A new year is upon us, and that can mean only one thing: resolutions. For most folks, these tend to be of the "get in shape" or "quit smoking" variety. But if you're a PC World reader, consider adding some PC-specific resolutions to the mix. In fact, I have three suggestions for improving your computing life in 2013: Look, you've heard it before. Like flossing your teeth and emptying the cat box, backing up your PC is one of life’s annoying necessities. Consider the consequences if all your data suddenly vanished: your Word files, photo library, Quicken data—everything. It’s a chilling thought, but it happens. Frequently.
Microsoft's free previews of Windows 8 will expire next month, giving users about three weeks to upgrade to a paid copy or face hourly restarts. All three Windows 8 previews -- the Developer Preview of September 2011, the Consumer Preview of February 2012, and the Release Preview -- expire January 15, 2013. Windows 8 Release Preview, the third and final of the sneak peeks, appeared May 31, five months before the new OS launched in retail on October 26. blog first reported on the impending expiration of the previews.
Bad news for employees: Your slacking days are over. . DeskTime employs automated software that tracks and analyzes employees' productivity in real-time. It does this by sorting your company's various applications into categories -- "productive," "unproductive," and "neutral" -- and monitoring who's using what and for how long. All this happens quietly and unobtrusively in the background, with no user input required.
Identity theft is scary business, for sure. But it's a threat that seems a whole lot less likely once you sign up for ProtectMyID, an online identity theft protection service that comes from Experian, a trusted credit-reporting company. ProtectMyID is not cheap though, as it costs $16 per month for regular monitoring. To sign up for ProtectMyID.com, you need to provide some basic information about yourself, including your address and social security number. It then begins protecting your identity by monitoring the use of your social security number, certain credit accounts, and address. All of the information you need to get started is presented in ProtectMyID's neatly-organized dashboard, which easy enough to browse, but slightly text-heavy. ProtectMyID offers three different "Surveillance Alerts": Internet Scan, Change of Address Alerts, and Credit Alerts. The Internet Scan feature monitors what Experian calls "a vast number of online sources" where compromised credit and debit card numbers, Social Security numbers, and other personal data is found, traded or sold. To activate this protection, you need to manually add the cards you'd like protected, and Experian limits you to three. If you have more cards than that, you're out of luck, unfortunately. The Credit Alerts feature monitors your credit report (from all three leading reporting bureaus) for what it calls "leading indicators of identity theft," which include new loans and accounts. The Change of Address alerts, meanwhile, monitors address changes that affect your credit accounts. If any alerts are raised, ProtectMyID will alert you via text message or email. Both of these are more comprehensive than the Internet Scan feature.
If you have a huge CD collection from pre-digital days, you may have decided to convert it all to MP3 format for listening on the computer or on the go, via your phone. But the CD ripping software may have not found all of the correct track names and album art, so you may have ended up with files full of "unknowntrack1.mp3", "unknowntrack2.mp3", and so on. This looks messy, and how on Earth can you find a particular song if it's not named properly? Songs without metadata or album art are absolutely impossible to index and find. Listening to the song and then renaming it by hand is a long, slow, and very tedious process. That is why it is worth investing $50 to buy TuneUp. TuneUp has a huge extensive database of music, and by listening to your tracks, it can identify the track, rename it for you, provide album art, and even fix the metadata, including inserting the music genre and track numbers for you. song, but it seriously impressed me by finding all of my Scottish bagpipe music and standup comedy tracks. So it isn't all Justin Bieber and Britney Spears. It has a lot of obscure stuff tucked away too. After installation, start up either iTunes or Windows Media Player, and TuneUp will automatically start at the same time in its own window. When you have some files you want renamed, use your mouse to drag the songs into the TuneUp window and it will begin scanning them. When it finds possible matches, it will display them for you to see. This is one of the most important things to emphasize here: TuneUp does NOT change anything unless you tell it to. And if you tell it to change something and realize you've messed up, there's an "undo" button to put everything back the way it was.
With Christmas only a few days a way, most businesses will be shutting down for a holiday break at the close of business today. It should be a time of peace and relaxation—a time to reflect on the year that has slipped away, and to envision goals for the year to come. But, it seems a majority of IT admins and security professionals will still be losing sleep over potential cyber attacks. of 270 IT security and business professionals. It asked a range of questions around information security risks and practices, and the breakdown of the results is interesting. such as Christmas and New Year’s?” Overall, nearly six in ten answered, “No”. But, when you break the responses down, it turns out that business stakeholders are less concerned, but 61 percent of information security professionals said, “Yes”. is largely unfounded, according to Andrew Storms, director IT security operations for nCircle. Maybe it’s just cyber-attack PTSD?
previewed a few at Computex earlier this year. instead. Given that most collaboration technologies suck at enhancing collaboration, it would be fascinating if a technology designed for a completely different purpose did a better job.
A long list of Web sites went dark for one minute at 9:30 a.m. ET today to mark a moment of silence for the 26 women and children who were murdered a week ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Earlier this week, Connecticut Governor Daniel Malloy asked the nation to pause for a collective moment of silence to honor the victims of the shooting. Then a campaign, called Web Goes Silent, was launched to ask Internet users to take a five-minute break from their online activities. Using the hashtag #momentforsandyhook, that meant no posting on Facebook, no tweeting, no email. offering Web administrators a piece of JavaScript that greyed out their web page for a minute at 9:30, while a message appeared, noting, "We are observing a National Moment of Silence for the victims of the Sandy Hook tragedy." The Huffington Post was among many websites that observed the moment of silence.
Microsoft's Surface tablet may be getting some competition in the coming months from slates made by HTC and Redmond ally Nokia. HTC is reportedly planning two tablets—one with a 12-inch display, the other, a seven-incher—both based on Windows RT, the version of Microsoft's operating system for ARM processors. citing sources familiar with the company's plans. A seven-inch RT tablet would be a first for the operating system and give the Microsoft mobile ecosystem a direct competitor to the iPad Mini, Google Nexus 7, Amazon Kindle Fire, and Barnes & Noble Nook HD.
For a small number of Facebook users, a buck is now all it takes to get a message into someone's inbox, even if the recipient isn't a friend. , which remove the capability to block messages from people you aren't friends with. Under this policy, the main Inbox is reserved for messages from friends, or for other messages that Facebook's algorithms deem important. Everything else is routed to an “Other” section. In the test, users can pay $1 to make sure their messages land in the Inbox, rather than the Other section. Facebook thinks this could be the best way to deliver important messages from non-friends while keeping spam out of the Inbox. in a press release. “For the receiver, this test allows them to hear from people who have an important message to send them.”
The National Rifle Association identifies the real culprit behind the mass shootings in our country: video games.
Volvo brings Spotify to the car with help from fellow Swede Ericsson, and could free cloud-connected content for the car from captive data plans.
Just in time for the holidays, a new study has delivered 33 new species of trapdoor spider. The additional arachnids more than quintuple the members in the genus Aptostichus, boosting the described total from seven species to 40.
On this week's
NASA recently unveiled a prototype spacesuit, the Z-1, to be used by astronauts in deep-space missions. Everyone with eyeballs immediately noticed the similarity between the agency's idea and the character of Buzz Lightyear from Pixar's
[HTML1]Since 2007, Wired.com's This Day In Tech blog has reflected on important and entertaining events in the history of science and innovation, pursuing them chronologically for each day of the year. Hundreds of these essays have now been collected into a trivia book, Mad Science: Einstein's Fridge, Dewar's Flask, Mach's Speed and 362 Other Inventions ...
It's been a long week for the filter-filled photo-sharing service. After the initial outrage over changes to the company's terms of service, Instagram is reverting to a happier time in legalese. Specifically, 2010.
The infinity tumble is said to be the most difficult move in all of paragliding, an acrobatic somersault in which the guy crazy enough to do it experiences six times the force of gravity. Doing it once is impressive. Horacio Llorens did it 568 times. In a row.
The megayacht that Steve Jobs commissioned in the final years of his life has been impounded in Amsterdam after a payment dispute by the designer, Philippe Starck.
The Senate late Thursday forwarded legislation to President Barack Obama granting the public the right to automatically display on their Facebook feeds what they're watching on Netflix. While lawmakers were caving to special interests, however, they cut from the legislative package language requiring the authorities to get a warrant to read your e-mail or other data stored in the cloud.
Moog Music's Animoog synthesizer -- the iPad's most spaced-out, most diabolically fun musical instrument app -- just got a big upgrade.
We're living in a Black Swan world, but what does this mean for the future of technology? My new book Antifragile?argues that technologies, ideas, and theories ? anything informational or cultural, as opposed to physical ? age in reverse.We may be trained to think that the new is about to overcome the old, but that?s ...
Here they are: the best geeky shows of 2012.
Nearly every coral reef could be dying by 2100 if current carbon dioxide emission trends continue, according to a new review of major climate models from around the world.
If you're based in New York City, New York's Next Top Makers competition is offering resources and prize money to individuals, teams, or companies that design a new product with "commercial potential" and a business plan.
True to the legacy of the legendary racer and auto designer who helped define the modern sports car, the Shelby GT500 is a Mustang with more power than any sane individual needs.
The Kremlin isn't just upgrading its electronic surveillance to monitor protesters. It's using that tech to extend Moscow's influence over its neighbors in the former Soviet Union.
Flipboard released an Android tablet app on Thursday that looks and works amazingly well. In doing so, Flipboard did exactly what other major app makers should be doing, but aren't -- making good Android tablet apps.
.post .entry .gallery-overview .gallery-slide img {width:auto;}.post .entry .gallery-overview .gallery-slide {text-align:center;}Christmas means a lot of different things to a lot of different people ? religion, family, charity, presents. For photographer Jesse Rieser, Christmas is a time to cast an almost anthropological eye over the "monuments to merriness" assembled by Americans in full holiday spirit."I'm celebrating people ...
For the last 17 years,
Joe Woodland -- who died last week at the age of 91 -- is the man who dreamt up what became the Universal Product Code, the ubiquitous bar code used to ring up your groceries every time you visit the supermarket.
The history of encryption is a tale of broken secrets. But there are the few elusive codes that no one has ever managed to crack.
Here are the superheroes of tech, both real and fictional, you told us on Facebook you most wanted to be.
Winter is here, which, for those of us living in areas not yet in the grips of global climate change, means snow. And slush. And sleet. Driving under such conditions can be, shall we say, challenging, without the proper hardware.
Skiing and snowboarding may bring you to the mountain, but the apr?s scene is what keeps you around after the lifts stop running.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
The European Union is expected to accuse Samsung of antitrust violations in its patent war with rival Apple. The EU's competition commissioner told reporters in Brussels at a Thursday press conference that the agency would soon send Samsung a list detailing how the company improperly used standard-essential patents in its ongoing legal battle with Apple.
A proposal forbidding internet service providers from turning the data-cap meter off to grant a so-called internet fast lane to preferential online services was introduced Thursday in the Senate. The bill by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) comes a week after a report found that the institutionalization of data caps by ISPs is geared toward profiteering rather than the stated goal of managing traffic congestion.
A Kickstarter developer claims Apple dropped the hammer on its multi-device charging station because of a new, and so far unannounced, licensing rule for the Apple Lightning connection cable. According to the developer, Apple will not allow Lightning connectors alongside other types of connectors, including its own 30-pin iPod/iPhone connector, in third-party chargers.
If you need to test Wi-Fi signals on an airplane, Boeing has discovered potatoes are a secret to success.