Everyone likes to save a buck or two when shopping for stuff online, and generally speaking there are two types of online product discounts – coupons and specials. The difference between a coupon and a special is that a coupon usually requires the use of a promotional code under certain purchase conditions to receive the discount; the special on the other...

On my personal web site I do list an @aol.com email address as the way to contact me. Why? Mainly because I’ve had the address for years, it works, and I really couldn’t give a crap what techies say about it. Techies typically scream out "GMAIL! GMAIL! GMAIL!" I don’t care because Gmail periodically breaks as does Hotmail as does...

A lot of people don’t know what a “torrent” is, or what “torrenting” involves. Considering how torrents have become such a large part of the internet in recent years, that’s rather problematic, wouldn’t you agree? There should be a guide of some kind – something to help the newbies along on their way and introduce...

Here are two things you should remember about the internet concerning multimedia content:The internet is inherently lo-fi. Good content always trumps the technology it’s presented in.What does lo-fi mean? In simple terms: "Not broadcast quality." In technical terms: Non-widescreen, monaural (meaning not stereo), low-bandwidth multimedia...

In this issue of “In Layman’s Terms”, we’ll look at some terms related to networking. Mac AddressA Media Access Control Address, also known as a hardware or physical address, is a unique value associated with the network adapter on your computer. Basically, it’s what’s used to identify and associate with a system over a...

Yesterday, the ISP I use, Brighthouse Networks, had a major outage. And wow, was it a doozy. There was not only zero internet connectivity but nobody could contact customer service on the phone either to even report the outage as they were down as well. On top of that, even the main brighthouse.com web site was having problems. Like I said, it was a doozy. And...

Most of you out there are familiar with web sites like SpeedTest.NET and PingTest.NET, but this only covers the network address of your computer. When you want to test a web site’s response to a PING, and also test to see how the site fares out when PINGed from other countries, the place to do your testing is WatchMouse; that site will test any domain from...

Facebook has their "like" and Google their "+1" (which I like many others call a 1-UP). What this does is only allow for positive, barely-interactive feedback. I say barely-interactive because a like/+1 doesn’t involve typing anything. On Facebook in particular, there are people aplenty who sincerely believe there should be a...

Having the ability to call (as in voice call) landline or mobile phones through your PC or Mac is a must-have thing if your only phone is your cell phone. People become very irritated when they have to call somewhere with a cell phone only to go on hold for 10 minutes which does nothing but drain battery life and waste time; having a PC-to-phone way of making...

The ISP I use, Brighthouse Networks, dropped their personal home pages service (which they called PHP, not to be confused with the scripting language of the same name) in late 2010; that meant no more web space, meaning no more free FTP. Verizon internet, amazingly, was still offering free FTP access to their personal home page service all this while but not...