If you’re currently feeling the pinch of an overpriced privately-owned ISP, watch out because municipality-run, a.k.a. "community broadband" internet is making waves. Currently there are 133 US cities that have community broadband. This map shows you where they are. The red markers on the map are FTTH (Fiber To The Home), and yes that means...

One of the last bastions of purity concerning job security was the US Postal Service. Working for the USPS was in a way like working for the state govt., federal govt. or the military in the respect that employees stayed there (usually happily) for decades. Well, you can scratch the USPS off the job security list as they’re cutting out 7,500 jobs, which...

Here’s an interesting factoid when it comes to video games: There were no gamers before 1985. In the late 1970s there was the Atari 2600, which had a lot of games ported over from popular coin-operated arcade machines of the time. In the 1980s there was the Nintendo Entertainment System which also had a lot of games ported over from arcades – but...

I caught mention of this on the PCMech Forums so I had to check out Genpets. This is billed as the only "bioengineered buddy", available in 7 different personality types. The reason the Genpet looks so creepy in its packaging is because since it is a real-deal bioengineered.. um.. thing.. shipped in "hibernated" state. The explanation for...

There are certain products that suffer from permanent identity errors in the way people write or pronounce them. 1. Firefox’s Abbreviation The mistake: Writing the abbreviated Firefox as FF The right way: Writing as Fx or fx Who says this is so? The Firefox developers themselves (see point 8 on that link). Yes, I’ve been guilty of using FF on...

Not-so many moons ago in the mid-1990′s, overlay area codes were introduced into the US phone system. Prior to that there was no area code in the United States where the middle digit wasn’t a 0 or a 1. Whenever you see a middle-0 or middle-1 area code these days, those are carryovers from Ye Olde Bell System. US phone numbers are laid out as area...

The unofficial goal of any vintage PC these days can be summed up in a single phrase: "Let’s get this thing online!" This of course means to connect the computer to the internet. That in itself isn’t too much of a hassle, but once connected, what productive thing – if any – can you do with that old internet-connected box? In...

Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition a.k.a. Windows ME is the shortest-lived Windows that ever existed. The total time it was on the market was only 11 months, but even given it’s super-short tenure it frustrated and angered people to no end. Noted in the video below, the primary reasons why WinME ticked people off left and right was primarily due to the...

It’s a common story that if you’re the one in the family who knows computers, everyone wants you to fix everything they broke because of their own stupidity. It’s most likely true you’ve already been fixing their busted OSes and/or computers for some time now and want a way out. I’ll give you 7 ways to do it. 1. Delay any answer to...

What’s now known as the netbook originally made its appearance as a subnotebook several years prior. If you worked in a corporate environment back in the mid-to-late 1990s, the one you probably remember is the Compaq Contura Aero in 4/25 (486/25MHz) and 4/33 (486/33MHz) flavors. You may also remember the the 410C and 410CX models. The Contura Aero...