history

Google puts Android on parade--literally

BARCELONA, Spain--Love Android or hate it, there's no denying it's been a hit with device makers and carriers.

Exhibit A was on display at Google's booth at the Mobile World Congress show here in Barcelona, Spain. Dozens and dozens of Android phones and tablets slid by on a curving track that looped them continuously.

The collection featured some notable models such as the first to come to market, the T-Mobile G1 from October 2008. But then there were members of that vastly larger collection of forgettable models--useful to customers, perhaps, but probably nothing deserving even a footnote … Read more

Grow your family tree with Family Tree Builder

Genealogy comprises one of the largest categories of Internet resources, and it's a popular pastime with millions of people around the world, and more every day. MyHeritage's Family Tree Builder is a free genealogical tool that makes it super-easy to get started mapping out your family history using a variety of resources. It includes many up-to-date features, such as Face Recognition Technology for identifying ancestors in old photographs and the ability to publish your family tree online so others can compare their research to yours. It can import GEDCOM data, too.

We've seen many genealogy tools, but … Read more

Apple fans celebrate Steve Jobs' 57th birthday

Today is the birthday of Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple.

Jobs passed away last October, succumbing to a battle with pancreatic cancer. Had he lived, this would have been his 57th birthday.

Fans remembered him on Twitter today, with "happy birthday Steve Jobs" quickly becoming one of the service's top trends. According to the New York Post, an unofficial birthday party for Jobs is also planned outside outside Apple's flagship retail store in New York.

Following Jobs' death, interest piqued about the technology visionary and inventor. Jobs was the main topic and namesake of … Read more

How to remove your Google Web History

Editors' note: Now that Google's unified privacy policy is live, clearing your Web history, as outlined below, will only prevent Google from personalizing content based on your Web activity going forward. However, Google will still track your data. For more information, read "Five ways Google's unified privacy policy affects you".

Do you know if Google is tracking your Web activity? If you have a Google account (for, say, Gmail) and have not specifically located and paused the Web History setting, then the search giant is keeping track of your searches and the sites you visited. This … Read more

Life's first cells may have evolved in geothermal pools

Earth started as a violent place, its surface churned by continuous volcanic eruptions and cloaked in an atmosphere that would have been poisonous to today's life-forms. Furthermore, the thin primeval atmosphere may have provided only scant protection from the young sun's harsh ultraviolet glare. Given these inhospitable conditions, scientists have long wondered: How did the first cells come to be nearly 4 billion years ago?

Conventional scientific wisdom holds that life arose in the sea. But a new study suggests that the first cells--or at least the ones that left descendants still extant--got their start in geothermal pools, … Read more

How to quickly delete Google search term history in Android

Erasing your Google search history from an Android device used to be a convoluted process, but no longer.

The new update to Google search for Android makes it so you can delete terms from your search history quickly from within the app. Here's how:

Step 1: Make sure you have the latest update to the Android Google search app installed.

Step 2: In the Google search app, long-press on any search term you want to delete.

Step 3: Press the "Yes" button to remove the term from your search history.

That's it. Now you don't … Read more

Save it with Clipboard Help and Spell

Clipboard Help and Spell is a free tool that saves and stores your text Clipboard entries, letting you search, filter, and open just the right entry among many. It offers hot keys, text formatting, image capture, and more options than we could describe, even if that's all we did in the allotted space.

Clipboard Help and Spell has a main window that we could open from the program's system tray icon, but most of the time that tray icon is the program's primary interface. Clicking it calls up a handy menu of common operations like opening clips, … Read more

'Steve Jobs': An apt portrait of a jerk and a genius

book review Amid the choking fumes from the Apple flame wars, Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs comes as a breath of fresh air.

Jobs, along with the bold company he built, gets people's blood boiling with loyalty and with loathing. Vitriol often is the chief characteristic of debates between fans of Macs and of Windows PCs, between fans of iOS and of Android.

Isaacson, though, has done an admirable job navigating the minefields with his biography, simply titled "Steve Jobs." The result is a book that, although not perfect, is a reliable and captivating guide … Read more

How to search for text in your browsing history

If you've been online for more than a few months (and if not, where have you been?), you've no doubt experienced the frustration of forgetting where you found some tiny but crucial bit of information. Typical browser history searching is limited at best, and if you're diligent about clearing your history, it can be useless. Recawl is a great search tool for those who don't mind keeping a private browsing record; it monitors your browsing in Chrome and lets you search every page of your history. Here's how to get started with it:

Install the Recawl plug-in for Chrome. … Read more