Today’s tip will be a quick one as the much anticipated Firefox 3.5 is now available for download. This new version boasts a faster javascript engine, HTML 5 support, private browsing and overall faster performance. If you are interested you can read about all the changes here. Before upgrading, make sure all the add-ons you use are compatible with the new...

On YouTube there are more than a few prominent video-makers there that have run into the problem of having videos pulled (or accounts outright banned) due to them not being family friendly. Personally I think the term family friendly is fairly easy to figure out, however when it comes to YouTube the lines are blurred as it appears to be dependent on whether the...

The original Sony Walkman is 30 years old as it was originally introduced in 1979. I do distinctly remember these things from my childhood. I never specifically owned a true Sony model (only the cool kids were able to afford one), but the word Walkman was so widely used that it was the standard term used to describe a portable cassette player. In today’s...

If you are looking for a media player or are ‘re-evaluating’ the software you are currently using, here is a nice article comparing popular media players. The players compared are Winamp, MediaMonkey, iTunes and Windows Media Player, all of which are widely used. Features/functions compared are:File type support Searching/Filtering and...

Last Friday I went to configure my father’s new PC, a Dell Inspiron 531 mini-tower. This is Dell’s lowest-priced offering and it’s as basic as basic can get. A box with Windows XP, mouse, keyboard, power cable and not much else. This box comes provided with a 1.6GHz single core AMD Athlon 2560e 512K, your option of Vista or XP (the chosen OS...

First of all, I’m stealing the tagline of Miro HD Video Player for the title of this tip.  Miro is an open source application which connects to free Internet repositories of video and downloads them to your machine for viewing. You can think of Miro as a Tivo for Internet TV as you can save shows from their guide and when new shows are available, they are...

If you really want to dig into Firefox customizations and make some interface changes which may not be available through existing themes or add-ons then utilizing the userChrome.css file is what you need to do. Don’t worry, you don’t have to learn a scripting language (unless you want to of course) as there a numerous customizations available for you...

There are certain times when you need to access your instant messenger from the web rather than from a client. For example, if you’re at a friend’s house and want to login on his or her PC for a few minutes, it’s the easiest way to get chatting without installing anything. The Big Three are AIM, Yahoo and Windows Live (formerly MSN). AIM The...

Well, the prices for Windows 7 are here and this is how it fares out. Is Windows 7 cheaper than Vista? YES (thank God). If Microsoft had priced this the same as the previous OS that would have been a seriously stupid maneuver. Starting today, if you pre-order Windows 7 as an upgrade, the Home Premium Edition (which is what most people would go for) is just a...

Google Wave is poised to potentially be the next big thing on the web. In a nutshell it combines email, chat, voice and documents into a single interface. Unfortunately, it is not publicly available yet so there is a lot of a speculation on exactly what Google Wave does and how it works. If you are curious about it, here is a great Q&A session on Lifehacker...

You have probably seen several posts on this site covering popular and alternative file archiving tools, such as WinZip or 7-Zip. If you are a Mac user looking for a better tool, check out The Unarchiver. The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for “BOMArchiveHelper.app”, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is...

USB flash drives have become so standardized and normal that people don’t think much of them anymore. Whereas they used to be fairly expensive (considering), nowdays you can easily get 8GB drives for as little as $20. Reminds me of the old days when we had to use floppy diskettes and we thought we were rocking out with modern technology. Since there is...

New software from Microsoft, Hohm, is a free web-based tool that you can use calculate how to save on energy costs in your own home. Defined: Microsoft Hohm is a free web based application (running on the Windows Azure platform) that enables consumers to better understand their energy usage by utilizing advanced analytics licensed from the Lawrence Berkeley...

A lot of people are disliking YouTube these days. If it’s not for their ever-present "scheduled maintenance", it’s for the continually tightening grip on what is considered "acceptable" content and what isn’t. And let’s not forget that the community (and it’s a stretch to call it that) is simply awful. There are...

On the heels of my post yesterday regarding scammers using fake websites to steal information from job applicants, I thought I would post a few pointers to help determine if a website is indeed legit.Does the site look professional? If the site looks very thrown together and has little to no content with typos everywhere, stay away. Is there any contact...

I learned of fixoutlook.org from this article, so I’d like to add into the fray why I don’t use Outlook personally. First of all, I used to use Outlook. And I’m not talking about Outlook Express here, I mean the full version of Outlook. The client was good but there were certain things about the software that really rubbed me the wrong way. I...

Microsoft has just announced some beta anti-virus/spyware/malware protection software called Microsoft Essentials. It’s free and free is good. This software is only available to people running a legal copy of Windows. This is fine. My copies of XP are all legal as is my Windows 7. After jumping thru several hoops trying to download this thing, I sign in...

In the news recently, there was mention of a City in Montana requiring not only information on your social media accounts, but your user name and passwords as well. It goes without saying, this is huge concern to applicants’ privacy. On a related note, phishers and scammers are taking advantage of job applicants as well by setting up phony companies to...

What exactly does "doesn’t need a PC" mean? It means this printer doesn’t need a PC at all. It’s web-connected on its own. This is called the HP Photosmart Premium and yes, it has its own 4.33-inch touch screen. When I say it doesn’t need the PC at all, I meant it. According to this article, this will be introduced in the fall...

I’ll start this one off by answering the question: Hot enough to melt plastic. I know this from personal experience. (And by the way, if you have your own sob story or stories about how you had an item melt in the car, feel free to post it as a comment.) The first time I had something melt in a car from Summer sun was when I was still living in New England...