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Category: Future Shop Techblog

  • Review: Griffin Beacon Universal Remote Control (iOS version)

    The Griffin Beacon uni­ver­sal remote con­trol is an inter­est­ing device. It’s a little bit lar­ger than an Apple TV2 (or a hockey puck if that’s closer to your frame of ref­er­ence) but it’s got an odd, Zen-like IR ‘stone’ on the top that’s where the con­trol sig­nals come from. Not your every­day IR blaster. On…

  • Review: Logitech Harmony 900 Universal Remote Control

    All things in life, as with the Force, have a Light Side and a Dark Side. The Logit­ech Har­mony 900 Uni­ver­sal Remote Con­trol has both. A bit of a background I have a his­tory with Logit­ech Har­mony remotes and cur­rently own a Logit­ech Har­mony 720. I’ve always found them chal­len­ging to pro­gram and set up. As…

  • New smart Wi-Fi Router review part three — Linksys EA4500

    This post will wrap up my three-part series the latest offer­ings from Cisco / Link­sys. If you want to check them out, part one looks at the Link­sys EA2700, part two looks at the Link­sys EA3500, and today we’ll take a boo at the Link­sys EA4500, the top of the line entry in the EA-Series.

  • Using your Android or iOS tablet as a second monitor

    As we’ve seen pre­vi­ously (The more screens, the bet­ter — Our guide to mul­tiple mon­it­ors ), hav­ing more screens to dis­trib­ute your desktop across can be a huge bene­fit to your com­put­ing experience. And as you’ll have noticed in the title, if you’ve got a tab­let, you can even bring it into the mix, as long…

  • New smart Wi-Fi Router review part two — Linksys EA3500

    This week we’re going to look at the second router in my three-part series on the latest offer­ing from Cisco / Link­sys, and for this post we’re going to step it up a notch with the Link­sys EA3500, tar­geted at folks with slightly more soph­ist­ic­ated net­work needs. If you haven’t read my pre­vi­ous post on the EA2700,…

  • Guild Wars 2 Open Beta Weekend Overview

    There are those who eagerly anti­cip­ate online gam­ing events. And then there’s the rest of the world. I kinda fall into the first category. This past week­end I par­ti­cip­ated in such an event — the first Guild Wars 2 open beta test. Basic­ally it was two and a half days of fresh Guild Wars good­ness! But first…

  • New smart Wi-Fi Router review — Linksys EA2700

    Since the last time I looked at home Routers, home net­work­ing has got­ten more com­plex. These days, folks are hook­ing up almost everything to their home net­work, either wired or wire­lessly: game con­soles, audio sys­tems, tab­lets, hand­held gam­ing devices… the list goes on. And older routers have occa­sion­ally been cranky when mix­ing brands and types…

  • Norton Identity Safe — a personal online security suite

    In this increas­ingly secur­ity con­scious online world, con­sciously prac­ti­cing online secur­ity is becom­ing more and more dif­fi­cult. How many of us use the same pass­word, or set of pass­words for many of our online activ­it­ies? Or look have soft­ware license keys stored in ran­dom loc­a­tions? And have yet anoth­er browser app or plu­gin to help…

  • Macintosh Java malware has mutated!

    Over the last few weeks we’ve read that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Apple Macin­tosh com­puters run­ning OSX have become infec­ted with the Flash­back tro­jan, which is a type of vir­us that could, through a hole in Java secur­ity, infect your Mac and con­nect it to a bot­net of over half a mil­lion oth­er Macs. And we’ve also read that…

  • Adobe Creative Suite 6 Kicks!

    If you’re doing any­thing at all cre­at­ive with your com­puter, you’re likely aware of the excel­lent suite of cre­at­ive tools from Adobe (coin­cid­ent­ally called the Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite). Well earli­er today, Adobe announced a huge upgrade to the suite, Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 6 — CS6 — which con­tains a lot of new fea­tures to all products…

  • Music in the Air, music everywhere

    A friend recently turned me on to one cool applic­a­tion that let’s me listen to syn­chron­ized music from all my net­worked devices at the same time. This is likely one of the coolest soft­ware enhance­ments I’ve made to my home listen­ing exper­i­ence in a long time.

  • Back to School 101: Security Software

    Sum­mer­’s almost over and if you’ve got a stu­dent in your fam­ily, it’s time to start think­ing about prep­ping their com­puter to safely return to Hog­worts school. Prop­er com­puter secur­ity is a defens­ive game. You want to build pro­cesses (both soft­ware and beha­vi­our­al) that encase your com­put­ing envir­on­ment in a series of pro­tect­ive shells, pro­tect­ing…