A standard argument by Linux users is that if WINE cannot run a Windows  app for whatever reason, do it virtually. Load up Windows in a virtual session with your app of choice, be it VMware, Virtualbox or the like, load up your Windows session and run your app that way. There is nothing to my knowledge that Linux cannot run virtually if WINE doesn’t...

I’m sure you have received a phone call and your caller ID shows the number is from an unusual area code. While this is usually a definite indication the caller is a telemarketer, one thing I like to lookup is the location of the respective area code. One thing I have noticed is a lot of the unknown calls tend to originate from the mid-west. I’m not...

Make no mistake, hard drives run hot. Granted, they’re not a hot as the processor or the RAM, but processors have big fat heat sinks and a fan cooling them down and you can get RAM with heat spreaders. So what can you do to cool off the hard drive? Attach a fan to it. How much do they cost? They can be as little a 3 bucks or as expensive as 30 bucks. The...

I’ve mentioned this before but it bears mentioning again: Google Street Views freaks a lot of people out.  And I mean a lot of people. This time it’s stirred up privacy concerns in Baltimore where some are getting a bit perturbed at the fact that no matter how much effort you put into your personal privacy on the internet, your house is still...

I use Google Calendar quite a bit. I find it to be a great tool for time management. Recently, though, it was announced that you can sync your Google Calendar with your Iphone. So, I tried it and I filmed it as I went. All in all, it is a smooth process to set up. If you have anything in your calendar on the Iphone beforehand that you care about, you need to...

I’ve written in the past about how user reviews on retailer sites (Amazon, Newegg, etc.) should always be taken with a grain of salt for the simple reason that you don’t know who is posting and what their motivation is. Here is a great example of that (article title: Slide Caught Posting Fake Positive Reviews For Their Own App). For the most part,...

Wireless phone chargers come in all shapes and sizes. And that’s annoying. What works for one phone probably won’t work for the other. Granted, there are many phones that can be charged via USB – but – some require "special" mini-USB chargers to be used (Motorola springs to mind) so the universal nature of USB is out the window...

Something that’s definitely undisputed as far as computer cases are concerned is that they used to be built like tanks back in the day. The plastic was rigid. The steel never bowed nor bent. The buttons and switches were large and in charge. And they always worked. Standard PC tower cases today are lighter and put a large emphasis on cooling. However since...

If you prefer using a mail client on your local computer as opposed to accessing your email via a web interface and are looking for a portable solution, you might want to take a look at i.Scribe. Scribe is a small and fast email client with an intergrated contact database and calendar. It supports all the major internet mail protocols and uses international...

Facebook has gotten themselves into a pickle again. Changes to their terms of service has reignited fears about the privacy of the information you put onto Facebook. On Monday, Facebook reacted by stating that they do not “own and control their information”. Now, the Facebook terms of service were last revised on February 4th (as of this writing). What has...

Google Trends is one of those things that’s easy to miss but is very useful. Upon first glance it looks very similar to the main Google search but has stuff in it that the regular search does not. Example: A trend search for Red Sox. The results are not necessarily going to be current information but rather what was most popular on the internet concerning...

This is an article about how to make your returns for broken/busted/non-functional stuff you bought just a tad more pleasant. It is an unfortunate truth that in most electronics retail the salespeople are given little to no training whatsoever as to how to handle returns and repairs. In fact, more often than not the only thing their told to do is point a finger...

If you find communicating via text messages convenient and you need to send a quick message while sitting at your computer, the ‘hassle’ of opening your phone and thumbing the message (and the cost associated) may be unnecessary. Instead, take a look at the web site Txt2Day.com. Now you can send free text messages to almost any major cell phone...

In 2007 and 2008 the netbook laptop format made a big splash and continues to do so in 2009. But what about having this mini-sized format in a standalone desktop computer? Is there an option and moreover it is cheap? Yes and yes. Enter the booksize PC format. These PCs are called as such because they are similar to the size of hardcover printed books. And they...

Whether you author a freebie WordPress-hosted blog at WordPress.com or self-host it on your own site via a downloaded version from WordPress.org, both operate the same way. Here are 5 tips and tricks when using WP that make it more fun (and productive) to use. 1. Use IE when authoring WHAT?! Yes, the animations on the menus in WP 2.7 are smoother in IE than...

For those of you out there concerned about your search history being saved and ‘data mined’, an alternate search engine to take a look at is Ixquick Metasearch. Ixquick is a metasearch engine: when you search Ixquick, you are searching many popular search engines – anonymously – at the same time. Combined, these engines cover more of the...

If you have your own domain email account (i.e. me@mydomain.com, me@mycompany.com) and are continually getting pummeled with spam despite your best efforts, a service you really need to look at is Postini. Postini is a Google owned service which provides hosted spam protection for ridiculously low pricing (at the time of this writing $12 per email per year)....

If you take advantage of Firefox’s ability to save passwords and prefill them on certain web pages, eventually you will have a bunch of dead or out of date entries. It is good idea to occasionally review and clean them out. Here is how (Firefox 3):Go to Tools > Options. Security tab > click Saved Passwords. Click Show Passwords. It is good to show...

The human eye can see around 7 million colors. And that’s a rough best-guess number because no one truly knows the exact amount. Your immediate thought might be, "But my monitor is rated to display 16.7 million colors (like this one). That’s more than double what my eye can see. Isn’t it physically impossible for the human eye to see them...

Periodically I am asked whether it’s “safe” to leave a computer on all the time. The answer is yes if it’s a desktop (meaning not a laptop). Chances are if you’ve been using computers long enough you’ve encountered at least one instance where some type of hardware failure occurred right as you turned on the box – and...