TCB

O.K., I admit it. I’ve been spending too much time on Digg. It’s not such a bad pursuit, I keep telling myself. Over the past week or so, I’ve combed the postings for hours each day, trying to understand the path to Digg’s success. It’s a frustrating obsession. I’ve tried submitting a bunch of articles, […]

No sooner than I penned a piece on where to buy toilet paper online, I remembered that I had an online gift certificate languishing in a Thunderbird folder. Okay, so I admit to having never made that all-important online purchase, prior to writing the article. Call me a creature of habit, but I like to […]

We’ve all bought something crazy online. Something on impulse. Something that maybe we really didn’t need. Something that, when you get right down to it, would have been better purchased in the bricks and mortar world.
My biggest crazy purchase was many moons ago, when I bought a nice little Weber gas grill.
This was way […]

Call me the intrepid reporter, but I’ve become absolutely fascinated by the whole red wine-blood pressure connection. So fascinated that I’ve devised a little experiment, in real time. I’m going to take my blood pressure before and after imbibing a couple of glasses of red wine tonight, and post photos of the blood pressure monitor, […]

Whether you travel near or far, it seems there’s always someone who can’t make it to the Thanksgiving table. It doesn’t have to be that way. Forget the price of a ticket. Good ol’ Uncle Lou in Miami needn’t feel left out.
This crazy modern world (la digital vida loca) gives us lots of ways to […]

My eyes almost popped out like a Tex Avery cartoon last weekend when we passed a pair of gas stations out on the highway selling regular for under two bucks per gallon. The magical psychological price point was shattered, with both stations at $1.98. Here we are, a week or so past Election Day, and […]

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of the big pharmaceutical companies and their expensive drugs. But I’m not a complete Luddite. I believe that less is more, but I don’t like to keep my head in the sand when it comes to major developments - especially when they come from outside the normal […]

Black Friday… a day that shall go down in infamy as the most insane shopping experience of the year. Do you dare venture out on the day after Thanksgiving to hoard those techie toys at bargain prices?
This year’s price wars are shaping up to be especially bloody, with Tarjet housewife-chic Target and the evil empire […]

Put in the orders for a keg of egg nog and those snazzy corporate gifts! Four out of five companies are planning to spread that holiday cheer with office parties… and not only that, they’re planning to spend more this year.
According to a survey of human resource executives released today by a Chicago-based outplacement consultancy, […]

I’ve been reminded, once again (and twice in the last week) the reason why I don’t have my computers and home office in the basement. Our sump pump has worked like a charm for years, until last Thursday, when it decided not to start. This disrupted my video production experiments, if only for a few […]

It’s been a while since I first considered using a car donation company to get rid of an old Honda we’ve had sitting the driveway. I had plans of reviving the old Civic to use as a winter car. The plans got more and more grand, of course. Not only was I going to either […]

Anybody have a recommendation for a good GPS system? We went out for a drive on Sunday afternoon and got good and lost. I mean seriously lost. As per my usual pre-trip procedure, I tried to print a map from the Web before we left… alas, the printer hung up. Since we were in […]

As I sit here and look at my tower PC, I can’t help but think the thought… the average PC is just too darned big (and way too loud). My old Pentium 4 monolith eats up an inordinate amount of desk space. There’s a ton of space inside the case that I’ve never used. I’ve […]

Can you guess the average price for 4×6-inch digital photo print from an online photo lab?
Is it:

A - 29 cents?
B - 25 cents?
C - 19 cents? or
D - 16.5 cents?

If you chose D, you chose correctly… at least by my calculations. (I’ve been tracking over two dozen online digital photo printers […]

I’ve been living with a less than adequate seating situation in my home office. There are two work areas, three computers (not counting the laptop), and just one real desk chair. And a real desk chair it is… an honest-to-goodness Herman Miller Aeron (that I splurged for way back before the dotcom bust). While I’ve […]

The work-at-home lifestyle has its ups and downs. From a decade’s worth of experience, I can tell you that achieving that vaunted balance between work and family life is a real trick. Configuring a home office for optimal productivity is key. I’m not just talking about setting up your workplace with the right computer desk […]

I was working for a big insurance company when the desktop publishing (DTP) revolution took off in the mid-’80s. This place was IBM blue, through and through. If you needed a desktop computer at that place and time, you only had once choice: an honest to goodness IBM PC. Unfortunately, WYSIWYG DTP wasn’t easy to […]

Every so often, I think back to figure out why I made the choices to get where I am today. I can thank a great high school graphic arts program for helping me to get my first real job after high school, and that first job for introducing me to the world of computer graphics. […]

The dog days are upon us. It’s a smart geek that uses technology to their advantage. Now I don’t know how smart I am, but I’ve come up with a handful of handy hints to help you beat the heat, save a few bucks, and get the most out of your vacation time — from […]

Installing a D-I-Y home surveillance system has been in my top five to-do-list for more than a year now. Like many of the geek home improvement projects I’ve put off doing around here, it’s the search for the right components at the right price that’s held things up. But it’s not just the cost. While […]