As if Gmail wasn't powerful enough, you can find all sorts of goodies and extra features in Gmail Labs. The list is pretty massive, so we've narrowed down our 10 favorite labs to help increase your email productivity.
These days everyone wants you to hack your life in order to make your day-to-day existence more efficient. But there are times when the effort's not really worth it—and this chart should help you work out what to spend time on, and what to ignore.
Homeowners in northern states have already had to turn on their furnaces and boilers this fall. And a lot of them are already paying too much to make the house warm and keep the lights on. The thing is, you don't have to be a glutton to waste energy—many homeowners with good intentions still end up blowing money this…
Stand-up comedians everywhere mourn as it seems they might be about to lose another bit about plane travel. Testing has shown that boarding by "zones" is by no means the most efficient ways possible to fill a plane full of angry, sweaty, gassy passengers. It also shows the most efficient way.
Sometimes your computer's CPU uses a lot of electricity—like when you're encoding an HD video, or playing a game. Sometimes it doesn't use much, like when you're writing a college essay on some dead guy or browsing Craigslist. Modern processors are able to down-shift when less power is needed—but it's slow. Faster…
Oh, you work in an office where everyone has an iPad? Good for you. Here's how to spend less time in meetings and more time being productive. The $10 Meeting Mngr Pro app will obviously pay for itself very quickly.
It's not often (ever?) that a convention center is anything worth being excited about, but Ireland's new Convention Centre Dublin uses ingenius engineering and an omniscient mother brain to monitor and adjust itself. The result? Zero carbon footprint.
IBM's adding a new lower-low-power option to future Power processors that's one step beyond its current nap, sleep and heavy sleep options—the ability to put the processor into "deep sleep". It'll feel very refreshed in the morning.
Remember how annoying it was when your neighbor blasted Katy Perry at 3 a.m.? Now just imagine if his windows were literally melting the side of your house off. Low-E insulating window panes look like they're doing just that.
Sure, the Sidetrack table turns your home into a near-police state, with monitors in every room. But how else are you going to get an exact chart of your ADD wanderings? It's also... woooooaaah SHINY!
Samsung's Bada Mobile OS to Launch in Early 2010...Google Talk Knows When You're on Android, and Likes It...California Passes New Efficiency Standard for TVs...Acer Ferrari Netbook's Tackiness Burns My Eyes...
The gauntlet has been thrown down yet again in the solar cell efficiency arms race. This time Sharp comes up with a cell that can harvest 35.8% of available sunlight.
Responding to criticism for its secrecy over its data centers, Google has lifted the veil a little on how much energy its information hotbeds use. The world's largest search engine insisted that Google-designed data centers used nearly five times less energy than conventional facilities, and launched a website to…
The promise of an organic light emitting diode (OLED) is that it will eventually become a super-efficient, low-cost light source to replace our archaic dependency on incandescent bulbs and those oh-so-yesterday LCD TVs, among other things. Ultimately, OLEDs were expected to possibly supplant the already efficient…
Optics junkies at the University of Michigan have found a way to greatly boost the efficiency of OLEDs to produce 60% more light from the same amount of power as those previous, cranking out 70 lumens per watt. Their method uses a layer of five-micrometer-wide lenses mounted on top of a reflective grid, which coaxes…
It's an interesting week in the world of LEDs: on the weekend we heard about ultra-cheap ones, and today Osram (yes, the lightbulb people) has news that they've pushed white LEDs to world-record brightness. By optimizing the diode, light converter and the package, their lab test squeezed 500 lumens out of a single LED…
The "$1 per Watt" barrier may not sound as impressive as the sound barrier, but this next-gen wind turbine is the first, and has an unusual design. The AeroCam's horizontal-axis, flat-blade shape has blades that're dynamically angled to maximize wind-catching. It's also compact, so can fit into urban environments, and…
The latest edition of Nature magazine details a new method scientists have derived for converting heat energy into electricity, using silicon to instigate the conversion. Researchers have more investigations to carry out, but if preliminary findings are indicative of what is to come, appliances that charge using your…
X-Keys are a strip of shortcut buttons that you stick on your monitor and assign macros to using software, allowing you to quickly do tasks you do frequently with the push of a single button.
