Sometimes you might find that the applications you’re using simply refuse to play nice with your Firewall, and even trying to allow exceptions into the software doesn’t seem to help matters. The temptation to simply turn off your firewall and be done with it might be pretty high. After all, all it does is complicate your network experience,...

Once your printer is in proper working order (see the article prior to this one), now you can do some cool stuff with it. Instead of the plain old boring documents you normally print, you can take any image and “rasterbate” it. What does “rasterbate” mean? Tiled printing. It’s the process where you take one photo and print it across...

Some USB keys have a physical write-protect switch on it, but many don’t. It is possible to make your USB 2.0 “write-protected” simply by modifying the file-write permissions on it. Fortunately this can be done without the need to hack the registry or use any apps. Check out the video below to see how it’s done (it’s really...

So, you’ve finally gotten your server up and running, have you? You’ve got a website, you’ve worked out all the gory details surrounding bandwidth and firewalls, you’ve managed to force your way through the unwieldy, arcane labyrinth of NAT, and now…you’re finally ready to open your doors to the world. Wait, no you...

For those of you into the itty-bitty Linux distros, SliTaz is definitely worth checking out as it’s only 35MB in size. It’s rare that a Linux flavor comes along this good at a size so small. I checked it out and it looks really good (and functions well) for what it is. SliTaz is designed to run in RAM and then store everything to a USB key. Once you...

If you can believe it, Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger, formerly Windows Messenger) is 12 years old; it had its initial launch on 12 July 1999. Amazingly, really old versions of the Messenger app still work with the service to this day. The versions seen in the video below are 4.7 and 5.0. Note to XP users: You can use MSN Messenger 4.7 which is...

I’m going to say up front that this app is not for everyone because it requires a very specific mindset to use it. ReminderFox is an app for use in the Mozilla Firefox web browser or Mozilla Thunderbird email client; it can best be classified as the “happy medium” between a full calendaring app and a to-do app. What ReminderFox does is make it...

The recent reinstallation of the Windows 7 operating system on my laptop involved a ton of updates, several of which were updates with .NET in the title. Here’s an example of a few of them:On reboot after installing anything with .NET in the title, Windows will crawl along very slowly as if it’s doing something very CPU-intensive in the background....

I made the the plunge and upgraded my laptop’s 500GB HDD to a 256GB SSD. In particular, this one. And of course the price dropped 25 dollars the week after I bought it. Hate it when that happens. And yes, I’ll be writing about my experience with using SSD soon. On a laptop you typically can’t run multiple internal hard drives. Not in the...

Concerning online video quality, in the widescreen realm there’s 360p, 720p and 1080p. Most people almost never use 480p widescreen because it has a “weird” pixel resolution (853×480) that most cameras and software do not output, so 480p is almost exclusively 4:3 aspect ratio at 640×480. In literal pixels, 360p (usually) translates to...