Websites with a beef against over-reaching legislation have drawn a line in the sand; today, many of them are following Reddit’s lead and going black to protest SOPA and PIPA. The controversial bills have been under heavy fire recently, and the heat’s bound to increase when 25 million Joe and Jill Everymen find Wikipedia cold, dark, and urging readers to contact their Congressional representatives. But you’re not Joe or Jill Everyman. You’re a Maximum PC reader, a tech-savvy webizen who already understands that SOPA flat-out sucks. What if you need to get your Wikipedia (or Destructoid, or Boing Boing, or…) on today? 
Spotify’s a pretty awesome streaming music service, but the Facebook integration it’s rolled out in the past week has left users with a pretty not-awesome taste in their mouths. Never mind the fact that new users need a Facebook account just to sign up now; even old users woke up the other morning to find their Spotify listening selections blasted on their Facebook feed. That sucks, so here’s how to disable it from either application.
With the exception of a few yahoos, when most of us think about searching the web, we’re thinking about Google. While Mountain View may be able to fulfill the bulk of our search-related needs, there’s no harm in mixing it up a bit. When looking for an alternative to Google, you could do a lot worse than giving Bing a try. While only a few years old, Microsoft’s upstart information-seeking darling has managed to incorporate a number of user-friendly features into the service’s already impressive set of capabilities. Care to give Bing a spin? We’ve put together 10 of our favorite Bing tips for you to trick out your browsing experience with.
We used to have a love/hate relationship with sticky notes. They were great for jotting stuff down, but over time the small yellow squares ended up consuming the entire surface of our desks in a slow, ever-expanding Blob-like wave. We could never find the note we needed when we needed it. It always ended in hysterical tears and missed appointments.Modern Home Control Systems: Effective, Inexpensive, Easy to Install
If you ever saw a “Home of the Future” exhibit and thought you’d never be able to enjoy such awesome levels of home automation, well, your wait is over. With equipment available right now, you can assemble a do-it-yourself home-control system capable of managing everything from your lighting and ceiling fans to your heating, air conditioning, door locks, security cameras, and even your garage-door opener.
Often, a budget build means buying parts that are a little past their prime—and don’t get us wrong, you can find great deals there. But for this month’s build, I knew I wanted to explore Intel’s hot new Sandy Bridge architecture—and, if I could swing it, one of AMD’s new Radeon 6800 series GPUs—while keeping my total budget under $1,000.
