Copywriter, technical writer, translator (FR>EN, ES>EN, IT>EN), journalist

TechnoZen

Limit your screen time

If you know me, this might sound funny coming from me: I encourage people to get away from screens of all kinds, computer, TV, phone and otherwise, as often as they can. I actually follow this advice. For instance, the main reason I don’t have an iPad

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Hi-tech tips for small firms

This is the second of a two-part series. To read part one, click here. You might think small law firms have small budgets, but they don’t all act like it. Thank technology, which is getting better and cheaper all the time, for letting savvy lawyers build big-firm

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10 smartphone security tips

Ryan Fahey at InfoSec Institute sent me an article about security tips for Android phones. After I read it, I realized the title of the article implies a scope much narrower than the article offers. The tips in this article go beyond just Android – they apply to

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Getting website statistics

For a self-described geek, I don’t spend enough time tracking my website’s performance or improving upon it. Then I got a message via my website’s contact form that got me thinking about my site’s place on the web.

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Technology makes work possible for office-less lawyers

Doug Simpson practises law and runs Legal Systematics, his online form and document assembly business, from all sorts of places. He works from home offices in the Toronto suburb of Burlington as well as Victoria Harbour, on the shores of Georgian Bay. He meets clients at their

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Pulling text out of PDFs

My favorite way to research is to ask questions of subject matter experts. They take you right to the core of a topic and help you consider angles you didn’t know about. My second-favorite way to research is to read documents online and pull text from them

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Mind those annoying patent trolls

They’re known as NPEs, or non-practising entities. Their reason for being is to make money from the patents that an operating company uses in its products. If a letter arrives from one, here’s why it should not be tossed in the trash. There’s a certain type of

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The most common reason computers slow down

Your computer has been running well for a long time, but lately it’s been limping along. Why is that? Here’s the most common reason:

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Securing your LinkedIn account

Over the past year or so, well-publicized hacks into email services and social networks have prompted me to change several passwords. Of particular concern is all the spam I get from Yahoo addresses. The problem has died off, but several months ago I must have sent an

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Rescuing my time

I won’t say I get distracted too much during the workday, but I’d like to know how productive I am without having to manually track my time. So for the past few months, I’ve been using RescueTime. In essence, RescueTime tallies the time you spend using specific

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