One thing I’ve noticed a lot of people run into – and that includes a considerable number of tech blogs (I’m looking at you, Business Insider)- is a tendency to confuse Chrome and Chromium. And hey, I can’t really blame them for that. The two operating systems are rather strikingly similar. After all, one does happen to be built based on...

If you’ve been working with computers long enough whether new, old or both, you’ve most likely used The Ultimate Boot CD at least a handful of times. UBCD is a free ISO you can download and burn that contains a plethora of disk utilities. Many of the utilities are redundant in the respect that several perform the same function but just in a different...

I just upgraded to Firefox 6 recently. Why haven’t I written an article about it? There’s not really much more mentioning. Fx looks the same, acts the same and there’s nothing I could really point out that would say, "Hey, look at X feature.. totally new/awesome/blah-blah". The only thing that is making news concerning this browser...

With the release of Chrome 14 onto the Beta channel, there’s been a lot of talk about some new program known as “Native Client” that’s built into Chrome. Everyone says its a new feature, a new function…except, it really isn’t. Thing is, Native Client has actually been built into every release of Chrome since 10 or 11. The Beta...

There’s a lot of USB stuff out there and a lot of it is great, but some of it is total crap. These 5 are things you should never buy – not even for someone else. Let’s start with 5 and work our way down to 1. 5. Darth Vader USB hubJust because it’s Star Wars themed doesn’t mean it’s good, and this isn’t. What once was...

Some PC games are best played with game controllers rather than the keyboard and mouse. For example, racing games are much better experienced with the game controller over the keyboard – no question there. Another instance are games that were designed for game consoles first, then PCs second. The best OS for gaming on the PC is Windows – and...

There are times when you need to have letters typed out that show an accent, such as é. Ordinarily this requires opening up the Character Map program or using some other utility to have those letters typed out. A really cool, free and small utility to take care of this task for you is Accents. This can be run either as an AutoHotKey script or as a...

You may run into the situation where you ‘inherit’ a PC from someone else where the Internet Explorer is chock full of crap, namely toolbar apps. This is the long way to get rid of crap out of IE when you can’t reinstall Windows for whatever reason (usually not having the disc). It requires some simple uninstall procedures, followed by checking...

At certain times you may get "adventurous" with your USB stick and do something to it which makes it unreadable – meaning to the point where you can’t even format the thing anymore. It also could be you have a USB stick so old that it has a really difficult time initializing. Should you toss the stick out at that point? No, there is one...

Ah, the ubiquitous "grandma" user. This is the type of user idiots like to spout out when talking about things like tablets and Macs, e.g. "So easy, grandma could use it." We all know what these folks are really saying is, "So easy a knuckle-dragging mouth breather with a 1st-grade education could use it". Right. Before continuing,...

Linux does video very well these days as there are good solid apps to get the job done. One of these apps is DeVeDe, which takes a ton of hassle out of making a DVD video disc. My favorite feature about DeVeDe is that it will compress any video you throw at it based on the size of the disc you choose and make it fit most of the time. In the video below, I take a...

Today is August 12, 2011. On August 12, 1981 the IBM PC was first introduced to market. The model number of that particular unit was the 5150. Before continuing, this is the best video I know of concerning Ye Olde 5150, and it’s darn good. It’s funny, it’s informative and, amazingly, it’s not boring at all:I dare anyone to find a better...

Most of you who use webmail probably configure the welcome screen to give you local information; this is accomplished by typing in what town/state you’re living in. After that you receive news headlines that are supposed to be local to you. The problem however is that local really doesn’t mean local in this instance, but rather regional. For example,...

When Microsoft did away with a whole bunch of screen savers in Windows 7, it really ticked off a lot of people – yours truly included. Most ‘full’ desktop Linux distributions come bundled with at least 50 screen savers (and even over 100, depending on distro). Some are great and some not-so great, so here are my picks for the top 20 Linux...

Regular readers of my articles know I have no love lost for optical disc media. It’s a decidedly old technology that’s been around since the mid-1970s and has gone through several generations (CD, DVD, Blu-ray, etc.). In my experience burned discs have an average life span of 5 years or less. Yes, I have in fact had discs last beyond 10 years, but...

Bloglines at one point was on the chopping block and was going to go away permanently, but then in very-late 2010 it was saved and has been running ever since. Basically put, the only way to use RSS the right way the first time is through a web service, namely Google Reader; a service a ton of people use for keeping up with the web sites, public Facebook pages...

USB sticks are great. They’re cheap, plentiful, available everywhere and can store a few DVD’s worth of data while still easily fitting in your pocket. But are they safe to synchronize data to? It is true that Flash memory can fail without warning, but unless you’re USB stick is a few years old and/or gone through some heavy use, the likelihood...

The most annoying part of using a laptop is the mouse, no question. It is something that the industry has always struggled with. In the early days of pointing devices on laptops, it started with an in-built trackball, and they were horrible. Placed just below the keyboard or in the LCD bezel itself, they routinely started to fail in as little as 3 months of...

Definitely one of the underdogs (compared to KDE and GNOME) but still a rock-solid, fast and stable window manager that gets the job done, fluxbox is what I personally believe to be the best lightweight window manager for the Linux desktop environment. The Linux desktop these days unfortunately has ballooned up in bloat by an alarming amount – but...

Long ago when I was playing Diablo II regularly, a friend of mine gave me an item in-game that he thought would help me out during gameplay. It was some kind of jewel or rock or whatever it was. I found that I didn’t have much use for it and discarded it by dropping it somewhere and moving on. A few days later, that friend asked me if that jewel/rock/thing...