For a phone that charges off energy it finds in my pockets, I wouldn't care whose name was on it. It'd even be OK if all it does is give a dialtone.

The very best thing I've found for removing adhesive residue is Bestine rubber cement thinner. It will even remove still-attached labels and tape safely. Apply along the edges, let it bleed under, peel back until you feel the slightest resistance, then repeat. Then use a little more to wipe away any adhesive that…

@mattyrb: I remind people from time to time that I periodically search on "fw:|fwd:", then hit select all, then delete. But I like your tactic even better.

@Wozamil: Only social media LEGENDs (sic) who don't know how to use their twitters (sic).

NES systems aren't especially rare, but NES systems broken beyond repair are. I'm sure I've fixed two or three dozen, at least, over the years, and I've only found two that I couldn't revive by cleaning or replacing the 72-pin connector, or replacing the AC adapter. Of those two, one had obviously taken a shower in…

I think it would be hilarious to whip an Ipad out of a genuine, vintage Trapper Keeper. The more beat-up the better.

@WalnutSoap: Thoroughbred of Sin: The one in the picture must be 25 years old. When I was in the third grade, that's what they all looked like. Or, at least in the town I lived in, that's all you could get.

@Platypus Man: The difference is enough that for several years, I was putting 10K RPM SCSI drives in my desktop PCs and putting up with the heat and noise. This was before the 10K RPM SATA drives became available, and long before SATA SSDs.

@Platypus Man: Hard drive speed is the most underrated, misunderstood component of computer performance. So any time you replace a drive with something newer that has higher platter density, higher RPM and/or better seek times, you'll get a performance boost.

Keep in mind, when you do the freezer trick, that it's a very temporary fix. You've got about 30 minutes to get your data back, and when the drive quits after the freezer treatment, it's probably for keeps.

@Jimmy1: He had a habit of driving really fast. He and Paul Allen had another hobby too. They used to break into construction sites late at night, figure out how to drive heavy construction equipment, and then race. One time they had a close call involving a bulldozer and Gates' Porsche.

@hewhoroams: Indeed. Micro Center sells a USB keyboard for $10 that's the size of a typical laptop keyboard. I bought one to use with my netbook when I want a keyboard that's a little less cramped. It's a far cry from an IBM Model M, but it's nicer than an undersized netbook keyboard.

@teknoboy66: When shopping for a printer, always check the availability and cost of aftermarket cartridges.

Target cashier: That will be $6.65, sir. Will that be cash or credit today?

@JoshUng: That was the first thing I thought when I read this. Not only can you make a ton of money, you can play pretty much as long as you want. Jamie Moyer is 47 years old and still playing.

@Unionhawk: Exactly. It's better than it once was, but it's still more sluggish than MS Office and there's less you can do to improve it. I had Office 97 running acceptably on 50 MHz 486s in 1997-98, and unless you were trying to run it on absolutely ridiculously underpowered hardware, MS Office has always had…

@iberath: The Dockstars cost half as much as a Pogoplug. The only downside I see is that they only have 128MB of RAM. But for the price, I suppose you could run Apache and PHP on one device and MySQL on another.

@silvermoonstar3: Try putting less salt in. It doesn't take a lot of it, and most people use too much.

@Aarrrgh: Then police your advertisers and make sure they're distributing clean ads. Also realize that your readers running ABP with the malware domains extension (and nothing else) won't hurt you.

@bokscutter: That approach has the additional benefit of being system-wide, so every browser and every app that hits the Internet gets protection, no matter what. The downside is having to maintain it manually, and having to have admin rights to do it. And I'm more comfortable walking my mom through an ABP install…