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Watermarks are a great way to ensure that your images aren't appropriated by some jerk on the Internet who wants to claim your brilliant work as his or her own. Mytoolsoft Watermark Software is an easy-to-use program that can not only apply custom watermarks but also perform other basic editing tasks, such as resizing and converting images to other formats. We think it's a great choice if you're looking for a simple way to affix your mark permanently to your images.

The program has a sleek and intuitive wizard-style interface. Users first select the images they want … Read more

Live in an area prone to flash floods, hurricanes, blizzards? Smartphone users will soon get a severe-weather alert from the National Weather Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The new nationwide emergency alert system, called the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), sends 90-character text messages to smartphones of people facing extreme weather conditions. Severe weather defined by the NOAA includes tornadoes, flash floods, hurricanes, extreme wind, blizzards and ice storms, tsunamis, and dust storms. Note that thunderstorms aren't on the list because they occur so frequently. … Read more

In the hundreds of millions of Asian, Latin American, and African households where water is only available once every week or two weeks, families lose both time and potential income waiting to fill their buckets. SmartPlanet's Sumi Das talks to a founder at NextDrop, an organization that's using SMS technology to help families make sure they never miss a precious drop.

This post first appeared on SmartPlanet under the headline "How texting can solve unreliable water issues."

Tumblr (free), the popular blogging platform, just released a revamped version of its app for iOS. In the major update to Tumblr 3.0, the layout has been completely redesigned (bringing it more in line with the Android version, covered in April by Jaymar Cabebe), giving you many of the tools found on the Web site and intuitive swipe controls for posting.

Several tweaks to the interface make the app both easy on the eyes and easier to use. The revamped Dashboard supports high-res images; you can now post and listen to audio links that stream directly from Spotify; and … Read more

More advertisers are flocking to the Web to court buyers, according to the Associated Press. First quarter results for Internet advertising revenue are in and they're record high -- reaching $8.4 billion.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, which gathered the data, told the Associated Press that this is the highest Internet ad revenue ever recorded for the first three months of the year and it's up 15 percent from $7.3 billion during last year's first quarter. The overall record is $9 billion, which happened during the fourth quarter of 2011.

Notepad++ is a popular text editor and Notepad replacement with many useful features. One of its best features is its support for plug-ins. NppCrypt is a Notepad++ plug-in that lets you encrypt selected text or entire text files. If you don't want to use BitLocker in Windows 7 or TrueCrypt, here's how you can use Notepad++ to encrypt your text files.

Step 1: Download and install Notepad++.

Step 2: Launch the plug-in manager by going to Plugins > Plugin Manager > Show Plugin Manager.

Step 3: Select NppCrypt from the plug-in list, then … Read more

Topping my list of Microsoft Excel pet peeves is the program's automatic conversion of two numbers on either side of a hyphen into the date and month the numbers correspond to, such as "1-1" becoming "01-Jan."

The change occurs even when you choose any of the options available when you select Paste Special. I have looked high and low for a way to disable this setting in Excel, to no avail.

You can make the change for an entire worksheet by clicking the small box above 1 and to the left of A in the … Read more

Apple's TextEdit program is a basic text editor included with OS X, which like WordPad for Windows can be used to quickly create text documents in plain text (.txt) or in rich text (RTF) formats. Similar to Preview for image files, TextEdit is commonly used as a starting point for opening various supported file types in order to preview them and make small edits to their contents. This helps when you need to quickly edit scripts and HTML code, or system configuration files.

TextEdit is not only useful for quickly editing code (which is primarily stored in basic text … Read more

If you find yourself typing the same text over and over again, it makes sense to find a way to automate this task to save time and effort. Auto Text Typer is a simple program with which you can save multiple sets of text and easily insert them almost anywhere with the use of a simple hot key. We think the program is a great way to speed up redundant typing tasks.

Auto Text Typer has a simple, straightforward interface with a handful of clearly labeled buttons. We clicked New in order to create a new block of text and … Read more