If there is one thing that causes the most confusion for people that are new to the web design game, it’s the concept of a web server. When most people think of a “server”, they think of a physical machine like a big computer system sitting in some chilled computer room somewhere, or at the very least some computer system sitting in the basement of some hackers house. The truth is that a server in this sense is technically software.

I think for geeks, that first computer is a little bit like a first love. You remember it longingly, even though it isn’t anything that would make you at all happy today. It has nothing that you need at this point in your life, but you still remember all of those feelings. Those emotions that felt so strong and so powerful back then. Yes, for geeks, our first computer is just like that.

I think there can be little doubt that writers here at MakeUseOf really love Google Maps and Google Earth. We’ve written about them extensively, such as John’s Google Maps mashups article or Ann’s article on historical mashups using Google Maps. There are a lot of really cool things that programmers can do with Google mapping tools. This was the case over five years ago, and it’s still the case today.

I have to admit that I’m a huge fan of Facebook. Since I’m almost always working on the computer, it’s one of the fastest ways that I can stay up to speed with what’s going on in my extended family’s lives. I can see pictures of their vacations, celebrate their accomplishments, and share our own lives with them as well. This is why, anything I can do to make accessing Facebook more convenient is a good thing.

I’ve spent a lot of time helping out friends and family with their computer issues, and I have to say that above all other problems, the one issue that I see come up again and again are temp files and log files eating up shrinking disk space and eventually bogging down the system. The temporary Internet files folder is a common culprit, but that’s one that has an easily solution.

Having a popular blog or website can be fantastic, and one of the most popular ways that many people opt to inject a bit of adrenaline into their traffic numbers is by either purchasing advertising space on other websites or ad networks, or otherwise getting either an ad or a banner published on other websites throughout the Internet.

One game that I stumbled upon and almost passed by is a vintage-looking game called Tiny Tower. Picture the sort of animation that you probably would have seen on a Nintendo-era game, but with a sort of fast-paced and mind-challenging organizational challenge of any number of Facebook games of today. It is clearly a time management game. It’s like Diner Dash meets Sim Tower, and it is highly addictive.

By many accounts, Bing is really giving Google a run for its money. On November 6th of this year, the Guardian reported that Google’s search share in the UK dipped under 90% as Bing’s share continued to climb. Now, I’ve always been one to cheer for the underdog, mostly because I never like the see the formation of a monopoly. However, is this really about real competition? Does Bing really have what it takes to go head-to-head and win against Google?

Have you ever gotten to the point with your tablet where things start to get bogged down a little? We often like to boast about the CPU and superior memory of our mobile devices, but there is nothing more frustrating than when that zippy little mobile device starts to lag behind when you’re trying to open apps or run demanding games and applications. So, what’s the solution?

I usually turn to my Android tablet so that I can sit back on the couch and really relax while playing. One of the most heart-pounding and addictive games I’ve discovered is one called Monster Truck Mayhem. You can find the game with the Google Play app, and trust me, even the free version offers hours of fun.

Anyone that knows me well knows that I live, eat and breathe search engine optimization. I really started following online communities and behaviors from my days in college back in the 90′s, when I was trying to sell off items via bulletin board systems. Times were a lot different back then, online content and communities were worlds different, and the phrase search engine optimization was not really a concept yet.

There are few things in life that bother me more than bad customer service. Between suffering through automated menus, trying to communication with people whose accent is undecipherable, and voice recognition systems that make me feel as though I must be talking in a foreign language – I dread calling customer support, I really do.

One of the hardest things about conducting online research is sifting through so much noise to get to the good stuff. I think a large part of Google and Bing’s never-ending effort to improve search results is to remove a lot of that noise and to offer searchers quality sites with quality content about the topic they are searching for. If you think about it, that’s a tall order.

Doing a home improvement project on your own isn’t always a simple matter. Sometimes it seems simple enough when you get started, but before you know it, you realize that if you had just taken proper measurements and planned out your renovation in a little more detail ahead of time, it would have saved a whole lot of headache. Since I happen to have a DIY project that I’m planning out this year, I needed a program that would help me plan out the entire project.

Years ago, I wrote an article about donating your CPU time to science – taking advantage of an Internet computing model known as distributed computing. In that article, I discussed some of the cool projects you could devote your computer’s CPU time to, including things like defending against bio-terrorism, fighting cancer, and supporting nanotechnology. In fact, I ran a few of those projects for quite a while after writing that article.