An exploration of technology, programming, cartooning, old time radio, and whatever else crosses my radar
Have you seen those colorful little pictures in the address bar of your browser, to the left of the web site’s URL? These pictures are called shortcut icons, and they also appear next to web site names in favorite and bookmark listings and make those web sites easily recognizable. Your web site can stand out [...]
Amazon.com is well known for selling books, CD’s, and electronics, but did you know that they also offer free and legal music downloads? In addition to their weekly Music You Should Hear podcast, which features full tracks from what they call an “eclectic group of artists,” they maintain an archive of tracks from previous shows. [...]
Blogger is the most famous and most popular of all the free blogging services, and for good reason — it’s one of the most capable services that asks for very little in the way of personal information. You will need to create a Google account if you don’t already have one, and for that you’ll [...]
In the twenty-seven years I’ve been using computers, storage capacity has increased tremendously. My first disk-based computer (a TRS-80 from Radio Shack) stored programs and files on single-sided disks that could hold 180K (about 180,000 characters) of data at a time. With these disks it was easy to find the file I was looking for. [...]
In the same way that a briefcase filled with money in the middle of your living room would be a very attractive target for a burglar, your computer is also packed with desirable information that can be stolen. Think about the personal data that is probably stored on your computer’s hard drive right now; things [...]
Your first mouse was probably shaped like a bar of soap, had very low resolution, and had to be disassembled and cleaned periodically. Today’s mice are very different, with sleek designs, high resolution, and improved optical technologies that rely on sealed electronic sensors that never get dirty. The problem with these advancements is that choosing [...]
When it comes time to add a new printer to your computer system, these days there are two clear choices: inkjet printers and laser printers. Both types of printers produce about the same quality text and graphics, but they do it in different ways. Let’s look at the two types:
Inkjet Printers
Inkjet printers work by spraying [...]
Uninstall programs you no longer need.
Even when you’re not using them, installed programs take up space in the Windows registry, which is a huge file that lists the options and preferences of almost every program installed on your system. And since each program you run will access the registry many times, and a bloated registry [...]
The Internet brings the world into our living rooms, but it also brings many problems that are new to the Internet age. One of the biggest problems is our potential loss of privacy. It seems like every web site that offers a service wants to collect personal information about us, and many of those web [...]