Our friends at Panasonic were kind enough to send over their top suggestions for this holiday season. RP-HJE160 – Ergofit Noise Isolating Earbuds (Green, Pink, Blue, Purple, Orange, Red, Black, White) MSP: $29.99 A Perfect Gift For: Dorm Bound Students, Transit Commuters, High-Tech Tweens Wish List Worthy Features: ErgoFit design and soft ear caps for […]

The fine folks at IRES Technology Corp have been kind enough to supply a uCorder model IRDC250 wearable video recorder with 2 GB of internal flash memory and PC webcam functionality for a lucky reader.  This baby will record up to 2 hours of 640×480 AVI format video on a single charge. The contest is […]

We’re in the process of recovering from a major system failure earlier this week.  Thanks for your patience and support.

  (The Berlin Wall, December 1985.  Photo by Eric Jacksch) Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall fell, uniting East and West Germany. Celebrations today include fireworks, concerts, and the toppling of foam dominoes painted by school children. Spiegel Online International has a great collection of historic images and coverage of the 20th anniversary celebration.  […]

A new student-run program in Indianapolis called Now Think Now encourages teens to think and make better decisions behind the wheel.  Their web site explains, Now Think Now is a social site where teens and other community members can gather and share their stories, ideas and opinions. Our ultimate goal is getting teens the information […]

As H1N1 (swine flu) continues to spread, so does misinformation on the Internet. There are several emails in circulation that are simply wrong, and web sites with false information are popping up all over. And scams are starting to emerge. We share this planet with people who still believe the earth is flat, lunatic conspiracy […]

Tens of thousands of pounds of disgusting and dangerous sewage gets pumped into the basements of homeowners in Ottawa, not just once or twice, but three or four times – in what the City claims is a “hundred year occurrence.” The top public servant in Ottawa claims the sewers are working just fine, the way […]

I hope that regular readers of my security column will forgive me, but today I’d like to get a few things off my chest. With the holidays approaching, we’ll undoubtedly hear Canadian retailers whinging about how the Internet is costing them revenue and begging us to “shop local.”  They’ll tell us how Internet shopping hurts […]

We often hear banks complaining loudly about the losses they suffer from payment card fraud.  Campaigns like “Protect your PIN” and humorous commercials with a miniature armoured truck following a customer down the street must cost tens of millions of dollars. But then consumers still receive calls like I did on Saturday afternoon.  The bank […]

Ars Technica has a great article this morning entitled 30 years of failure: the username/password combination. One of the things that they didn’t discuss is why we continue to use passwords for authentication even though they’re known to be a serious weakness. The first reason is that, as long as we don’t include the cost […]

I recently installed Windows 7 Ultimate (32 bit) on my brand new HP Mini 110 (it ships with XP). The Windows 7 distribution included all the drivers needed to get the system up and running, including the WiFi drivers, making it a very painless process.  Once running, it automatically downloaded the vendor-specific video driver, resulting […]

A common complaint among computer owners is that, over time, their computer starts to run slower.  There are a number of causes including hard drive fragmentation, registry fragmentation, registry errors, malware, general clutter and unnecessary start-up programs. Taken individually, most of these problems aren’t that serious. Windows is getting better at avoiding fragmentation, and the […]