organization

Manage personal and business information with SEO Note

Personal Information Managers, or PIMs, are among the most useful freeware a busy person could wish for. SEO Note is a free PIM that uses a simple tree view for maximum flexibility. It saves your personal and business notes and contacts as articles in plain text, rich text, or HTML files. You can quickly access your important data via searching, bookmarks, and the tree view. With Tool Tips, Quick Start Guides, FAQs, Forums, and more on the Help menu, it offers plenty of assistance, but it's also fairly intuitive. The developer compares SEO Note's functionality to a simpler … Read more

How to use multiple bookmark bars in Chrome

It can be a challenge to keep that bookmark bar trim and handy, but Bookmark Bar Switcher gives you the power to create different sets of bookmarks for work or entertainment. Here's how to use it:

Install Bookmark Bar Switcher here. Click the Bookmark Bar Switcher icon in the upper right to create one or more new bars. Click the icon again to manage which bookmarks appear in each bar. Your bookmark bars appear near the bottom of the left sidebar. Just drag and drop bookmarks into the proper bar.  If you want a bookmark to … Read more

A place for everything: How to manage your photos

Managing your photos--a lot easier than you think.

What a surprising number of people don't realize is that every device these days pops up as a drive on your system, and that you can drag and drop your files onto your computer--even your phone. (And to those of you saying "everybody knows that already!" trust me; they don't.)

Commit to downloading First, you have to make the decision--and stick to it--that you'll download (or upload) all your photos and videos within a day or so of taking them. It's a good idea to get … Read more

Get your news from the grid

Skygrid is a fun-to-use, visually slick app for browsing through recent news from multiple sources.

Skygrid isn't tied to any particular news outlet, and you can't see much more than a short blurb and a thumbnail image for any particular story--so whether you're checking out a story from PBS NewsHour, CNET, TMZ, or WebMD, you'll have to click through to the source's Web site to read the whole story. Even so, Skygrid makes surfing the headlines fun, with a streamlined grid (of course) interface that lets you swipe through different sections and stories, with the … Read more

Photo Event Organizer sorts your snaps for you

Photo Event Organizer takes a unique approach to organizing your digital snapshots: it scans your images and automatically organizes them based on the day they were taken, called the Event. Events don't have to be a big deal--"that day you took a bunch of pictures" will do. But the idea makes sense since folks tend to snap a lot of pictures on birthdays, dates, at ballgames, and other events, then plug in their USB cable and and upload the lot to one big archive, sometimes even one big folder.

While Photo Event Organizer's compressed file … Read more

Human-powered: Biofuel cell converts glucose into electricity

As scientists unveil artificial organs and prosthetics to improve the function of our hearts, kidneys, hands, and even eyes, it's easy to gloss over these devices' Achilles' heel: power.

Even building devices that run on very low power, such as pacemakers, tend to require additional invasive surgeries just to replace their batteries. Meanwhile, artificial limbs can be huge energy hogs, with the power source needing to be swapped out as frequently as every few weeks. Impractical is an understatement.

Biofuel cells could very well solve this problem. Researchers around the world are investigating how to use a body's own energy to power various devices, and one team out of France last year successfully implanted in a rat a biofuel cell that uses glucose and oxygen to generate electricity.… Read more

How to get your iPhone ready for iOS 5

Four months after it was releaed in June at Apple's WWDC, iOS 5, the next major version of the software that powers Apple's iPods, iPhones, and iPads, will release today. By now, you're probably ready for the handy new features, tweaked UI, new Twitter integration, and everything else (read what we've learned so far of iOS 5), but is your iOS device ready?

To make sure your iPhone is set up for the launch of the latest iOS, we've put together a step-by-step guide for making sure it is primed for the update.

Editors' note: … Read more

Honey, can you print my new blood vessels?

If you think that engineering functional human body parts using a printer and laser is a sign of the end of time, you might want to proceed with caution. If you think such a development portends the saving of lives, read on.

Because researchers from an interdisciplinary group of five Fraunhofer institutes in Germany are announcing their successful creation of completely functional blood vessels using 3D printing and intense laser impulses.

First, advances in 3D printing have enabled researchers to print organs inexpensively and quickly using a modified inkjet printer. As in, very modified.

Using special inks, the researchers were … Read more

Wunderlist, the wonderful task manager

Wunderlist is a beautifully designed, multiplatform task management tool that can sync with the cloud and even add tasks via e-mail.

The beauty of Wunderlist lies in its simplicity. Its interface is made up mostly of Tasks and Lists. Lists are essentially groups of tasks, great for organizing projects or categories of to-dos.

To get started, tap the Lists tab on the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, then create a new List. From there, you can tap the List and add new Tasks to it. You can prioritize Tasks with a star, create due dates, and add … Read more