword extension, users can now say "OK, Google" to instruct the browser to search for anything they need, including measurements, weather, and directions. The app is currently in beta, and can be downloaded from the Chrome Web Store.

A Firefox extension - a way to stop webpages that take too long to load

A lot of times it happens that the web page you’re trying to reach keeps loading for an indefinite period of time. On the webmaster’s side, it’s usually an indication of poor site optimization, excessive use of scripts, quirky server response time, or many other reasons. While on the user front, it causes several issues, including excessive use of internet bandwidth and system resources being the worst of the bunch. Of course, you can manually stop a website from further loading via clicking the Stop button on your web browser, but if it’s a constant issue you’re facing with a website that you regularly visit, then you may want an automatic solution. This is where KillSpinners for Mozilla Firefox comes to the rescue. It is a small add-on for Firefox that prevents pages from loading for an excesive amount of time by overriding the default load pattern of a website with a user-specified time interval.

This is how KillSpinners works: Let’s say you set the time interval for allowing sites to load to 20 seconds, then any website that doesn’t stop ‘spinning’ (in reference to the spinner in its tab while its loading) during that time will be automatically stopped from loading further by KillSpinners. The extension is very easy to use, and handles everything on its on.

KillSpinners kicks in when it notices that a website hasn’t stopped loading after 30 seconds, the default timeout of the extension. A notification is also shown beneath the URL bar stating that KillSpinners has prevented the page from further loading. You can modify the default time interval to however you prefer from the add-on’s Options screen.