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
Much as I love Gmail, I don't love how messy it can be. Messy interface, messy layout, and, sometimes, messy emails.
Specifically, after a few messages go back and forth between you and someone else (that's called a thread), you end up with a lengthy, cluttered, messy explosion of text.
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
It's baa-aaack!
Last month I explained how to shut down Windows 8, an option you wouldn't expect to require step-by-step instruction. And yet.
One thing you might have noticed, especially if you're a laptop user, is that the Power menu, once you finally reach it, has no Hibernate option. You can click Sleep, Shut down, or Restart, but if you want to hibernate your machine, well, you're outta luck.
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
At the risk of sounding like a cranky old man who doesn't like change, I'm feeling a bit cranky about Windows 8 and some of the changes it imposes. (Get off my lawn, Microsoft!)
For example, every time I boot my PC, I have to enter my Microsoft account password. Hey, I'm all about security, but this machine never leaves my desk, so I'm really not worried about unauthorized access. The password check is one step I could do without.
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
Recently my wife came to me, laptop in hand, wanting to know why some Word documents looked different than others.
In other words, some spanned the entire width of the screen and had very large text, while others seemed to show the entire page at once, with much smaller text. Occasionally she'd see a file with two side-by-side pages, as shown in the above screenshot.
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
This is an updated, Firefox-oriented version of a post I wrote several months ago.
If you're a Firefox user and Kindle (or Kindle app) owner, today's your lucky day: You can now send Web pages directly to your mobile device.
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
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
This is the time of year when friends, family members, casual acquaintances, and people in the street stop me to ask about buying a new PC.
"What should I get?" they ask. "What do I need?" Also heard with increasing frequency: "Should I get a tablet instead of a laptop?"
Loaded questions, to be sure, but not difficult ones. A tablet can take the place of a laptop if all you do is browse the Web and read e-mail. If you need to get any serious work done, whether for school or business or just everyday life, a laptop is still the smarter choice. It gives you a keyboard, a bigger screen, copious amounts of storage, and compatibility with all your favorite software.
