Firefox stores a surprising large amount of data for you. Passwords, cookies, certificates, extensions and more. Thunderbird, while an overall capable email client, does not provide built in tools for backing up and exporting email accounts. Fortunately there is one free program which handles all exporting (backing up) and importing of these programs as well as many other Mozilla products: Mozbackup.

Modern browsers including Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer now include “geolocation” services based in the browser. What this does is attempt to locate you based on your IP, wi-fi or network location. It is used for several reasons, including adding a location to your tweets or Facebook updates, or to locate you on a map. You might want to hide or fake this location due to privacy concerns, and it isn’t too terribly hard to do so.

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a method of linking two locations like they are on a local private network. There are several reasons why you might want to set one up. Usually there is an aspect of convenience and you might also want to add security to your connection. Let’s go over several [...]

Much to the chagrin of students and parents worldwide, it is not unheard of for graphing calculators to cost upwards of $100. Thanks to software, you have a full-featured graphing calculator that’s designed to work just like a hand-held calculator. With a simple program from Microsoft named Microsoft Mathematics 4.0, you have the full power [...]

Two of the best-selling readers in today’s market are Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad. While both are ground breaking and very cool technology, they both have their own pros and cons for being used as a reading device. So which one is a better reader for the bookworm within each of us? Every person has [...]

The term hex, short for hexadecimal or base-16, is the raw data structure that all files stored on your computer follow. Although literally every file is stored on your computer in this format, you almost never see this data anywhere. Yet being able to directly modify the raw bits and bytes in your computer can [...]

The number of visitors that a website receives is an important statistic for many. Google Analytics, the widely-used website analytics platform, and alternatives like Webalizer or AWStats are great for long-term stats, but what if you want to see how many visitors are on your website right now? Real-time visitor tracking tools have been popping [...]

I think everyone has had that sinking feeling when you realize you’ve just made a very…big…mistake. Accidentally reformatting and/or installing a new operating system on the wrong hard drive is one of those things you could do to trigger that kind of a feeling. Or at least I have. Let’s assume for a moment that [...]

The holy grail of entertainment in your home is the mesh between television and your PC. Since the CPUs in today’s PCs are much more powerful than the set top boxes that provide the majority of programming, it is entirely possible to use your PC to record shows and to play them back later. If [...]

Something that many consumers do not really think about is that hardware you buy in the store actually has software running on it as well.  Any router you get – that’s the device that distributes the Internet coming into your house or business to multiple computers – has software running on it. Although “officially” the [...]

For any web-warrior who spends the majority of their time working at a computer, the ability to track your time is crucial. Both from a productivity standpoint and from a billable hours standpoint, the ability to capture your working time is very important for the business. There are lots of time tracking applications available so [...]

Some of our articles here on MakeUseOf require the use of your own web server. Although the easiest way to go about finding web space is to purchase hosting where a web server is already set up for you, a free and almost-as-easy to use option is to install a server on your local home [...]

My6sense, the “digital intuition” company who I have mentioned briefly here, has just released a Chrome extension which helps you to sort out the irrelevant tweets from the relevant twitter posts you should be noticing.   As people tweet more and more, this app will help a great deal in increasing your productivity levels by [...]

If you have ever waited anxiously for a family member or friend to arrive at your airport after a long flight you will understand the need to receive reliable, up to date information about where a plane currently is located and when they are estimated to arrive. I covered some sites for tracking flights back [...]

The reports of RSS’s death have been grossly exaggerated. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, got its start in 1999 under the direction of Dave Winer for his Scripting News website. Since that time, RSS has been used in many applications across the web and is useful in many ways which you might not [...]