Over the weekend, I saw a pretty interesting article regarding building your own Home Theater PC (HTPC) which is virtually silent. So how quiet is the Phantom? 20 dB or less typically, but if that means nothing to you, put a different way, sitting on the couch 6 feet away, its probably less audible than the person next to you breathing. The article details all...

Have you ever opened a file, made changes and then instead of selecting “Save As” you hit Ctrl+S or select “Save” and your changes are lost? Admittedly, I have done this several times. Thankfully, there is a simple trick which works most the time: the undo function. After saving over the existing file, first you save the document in...

You may have seen a recent news blurp that President Obama’s Twitter account was recently hacked. This was accomplished by the “hacker” guessing the forgot password questions. If you think about it, these questions are usually “what is your favorite food?”, “what street did you grow up on?”, “what was your high...

Everyone knows what a phone book and web search engine are, but if you were to combine them, you would end up with something like Spokeo: Spokeo is a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books, social networks, marketing lists, business sites, and other public sources. Most of this data is publicly available on the...

As you can probably tell from my previous posts, I am not a big fan of Flash at all. That said, Flash, never the less, remains a “development” platform that website developers continue to use. So if you would like to build your own website based in Flash, then check out Wix. Much like WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors, Wix provides...

With advertisements from ISP’s boasting new internet connection packages with faster and faster speeds, I have to wonder if you (presently) really need speeds exceeding ~4Mbps (~500KB/s). While it is hard to argue faster is not better, it is important to understand that while your connection may support ultra fast transfer speeds, your speed is limited by...

Some developers at Google looking to push the HTML5 envelope have ported Quake 2 to the browser. There is a demo movie you can watch which is pretty impressive. In order to run it, you currently have to download the code and host it yourself. Additionally, since this port uses some ‘experimental’ HTML5 features, it only works in Chrome and Safari...

Nir Sofer, the developer of the fantastic NirSoft collection of utilities (which I have written about many times)  has, without a doubt, spent hundreds of hours developing his programs. As you might expect not all users are appreciative of the amount of work it takes to develop and maintain these programs and also expect that he should provide support for their...

First off, I don’t like using the word hacker as a negative term since technically it is not, but since it is the media term for a “bad computer person” I will make an exception in this case. There is a really good article which everyone should read titled “How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords” which goes into some detail about ways...

Both Firefox and KeePass are popular among PCMech readers, so it makes sense that the combination of these two would be a perfect match. So if you want to ditch the integrated Firefox password manager in favor of KeePass, give the KeeFox extension a try. KeeFox is still in beta, but has a pretty nice feature list. There is a bit of configuration required and a...