On balance, USB-C has been pretty great. I would be the last person to suggest that we should go back to the bad old days of USB-A (insofar as we've actually left it) or, even worse, micro-USB.

Power banks are the easiest gadget to neglect. You charge them, stick them in a drawer and then only pull them out when you need to travel or when the power's out. Which is why it's easy to miss when your power banks are outdated or no longer suitable to have your back when you need them most.

My parents owned a station wagon only very briefly when I was a child, but I'll never forget how awesome it was to hang out in the back of that wood-paneled beauty with the seats folded down. It made long trips a breeze, and I was sad to see it go.

Driving used to be something more than just a way to get from one place to another. Just taking a drive down to the store could be an exciting experience in the right car. The so-called "driver's car", which emphasizes feedback and responsiveness to your inputs was a great way to forget about your dull 9-5 life. For those who cared about such things, there were plenty of choices at every budget level. These days? I'm starting to doubt that a true driver's car even exists anymore in any form.

It's the start of the festive season, and so people are unpacking their trees, putting up lights, and doing the same old Christmas decoration thing as last year, and the year before that.

Corruption is bad in any walk of life, but you certainly don't want it in your computer. Yet when your apps aren't working correctly, or Windows seems to just crash for no reason, there's a good chance file corruption is the culprit.

The first time I gave money to a Linux project felt weird. I'd been playing with one distro or another for a while, never quite figuring it out. Then Ubuntu Linux launched just as I started college, and because we all had bad internet, they sent me an installation disc for free.

The numbers on Linux installations are finally starting to show some life, and despite what some people might say, it's not all down to just one or two major moves. But, undeniably, the rise of Linux gaming has something to do with it.

All of my most recent wireless keyboards have built-in lithium batteries. At first, this seemed like a step-up, but it turns out that when we're talking about peripherals, there are plenty of reasons to prefer good old removable AA batteries.

SUVs and crossover vehicles might look like the same thing at first glance, but in most cases those similarities are only skin deep. Both SUVs and crossovers vehicles have become immensely popular, but you should make sure you're getting the vehicle type with the attributes you need.

You charged your laptop to 100% last night, closed the lid, and put it in your bag. However, when you take it out the next day to get started on your work (or browse the web) it won't turn on—the battery is dead!

Another year, another long list of changes to Windows that "nudge" you into making choices or adopting behaviors that aren't in your interest. At some point, it really feels like Windows stopped existing to make the actual users of PCs happier, and now serve a different master. I think these changes are the most worrying.

You've heard that the world's infrastructure runs on Linux, and how important Free and Open Source (FOSS) software is to just about all the technology we enjoy every day, but there are some (to bring out the old cliché) unsung heroes of FOSS without which your stuff just wouldn't work—and you should at least know their names.

For the longest time, smartphone battery life was a real issue. I remember my first few smartphones basically traveling with me from charger to charger. They would charge at my desk, charge in my car, and charge next to my couch. While phone battery life is now much better, the real revolution has come from fast-charging.

So you buy a Kindle and you think to yourself, "I sure would like to turn the pages from way over here, surely there's a solution for that?" Well, to my personal surprise, I have recently learned both that people who want to turn eReader pages at a distance exist (it makes sense when you think about it) and that Kindles in particular have no elegant way of achieving this goal. Hence, the existence of weird and wacky "Kindle page turners."

You might have seen some noise on the internet among car enthusiasts about the Toyota Hilux Champ, a simple bare-bones pickup that many US customers clearly want.

Google's product cemetery is littered with both bad and good ideas. Some failed because the execution was poor, others were simply released half-baked, or too soon.

Unlike Windows, macOS doesn't give me a persistent feeling like I'm being spied on, or my personal data is being sent to who-knows-where, but in the end, that's just a perception. I think Apple is doing a better job when it comes to security and privacy, but there are still a few ways I like to tighten things up when I set up a new Mac.

If you're a Chromebook user, then it makes the most sense to use Google's productivity suite to its full potential. These lightweight web-focused computers are perfect for school, college, and even work. But if you know a few core tips and tricks about using Google Docs on your Chromebook, you will be even more efficient. That's less time working, and more time pretending to work while you browse the web.