Personally, I am sick and tired of the United States government meddling more and more in our lives.  The movie and music industry is using our elected officials like puppets (muppets) and we are sitting idly by and letting it happen.  Well, I signed the petition, and my voice will be heard next election.  G.R.I.P. - Get Rid of Incumbent Politicians.  If we really want to make changes, we have to get those that pander to big business out of office and let them know that we have the power to do it.  After all, they are there to represent us...

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QNAP has limited the amount of resources dedicated to their NAS lineup when rebuilding a RAID array or performing rsync backups.  The decision here was to limit the amount of impact these types of processes have on your system in order to maintain an acceptable level of responsiveness.  This is very considerate of QNAP, however, I prefer a bit more control over my system and would like these processes to complete faster; well-knowing I will be sacrificing system responsiveness.
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Many of us are struggling to get a grip on our financial lives.  A lot of us don't know which accounts have what in them, what bills are due on what days, or what credit cards have the highest balances.  Getting a grip on your financial life doesn't have to be a strain.  There are utilities out there that can provide you real time information about your financial picture without having to worry about waiting for statements or miscalculating something in a spreadsheet.  The best part about all of this is that these two utilities I am going to introduce to you today is that they are completely free.

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Personally, I have never really been a fan of Apple products.  That doesn't mean they don't have their place in the world, it just means they aren't for me.  However, when one of the most influential people in technology passes, we ALL mourn the loss.  Whether we are PC, Mac, Linux, etc, we can all recognize and appreciate what Steve Jobs has done in our industry.  Steve, this one's for you...

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We, at computingondemand.com, had been looking for a way to benchmark a NAS in a repeatable form without the need to buy additional software.  For us, we had been performing a test in our NAS reviews that benchmarks the speed at which you can transfer the Avatar ISO to and from a NAS.  This was a drag and drop process that proved to be a hassle to run more than one time.  It was even more of a hassle waiting for the test to near completion to document the transfer speed at that time, and then average the results.  Because of this, I created a simple batch file that can perform the test repeatedly and calculate the results, allowing me to walk away while the test was running and perform other duties.  Now, I am releasing this repeatable test to our readers so they can directly compare the results they get with ours. (more...)

Clever utilities are what really get my mouse twitching.  In the age of the connected home, more of these devices are disconnected from one another.  I have a keyboard and mouse for eight PC's in my home, 3 of which are HTPCs.  The HTCPs in my home all are capable of using a Logitech Harmony Remote control and all are currently using a Rocketfish Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse Combo, but it still is a bit cumbersome.  Instead of having tons of remote controls on my coffee table, I have a Harmony Remote, a laptop, and my Rocketfish Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse.  Well, recently, Microsoft's Garage Program featured an application created to help alleviate the need for multiple mice and keyboards for multiple computers.  The application is called Mouse Without Borders.

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Recently, Google introduced their own DNS service for internet customers.  With the latest iteration of their service, along with OpenDNS and a few other DNS Service providers, they have started to use CDN's (Content Delivery Network) to increase performance.  This helps latency issues that your ISP is typically unable to address by gathering and using data stored on DNS servers based on the requestor's location.

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If you are running a popular website that utilizes WordPress you may have been asking yourself how you can have the site perform better. Outside of the slew of plugins and functions you can use, you can use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to speed things up a notch. A content delivery network is a slew of computers or servers located around the state, country, or wold that caches data for you. This can reduce latency by having content delivered to your reader from a location that may be closer to them than your hosting provider's server is.

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The nice thing about running sites on WordPress is that you will never run out of things to try. It seems like there is always something new that can be done to better the experience of the reader or further enhance the site. Featured Images are a great way to show off your post, but what if you don't want the featured image displayed on every page of your paginated post/page? Well, welcome to the solution center! There is an easy way to accomplish this.

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I have a lot of data.   So much so, that there are servers and multiple NAS on my network.  Not all people are like me, but if you are and you have a lot of important data, then backing it up may have become an issue.  Until recently, I had been using a bunch of external disks to do my backups, but when we got our hands on the QNAP TS-419P+, everything changed.  QNAP has bundled a featured called RTRR (real-time remote replication) into their firmware and it allows you to have your QNAP NAS schedule a sync or a backup either from an RTRR servers or through FTP.

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