Here is something interesting Mac users might want to take a look at. The Growl application centralizes the way applications notify you of events using a common interface. For example, the following events can all notify you through the Growl system:Safari finishing download a file. New email received. Incoming Skype call or message. Low battery.The benefit...

If you upload videos to YouTube but have not bothered with the task of basic editing (as needed of course) for whatever reason, there is good news for you: Google has introduced a new tool which allows you to edit your videos directly on YouTube: YouTube has a new video editor that lets you create videos using excerpts from the videos you’ve already...

For those of you that have ever watched the television show COPS (and who hasn’t?), many segments of that show include in-car police video footage. COPS is a show that first aired in 1989 and is still running to this day! Camcorders that used magnetic tape were standard up until the mid-to-late 2000s before the storage medium changed to Flash or DVD-based,...

In recent years it’s become increasingly common that gamers aren’t taking a liking to the newer 3D titles as much as they used to. They’re all more or less saying the same thing: "If you’ve seen one FPS, you’ve seen them all." Unfortunately, I can’t disagree with this. The 3D gaming arena, which is dominated by...

Much like new OS and browser releases, I like to keep tabs on the features available in the latest versions of Microsoft Office. So when Office 2010 was officially released earlier this week, I took a look at the new features available. Overall, there is nothing I see which makes me want to upgrade from 2007. Currently 2007 natively supports the XML document...

When you go to download/upgrade your Adobe Flash Player, which you would ordinarily download from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/, this installs a download manager which some of you (myself included) find quite irritating to deal with. There is a way to download a standalone installer that does not use the download manager. It is available...

Good through Friday (6/18/2010), The Windows Club is offering a free copy of Paragon’s System Backup 9.5/2010. While I have never used this product personally, I pass this link along because everyone should have a reliable backup process and if you have nothing in place this program may fit the bill. You can read the full description on Paragon’s...

Today, PCMech has switched over to the Disqus (pronounced “discuss”) comment system. Some of you have used that system before, but many of you haven’t, so here’s a quick Q-and-A on using it. Does it require you to sign up for an account? No. Using a Disqus account is completely optional. If you want to post comments the old way, you can...

In Windows XP, the system restore feature was added to the OS which allows you to take incremental snapshots of your system state as a tool to assist in recovery from OS problems. While certainly not bulletproof, it is a useful feature nonetheless. By default Windows creates a new restore point when updates and/or applications are installed, however if you want...

Said honestly, it annoys me that whenever I perform a search on any search engine that Wikipedia results show up first so often. How to get Wikipedia Google search results to not show up can be done the manual way or the fancy way. Manual Way Simply add -wikipedia to any Google search term. The dash in front of wikipedia must be included. This tells Google,...

Now that Office 2010 is here and after using Office 2007 for a couple of years now, I have to say that I really prefer the ribbon interface over the old menu driven one. However, sometimes I still have a hard time finding function I need in the ribbon as “translated” from the menu. Thankfully, there are a couple of helpers for situations like...

Even though the internet as a business medium is still see as the "Wild, Wild West" by many, it has established itself as a genuine means of conducting good, solid business. Something to bear in mind is that advertising on the internet now has evolved quite a bit. In the past, ads were quite literally just thrown out on the internet in one-for-all...

Currently you can purchase USB 3.0 cables. A 3-footer is about $9 and a 6-footer is $12. But what about cards, cases and motherboards? I checked out NewEgg to see what was currently available. Cards This is most likely how the majority of you are going to delve into the world of USB 3.0. Fortunately the starting price for a PCI Express card is $19.99. The PCI...

Many of you shop NewEgg or other like online retail web site to buy things. One of the items they sell is Microsoft Windows 7. For single-license versions of the OS, there are three types you can buy:Upgrade OEM System Builder Full RetailUpgrade is easy enough to understand. In order to install the OS you need a qualifying product such as Windows XP or...

From the “it was just a matter of time” category, Twitter will soon be pushing out ads through user message streams as well as through a trends campaign: Twitter is beginning to roll out its ad platform, which allows advertisers to insert messages into users’ streams. But the microblogging service already has an idea for a new product: Selling some...

One of the criticisms of Microsoft has been that over the years their Windows OS  has attempted to be everything for everybody which contributed to a serious amount of bloat in the OS. Attempting to combat this problem, Microsoft has released their Live Essentials package as a separate package which is freely downloaded from either Microsoft.com or Windows...

As I am sure Google is the search engine of choice for most of our readers, they have just recently published an update to their search engine indexing process: Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s...

Included in the last round of Windows Updated patches released by Microsoft was, for some reason, a Firefox extension called “Search Helper Extension”. As part of its regular Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released an update for its various toolbars, and this update came with more than just documented fixes. The update also installs an add-on for Internet...

Although this has already been written about on TC, this is my own slant on it. Yesterday I’m over at Dave’s place for the weekly meeting, he loads up Google on the Mac and the Google home page shows this disgustingly huge background image, and the image itself was disgusting. It was some type of multi-colored beach ball thing. Dave’s exact...

If you visit the Google homepage regularly, a few weeks ago you probably noticed they published a Javascript version of Pacman as their Google logo. Much to the dismay of some employers (I’m sure), Google has made their Pacman tribute available indefinitely. If nothing else this is just a time killer and a fun way to pay homage to the iconic game. Just...