Today (Jan 18th) is a large-scale protest day to SOPA/PIPA. No doubt, you’ve heard all about it. Many large websites are going black today in protest of the bill, including Wikipedia, WordPress and Google (in the form of a censored logo). If I had more time available, I might have set things up to black out DavidRisley.com and PCMech.com. But, I...

External hard drives are great. As an iMac user (yeah yeah, whatever )… I make use of external hard drives for backup purposes and redundancy. The thing is, they take up space. And then there’s a wire on your desk. If you’re trying to get rid of desktop clutter, then a good option is to put some of your computer add-ons (like external hard...

Over the last couple of weeks, PCMech has had a new sponsor: Reimage. We’re happy to be working with Reimage – especially because this software is truly unique and actually does what it says it will do.Here’s what Reimage will do for you… The scan (which you can do for free) gives the user an evaluation of the current state of...

Louis CK is a pretty well-known comedian. And honestly, one of my favorites. And he’s been generating some online news lately because of his sale of Live at the Beacon Theater. He produced it himself and took the sale directly to the Internet for $5/pop. And, as he said: No DRM, no regional restrictions, no crap. You can download this file, play it as...

I don’t think it is much of a secret that Mozilla (the company behind Firefox) depends on Google to a very large degree for its own existance. Google pays Mozilla a big (yet, undisclosed) sum of money to keep Google as the default search engine in the Firefox browser. Without that revenue, Mozilla probably wouldn’t be here today. In 2011, Google...

Digital SLR cameras take awesome photos. We all know that. However, any of them built within the last couple years or so usually also include the ability to record videos. Due to the optics of a DSLR, the video quality is AMAZING. They really blow away traditional video cameras in a lot of ways. The newer, more expensive DSLRs come with a lot more bells and...

Google is in the process of officially rolling out the new Gmail theme. My own account froze for a minute or so today, then rolled back online with the new design and an intro video. But, change isn’t easy. While most of the changes are totally OK with me, one thing I didn’t like was just how WIDE the individual email rows are by default. Come to...

Today is “Black Friday”, which means everybody is out looking for bargains. Well, how about one you can actually use? It is web hosting by Hostgator. And, for TODAY ONLY,  you can save 50% on any new Hostgator account. This means you can get good, solid hosting for as little as $2.48/month. Have your own website - for as little as...

Steve Jobs has died. He left a large and positive mark on the world. Whether you use an Apple product or not, his vision has had a HUGE influence on the entire world of computing. As Apple said, the world is immeasurably better because of Steve. Rest in peace,...

After running a first-generation Mac Pro for over 4 years, it is about time to upgrade. In looking at the comparison between the Mac Pro and the new iMacs, I arrived at what (to me) was a surprising decision.Coming from a Mac Pro, I had always considered that I would upgrade to a Mac Pro. However, after looking at the pricing and the options, it is clear that...

I remember when HP was a big deal. But, today, they seem to be hell-bent on destroying themselves. The rather public failure of the WebOS is just the tip of the iceberg with HP. They took a nice tablet with a nice OS – honestly, the only tablet OS that had a chance at competing head on with Apple’s iPad – and they destroyed it. In no time...

The news hit yesterday. Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion. Barring any regulatory hurdles, the well known internet-based voice chat system will be a Microsoft product. Yesterday, the blogs were full of debate over the future of Skype and, of course, whether they overpaid for it. I’m an everyday user of Skype. In fact, a couple months ago, I...

Nobody can argue with the fact that Amazon remains one of the most innovative companies in existence. That was shown, yet again, with their surprise launch of Amazon Cloud Player. This all comes off the heels of their recent inclusion of streaming movies to their Prime members, and the talk of an Amazon App Store for Android. Cloud Player is a cloud-based music...

So, the big Apple news yesterday was that Apple released subscription billing capability into the App Store. This is actually really cool in many ways. It allows magazine publishers to easily distribute to iOS devices. It also allows some cool opportunities for web entrepreneurs to do subscription services on iOS devices. Problem is, Apple ruined it by getting...

Several months ago, I wrote about how I was going to ditch the Iphone and head on over to the Android side of the fence. I picked up an HTC Incredible. Shortly thereafter, I wrote about my experiences with Android after a few days of using it. Now, my main reason for switching at the time was Google Voice. It wasn’t available on the Iphone. Now, it...