With stories abounding of identity theft aided by information lifted from discarded storage devices, you want devices you no longer plan to use to have no usable information when they head out the door. Here’s how to wipe them clean. More

When you use a site like Gmail, you have to decide: Do I want to use the service’s website, or do I want to use it through an app, like Outlook? Here’s how to get the best of both worlds. More

The winter is almost over. Maybe it’s time to transform one of your hoodies into a laptop sleeve/bag following these easy steps. It just takes a few seconds. [ Likecool ] More

With stories abounding of identity theft aided by information lifted from discarded storage devices, you want devices you no longer plan to use to have no usable information when they head out the door. Here’s how to wipe them clean. More

If you’re anxious about switching from a PC to a Mac, consider this: There are a multitude of ways you can virtualize Windows within OS X, and they all work uniquely well. Here’s how to choose the right one. There are three major virtualization products for Mac, and at their core, they’re all quite similar. Each creates a virtual machine, which is to say, crudely, a software implementation of a separate computer. When you install Windows in a virtual machine, Windows thinks it’s installed on a PC with a somewhat generic set of hardware. In fact, the hardware it thinks it’s installed on is a software construct, and any time Windows utilizes what it thinks is a hardware component, its requests are actually being passed through to your Mac’s real hardware.

One drop. Five minutes in a pocket with your keys. Three months of regular use . This is all it takes for an iPhone’s backplate to go from a mirror-like shine to a scratched-to-hell eyesore. Here’s how to fix it. MacRumors forum member Shenaniganz08 salvaged an iPhone 3G from eBay, sanding, buffing and polishing it back from the brink of a life in a case, which would be dumb, because cases are dumb

So you’re fed up with Google, and you’ve got a litany of reasons. You don’t even have to explain—I’m just here to help you crawl out from under the shadow of the big G, step by step. You don’t have to be ready to commit to a full overhaul of your online lifestyle to understand why someone might want to yank their data from Google’s servers, and hand it off to someone else: You’ve got Google’s CEO deafly rehashing fallacious arguments about privacy—”If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”—and hesitating on a drawback; you’ve got contextual advertising that seems just a little too closely tuned to that sexxxy love letter your girlfriend sent you while you were on that business trip; you’ve got that violently insane ex husband who now knows where you are because of Google’s clumsy Buzz rollout. Most of all, you’ve got reasons, and you’re ready for change. The decision to close your Google account has to be carefully considered—after all, this is the place that stores your email, your documents, your contacts, your photos, your news, and even your health records. But this level of investment to one service is as good a reason to leave as it is to stay: If looking at your Google Dashboard , which lists all the services you use, and the amount and type of information you store on them, doesn’t make you feel a little uneasy, then hell, what would

This generation of Android phones is faster, more powerful and generally awesome -er than anything before. But for whatever reason, they don’t have one thing other smartphones take for granted: multitouch. Here’s how to fix that, and so much more. Google’s Nexus one and Verizon’s Motorola Droid are, in a sense, miles ahead their competitors in terms of hardware specs, but moreso because they’ve got much newer versions of Android’s software, with 2.1 and 2.0, respectively. In the midst of a slew of new software features and despite base-level hardware and software support, Google, who has always been cagey about the multitouch issue, continues to leave it out of their core apps. This is especially weird in the cases of the Droid and Nexus One, which don’t just support multitouch on a hardware level, but fully support it on an OS level, too.

As any diligent weekend reader knows, we don’t just find and explain the news around here, we like to do stuff; hack things; make gadgets better . Here’s the cream of this year’s how to guide crop: Make Your PC and Mac Share Stuff Like Best Friends : Getting PCs and Macs to play nice over a home network seems like something that should be trivially easy by now; incompatibilities like that feel like a relic from the 90s. Yet somehow, after all these years, it’s still a pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you read this guide.

As any diligent weekend reader knows, we don’t just find and explain the news around here, we like to do stuff; hack things; make gadgets better . Here’s the cream of this year’s how to guide crop: Make Your PC and Mac Share Stuff Like Best Friends : Getting PCs and Macs to play nice over a home network seems like something that should be trivially easy by now; incompatibilities like that feel like a relic from the 90s. Yet somehow, after all these years, it’s still a pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you read this guide.