@DaveyNC: Except firefox doesn't make you do anything with extensions if you don't want to, neither does Chrome. In fact, IE8 is far more confusing on install than any other browser I've ever seen. It asks all kinds of questions that the "blue-hair"s aren't going to understand at all.

I know "the internet" was mentioned, but youtube is especially helpful. My mother has always had a slight interest in airbrushing but never took it past the basic hobby level. She got laid off recently and decide to try her hand at it professionally. She was having a really hard time understanding the more advanced…

I assume the Ubuntu One music store will work like the Ubuntu One app(and any current software on Ubuntu that syncs with One) in that you can enter a new server address and have it use that instead. One is basically an open system that anybody can run a server for, I assume the music store will be the same.

I created a tachometer for my brother's car out of an arduino. As far as I could tell, nobody on the Internet had done this before. The closest I could find was a tachometer for a RC electric motor(I used their source as the original base, but found it to be wildly inaccurate and had to formulate a new method on my…

This may seem like a dumb question, but Google turned up nothing for me: If you seal all the leaks in your house, how does fresh oxygen get in? Seems to me that being perfectly insulated would be deadly.

I've been using GIMP for practically ages, so I have got used to it's interface odditys, but just recently needed to give my mom a simple all purpose image editor and was very surprised at how good the [Paint.net] interface was and was instantly sad I couldn't have it for Ubuntu. I really hope the GIMP people are…

Vote:GPodder

Changing default settings is not new to Linux or browsers. I liked it when the default was Google, but it takes two clicks to change it back, so not really an issue.

@natural selection: Every keystroke is not passed back to Google. Only things put into the address bar are sent back to Google (for the suggestions). And that is only typed things, not every address. So if you go to [mybank.com], Google knows you went to mybank.com, but from there they have no idea.

@iamnotafish: I used the beta for Windows and found it completely impractical. Until we all have 3D touch screen displays it is nothing but in the way.(and even when we have those the bumptop metaphor probably wont work).

@jokono: How is drowning the poor fellow any better than a quick blow to the head? That's 1 minute+ of suffering as apposed to a brief second.

I bought my netbook with Linux preloaded(thanks Dell) but it was Ubuntu 8.04, as in April of 2008(purchased September 2009)! So the first thing I did was load the 9.10 NBR Beta on it. Well, that and installed 2GB of RAM which was super easy. After that I just setup my network shares from my fileserver to auto-mount…

@Mark Pettersson: My 9" Dell A90 is fantastic, don't hate. The keyboard is almost a full laptop keyboard and takes very little time to adjust to. I don't have large hands, but they are at least average full grown male sized, possibly a little large. The 9" screen is small but a full screen browser still gives me more…

Netbook here. I was actually surprised that the netbook took over for my desktop as I had a laptop for years before buying my netbook and only used it when I need to bring it somewhere. With my netbook I sit it on the living room coffee table and sit myself on the ground indian style with the couch as a backrest and…

I do look down on @aol.com, @hotmail/msn.com and @x.rr.com(Time Warner's Road Runner). I sidestep the problem personally by owning my own domain. I just do whatever@mydomain.com and it automatically hits my inbox. So my lifehacker account is lifehacker@mydomain.com. This way I can keep track of who is emailing me and…

@Simieski: Gmail does have a delete button. To preview just click it, it comes up every bit as fast as a preview pane. There are newer/older buttons at the top of every email to cycle through them.

@sqlfanatic: Depends on your phone. There are lots of password managers for phones. Some of which do nice file syncing with desktop clients. Most of the time they take advantage of the phone's copy/paste ability to allow you to easily move the password from the manager to the webpage.

Might have to give this a go. My 8GB SSD made it hard to do a hackintosh so I'm kinda low on my "running experimental OSs" quota. Ubuntu NBR 10.04 Alpha 1 completely didn't work and was unusable for me. How am I suppose to retain my geek cred if I'm only running solid and stable OSs.

@Jeb_Hoge: Try using direct IP addresses instead of hostnames. That goes for any networks without a good DNS/DHCP server.

@novajeeper: It is in there because it has basically all the same features as all the others and isn't another Andriod phone. The Pre compares quite well. And they actually have the "average usage plan" wrong. The base monthly price for the Pre is(or at least was when I got mine) $69.99. That makes it way cheaper than…