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It’s that time of year, we’re all looking ahead and I’ve already resolved to lose three stone throughout 2011 (pity about the weight that went on over Christmas, not a great start I admit).

There are of course more realistic resolutions people can take up for any New Year. Mastering a few basic computer skills is one of them. You can probably do more than you think already; if you’re reading this then let’s face it, you don’t need any help finding your way to a website.

There are other things you can do, though, and they’ll all make your life significantly easier. Here are just a few:

1. Find your way around

The AA, The RAC, Google and many others offer a route planning service free of charge. Just enter your postcode, the postcode of your destination and you’ll get a route planned for you, a map and an estimated arrival time (which never takes account of traffic so assume it’s underestimated). Also look at the train times - the National Rail site offers a real time link to train departures and arrivals, so if you’re expecting to meet someone at your local station you can check whether the train’s going to be late without leaving your desk.

2. Weather

There’s this rumour it’s been snowing over the last few weeks, I haven’t checked it out myself. But you can have a look at the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ weather website and narrow your search down by postcode if you want to plan around what the weather is going to be doing.

3. Communication

Modern computers often have a microphone and many have a webcam. The addition of a bit of software can turn this into a free international video phone - great for keeping in touch with family across the world. NB: Make sure the light’s not behind you otherwise you can end up looking like one of those re-enacted witness interviews on Crimewatch.

4. Shopping

Yes of course there have been delays over Christmas in terms of deliveries because of the snow (which were actually quite useful: "You were hoping I’d buy you a what, darling? But I did, it just hasn’t arrived yet..." PLACES QUICK ORDER) but this is very rare. The internet offers a great opportunity to let people who’re being paid take the strain of getting items to you, while you focus on stuff that’s more important.

5. Join a social network

Twitter et al get a rough press sometimes but they’re honestly not packed with people wasting time telling you what they had for breakfast. If you need a local plumber try asking on a social network - someone will know someone and be able to recommend them. If there’s some information you’re looking for whilst writing your dissertation or if you have local information you think might be worth offering, join up and have a look around - you could get quite a reputation and before you know it people start helping you, too.

This is of course stuff you can do on the internet. Without connecting up there’s other stuff you can do:

• Organise your family photos - and please, please back up so if your computer goes wrong you won’t lose them!

• Organise your music collection - put CDs onto your computer, then they’re all available on your mobile music player if you have one.

• Get your household accounts in order - why not scan in those receipts and warranties so you always know where they are?

That’s all before you’ve started buying extra software, adding bits of hardware, mastering spreadsheets and databases or even opening up a word processor - that’s for another day. Meanwhile all the stuff I’ve listed is free of charge. Have a great new year - and make use of that device you’re looking at right now!

Guy Clapperton is a journalist specialising in writing about technology as well as small business for several major broadsheets. He broadcasts occasionally on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio stations and reviews the newspapers on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News Channel.

'Tis the season to be jolly, and we're all due a bit of time off - but what are you going to do after you've opened all your presents and polished off your Christmas dinner?

Well, that's a good question, and one which I've been asking my colleagues at the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. Thankfully, it turns out that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ website is absolutely jam-packed with games, quizzes, videos and activities you can do on your own and with your family this Christmas.

In fact, there are so many that as an early Christmas present I would like to present The WebWise Guide To The Best of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. In this list you will find a hand-picked selection of some of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's most interesting stocking fillers - from games to play on your own or with your children, to short videos, recipes for those leftovers, garden designing tools and more. What else could you possibly want?

Videos

As you'd expect from an organisation which primarily deals in making things for TV, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ website is absolutely choc-full of videos. However, we're not just talking about iPlayer, where you can catch up on programmes you missed on TV. Oh no. For starters, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Comedy website has lots of delightful exclusives, including our favourite: Misery Bear’s Christmas special.

Alternatively, you could watch these great animations made by Hands On History, and this funny showreel of bloopers from comsumer rights programme Watchdog is guaranteed to raise a smile. For fans of either Prof Brian Cox or - well, the universe, there's a whole site dedicated to archive material from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ - and something similar about the Battle of Britain.

Games

Perhaps surprisingly for a broadcaster, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ website has some really great games - so much so that it was difficult to pick which ones to tell you about. The absolute pick of the crop is The Doctor Who Adventure Games, which you can download and play. So far there are three episodes, and they're really amazing.

Apart from that, fans of magic and adventure will love the quizzes and games on the Merlin website, and Wallace and Gromit have also got some fantastic games centred around invention. Also, it would be extremely lax of me not to mention the Only Connect Quiz, a fiendishly difficult and addictive game already considered a real cult classic.

For children

Want to keep the kids occupied? The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ website is the perfect place for them to have a look around, as everything on it is safe for children (although you should always make sure very young children aren't left unattended at a computer - find out more in our section on internet safety for children). The most obvious places for children to go are the C³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and CBeebies websites, as well as ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Schools. I particularly enjoyed Shaun the Sheep's Championsheeps, which frankly is far too good for children.

If you want to give your children some learning-by-stealth, unlike their school ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Bitesize is open for business throughout the school holidays - so they can have a go at innovative games like Questionaut - a beautifully surreal as well as cunningly educational quest to retrieve a strange creature’s top hat. There’s also the beautifully addictive Greek Hero game on the Primary History website (part of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Schools), where you can complete tasks and even meet up with Socrates.

Extras

Making New Year's resolutions? We can help you with that, too. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Food's Recipe Finder will help you with your post-Christmas health kick. Finally, for the Grinch in every family, Victorian Christmas will help you get into the spirit of things.

So, hopefully that should be more than enough to keep you busy. Happy Christmas from everyone at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ WebWise - and have a great new year, too.

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Some people protest by taking to the streets, but today, thousands more are doing it while sitting at their computers.

In the past week, protesters have managed to take down websites owned by MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and PostFinance for their actions against WikiLeaks (a website known for publishing controversial and confidential information). Many others have been hit over the past decade, including the governments of Georgia and Burma. Protest shades easily into cyberwarfare, and in the UK this can amount to law breaking behaviour.

A website is easy to attack using a Distributed Denial of Service attack or DDoS. The idea is to send it more traffic than it can handle. The website gets so bogged down processing fake traffic that it doesn't have time to respond to real users, who are therefore deprived of their service. You could get the same effect by having hundreds of people phone the same restaurant to order a pizza, then hang up if they get through.

Websites often get swamped even without being attacked. Servers can crash if too many people want to check their swine flu symptoms or visit online library Europeana, or whatever, and they all try to do it at the same time. The idea behind a DDoS attack is to do it deliberately.

Criminals do it by using networks of remotely-controlled home PCs that have been compromised by computer viruses ("botnets"). The amorphous and unorganised pressure group that calls itself ‘Anonymous’ is doing it mainly by publicising its plans via chatrooms and social networks.

Anonymous has had lots of media coverage because of its association with WikiLeaks (the two are not actually connected), but DDoS attacks have been growing recently. In 2008, Anonymous was involved in DDoS attacks against Scientology.

Then came Operation Payback, which was a response to moves against file-sharing sites such as Pirate Bay: hence Operation Payback's use of a sailing ship logo. This attacked a number of pro-copyright bodies including the UK's Intellectual Property Office (aka Patent Office), and some law firms.

But it's important to note that, in the UK, DDoS attacks are against the law. Following a court case in 2005, sections of the Police and Justice Act 2006 were drafted specifically to tackle DDoS attacks, says Lawdit, adding: "A conviction under this section can result in ten years imprisonment and a fine of £5,000."

If you want to protest online lawfully, you can sign petitions, join Facebook groups, or use Tweetminster to find your MP on Twitter. If you can summon the energy to put pen to paper the old fashioned way, that's even better.

Jack Schofield is a technology journalist and blogger who covered IT for the Guardian from 1983 to 2010. Before specialising in computing, he edited a number of photography magazines and books.

Internet security is big business. Collectively, we spend huge amounts of money on software that protects us from potential intruders.  Firewalls and virus scanners take on the role of nightclub bouncers, deciding who can come in, who should be chucked out, and who shouldn't stand on the stairs because they're becoming a fire hazard.

But a more fundamental level of security whose importance we often disregard is the humble password. This string of letters and numbers is, after all, often the only barrier that exists between an evil CyberLord and your email, your Facebook page, the files on your computer - even your money.

It's a bit of a wild west out there, and there are many ways that you can have your password prised out of you. Perhaps a virus on your computer that logs the keys you press and sends that information back to some criminal mastermind, or what are known as "social engineering" techniques, which often take the form of a spam email urgently requesting you to click through to a website and "verify" your password - but, of course, it's not authentic.

This can be a bit of a rigmarole for criminals, however, and guessing your password can be much easier - not least because we're horribly unimaginative. I once worked in an office where stringent security measures were taken; backups of all company data were made at the end of every day onto a special hard disk, which was then taken off-site and stored in a locked safe overnight. But all our email passwords were set to the same thing: "pass123". Staggering, no?

Don't take chances

A huge number of people choose passwords that are simply a word in the dictionary, or a name, or a place name. And it's quite possible that those people will carry on using them and say "Well, I've never been scammed." But that's a bit like wandering blindfolded around town and saying "Well, I haven't been hit by a car yet."

A number of us have wised up a little and are aware that a combination of letters and numbers is a good idea, but guessing a supposedly unique combination of those is easier than you might think. A few years ago a password-cracking study combined 1,000 common passwords - things like "letmein", or "123456", or that still inexplicably popular choice, "password" - with 100 frequently-used suffixes - things like 1 or 7, 4u or abc. And by doing so they managed to crack 24% of a random sample of people's passwords.

It's not enough to think that, simply because it contains letters and numbers, "blink182" is a good choice of password, because tens if not hundreds of thousands of other people will have had exactly the same idea. The most popular password in the world used to be "password", but today it's "password1". Not much of an advance, is it?

The other issue is that we tend to use the same password everywhere. Just consider the number of websites you visit where you log in using an email address and password. I'd bet that many people reading this use the same password to actually retrieve messages from that email address - so every time we sign up to a website, we're essentially surrendering the details of our email account. We do this automatically, without even thinking.

Make it memorable with music

So, how to choose a password that's offbeat and unorthodox, but doesn't need to be written down for us to remember it? The best method I've found is based on songs. We all have our favourite lines of lyrics, and the initial letters of those words, interspersed with a memorable number, is infinitely more secure than "holiday123". And we'll always remember it, because we love the tune.

But what about the problem of different passwords for each website? Well, there are password management services that can remember all your passwords for you, but to access them you need to come up with - yes - a password. And the most secure place to store passwords is always going to be your head.

So what I do is incorporate part of the name of the website into my passwords: perhaps stick the second letter of the name of the website at the beginning of the password. Or the third at the end. Or something else. It's up to you.

This might all sound preachy, and I wouldn't blame people for thinking it doesn't matter. But I've been defrauded in the past for not following these rules, and you wouldn't want to look as stupid as me, now, would you?

Rhodri Marsden is a writer and musician who regularly details his fascination and exasperation with modern technology and the internet for both The Independent and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ 6Music.

6.30am: Tuesday morning. The alarm goes off, and on local ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio, Paul Ross and Gaby Roslin are telling me there's a light dusting of snow in some areas of London and it should ease off. I check out of the window and that's about right.

7.00: Computer goes on for early blogging. Ross and Roslin still telling the same story - they're indoors and without windows, it's fair enough - but Twitter and Facebook are telling a different story. People are outside, actually on the spot with their mobile phones and they're tweeting away telling me exactly where the snow is, how deep and whether it's still falling.

The internet is an unbelievably useful place for finding out about what's going on around you in real time. There are pretty much two avenues to consider - "official" sites and the more social stuff.

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

This column is clearly on a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ website, so I'm bound to send you to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ weather bulletins first, at bbc.co.uk/weather. That's not just vested interests speaking, though. The layout is clear and the best bit is that you can put in a postcode or area and it'll tailor a five day report (including the current weather) for you.

You can set somewhere as your current location and have favourite locations, perhaps a workplace or relative's home. Your local ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio's website will take a feed from this if you want information on travel and related bulletins as well.

The Met Office

The other official weather site is of course the Met Office. This isn't as search friendly as the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ but you can select from a dropdown menu of areas which is just as useful. This will also tell you - as it did as I was writing - when severe weather warnings had been issued.

Social networks

My own source of more-accurate-than-the-radio information this morning was social networking. People struggling to get into work were tweeting and Facebooking about just how cold they were, and how tricky it was negotiating the journey. This, as I said, got the information to me faster than it was getting to the radio. There's a nice website based on people reporting weather conditions to Twitter, called UK Snowmap - which looks for people commenting on snow and puts a marker on a map.

The only problem is that it's completely haphazard. The reason Twitter told me about the snow more quickly than the estimable Ross and Roslin was because people I follow happened to tweet it a bit more quickly than people picked up the phone to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio London. It could just as easily have gone the other way.

Likewise Facebook. Yes, a lot of people mentioned that it was snowing. A handful of them mentioned where they were at the time, which is essential information if it's going to be useful, and a lot of the messages just said "snow!" Oh, and I had only their word that it was snowing anyway - you can put anything on Twitter or Facebook; the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, Met Office and others are honour bound to do some checking.

This isn't to criticise the people putting the messages up. They didn't undertake to deliver a personal weather service to me, and there's no reason I should expect an accurate report. The fact that Twitter delivered it is a bonus for membership, not some sort of right. So although the informal, social approach can be very informative indeed but you can't take it for granted.

It's worth noting that hybrid services taking the best of official services and social networked services are starting to emerge. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has, for example, been involved in Crowdmap.com - with which it built a coherent picture of where crowds were during the London tube strikes; it did the same thing during the floods in Cornwall only weeks ago and the results are still there.

The information is drawn from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, mobile phones and a number of other sources and then put out there in graphic form. So you get all the "official" people's efforts combined with a real-time snapshot of what individuals are reporting. Presumably this is the way things will develop.