For decades now, Linux users the world over have happily enjoyed themselves using symbolic links to increase productivity, make their computers easier to navigate, or squash certain location-related bugs in what they are trying to do. However, users of the more mainstream Windows persuasion have long been left out of the game, not realizing their computers are capable of such wizardry, or not knowing how to make use of it. What are these mysterious symbolic links, why are they so wonderful, and how can you ...

Symbolic Links on Windows…the Easy Way!

Whenever I’ve had a side-job of computer repairs, the most common complaint I heard from people about their computers was: “it just runs slow!” Identifying the exact reason why varied in difficulty from case to case, but in the end it was always something like multiple anti-virus programs were installed and running in the background (sometimes actually attacking each other), too many start up items were enabled for the amount of installed RAM to handle, or some kind of malware had been introduced to ...

Myths vs Truths: The Slow PC

For decades we’ve seen scifi concepts of a heads-up display (or HUD) that presents all sorts of different pieces of information right on a person’s field of vision, completely personal to the wearer. In the last couple of years, concepts began to arise for contact lenses that could project such a display, though any serious plans to make the product were stymied by the question of how to give power to the things, not to mention how to mass produce such fine and fragile pieces of technology. More ...

Project Glass – Google's Personal Heads-up Display is Real

I don’t know about you, but it feels like I’ve always been searching for the perfect sci-fi user interface for my PC. Admittedly, a lot of my inspirations (Star Wars, Minority Report, Tron, etc.) are not as practical as they are awesome to look at, but I just had to believe that a PC could look like something straight out of a movie if done properly. Sadly, in the past every theme I came across either cost money, had a lot of glitches, wasn’t usable on a daily basis, completely fell short of what I ...

Trick-out Your PC Desktop With These Cool Sci-fi Mods!

We've all been there before: it's spring break, and you've got a couple relatives staying over, and unsurprisingly they brought their laptops, smartphones, and tablets with them which of course all need to connect to wifi. Normally this shouldn’t be a problem...right? Yes, but ‘normally’ is the key word here. For whatever reason, not all of the computers in your house have played nicely together over wireless, and the result is a networking conflict that effectively takes out all internet access for ...

2 Tips for Resolving IP Address Conflicts

Now that the Windows 8 Consumer Preview has been available for download for around a month, I’ve had the time to use it and compare with the Developer Preview of late last year. Overall I have to say it is shaping up to be the most solid OS I’ve had the pleasure of using in quite some time, and provides exactly the refresh that Windows has needed in recent years. I’d encourage everyone to download the preview and see just how good the upgrade really is. But of course, rarely does anyone get big ...

Three Changes Windows 8 Needs