Stop avoiding dashes in your writing just because you don’t know how to type them outside of word processors. Learn the proper keyboard shortcuts and you can type these essential parts of the English language in basic text editors, browsers and anywhere else you may need them.

Don’t let a dying hard drive on your Mac catch you by surprise. Be warned before anything happens to your precious data. SmartReporter is a free application for your Mac that can warn you of hard drives problems, thanks to S.M.A.R.T. data. This gives you a heads up, because errors on a hard drive can mean problems are coming soon.

Do you want to start using Facebook to help grow your business, but don’t know where to start? Then it’s time to check out the latest free manual from MakeUseOf: “Your Guide To Social Media Marketing” by author Mike Nichols of YourZulu.com. Businesses of all sizes are always looking to get the step up on their competition. Often, there are questions lingering over them about return on investment, sales, and customer retention.

Did you know, that the Internet can also make you alarmingly unproductive? It’s true! It may be hard to believe, but constant access to all the world’s information – from the average flight velocity of an African swallow to what the girl you had a crush on in college is doing right at this moment – causes some people to get less work done instead of more.

This week – Facebook overpays for some Photoshop filters, Canada ditches the penny and starts work on a digital currency, and how one Chinese activist turned the tables on the police state. It’s all here to entertain and inform you, so what are you waiting for? Subscribe to Technophilia, Earth’s Favorite Technology Podcast today!

Move any Windows program to another hard drive, without breaking the program. If your primary hard drive is full, and what you’ve put on there is software, SymMover is what you’re looking for. Many people add a second hard drive to their computer when the first one fills up. Moving files – such as music, videos or photos – is a simple matter. Moving software, at least on a Windows system, isn’t.

See coupon codes in a sidebar, alongside almost any online store. Sidepon relies on user-contributed codes to function, is quick to check and doesn’t require you to register for or install anything in order to work. We’ve previously shown you the top ten sites for online coupons and promotional codes. Sidepon was made to be like these sites, but with a better UI.

Flush away the crap you don’t need in Google Reader and get back to what’s important – reading. “Google Reader Readable” is both a Chrome extension and a userstyle that removes basically everything from Google Reader except for you what you want – the article you’re reading right now and your lists of feeds.

We’ve got our first outbreak of Mac malware. The culprit? Microsoft Office. Java helped too! The point is, malware on your Mac is more likely than you think. Find out more by listening to this week’s Technophilia Podcast, earth’s favorite technology podcast, hosted by three MakeUseOf authors – Justin Pot, James Bruce and Dave LeClair.

Remove people, objects and other annoyances from your photos, quickly and easily, without leaving anything obvious behind. Seam Carving GUI is a simple app for doing this and resizing images in a way the human eye can’t detect. It’s completely free, and a tool amateur photographers not willing to pay for Photoshop should keep around.