Here’s a situation that’s happened to everyone at some point or another: You’re in the middle of composing an email, and something out-of-the-blue happens. The power goes out, or your browser locks up. Or maybe it was a goof on your part where you closed the browser or hit the “back” button by mistake. No problem, right? Your...

If you subscribe to the PCMech newsletter, in last week’s rant I wrote about how I quit cloud storage completely. Yes, I still house my email “in the cloud”, so to speak, but as far as file storage services like Dropbox and SkyDrive, I quit those completely. Cloud storage invented this need to the effect of, “If you’re not...

XM Satellite radio has had a rather tumultuous history. You can click that link to read up all about the rollercoaster of events, ending in 2009 where XM was planning to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy. You will absolutely not believe all the cash that was thrown around concerning the service over the years. Everyone took a bath on it, so to speak. Just for kicks, I...

Since I know a few who read this will probably get instantly confused here, what I’m specifically talking about is www.outlook.com web-based email and not the Microsoft Outlook software product. Yeah, I know, Microsoft did a dumb again by naming two products almost the exact same thing even though they’re almost completely different from each...

Did you know Bing Maps has the ability to show coordinates for easy-use in your GPS? It’s true. For the longest time there was no way to get coordinates out of Bing Maps, but now all it takes is a single-right-click and you can get coordinate information quickly and easily. See video below to see how it’s...

I think it can be said without a shadow of a doubt that Counter-Strike defined what an online FPS (first-person shooter) is supposed to be. While true there were several other FPSes out there, CS was the one that took to the internet by storm. It was originally released in 1999 as a Half-Life modification, i.e. “mod”. It is really difficult to...

The new Digg (which I suppose you could call a news aggregator site?) is now online, dubbed the “v1″ system as it is a total rewrite. Admittedly, I like the design. A lot. It’s clean, simple and easy-to-use. There is no guesswork involved when using the Digg site, and no learning curve. There is, however, one fatal flaw with the system. You...

Government – any government, mind you – runs on paper. Not thousands of documents. Not tens of thousands. Not hundreds of thousands. Millions of documents. Possibly billions by this point. If you ever wondered why it takes government so freakin’ long to modernize, it’s because of the absolutely colossal amount of paper that needs to be...

Tablets are much like laptops in the respect they’re not meant to be taken apart. And while with most laptops you can upgrade the RAM and primary storage device (HDD or SSD), with a tablet it’s basically “what you get is what you get and have to live with”. Where you can get creative with a tablet however is with the operating system. For...

When you’re out and about with your laptop, you obviously want the battery to last a long as possible. There are many ways to eke out more battery life, and I’m going to list five of them below. You’ll know some of the tips very well, while others are not-so obvious. We’ll start with the obvious tips first and end with the not-so...

Netflix, as most subscribers to that service area aware, is Silverlight powered. And as any Linux user who has tried to get Silverlight working on that particular operating environment knows, it’s not easy. Not impossible as there are workarounds, but not easy. As to the question of whether Netflix will ever support Linux? Nope. The alternative to Netflix...

In the context of this article, a self-publishing website is any place where you create the content, post it for sale through their system and get paid via direct deposit, mailed check or PayPal. Examples of sites like these are Zazzle, Lulu and CreateSpace. Self-publishing doesn’t always refer to books whether printed or e-book, as it could also mean...

The Steam client has, unfortunately, porked up quite a bit over the years. Even though it needs to go on a serious diet, you can still fortuantely slim down the client by purposely choosing “Small Mode” and disabling a few features to get it running relatively speedy. Check out the video below to see how it’s...

This is going to be one of those blogs where I go into Old Man Mode, and bear in mind I’m only 37. Whenever I go into a big box retail electronics store (Best Buy, hhgregg, etc.), beforehand I have gone online, found the exact thing I need, confirmed it is in the store I will be going to via that store’s website, and written down the SKU number along...

YouTube launched in 2005. Prior to that it was very difficult to share video on the internet, and video streaming was almost nonexistent. Yes, there was RealPlayer streaming, but nobody offered this capability for free. The way people used to share videos before YouTube was to manually share static video files via email, newsgroups and websites. An example of...