The good news is that there’s a simple way to disable Graph Search. If you’ve tried it out and your mind is set on hating it, you don’t have to keep staring at that blue bar that keeps telling you to “Search for people, places and things”. So yes, you can get your “old Facebook” (or the newest old Facebook, to be accurate) back, at least until Facebook decides you can’t anymore. What do you have to do?

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting increasingly used to being notified instantly about anything that happens. A new text message? I get a pop up and a sound. A new email or Facebook update? I get a red badge. A new update is available? I get an icon in my phone’s notification center. No matter how small the change is, I’m notified about it one way or the other. Unless, of course, this happens on my computer.

I love road trips. Just saying or writing this word sends shivers of excitement down my spine. If you think I’m crazy, it’s probably because you grew up in a country where road trips are taken for granted, and the number of places you can drive to and go to are endless. To me, road trips are fun and exciting, no matter why I have to take them, but regardless of how you feel about road trips, it’s always good to prepare before you embark on one.

Each generation had access to different classroom devices while growing up. In my school, we had Windows 3.11 desktop clients running on a network. Nowadays, many schools offer laptops, or even tablets. Which do you think is the best device for classroom use? Or maybe these devices only serve as a distraction?

Do you sometimes get tired of YouTube? No, I don’t mean of YouTube’s content – it’s so diverse you can always find something new and exciting to watch – I’m talking about YouTube’s interface, with its suggestions, comments, and clutter. For me, YouTube’s interface is sometimes a reason all by itself to not watch videos at all – it’s just too messy. Check out this list of alternative interfaces and ways to watch YouTube.

One thing that’s still sorely missing from Google+ are vanity URLs. Vanity URLs are personalized URLs that usually include a username, company name or group name in the URL itself. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter already support vanity URLs. While you won’t be able to get one at plus.google.com as of now, you can get it on one of the many different services that offer Google+ vanity URLs on their own domains.

If Google is the best thing since bread came sliced, the ability to search Google from your browsers’ address bar is probably the best thing since the Internet. In most browsers, you can use and set up various shortcuts and codes to make searching faster and easier, but to this day I have not seen a better way to do it than InstantFox.

Emoticons are not a new thing, but I got to thinking about them this week following the addition of over a 1,000 new ones to Gmail. Emoticons had their ups and downs, but they refuse to go out of style and insist on remaining relevant even after several decades. What about you, do you use them?

As MakeUseOf’s Twitter manager, and a somewhat active user on Twitter myself, I’m always on the lookout for good Twitter tools. These include great clients, insightful analytics tools, interesting Web apps, and cool Twitter mashups. But so far, my Twitter finds were pretty segmented. It’s either a client, a tracking tool, a backup tool, or something else. That is, until I found Twitonomy.

A few months ago, I took a close look at Livescribe’s Echo Smartpen, and was very impressed. Having liked the Echo Smartpen so much, I couldn’t imagine how it could get any better, so when Livescribe released the Sky Wi-Fi Smartpen I had to check it out. On paper, the Sky Smartpen should be everything the Echo was, but with the added bonus of wireless syncing. What could go wrong?

After telling you how you can browse Instagram on the Web and on your desktop, after teaching you how to backup your Instagram photo collection, and being pretty sure you all know how to use the regular Instagram app, it’s time to show you some cool mashups, tools and hacks that will make Instagram even better, for you and for everyone you share with.

Ah, Instagram. There isn’t much that hasn’t been said about the photo-sharing phenomena. When I think about it, it still surprises me how a simple app like Instagram achieved such am superior status, but even the greatest social-media hater can’t deny its power and allure. Being a tech blog, we haven’t exactly ignored Instagram either. We’ve already told you about sites that enhance your Instagram experience – except for backup.

Some Flickr users have been receiving emails regarding a privacy-setting bug affecting their photos. Whether you’ve received this email or not, this bug may affect you if you have any photos on Flickr. According to the email, a site-wide bug was discovered that caused private photos to be switched to public. Once the bug was discovered, Flickr decided to take an extra precaution and set every photo that may have been impacted to private.

Aaron Swartz was behind things we’ve all heard of, like RSS and Reddit, and believed academic journal articles should be free for all. He downloaded thousands of articles using his university log in, and was arrested and charged for it. Now that the dust on this case has settled somewhat, it’s time to take a look at this question again: should government-funded research articles be free for all online?

Google has rolled out over 1,000 emoticons for Gmails’s new compose, which you can add to your emails by clicking the “Insert emoticon” icon or with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+2. The complete emoticon collection includes some familiar faces such as Google Talk’s square faces and “secret” animated crab, but if you scroll diligently you’ll find many different types of animated and non-animated faces, food items, animals, weather icons, and pretty much anything you can think of.