Guest Blogger

One of the problems I have with file sharing is that more often than not, it’s rather slow. When I say file sharing, I mean between one person and a friend, not bittorrent, eDonkey or Gnutella. For this you usually have to go through an Instant Messenger’s file sharing program or through sites like Rapidshare or Megaupload. The problem with IM file sharing is that it’s usually slow and if it gets interrupted, often you’ll have to start all over. The problem with sites like Rapidshare is that they don’t stream, which can be frustrating. Yes, there are sites like Streamfile that try to fix that last problem, but it can still mess up and you have to start all over! [click to continue...]

I love Picasa. Here are five reasons you should use it, along with some tips. They are listed in no particular order. [click to continue...]

Nintendo’s Wii controller is an interesting piece of technology. One of the great things about it is that it connects with Bluetooth. Which, lucky for you, means you can connect it to any computer that has bluetooth! Even if your computer didn’t come with bluetooth connectivity, relatively inexpensive adapters can be purchased online or at your local computer shop. [click to continue...]

This is another one of my essential Firefox extensions. I can’t stand the ugly Firefox download window. I prefer to see the status of my downloads in the Firefox Status Bar at the bottom of the window. Enter Download Statusbar. [click to continue...]

If you’re like me, being able to have everything connected to a single email address makes life easier. Unfortunately, most Instant Messengers require you to set up email addresses with their service to use with their Instant Messenger program. Luckily, you don’t have to worry about this with MSN Messenger. You can go to passport.net to use any email address (for example, a gmail one) to sign into MSN Messenger with! This will also let you use your email address for all things live. Like Mail, Calendar, Skydrive, etc.

The process is dead simple. Go to passport.net, scroll down to Use an e-mail address you already have and click Get started now under it. After that it’s just a matter of filling in the necessary information. When you sign in to MSN Messenger, use your ‘regular’ email address and the password you created to associate with it. It’s really simple and something I wish I could do with other instant messengers.

I love music, and I love video games. This makes rhythm games perfect for me. And the best part? I don’t have to pay for some of the great ones! This is a list of my three favorite rhythm games, in no particular order. [click to continue...]

The following list will guide you through how to play NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Nintendo GameCube/Wii, Nintendo Gameboy/Color/Advanced, Nintendo DS AND Nintendo Virtual Boy games on your Windows PC. [click to continue...]

Defragging is essential in keeping your Windows machine fast. Don’t you wish it was a more automatic process? Well, it can be! JkDefrag, a great defragging program, comes with a way to use it as a screen saver, and it’s a very easy thing to do. [click to continue...]

A command line tool that I find use for very frequently on Linux is the “date” command. It’s a pretty simple command that returns you the date and time when you call it without any options. But when you begin to use some of the options it provides you with this tool can make your life much easier and fun. Let’s take a closer look at the command itself and some of its options and the cool tricks that we can make it do. [click to continue...]

I love tweaking. The only problem is, I haven’t really been able to find a one stop program for all my tweaking needs on Vista. That’s where Ultimate Windows Tweaker comes in. It claims to be the Tweak UI for Windows Vista, and I feel that it lives up to that. It works on both 32 and 64 bit Vista systems and is portable, which means there’s no need to install anything. You can download it here.

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After you have it downloaded, extract the file from the .zip file and run it. You should see a Window like the one above. If you want to play it safe, click Create System Restore Point to make it easy to go back if anything messes up. The program has over 130 tweaks, most of which are self explanatory. The only problem I had with this was on my 64 bit system. The shortcut icons would not disappear. Luckily, there are other ways to do this. Overall I find it to be a very handy (and small) application.

You’ve taken a bunch of pictures with your digital camera and you want to post them on the web. Of course, you don’t want other people stealing your work so you decide to add a watermark to your images. In this tutorial I will show you how to add a watermark to an image using GIMP, and open source image editing package. [click to continue...]

Wget is a very cool command-line downloader for Linux and UNIX environments. Don’t be fooled by the fact that it is a command line tool. It is very powerful and versatile and can match some of the best graphical downloaders around today. It has features such as resuming of downloads, bandwidth control, it can handle authentication, and much more. I’ll get you started with the basics of using wget and then I’ll show you how you can automate a complete backup of your website using wget and cron. [click to continue...]

For quite a while, Windows users have had to just sit back and envy OS X users because they get to use the terrific notification app growl. Well, envy no longer, just install Snarl. It is in fact “inspired by, and based on” OS X’s growl, but is still in its early stages. You can download Snarl here and check out the growing list of extensions for it here. Keep reading for a brief overview and some screenshots. [click to continue...]

OpenArena is an open source First Person Shooter based around a Quake engine. It’s fast, violent, and very entertaining. And best of all, it runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X! It also has very low system requirements and can is portable, making it perfect for passing around the office and playing a few games while the boss isn’t looking. Not that I encourage that type of thing. [click to continue...]