Consumed Consumer . org

I recently had to play a bit with a new installation of Ubuntu and again, old unnerving ghosts came back to haunt me. Since these ghosts have a habit of tormenting indiscriminately, I am sharing my solutions with you.

Most of us use Gmail, but there's a small minority still clinging to hotmail or Ymail, because that's what their ancestors used when they were chasing wild goats. For all, here's how to get your browser to use you email service whenever you click an email address.

Have you noticed your Internet connection getting sluggish even while your Speed-tests show no slowdown? Are your VoIP conversations breaking up and becoming unintelligible especially when torrent downloading? If your answer is yes, you might benefit from the following tips.

I will be writing this guide as I perform every step. Hopefully it will be helpful to you as well. An UPDATED VERSION was published 1 year later.

Now that the latest LTS is out, I thought the time is ripe to upgrade.

With GooglePages suffering a slow and controlled death, it is high time to look at hosting alternatives. We even include a section for Blogger’s who only want to host their .js scripts.

Now that we recovered passwords and we're in, it's time to do a little clean up of this older Win XP / BT5r1 box.

Adobe Flash was for a long time the dominant platform for animation and quick video and audio publishing on the web. The advent of Microsoft Silverlight and similar technologies hasn't changed that much, despite Flash's well known problems: high resource utilization and security holes. The many Flash updates can result in a situation where multiple Flash versions coexist on your system, resulting in security holes and memory leaks. In this article, we are looking at how to identify and resolve such conflicts.

I recently discovered I needed to brush up on my CSS skills. Here are a few sites that can help.

A larger than life, but little known and little understood Internet security flaw gets coverage (again!). We keep wondering about OpenDNS and mention the Nisemono contest, since DefCON and DotCON sound soooo similar :) It is hard to believe that certain vulnerabilities so pervasive and so fundamental have persisted for such a long time unpatched. Yet this is the reality Dan Kaminsky ( A ), a security researcher, has been trying to change.

A recent large scale study has established a link between musical tastes and personality. The researchers are now attempting to scale up the study .

I recently installed 11.10 on an old Toshiba tablet - color me impressed. I was itching to try this new version especially since I just inadvertently blew up the linux 10.10 partition in my old dual boot Toshiba Tablet and rather than fix it I had decided to wait for the new release.

I recently had an ISP service interruption at home, leaving me without a working Internet connection for a few hours. I used my iPhone to tether into my 3G connection, did a few speed tests, and wondered how it compared to my regular (cable modem) internet connection. Here are the test results.

In what is becoming a regular occurrence, I attended yesterday evening a meeting of the Art Experience Group (AEG). We ate, drank, watched a movie, and plotted to take over the world. The spiritual one, that is :)

I think among Canada's telecommunications monopolies, Bell Canada is the benevolent, customer oriented giant (while Rogers is the ugly duckling). Yet now and again, Bell Canada's customer service manages to disappoint.

We recently learned that Canada's Competition Bureau (7) took the unusual step of warning the public about several hoaxes perpetrated on the Internet and not only (9). This is a good opportunity for this article, since after getting for the nth time a chain email from a friend, I had already decided it's about time I write this little ditty, in the hope that if I am to receive more junk / chain mail from friends, they will at least be more interesting / innovative.

You're traveling to a new country and either because you have a prepaid in your home country without roaming privileges, or because roaming is too expensive, you want to get a local SIM card to send and receive text messages (SMS), check your email and use Google Maps for directions. Where do you go and what do you get? In this series, we’ll have an answer (or more) for you for the countries we are travelling to most often. Today, Canada.

In the first part we looked at general purpose hosting . In this second part we are looking at specialized hosting , not so much as an alternative to GooglePages (as I strongly doubt that it has ever been used for video or audio), but for the sake of completion.

Blogger has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Quite a few improvements have been introduced –first in draft- since Google took over, but the pressure to innovate has been diluted partially through the rising profile of the Wordpress self-hosted platform, where most serious bloggers reside. Yet lately, Blogger has been giving signs that some improvements may be coming. We are looking at the latest and best tips we could find for this platform: