“Screen saver” style imagery is nothing new on television sets as the sets and console DVD players themselves have had them for years. However they’re all boring. The most you’ll see is the logo of the company who made the DVD player or television and not much else, if anything. Using Windows Live Movie Maker Beta, it’s easy to...

Optical Character Recognition, a.k.a. OCR, is a technology that converts an image of text into editable text. This is a technology that has been around for quite some time and was first used by most people in office-places as far back as the Windows 3.1 days. As far as where it was used, OCR was usually included as part of a fax software bundle. The fax machine,...

Users of the Google Chrome web browser use the address bar itself instead of an additional search bar to perform a search. Firefox can be modified to act exactly the same with a configuration tweak. Type about:config in Firefox’s address bar. Next to Filter type keyword. You will see this:The keyword.URL Preference is the one you want to modify, but...

Art is obviously subjective and open to interpretation, however if you want the absolute fastest (other than creating a free 30-second video from Animoto) way to create an artistic or at least art-like video, you only need three things:CreativeCommons Windows Movie Maker YouTube with AudioSwapHere’s how it’s done and you will be amazed at the...

One of the more annoying aspects of the internet is that it’s tough to check web sites to see if the username you want is taken unless you go to each web site individually, right? Wrong. There is CheckUserNames; this site will check the username you want on 160 different web sites. Absolutely no registration is required to use CheckUserNames. All you have...

A dingbat when referenced to fonts is a symbol for decorative purposes only, i.e. an ornament. In the Windows environment, most people first encountered the use of dingbats with the Wingdings font, which at the time of this writing is 20 years old. Yes, that does mean it’s been around and in use since Windows 3.1. Today you don’t have to use...

When you go to download/upgrade your Adobe Flash Player, which you would ordinarily download from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/, this installs a download manager which some of you (myself included) find quite irritating to deal with. There is a way to download a standalone installer that does not use the download manager. It is available...

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...

Said honestly, it annoys me that whenever I perform a search on any search engine that Wikipedia results show up first so often. How to get Wikipedia Google search results to not show up can be done the manual way or the fancy way. Manual Way Simply add -wikipedia to any Google search term. The dash in front of wikipedia must be included. This tells Google,...

Java is one of those things that most if not all of you have installed in Windows. It is something that’s a necessary "evil" of sorts to run certain things. Certain web sites need it to launch Java applications or you may require it for a locally installed program (such as OpenOffice). Everything Java does can be controlled via the Java Control...

A type of information that’s not the easiest to come across is finding where postal, i.e. ZIP code boundaries actually are. You would think that as vast as the internet is, that information would be readily available. True, you can use sites like this one to get ZIP boundary information, but what it lacks is the ability to mark spots on the map. Google...

Every laptop and netbook should have an on-screen volume display, but unfortunately some don’t. The end result is that whenever you change the volume via the keyboard (usually a Fn+F8 for up and Fn+F9 for down) you have absolutely no idea what the volume level is other than by ear. Why is an OSD volume meter so important on a laptop? Because it’s...

These tips are for use in supported browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc.), meaning they probably won’t work in Opera or other alternative browser. JavaScript also needs to be enabled in order for these to work (you would know if you turned if off). Yahoo! MailSearch mail: s Forward message: f Reply to all: a Turn the reading pane on or off:...

There was a time when Hotmail and Y! Mail allowed the use of inline images when composing an e-mail, but then took away that functionality for whatever reasons. Gmail to the best of my knowledge has never had a native way of using inline images when composing a new message. Using a little copy/paste magic, you can insert inline images when composing a new mail...

For whatever reason, RSS feeds just refuse to die. I think this is because they’re found renewed life on other mediums such as mobile platforms (it is very small data that would be perfect for that platform). On the PC side, I personally believe one of the best use of feeds is when they can be delivered to your e-mail easily. This video will show you how...

In what is arguably the most nerdy way to send and receive instant messaging through popular networks such AIM, Yahoo and MSN, it is possible to do it all using IRC. While it’s true that instant messaging isn’t used as much as it used to be, IRC shows absolutely no signs of slowing down whatsoever and people do use it regularly – so much that...

Question: What’s the fastest webmail on the planet? Answer: The type where you host it yourself. An often overlooked way of doing webmail (only because most people aren’t aware of it) is using a web hosted solution. This is where you register your own dot-com/net/org, then use your web host’s webmail system in order to send and receive...

The last time I did a video on this subject, I thought it would work for everybody who used the Windows Live Mail client, however a few said that even with the instructions they still encountered the infamous “red X” box where the signature image should go. Well, I was having none o’ that. I was bound and determined to find a way to get a...

(Note: This will also work in Windows Vista) Something that’s still a problem in Windows – even in 7 – is that there is no easy way to remove items from the “New” menu. The “New” menu is what you see when you right-click on an empty area of the desktop and hover over “New”. Some of us, yours truly included,...

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was released yesterday so feel free to download it. As is my usual practice I installed the OS in VirtualBox to test it out. The way to get better graphical capabilities in VirtualBox session is to install what’s called VirtualBox Additions. While the session is active, you click Devices then Install Guest Additions, like this:When using...