Wait! Before you click “accept” on that random person from high school who just added you as a friend you on Facebook, read this.

I’m about to go all Doctorow in a minute, but I think there’s something seriously to be gained by maintaining a velvet rope around your social networks and communities, with a few notable exceptions. If you’re building a brand, promoting a site, or building a community for some cause or other purpose, then I completely understand making sure you have an open door policy. What I’m referring to are personal accounts on social networks for yourself and to keep you in touch with your friends, family, and loved ones.

If you have a MySpace or Facebook account, a Twitter blog or a Plurk stream, or anything similar, it would likely behoove you to do a couple of important things while you’re setting it up: pay attention to the privacy policy and any available privacy settings, and make sure you’re taking the exclusive approach from the beginning instead of the all-inclusive approach. I admit I’m saying this because I’ve learned it the hard way, but there’s some value in making a conscious decision on who to let into your personal and private communities and who to exclude. I’ll explain below the jump.

Continue reading Spinning Gears :: On The Benefits of Cleaning Up Your Social Networks…

Looking for an affordable PC? Something you can get the basics done on – word processing, maybe a little photo editing here and there, no gaming or anything. Just something you can surf the web on and check email, maybe watch a few Web videos with? Well, you certainly don’t need to head over to Alienware’s site for something like that, or start pricing out expensive components to build a water-cooled system. There are several budget computers on the market right now that match your usage profile perfectly, and they aren’t necessarily all ugly beige or black desktops, either.

Companies from Acer to ASUS to Dell are in the game of providing affordable, low-power (as in power consumption) PCs that pack enough horsepower and storage for the average user in a small package that comes complete with accessories that complete the package (goodies like a nice widescreen monitor and media keyboard). The most expensive PC in PC Mag’s list is $599, and the least expensive is $298 USD. For that spread, I’m sure you can find something that’ll get you online and get you surfing. But when it comes time that you get the itch to start loading up games, you might consider some beefier hardware, okay?

[ PC Mag :: How to Buy a Cheap Desktop PC ]

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a food nut, and I definitely have champagne tastes. That doesn’t mean I work on a champagne budget – I have to search for bargains and I’m definitely not about to shell out $25+ dollars for a bottle of wine unless it’s a special occasion (or the wine is REALLY good). That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to get hands-on with my food and enjoy the finer tastes in life – I have a waistline that proves the opposite; I love great food, especially when it’s lovingly cooked with fresh and high quality ingredients.

You can imagine when I stumbled on Foodoro I was instantly enthralled; the site caters to folks like me who enjoy fine food and want to support independent businesses and specialty food shops at the same time. From beautifully crafted cheese from a family farm to organic tea imported from Fujian, China, Foodoro can sate your cravings for everything from home-baked cookies to vegetarian tamales.

Prices are reasonable, especially for independent producers who may need to spend more to get quality ingredients. For $18 USD, you can pick up a sampler of some delicious cookies packed with chocolate and mint chips. For $30 USD, you can get a pound of wild Nori directly from a sea vegetable grower.

Foodoro encourages you to explore new foods and discover new tastes, and helps the people who bring those foods to you prosper at the same time. You fill your belly with delicious food without emptying your wallet, and the businesses that provide the food prosper thanks to your support. Everybody wins, especially my stomach.

[ Foodoro ]

This article is near and dear to my heart because I’m considering building a kind of hybrid HTPC/home server. While my version won’t live in the entertainment center under the TV, for a number of you, you might consider tossing a computer in your cabinet, complete with fat hard drives that hold your music, movies, and favorite TV shows.

Well, that box doesn’t have to be terribly powerful, but it won’t be very good on that big flat panel TV you’ve got if it’s not powerful enough to keep up with your video and music needs, so ExtremeTech put together a parts guide to building your own HTPC, complete with a list of parts you may want to consider to make it fly.

[ ExtremeTech :: Build a Home Theater PC ]

While I can’t claim to be one of the wonderful people who have freed themselves from the tyranny of CRT displays (I still have a 22-inch CRT upstairs-mostly because it takes 2 people to lift, and a 19-inch or two in storage that I need to recycle) I’m very happy with the LCDs that I use on my primary computers at home and at work. At home, I rock a pair of 24-inch LCDs, and at the office I have one 24-inch, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

But am I getting the image quality that I could get? I essentially popped them out of the box and hooked them up to their respective computers: I didn’t tweak much in the way of settings or anything, should I have? Well, ExtremeTech has answers to those questions – there are a ton of configuration options available in the on-board menus that ship with your LCD display that you may not know about, and even if they don’t give you better image quality than what you had out of the box, they at least allow you to customize the display to your particular environment.

From tips as basic as avoiding the VGA port altogether to verifying that you’re using the native resolution on your display, the tips are pretty solid – if you’re a hardcore gamer and obsessive about image quality, these shouldn’t be a surprise to you, but they’re always good to keep in your back pocket.

[ ExtremeTech :: 10 Tips for Better LCD Image Quality ]