Need an easy way to improve your graphics and video card settings, but don’t want to waste a lot of time doing it? Try these tools to fix that problem.

F.lux is a program designed with your eyesight in mind. Your computers internal clock tells F.lux what time of day it is, and depending on when the sun is up, it’ll change the bright colors of your monitor. In the course of 24 hours, you’ll slowly see your machine go from bright sunny colors during the day, to warm neutrals at night, so you aren’t blinded by normal settings at 3 am. You can set the colors to not change, delay them for an hour, or even change your location.

But what if you need to check your actual graphics cards stats? GPU-Z does exactly what it should- it gives you all the stats you could think of for your graphics card. All you do is fire up the executable and it automatically reads off the information for your graphics card. It supports both Nvidia and ATI and it’ll even validate the results with other statistics from the website. Cool!

Article source: http://revision3.com/haktip/graphicstools

On today’s HakTip, we’re checking out the Problems Step Recorder, a built-in Windows 7 program that will record every mouse or keyboard click for faster and easier problem solving.

Today I’m helping my mom fix her computer!

Again… And yes, she is running Windows… Did you know there is this thing called the Problems Step Recorder built in to windows 7? Well, I checked it out and this is going to save me so much time explaining the difference between left clicking and right clicking on the mouse to my mom.

PSR (for short) will record in images, each click of my mouse and every time I use the keyboard (but it won’t record my actual key strokes!). It’ll save everything into a zip that I can share later.

Before you start with it, disable your second or third monitors and turn your resolution down so it’ll be easier for the non-techy person to understand the captured images.

Then run psr.exe and open the program. There’s just a few buttons – record, stop record, add comment, and the run time so the program makes itself very easy to use.

I’ve got PSR open and all I need to do is hit record. Now each time I click somewhere, Problem Steps Recorder will display a little red icon showing me that it’s captured that as an image. When I type something in, it’ll also take a screenshot and explain that I was typing at that time. After I’ve finished my step, I can also add a comment. Doing so will capture my comment for the non-techy and display it during the steps. When I’m done, I hit stop record and save my .zip file. I can now send my simple steps to my mom via email, dropbox, or whatever.

So what program do you use to help friends and family? Tell me about it — tips@hak5.org, or simply leave a comment below.

And be sure to check out our sister show, Hak5 for more great stuff just like this.

Article source: http://revision3.com/haktip/psr

If you aren’t familiar with Greasemonkey, it’s a popular Firefox extension that, since 2004, has been letting users install javascript add-ons, or greasemonkey scripts, for making real-time changes to web pages. Opera has supported the scripts since version 8, and Chrome since early 2010.

And today I’ll be demonstrating the installation of a simple Greasemonkey script to save your retinas – so let’s get started.

The script is simple enough, this bit of javascript. Basically it sets the variable newSS for new style sheet with our preferred values. The background should be black, the text gray, and the links and visited links – these values are Yellow and I find them easy on the eyes.

So this brings me to ask, what scripts, greasemonkey or otherwise, rock your world? Share ‘em with us at tips@hak5.org, And be sure to check out our sister show Hak5 every week for more great stuff just like this.

Article source: http://revision3.com/haktip/inyoureyes