Google Talk is Google’s own desktop instant messaging program. You can log in using your Google account. And if you are on Gmail, you have already been using Google Talk, possibly without noticing. With the Google Talk desktop application, you can stay in touch with your contacts and continue the conversation after logging out of Gmail. The tool supports text chat, file transfers, voice calls and voicemail.

There is absolutely no reason why you would still want to routinely run games, movies, or music from optical discs. Inserting, ejecting, and switching discs is a nuisance and subjects both the drive and the discs to wear and tear. Moreover, optical drives are annoyingly loud and probably use a fair bit of energy. Finally, you might not have an optical drive to begin with. So what should you do instead?

Sound Sunday stills your music appetite with legal and free downloads from a variety of genres. Our goal is to match artists with an audience that appreciates their music. This edition is heavy on the indie rock side, but also holds gems for fans of ambient, electronic, dubstep, beats, and alternative music. Let it be [...]

Facebook apps are a way for third parties to offer features and services inside Facebook. If you spend a lot of time on Facebook and love to share activities with friends, such as playing games or listening to music, apps are a godsend. The downside, however, is that most apps need access to your personal data and some require additional privileges. Hence, third party apps can become a security risk.

Technology has made the world a smaller place. People from every part of this planet use many of the same tools, visit some of the same websites, and mix in various chat rooms online. The internet is a melting pot and a beacon of globalization. And yet it isn’t. The biggest obstacles to global understanding and unity, despite the technological ability for global exchange and communication, are culture and language.

Sound Sunday is a weekly feature promoting legal and free music downloads. Every edition invites you to explore various genres and artists from around the world. This week you will have to hang in for a bit of a journey from classic genres to experimental and abstract music, all held together by pleasant melodies. Note [...]

Space: the final frontier. For centuries humans have gazed into the stars far beyond our Solar System and our galaxy, the Milky Way. In recent decades we have sent many missions into the unknown. Manned space travel outside our Solar System, however, is far out of reach and is very unlikely to happen within our lifetime. Meanwhile, virtual space explorers are collecting information and first impressions of the sights that are awaiting the generations that will come after us.

You can never be sure about the weather, unless it’s happening. Fortunately, today’s forecasts are pretty reliable. And while weather reports are all over the place, if you don’t consistently listen to the radio or watch TV forecasts, a browser plugin might be a convenient solution. Weather Watcher Live is a Chrome extension powered by WeatherBug that puts a weather forecast directly into your browser toolbar.

Sound Sunday is a weekly feature promoting legally free music downloads. This edition launches with an ambient music track and concludes with choir music. However, these quieter albums are merely building up towards and bringing you back down from the climax formed between dance hip hop and melodic death metal. Note that name your price [...]

Crop circles were described as early as the 17th century. One of the first known records speculates they were caused by ‘airflows from the sky.’ In the 1970s and 80s, crop circles suddenly started appearing en masse throughout the English countryside. This caught the media’s attention and caused many speculations regarding their origin. At one point, the most plausible theory involved whirlwinds and other extraordinary meteorological phenomena.

With computers growing smaller and lifestyles going mobile, less devices offer sufficient space for internal optical drives. Presently, the market is kept afloat by Blu-ray consumer home video sales, but in terms of data storage, optical discs are slowly becoming obsolete. Moreover, while most movie buyers still prefer to own a physical copy of their purchase, this market, much like the music market, will soon be taken over by streaming services.

Sound Sunday is a weekly feature promoting legally free music downloads. In this edition we make a transition from acoustic folk to electronic breakcore, passing blues, rock, rock’n’roll, dance music, jazzy hip hop, trip hop, and new age trance on the way. It’s a wild mix, just the way you love it. Note that name [...]

Every day dozens of tech questions cross the desktops of editors and contributors on MakeUseOf Answers. Many of them are easy to answer and have actually been asked and solved previously. Looking at other Q&A forums, the same scenario unfolds. It seems that many people don’t understand how to use the Internet. Or maybe they are overwhelmed by the amount of information presented.

There seems to be this huge misunderstanding that anyone who knows something about computers is a geek and can fix them, regardless of what is broken. In reality, when it comes to complex issues, most geeks simply know how to use Google and aren’t afraid to try and follow instructions they found online. The thing is, this is an amateurish approach, which is fine when playing with your own computer. It becomes a problem with other peoples computers.

Sound Sunday is a weekly feature promoting free album downloads. In this edition we have the new single from the Stereophonics and a selection of progressive, instrumental, rock, metal, stoner, hardcore, thrash, and doom albums. Some of the albums were picked from Metal Bandcamp, a site dedicated to metal bands and record labels on Bandcamp. [...]