Tips, guides, and reviews about software, web apps, technology, mobile phones, and computers.

  • How To: Fix Your Wireless Mighty Mouse’s Bluetooth Connection

    An issue that’s been popping up around the blogosphere recently is losing the Bluetooth connection with an Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse on Mac OS X. Essentially, the Bluetooth connection will be working fine and then – without warning – it will stop, leaving the user with no mouse support whatsoever. Here’s a simple way to…

  • How To: Automatically View YouTube Videos in HD and Resized to 720p

    Firefox Only:  Now that YouTube has a high quality / high definition option available for almost all videos, you may have found yourself wishing it would be enabled by default.  Realistically, YouTube has the higher quality mode disabled by default to save bandwidth on users who don’t mind lower quality videos, but this guide will…

  • How To Check Your HDD’s S.M.A.R.T. Status

    As your hard drive begins to age, the chance for failure and resulting data loss increases.  Today’s hard drives feature a monitoring system called Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology or S.M.A.R.T. for short.  With S.M.A.R.T. and the appropriate software, it is possible to keep updated on the status of your hard drive and the important…

  • How To: Automatically Hide Labels in Gmail

    Firefox Only:  Although Gmail’s labels can be extremely useful for organizing and increasing your email productivity, they can become quite a nuisance if you have several labels applied to a message.  When this happens, the labels take over the space that usually displays the message preview, and makes your inbox start to look cluttered and…

  • Spice Up Firefox’s Appearance with Personas

    Firefox is a great browser, but despite all it’s usefulness it is pretty drab in the aesthetics department.  While the browser has always allowed you to install themes to modify its appearance, they have never been wildly popular nor particularily intuitive for the everyday user. Personas for Firefox are lightweight, easy-to-install “skins” that can be…

  • Cleanup Your Computer With CCleaner

    As a computer begins to age, many problems can arise such as slow startup, slow program execution and increased memory usage.  Many of these problems are caused by improper shutdowns, viruses, excess temporary files, and residual uninstall files. CCleaner is a free program, available at http://www.ccleaner.com, which will give your computer the thorough cleaning that…

  • Fix: Featured Content Gallery WordPress Plugin Displays Incorrectly in Internet Explorer 6

    For many websites, the Featured Content Gallery for WordPress provides the centerpiece and main focal point of the front page (Techerator included).  This plugin has the ability to display posts in a specific category as well as a graphic and accompanying text for a great preview of articles on the site. The Problem When doing…

  • How To: Remove the Smiley from the WordPress.com Stats Plugin

    One of the first plugins I installed when building the Techerator website was WordPress.com Stats, a plugin which offered useful and practical statistics (instead of the overwhelming metrics that Google Analytics and others provide) with the added benefit that since the statistics monitoring is hosted by WordPress, it would have no adverse impact on the…

  • The Evolution of the Category Page

    One of the bigger items on my “to do” list was to get the category page layout looking similar to the front page layout (with the thumbnails and short article text).  Although specifying the “read more” tag in each post worked well enough to make the category pages easier to read, I still felt it…

  • Opening Apple QuickTake .QTK Images

    Technology is always changing.  With these constant changes come some problems, such as old and unsupported file extensions.  One file extension that was once widely used, .QTK, is no longer supported by many of today’s digital image manipulation software.  Many individuals may still have pictures saved that were taken with the Apple QuickTake that they…