For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
Finally, a way to browse the Kindle Lending Library in your browser.
As an avid reader, and an especially big fan of ebooks, I thought subscribing to Amazon Prime seemed like a good idea.
After all, the $79/year membership lets you check out one ebook per month from the Kindle Lending Library, which is rapidly approaching 300,000 titles.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
Reader Kristie wrote in with this puzzler:
"I just found a shoebox full of 3.5-inch disks. I think they were from my old digital camera, but I have no way of finding out because I no longer have a computer (or camera) that can read them. What can I do?"
Talk about a trip down memory lane! I haven't so much as laid eyes on a 3.5-inch "floppy" in years, and I'd forgotten that a few early digital cameras did indeed storage images on that kind of media.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
I don't like Gmail...I love Gmail. But I'm not wild about using it from within my Web browser, as I find the interface, well, lacking. (Unattractive and unintuitive are two words that come to mind.)
Sure, I can tolerate it if I have to, but I find that I work much better within the confines of a more traditional desktop mail program.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
You know those lengthy terms-of-service (TOS) agreements everybody ignores when installing a piece of software or registering for a new Web service?
Turns out, they're kind of important, especially for those concerned about privacy (and these days, who isn't?).
For example, you may recall that back in December, Instagram caused a huge kerfuffle when it made changes to its privacy policy, which were outlined in an updated TOS.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
Every so often I like to revisit topics I haven't covered for a few years, the idea being that new readers might have missed them the first time around.
This one skews heavily toward novice users, but it always surprises me how few people take advantage of this great time-saver.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
If you own an Android-powered smartphone or use the Google app on your iOS device, it's a good bet you've fallen in love with Google's voice-powered search. It works freakishly well.
What you may not know is that you can enjoy a similar experience on your PC. All you need is Google's Chrome browser.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
Google Chrome does a lot of things well, but it's not the greatest when it comes to mouse-wheel scrolling.
Indeed, you may have noticed that when you turn your wheel, the page lurches up or down in "steps," instead of scrolling smoothly. This isn't the end of the world, of course, but certainly the experience could be better.