Being the most computer savvy one in the family is a tough life. Sure, it has its advantages like usually being the smartest one and feeling validated by the fact that your loved ones “need” you. However, that need should only go so far. Friends and family tend to solely rely on the computer guy for their technology needs that they never try to actually do the tasks themselves. Their computer skills stagnate and they turn into technology babies. Did I mention that I hate kids and babies?

Imagine receiving late night phone calls with vague questions like, “Where did my music go?” or “Why can’t I connect to the Internet?” I don’t know how those technical support agents do it, but kudos to them. I am in awe at their patience in diagnosing and fixing problems over the phone without even being on site (or seeing the computer screen for that matter).

Well, I’ve had enough! I just don’t have any time or patience for that. I’m tired of people asking me, “Does this sound like a good deal on eBay?” I’m tired of people requesting me to remotely diagnose their computer problems over the phone. At the very least, I need to see what you are seeing. First, I need a screen!
Read the rest of this entry »

“Oh, we’re not gonna take it!
No, we ain’t gonna take it!
Oh, we’re not gonna take it anymore.”

The lyrics to that Twisted Sister song convey a very similar emotion that I felt a couple days ago when it happened again. This was the last straw. As usual, I was working on FireFox with about gazillion tabs open. One of them was a blog post and another one was an eBay listing. Both of them were in the making and had not been saved yet. It’s too bad that my browser crashed when I opened a PDF file … Curses!

Many computer users like myself put up with that same crap everyday. It’s high time that we actually do something about it and stop subjecting ourselves to the instability of Adobe Acrobat and browser window integration! Think of the emails! Won’t somebody think of the half-written emails that have been lost in “illegal operations!?”
Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look around in the cyber underworld. Search and download a video file with uTorrent or Gnutella. What do you see? I see DivX everywhere. Online video piracy takes a couple of forms. You have the *.flv Flash format popularly seen at YouTube. Of course, you will find the uncompressed, mammoth *.iso files directly ripped from DVDs. Then, you have the smaller compressed versions of the *.iso files as various MPEG formats. Sometimes they are in the highly-redundant, DVD-native MPEG2 format or the cross-compatible MPEG1 format. Other times, they are in one of the newer types of MPEG4. DivX, Xvid, and other MPEG4 formats have become staples in both the cyber underworld and the mainstream Internet. Out of all these variations of MPEG4 formats, the most popular is undoubtedly DivX.
Read the rest of this entry »