If you've read about Yahoo! Pipes already chances are your interest has at least been piqued, the concept is definitely interesting.  Take a look at the official description:

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

While Pipes certainly sounds powerful it's safe to say that the service is still in a beta-ish state. There's plenty of functionality, don't get me wrong, but every time I've had a stroke of inspiration I've found the service woefully lacking. It's not really enough to mash a couple feeds together, you really want the ability to quantify and label your results - right now Pipes really only lets you list them.

Despite being in its infancy, though, Pipes has a great deal of potential. In its current form Pipes can be used to combine multiple feeds, search multiple sites, and even filter your results. Earlier today I setup a 'pipe' that combines a couple of my favorite video game comic feeds, filters out any "news" items, and shows only the new comics (or their permalinks.) It may not seem like a lot but because I almost never read the "News" posts it certainly cuts down on clutter in my Feed Reader - it also combined three seperate RSS feeds into one.

Over the next couple of days I'm going to share some very basic uses for Pipes that I've found.  The goal, really, is just to show off some of the things you can do while using Yahoo!'s new service.  If you're at all interested in Yahoo! Pipes please feel free to share your questions or insights.

If you do a lot of online shopping (and nowadays who doesn't?) you may occasionally get the "how safe am I" jitters. When it comes to internet threats there are few things scarier than your identity being stolen and your credit being hurt.

It's not just the internet of course, I was one of many people forced to get new credit cards after the recent TJX compromise.

Anyway - Lifehack, via CreditPro, has a great list of things you can do should you find yourself the victim of credit fraud. It's great reading and a definite bookmark for future reference.

Last week I implemented a major change in how I handle bookmarks and have been so happy with it that I decided I should share. Let me start by attributing the main concept used here to Virtually Shocking's recent post about the Firefox Bookmark Bar as well as a Cranking Widget's post titled "How to Use Firefox Live Bookmarks for RSS Feed Probation."

The basic process here uses ideas set forth in the previously mentioned posts as well as my own truncated GTD process. While you can certainly accomplish this without the use of any Firefox add-ons, I'll start by recommending two specific ones. For all of you Google fans I recommend starting with the Google Sync plugin. All the steps we make in this process will be mirrored across all FireFox browsers that you have Google Sync installed on.

The second add-on that I recommend is del.icio.us. In the same way you'll need a Google account to use Google Sync you'll also want to grab a de.icio.us account. [The del.icio.us add-on will be marked by italics while the service will be in plain text.] There are SEVERAL del.icio.us add-ons floating around the Firefox Add-on Library, the one I'm recommending is super simple and doesn't add any toolbars or sidebars. Some of the ones that do add toolbars can interfere with Google Sync so you want to avoid them if you're planning on trying this out.

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Have you ever clicked on a link only to get brought to a page that's not available?

[ErrorZilla] Implements a useful error page when a website cannot be reached. Will add "Try Again," "Google Cache," "Coralize," "Wayback," "Ping," "Trace," and "Whois" buttons, along with the Firefox logo to the error page when a website isn't found or a web server is down.

This is a great way to figure out if a site is permanently unavailable as well as track down what was originally on it.

In the past I wrote about using SUPER to convert YouTube videos for the PSP and mentioned that I use SUPER for about 90% of my video conversion needs.

SUPER is great for converting video files of any type (including ripped DVDs) into PSP, iPod, and GP2X friendly files. You can even convert video files into audio files to create MP3s files AND (as I learned last night) even to download streaming audio.

Simply start SUPER in the normal way, right click on the application window, and select "Add streaming link(s)." In the next dialogue enter the url for the file and then select "Save stream to your Harddisk."

That's it!