As Chris recently described, Windows has its fair share of annoyances. By far, one of those annoyances that bugs me the most is the file right-click menu. It’s a beast that seems to change and morph at will. It sometimes offers what you need, but most of the time it doesn’t. The right-click menu is also probably the one area of Windows that has the potential to offer a lot of productivity.

With the introduction of ever more sophisticated smartphones and tablets into the market, and the availability of some of the most amazing apps out there, it should come as no surprise just how dramatically technology has transformed the family. Today, there may actually be more communication between parents and kids, even though much of that communication is via text messages. These days, women that are running a family are filling more roles than ever before.

A lot of people monitor their favorite sites using RSS feeds or just regularly monitoring a long list of bookmarks, but if you get really busy, checking your feed reader or visiting all of your bookmarks to search for new changes on your favorite sites isn’t always easy. So, I’m very happy to introduce a very cool Firefox plugin for Firefox users called AlertBox, a really convenient notification box in your browser window.

If you work in a typical office environment, the odds are pretty good that the mail system is an Exchange sever and that the mail client of choice is Outlook. We’ve covered Outlook here at MUO from a few angles, including Outlook Journal and backing up your Outlook data. We even covered some cool VBA scripting in Outlook where you could export your tasks into an Excel spreadsheet. In this article, I’m going to take a closer look at the Outlook client itself.

When it comes to promoting a website or a blog on the Internet, there are so many things to think about that it can feel a little bit overwhelming. Setting aside the entire field of SEO – even regular website owners that are not really SEO “experts” need to have a basic understanding of how and why one web page on the Internet may receive more “clicks” and more traffic than another, nearly identical page.

Whether you’re a man or a woman, visiting new places can introduce a long list of dangers that you are not aware even exists – especially if it’s the first time you’ve ever been there. Almost every place in the world has a “bad part of town” or a certain criminal element. When you travel, you should have certain tools and personal security measures in place to protect yourself and your property.

There’s no question that growing up in today’s world is nothing like growing up over the past few decades. Obviously, computers and technology make a childhood of today nothing at all like a childhood of the last few decades. Instead of radio shows, kids have streaming movies on Netflix. Instead of drive-in theaters, kids have 3D cinema with digital surround-sound. Instead of ham radios, kids have mobile apps.

First off, I have to say that like most of you reading this, I love technology. I love it. I dream about it so much that I just had to write an article about where technology is going to be in 20 years. I imagine a world where everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses, riding in anti-gravity vehicles that run on renewable energy, and everyone is telecommuting from home via a global high-speed wireless network.

Why are myths started? At least one definition of myth is “any invented story, idea, or concept.” So why do such stories get invented? How do so many situations arise where people feel the need to keep spreading false information, without bothering to confirm whether or not it’s even true?

In the world of search engine optimization, there are countless theories, rules, techniques and endless speculation across the blogosphere. There are some awesome SEO experts out there, and there are many more scammers, fraudsters and worse. It’s unfortunate, but in a field where the rules can get complex and may change every year (or month), [...]

In an effort to understand the magic ingredients that make up the recipe of a successful website, I went out in search of successful bloggers that have formed popular, profitable websites. The fruits of that search turned up two big names in the blogosphere. Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine, and Joshua Topolsky of The Verge. I’ve interviewed both of them at length, and here are their thoughts about the two different paths a blog can take to become wildly successful.

Back in 2006 through 2008, I spent many months working with a team of researchers trying to track down the origins of a very strange online hoax. These days, the details of the hoax are not so important as are the lessons that the research project taught me. The most important lesson was that you can accomplish a whole lot of amazing things if you just have the right tools at your disposal.

I continue suggesting to everyone that running Ad-Aware is a good idea. It doesn’t necessarily have to be run exclusively as the only anti-virus software, but I’ve found that the Ad-Aware team has done a fantastic job identifying the adware that exists out there, and it’s always Ad-Aware that spots it, when the standard AV software remains silent.

Transferring data between a computer and a smartphone has not always been quite as fast and easy as it is today. I remember as recently as 2009, when I was writing articles here about how to sync up a Windows Mobile phone to a laptop so you could not only transfer files, but also share mobile Internet. Things were a little bit more complex then, where you needed to install ActiveSync first, before you could really transfer anything at all.

When the Internet was small and young, file formats were pretty much limited to image types and media file types that the browsers of the time could handle. At the very beginning, text was almost exclusively meant to be presented on the Internet in HTML format, or provided as a file download via FTP protocol. Pictures were JPG or GIF across the board, and sound files were these strangely embedded WAV files and those pathetic electronic MIDI files.