Are you in a profession where you book appointments with the general public or a large group of people? If so, you will be able to save yourself and your clients a lot of time with this new tool from the makers of WhenIsGood. It’s called YouCanBookMe and it allows you to publish available times directly from your Gmail or Google Apps calendar.

What’s in a name? Possibly your online identity. If you are forming a social media strategy, one of the items on your checklist is choosing a name. Rather than log into several dozen sites to see if your super-cute handle has been used, try NameChk.com.

NameChk scans all the popular social media platforms for you and tells you if a given name has been used. Granted, the name used might be yours (they don’t know that), but at least you can see which platforms still have room for your clever pseudonym.

Technology marches on — and so does the need to manage it! Even with all the cool stuff on my computer, I still find myself frustrated with repeating the same tasks over and over. Enter AutoIt to save the day (and my blood pressure).

This Microsoft Windows automation tool can speed you through repetitive tasks, giving you more time for what’s really important. While it could be considered a tool for the geek crowd, you really don’t have to learn how to write code because it has a macro recorder.

Turn on the recorder, then do the task once manually. Turn off the recorder and — voila — you have a script for doing that task. Save it to a file and all you have to do is double-click the file to run it.

Here’s a sample of what the tool produces:

Send("{LWINDOWN}e{LWINUP}")
WinWait("My Computer","")
If Not WinActive("My Computer","") Then WinActivate("My Computer","")
WinWaitActive("My Computer","")
Send("{ALTDOWN}d{ALTUP}c{SHIFTDOWN};{SHIFTUP}\clients{ENTER}")


This script opens the Windows Explorer application and then directs it to my Clients directory. How many times a week do you think I might do that? Right. Now you get the time-saving value of this little gem.