• Cutting the cord: How to ditch your cable company

    Posted February 11, 2012 - 7:52 am

    By now, the fact that anyone can watch TV online without paying a dime to a cable company is practically common knowledge. But lucky for most cable companies, time-sensitive television programming such as news, sports, and popular shows the first night they air are still somewhat off-limits unless you know where to look. Here are some quick and dirty ways to get TV programming with just an Internet connection and a computer or a mobile phone--no gazing into neighbors’ living rooms required.

  • iPhone problems solved: 6 tips to speed up your iOS device

    Posted February 3, 2012 - 12:10 pm

    Apple's iOS 5 update brought us 200 new features, along with a host of new problems, including hefty performance bottlenecks, overall sluggishness and frequent app crashes. We've got the solutions.

  • Turn a PC into a DVR

    Posted January 28, 2012 - 7:28 am

    Looking for a way to cut that pricey cable-TV cord, but don't want to give up on watching and recording your favorite network shows? Turns out there's an easy and very affordable solution. It's called Windows 7.

  • 8 steps to building and maintaining an infrastructure road map

    Posted January 25, 2012 - 4:41 pm

    Long-term tech planning can help avoid costly missteps, but it's never easy amid rapid change -- here's one way to get it done.

  • Three ways to tweak Ubuntu Linux's Unity desktop

    Posted January 21, 2012 - 3:11 pm

    The Unity desktop environment that was recently made default in Ubuntu Linux has been nothing if not controversial, as has the alternative GNOME 3.

  • Enough waiting, here's how to make your own Windows 8 tablet

    Posted January 21, 2012 - 7:20 am

    Although CES didn't exactly signal the advent of Windows 8, the touchscreen-centric OS is definitely on quite a few developers' minds. Of course, until the complementing tablets finally come out of hiding, everyone else is left twiddling their thumbs. But if you happen to have special access to the preview version of the system software, you can simply create your own Windows 8 tablet -- from spare parts, no less.

  • How to defend your Android phone from annoying mobile ads

    Posted January 21, 2012 - 7:15 am

    Your Android phone used to be an ad-free paradise--a place where you could play games, check email, and make a few calls, all without being bothered by those pesky sales pitches that have taken over your PC. But not anymore: As Android's popularity has grown, so too has its attractiveness to advertisers.

  • How to access Wikipedia and other blacked-out pages today

    Posted January 18, 2012 - 7:49 am

    Your phone, or your desktop browser imitating your phone, can get at a lot of pages blacked out today in opposition to the Stop Online Privacy Act. Here's how.

  • What’s on your laptop can be career limiting

    Posted January 17, 2012 - 12:55 pm

    I know the readership of this column is a technical crowd. Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about computer viruses and other related technical issues.

  • Selecting the right cloud: A step-by-step guide

    Posted January 9, 2012 - 4:55 pm

    An architectural approach for savvy enterprise adoption of public cloud computing.

  • How to tie your social media accounts together

    Posted January 7, 2012 - 7:50 am

    If you’ve already created accounts for your business on major social media sites, then you know it can be incredibly time consuming to manage all of them. Sending out messages to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn takes an extra minute or two for each message. While that isn’t much at first, when you’re trying to send out dozens of messages a day it multiplies quickly. Luckily, you can quickly and easily tie these services together to send messages to more than one service at a time.

  • How to get free or cheap tech support

    Posted January 7, 2012 - 7:12 am

    It's bad enough that you have to spend your Sunday with the phone wedged between your shoulder and ear, as you root through your computer's control settings or tangle with a mess of serpentine cables behind your home entertainment system, because something isn't working. Having to pay for help just makes matters worse.

  • How to make exceptions for your most important callers

    Posted January 6, 2012 - 11:28 am

    Two emergency workers asked how to silence all the calls on their phone--except for the call to action. Here's some good ways to get that set up.

  • Partition your hard drive with data still on it

    Posted January 5, 2012 - 9:50 am

    Reader Kevin Riley has a 1TB FireWire hard drive that is about a quarter full. He’d like to partition the drive but doesn’t want to have to back up all his data to another drive, partition this drive, and then move his data back. Luckily, there's a way to safely partition it with his data still on it.

  • How to reset a forgotten administrator's password in Mac OS X Lion

    Posted January 3, 2012 - 4:34 pm

    Reader Lee Benjamin would like to reset his administrator’s password but it doesn’t work the way it once did. He writes:

  • Send Google Calendar alerts to any cell phone

    Posted December 31, 2011 - 7:58 am

    You can also set up Google Calendar so that it will text appointment reminders to any cellphone--smart or dumb

  • How to choose an ISP for your small business

    Posted December 21, 2011 - 4:10 pm

    It may seem as if all Internet connections are the same, but some differences--beyond price--exist between Internet service providers, and between types of connections that a single ISP offers. This guide is designed to help you choose the ISP and the connection that best suit your small or midsize business or organization.

  • Google+ Hangouts: The complete how-to

    Posted December 21, 2011 - 12:07 pm

    Like many Google products, Google+ is easy to jump into, but you'll be finding things and saying to yourself, "Hey, I didn’t know I could do THAT" for months after your first post. Here are the ins and outs of using Hangouts, the free group video chat in Google+.

  • How to share Amazon Kindle ebooks

    Posted December 10, 2011 - 8:27 am

    Want to share one of your Amazon Kindle ebooks with a colleague, friend, family member or other reader? Check out this quick and easy Kindle-sharing tutorial, and you'll be loaning out your digital books in no time.

  • How to fix iTunes Match Error tracks

    Posted November 20, 2011 - 8:46 am

    Among the icons you might see in your iTunes library after enabling iTunes Match is this unfriendly guy to the left: a cloud with an exclamation point in it. No, it's not hinting at a chance of inclement weather; it means that iTunes Match has encountered a problem while scanning the track in question.

  • Dealing with iTunes Match's 25,000 track limit

    Posted November 19, 2011 - 8:01 am

    iTunes Match -- at least up to this point -- places a hard limit on iTunes libraries. There is a way around this, but it's not an entirely scenic route.

  • Hands on with iOS over-the-air updates

    Posted November 12, 2011 - 8:16 am

    Thursday's release of iOS 5.0.1 marked the first time that public upgrades to the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch can be installed directly on those devices, without requiring a visit to iTunes.

  • Organize and play your media from a NAS

    Posted November 12, 2011 - 8:04 am

    While it's terrific that family members and co-housers needn't line up to use a single computer, things can get confusing when you have media scattered among a group of computers that everyone would like access to.

  • How to put Windows 8 on a Flash Drive

    Posted October 31, 2011 - 1:38 pm

    Installing the preview version of the new OS is much easier when you do it from a bootable USB drive.

  • Prevent your systems from being hijacked: A quick guide

    Posted October 31, 2011 - 1:14 pm

    It's time to rethink some old, and now outdated, security truisms that enable a very scary kind of attack.
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