3 Easy Things You Can Do Right Now to Regain Your Digital Privacy

I recently read an article on C|Net called Americans Resigned to Giving Up Their Privacy, Study Says, and I wasn’t surprised. Online privacy falls into that list of concerns for most Americans with global warming and child labor: If you ask about it, people will be quick to tell you it’s a legit problem they’d like to see fixed, but then they drive away in their SUV following directions on their iPhone. It’s not that they don’t care, it just seems futile, and the benefits don’t seem to outweigh the costs. People want to be able to function easily in society, and these problems have gotten so out of hand that any little change by one individual would be like taking a drop from the ocean, so why bother? While I can see that logic, digital privacy is different in a few important ways, so I wanted to suggest some easy things that you can do to dam at least a few of those rivers of data leading into the ocean that you’re otherwise resigned to live with.  Read more →

Firefox Bookmarking Isn’t as Bad as You Think

Mozilla’s Firefox may simultaneously have the world’s easiest and most cumbersome bookmarking system. On the one hand, it’s much slower and less intuitive than other browsers in the way that you have to click the “star” icon to bookmark something, and then go out of your way to put it where you want and rename it, by either clicking it a second time, or finding/moving the bookmark in the Unsorted folder. On the other hand, they have a less well-known drag & drop system that Just Works (a very high compliment indeed).   Read more →

8 Keyboard Shortcuts that Will Change the Way You Use a Computer

I hate hyperbole, but it’s true – learning about (and using) these key combinations really will revolutionize how much faster and more efficiently you can move around your system! They’ve been around for years, and work in pretty much every program on every platform, but lately I’ve been encountering more and more people who still don’t know about them, and people always seem to be blown away when I show them, so without further ado, here’s what you need to know:

Read more →

It’s Surprisingly Easy to Add Space to Your Windows Server!

Is your Windows Server VM out of hard drive space? It’s always been possible to expand the space you’ve allocated its VM and then run some complicated disk utilities to get Windows to recognize the extra space and (usually) not break the in the process.  But ever since Windows Server 2008 you now have a MUCH easier and more reliable way to expand the amount of space you’ve made available to Windows’s primary partition. Weirdly, not as many people know about this as I would’ve expected, so I present it to you here, on the off-chance that you figured there HAS to be a better way, and did a little searching…  Read more →

How to Change Shortcut Icons in Linux Mint

Linux Mint is the distribution of Linux that most people try first, when they’ve grown tired of Microsoft Windows and want to try a free alternative. As such, it has quickly become the most popular Linux distribution (“distro”) available (which is saying something, since there are hundreds). It’s built on another massively popular distro called Ubuntu, but has more stuff pre-installed and configured for immediate use. Also, with a taskbar & start menu at the bottom of the screen, it looks & feels relatively similar to the Windows that most people are familiar with – which can make it hard to think outside of the box that you’ve been working in your whole life.  Read more →