I'm sure there are a lot of times where you need to know your external/public IP address, and there is probably a specific site you always go to for that information.

I didn't realize how many different sounds our hands could make until I played with the American Heart Association's Hands Symphony site. They are using the site to promote learning CPR, and in doing so came up with a rather viral campaign.

Creating patterns that are repeatable and look good is something designers spend a lot of time working on. I recently came across an awesome site called Subtle Patterns that looks to make this a little easier for non-designers by providing us with a small image that we can use to repeat across an entire website's background.

A couple weeks ago I was trying to configure a TV antenna to get some of my local television stations in the over-the-air HD quality they broadcasted in. The problem was that in trying to figure out the best direction to point the antenna I realized that there had to be an easy way to get the optimal direction for the antenna to face. That's when I came across AntennaPoint.com.

When doing web development work I frequently find myself needing placeholder images that have specific dimensions. The last thing you want to do is sit there taking the time cropping a bunch of images to the size you need, and that's where placeholder generators come into play.

Foodily, as the name suggests, is all about food and helping you find and share recipes with friends. There are literally hundreds of food/recipe websites out there like Allrecipes.com and Epicurious.com, but Foodily has a few features that set it apart from the rest. They also incorporate social features, and have a beautiful interface that adds to the whole recipe finding/sharing experience.

Some of the smartphones these days have really nice features to help you find your phone if it gets lost. With the iPhone, for example, you can use Apple's Find My iPhone to not only get a GPS location of the device, but you can also have it chime to help you realize that it is just sandwiched between your couch cushions.

When you go to a website you may see a font that looks interesting and sparks some curiosity as to what font type was used. There are all kinds of web developer tools that make finding this info pretty easy, but all you really need is the WhatFont bookmarklet. When you run the bookmarklet you'll be able to click on any of the text on the page you're viewing to see more details about it.

I'm sure most of us have used a Lorem Ipsum generator for some filler text at one point or another. If you want to spice things up a little bit we have a few alternative text generators that will throw a little something different into your projects.

A lot of reviews for browsers reference a lot of performance and standards compatibility tests, such as the SunSpider or Acid3 tests. There is another test available to help you figure out how well your browser supports HTML5 already. The site is HTML5Test.com and scores the browser out of a possible 450 points.

Don't you hate when someone is trying to explain a computer problem they are having and you aren't able to see exactly what's on their screen? It's especially painful when the person you're trying to help doesn't know much about computers.

Finding fonts to use on your website can be a pain, but a lot of people don't realize that Google has an interface for finding and using fonts on any site. Google Web Fonts lets you see samples of over 200 fonts in either a single word, sentence, or paragraph format.

I'm sure we've all quoted Mission Impossible at one time or another saying "This message will self destruct in...". Your average Joe creating a message that can actually self destruct, on the other hand, may be a little more difficult. If you don't mind going the digital route a service called Privnote is looking to accomplish exactly that though.

For many of us it is difficult to test a website from another country, but there are online tools that try to make this kind of thing more accessible to everyone. One service I tend to gravitate towards the most is the WebPageTest.org site we previously covered. If you are looking to troubleshoot network issues, however, that site may not provide the details you are looking for.

A few weeks ago someone came to me with their computer because it was in a virtually unusable state. They couldn't download and install any applications anymore because of multiple viruses they managed to get infected with, and their existing antivirus app had been expired for quite awhile ().

If you're new to Linux there is no doubt that the Linux directory structure can be rather overwhelming. Many of the folders are made up of titles that are just three or four characters in length, and when it comes to Linux it is better not to assume you know what one of the folders is used for.

I've used desktop programs in the past to fill out PDF forms, and from time to time I would have people ask how I was able to add text to a non-editable PDF document. I was always hesitant to recommend some of the apps I used because these were your average computer users, and I knew that the programs would be likely to confuse them with the learning curve they seemed to have.

Whenever you're working with a lot of smaller images you're supposed to combine them into a single one called a sprite. You can get an example of what I'm talking about by looking at Google's sprite, which has most of the little icons you'll come across while searching.

As a developer I'm always creating temporary DNS entries to try out new things. I own several domains that I'm able to work with, and more often than not I just end up adding a subdomain for anything I may need.

You may be wondering what the best way is to develop code on some of these web-only computers that are coming out like the Chromebook. Well, one free solution is CodeRun, which is a feature-packed development environment for C#, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and a few other languages. Here is a list of the main features you'll find in the CodeRun IDE: