PriceAmbush.com is a new web service that lets you find products at the price you want. The service is very simple and very straight forward. You search for a product, set the price target you want and PriceAmbush emails you when that target is found.

What services do you use for a better shopping experience?

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PayPal, teaming up with VeriSign, has recently released a new hardware SecurID device to help increase the security available to their users. The PayPal Security Key is a small dongle-like device that generates an algorithmic 6-digit password token every 30 seconds. Once activated, independently for each account, the current token must be entered when logging into your PayPal or eBay account. This means even if someone gets a hold of your username and password, they still won’t be able to log in to your account without the 6-digit token.

Since the security key is activated independently for each account, the same device could eventually be used for other VeriSign-owned companies and websites as well.

Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson interviewed Director of Account Protections at PayPal, Michael Vergara in episode 103 of their weekly podcast, Security Now for an in depth look at how the security key works to keep your account safe.

If you use your PayPal or eBay account regularly or are concerned with the security of either of those services, the Security Key is highly recommended. The PayPal Security Key is available for an introductory price of $5.

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Picasa is a free, digital photo editing and media organization program from Google that helps you do almost everything with your digital photos. Picasa helps you organize your photos into albums, add effects and fix basic photo problems like ‘red-eye’ with just a few clicks and print, email or upload your final collection to the web to share your photos with friends and family.

Picasa also makes it easy to edit and enhance your digital photos with simple and intuitive controls. Picasa includes 12 visual effects as well as many basic fixes.

Picasa’s Basic Fixes are buttons that make it fast and easy to crop, remove red eye, fix the contrast and color, and enhance your digital pictures.

One of my favorite features in Picasa is the screensaver album. Once Picasa is installed, go into your desktop properties and select Picasa as your screensaver. Whenever your screensaver kicks on, Picasa will play a slideshow of the contents of the screensaver album. If you keep lots of family photos on your computer, your idle monitor can become a digital photo frame.

Its easy to share your photos with Picasa too. If you have a CD burner (and who doesn’t anymore), Picasa can burn Gift CDs and DVDs that instantly play photo slideshows on grandma’s computer. Picasa has plenty of print options for your home printer as well as uploading your photos to order professional prints.

Picasa supports jpg, bmp, gif, png, psd and tif images as well as RAW data files, including cameras from Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Minolta and Pentax. Picasa will also recognize and organize your avi, mpg, wmv, asf and mov video formats.

Picasa is a free download from Google.

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7-Zip is a lightning fast, open source file archiver with a high compression ratio.

While Windows XP has Zip Compression built into it, 7-Zip supports many more compression formats including, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ and more. 7-Zip integrates with the Windows Shell, so extracting a Zip file is just a right-click away.

7-Zip is an open source, free download for Windows. There is also a pz7ip project at sourceforge for Posix/Linux systems.

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Learning keyboard shortcuts is one of the easiest things you can to speed things up. Left hand keyboard shortcuts like Copy (Ctrl+C), Paste (Ctrl+V), and Undo (Ctrl+Z) have become second nature to me. In fact, unless I’m typing something, my left pinky finger basically lives on the Control key.

A really useful blog I’ve discovered recently is Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Day and it delivers exactly what you’d expect. Everything from software specific shortcuts like Ctrl+Shift+F to “Select Font” in Microsoft Office applications to Ctrl+A, another second nature shortcut to select all the text in a document, page or text area.

As you might have guessed, the shortcuts on this blog are entirely Windows shortcuts and though some classic shortcuts will work on a Mac (using the Command key instead of Control) some won’t. You have been warned.

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