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How To Find Games You Can Run At ‘Max Settings’
Is It Possible To Recover An Email Address Ruined By Spam?
Test Your Google SEO Knowledge

How To Find Games You Can Run At ‘Max Settings’

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 03:00 AM PST

Being able to run a video game at the highest possible settings for video and audio is a win, because heck, it makes you feel good. You know that you are getting the absolute best possible experience the game has to offer.. supposedly.

It’s an unfortunate truth that game developers purposely put obscene amounts of bloat into their games concerning ‘max’ hardware requirements. Why? Because they can. The developers purposely test the limits of hardware even though it usually does nothing for enhancing gameplay.

Still, however, you want to run games at max settings and be able to do it easily.

Now before continuing, bear in mind there is no way you can run any high-graphic brand new game right now at max settings unless you have a Windows computer rig that cost you at least $2,000 to put together – and built it less than a month ago. You do need ridiculously fast premium hardware just to be able to run those high-graphic games. In addition, it’s usually par for the course that every 8 months you will need to upgrade hardware (usually the CPU and video card(s)) just to stay ahead. No one ever said modern PC gaming was cheap.

Given the nature of how fast hardware goes obsolete these days, you can use this to your advantage.

If you have a moderately speedy PC now, that should be able to run any game made 5 years ago at max settings. This is because most of what was considered bleeding-edge maxed-out tech 5 years ago is relatively affordable now – and in fact you may already have the appropriate hardware.

Are there good 5-year-old games? Yes, and there are plenty. Here’s a link you can check out with a whole slew of games sorted by release date oldest-to-newest:

http://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released&sort_order=ASC

You’ll notice there are several with a high Metascore (meaning a lot of people like that particular title), and since the games are all ported through the Steam client, they will work on your PC whether running XP, Vista or 7.

Oh, and there’s another nice perk – most of the games are under 10 dollars.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

How To Find Games You Can Run At ‘Max Settings’

Is It Possible To Recover An Email Address Ruined By Spam?

Posted: 08 Mar 2011 07:00 AM PST

In the context of this article, "recover" means "make usable again". It’s probably true that there’s more than a few of you out there who have an email address that you’d like to use again but can’t because it’s completely overrun with spam.

Yes, it is possible to recover an email address ruined by spam. The only prerequisite is that the existing email account must be accessible via POP.

Method 1. Using a webmail provider as a spam filter

Three of the easiest free webmail providers to use as a spam filter are Gmail, Hotmail and AOL. You could use Yahoo! Mail, but they charge for POP access. Using your preferred choice of webmail, sign up for a new email account. Then configure the account to import email via POP from the existing spam-ruined account. The webmail provider should be able to catch the vast majority of the spam that comes through, and in addition you can send mail out as that email address if you like from the webmail provider.

If you prefer to use a mail client, that’s not a problem. Each of the webmail providers above provides free POP access. Two of them (Gmail and AOL) provide free IMAP.

Method 2. Mozilla Thunderbird 2 + ThunderBayes

Thunderbird does have built-in spam filtering using Bayesian filters, however when it comes to email accounts that get absolutely clobbered with spam, it’s simply not good enough. An alternative junk filtering system is ThunderBayes. This is a better filtering system that really gets the job done.

Thunderbird 2 is still available for download here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/latest-2.0/ Simply pick your platform (most likely win32) and then your localization (for USA it’s en-US).

ThunderBayes can be downloaded here: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ Yes, it is true there are versions for Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird 3, but I haven’t tested those personally.

My spam experiment with TB2 and ThunderBayes

I own a dot-com domain that gets mountains of spam if I use a generic webmaster@example.com catch-all account (meaning [anything]@example.com will go to that one address). I figured that would be a really good test to see if TB+TBayes would actually work.

The TBayes setup was really easy because of its tight integration into the Thunderbird client:

TBayes simply adds in an additional area where mail is checked upon arrival. It has both ‘spam’ and ‘ham’ (for email you actually want) settings, and once running is completely automatic. No fuss, no muss; it’s a simple easy setup.

Upon activating the email address, the account immediately started getting bombarded with spam. ThunderBayes only required a very short ‘training’ period, and it was then catching spam far better than TB’s standard filter ever would.

This is how much spam I received in less than 24 hours:

count

Yes, that is only the Junk folder. Now you know what I mean by "mountains of spam".

TBayes was able to correctly identify 99% of the spam that came through, so it’s safe to say that yes, it definitely works.

What really impressed me more than anything else is that I purposely set up the mail to be delivered from the server completely unfiltered – and TBayes was catching spam left and right in fine style.

Initially, TBayes is very aggressive, but that’s okay because you want it to be. Once you start marking mail you want to receive as ‘ham’, TBayes obeys this without issue and the mail you want to get to your inbox actually does get there.

Yes, a spam-ruined email address can be saved!

Whether you choose to go the webmail-filter way or the TB+TBayes way, both work quite well. Personally I prefer the mail client way of doing it, however you may find the webmail way easier to deal with.

I was successfully able to recover an email address that receives 2,000+ spams daily, so no matter how ruined-by-spam you think a particular email address you have is, believe me, it can be made usable again.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Is It Possible To Recover An Email Address Ruined By Spam?

Test Your Google SEO Knowledge

Posted: 08 Mar 2011 07:00 AM PST

For those of you who design websites or like to tweak your HTML source to be optimized for Google’s search engine, you can test your knowledge using this Google SEO Quiz.

This brief quiz covers questions much more deep than the "what is the most important tag" variety. If you find yourself in need of some studying, then you can check out Google’s SEO document for webmasters. The quiz is actually setup as a competition so if you know your stuff, you might find yourself on the top scorers list.

So for those of you into SEO, give yourself a quick test and see how you do.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Test Your Google SEO Knowledge