Homes and businesses are inundated with calls from telemarketers. It’s become such a problem that even TV sitcoms such as Seinfeld have added the concern into their story lines. While Jerry was able to make us laugh about this pickle, most aren’t hee-hawing when they pick up the phone at home when it happens to them.

My home number has been swamped with calls from someone trying to sell me something for years. Every year, it seems to get worse. The do not call list, known as the Do Not Call Registry, never helped to a noticeably different state and the answering machine still doesn’t prevent the phone from ringing through the day needlessly.

What to do? Get Packet8.

Packet8 offers a business package called Virtual Office. One of the many features of Virtual Office is Auto Attendant. You all know what auto attendant is. When you’ve called Best Buy or some business and it answers immediately and warns us to listen carefully for the menus have changed (talk about a boy cry wolf, I hear this ALL the time!) and then we make our selection by pressing a number on the keypad. Well, you can add this to your home number and then listen to the results. Silence!

See, the trick lies in using the same ammunition as the telemarketers use: computers. When you receive a call from a telemarketer, a computer dialed your number and then transfers the call to an agent when you pick up the call and activate it by saying “hello” or how ever you answer your phone. When their computer reaches the automated attendant, the transfer may or may not occur. If it doesn’t, then the call is dropped. If it does, the agent then hears a menu and figures it’s a business and hangs up. If neither happens, the auto attendant hangs up the line within a specified time frame and then the call is dropped by it.

In the month I have had this on my personal line (I need to answer all business calls and not frighten off potential customers with an auto attendant,) I have not received one telemarketer call. A blissful thing since I would get on the average about five calls a day! Everyday. Friends and family haven’t complained about this, either. In fact, you still need a direct line, so you can add another number and give that out only to a select few.

Once the agents start pressing one to get to our live phone extension, then we’ll have to figure a new trick, but for now, this works great and it will most likely work for you, too!

I love the On-the-Go playlist on my iPod but have added a song or two by accident I didn’t want in my list. Well now thanks to shadownight’s post at macosxhints, I can remove them on-the-spot instead of having to wait when I get back to my Mac and delete it via iTunes.

Select the song in the playlist, and like the way you added that song, simply hold the select button (middle button) and watch it quickly disappear in just but a second! Just like that. Repeat where necessary.

The title is a bit misleading, but this is basically the cleanest install you’ll get of Windows XP on your system without having to format your hard drive. Many need to do a destructive install of XP, destructive because you’re formatting your hard drive and thus losing all that’s on it, due to root-kit type spyware or other problems that prevent ones install from being productive. We do it week in and week out as Microsoft has kept us well employed in the day time. While we back up data files, we can’t backup program installs and some customers dread this. If you’re such a person, then this non-destructive reinstall of Windows XP may be what you’re looking for.

In short, the article shows you how to navigate through Microsoft’s confusing messages during install that helps you basically wipe out the C:\Windows directory and then re-install it. The article does not mention the fact that this means there could still be infected files or spyware living elsewhere on your drive that could re-appear after this procedure has been completed. It does state that your registry file is pretty much kept in tact, which is another security problem, that once again the article neglects to mention. But with that said, if you just want to try this as a last ditch effort, try it.

After you have performed this re-install, download and install anti-spyware such as Ad-aware and Search and Destroy as well as Microsoft’s Windows Defender after you patch your system via Windows Update. If any pests still linger, these helpers may get what’s left.

It’s a well known fact that Verizon is not a friend of the Bluetooth camp. It likes to retard the Dail-up Networking (DUN) feature as well any file transferring (OBEX Exchange). Sometimes you find just simple syncing isn’t the easiest thing in the world, either.

Some find iSync and RAZRs compatibility less than desireable. Even though Apple’s iSync Devices page shows the RAZR line as supported, the footnotes indicate some trouble ahead for you ultra-thin phone users. Calander sync seems to be a biggie as one such problem for the v3c. But thankfully Brian Toth documented how to get the iCal and iSync to get (i)RAZR to get that important to one and another. It’s not a difficult task, but it’s not for the faint at heart, too. There’s some blood involved. You’ll need to do some package opening and file editing, but it’s nothing too major and within a few minutes, you’ll be syncing your days events with your phone! Give it a try and remember who helped make this happen…Brian.

If you don’t have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, then you can’t put your Mac to sleep as easy as closing a lid. You’ll have to go to the menu and click the Apple and then click “Sleep…” and then acknowledge the dialog box that yes you really are sane and understand your actions. Some know the trick of holding the option key while selecting Sleep will remove the three trailing periods to cancel the dialog box (works on the shut down and restart option, too) but you still have to go through the menu. Well now you don’t.

The good folks at Lifehacker found a sweet keyboard shortcut that lets you put your Mac into nighty-night mode in just two seconds! Simply hold down your Command key, Option key, and Eject key all at the same time and within two seconds, your white LED will be glowing indicating that the instant Sominex has taken effect! Sweet dreams.

Monday SvenOnTech warned you of a tip that had you alter your My Documents folder in your Windows VM of Parallels Desktop to point to your Mac Documents folder. Today, we’ll give you a tip that will actually save you time and frustration in case your world of Windows comes crashing down due to trojans, viruses, and spyware.

One tricky thing with Windows is that if you’re infected with one of the above pests, you need to remove it before worse things happen to your system. Viruses for the most part are easy to remove and trojans can be a bit more difficult but can also be removed from you system for the most part. Spyware is a bit tougher with Browser Help Objects (BHO) or even worse if they are root kits. In many cases, a fresh install is the only safe way to insure you have a clean system. For PC owners, one back-up trick is to make an image of your system when its clean. Re-imaging a PC usually can bring a user back up an running in about 30 to 40 minutes to where they once were. It’s a smart trick that saves many time and money.

Mac users have a similar trick but instead of taking about a half an hour to be back in business, it’ll only take but a few seconds to be back in the VM game. The trick is much like the image one PC users do but the great thing is with Parallels Desktop, you don’t have to create an image as it’s already there. Found as an HDD extension, your image file will be found in the ~/Library/Parallels/ folder. In our case, we have ours in the ~/Library/Parallels/win98/ folder since we don’t have a need for the two or three programs that run only on XP with the added overhead of that operating system. So we made a copy of your win98.hdd file and left it the same directory. That’s it.

Now if we get zapped with a really bad Windows treat, we just shrug our shoulders and delete the win98.hdd and copy our backup to the same name. We restart Parallels Desktop and –bam!– we’re back in business. With this kind of ease, who needs protection? (Just kidding, we’d never recommend playing naked on the Internet.)

We’d recommend making back-up copies of your HDD file often so you at least have the most current version of your VM if things do go bad. It’s also good to keep at least one copy of your first install so you have a “sanitized” version of your install so you have a clean version of your VM in case gremlins sneak up on you with a VM that seemed fine a week ago.

Thanks Parallels for making it easy for us to re-image our VM nice and fast.

Hey, so you’re a bit bummed that your snazzy MacBook looks like trailer trash worked on it and want it cleaned, now, then there’s some hope. Go into the bathroom and grab your wife’s finger nail polish remover. Apply it to a cloth and do some rubbing and bingo, you’re back in business. With all the bad press Apple is getting for the dirty white MacBooks in the wild, hey, this may help keep you happy until Apple fixes your new baby.

[Via Lifehacker]

Looks like Tigers latest update, 10.4.7, didn’t just fix the Firefox font rendering issue but also added a new preference to the trackpad. MacBook users got to see this great feature ahead of the cutting edge crew as those with the iBook replacement have been enjoying the feature since its release. But no longer, MacBook Pro users now can place two fingers on the trackpad and then click the button and, presto!, up comes a context sensitive menu as if you had just hit a right mouse button! Woo hoo! How great is this?

All you need to do is download the update and then go to System Preferences. Go to Keyboard & Mouse settings and select the Trackpad button. Enable the “Place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click” check box and you’re set. After that, simply put two fingers on the trackpad and then click the button (while your two fingers are still on the pad) and there you go. This trick also works if you click the button first and then tap with your two fingers; however, if there is an applicable left mouse button event, this won’t work as the left action will happen.

Enjoy the new added trick for all y’all MacBook Pro users!

If you’ve read your iTunes Music Store agreement well, you’ll remember that Apple is straight-up about what happens if your hard drive takes a dump. SOL (sorry out of luck ). But Lifehacker is reporting that there’s this dirty little secret that indeed you can re-download lost music. Lh couldn’t verify this claim, but three comments do confirm it. In fact, they all state that Apple gives you a whipping before resetting your account with the new download links.

So if you’re not a good boy or girl and don’t backup your music files or use RAID5 like we do here at SvenOnTech, then this may be an option. One we wouldn’t rely on, but still, an option.

One common complaint I hear from many iPod users is that the Artists section has too many redundancies in it. The most prevalent occurrence is an Artist featuring Some One. Rappers are famous for bringing on a huge posse and thus you get LL Cool J featuring Janet Jackson or Fat Joe featuring Ja Rule & Ashanti. Of course if you get enough of these featuring people going, Fat Joe will fatten up your Artist list and truth is, he’s only one artist. If you’re like me, having over 85 GB of music can make going through your artist list a bit tedious.

It would be nice if Apple added a feature that would show “Similar Artists” much like it’s wonderful “Show Duplicate Songs” feature. But you can get around this by simply searching for “featuring” in the Song field. For me, it brought up a large amount of songs that I then edited and moved the featuring mark to the song title which is common practice in liner notes. Within a few minutes, I reduced my Artist count down to 1741.

The next phase of reduction is going through all your classical music (if you have that.) Most classic works put the symphony or conductor down as the artist and then you, once again, get this bloated list. At this point a personal decision on how you’d like to handle this has to be made. If you’re more in tune to the conductor than the composer, then keep it as is. If you would rather keep everything together by composer, like I do, then go and find all your classical by sorting Genre by Classical and then make the changes. To keep the conductor in the meta file (so you can still do searches,) move their name to the Comments field.

These two changes will greatly reduce your scrolling the next time you look for LL Cool J’s song he did with Janet.