Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If you engage in web design, graphic design, photography or any other endeavor requiring the use of colors, you probably need to determine the numeric value of various colors on a regular basis.
I used to use good ole trial and error in order to match the hex value of colors displayed on the screen as closely as possible, but I have long since found a fast and simple way to determine the exact numeric value of any color with just a few clicks of my mouse. [Read more…]
A while back I wrote this post about how replacing the now-abandoned older versions of Windows (such as XP and Vista) with Linux can give an older Windows PC a new lease on life.
I’ve received a lot of great feedback from that post from readers who have given Linux a try. Most of them seem to be happy with it, but many others not so much.
Several folks from the “not so much” group have asked me if there’s a non-Linux alternative to Windows that will actually run Windows programs instead of generic Linux-based alternatives.
Well, as it turns out the answer is yes. [Read more…]
As technology advances,manufacturers keep on packing more and more power into ever-smaller packages.
Truth be told, even the cheapest mobile devices on the market today are several times more powerful than the original IBM PC was back when it was introduced.
In case you haven’t noticed, this incredible “smaller but more powerful” dynamic is now beginning to reshape the desktop computer market as well.
Every generation of desktop computers shrinks the size/power ratio even more, and now we actually have smaller than brick-sized PCs that rival their much larger counterparts.
A perfect case-in-point is the tiny, yet surprisingly capable Azulle Byte 3 Fanless Mini PC. (#ad)
As this photo shows, I can literally hold the Byte 3 in the palm of my hand: [Read more…]
A while back I wrote a post explaining the benefits of replacing your hard drive with a Solid State Drive (aka SSD).
Of course the greatest benefit is the amazing speed increase you’ll gain by replacing your hard drive’s spinning platters and read/write heads with an SSD’s lightning-fast memory chips.
You might recall that in that post I recommended paying a PC Tech to swap out the drives for you, but since then I’ve had a couple of emails from folks who really wanted to try upgrading their laptops themselves, prompting me to decide to write this post explaining the procedure.
But before we get to that, if your laptop was made in such a way that the entire case has to be partially disassembled in order to access the hard drive, I still strongly recommend that you hire a qualified PC tech to remove the hard drive and install the SSD for you. Just sayin’.
On the other hand, if your laptop’s drive bay is easily accessible via a small removable cover you can swap out the drives out yourself. Just follow the instructions below.
A while back Google removed the “View Image” button from the photos they display on Google Images due to some kind of deal they made with Getty Images.
I don’t know about you but I really liked being able to view an image directly from Google’s own server instead of having to visit the original website just to check it out.
Why is this is important? Because it’s easy to download malware to your computer simply by visiting an untrusted website, even if it’s just to display an image that’s contained on one of the site’s pages.
Well, apparently lots of other folks really miss the “View Image” button as well because there’s now a fantastic browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that restores the missing button.
The extension is called “View Image” and it works like a champ. If you’d like to give it a try just follow the steps below that match your preferred web browser. [Read more…]