Foobar2000 is something that’s actually been around a very long time (since 2002!), but for whatever reason I never heard about it until very recently. The foobar2000 program is an audio player for Windows. Just audio, meaning no video. And that’s just fine because there are some of us out there that appreciate dedicated audio player programs, yours...

For those of you who remember and enjoyed the simple (but addictive) game Lemmings, a game you should give a look to is Pingus. If you haven’t played Lemmings, the concept is simple: The player takes command in the game of a bunch of small animals and has to guide them around in levels. Since the animals walk on their own, the player can only influence...

When it comes to webmail, be it Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, we don’t ask for much. Truly. All we want is the ability to send an receive messages with minimal fuss. Many don’t even bother using the built-in address book or calendar features because as long as the mail keeps flowing, that’s what matters. Being that mail flow is the most...

Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service?  Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress. These are the opening lines from a Library of Congress Blog post. We have all heard stories of how people doing not so smart things and sharing them with the world have had repercussions,...

Many people like to use mouse gestures as shortcuts for performing common browser tasks such as the back or refresh functions. So for those of you who want to shortcut your URL keystrokes, check out the Firefox add-on URL Alias. Using this add-on, you can provide a few keystrokes as a way to ‘fill in the blanks’ on a template URL. Their download page...

A common tool that network and system admins make use of is the “ping” command which is a very simple and effective way to verify a machine is available on the network (firewall rules depending of course). So if you find yourself having to ping multiple machines at once, a very useful tool is Nirsoft’s PingInfoView. PingInfoView is a small...

While we’re all waiting for USB 3.0 to become widely availble so we can use something much faster than the 2.0 spec, Intel is developing a technology called Light Peak that they believe will succeed USB altogether. How fast is Light Peak? Intel says it will transfer an entire full-length Blu-ray movie in 30 seconds. Yep. That’s fast. For those of you...

Unless you record demo/training material often, most likely you do not have a screen recording program. Note that this is different than a simple screenshot program as your actions and audio are captured and then embedded into a video file. If you ever have the need for something like this, then check out ScreenToaster which offers:Register & use it...

Everyone at some point or another has bought computer hardware only to find out it wasn’t powerful enough, or that money could have been saved because too much was purchased. Sometimes it’s tough to find that happy medium where you get what you want without spending too much. This is a quick true-or-false list on some of the more common computer...

Have you ever ordered something from Amazon which totals $23 with the shipping charges tacking on another $5? Since Amazon gives free shipping on orders $25 and over, you are actually better off here ordering an item under the shipping amount and getting the free shipping (plus the extra item). In a recent post I read on Lifehacker, a tool which makes this easy...

I’ve been using Windows 7 since the RC was released, then upgraded to the full Home Premium edition later upon its release. While using my PC today, a thought occurred to me: I had never defragmented the file system since installing the OS. I launched the Disk Defragmenter program, which to the best of my memory was the first time I’d ever done so in...

When I first read that some Seagate 500GB FreeAgent Go portable HDDs would come preloaded with a popular movie (such as GI Joe), I thought it was a good idea. That was until I read that the movie was digitally locked and would cost $9.99 to unlock. Y’know.. it’s bad enough when you buy a pre-built PC that it comes with a bunch of crap in Windows that...

For those of you who make use of Skype’s ability to make and receive calls to/from any phone (via your Skype Online Number), a feature which had been missing for far too long is now available: caller ID. Previously, whenever you would call from your Skype number, a random phone number would appear on the recipients caller ID instead of your Skype Online...

I know this has been tossed around quite a bit already but I couldn’t resist showing this here. For as long as mobile devices have been around that are powerful enough to do it, somebody will have the thought of, “Hey, let’s see if Windows 95 runs on this thing!” Why? I have no idea. Linux is obviously the better choice, but...

Over the weekend, I saw a pretty interesting article regarding building your own Home Theater PC (HTPC) which is virtually silent. So how quiet is the Phantom? 20 dB or less typically, but if that means nothing to you, put a different way, sitting on the couch 6 feet away, its probably less audible than the person next to you breathing. The article details all...

If you search the internet for Windows 7 sucks, the results aren’t what you would expect. Most are old and people don’t seem to be complaining all that much about the Win 7 OS these days. I want to make clear to appease the fanboys, fervent Linux and fervent Mac users that I’m not advertising Windows. But what I am saying is that generally...

Have you ever opened a file, made changes and then instead of selecting “Save As” you hit Ctrl+S or select “Save” and your changes are lost? Admittedly, I have done this several times. Thankfully, there is a simple trick which works most the time: the undo function. After saving over the existing file, first you save the document in...

You may have seen a recent news blurp that President Obama’s Twitter account was recently hacked. This was accomplished by the “hacker” guessing the forgot password questions. If you think about it, these questions are usually “what is your favorite food?”, “what street did you grow up on?”, “what was your high...

If there were any indication that email still matters, it’s that major webmail providers continue to routinely develop their respective services. Both Google with Gmail and Microsoft with Hotmail have been striving to provide a better user experience to keep users happy. Hotmail Hotmail’s biggest to-do recently has been rebranding, or rather...

Everyone knows what a phone book and web search engine are, but if you were to combine them, you would end up with something like Spokeo: Spokeo is a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books, social networks, marketing lists, business sites, and other public sources. Most of this data is publicly available on the...