For a while now it’s been possible to map an internet FTP shortcut in Windows Explorer, with emphasis on shortcut and not drive letter. Most of you out there are very familiar with the "Map Network Drive" feature of Windows, but when mapping an FTP location as a shortcut, the steps to take are slightly different. Here’s how to do it in...

Some people are confused (or just have the wrong idea) about what a computer server actually is. The technical definition is that a server is a computer dedicated to providing a specific service or services. Concerning what you would use in the home, the most common example is a file server, i.e. a computer where its sole purpose in life is to store files you...

The internet as we know it today predominantly runs on Linux. There’s an extremely high probability that the internet connection you’re using right now is connected thru a Linux server – and routed thru many other Linux servers along the way. Below is a graph showing the market share for top servers across all domains from August 1995 to...

This is written for the benefit of those who use the Hotmail webmail service. If your e-mail address ends in @msn.com, @live.com or @hotmail.com or you use Windows Live Domains, this applies to you. POP-based Hotmail is not available in the free version at the time of this writing and I’ll say that right up front. You need to flip over $19.95 a year to get...

For development and testing reasons, I wanted to set up a local server on my Mac Pro so that I could operate a local copy of PCMech.com. I thought I would document how I went about it for the benefit of others down the road. The easiest method to set up a quick LAMP server under OS X is to use MAMP. MAMP stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Now, both Apache...

Foxmarks is a freely available add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Normally what you would do to send/retrieve your bookmarks is use the Foxmarks servers to store this information, however if you host your own web site (or just use free FTP space provided by your ISP) you can store your own bookmarks privately via FTP. See video below for...

All-In-One motherboards tend to be something either you love or hate (personally, I love them). One thing I have found to be the case though, is they make for a great foundation on home servers. For example, I have a home server running on a Biostar all-in-one motherboard with a Celeron 1.3 Ghz processor and 512 MB RAM. The machine has a RAID 3 card installed...

There is a tool inside of OS X called Automator. Automator is a very undervalued utility that is bundled with OS X. It is one of those things that I wish came with Windows, but sadly it does not. Automator is a utility which allows you to create a workflow, a series of software actions your computer will take, and then run it. This allows you to have your...