This week, the PCMech poll of the week is rather timely given the news of the week. But, before we get into that, let’s talk results from last week’s poll. I asked whether or not you use ad blocking software. As it turns out, a pretty substantial majority of the participating readers do make use [...]
Last week, a wave of disturbing news came to light. Of course, anybody with any common sense knew it was happening well before last week. But, the scope of it wasn’t fully known by the public until it was leaked to the media by Edward Snowden. As it turns out, the U.S. government has been operating an [...]
In last week’s poll of the week, I asked how many monitors you guys use. And, the results are in… Nobody said they use more than 4 monitors, so I guess we don’t have any NASA engineers or day traders in the audience. 4% use four monitors, 6% use three monitors, a whopping 54% use [...]
By now, it is pretty much a proven fact that multiple monitors increases productivity. And, honestly, with the pricing of monitors never being so low, there is really no good reason not to have more than one. The question for today is: How Many Monitors do you use? Here’s the poll for you to answer, [...]
Last week, I posted the first PCMech poll (in quite some time, anyway). The question was… Which social media site(s) do you use? And the results are in. The voting sample was small, although I expect that to grow once we get more regular about it. Here they are: Not surprisingly, Facebook comes in on top. [...]
The “cloud”. It is one of those magical marketing terms, like “Web 2.0″. We’re supposed to believe that everything is magical in “the cloud”. That everything just works… in “the cloud”. Of course, in real life, we also know the saying… sh*t happens. And, it does. Just because something is cloud-based (which is just fancy-talk [...]
That’s the gripe. Windows 8 has pissed off a lot of people, making it perhaps the most divisive operating system it has ever released. The chief gripe is the new desktop. You’re pretty much forced to use the “metro” desktop rather than the traditional icon-based desktop and start menu. People don’t like that. Microsoft insists [...]
The world is pretty keen on social media these days, and there’s no doubt it is here to stay. And will only grow. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that YOU use it much, personally. Do you use social media much? Here’s my video… So, that’s the question… Do you use social media? Reply in [...]
Many of us are now carrying smartphones in our pockets. If you aren’t yet carrying one, stats show that you may in the not-too-distant future. Most smartphones today have an integrated GPS and pretty well-developed navigation apps. Case in point, this last weekend I navigated to a fairly remote point in east central Florida using [...]
Are you sharing your location on social media? Are you checking in on Foursquare? And, are you checking in on Facebook? Or, even if you’re not checking in, are you telling the world where you’re located every time you post a status update? There are security risks with being so public about your location so [...]
Samsung has recently introduced their Galaxy S4. And, I recently had the opportunity to check it out. Now, I preface everything here with this… I am a long-time iPhone user. I took a temporary hiatus into the world of Android awhile back, and was quite disappointed. So, what did I think about the Samsung Galaxy [...]
It really is amazing sometimes just how connected we are to the Internet. It used to be that going online was a bit of a novelty. We’d buy a computer just so we could go online, and internet connectivity was something that we looked at as special. Remember those AOL discs? Today, many of us [...]
To make good videos with almost any camera, it is good to remove vibrations from hand-holding it. And, the most common way to do that is by mounting it on a tripod. Problem is, mounting a smartphone onto a tripod requires some extra gear. Whereas almost all cameras have a tripod mount on them, phones [...]
Ever tried to record video with a point-and-shoot camera, smartphone, or…. well, ANY camera, and do so using the built-in microphone? What does it sound like? Garbage, that’s what. The resulting audio is noisy, full of hiss in some cases, and it picks up every little background noise going on. The subject of the video [...]
Millions of elderly Americans live independently at home, however in many cases, there is a younger family member worried about it. They don’t want to lose the independence of living at home, yet the younger generation is worried that something could go wrong and they couldn’t do anything about it. I’m somewhat familiar with this, because this [...]
