Tips and Tricks

  • Cutting the cord: How to ditch your cable company

    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.

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

    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.

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  • Turn a PC into a DVR

    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.

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  • 8 steps to building and maintaining an infrastructure road map

    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.

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  • Three ways to tweak Ubuntu Linux's Unity desktop

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

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

    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.

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  • How to defend your Android phone from annoying mobile ads

    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.

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

    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.

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  • What’s on your laptop can be career limiting

    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.

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

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

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  • How to tie your social media accounts together

    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.

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  • How to get free or cheap tech support

    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.

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  • How to make exceptions for your most important callers

    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.

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  • Partition your hard drive with data still on it

    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.

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

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

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