For those of you who have ever seen the movie Blade Runner, there are scenes whether the flying police vehicles known as "spinners" fly past Los Angeles skyscrapers that show absolutely humongous advertisements directly on the buildings themselves:(Note the image of the face on the building behind the spinner; that’s part of an...

Chances are you’ve received spam that somehow found its way into your inbox, and nowhere in the email does your email address appear in To, Cc or Bcc. You can use this to your advantage to slow spam by specifically requiring your email address to be in To, Cc or Bcc to be delivered to your inbox. Important note before continuing: This method does have...

Every so often you login to a web site that starts with https:// instead of http://. Modern browsers either show an image of lock and/or change the color of the address bar to inform you of this. The ‘s’ is for ‘secure’. It means that the information transferred is encrypted while on http it is not. Most major webmail providers do offer...

Back in the early 2000s I remember reading about several instances where people would get fired from their jobs for what they wrote on their blogs. These blogs contained negative opinions (read again: opinions, meaning not accusations) that were something to the effect of, "That guy I work with, John, he’s a jerk." And yes, that was enough to get...

When you purchase a new/refurbished system from some manufacturers, the recovery disk media is an optional component. Optional because the recovery data is typically stored on a partition on the hard drive which you can access via the BIOS boot menu. So should you purchase this optional media? Absolutely. What if your hard drive crashes and the system is off...

Something interesting to think about is that if there were no Windows, what would you use? You obviously have to use something for an OS. In a no-Windows world, there is basically only one choice: UNIX. On the desktop and laptop, Mac OS X is derived from UNIX, and Linux is "UNIX-like". On the smartphone, Apple’s iOS is derived from OS X, which...

Today, PCMech has switched over to the Disqus (pronounced “discuss”) comment system. Some of you have used that system before, but many of you haven’t, so here’s a quick Q-and-A on using it. Does it require you to sign up for an account? No. Using a Disqus account is completely optional. If you want to post comments the old way, you can...

Have you ever been downloading a file and about 80% of the way, something interrupts it? This can be frustrating because (most of the time) you simply have to start the download again. For small files, this is not really an issue, but for larger files it can be a huge inconvenience. As an alternate to traditional downloading via a browser, try using a download...

Usually when one wants to decrease hand and wrist pain from computer use, they buy ergonomically friendly input hardware, such as a Microsoft Natural Keyboard. This is good, but you can take it a step further by following the old adage of, "type less, click less". Here are five ways to do that: 1. Assign the mouse wheel button as a double-click. I...

TransferJet is a brand spanking new wireless technology. It’s low-power and can send data at 375 megabits per second. And no, that’s not a typo – it’s fast. (Note: Some other manufacturers are claiming 560 megabits!) When will we be seeing TransferJet tech? February, as in next month. But hang on, don’t go and throw out all your...