Web

If you have a Facebook friend who updates his or her status with incredibly uninteresting topics and with too great a frequency, there is a way to remove this person's posts from your News Feed without the awkwardness associated with unfriending or blocking the person in question. You can hide a friend's updates, which removes them from your News Feed but keeps them on your friends list. They'll never know they've been hidden. And the process is simple to reverse, should you want to unhide the offending friend and add their updates back to your News Feed.… Read more

In word processing, there are three beasts: Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, and Google Docs. Most users are likely tied to Word, but its offline, collaboration-free nature makes it look a little boring next to Google Docs. 

Whether you use Docs as your primary word processor, as a place to keep your files in the cloud, or just as a notepad for your online finds, these tips will help you get the most out of Google Docs.

1. Easy uploading. To quickly upload files of almost any format to Google Docs, drag and drop files from your hard drive to the Docs home page. To upload an entire folder (like My Documents), go to Upload > Folder. Subfolders will also be added. 

2. Better photo inserting. Easily insert a photo into your doc by dragging and dropping files from your hard drive into the doc. To wrap text around the photo (pictures are put in-line with text by default), click it and select "Fixed." If you plan to grab a photo from the Web, go to Insert > Image > Google Image Search. This tool is far better than searching, saving a photo to the desktop, and reuploading it to Google. … Read more

If Facebook's new facial-recognition photo-tagging feature has you thinking more about how you are sharing information on the site, one easy tool at your disposal is Facebook Groups. A group lets you share different information--status updates, photos, links, and so on--with different subsets of your Facebook friends. Create a group of local friends and another one of old high-school buddies so that your neighbors on Facebook don't have to listen to the intricate plans surrounding your 20th high-school reunion. Or create a group that includes everyone but your mother, who recently surprised you with her Facebook presence. … Read more

Tagging friends in Facebook photos may be somewhat of a chore, but that doesn't mean we asked to be opted in to Facebook's new facial-recognition photo-tagging feature. As we reported yesterday, Facebook quietly rolled out facial-recognition software "that will automate photo tagging and suggest friends to tag in your photos based on what they look like."

Here's how it works: when you or a Facebook friend uploads a photo, Facebook uses facial-recognition software to match faces in that photo with previous photos on Facebook in which you've been tagged. Facebook groups similar photos together and suggests names for tagging purposes. Granted, Facebook isn't tagging photos itself, but it is certainly making the process easier for your friends to tag photos of you.

As Facebook says here, "Now if you upload pictures from your cousin's wedding, we'll group together pictures of the bride and suggest her name. Instead of typing her name 64 times, all you'll need to do is click 'Save' to tag all of your cousin's pictures at once." That's great, unless one of those 64 photos are of you at the end of the evening, slumped in a chair with your tie in your drink.

The introduction of facial recognition on Facebook has many users rightfully uneasy. Worse, Facebook has enabled it by default. Here's how to disable it:… Read more

If you recently ordered a present for a loved one on your iPad or iPhone and don't want him or her to stumble across the site you used to place the order, clearing your browser history will eliminate that possibility. Clearing Mobile Safari's history is a great way to cover your tracks on the Internet, as well as free up some memory (although the amount of memory is minimal). We are going to show you how to erase your browser history, cookies, and cache on your iOS device of choice in two simple steps.

… Read more

Podcasts are great: they keep us informed, they enrage us, they make us laugh, and they make our time at the gym pass more quickly. Some Android users drift into iOS-envy when pondering Apple's easy integration of iTunes podcast subscriptions with their devices. Don't despair--Google's got your back. The Listen app makes it easy to subscribe and listen to podcasts on any Android device, and it integrates with Google Reader to make subscribing that much simpler. Here's how to get started: 

Apple recently updated its Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (iTunes links) apps for iOS. The latest update brings the apps iWork trio to the iPhone and iPod touch, as well as updated the iPad version. With the additional exposure and use that is sure to follow with the new release, being able to quickly find documents on the go is something users are going to want to do.

This guide will show you how to use your Dropbox account as a WebDAV to share your documents with minimal effort. … Read more

Whether you're checking your e-mail, looking through bookmarks or trying to find things on the Web, these extensions are built to save your precious time. Check out the list below and give them a spin.

1. Mail Checker Plus for Google Mail. If you have Chrome open often, there's no need for the desktop Gmail notifier once you have this extension. A chime will sound as a new e-mail arrives, and the icon will do a little dance back and forth. Not to mention the fact that you can pick from a range of color options indicating … Read more

It seems that there is always news of accounts on certain Web sites being hacked, or being at risk for getting hacked. In general, though, any account that you have with a weak password could be at risk. To eliminate concern, there are free password-strength-checking tools available online. Below you will find three of the more popular ones available.

1. Microsoft's Password Checker. This is definitely one of the more well-known sites that allows you to check your password. Having the Microsoft name attached to it may make the user more comfortable to test their password strength here (… Read more