Now in case you weren’t aware, Facebook is going public as a company, as in a publicly-traded company, this week. Many are saying "too little, too late" here and that having Facebook going public is a disaster in the making for two reasons. First, Facebook ultimately has nothing that would continue to keep people using the site (if your friends left Facebook, would you have any real reason to stay there?), and second is the waning userbase. As everyone knows, there is a distinct difference between total number of users and total number of active users. I don’t have to ask you if you’ve noticed your friend activity on Facebook is decreasing, because you already know it is.

I am in the 50% who does believe Facebook is a passing fad – but with a condition. As for Facebook itself, yes, it’s a fad. As for social networking, that’s not a fad.

We as humans like to connect, communicate and share stuff with other humans. That’s what we do, that’s what we’ve always done and no matter how you look at it, social media really ramped up our internet communications with each other and made it easier.

I do believe social media is here to stay, but as for Facebook, that’s a train wreck in progress and they should have went public a year earlier.

No, I’m not saying Facebook is dead, but it’s definitely past peak (at least in the US).

Via Yahoo! News

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Is Facebook A Passing Fad?

BrightHouse Networks in Florida for example does use the Time Warner Roadrunner internet service. In the Tampa Bay area, email addresses to customers (for those that elect to use them) are assigned as username@tampabay.rr.com. The rr.com portion means RoadRunner. For other areas like Michigan that also has RoadRunner service, they have similarly assigned email addresses that contain their locale. I’m sure the rr.com email addresses will stay, but does this mean new email addresses after the branding change will be something else? Nobody knows.

As for pricing changes, it depends which ISP you use and where. Either you’ll pay a little more (and by little I mean a change of $5 or less) or your monthly subscriber fee will remain the same. If you are a RoadRunner user, you may want to ring them up and ask if any pricing changes are coming soon.

Via DSLReports

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

RoadRunner Internet Service Branding Going Away

To make a long story short, it’s basically cloud storage turned up to 11. I’ll explain.

As expected, you can store pretty much every kind of file you can think of online, and access it anywhere, any time- as long as you have access to the Internet. What’s more, Google boasts, it seamlessly integrates with the rest of your Google experience, meaning you can easily share a picture from Google Drive on Google. New users start with 5 GB of available storage for free, and can pay monthly stipends to increase that storage to 25, 100, or even 1 TB of space- the prices aren’t actually all that bad at lower tiers, truthfully- though it starts to get a touch pricey once you pass the 1 TB mark. It’ll be able to do more than just store files, however- and that has group storage organizations like Dropbox very, very worried.

See, in addition to the seamless integration with apps like Gmail and Google Docs, Drive is designed to help users collaborate and share files and content. It looks very, very similar to Google Docs- not a bad thing- and functions in a fairly similar fashion.

What’s more, according to Google, they’re currently working with a number of third party developers to help set up Drive to do everything from website mockups to sending faxes. In other words…if you’re a Google user, you’re soon going to have a whole new suite of cloud productivity applications right at your fingertips. Not too shabby at all.

For the time being, you’ve now got five gigs of free storage to use as you see fit. Go on, give it a try.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Google Drive, and What it Means for You

Protip against driveby infections (the ones in the browsers): Disable addons in your browser and only activate the ones you need. Chromium and Chrome for example let you disable all additional content like flash, html5, pdf and java in the options, you will see a grey box instead of the content and can manually run it using right-click -> Run. Chrome options -> Content options -> Plug-Ins -> Disable all or Click-to-play. Chrome also allows you to whitelist sites you trust, like youtube. This will make you immune to driveby infections regardless of the version of your java or adobe reader, because you will only be able to click and run content, that is VISIBLE on the site. Malicious content is ALWAYS hidden in a 0pixel iframe! This also stops the nasty flash advertisements implying you can’t aim precise enough to win an iPad3.

What the malware coder is saying is that you’ll never actually see a driveby browser infection in progress because they’re always hidden in the code, so by purposely setting Chrome to click-to-play for everything, you only enable content for what you see, meaning that what’s not seen (the driveby infection) won’t run because you never enabled it to do so.

This is good, solid and most importantly very effective advice.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Malware Coder Gives The Best Advice On Protecting Against "Driveby" Browser Infections

How fast is fast concerning 802.11ac? It boasts wireless speeds up to 1300Mbit/s. Whether you can actually acquire that with the hardware is indeterminate, but if you were only able to get half the rate (650Mbit/s), that still blows N out of the water and then some.

So anyway, if you gotta-gotta-gotta have the new 802.11ac standard, there’s the Buffalo WZR-D1800H and that would most likely be the first one you’d buy once it becomes widely available. The price should be under $200.

Via SlashGear

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

The 802.11ac Router Finally Ships

It was actually kind of bothersome- they were like a group of Internet hipsters.

Last week, I discovered that I’ve had a reddit account just sitting around collecting dust for a good seven months. I decided I might as well try logging in to see what all the fuss was about. On a completely unrelated note, I believe I may have lost part of my soul. Reddit calls itself “the front page of the Internet,” and rightly so. Pretty much anything that’s interesting and popular online either found its start on Reddit or eventually makes its way TO Reddit. It’s actually incredibly easy to log in and waste away hours upon hours of your life browsing, reading, commenting, and voting.

So, yeah. I’m kind of a hipster now.

For some users, though, getting started and figuring out what everything’s about can be a little intimidating. This brief guide’s designed to get you up and reddit-ing in no time flat; here’s all the most important things you’ll need to know in order to get yourself started. First up, we’ll discuss Karma, upvoting, and downvoting.

Whenever a user submits a link or makes a comment, you’ll notice that there are two little arrows to the left of them- an up arrow and a down arrow. If you thought what they said was particularly insightful or witty, or you absolutely loved the image they shared with everyone, click the up arrow- you’ll vote the link up, making it more likely to appear on the front page of the site. With comments, it makes them more likely to appear near the top of the page. In both cases, the user receives either comment karma or link karma.

With downvoting, the opposite applies. Pretty basic, yeah?

As for Karma…you can redeem it for avatar awards and such if you collect enough of it, but other than that, it doesn’t really have any purpose other than making you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Or terrible, if you get enough negative karma.

Next, we’ll talk about the various subreddits on the site- there’s one for just about everything, as you’ll soon find (some of them are a touch more…disturbing than others. There are a few you’ll want to actively avoid, and you can usually tell by the name of the reddit which those are). In general, a subreddit’s URL consists of http://reddit.com/r/name.

If you want to submit a link, it’s as simple as going to the front page of reddit, clicking ‘submit a link’ and then filling in the requisite information. If you’re sharing a photo, you should probably look into using a free image hosting service- Imgur is a common one on reddit. Make sure you submit it to a subreddit community that actually fits the subject matter of the link.  Oh, you can also search for subreddits that might catch your eye. Again, pretty basic.

That’s…pretty much all there is to know about Reddit. Enjoy your vast decrease in productivity.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

A Beginner’s Guide to Reddit

Why is it so difficult to close accounts? Because the way most user databases are designed simply don’t allow it. If you’re user #492862, your account can’t be truly deleted because then the whole database would be "off by one" and mess up everyone else’s accounts. What happens instead is that your account is simply "hidden" if you elect to close it.

In other words, it’s impractical to even think about actually deleting any account you have out there, because there’s basically no way to do it. Even if a web service states your account is deleted, it isn’t. Just moved and hidden. That being the case, you are better off modifying the existing account and then abandoning it entirely.

How to abandon any web account

Step 1. Use a standalone password manager

I use KeePass for all my accounts. For you Linux folk out there, you would use KeePassX. Both are free. For security reasons it’s much better to use either one as it’s a standalone program that is not integrated into the browser. Personally – and I know this is overkill – I consider saving passwords in a browser to be a not-so smart maneuver because a) Most spyware/malware exploits are specifically designed for web browsers, b) You figuratively paint yourself in a corner by having all password management in a single browser (and I’m sorry but the ones that say they work across multiple browsers usually work poorly at best), and c) You have far superior password management control in a standalone password manager client.

KeePass or KeePassX act just like a file manager. It’s easy to move things around, manage your account data easier, create folders, import/export data easily and so on.

The best feature however is one that’s not even listed – and that’s the ability to create an "Abandoned" folder. When you abandon an account, you should not delete the information you have on it, but rather just move it to your "Abandoned" password manager folder. I’ll talk about that more in a moment.

Start by putting all your accounts into a password manager. This may take time. Possibly several hours. But it’s worth it.

Step 2. Modify the web account you want to abandon and change all pertinent information.

For whatever web account you’re setting up to abandon, you modify it specifically to point to throw-away information. For the email address, point that to a throw-away (you probably already have one just for that purpose). For accounts that requires a phone number, get a Google Voice number and point to that (especially helpful if the account doesn’t allow the change of a phone number without verifying it first with a call or text message).

Step 3. Once the changes are completed and the account updated with the new information, move the entry in your password manager to your "Abandoned" folder.

It’s becoming increasingly common that businesses simply never delete accounts, and things can and do screw up on their end. For an account you abandoned five years ago (only because you had no real way of deleting it), that company may have been bought and sold three times by now, reactivated the account accidentally due to data fumbling on their part, and well, you can see how that would be a problem for you. If on the other hand you took the steps to modify the account and point it to throw-away information, if a company screws up and starts doing wacky things with old accounts you abandoned a long time ago, it doesn’t affect you at all and that’s good peace of mind right there.

Password managers are small and the account data held within them is just encrypted text and nothing more, so there is no reason to permanently delete anything out of there. After modifying any account you plan to abandon, simply move it to your designated "Abandoned" folder and that’s all there is to it.

Final notes

What do I mean by "web account"?

Any account that requires a username and password to use it.

For example, got an old MySpace account? Put it in the password manager, change the email address to a throw-away, then move the password manager entry to the Abandoned folder.

Whatever is out there that you signed up for, gather all that account data in your password manager, modify appropriately and move to Abandoned so you have better control over all of it.

If the web service offers an option to "close" or "delete" an account, should you do it?

You can, but I’d still keep the old information in the password manager Abandoned folder anyway. If you elect to do that, I’d suggest putting a note in the title of the entry in your password manager, such as "MySpace – closed 14-May-2012". This lets you know exactly when you closed the account just in case you ever needed the information. For entries such as closed financial accounts, that’s especially good information to have just in case you ever need it.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

How To Properly Abandon A Web Account

My mainstay format conversion utility was WinFF, which is essentially nothing more than a graphical front-end for FFMPEG. Whenever you want to convert anything to anything no matter if you’re running Windows, Mac or Linux, FFMPEG is more or less required.

Format Factory to the best of my knowledge also uses FFMPEG for its media type conversions, but it’s a whole lot easier to use even compared to WinFF, which is already easy to begin with.

Important note: Format Factory does install two browser toolbar apps that you have to remove. Unfortunately the installer installs "Ask Toolbar" and "Ask Toolbar Updater" without asking you first. Very shady. They can be uninstalled easily, and no, it’s not spyware because this is a featured download on Download.com. However the fact it still does it is just plain wrong and I don’t deny that. Aside from that however, everything else is OK. If you’re still bothered by the toolbar uninstallation stuff, just use WinFF linked above instead or use FFMPEG from the command line.

Moving on..

What I appreciate about Format Factory up front is the stupidly easy "All to" buttons on the left:

Your "All to" options cover just about everything you’d want a media format conversion utility for. Mobile Device, MP4, AVI, 3GP, RMVB, GIF, WMV, MKV, MPG, VOB, MOV, FLV and SWF. You simply click the button for what format you want to convert to, a window pops up where you click the "Add File" button, set any options you want (which includes cropping, a nice touch), do your conversion and.. that’s it.

Does it work? Yes. Does it work well? Also a yes. Conversions are easy and the speed is only limited to how fast or not fast your PC is.

Link: Format Factory

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Format Factory Converts Any Media Type To Any Media Type

You can play the game right now by going to wolfenstein.bethsoft.com. Pretty cool? Absolutely.

And, if you feel like sitting through this (it’s just shy of 25 minutes long), you can listen to "Wolfenstein 3D Director’s Commentary with John Carmack", seen below. For those of you into gaming history, you’ll definitely like it.

Via PCMag

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Play Wolfenstein 3D For Free In Your Web Browser

What makes Netscape Mail notable over the course of internet communications history? Pretty much the fact that it had some fairly advanced features that other mail clients of the time didn’t. See the video below to see what made Netscape Mail a cut above the rest.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Retro Friday: Netscape Mail