Outside of PCMech, our illustrious leader Dave has his own Facebook public page and a Google+ page where he interacts with his fans. As for myself, I do the same thing to interact with my fans. Dave’s audience is primarily a mostly-25-and-up entrepreneur (as in pro-blogging) crowd and mine is a mostly-25-and-under entertainment (as in music fans) crowd. If...

For anyone that’s ever seen an episode of Hoarders, you know that hoarding is bad because it can lead to destructive habits that can significantly decrease the quality of life. Data hoarding is not the same as regular hoarding because you’re dealing with data and not physical items. And there are some out there who never delete anything. Some keep...

These days a lot of people feel more than just a little uncomfortable giving out their credit card info online when making a purchase, and don’t want to go the PayPal route either. You’ve heard time and time again, "Get a prepaid credit card!" Okay then, how? I’ll tell you how. Knowing the difference between a locked and unlocked...

Periodically I receive PCMech reader mail from people asking for help with browser cookies, specifically pertaining to how they work with a security suite. Said honestly, it is not easy to explain how browser cookies work. They’re simple enough to define, but when it comes to explaining what they actually do to someone who doesn’t know otherwise,...

Something that’s somewhat annoying about Google Maps is that when using the Street View feature there’s no way to preview whether an area has street views or not without actually engaging it. If you use Google Earth on the other hand, you can preview. Confused? See the quick video below for an...

"Tablets will replace PCs and everything will be great!" Don’t count on it. The dark side of tablet computing is its overreliance on the cloud to do basically everything. The cold bitter fact is that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo!, AOL and anyone else that offers cloud services (mail, storage, docs, etc.) absolutely do not care about your data...

This is a quick tip but a good one to know. Strangely enough there is no way to rename a task once it’s set in Windows 7 Task Scheduler. You can right-click/Properties or edit the task until you’re blue in the face (or screen, ha ha), but you can’t rename that darned task. There is a workaround however. Right-click your task and select...

I’ve covered AutoHotKey before, but didn’t cover how to automate mouse movements until now. In the video below I show how that’s done using an older release of the software (which is still available); I use the older release because it comes bundled with AutoScriptWriter II. That software, while a bit on the ugly side, does make for creating...

[Insert opening theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey here, with "THE DAWN OF E-MAIL" subtitle, and jumping dial-up modems instead of monkeys.] In the beginning, email was all plain text… …and the way in which it worked was that the displayed (meaning the one you would see) header on reply would look something like this: Steal my cheeseburgers...

This is a follow-up to this article, where I said there are many ways of "syncing" a POP account, and this is another way of going about it using a separate Hotmail account. Requirements:An email client with auto-blind-carbon-copy, a.k.a. auto-bcc capability (such as Mozilla Thunderbird, nPOPuk, Sylpheed, etc.) A Hotmail account (if already using a...

Recently my sister had some good luck and happened to win a $500 gift certificate for Apple products. Per her profession she took an online survey for work-related products, and one of the perks is that if you filled it out you might win the gift certificate. Sounds like a spam, I know, but it was legit and she did really win it. Right after that she texted me...

Mozilla very recently released (as in official, not beta) version 8 of the popular Firefox browser. On The Mozilla Blog there’s a whole write-up about all the changes and whatnot. Out of the changes listed, this was the only one that really caught my attention: Firefox lets you load tabs on demand, making it much faster to restore windows with many tabs....

One of the more annoying parts of putting a PC together is where to put an external USB hub. Many people use the smaller 4-port flavor, and of course whenever the cable connecting it in the back gets moved, it slides all over the place because it has barely any weight to it. Smaller 4-port hubs also have the very annoying habit of leaning because of cable...

Lately there have been disorganized attempts to get something calling The Darknet Project a.k.a. TDP off the ground. What is it exactly? This article states it best as, "to create a global darknet, a decentralized web of interconnected wireless mesh networks that operate independently of each other and the conventional internet". Recently the people...

Yes, I know, there’s no such thing as true synchronization when it comes to POP email accounts, but this is the next best thing. Not everyone uses webmail, and many still use POP. Some use POP because they have no other choice, such as a business or ISP-based email account; others simply can’t stand webmail or IMAP and go the POP route because...

For those of you living in nations that must observe Daylight Saving Time, here’s the stuff you probably forgot to change the clocks for so they can observe DST proper:The clock(s) in your car(s) Microwave clock Oven range clock Laptop or netbook (did you turn it on today so it can auto-adjust?) The wall clock(s) you have that aren’t atomic...

I don’t think anyone would argue with me when I say China is the #1 maker of tech gadgets in the world. Note that I didn’t say good tech gadgets, but they have mountains of the stuff. Those who manufacture tech gadgets will make anything and everything – and moreover when you order direct from China, it’s cheap because you can knock off...

I’ve talked about the Popcorn email client before but never actually showed a video explaining how it works. Popcorn is as minimalist as you can get with a GUI-based mail client; the only way to go more minimal would be to use a text-based client. While true this client only supports POP (with or without SSL), it easily runs off a flash drive and will run...

Back in the mid-1990s, email wasn’t a household word yet and the clients used to connect to email services were difficult at best to use. One such client that was at one point very popular was Eudora. It is without a doubt one of the most difficult clients to set up and get working, but many held a large affection for it and some even still use it to this...

Most of you out there had that phone in the past which you miss dearly because everything about it was "right". You probably stopped using it only because you changed carriers, am I right? In case you weren’t aware, Sony is phasing out feature phones, and that truly marks the beginning of the end for the feature phone – at least in the US....