The Internet has brought together cultures and nationalities that had previously never really interacted very much. The openness has also fanned perceptions and prejudices on all sides. The following are some of those notions that I realized people from other countries believe about Americans, and how Americans sometimes feed those beliefs through their online behavior.

Binaural beats are sounds of different frequencies that play in each ear. The premise is that the brain’s effort to sync up the two sounds into one perceived sound eventually “tunes” the brain to operate at a mental state within that range. The makers of binaural beat products tweak each frequency range to create a sort of “resonant frequency” in the brain that matches known frequencies for things like concentration, relaxation, and excitement. In order to test that theory, I decided to do a personal experiment of my own – completely unscientific, mind you – to see if binaural beats would improve my own concentration.

People usually develop their own systems to keep desktops organized, whether it’s building “fences” around areas for certain types of shortcuts, organizing links and shortcuts into subfolders, or a long list of other ideas. Some work pretty well, but others don’t. For the most part, all of the usual approaches to desktop organization require constant maintenance and upkeep. If you aren’t careful, it’ll get away from you again.

While not specifically marketed for tablets, let’s face it – to fully experience any FPS game, you really need the larger screen of a tablet. You can purchase from a long list of great first person shooters for an Android Tablet, but if you’re looking for the affordable option – aka free – Critical Strike is the way to go. The quality of the game jumps right out at the main window when you launch the game.

In my never-ending quest to find new ways to automate my activities in front of the keyboard, and to shave precious seconds off of my work schedule, I always appreciate new and creative technologies that serve that purpose. Sometimes, it’s the simplest-looking app that can make the biggest difference. Oddly enough, it was during a question of mine to find a spell auto-correction app for Windows that I stumbled across a cool app called PhraseExpress.

Smokin’ Guns isn’t like the usual military-style shooting games like Call of Duty or Metal of Honor. It also isn’t like the surreal, monster-filled Doom-esque games that fill the gamestore shelves. No – this game is all about a gunfighter and his gun. Just trying to survive in a crazy, wild place where everyone else also has a gun with a bullet that has your name on it.

You know that feeling when you are fooled into clicking on something on a website that you didn’t intend to click on? Maybe it was an order screen that fooled you into paying for extra shipping, an installation wizard that tricked you into installing some adware browser toolbar, or a “free” download that turned out not to be quite so free after all. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all been disappointed by the tenacity of marketers that are overly aggressive.

I have to say that the first time I used a stylus with my Android tablet, I realized that I could never go back to using it with just my finger again. A tablet is an ideal vehicle for applications that are stylus-centric. That means big areas of the screen that you can quickly tap for a function, slider windows to flip between functions with ease, and of course the ability to sketch or draw to accomplish a task.

There is this fascinating service called Tint, and I actually struggle to accurately describe it – that’s how unique it is. Tint is 50% about promoting your social networks, but it’s also 50% about providing website content. It’s both. It should be a paradox that should cause the Universe to implode and create a black hole – but it doesn’t. Somehow, Tint pulls it off and makes it work – it brings social content and web content together in one place.

By no means am I a male model. So, it is not without some hesitation that I embark down a road giving people advice on how to take a better self portrait. Then again, having spent more than a decade posting my mug on the Internet in various forms and on a variety of websites, social networks, forums, blogs and even on television – I’ve learned a few interesting things about what makes a really good self-portrait, and what doesn’t.

There are times when you realize that an ad or maybe some other content needs to go into an area of your blog that isn’t so easy to get to. Sidebar content is one thing, and usually fairly easy to modify, but when it comes to other areas of your website that might be dynamically generated by code, inserting single content isn’t so simple.

How about a way to embed a connection to your own hosting account – whether it’s just a file hosting service or a web hosting account – directly within the Windows file explorer system? Wouldn’t it be cool to essentially “mount” your hosting account to your computer? Well, we can with a really cool free app called Swish.

How many times have you discovered a cool video on YouTube and realized that you didn’t have enough time to watch it, and wanted to bring it with you to watch on your tablet while riding the train? How about that awesome video podcast that you’d love to listen to while waiting at the doctor’s office? 4K Video Downloader can make your whole experience with getting media off the Internet a lot simpler and more convenient.

I am always in search of a better email client. Don’t get me wrong, Gmail is great and everything, but there’s just something about a desktop email client that feels so much more powerful and functional. We keep trying to come up with new and innovative ways to make Gmail itself act as a desktop email client, but the truth is that there is nothing more powerful and full of features than true desktop email clients like Thunderbird and Outlook.

There are a lot of things about Facebook that annoy people – not just the annoying things that people post. In my case, I got really frustrated at the beginning when there were certain friends that I realized I was missing updates from. These were really good friends, and I was interested in just about every single thing they posted.