It is one of those things I’ve been tossing around in my mind for awhile now. I keep threatening to do it, but then I get cold feet and end up never making the call.

Why, you ask?

I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just slow to accept change. I’m so used to having cable that the idea of not having it seems odd to me. For some irrational reason, I wonder what I might be missing if I cut the cord.

But, these days, what am I really going to be missing?

With the Apple TV (which costs a mere $99), you have access to Netflix, Hulu Plus, iTunes, Youtube. Plus, with AirPlay capability, I can send (almost) anything from my computer over to the Apple TV.

Netflix has a ton of content available 24/7, although it tends to be lacking in the current programming department. However, Hulu Plus makes up for it by getting access to a ton of current programming. Between the two, we’re talking about $16/month.

For those occasional live programming events (like the Super Bowl), one could just grab a DTV antenna and watch it live in all its high-def glory.

And, there’s Amazon Instant video, which we have access to as Amazon Prime members. There is a lot of overlap between it and the other services, however there are some uniques. For example, for some reason, Amazon has almost all the Deadliest Catch episodes whereas they are completely lacking from Hulu and Netflix isn’t quite as current. (Yeah, I like watching Deadliest Catch sometimes. ).

Apple TV has no Amazon access (although that’s sure to change at some point). But, you can also pick up a Roku and access Amazon and a number of other Roku-specific channels.

In fact, if you’re not an Apple person and don’t run Macs, you might want to just get a Roku and skip the Apple TV, anyway. You won’t have AirPlay, but without a Mac, you probably wouldn’t care.

So, all that said, it seems like a no brainer to cancel the cable. Perhaps when/if I do it, I’ll document the experience and transition here on PCMech.com.

But, I’m curious…

Do YOU still have cable TV or satellite service?

OR… have you cut the cord? And, if you have cut the word and depend solely on the Internet for any video content you watch, how do you like it?

Post a comment and let us know. I’m actually rather curious.

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Do You Still Have Cable TV?

While the latter is still a bit out of reach for the average user, the former is getting a lot more common, particularly with the release of peripherals such as Microsoft’s Kinect system.

But what if you don’t have the money to shell out for a Kinect(or simply can’t be bothered to purchase one)?

Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Flutter.

It’s simple (albeit brilliant) premise: the application connect’s with your system’s webcam, and allows you to use gesture controls to change, select, pause, and play music and videos once you’ve selected a ‘preferred’ app (basically, that’ll be the application Flutter controls by default). As an added bonus, the application is compatible with YouTube, Netflix, Pandora, and Grooveshark, in addition to supporting most media players (VLC, Windows Media Player, iTunes, and QuickTime are a few examples). An excellent idea, to be sure – and a great way to put your webcam to use when you’re not actually utilizing it for video chat.

When you aren’t using Flutter, it’s a simple enough matter to turn it off: all you need to do is toggle it with an icon in the system tray.

Flutter comes in a few flavors: those of you with Windows 7 can download the msi from the app’s official website, while those of you who plan to install and use it in Chrome can nab the app on the Chrome Web Store. It’s also available on the Apple iTunes store, as well.

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Control Media Using Your Webcam With Flutter

You get the idea. Essentially, they streamline a bunch of tasks for which we used to need at least ten different pieces of tech, and shove them all into a single, portable device. It’s easy to see why everybody loves them, and why those few who still don’t have a smartphone are sometimes seen as a bit strange.

The fact is, most of us can’t live without our phones, simply because they keep us in contact with people from both our work and personal lives. Myself, I don’t even have a landline – I’ve my smartphone, and an Internet phone line. The easiest way to reach me is to send a text. It’s safe to say that many people actually do need their smartphones. But at what point does that need cross the road over into an addiction? At what point does viewing something as a necessity for one’s day-to-day life steamroll out of control into an obsession?

We’ve already covered Social Media and Internet addiction, so today we’re going to look at something very, very similar – smartphone addiction. According to a Gazelle survey some time ago, at least 65% of people feel as though they can’t live without their phone. Of those respondents,  18% were willing to sacrifice their personal hygiene and health for a smartphone, while 15% would rather give up on intercourse than give up their iPhone for a few days.

The infographic – which breaks down smartphone usage habits as well as addiction – can be seen below. One interesting tidbit from the piece concerns how Blackberry users view the world. Apparently, we’re much more pessimistic.

I wonder why that is?

As always, click for a larger version, and I’ll see you folks next time.

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[Infographic]: Are you Addicted to your Smartphone?

It’s a phenomenon that’s been termed “Information Withdrawal,” and it’s more than just an addiction to social networks. It’s more than just a compulsion to play Farmville, or to check your news-feed, or to post daily tweets.  It’s a need for connectivity – a need for your cell phone, your laptop, your tablet. It’s a need for modern technology, without which one feels lost, confused, and afraid.

Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe not. At this point, we know too little to say for certain. We simply haven’t done enough research.

On some level, though it sort of makes sense that there’d be such a general, ingrained need, when one stops to think about it. After all, many of us spent our childhood with smartphones, and computers, and game consoles. For many of us, they were companions just as constant as friends or family. Even those of us who haven’t have probably grown so used to modern conveniences, so comfortable with them, that we can’t imagine going without them for even a day.

Not only that, we’ve had bred into us a sense of urgency. A sense that we’re always missing something; there’s always something vital we need to be attending to online. Our friends are making plans without us. There’s an awesome story we could be reading. Our YouTube subscriptions are being updated. Our inboxes are overloaded with emails. People are trying to reach us, and we’re not available. We’re alienating ourselves.

People online are having fun without us. 

The question of what we can do about this is a very, very difficult one to answer. It’s pessimistic, but it might be better to ask if there’s anything we really can do. Internet addiction isn’t like alcoholism, or nicotine addiction, or a gambling problem. It doesn’t generally cost us any money, and it’s not considered socially unacceptable like excessive drinking. It’s not stigmatized like gambling and drugs, and it’s not consistently labelled as unhealthy like smoking. I’ve said before that the Internet is the lifeblood of our society. The Western world all but requires it in order to function.

How can we possibly kick an addiction to something that many of us actually require for our day to day lives?

We’ll look at the issue – as well as how one might deal with the addiction – next time.

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A Web of Likes: The Complex Nature of Internet Addiction

Bandicam: Probably among the most full-featured recording apps out there, Bandicam’s got pretty much everything you need to get started, and supports pretty much every title on the ‘net you might want to share footage of. It bills itself as a “better alternative to FRAPS,” compresses video to save space, allows uploading to YouTube without having to modify the file, and lets you record more than 24 hours of straight footage. Unfortunately, these features carry a price – if you want to use Bandicam, you’ll need to shell out $39.

FRAPs: FRAPs is the best known app out there, as far as capturing game footage is concerned. It saves the game video into AVI format, allowing for smooth recording (since it doesn’t compress movies while it records them), and is incredibly simple to use, to boot. While a free version does exist, it’ll add a watermark to your videos. If you want to remove the watermark, you’ll have to shell out for the full version.

Taksi: Taksi is basically FRAPs, except completely open source, and totally free – in other words, no watermarks on your videos. You can capture games in full screen using hotkeys, as well. Unfortunately, there’s one caveat- videos captured using Taksi don’t generally have audio included (which could be a deal breaker for many). There’s not much else to say about it, other than if you’re looking for a free alternative, you could do a lot worse.

X-Fire: X-Fire includes friend lists, a chat system, server browser, live broadcasting, user profiles, contact linking, and in-game voice chat along with its screenshot and video recording features. It’s a far more social experience than any of the other recording applications on the list, and works pretty well, to boot. Still, it might be a bit too beefy for users that are chiefly looking for recording software.

Once you’ve figured out what app you’re going to use, there are just a few things you’ll need to consider before you start recording:

• Recording video while gaming takes up a LOT of processing power. If your system already has trouble running a particular title, chances are you aren’t going to be able to record it without severely limiting the frame-rate.
• Consider utilizing a video editing program (such as VideoLAN movie creator or Windows Movie Maker) to touch up the video after you’ve recorded it.
• Depending on what app you’re using, you might need to compress your video before uploading it to YouTube (if indeed that is what you’re planning). Keep this in mind when choosing your platform.
• Potentially, you could also look into purchasing a game recording device for yourself (which will probably be necessary if you’re trying to capture console footage).

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Gamer’s Corner: Capturing Game Footage

There is a particularly vile breed of scum populating the corners of the blogosphere. These men and women haven’t got a single shred of originality between them – yet somehow they continue to come up with new, regular, and fresh content for their blogs. That it’s not theirs is just a minor technicality – what the original authors don’t know won’t hurt them, right?  These amoral individuals are known as content scrapers- and there’s a good chance that if you’ve been writing online for any significant stretch of time, you’ve encountered one.

Chances are, you don’t even know that you did.

So how does one deal with this most vile class of plagiarist? What exactly can one do when they’ve been victimized by a content scraper? And furthermore, why should one even care about them? If they think your work’s good enough to copy, more power to them, right? It’s not like they’re actually turning a profit off your writing, is it?

Well, actually…

There’s a good chance they might actually be getting traffic that would otherwise go to your blog, resulting in both revenue and traffic loss, and potentially wreaking havoc with your SEO. Not only that, the fact that they’re trying to turn a profit off of the hard work of others (without actually doing anything themselves- most of them actually have an automated systems designed to nab content straight from the RSS feed of blogs). It’s a new level of laziness.

Thankfully, they can be stopped – here’s how.

Tracking Down Scrapers

Unfortunately, there’s no surefire method to tracking down one of these rats. The only advice I can give you is to use all the tools at your disposal. Do periodic Google searches for the titles of blog entries you’ve made, use plagiarism checking tools such as Copyscape, check for links and trackbacks to your content, and consider utilizing applications such as Tracer to keep an eye on what people are copying off your site .

Taking Scrapers Down

If a content scraper is hosting the plagiarized content on a well-known blogging platform, your course of action is very, very simple: just report them to the company that manages the platform. The staff of that organization will investigate the claim, and with any luck, shut down the offending website. If they’re not on any sort of blogging platform, or you can’t tell what platform they’re on, things get a little trickier. You can try contacting the web host (depending on who it is, they may or may not take action) or the content scraper directly (it’s highly unlikely they’ll actually respond, or take you seriously, if they do).  If you’ve convicted yourself to trying, you can do a Whois lookup on the domain.

One alternative to simply taking out content scrapers is to take advantage of them – use them to drive more traffic to your site.

In order to do this, you’re going to have to link back to your content in multiple places with each post, and include a header or footer that links back to your main page. This’ll let readers know that the content they’re being shown is yours – and that it doesn’t belong to the scraper. At the very last, it offers some degree of protection.

Unfortunately, if you’re dealing with a particularly crafty scraper, that method won’t really work, and your only recourse is to take them down.

Content scrapers are one of the most irritating plagues on the Internet, and one of the biggest blights the blogging world has ever suffered from. The methods listed here are by no means guaranteed to protect you from plagiarists, but they can’t hurt, either – ideally, you want to do whatever you can to protect your content.

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Dealing With Content Scrapers

One thing we haven’t actually addressed is how the PC impacts one of your most important organs – your eyes. I’m sure most of us have dealt with eye-strain at one time or another. After all, even those of us who don’t utilize the computer for our job probably use it for entertainment (or, at the very least, Facebook). But how does squinting at a screen all day affect one’s sight? When does one cross the line from routine computer use to unhealthy?

Most importantly, how does one avoid causing permanent damage to their eyes in our increasingly-connected society?

Today’s infographic addresses all of these questions. Titled “Healthy Eyes in a Digital World,” it presents us with an in-depth examination of the effect computing technology has on our vision, and launches from that into an explanation of how to keep one’s eyes in working order while on the ‘net. A lot of the information in this segment is stuff most of us already know: regular eye checkups are important, as are frequent breaks and proper posture. Still, it’s valuable for those of us who weren’t aware of it.

The infographic concludes by presenting us with a few very cool technological advances which could quite literally change the way we see the world. You can view it below – click to enlarge.

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[INFOGRAPHIC]: Healthy Eyes in a Digital World

Clutter is one of the biggest problems with the Internet these days. Some websites are just designed in a sloppy fashion, or interrupted by advertising, poorly-placed images, or simply a terrible layout.  Furthermore, no matter where we go, or how we browse, there’s always something there to distract us, something vying for our attention. Maybe a website is simply laid out poorly. Maybe the article you’re trying to read is comprised of several pages, or split up into a slideshow (which is a terrible way to organize content, in my opinion).

Either way, it ends up making browsing feel like far more of a chore than it should. As it just so happens, there’s an app for that. And it works very, very well.

Today, I discovered something which, admittedly, probably shouldn’t have flown under my radar for as long as it did. The fine folks at Evernote have a browser extension, known as Clearly, for just the situation I described above. Using Clearly, you can connect to Evernote and sync articles with any system with the application installed, customize how you view content online, organize the content you have viewed, and highlight any details in an article you deem pertinent. Even better; it’ll actually link you to notes from your Evernote app which might relate to what you’re currently viewing online.

It’s simple to use, and allows for uninterrupted browsing and reading.

Clearly is available on the Chrome Web Store. You can also nab it from Evernote’s website, as well.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

[Application] Think Clearly While Browsing

Virtual Bounty Hunter: Read this. Y’see, data breaches are actually a very serious problem that have been plaguing enterprise ever since the inception of the Internet. One only has to look at how many breaches we’ve seen in the past few months alone to see that, either as a result of lax security or very, very smart criminals, sensitive data is getting into the wrong hands with alarming frequency. Virtual Bounty Hunters- a fairly new idea – are basically individuals who are hired by organizations to stroll into the seedy underbelly of the Internet to track down lost or stolen data, and to help figure out who it was who committed the breach in the first place. While it’s probably a fairly by-the-numbers job in practice, it seems very, very cool on paper.

White Hat Hacker: Look at your security system, the security system of your bank, the security system of your workplace. Chances are, someone somewhere down the line hired a White Hat to intentionally try to break their security. These people get paid to crack through firewalls and encryption like eggs. It’d be like getting paid to smash windows…well, if those windows were digital. And they protected sensitive data.

I’m not very good at analogies today.

Pro Gamer: With Riot’s recent decision to establish a legitimate pro gaming league, professional gaming has finally started to come to the forefront of Western culture. Somewhat. Professional gamers are those guys and girls who could probably beat you with their eyes closed. They’re the best at what they do, and they get paid to play – I don’t think I’ve met a serious gamer who hasn’t dreamed of being able to do that at least once in their life.

Youtube Partner: I’m sure all of us would love to make a living off of YouTube, but only a select few individuals ever get to become YouTube partners. A combination of original content and luck could very well set these men and women up for life, and aside from posting the occasional video blog (which, admittedly, can be a lot of work), they can experience a degree of freedom of which most of us can only dream.

Indie Developer:  As I’ve discussed in one of my previous articles, the current landscape of game development makes it entirely possible to become a successful indie developer without ever leaving the house. If you’re skilled enough and your ideas are original enough, someone’s going to want to pay you to see your plans come to fruition- as the old adage goes, “if you build it, they will come.” The amount of creative freedom afforded by being an indie developer is something a lot of other developers can only dream of, and people love them- it’s always easier to relate to the little guy, after all.

Image Credits: [Korea Times]

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Five of the Coolest Jobs on the Internet

Feel free to take a few moments to stop laughing before you continue reading this article.

Thankfully, there is hope for me yet. I’ve decided that I will, at long last, start using Linux. I’m going to start small, mind you – I’ll probably just run whatever distribution I end up deciding on in a virtual machine for the time being. Maybe I’ll see if I can grab an old PC online to convert into a full-fledged Linux box which I can mess around with. At the moment, I’m still in the research stages, and I’ve come across some fairly useful stuff in my wanderings. Feel free to contribute a few resources of your own, if you find this list to be woefully inadequate.

Oreilly.net (Linux Commands Directory): This one’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s a directory of pretty much every single basic command in Linux (as well as details on what each command does).  If you’re trying to figure out how something works, or what something does, this is the place to go.

The Linux Subreddit: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you can find pretty much everything on Reddit. The Linux subreddit contains news, advice, and information in droves about the open-source OS, and is actually pretty useful for learning some stuff about it. If you’re feeling confident, you can pore through the posts to find a cool project to do, or simply look to get some help with a particularly irritating problem. Either way, don’t discount Reddit as a resource for learning Linux.

How-To Geek: For those of you who don’t know, How-To Geek is a massive help center/blog related to all things about technology. There’s an Encyclopedia’s worth of how-to’s and tutorials related to Linux, as well as a bunch of cool tips and tricks.

The Linux ie Beginner’s Guide: Again, pretty much what’s written on the box. It’s a tutorial for anyone who’s new to Linux, and walks you through the initial installation process, hardware configuration, and all the most basic (and most important) commands.

Distro Watch: Deciding on which Distro to use is probably one of the more difficult tasks when it comes to using Linux. DistroWatch contains information on pretty much every Linux distribution out there, as well as updates and new releases. The site is a bit overwhelming simply due to the sheer volume of information, but it’s still a useful resource if you’re trying to figure out a distribution (or keep abreast of updates once you’ve settled on one).

That’s what I’ve found so far. If any of you’ve any further suggestions, I’ll gladly add them to the list.

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Five Websites for the Linux Noob