Life needs a soundtrack. You become the music supervisor on the set of your own life story when you make playlists. We’ve all created a few. “Darla’s Girlz Nite Out Playlist;” “Rainy Day Songs;” “Ben & Deb’s Romantic Playlist;” “Music for Studying” … We pick and choose songs that create a mood, bring back memories [...]

Take care of your car, and it could last 20 years, possibly 30 … or more. Though its styling might be out of date, it will still get you down the road. If only we could get that much life out of our desktop computers and laptops. Granted, it’s a lot less expensive to replace [...]

As personal computers have evolved from clunky metal boxes to sleek, streamlined and wireless permutations, not much has changed with the number one form of user interface: the keyboard. While there are still choices to be had – USB connected or wireless, control and function key configuration, switch technology (capacitative vs mechanical) and level of [...]

Universal Serial Bus, or USB, connections make it deliriously simple to connect thousands of different kinds of peripheral devices to a computer. Whether you want storage on a flash drive, a connection to your printer, an interface with a mouse or controller or upload/download capability from a multimedia device, transfering your data is as easy [...]

Compared to the world’s most dangerous jobs (commercial fishing, logging, flying aircraft), professional computer users tend to think they’re fairly safe at their workplace. But even the most sedentary job has its risks. Here are a couple of health concerns you might encounter if you sit at your computer for long hours – plus suggestions [...]

Tom Abate wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle Jan. 17, 2011, about the grand opening of a museum dedicated to celebrating mankind’s quest to augment its capacity for problem solving. The Computer History Museum fittingly occupies two stories in what used to be the headquarters of Silicon Graphics. The museum’s mission is “to preserve and [...]

If you’re faced with buying a new CPU, should you go with a dual-core or quad-core processor? What’s the difference and why would you choose one or the other? Just about all processors available today from the two largest manufacturers, Intel and AMD, are either quad-core or dual-core. The name clues you in to the [...]

What is snark? Call it sarcasm, satire, potshots, or plain old making fun of something, snark is one of the Internet’s top commodities (after porn, e-commerce and the legitimate exchange of information). When your brain is fried like pepper bacon after a day of caring about other people’s problems, log on to these sites and [...]

What’s next in the world of computer hardware? Are we getting close to those TV ads where the guy is placing stock trade orders via an interface in his eyeglasses lens? Maybe not quite yet. But here are a few developments that may hit the market in the next few years – or decades: Fabric [...]

New inventions, processes and concepts are entering the language all the time. And we need new words and new terms to name them. Fortunately for computer users, geeks are smart and usually funny. Word coinage in the field of computers is pithy, wry and sometimes deliberately ironic. Let’s look at a field that takes itself [...]