eBabble

American Conquest

Posted by in Technology

Blast from the past: originally published June 17th 2003. Next up is American Conquest from CDV. Not a big name in North America, but they’ve has a lot of European hits like Sudden Strike and Cossacks. American Conquest is a real time strategy game set in the Americas from the Spaniards arrival to American independence. This is a big game, with 42 missions and 12 nations or tribes to play. It provides some innovation, albeit slight. It’s a traditional real time strategy: collect resources, build a base, pump out troops and defeat your opponents. You…read more

Apr.27
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Mar.16
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Unreal II

Posted by in Technology

Blast from the past: originally published June 17th 2003. Unreal II is the follow up to the huge first person shooter hit of many years ago from Epic. You run a small ship and get sent on mission killing bad guys. Cut scenes fill in the story, as do refits and mission briefings aboard your ship before each new level. Unreal II is a standard first person shooter: run around shooting things, getting new weapons and solving simple puzzles to advance. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. What’s brought to the table this…read more

Mar.03
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MailStore Home

Posted by in Technology

In the wake of the Gmail temporary loss of accounts a lot of tech sites are highlighting ways to back up your account.  I like the suggestion of Hotmail accessing your Gmail through POP but that’s another cloud solution to maintain.  Using Thunderbird and POP access is another good idea but you need to have it running to pick up your mail. The best solution I’ve found is MailStore Home.  It will backup and restore your email from basically any email client native or online and it’s free for personal…read more

All-In-One Tray

Posted by in Technology

All-In-One Tray is a great free Windows 7 utility that sits in your system tray and provides access to pretty well all the operating system’s built in utilities plus a lot more like purging DNS cache and rebuilding icons.  As well there are four custom spots for whatever you’d like. Very slick and a 7 MB footprint make All-In-One Tray a must have.

Nov.17
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PeerBlock

Posted by in Technology

It’s hard for those who like to maintain anonymity and privacy on the internet, especially when downloading files from torrents.  PeerBlock is designed to help with that: here is the straight goods from their FAQ: What is PeerBlock?  The short version is: PeerBlock blocks “known bad” computers from accessing yours, and vice versa.  Depending on the lists you have it set up to use, you can block governments, corporations, machines flagged for anti-p2p activites, even entire countries!  Whether you’re sharing files with Bittorrent or just surfing the web, PeerBlock can…read more

Nov.11
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Microsoft Windows XP

Posted by in Technology

Blast from the past: originally published December 14th 2001. I don’t have to tell you that Microsoft launched their latest operating system on October 25th. There was enough media coverage, advertising and hoopla to let everyone who has a PC get word of the new Windows eXPerience. I was at the product launch in Toronto, Ontario and received my press copy of Windows XP Professional. The question is why did I take so long getting to it? It’s the latest and greatest, so shouldn’t it have been installed ages ago? Way back when in…read more

Nov.05
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DriverEasy

Posted by in Technology

While on my recent trip I picked up the June 2010 issue of PC Plus; in it they glowingly recommended a product called DriverEasy.  I was on vacation and although PC Plus is the most expensive British tech mag import I was in Paris and splurged, but that’s an aside; back to DriverEasy.  It is a tool that scans, downloads and installs device drivers for your Windows system, all for free.  You can upgrade to the paid version that provides device driver backups and faster downloads.  I took the free…read more

Jun.28
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Macrium Reflect Free Edition

Posted by in Technology

Setting up a PC for a friend and they needed some sort of backup.  My first thought is always Windows Home Server but this was a single PC and the extra cost couldn’t be justified.  I turned again to Macrium Reflect Free Edition: the user had an older 200 GB Maxtor external USB hard drive that would hold the backup files.  To be fair I first tried Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 Free Edition and ToDo Backup but neither one did exactly what I wanted: a backup that could be…read more

Jun.21
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Disk Space Fan

Posted by in Technology

Eventually every PC user comes to the point when they try to save something on their PC and there isn’t enough space.  We all react the same way: what’s filled my hard drive?  It seemed for a while gargantuan hard drives with 1 to 2 TB were the norm and we could never fill that space, but now SSDs are the hot item and most of us can only afford something 40 to 120 GB.  Or you store everything on a server and only run the operating system and applications…read more

Apr.22
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