Taking a break from our regular awesome software reviews and tutorials, I thought it’d be interesting if myself and some of the other staff writers here at MakeUseOf show you our own home setups – whether that be in the form of fantastic custom desks, complicated home media-streaming networks, or just the apps and services we make use of on a regular basis and our favourite software tools.

The Jetpack plugin suite is an essential first plugin install for every new WordPress blog owner – and Jeffry covered the installation and some of it’s features before. If you’re not convinced yet, here’s another 3 reasons why you should install it now. It also ties in nicely with the newest release of the WordPress [...]

Last time, I introduced you to Kinect hacking on the PC and the drivers involved, as well as a basic zombie survival game demo. While killing zombies is awesome, it’s time we moved onto doing something actually useful. So I’d like to show you the Kinemote application, as well as how to use it to control both your mouse for general Windows tasks, and Xbox Media Center.

Microsoft Kinect development has moved on to a more user friendly state now, and the drivers have been released for all to download and play with. One studio has even gone so far as to make a little tech-demo zombie game for the PC, so today I thought I’d walk you through the process of setting up the Kinect on your PC and getting the game running.

This week I decided to highlight 6 new games that are specifically for the iPhone, but iPad owners can of course enjoy these too as the majority comes with universal builds and retina HD graphics. There are some absolutely stunning quality games I found this week and so can you.

Many bloggers will search for the perfect Wordpress widget that will do exactly what they want, but with a little programming experience you may find it’s easier to write your custom widget. This week I’d like to show how to do exactly that, and the widget we will be writing is a simple one that picks out a single random post from your site, pulls the featured image, and displays it on the sidebar.

If you’re running Windows 7, it’s entirely possible you’ve never even heard of the Windows 7 Cloud. Beyond being the thing that came installed with your new computer, there’s actually an awful lot of incredibly useful technology built into Windows 7 and the entire Microsoft product line. The Windows 7 Cloud is Microsoft’s way of promoting and tying together a range of different technologies.

Plex is widely regarded by many as being the best media player, manager and streaming application around – available for both Windows, Mac and even mobiles (though the mobile apps are not free). If you’re looking for a single solution as both a media center and server, then read on.

Featured Images were introduced into Wordpress in version 2.9, and it enables you to easily display an image that’s associated with your blog post in various parts of your theme. Today I’d like to show you how to make use of featured images in your blog. I’ll show you how to add and assign the image to your post as well as the code you’ll need.

One thing I’ve been meaning to do is set up my always-on home server as a CCTV Surveillance System that sends alerts to my iPhone whenever it detects motion. Though the results are fantastic, you do need a lot of free software to get the thing up and running properly. It’s a lot to download, but there isn’t anything inherently difficult about it.

Having given ioBit Advanced System Care a test run, I can confidently say it’s a great free solution for – indeed – many of your windows problems. The app makes a thorough effort at both cleaning and optimizing your system.

Last time we talked about Wordpress backups, I showed you how incredibly easy it was to backup your entire database and files though SSH with only a few commands. This time, I’m going to show how to automate those commands, giving you fresh backups of your entire site every week, with very little effort.

I’m back again with 5 absolutely top-quality, action packed iPad games to suit every taste, and this time I have a real variety for you from soccer-based streaking games to quirky trivia and steampunk shooters. Be sure to check out the archives of iPad and iPhone games we’ve covered before too.

I’m a big fan of RSS, let it be known. The idea of actually visiting the same website over and over in order to read the content is rather tedious. However, one problem I do constantly run into is sites that display an excerpt in the feed instead of the full content – so today I’m going to show you 3 ways in which you grab the full feed from the partial feed.

If you had previously applied an activation hack to your Windows install to get around that restriction, you may be shocked to find that the recent Service Pack 1 update from Microsoft nullified that hack and is now given you a warning and countdown. Here’s how to fix that and activate Windows permanently again (without phoning Microsoft).