If you’ve been in a public space in the last year or two, you’ve probably seen a QR code—a small, square two-dimensional barcode that looks a bit like a miniature crossword puzzle. They’ve been around for more than 15 years, but they’ve recently exploded in popularity, thanks to smartphones, which are perfect QR-scanners.
We're tired of arcane web interfaces and sluggish CPUs on our network storage. It's time to build a Windows Home Server with enough capacity for all our data and enough power to flawlessly stream HD video.
Car nuts race their rides to see who’s machine is the fastest. Fitness fanatics run marathons to test their physical limitations and endurance against that of their fellows. Geeks and gearheads? Our battles are fought and won on the basis of how capable our hardware is. While our desktops and laptops might be a thing of wonder to behold, carrying them around with us for the sake of collecting the accolades we deserve isn’t always convenient. Carrying around a smartphone or tablet, however, is. Benchmarking also provides the added benefit of telling you how well your phone manages the current version of your handset’s operating system and apps, as well as whether future OS upgrades will slow all that zippy mobile computing hotness to a bag of sluggish hardware fail. If you’re the owner of an Android handset, there’s a lot of options out there to see how hard your phone rocks. Here’s three of our favourite free benchmarking tools, along with the reasons why you should use them. 
With Windows 8, Microsoft is reimagining the most basic premises of personal computers. CEO Steve Ballmer recognizes the drastic changes coming in Windows 8, even calling the platform one of the biggest risks taken by the industry giant.
We may call the glorious series of tubes the World Wide Web, but that doesn’t mean you can view every website’s content all around the globe. Many of the big name content providers – like Steam, Netflix, Pandora and BBC – employ region locks to limit their services to specific countries. But this is the Internet we’re talking about, so naturally, there are ways around the roadblocks.
Thanks to the difficulties that RIM is having with getting BBM to work with the Playbook’s QNX powered operating system, the launch of Playbook 2.0 has been delayed until February, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the benefits of rocking a few Android applications on your Playbook right now. Thanks to the clever coding efforts of a number of Blackberry enthusiasts, a little elbow grease, and some patience, you’ll end up with a RIM-built tablet that’s not only functional (finally), but also down right enjoyable to use. 
When it comes to protecting the data on your computer, you can’t do better than strong encryption. Properly encrypted, your files are safe even if a ne’er-do-well gains access to your computer, either physically or through a network. In the past, we’ve discussed how to use various encryption tools to encrypt individual files or create virtual, encrypted drives. Now, we’ll look at how to get maximum security by encrypting your boot disk using the BitLocker full-drive encryption system that’s built into Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise.
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