Many moons ago there used to be several electronics store chains that were truly good at what they did. Back in New England where I grew up, Massachusetts had quite a few of them both regional and national, such as Tweeter, Nobody Beats the Wiz! (which still exists,) Fretter and so on. Even Service Merchandise (which also exists but online-only) had a truly...

This article concentrates on the crap you download and not the crap that just accumulates over time. It honestly amazes me how much I download. If you’re like most people (including myself), you probably have a downloads folder where you place everything. Then seemingly all of a sudden the folder contains 6 gigs or more worth of files, with the top 3...

Periodically I get asked the question, “So, what are you running?”, in relation to my computer box, its OS, the apps I use, the hardware I use and so on. Before I list off my stuff, Dave uses a Mac Pro quad-core with I believe 9GB of RAM. His monitors are dual Dell 24-inchers and an older third one that I can’t remember the make/model of at the...

Over the course of the weekend I finally got around to hooking up my Magnavox DTV Digital to Analog Converter. The model of this particular converter is TB100MG9 for those interested. For those that just read the above and said, "What’s that for?", it’s the thing used to receive a digital over-the-air signals for an analog TV. Or to be very...

Situation: You’ve decided that you’re going to build a new computer. You put your part list together (case, mainboard, RAM, hard drive, processor, etc.) and then come to the point where you have to purchase an optical drive. Seems like a waste of money, doesn’t it? On the Linux side of things, it has been proven that you can install a full...

In the world of business there are many corporations that do not follow the calendar year (i.e. year begins on January 1) but rather the fiscal year. While it’s true that a fiscal year can start anytime depending on the business, most of them will use September. As an example, high schools in the United States traditionally use September as the beginning...

For users of Windows Live Hotmail you may have noticed that for some (but not all) forwarded e-mails and newsletters that contain images show these images as nothing but little gray boxes. In particular, this gray box: http://gfx1.hotmail.com/mail/w3/pr01/ltr/i_safe.gif This is a relatively new issue that seems to have sprouted up with Hotmail. There is no...