How-To Geek

QR codes are plastered on advertisements, billboards, business windows, and products. They appear to be very popular among marketers, although it’s rare to see anyone actually scanning one.

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ActiveX controls are Internet Explorer’s version of plug-ins. For example, Internet Explorer’s Flash player is an ActiveX control. Unfortunately, ActiveX controls have been a significant source of security problems.

Our first edition of WIG for May is filled with news link coverage on topics such as Adobe has confirmed a ‘leaky PDF’ flaw, Lotus Notes is suffering from a huge Java security hole, iOS 7 will possibly have a visually different (flat) look, and more.

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Microsoft recently launched Office 2013 as well as Office 365, a subscription service. Office 365 will cost you $9.99 per month or $99 a year, while Office 2013 will cost you $219.99 for the Home and Business edition, which can only be used on one PC at a time.

Last year we shared an awesome collection of ocean waves wallpapers with you and today we are back with more. Relax and enjoy the view as the waves roll across your desktop with the second in our series of Ocean Waves Wallpaper collections.

Disaster has struck the island nation of Camatuga and their bridge system now lies in ruin, but not all is lost! You get to come to the rescue by using your bridge building skills and expertise to help reconnect the island nation. The question is though, can you successfully rebuild Camatuga’s bridge system or will the challenge prove to be more than you can handle?

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On July 19, 2012 a power solar flare provided scientists a rare opportunity to record an awe-inspiring sight…coronal rain from the coronal mass ejection that occurred that day. So sit back and enjoy the view in this UHD video as you watch liquid fire reaching into the darkness of space only to rain back down upon the Sun’s surface.

Microsoft attempted to make typing appear smoother in Office 2013 by adding a typing animation feature. If you’re a slow typist, you probably won’t notice it. However, if you type upwards of 80+ words per minute, this feature can be distracting and annoying.

Chromebooks aren’t “just a browser” — they’re Linux laptops. You can easily install a full Linux desktop alongside Chrome OS and instantly switch between the two with a hotkey — no rebooting necessary.

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

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This week Google has officially unveiled its latest iteration in apps for Google Chrome and Chrome OS users…packaged apps. Now you can install this new brand of apps that provide native app goodness, will work offline, and can communicate with additional hardware that is hooked up to your computers.

Previous versions of Excel have had an option for viewing two spreadsheets side-by-side. However, Excel 2013 now makes it easier by allowing you to snap each spreadsheet (opened in separate windows) to each side of the screen.

The Great Firewall of China, officially known the Golden Shield project, employs a variety of tricks to censor China’s Internet and block access to various foreign websites. We’ll be looking at some of the technical tricks the firewall uses to censor China’s Internet.

What do you get when you mix machine parts, a touch of physics, obstacles to overcome, and your imagination together? Fantastic Contraption! With this game you get to build geeky machines to your heart’s content and send them on their way. But are you smart enough, geeky enough, to build the most fantastic contraptions ever or will your dreams of machine supremacy crash and burn?

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Creating password protected accounts is part-and-parcel for operating on the web these days, but no two sites approach password creation in the same way. One site might allow you nearly unlimited freedom in the characters you choose and the length of your password, but another may limit you to as few as eight characters with no special characters allowed. Needless to say the ‘creation process’ can be frustrating much less managing the ever growing number of passwords we need on hand to access all our accounts. With this in mind Casey Johnston from Ars Technica decided to ask some companies about their password policies and received some interesting responses…

Xbox Music recently updated allowing you to sync your music collection to the cloud and play it on other devices, unfortunately the auto-tagging feature doesn’t always work so well which means you can only listen to part of your music collection.

We recently showed you how to turn your Raspberry Pi into an always on Usenet machine centered around the feature-rich SABnzbd Usenet client. Now we’re back to show you how to use NZBGet, a more Spartan but also very lightweight Usenet tool.

When people think of innovative tech companies, they generally don’t think of Microsoft. Microsoft has actually had a history of innovative products and ideas, but they’ve failed to execute them over and over again.

Your office mate says the new device your company issued is a fob, and you say it’s a dongle. Before things come to fisticuffs in front of the water cooler, let’s investigate.

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