Tech Olive

Gaming is fun, I think we can all agree on that. Gaming with friends around, however, is even better. Fragging your friend is way more entertaining when they’re in the same room as you. You’re able to see the frustrated look on his/her face as you carefully place a .50 caliber bullet into their skull from across the map.

LAN parties are great for socializing while gaming (even if they sometimes contradict each other), as well as meeting new friends. We have the tips and hints you need to enjoy your next (or even first) LAN party.

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Reader Vinobrillo asks:

Edited so that you can understand and read it (we’re guessing he doesn’t speak much English or his grammar just isn’t there. Then again, this is the Internet. Nothing personal, dude!)

“Hello guys, I’d like to know a few details. Please help me with it. I have three 1TB and one 2TB external HDDs. I use them for movies and songs. I want a device in which I can connect all of these drives and access them via wireless with my laptop and to my Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ for my big screen. How can I do this? Is there any hardware available?”

Yes, there is hardware available. We’d recommend getting a PogoPlug device. They’ll run you around $100, but it’s dead simple to set up and just plain easy to use. It also has the four USB ports you’ll need for all of your external drives. Basically, the device plugs into your router via Ethernet. Then you simply mount the PogoPlug drive to all of your computers and you can access all of your external drives just like if they were plugged in right there.

As far as streaming to your FAT+ wirelessly, you’ll need the USB wireless adapter for the FAT+. Seagate features them on their website, but they don’t seem to be in stock at the moment. You might try eBay or some third-party vendors that might have them in stock.

Any of you guys have any suggestions? Add them in the comments!

Here’s a nifty use for those older school supplies you’ll never use again. A commenter over at Lifehacker lets us know about a cheap alternative to those $20+ gaming mouse pads:

“I went to the store today to look for gaming mouse pads. I found one by rocket fish for $20, but it didn’t have any special features or secrets, just a plain black mouse pad. The front of the package had a place where you could feel it, so I did, and it instantly reminded me of a matte 3 ring binder (the ones without the glossy, clear cover sheet protector on the front).

Knowing that this rocket fish surface was supposed to be good for laser mice, I grabbed a binder from my supplies, and taped one flap down to my desk so it wouldn’t move. Using this for my mouse pad has been the best experience I have had with the mouse, and I plan on taking the cover off the binder so I can preeminently affix it to my desk (and use the other cover as a travel gaming mouse pad!). Just something that I found today, and wanted to share! Made my life easier while gaming and I hope other people looking for high mouse control can try this out!”

via [Lifehacker]

I’m a man of multiple browsers and I’m sure many of you are too. Sometimes Firefox doesn’t always cut it and I have to move over to Chrome for a while. A big downfall with using multiple browsers is that your saved passwords and bookmarks on your favorite browser aren’t with another browser that you might switch over to every once in a while. This becomes a huge pain in the rear end, but the guys over at Tested mention a quick and painless way to sync your bookmarks and saved passwords using Xmarks. This powerful, yet simple plugin can sync bookmarks, saved passwords, and even opened tabs over multiple browsers and even over multiple computers. The plugin currently works with Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari. We recommend you give it a try.

via [Tested]

With all the glorious Quarter 4 games just around the corner, it’s hard to contain all the excitement, and it’s all slowly building as the release dates grow nearer. More often than not, there’s that one game that stands above the rest. That one game that we’re all counting the days until its release. No other game quite compares to this one’s anticipation in your mind.

Today we offer you a way to count those days without having to scratch hash marks into your wall, with the use of your very own lightweight and customizable desktop countdown timer! With just a few minutes, we’ll show you how to create an awesome and fully customizable desktop countdown timer that will count the seconds to any date you wish.

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Plain and simple, Dropbox is a freeware application that automatically syncs files over the internet and also to any computers that you own. This is a dream if you have multiple computers in your household or if you share files constantly with your friends. The one thing that makes Dropbox unique from a lot of other syncing and sharing services is the ability to simply drag and drop files into the Dropbox folder on your computer and have them instantly be available to any computer that you give permission to. Any file that you put inside the Dropbox folder will automatically be synced and monitored for changes, so each time a change is saved, it backs up and syncs the file again. Best of all, it works with Windows, Mac, and Linux, so you can share files easily across different OSes. They also have an iPhone app available for free as well.

In this quick tutorial, I’ll show you how to get started using this extremely simple application and what features are the most useful.

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If you haven’t read Part I of our two-part Spring Cleaning series, read it here.

So, you’re finally tired of your PC gasping for fresh air and you also want to start charging rent to those spiders that have built their webs running from your GPU to your RAM. No problem. With about an hour, you can bring your PC back to its full cooling and airflow capabilities and if you prefer, you can take a little extra time to manage some of those internal cables that are beginning to resemble a botany class gone wrong.

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Reader Patrick writes:

I recently let a friend borrow my LCD TV. When it was returned to me I was presented with new little scratches on the screen itself and one large deep scratch. How would I get these out? HELP ME OLIVE!!!

I’ve heard of a lot of ways to remove and fix scratches from an LCD screen, some myth and some actually true, but we think the fellas over at Hackosis have a couple of good ways to fix a dinged up screen. One is a quick-and-dirty method involving petroleum jelly and the other is a more thorough, permanent fix involving lacquer. Keep in mind that it’s extremely important that you use a microfiber, antistatic cloth when cleaning/fixing an LCD screen. Anything like paper towels with large fibers will scratch that sucker right up.

Having PC issues? Need recommendations on what new piece of hardware/software or PC video game to get? Need relationship advice? Send us your question and we’ll answer it!

Here at the Olive, we’re no strangers to HD video and playback, and after being annoyed by Windows 7′s inability to display thumbnails or detailed information of our .MKV HD video files, we decided to do something about it. Some research revealed to us DivX’s Tech Preview, which adds this functionality to Windows 7 free of charge. So, we decided to put together a quick tutorial and share the information! Read on after the jump.

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It’s that time of the year, folks! Okay, it’s been that time of the year for a couple weeks now, but we can guarantee that a majority of you are still slacking in getting your PC in tip-top shape for the hot months ahead. So, we’re here to bring you a two-part series on spring cleaning your PC. This first part involves the software side. You most likely haven’t run malware scans in months and there’s probably random, unused files just sitting their collecting dust and taking up space. Your desktop is probably cluttered with random icons and your media files are most likely strewn all over the place. All of this can wreak havoc on your PC’s speed and agility, but I’ll be listing off some tips and techniques for getting your PC back to how it should be.

Image Credit: awjmfotos

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