1. Make up fake acronyms. Online veterans like to use abbreviations like IMHO (in my humble opinion) or RTFM (read the fucking manual) to show that they’re “hep” to the lingo. Make up your own that don’t stand for anything (SETO, BARL, CP30), use them liberally, and then refuse to explain what they stand for (“You don’t know that? RTFM”).

2. WRITE YOUR MESSAGES IN ALL CAPS AND DON’T USE RETURNS SO THAT EVERYONE HAS TO SCROLL ACROSS THEIR SCREENS TO READ EVERY LINE. ALSO USE A LOT OF !!!!! TO SHOW THAT YOU’RE EXCITED ABOUT BEING HERE!

3. When replying to your mail, correct everyone’s grammar and spelling and point out their typos, but don’t otherwise respond to the content of their messages. when they respond testily to your “creative criticism,” do it again. Continue until they go away.

4. Software and files offered online are often “compressed” so that they won’t take so long to travel over the phone lines. Buy a compression program and compress everything you send, including one-word e-mail responses like “Thanks.”

5. Upload text files with Bible passages about sin or guilt and give them names like “SexyHousewivesI,” then see how many people download it. Challenge your friends to come up with the most popular come-ons.

6. cc: all your e-mail to Al Gore (vice.president@whitehouse.gov) so that he can keep track of what’s happening on the Internet.

7. Join a discussion group and tie whatever’s being discussed back to an unrelated central theme. For instance, if you’re in a discussion of gun control, respond to every message with the observation that those genetically superior tomatoes seem to have played an important role. Within days, all discussion of gun control will have ceased as people write you threatening messages and instruct others to ignore you.

Describes how to simply create a batch file to end and restart Windows services with the click of a mouse-button. I implement this anytime I run the latest CPU and RAM-intensive games. But it’s also great for disabling and re-enabling unnecessary services quickly.

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Well, I’ve been running around the net like a headless chicken (not a pretty sight too, I can tell you) trying to round up all my links of legal e-books. It’s amazing how much content there is out there, and what’s more amazing is just how much is lifted verbatim from Project Gutenberg. So, without further ado, here’s some of my favourite sites for when I need to quench my thirst for prose and knowledge.

#1 Project Gutenberg
This should be the first port of call for anyone looking for ebooks. Project Gutenberg has been going on for decades, and its founder invented eBooks in 1971. There’s currently over 16,000 books there, and a wide range of audio books too.

#2 Yummy
Forget your Backpack, Del.icio.us and other snazzy web apps. This is an absolute godsend of a web app. Yummy is a social book-bookmarking service with tagging and printing. That’s right. Download a book, then go back and get it printed if you like it. The thing that makes yummy special is the tagging, which makes a refreshing approach to searching through the archive.

#3 ManyBooks
Manybooks is a superb site with lots of material – over 11,000 ebooks available for download. It’s possible to download in a wide range of formats, including PDF, eReader, Plucker and iPod notes. This is one of my favourite sites for fiction ebooks. Don’t forget to check out the PSP section whilst you’re there.

#4 World eBook Library Consortia
The World Library has over 100,000 ebooks in PDF format on just about every subject you could imagine. It’s a great resource, well organised and also features a wide range of audio books in mp3 format. Sadly, most of the material comes from other resources and it’d be great to see more orginal content.

#5 Penn State Online Books
The Penn State University Online Books archive is the dmoz.org of ebooks. There’s a massive range of books available, and a great section on banned books.

#6 The Universal Library
The Universal library is another digital library service, this time from Carnegie Mellon University. With over 10,000 books, it’s well worth a visit.

#7 My-Ebooks
My Ebooks is an old site with lots of material in various formats, including palm-friendly formats and Microsoft book reader. Some of the material is out of date (especially the tech manuals section) but is still a worthy resource nonetheless.

#8 The Etext Center
The University of Virginia’s Etext center is host to over 2,000 ebooks available in Palm and Microsoft Reader format. This smaller archive seems to focus more on British and American literary classics, but has a higher signal to noise ratio than simple archiving sites.

#9 The Virtual Library
Founded by Tim-Berners-Lee of the WWW fame no less, the virtual library is a great resource for anyone looking for more modern subjects. It reminds me a little of Yahoo! from way back when.

#10 The Internet Public Library
The IPL is a 10 year old collection of over 20,000 free books, browsable by author, title or Dewey Decimal Classification. There’s reams of content here, but it’s well worth looking through if you haven’t already found what you’re looking for.