Smartlife

Some say that the desktop computer is a dying breed as more people turn to their notebook PCs and smartphones to get their work done. That’s partly true, and while I don’t agree that the desktop computer is going the way of the dinosaur, there are quite a few web apps that can effectively replace the full blown software you have running on your table-bound desktop PC.

You may have heard the term “cloud computing,” but what exactly does that mean? It means that you access everything that you need…

eBay is twenty billion dollars worth of dot-com success story, making up for the scarcity of such things its own sheer size. It’s so successful, it even overrides the “capitalize at the start of a sentence” rule, and most of us have known that rule since grade school. Started in 1995, the auction site has grown larger than many countries’ armies and is much, much more welcome around the world. Last year they made over six hundred dollars per second because “take a percentage of everyone buying and selling everything”…

Technology has become the source of many bad habits. People are texting while driving, checking their email while at dinner, and spending far too much time on Facebook and not enough time actually doing work. Thankfully, technology can also prove to be very useful for breaking a bad habit too.

The various advancements in technology are designed to make our lives easier and more efficient. A long-distance call over Skype sure beats sending a telegram by horseback. If you have a bad habit that you’ve been looking to kick, some…

Living smart means staying informed, but these days that’s like Charlie Sheen staying stimulated — there’s far, far too much stuff doing that and what’s desperately needed is some means of control. Once upon a time the man who knew which rocks made the sparks had all the information he needed to get ahead. Nowadays things are trickier. Luckily the endless ocean of information has evolved its own filters — customizable searchbots which can be programmed to trawl the endless wastes and keep you up-to-date on everything you need to…

Stand-up comics and grandparents might decry the Internet as an infinite distraction. They might be right, but for many jobs, an Internet connection is as essential as getting to work in the first place. And just as you improve your commute, finding the fastest and easiest way rather than walking uphill in the rain (both ways), you should streamline your web surfing tools, too.

Chrome is Google’s browser, and since they seem to run the Internet these days, it’s pretty good. A big part of that is Extensions…

Computers can be like Sumo wrestlers: the more powerful they get, the slower they can become and the less you want to root around their crevices to try to fix the problem. That’s because every useful computer in the world not currently controlling nuclear warheads is online, which means the last person to know what it’s doing is the actual user. And if you’re in an office, meaning other idiots have had access to it, it’s probably suffering from more damaging parasites than the crew in Alien.

Your system shouldn’t…