easy

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- A device to call your mom when you crash your bike.

- Stop the madness: 3D-printed headphones?!

- A jacket that hugs you for getting "Likes" on Facebook.

- Target adds QR codes to hot holiday toys for secret shopping.

- Also, New York is about to have QR codes everywhere soon.

Bathroom break video: Salt Lake from Lance follows up… Read more

Vipre has quietly made a name for itself as an effective security suite that can hold its own against the big boys. The latest update addresses issues with speed while simplifying some basic tasks, but its one killer extra may not be enough.

Available exclusively today from Download.com, Vipre Internet Security 2013 (download) and Vipre Antivirus 2013 (download) offer a solid set of Windows security tools. The most notable is a new feature only available in the premium Internet Security called Easy Update.

Easy Update streamlines the update process for your other programs. You won't have to accept … Read more

If you've ever tried to create some "easy" photo effects using a not-so-easy tool, you'll appreciate Easy Photo Effects, a free tool that actually makes it easy to apply cool effects to your digital photos. It handles basic chores like resizing and adding borders and adjusting brightness and contrast, but it also has interesting filters such as sepia, colored grid, and embossed effects. With easy-to-access settings for each individual effect and a prominent Undo button, Easy Photo Effects lets you quickly apply, view, and change effects until you get it right. Easy Photo Effects only handles … Read more

Users of Facebook are sure to like this app, which is designed to make uploading photos to the social media site even easier. Easy Photo Uploader from ObviousIdea lives up to its name, simplifying the process and giving you more control of your pics.

Once it's installed, you just need to connect the free application to your Facebook account. The software is quite simple and easy to understand. Uploading is just a matter of right-clicking on the folder or the specific photo you want to share, a method that is faster than going through the usual Facebook utility. You … Read more

Foursquare is one of a number of Web sites jumping ship from Google Maps to an open-source alternative. You can put a good part of the blame on Google's hefty licensing fees.

A wide variety of sites use Google Maps on their own pages to pinpoint locations, offer directions, and provide other travel info. But according to The New York Times, the fees charged by Google for the privilege can easily run into six figures.

A recent blog posted by the Web site StreetEasy confirmed a price tag of $200,000 to $300,000 shelled out each year to … Read more

You're proud of your digital snapshots and want to share them without spreading them across the Internet. The solution is to watermark your pictures, just like Corbis, Life, and other big online archives do. Easy Watermark Studio Lite creates and places watermarks on single images or whole batches of pictures. It adds text and image watermarks, and it includes a variety of preconfigured watermarks that let you establish copyright, prohibit copying or unauthorized use, and other digital rights. It supports JPEG, BMP, and TIFF images. Easy Watermark Studio Lite is freeware, but it's also available in a Pro … Read more

People frustrated by the upgrade and setup process in prior versions of Windows may find a more user-friendly experience in Windows 8.

Ensuring that Windows installs properly across a variety of hardware and software configurations has always been a major challenge, and one that Microsoft has never solved to the satisfaction of all users.

Microsoft has already taken some big steps forward in this respect with Windows 7. Its next version of Windows promises further improvements, as described in the latest edition of the Building Windows 8 blog by Christa St. Pierre from Microsoft's setup and deployment team:

Apple's new EasyPay self-checkout feature lets you pay for your own items at the Apple store, but it doesn't yet have all the kinks worked out--at least in my experience.

The EasyPay feature requires you to download the latest 2.0 version of the Apple Store app. To buy an item, you're supposed to scan its barcode with your iPhone's camera, at which point it's added to your shopping cart. You then pay for your goods using the credit card associated with your Apple ID and iTunes account.

Beyond letting you pay for your own … Read more

As passwords have gotten more secure, they've also gotten increasingly complex and harder to remember. As a result, a crop of password-management programs has sprung up to help users keep track of their passwords without resorting to sticky notes on the sides of their monitors. Easy Password Keeper is a very simple, and not particularly intuitive, option for this task. It's not awful, but we've seen other programs that are both easier to use and more secure.

The program's interface is somewhat sparse, with a tree hierarchy down the left side with categories for passwords, Web … Read more