Did you own a Powerful and Expensive gaming PC?

I’m sure most of you said no. If your one of the many gamers burdened by a moderate to slow computer, you know that some games are just too good for you to run. So, how do you know if you can run the game you are about to buy? Sure they may have the minimum requirements listed on the bottom of the box, but sometimes, certan graphics hardware or drivers may not be able to play a particular game. Well, the Can You Run It web tool is the solution to this problem.

Can You Run It? Uses an Applet program that installs itself in your browser like a Firefox Add-on. When it’s installed, the web tool can scan your hardware and software to see if you can run a game. It’s as simple as that! Now you don’t need to bother with all of the pointless research before buying the game.

The site has 2 scan result categories. It will give you either a passing or failing grade on the Minimum Requirements and the Recommended. It will also give you a detailed checklist that tells you what failed the check and why.

Check it out at Can You Run It?

This has been patched and no longer works

Ever want to get the old facebook back? Even after facebook says you can’t? Well you can still hold onto your precious old facebook a bit longer by using firefox and a smidge of elbow grease. Hopefully by the time facebook screws up fixes this method you will be able to choose which layout you want again.

1. Download firefox if you don’t have it.
2. In firefox click on this link and install the “User Agent Switcher“
3. Once installed it will ask to restart firefox, let it restart it.
4. Go to tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options
5. Then Select user agents on the left and click the button labeled “Add” which will appear on the right and have it look like this:
   • Description: MSIE 5.5 (Win 2000)
     User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0 )
     App Name: Microsoft Internet Explorer
     App Version: 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)
     Platform:
     Vendor:
     Vendor Sub:
6. Click ok and ok again then go to Tools > User Agent Switcher > MSIE 5.5 (win 2000)
7. Now click on this link: http://apps.new.facebook.com/?fbnew_opt_out=1
8. Congratulations you will be back at the old facebook!

Beware some sitse may not like you switching user agent, if they look different or don’t work you can go to Tools> User Agent Switcher> and select Default to go back to normal. I know(and am sorry) this isn’t as detailed as most tutorial if you have any questions you can ask us in the forums… Figured people wanted this asap and i am very busy to put a video or something up.

The Wayback Machine is a site that has over 85 billion web pages archived all the way back from 1996, when the web was still young. Simply enter a URL into the site and get ready to take a trip down memory lane! You can visit the site here.

Here are some older versions of popular sites that you might wanna check out:

Microsoft.com on October 20, 1996

Google on November 11th, 1998

YouTube on April 28th, 2005 (Launch Date)

Enjoy!

Have you ever went back and fourth between your wordpad and web browser copying and pasting?  Well with firefox 3.0 you can select sections by holding Ctrl (windows) or cmd (os x) and selecting any additional spots.  May not be one of the “coolest” new features of 3.0 but it defintly is one that will keep me using firefox as i don’t think IE, Chrome, Opera will do this.  Commenters please let me know if this works on other browsers.

It is very unlikely that you will ever need to do this, but it is a good thing to know. This will basically change the physical identity of your computer. Possible uses:

• Wifi hotspot banned your mac address or they only allow certain ones(both unlikely)
• ISP only allows X amount of mac addresses to connect to your modem a week(this is also unlikely as almost everyone has a router nowadays and creates a LAN)

How To:

1. *Windows XP Users* Click on Start > Control Panel and select Network Connections, Right click on the network connection you wish to spoof the mac address with
2. *Windows Vista Users* Go to Control Panel, then Network and Internet, then Network and Sharing Center, and then Managed Network Connections.
3. On the general tab click configure button
4. Now select the advanced tab
5. In the left list box go to Locally Administered Address
6. Select the Value radio button and enter what you want to appear as your mac address

Now you can go to into a command prompt(start>run type cmd). then type ipconfig /all and you should see your newly spoofed mac addrses!

Basically file compression just looks for repeated things and instead of listing them out as repeats it puts a marker which refers back to the previous(same) item. Instead of using XX bytes to say there is a word it uses x bytes.

Example using the above 2 sentences ^
Instead: 2 times
Of: 2 times
It: 2 times
To: 2 times
Bytes: 2 times

There are 190 total characters(without spaces) in that example. If you take out the repeats(leave 1 for the reference and leave 1 character for the marker that is 13 characters you eliminated. Which makes it ~15% smaller. That was a very basic algorithm, the ones in zip,rar,etc are much more complex. This has been a detail of loseless file compression, basically that just means you can recreate the original file exactly how it was before.

However pictures, movies, sounds,etc are not as redundant as text and does not repeat much if at all, therefore it is very hard to compress them without permanently losing quality. Many of these are compressed using something as lossy compression, which means the original file cannot be recreated because you completely changed parts of the file. A great example of this in an image file is the sky, the sky is many different shades of blue however if you wanted to shrink the size of an image one of the first things a compression engine would do to the photo is change the many shades of blue into just a few.