One of my favorite things about Google Chrome is the sheer volume of addons available on the web store. There’s an application or extension for pretty much anything these days- from games to email to sharing content on social networks. There’s a rather unfortunate side effect to addons, however… install too many, and you might see your...

I’m always faintly shocked at how many people seem blissfully unaware of what their addons are doing behind their back. Don’t get me wrong, I love Chrome, but its addon security…sometimes leaves a bit to be desired. To be fair, a lot of the onus is on the user. In the same way that one must practice safe browsing to keep from acquiring a nasty...

It’s always kind of surprising to me how many people don’t really bother to maintain their PC.  A lot of folks seem to think that they can simply let their computer run. Trouble is, it doesn’t work that way. A computer’s a complex, intricate machine, and it needs to be well-cared for in order to properly function. What’s more,...

Recently I was checking out the latest openSUSE 11.4 distribution, which uses the KDE desktop environment by default. This is a very modern, very nice looking way to compute, no question. However there are two other environments openSUSE has installed by default, IceWM and twm, both of which are the absolute definition of a minimalist Spartan desktop...

This one’s really easy. Most people are familiar with the Windows Task Manager, where you can see all currently running processes, how much memory they’re taking up and so on. The Linux equivalent of this is top, and to the best of my knowledge works in every Linux distro there is. Simply run a terminal, type top, press Enter. That’s it. See...

A short while ago I did a quick review of the PCLinuxOS “KDE MiniMe”, a slimmed-down edition using the KDE desktop environment. Phoenix Edition uses XFCE, which runs lighter and faster than KDE does. Phoenix is definitely light on its feet and a breeze to use. See video below for...

This isn’t useful or productive at all – it’s just fun. In VLC’s preferences in the Video section / Output, there is the option to have video rendered as color ASCII:After you choose this setting, restart the player and any video played will look like this:To put it back the way it was, go back to where you chose Color ASCII output...

“Bandwidth conservation” is becoming more of a reality for many with more ISPs imposing strict bandwidth caps. It’s easy enough to instruct a browser not to download images or Flash content, however the way in which it’s done is inconvenient at best. The video below shows how to use a combination of two Firefox add-ons, Flashblock and...

Mac OS X Lion has caused a lot of hub-bub in the Mac community namely because Lion as far as I’m aware will not come on a disc. Download? Yes. USB key? Yes. DVD? No – although you can roll your own if you’re willing to do it in, dare I say, a PC-like nerdy way just to get it. (Seriously, you have to admit the way to make an OS X Lion boot DVD...

Some of you who have a passing interest in tech news have probably heard terms like “Canary,” “Dev Channel,” “Aurora,” Or “Nightly” tossed around. You’ve probably got an inkling about what these are – they’re different channels through which each respective company releases different builds of...