Blast from the past: originally published October 20th 2000.

Let’s jump right in this week and take a look at the Linksys ProConnect CPU Switch.  I bought the four CPU model SVIEW04 to clear some desk space; two monitors, keyboards and mice plus the hassles of switching them when I added in a third PC. My home network employs a server and three clients, plus any machine I’m fixing or working on.  This made for too much real estate in my tiny office, so a KVM ( keyboard, …

I’ve been using Harmony universal remotes since they were a Canadian company not yet purchased by Logitech.  I’ve found them to be easy to set up and use: pick your AV equipment through their application, set up your activities and assign the gear to the activity.
My main remote has been the Harmony 880: a nice colour model with eight buttons on the display and a rechargeable battery with charging base.  It was great until the volume up button stopped working, then the pause button.  Trolling online found many, many people …

I had retired my Intel E6600 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and eVGA 122-CK-F68 Nvidia 680i motherboard combo last year when I upgraded to an Intel i5-750 and P55 platform.  At the time I didn’t need it for anything so it languished in my office closet.
Recently I’ve been ripping my DVD collection and playing them back on my PS3 on one television and a Mac Mini with XBMC on another.  My existing WHS consists of four 500 GB hard drives in a dual Xeon 2.8 GHz server with 2 GB …

I’m the process of setting up a home theater PC (HTPC) on each of my two home televisions.  I have Logitech Harmony universal remotes on both but need a keyboard and mouse for my living room HTPC.  While perusing Staples before the holidays I came across the HP Wireless Mini Keyboard: a compact 2.4GHz wireless keyboard with a built-in mouse.

The packaging bills this device as a replacement for a laptop keyboard but it works wonderfully on a HTPC.  The keyboard is a netbook chiclet style and there is a small …

Blast from the past: originally published October 6th 2000.
It’s a sad time when I can’t get in any game playing, but that’s what happened this week.  I’ve beaten most of my games in single player mode and look for the challenge of multiplayer mayhem, but none of my friends were available.  I know I could just log in and fight a stranger, but what’s the point of that? I want to team up with a friend and then crush strangers into dust.  Otherwise why play games …

Blast from the past: originally published July 20th 2004.

The lure of a large monitor is strong for those of us who sit in front of a PC all day long. Simply for the fact that we don’t sit in front of the PC, but the monitor. TFT ( thin film transistor ) panels are all the rage, but value and quality come into play with a large CRT ( cathode ray tube ) monitor.

For several years I had used a Sony Multiscan 500PS 21” monitor, but is …

Blast from the past: originally published January 16th 2006.

Let me start off by saying this is not a server case: it is a workstation case. As the review progresses items will be pointed out that affirms this, but it’s better to think of it as a workstation chassis and look at it from this perspective.
I was building a new test server and needed a decent chassis. Antec is always my first choice and they had just released the Titan 550 Server, their first designated tower server chassis. I’ve been using …

All-In-One Tray is a great free Windows 7 utility that sits in your system tray and provides access to pretty well all the operating system’s built in utilities plus a lot more like purging DNS cache and rebuilding icons.  As well there are four custom spots for whatever you’d like.

Very slick and a 7 MB footprint make All-In-One Tray a must have.

Blast from the past: originally posted December 14th 2000.
I was putting together a system for a friend and he needed a reliable mid tower case from a reputable manufacturer at a good price.  Isn’t that what we’re all looking for when building a computer?  I looked around at what was available and decided on the Aopen HX45A mid ATX tower case.  Let’s take a look at this rugged unit.
The HX45A is Aopen’s current mid tower offering.  I had purchased a few about three years …

It’s hard for those who like to maintain anonymity and privacy on the internet, especially when downloading files from torrents.  PeerBlock is designed to help with that: here is the straight goods from their FAQ:

What is PeerBlock?  The short version is: PeerBlock blocks “known bad” computers from accessing yours, and vice versa.  Depending on the lists you have it set up to use, you can block governments, corporations, machines flagged for anti-p2p activites, even entire countries!  Whether you’re sharing files with Bittorrent or just surfing the web, PeerBlock can help …

A decent utility that in its free form give two great pieces of information: that TRIM is enabled and the relative life of your SSD drive.

Unfortunately it didn’t matter how long I left SSDLife running it never showed my drive’s estimated life.  I’ll leave it in my System Tray for a while and see what develops.

Found a great Firefox Add-on from the Electronic Frontier Foundation called HTTPS Everywhere.

This add-on forces Firefox to use a secure and encrypted connection to websites that support HTTPS.  It’s simple and once set you’re good to go.

Blast from the past: originally published December 14th 2001.

I don’t have to tell you that Microsoft launched their latest operating system on October 25th. There was enough media coverage, advertising and hoopla to let everyone who has a PC get word of the new Windows eXPerience. I was at the product launch in Toronto, Ontario and received my press copy of Windows XP Professional. The question is why did I take so long getting to it? It’s the latest and greatest, so shouldn’t it have been installed ages ago?
Way …

After implementing individual user accounts on WordPress contributors now submitted their posts for review and an editor reviews and posts it.  Unfortunately there isn’t an automated notification built into WordPress to let editors know there’s a post waiting.  Luckily there’s a plugin for that: Pending Post Notifier.

It’s very straightforward: enter the email addresses separated by a comma in the Notification Receiver box.

Blast from the past: originally published April 14th 2004.

This is our third review of a chassis or case from the Antec Solution line. The Antec was the best mid tower case for the money we’ve ever seen, while the Antec was a slight compromise for less real estate. This time around Antec has taken the value oriented SLK3700AMB and added features from it’s best selling “quiet” Antec Sonata . It’s a good idea to read our review first to see what makes it so great. The Antec …

The WordPress site I was working on had an issue with images: if the option to link to file, File URL, wasn’t clicked when adding the image it would default incorrectly to the post and clicking on an image would result in a 404 error.  This was annoying since multiple contributors were adding posts and images and while you can tell people how to do things there are some who never follow directions.

Multiple internet searches led me to a WordPress options page that doesn’t show up on the menu at …

I’ve been working on a WordPress powered website recently, implementing a lot of features.  The first item was to stop everyone using the admin login and create unique logins for everyone with properly assigned roles.  Here’s how WordPress breaks down roles:

Super Admin – Someone with access to the blog network administration features controlling the entire network (See Create a Network).
Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
Editor – Somebody who can publish and manage posts and pages as well as manage other users’ posts, …

Blast from the past: originally published December 31st 2003.

After having repeated success with the Antec SLK3700AMB mid tower case, I had the opportunity to build a PC using its smaller sibling, the Antec SLK2600AMB. Someone had asked me to construct our $1000 PC, so I gathered the parts and went to work. This case is a meant as a smaller, cheaper version of the SLK3700AMB and as such some features are removed, while other small touches have been added. Read on.
Let’s look at the Antec SLK2600AMB from the …

Came across a great Firefox add-on today: Siphon.  It syncs your Firefox add-ons across multiple PCs.  Install and create an account: that’s it.

Unfortunately it doesn’t sync settings but it’s still in beta and we can always hope for more features.

I was searching for an easy way to identify the hexadecimal number of a colour on a web site: they had black as the text colour and the link colour so no one could identify a link.  An internet search led me to Hex Color Finder, a nice free utility.

It’s very simple: click and hold the eye dropper and place it on the colour you want to identify.  Once identified the sliding scale at the bottom shows variances of that colour in case you’d like something darker or lighter.  If you …