Home internet

What Is a VPN, and Why Do I Need One?

A virtual private network (VPN) enables you to have a secure connection between your local device and an external server. It creates a private network out of a public Internet connection by hiding your Internet Protocol (IP) address. With a VPN, all your browsing data is routed through a safe encrypted passage protecting you from snooping eyes. Though not a magic bullet, a VPN is currently the best way to protect your device from hacking, DNS/IP address leaks and ISP surveillance. Indeed, a few governments frown upon VPN use, but if you purchase a high quality VPN service with traffic encryption and zero knowledge DNS,… Read more

“Serious Games” Want to Teach You Real Skills

If “serious game” sounds like a bit of an oxymoron to you, you’re not using your imagination to its fullest potential. Don’t worry, though – there’s probably a serious game out there that can help you, just as they’re already helping teach people things like flying planes and cutting better deals. A serious game is essentially a subset of education games that tries to emulate a real-world task or concept in a video-game format, essentially giving us a fun, low-consequence way to gain experience. Much like the concept of gamification (think Duolingo, layering game mechanics over a task), serious games are based on the idea… Read more

Make Google Calendar More Useful with These Free Calendars

Google Calendar is a popular tool for productivity but is useful for other areas of life too. You can make your calendar more entertaining by adding one of the many different calendars that will help you keep track of the fun things in life, such as movies, television, and sports. You can access these calendars either through the Google Calendar app or on websites that offer their own calendars. Calendars from Google The easiest way to add a new calendar to your Google Calendar is to add it directly from the app. There is a small, yet useful collection of calendars available. To add a… Read more

Fed Up with Facebook? Here are 6 Alternatives

So, you’ve finally had enough of Facebook – privacy issues, time drains, relationship-straining political debates, and all the rest. Still, social media is a valuable tool, so what are your other options? There are always Twitter and Google+, but if either of those appealed to you, you’d already be there. There are a few other options, though: social media sites that haven’t gotten much traction yet but that offer better privacy and more control and just might help you to partially fill that Facebook-shaped void in your life. Related: How to Delete Your Facebook Account (Or at Least Protect Your Data) 1. Sociall.io Sociall… Read more

Is It Time to Break Up Facebook? What Are The Options?

Facebook’s staggering dominance of social media is a thorn in the side of its competitors, governments and anti-monopoly advocates. Recently, one of Facebook’s co-founders, Chris Hughes, in a New York Times editorial, called for the company’s break-up on moral grounds. Immediately, the idea came under attack from Mark Zuckerberg as well as mainstream tech journalists. A friend just told me, “Dude, are you serious? Mark couldn’t do wrong. After all, he pledges to donate 99% of his shares to charity.”  (The fallacy has a name: “appeal to accomplishment.”) Why Is It Important to Break Up Facebook? Refer to the Hughes article again where he gives… Read more