Computer Tips and Guides

Posts Tagged ‘Mdash’

How to Make Gmail Play Nicely with Your Desktop Email Client

If you use Gmail as your email backend but prefer a good old-fashioned desktop email client for handling your day-to-day email, you’re probably aware that many clients—like Outlook or Mail.app—don’t play that nice with Gmail. Here’s how to fix that.While Thunderbird no longer needs any extra work to become the ultimate Gmail IMAP client, mail clients, such as Mail.app or Outlook, do not exhibit normal behavior when using Gmail’s servers.

Gmail ..read more

How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords

Internet standards expert, CEO of web company iFusion Labs, and blogger John Pozadzides knows a thing or two about password security—and he knows exactly how he’d hack the weak passwords you use all over the internet.

Note: This isn’t intended as a guide to hacking *other people’s* weak passwords. Instead, the aim is to help you better understand the security of your own passwords and how to bolster that security.

If you invited me to ..read more

NetBalancer Prioritizes Network Traffic by Application

Windows: Ever wish you could guarantee your BitTorrent download didn’t choke your streaming YouTube video—or vice versa—but don’t feel like setting up Quality of Service rules on your super-router ? NetBalancer shapes bandwidth allocations for different apps on your PC.

With NetBalancer, you can set separate download and upload priorities for different applications (you’ve got the options of High, Normal, and Low), you can choose to block or ignore traffic altogether, or you can choose specifically ..read more

Get Gigabytes of Free, Legitimate Music from SXSW 2010

Every year music lovers from across the country head to Austin, Texas for SXSW, and for the past six of those years, SXSW has offered hundreds of DRM-free tracks from artists playing at SXSW—and it’s all available via BitTorrent.

Just head to the Home of the Unofficial SXSW torrents to grab the first torrent, featured 646 tracks weighing in at 3.35 GB. These songs are all freely available on the official SXSW web ..read more

Five Best Public BitTorrent Trackers

A great BitTorrent client is all well and good, but you need a great tracker to get the actual torrent files and stoke the bandwidth burning fire in your client of choice. Here’s a rundown of five of the most popular options.

A bit of clarification is in order before we share the list of the top five contenders with you. In our call for contenders we asked for you to share your favorite BitTorrent trackers, but ..read more

Current Crop of E-Readers Compared: iPad vs. the Rest

Developer and blogger Darren Beckett rounds up a crop of five e-readers and gives them a short price and feature comparison with the newly released iPad—and rolled the results into an eye-friendly infographic.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

We may have our problems with the iPad, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t interested in buying it. This comparison pits the iPad against other similar devices, highlighting price, screen size and type, ..read more

End Windows’ Overeager Installation Checking

Not every application has jumped into the Windows Vista/7 era, and portable applications can be confusing to both of Mircrosoft’s newer operating systems. Prevent Windows from asking, every single time, if your program “installed correctly” with a quick system tweak.

Photo by SpeechRoom.com.

If you run a good number of portable applications, or have to install a good number of oldie-but-goodie apps, you’re probably familiar with a Windows dialog that pops up after installation finishes, suggesting that “This ..read more

Create a New Text File in Finder with One Click [Downloads]

Mac only: One convenient Windows feature missing in OS X is the ability to quickly create a new text file in the current folder. By simply dragging a small Applescript-turned-application to Finder’s toolbar, this dream quickly becomes reality.

There are any number of reasons you’d need a quick text file in the working folder—if you’re working with icons, testing a new file-based tweak, or just need to make an immediate note—the ..read more

Pastefire Makes Sharing Text Desktop-to-iPhone a Breeze [Downloads]

iPhone only: Anyone with a smartphone has been there: You’re browsing on your computer but want to transfer a bit of info to your phone. You could email it to yourself, or you could try Pastefire, a clever desktop-to-iPhone sharing tool.

Once you’ve downloaded it to your desktop, head to the Copy Zone, enter in any bit of text along with a username and password (doing this once will create an account for you—the ..read more

Networks Lights Turns Your Keyboard LEDs Into Activity Indicators

Windows only: You squeeze every bit of customization and productivity out of your computer, why let those lazy keyboard LEDs sit idle? Put them to work as network activity indicators.

Network Lights is a tiny application that turns the NumLock and ScrollLock keyboard indicators into incoming and outgoing network traffic indicators. Check out our video here to see the lights in action. The video starts with some simple browsing—we were looking for a ..read more