In the United States, Memorial Day lands on Monday of next week, May 25 2009. This holiday is meant to commemorate US men and women who died in military service. I tip my hat to all families who’s fallen heroes served our country. From a retail perspective, Memorial Day is one of the best times of the year to buy electronics from traditional big-box...

Tiny applications run faster because they require far less computing power. They’re useful for several types of computer users. If you run a slower computer box, the less resource an app uses, the better. If you have a slower internet connection, smaller apps that access the internet typically make far less demands on bandwidth. If you’re a gamer,...

If you are not familiar with Galaga, it is one of the more well known arcade games of the 80′s where you simply shoot alien bugs as they fly onto the screen and drop bombs. Very simple to play but incredibly addictive. To play this classic online, just go here. This version is actually a slight variant but the game play is exactly the same. If you have...

On the PCMech LIVE show last night a question came in that asked where the setting is to adjust the space System Restore uses in Windows 7. This actually took quite a bit of digging to find it. And to note, this is different compared to Vista’s location. Step 1. Start "ball", Control Panel Step 2. System and Security (left side green link) ...

Beta, to the best of my understanding, is a level of completion concerning software development. There’s the alpha stage, which loosely translates to "this is the very early stage; it’s very rough around the edges". Then comes the beta stage which usually means "almost everything works but its still somewhat buggy". After that...

Users of Microsoft Office 2007 should really take a look at some of the improvements made in SP2. While there are lots of improvements, the most notable include:Support for Open Document Format (ODF). This is OpenOffice’s native format and you can now read and write using Office. Native support for exporting to PDF and XPS. Previously this required an...

The junk I’m referring to in this article is physical junk, as in the stuff that lands in your postal mailbox and the telemarketing calls you receive. 1. Make your phone number unlisted. Easy solution but certainly not instant gratification. It may take as long as a year before the calls slow down. Telemarketing companies obviously have copies of the phone...

Flash is one of those things on the internet that’s been a source of irritation ever since it first appeared. From the perspective of a programmer, it’s bulky and difficult to "mold" into what you want it to do. From the perspective of the user, it’s "That thing that makes me wait to load just to view it, and when it does can...

Most of us are not graphic designers. So when it comes to designing web sites and applications, the most sensible choice is to use stock photography as it is cheap and readily available. However, before you design around the pictures you have available, make sure you understand the ‘dangers’ of using stock photography. A few quotes will give you the...

What is a keylogger? It’s something that records keystrokes and is normally used without the consent of the user. You’ve probably heard that keyloggers are a bad thing. It is when used for illegal purposes, such as having a keylogger app installed without your knowledge via spyware. But it’s not a bad thing when you are the one who installed...

Generally speaking, most people are smart enough to know what’s real and what’s b.s. But when it comes to an internet “most” list, this is where people go completely stupid, simply assume that what they’re reading is absolutely 100% true, and never bother to ask why certain things on a “most” list are higher or...

When it comes time to get a new computer, whether you are building your own or purchasing a pre-built, to really get the most bang for your buck you should only pay for the hardware you need. For example, if you are getting a machine for just internet and email, you don’t need a fancy graphics card because you ‘might’ play games on it…...

Late last week, a new Twitter client hit the App Store for the Iphone. It is called TweetGlobe. It was developed by a good friend of mine, so I knew about this app’s development for some time and it was awesome to finally see it go public. Tweetglobe does something that I’ve never seen on the Iphone – it maps your tweets to a 3D representation of the...

Judging from the overwhelming positive response from Windows 7 users (including myself), I guess it’s no surprise that Gartner is telling clients to skip Vista entirely and just go straight to 7. What’s more is that it will happen relatively quickly as Microsoft appears to be on target for a late 2009 launch – and that’s ahead of schedule...

If you hadn’t heard, Google had an outage last week. And, of course, it put the general internet community in a state of outright panic. Then Google fixed the problem(s) it had and life went on as usual. I’ve been using the internet long enough to where I remember what it was like before Google. Even though the site made its appearance in 1998,...

One really useful feature of Windows which I notice a lot of people do not take advantage of is the Quick Launch bar. This is the area in your taskbar which has the icons you can use to open programs. For many people I can see why they would not use it because between the programs they have open on the taskbar and the system tray, there really isn’t too...

If you are a user of Google Calendar, one thing you can do is share your calendar with others and add other people’s calendar in yours. This can definitely be useful as you can see what your friends and family are doing (assuming they use Google Calendar). Additionally, there are lots of informational calendars Google offers, such as holidays, which are...

Windows has always had the native screen capture functionality via the Print Screen button, but this is extremely limited to just capturing the full screen or the active window. Of course, then you had to paste this capture into another program to actually save the image making this a rather cumbersome process. Windows Vista now has a much improved utility for...

Wi-fi theft, as in the act of stealing someone’s internet connectivity by breaking into a wireless network, has been around ever since we first started using wireless routers. Before covering the topic of how likely you are for wi-fi theft, I’ll first say that wi-fi security has never been that good. If one is desperate enough to steal your signal,...

Most web sites will work with no issue using Firefox 3 or Internet Explorer 8. But there will be times you encounter a web page that will instantly crash your browser. One such example is crappy MySpace pages. It is very common to find pages with the following junk in it:Animated background graphic Animated Flash graphics Auto-play music player Other...