As an individual contributor, first line manager, or IT executive, you can help drive innovation within your organization simply by using old technologies in new ways.

I enjoyed being able to play PC games on the living room TV so much that I decided to buy a dedicated system for it: an Alienware X51. Aside from one little glitch it's all been smooth sailing so far.

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.

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.

A few years ago, all your work technology was provided by your company. Today, many companies are encouraging employees to bring their own smartphones, iPads, and even computers to the office. This can be a win-win, but only if you approach in the right way.

you to display the IP address to hardware (MAC) address mappings that a system has built so that it doesn't have to fetch the same information repeatedly for systems it communicates with.

Today's collection of one-liners are sure to win some converts. There's nothing like a quick command that saves you a lot of trouble and just might impress your boss and coworkers that you're the cleverest person around.

Find is not just useful for locating files, but also for doing things with the files once it finds them. You can find files based on numerous criteria -- their names, their owners, their size, etc. -- and you can then perform some operation on the files from simply listing them to changing permissions or analyzing their contents. You can also make the operation that you specify to occur only if you confirm that you want it to happen after you are prompted. Let's see how this works.

One of the things that really throws new Unix users is when to use quotes and which kind of quotes. Between single quotes, double quotes and back ticks, a person can start to feel that Unix is unnecessarily tricky.

One of the all too common coding mistakes leading to security vulnerabilities is the failure to validate all entered data for accuracy. A defensive developer will consider all input to be evil until proven otherwise. Anyone writing scripts on Solaris has a leg up when it comes to input validation -- the versatile and wonderfully handy ckrange command.

Ever type "rm -rf dirname" and then realize you've just blown away the wrong directory? You can always alias the rm command to "rm -i", but let's look at a way that you can selectively determine which directories get that special "Are you sure you want to do that" treatment and which get quietly blown away.

Unix users are always looking for ways to make their systems a little easier to use or themselves more productive. In today's column, we'll look at a series of helpful aliases that might preserve a few of those brain cells for harder tasks.