Wind up your knight and slash your way through chickens, spikes and a plethora of other obstacles. Wind Up Knight is a fun game that looks great on your Android phone or tablet. With colorful graphics and simple touch-based controls, it’s worth checking out. It’s easy to get lost in Google Play’s app store, especially when it comes to games.

See real-time Twitter information alongside your Google searches. If you miss Google’s real-time search feature, Hashplug is one way to bring it back – sort of. Once upon a time Google offered real-time search results, using Twitter. This gave any search up-to-the moment context, which was considered helpful by some and annoying by others. Those who found this annoying shed no tears when the service died.

Read the news without using up all of your bandwidth. A wide variety of sites offer mobile or text-only versions that work on any computer, but they’re occasionally buried and hard to find on the modern web. There are more than a few reasons to want to know where these sites are, however. Maybe you don’t like clutter? Maybe you’re one of the millions still using dial-up, and want a low-bandwidth way to read news?

Do you ever feel as if you could be shopping smarter when it comes to Amazon? That other people out there know the tricks to securing the best deals, free shipping and more? Well, it’s true. Other people do know these tricks, but thankfully they’re also willing to share them with you. All this and more will be uncovered in “Your Unofficial Amazon Trail Guide”.

It’s insanely late for Nintendo and YouTube to be offering this but you can now install the official YouTube app on your Wii. Watch the best cat videos from the comfort of your couch. Just fire up the YouTube channel on your Wii. If you’re signed in, you’ll see your subscriptions and playlists; if not, you’ll see the standard categories from YouTube. The visual style is not Wii-sque at all, which is probably a good thing in this case.

Try out ChromiumOS inside Ubuntu. Whether you want to start a separate Chromium session or run Google’s netbook operating system inside a window, a new third-party package makes the process simple. If you mostly use your computer to access the web, ChromeOS might be right for you. For the unfamiliar, ChromeOS is Google’s operating system [...]

Always know exactly how long it is until…something. The countdown dashboard widget for Mac is a fun way to obsessively keep track of the exact seconds until the greatest events in your life – or anything else. Clocks tell you what time it is now. Calendars help you know what’s coming up next. What’s the use of a countdown if you have both of those things? Context.

Start using the best instant messaging client out there for Mac. It’s called Adium, it connects to everything and there’s no reason for not using it. Okay, there’s one reason – Adium does not support Facetime. But if that’s not an issue for you, Adium is a piece of software you should install. Combine all of your conversations into one great interface, then customize that interface to work exactly the way you want it to.

Gmail’s new compose mode is simple, it’s clean, and it’s a great sign that Google isn’t done improving Gmail yet. Back in July Google acquired Sparrow, a brilliant email client for Mac and iOS users. Their team joined the Gmail team, and if this is a sign of things to come from that I have to say: everyone wins.

Do some reading, Metro-style. A variety of apps from major news sources and beyond give you quick, clutter-free ways to read the news you care about. If there’s one thing Windows 8′s new Metro (sorry, I’m not going to call it “Modern UI”) interface does very well it’s reading. The look is clean and keeps distractions out of the way – at least, once you’ve opened a given app. White space is used liberally and fonts are crisp and easy to read. This was all possible with Windows before, but now it’s the norm.

Let the web do the work. A wide variety of tools are dedicated to saving you time. From email to social media to your own website, you could be wasting time doing things free services could do for you, automatically. Getting these services working takes a bit of knowledge, time and creativity, but they almost always pay off. Interested? Then it’s time to read “Web Automation, Part 2″, by author Rahul Saigal.

Do some reading on the go. Kobo’s Android app is perfect for your tablet or smartphone, and it couldn’t be any easier to use. Whether you want to quickly browse thousands of free books or pay for the latest best-sellers, Kobo’s got you covered. Sometimes you don’t have your ereader with you, however, and that’s when Kobo for Android comes in handy. If you own a Kobo, and bought books for it, there’s no reason not have this app.

Recover any file on hard drives connected to your Mac, and protect deleted files from being overwritten. Disk Drill Pro offers a complete suite of file recovery and protection tools for your Mac, and we’re giving away 25 copies valued at $2225!

Bring back the start menu in Windows 8 – and then some. Pokki is a simple app for re-adding the start menu to Windows 8, but that’s not all it does: it also gives you access to a collection of miniature versions of popular web apps. They’re bringing the start menu back to Windows 8 while continuing to offer the miniature apps they always have. Here’s how it works.

Notifications might be important to you, but do you need them in your email inbox? Probably not. Do yourself a favor – find all of the notification settings for all of your social networks in one place, then turn them off. NotifyMeNot is a simple webpage you can use to fight the flood of useless social emails filling your inbox so you can instead use email to read messages from other humans.