If you find yourself dealing with wonky hardware problems, such as a PC that doesn’t boot or frequent BSOD when watching video, pop open the case and give the caps a gander. You might save yourself hours of troubleshooting effort.

Do you have a shared computer somewhere in your life? A computer that anyone and everyone uses in order to hop online to do a quick web search or to print a document? I have been dealing with situations like this for years, working with computers in a small school and at a nonprofit volunteer [...]

Do you still have an old machine kicking around in the basement or the back room, long forgotten? For no cost and almost zero effort, you can set it up as a dedicated network appliance, using one of the many turnkey products from the open-source TurnKey Linux project. I’m serious. You don’t need to know [...]

Jim Robinson over at Money Talks News has put together a nice article giving five basic steps for getting a jump start on your paperless life. Among other things he discusses options for prioritizing and cutting down on the total volume of stuff you plan on keeping, digital or otherwise. “Backup, backup, backup” made number [...]

Several weeks ago I was sitting at the dining room table with a family friend going through a stack of documents and letters. Her husband had passed away suddenly some weeks before, and I was doing the best I could to help her untangle the paperwork and understand what was what. This unfortunate scene made [...]

It’s too comical to be true. A few months back, when I wrote an article warning about inadequate attempts at sanitizing PDF documents, I thought that any organization serious about censoring documents would not make such a basic error. Especially not a government agency, after the military had been caught by this pitfall. Apparently this [...]

A few months ago I wrote an article that touched upon the problems inherent in attempts to sanitize documents before sending them to the enemy—perhaps to remove competitor’s names or trade secrets. I was reading a post on a board I frequent where a person was describing exactly this kind of activity—removing sensitive information from [...]

A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker sent me a PDF document to look at. He said that he was having trouble copying and pasting from the document and was scratching his head about why this particular PDF would have such issues. As it would turn out, there were several thousand other documents on a [...]

Like most people who are trying to archive reams of paper, the one reliable tool I always turn to is Adobe Portable Document Format. I trust my digital life to PDF. Almost everything I scan and most documents I write eventually end up squirreled away somewhere as PDF documents. Have you ever considered just how [...]

I can’t help it. As soon as I hear of a new version of anything, whether it’s an application or the entire operating system, I have to install it. Now prudence would lead one to take careful steps and wait until all of the wrinkles are ironed out before starting. I was almost not prudent [...]