Hacksar

If you have even the slightest attachment to your computer, you may have come to realize the hard way that often times you need to do some sort of job that can only be done on your computer. But, you’re stuck on some stranger’s computer and it doesn’t have all the cool bells and whistles that you simply need to do your job. Or, worse yet, you’re at school and you forgot to print out your essay, and nobody is at home to email it to you (or something of the type). You may think you’re smart and have set up a VNC server just for occasions like this… except for the fact that you’re not allowed to install any software on the only computer you have access to. There goes your master plan.

It’s ok, though, because there’s always another way. Keep reading for the simple guide to setting up remote access to your computer where all you need to actually access your computer is a web browser.

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Now with the prices of PlayStation 3’s dropping, more and more people are buying them. It not only is the most powerful gaming platform (from a hardware point of view) on the current market, but it also has the added benefit of being able to serve content in 1080p resolution, making the most out of that HDTV you just bought. It is also one of the best Blu-Ray players that you can get. However, did you know that you can stream virtually any media (video, audio, images) that you have on your PC to your PS3 over your home network? AVI, DIVX, MP3, JPG — you name it, you can most likely stream it.

If you have your PS3 on your network and want to share your files to it to watch on your TV, have no fear. It’s beyond easy; just keep reading for the guide.

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If you’re one of the few lucky enough to have an unlimited texting plan, and also find yourself constantly checking your Gmail account to see if you have any new messages, (but unlucky enough not to have a smartphone / data plan), you may be in luck. With a little bit of tweaking, you can set up your Gmail account to forward all the emails (or even only specific emails) to your cell phone as text messages. You no longer have to keep checking if you have a new message on a computer because you’ll be notified instantly straight to your phone!

To do this, you need a Gmail account and a texting capable phone. (There are also some restrictions on what service providers support this, but that’s later on. It can also be done without unlimited texting, but having unlimited texting is a great benefit — just so you don’t have to ever look at a $26,000 phone bill. I also can’t vouch for international users, but this should work in USA.) Keep reading for the step-by-step guide on how to set up your Gmail account to receive your emails on your phone.

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If you’ve been reading some of our previous posts (primarily the ones on BitTorrent), or even if you have a digital video recorder, you may have noticed that getting the files onto a DVD for easy DVD player playback is much harder that it seems. Almost 99 out of a 100 times, your DVD player won’t be able to just play a video file if you just drag/drop and burn whatever video file to a DVD. When you do that, you are usually burning a data DVD, which is specially meant for only PCs to read them; DVD players usually can’t.

However, if you ever have wanted to create your own DVD, whether it was a home video or just some other collection of video clips you’ve had, there is a way to do it. What you want to do is author the DVD. When you use DVD authoring programs, you have the ability to set not only the video to play on a DVD player, but also to create aspects of the DVD such as the menu screen, scene selections, and more. There are many programs that can do this for you, the best being free. Keep reading for the list and a quick guide on how to use the best one.

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If you’ve ever found yourself on a computer that doesn’t belong to you, you’ve probably had the lost feeling of not having all of your favorite programs at your fingertips. If you are trying to work with images, Microsoft Paint just doesn’t cut it; you need the real powerhouse of image editors: Photoshop. You have the software at home, but that may not mean you have it on every computer. Also, you most likely don’t have administrator priviledges on this alien computer, so you can’t even install your own copy of… whatever.

That’s where Portable Apps come in. For those of you wondering what a Portable App is, let me just say, they are one of the best creations for all computers. A portable application is a program that has the ability to run straight from one file, without any installation. They can even be run directly off of a USB flash drive, eliminating all needs for installation and admin rights.

Now, you may recall that Adobe’s Photoshop CS3 is not only a powerhouse image editing program, but the full installed version runs at a whopping  MB. So, you may think that you can never use this wonderful piece of software on any computer other than where it’s natively installed. Guess again. Keep reading to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop CS3 as a portable application straight from your flash drive, with no installation required.

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Often times, you have probably had some problem trying to save or send some sort of file, whether it was a Word document, PowerPoint, or something else that your recipient was unable to open. If they did not have the proper program installed on their computer, they would not be able to view the file you tried to send to them. Thankfully, a solution for this problem is to send the file as a Portable Document File, better known as a PDF. However, actually creating these files can be slightly troublesome unless you know what you’re doing.

PDFs were created by Adobe, and Adobe’s Acrobat PDF Reader can be found on almost every computer that has a web browser; many files on the internet are saved as PDFs and therefore many browsers install a PDF reader automatically. You can use this to your advantage by saving your files as PDFs. Keep reading for the breakdown.

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