It’s a sinking feeling because there’re so many confidential documents on the computer and since most of your trusted colleagues have also left for the day, there’s no point calling them for help.

So what do you do? Drive back to Office? Well that’s not required – just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation. And if you share the same computer with multiple people, you can use another email command to remotely log off or even shut down the computer from anywhere in the world.

There’s no magic here, it’s the power of TweetMyPC utility that lets you remote control your computer from a mobile phone or any other Internet connected computer.

It works like this. You first install the free TweetMyPC utility on any Windows PC and associate your Twitter account. The app will silently monitor your Twitter stream every minute for any desktop commands and if it finds one, will act upon it immediately. The initial version of TweetMyPC was limited to basic shutdown and restart commands, however the current v2 has a far more robust set of commands, enabling a far more useful way of getting your PC to carry out certain tasks especially when you’re AFK (Away From Keyboard).

Before we get started, it may be a good thing if you can set up a new twitter account for remote controlling your desktop and also protect the status updates of this account to ensure better security.

Protecting the account means that you prevent other users from reading your tweets which in this case are email commands that you sending to the computer. To protect your Twitter profile, log in to Twitter with the credentials you want to use, click Settings and check the box next to “Protect my Updates”.

Let’s get started. Install the TweetMyPC utility of your computer and associate your Twitter and Gmail account with the application. It will use Twitter to receive remote commands (like shutdown, log-off, lock workstation, etc) from while the email account will be used for send your information (e.g., what process are currently running on your computer).

How to Send Commands to the Remote Computer

Now that your basic configuration is done, it’s time to set up a posting method. You can use email, SMS, IM, web or any of the Twitter clients to send commands to the remote computer.

By Email: Associate you Twitter account with Posterous (auto-post) and all email messages sent to twitter@posterous.com will therefore become commands for the remote computer.

By SMS: If you live in US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, Sweden or New Zeleand, you can send associate Twitter with your mobile phone (see list of numbers) and then control your remote computer via SMS Text Messages.

By IM: Add the Twitter bot – twitter@twitter.com – to your list of Google Talk buddies and you can then send commands via instant message.

By Web:If you are on vacation but have access to an internet connected laptop, just log into the Twitter website and issue commands (e.g., shutdown or logoff) just as another tweet.

Download Files, Capture Remote Screenshots & more..

While the TweetMyPC is pretty good for shutting down a remote computer, it lets you do some more awesome stuff as well.

For instance, you need to download an unfinished presentation from the office computer so that you can work on it at home. Or you want to download a trial copy of Windows 7 on the Office computer while you are at home.

Here’s a partial list of commands that you can use to remote control the PC – they’re case-insensitive and, as discussed above, you can send them to Twitter via email, SMS, IM or the web.

Screenshot : This is one of the most useful command I’ve come across after the shutdown command. Want to know what’s happening within the confines of your PC when you’re not around? Just tweet screenshot and TweetMyPC will take a screenshot of your desktop and post it to the web.

ShutDown, LogOff, Reboot, Lock : The function of these useful commands is pretty obvious from their names.

Standby, Hibernate : Don’t want to shutdown the remote PC? Save power by entering standby mode with this command. Or hibernate your PC with a tweet, thereby saving even more power.

Download <url> : You can download any file from the Internet on to the remote computer using the download command. For instance, a command like download http://bit.ly/tCJ9Y will download the CIA Handbook so you have the document ready when you resume work the next day.

GetFile <filepath> : The Download command was for downloading files from the Internet onto the remote computer. However, if you like to transfer a file from the remote computer to your current computer, use the GetFile command. It takes the full page of the file that you want to download and will send that you as an email attachment. If you don’t know the file page, use the command GetFileList <drivename> to get a list of file folders on that drive.

GetProcessList : This is like a remote task manager. You’ll get a list of programs that are currently running on the remote computer along with their process IDs. Send another command kill <process id> to terminate any program that you think is suspicious or not required.

Conclusion:

TweetMyPC is a must-have utility and you never know when you may need it. And if you have been trying to stay away from Twitter all this time, the app gives you a big reason to at least create one protected account on Twitter.

That said, there’s scope for improvement. For instance, the app will wait for a minute to check for new messages in your Twitter stream so it’s not “instant”. The developers can actually increase that limit because the Twitter API now allows upto 100 checks per hour.

And since the app is dependent on Twitter and Gmail, it will not work during those rare fail-whale moments.

Published at Digital Inspiration

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1. Those that don’t follow up often enough. (99 percent of small business owners don’t follow up at all.) When your follow-up is inconsistent and infrequent, you’re simply wasting your time and marketing dollars. Your contacts won’t remember who you are…and those that do will simply regard you as “the occasional pest.”

2. Those that follow up too often. When you send too many messages to your contacts, you are going to be viewed as a mass marketer. In fact, a recent email study shows that 65% of men and 56% of women define spam as “email from a company that I have done business with that comes too often.”

So how do you determine the best pace at which to follow up with your clients? Well that’s the tricky part. Each group of prospects and customers is going to react to your follow-up differently. So ultimately, you are going to have to “test” your group. But here are some key, follow-up principles to keep in mind:

* Follow-up must be consistent
* Send frequent enough messages to keep your name fresh in your contacts’ minds
* Send valuable and educational materials as well as your marketing message
* Your messages should be building a relationship with your contacts
* Be personal, be real and a little entertaining

By following these principles, I have no doubt you will find the follow-up pace that is perfect for you, your customers, and your prospects!

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To be clear, Microsoft had a rather large presence on Twitter before through its various departments/products/services, but now it’s using the main /microsoft account to tweet. The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people. So far there have been only 2 tweets and the account only has about 1,000 people following it. That should change, fast.

So what was its first tweet? “Anyone can make games now, Kodu is available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace http://bit.ly/3wlWKo #microsoft #xboxlive #kodu” Like any good Twitter user, Microsoft has self-promotion down cold. But that’s not nearly as slick as Google’s first tweet back in February.

There’s probably not much to read into Microsoft’s love-fest with Twitter today, but you never know. After all, rivals have been snooping around, flirting with the service.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Porsche has to be doing something wrong, they are one automaker that is profitable and have a huge stake in Volkswagen. The most puzzling thing is, cash is in short supply for the German company and have approached Germany’s state bank for a loan of maker’s 1.75 billion euro ($2.45 billion USD), but the request has been denied.

Autoblog says that Porsche are now looking for alternative ways of finding the cash, but what could that be. Automotive News who is the original source of the story has said that Porsche has been looking outside of Europe to try to steam its increasing debts.

VW has seen that Porsche is like a wounded animal and have given them an ultimatum, VW have offered 3-4 billion euro ($4.2-$5.6B) for a 49% stake in Porsche, this will be in exchange for not forcing the repayment of a 700 million euro loan ($983M) which is due in September. As you would expect, the sportscar maker has turned the offer down.

Could this be the next big automaker filing for bankruptcy just as GM and Chrysler have in the U.S.?

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To enter landscape mode you have to open the email client and enter the following ‘RocknRollHax’, this is case sensitive and it is said to help if you use the shift key for the upper-case letters rather then the CAPS button.

While this does change it to landscape it isn’t a permanent change and will need to be re-entered each time you open the email application. If this ‘hack’ does become popular it wouldn’t be a surprise if Palm decide to make this feature a standard setting within the application.

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We have fresh news on the PS3 Slim rumors for you to read now, as it has been rumored that two Taiwanese manufacturing companies have been awarded contracts to build Sony’s PS3 slimline console.

According to this Joystiq report, manufacturing orders have been split between two companies, Foxconn and Pegatron respectively.

While this remains just a rumor, it is interesting to add that these are the same two companies that worked on the original PS3 console, so maybe it’s time for Sony to put the rumors to rest for good.

The source also suggests that the PS3 Slim will start shipping in July, with units expected to release onto the market around August time.

Let us know your thoughts on the news.

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Sadly, several celebrities have died in the past week. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson and Billy Mayes. Social media has nearly taken the Internet down, breaking news, sharing personal stories and spreading their own thoughts and feelings regarding these tragedies. So why would someone take advantage of the morbid trend by hacking into a celebrity Twitter account and reporting that they too have passed away?

In light of the untimely deaths of so many celebrities in such a short period of time, it’s just creepy and unnecessary for a hacker to break into Brittney Spears’ Twitter account and spread rumors that she is dead. The hacker even went so far as to us the pop singer’s twitpic account for effect. While Spears has since updated her Twitter account and Twitter itself says it’s working on the particular vulnerability that allowed the twitpic hack, one has to wonder at the thought process behind such a hack.

I know the regular celebrity death rumors get spread around the Internet every so often. Earlier this year there was talk of teenage icon Miley Cirus turning up dead. But this most recent hack into Spears’ account is especially insensitive and a Twitter user should never stoop so low for driving traffic, pulling a publicity stunt or merely gaining attention. The hack diminishes the purpose and value of a communication tool such as Twitter, along with the community composition that goes along with the microblogging platform.

With this being said, I urge you to remember what Twitter is made for and how it’s best used. There are plenty of ways to generate traffic and attention on Twitter without completely misusing the Twitter system and taking advantage of its community. From hashtags to joining in n the discussion of the hack itself, you can maintain a healthy web presence and still build your brand using social media tools.

Copyright © 2009 Blogging Tips

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You can also search through this huge collection of images using the Insert -> Clip Art command available inside all Microsoft Office programs. These images can then be downloaded to the local hard-drive so you can quickly use them in other documents as well without having to search the Office Online site again.

The Microsoft gallery of images, though huge, looks miniscule when compared with Google Images which has a few billion images in its index (warning – not all images found via Google Image Search can be used in documents due to copyright issues).

However, if you limit your search to images that are either in the Public Domain or available under some sort of Creative Commons License, Google Images (or for that matter, any image search engine including Flickr) is a good place to find photographs and clip-arts for inserting in documents.

Offisync, a free plug-in that lets you open Google Documents in Microsoft Office, can now be used for importing images from Google Image Search into your Office files as well.

The image search feature of Offisync is pretty similar to the built-in Clip Art gallery search. Upon installation, Offisync will add a new Google Search option to your Office Toolbar – you can directly search for pictures and then insert any one of them into document or presentation that you are currently working on.

The plug-in won’t add any attribution related information but it shows the URL of the page containing the original image so you copy-paste that information into the document manually.

While Offisync officially works only with Google Image Search, here’s a simple tip that will help you search other photo websites via Offisync as well -  use the site: operator with your search query.

For instance, if you want to limit your search to Flickr, use site:flickr.com <query> and it will only display pictures that are on Flickr. Use site:gov with the query to search for US Government photos that normally don’t carry any restrictions.

Add Website Screenshots in Documents

Other than inserting images, you may also use the Offisync plug-in to add website screenshots into your documents or spreadsheets.

Use the web search feature to invoke the built-in web browser, type the full URL of the website in the Address bar (or use Google Search to find that website) and Clip. Drag the marquee around the area that you want to capture and hit the Insert button.

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More specs on the phone:

With its 3.2-inch HVGA display, the HTC Hero is optimized for Web, multimedia and other content, while maintaining a small size and weight that fits comfortably in your hand. It also boasts a broad variety of hardware features including AGPS, digital compass, gravity-sensor, 3.5mm stereo headset jack, a five mega-pixel autofocus camera and expandable MicroSD memory. HTC Hero also includes a dedicated Search button that goes beyond basic search, providing you with a more natural, contextual search experience that enables you to search through Twitter, locate people in your contact list, find emails in your inbox or search in any other area in Hero.

The new Android UI will have something called “Perspectives,” a new method for connecting email, contacts, and social media automatically. This version will also be the first to support Flash natively.

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Agito Networks Inc has announced plans to try and allow businesses to bring VoiP over WiFi to their Blackberry smartphones. Agito Networks Inc have excelled in allowing these technologies to become available on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices and believe by adding support for BlackBerry smartphones it will allow users to save a huge amount on international calling.

The company is said to be planning to support the BlackBerry Bold, the Curve 8900, the Curve 880 and the Curve 8300, and hopes to in the future support the BlackBerry Storm. The costs are yet to be announced but are said to depend on the deployment factors.

For full details check out InformationWeek, if you are a registered user of InformationWeek you can also download the full report here.

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