Well, that didn't last very long. Shortly after T-Mobile announced a new app integrated into Facebook chat allowing users to chat with friends on Facebook using VoIP voice chat, Facebook shuts it down. The app, called Bobsled by T-Mobile, plugged-in to Facebook Chat and allowed users to essentially make phone calls with Facebook. Facebook pulled th...

Do you believe that impressionable youths are more inclined to behave in a certain way because of what they've seen on television, video games, or the Internet? Are young people who have virtually unlimited Internet use growing up in the 21st century any more susceptible to succumbing to potentially dangerous activities than other generations that ...

There are two kinds of people in this world. People like me who love to make lists and everyone else. Most list-making apps lack either list collaboration or list sharing; in some cases list-making apps lack both. List.ly solves both problems as a web-based app that gives users the ability to make lists that are a collection of products, places, or...

Have you ever visited a website and wanted to share it with just a group of your Facebook friends, or a handful of friends on Facebook along with a few family members via email? Today Facebook launched a "Send" button to join the famed "Like" button, giving Facebook users a more private way to share websites and blog posts with a limited number of ...

Read any good books lately? If so, what made them "good" books to you? Did they teach you something new about the world? Did they help you escape from the humdrum of daily existence? Did they soothe or comfort you in some way? Did they expose you to a social setting in which you felt immersed to the point of belonging to the group that was represen...

As it tends to do, TechCrunch got yet another "breaking" scoop -- this time about Facebook Deals based on an article in the New York Times. The news actually seems to have been embargoed and has since been deleted from nytimes.com, but TechCrunch cited the URL of the article anyway -- http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/latest-rival-to-groupon...

Laugh if you must, but did you know that you can get a certificate in Advanced Social Media online from the University of San Francisco? True story. It really shouldn't come as too much of a surprise when you consider classes offered at colleges for years that definitely step outside of the regularly expected curriculum: daytime serials, zombies in...

In this economy, adaptation is necessary for the survival of your business. The culture of business has changed dramatically over the past few years, and continues to evolve at an increasingly rapid pace. In order to keep your small or medium business out of the red, you may need to alter your basic strategies from time to time in order to stay in ...

At some point, you may find yourself in a position where you need to do some heavy data recovery or other forensic related tasks that need to happen. With the exception of stuff limited to those in law enforcement, I have found that there are a number of great forensic tools available for the OS X platform. In this article, I will be highlightin...

Owners of Barnes & Noble's NOOK Color Reader already have one of the best reading gadgets on the market, with access to over 2 million books, 150 interactive magazines and newspapers, and more than 12,000 children's chapter and picture books. With a recent upgrade, NOOK Color owners may have one of the best tablets on the market, thanks to Barn...

You hear a lot nowadays about Office Web Apps. For those of you who aren't familiar with Office Web Apps, they are free Web-based versions of Microsoft's Office Productivity suite. Office Web Apps include Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft OneNote. The great thing about Office Web Apps is that it lets you access...

Microsoft Outlook 2007 automatically filters your incoming email to keep your Inbox clear of spam and other junk. Any messages that Outlook identifies as junk email are automatically moved to the Junk Email folder. Outlook's default junk email filtering level is set to 'Low'. As the amount of unsolicited email continues to rise, you may need to ...

Microsoft Windows XP remains a popular operating system for those of us who still have older machines that will not support Windows Vista or Windows 7. For those of us who continue to rely on this older operating system, we may experience the need to reinstall Windows XP for a variety of reasons. Whether the problem is a result of a virus, a bad up...

In my previous post about ideal tax cheats, we considered the puzzle of why there is such a high compliance rate for paying taxes when a purely business (i.e. logical) analysis indicates that one can maximize lifetime income by paying less tax than what is owed. The odds are that any given tax payer will not get audited, or if so, then a settlemen...

Six weeks ago I bought my wife an first generation Apple iPad refurbished 16GB Wi-Fi only model from the Apple Store. The unit was priced at $349.99 with free Fed-Ex shipping. My wife loves her iPad. Apple still has these units available for the same price, which includes a new case, new battery, manual, and charger unit. In addition these refurbis...

WeatherBug provider Earth Networks is working to protect Spring through Fall sports goers from severe weather concerns. Most recently WeatherBug has launched their Outdoor Alerting System for schools, colleges and universities. This allows schools to utilize WeatherBug's in-cloud (IC) and cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning detection technology. So...

We've discussed Why the iPhone Tracking Hubub is a Gigantic Overreaction, and shown you How To Encrypt your iPhone Backups to prevent your location logs from getting into the wrong hands, but what if you want to access your own location info? It can be cool to see a map of where you've been since you've gotten your iPhone, and developer Pete Ward...

Empire Avenue is a hot trendy new social media app that wants you to sell yourself and your social media soul. This "social stock market game" has you buying other people to connect with them for free. The idea is that instead of following or just being friends with other people, you buy shares to connect with people you are interested in, brands ...

My wife has been ripping it up with QuiBids over the past few weeks. Always coming out way ahead of any money actually spent, she managed to land me a Vulcan Phantom Solo Speaker for my iPhone 4. Truth be told, this solo speaker would likely do better with my wife's iPad mentioned in the above link. But for the demonstration you'll be watching in t...

In the following tip you'll learn how to compress your PowerPoint 2010 presentations. PowerPoint presentations that contain images, video/movie embeds, style elements, etc. are usually very big files. If you need to share the presentation, the large file size may become a problem. Personally I always run into challenges when sharing presentation...

LockerGnome reader Robert asks, "My Windows XP machine is on its way out, so I want to clone the entire HDD including the OS. Do you know of any good HDD cloners for Windows XP --  free or not?" Cloning your hard drive from one drive to another drive is a great way to avoid catastrophic failure when you sense your HDD is about to go out. There ...

LockerGnome reader David asks, "I want to get a screen protector, but will the plastic that goes over the screen prevent me from using touch features? Won't the sensors not be able to detect my finger?" Screen protectors made for touch devices typically don't have any effect on a touch screen's functionality. In fact, some screen protectors actu...

Amazon AWS suffered one of the biggest outages in cloud computing to date, with data housed in a single availability zone knocked out for more than 24 hours in some cases. Many people are pointing to this as proof of a cloud computing failure. Some have suggested that traditional servers-in-a-rack models are safer. These people apparently don't und...