Faster Forward - Technology News, Observations and Occasional Rants by The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro - April 27, 2008

Returning To Sender: A Cable Conundrum

I often spend Friday afternoons packing up old review hardware to send back to whatever PR agency originally shipped it my way. (In case you were wondering: No, I don't get to keep any of the stuff I write about.) This routine comes with two challenges. The first is erasing...

Status Consciousness

This morning's column, like an increasing number of my Thursday pieces, started out as a blog post. I thought I'd write a short bit about the art of writing a clever Facebook status update. I'd seen this form of concise creativity take off on that site (especially after this Palo...

Paring Your Plug-Ins

After recently writing a column that noted how many different third-party programs in your Web browser can pose security risks for you -- and then being prompted yet again by Major League Baseball's MLB.com site to install Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in to watch a video -- I thought I'd take a...

Bonus Review: Apple's Time Capsule

It only took some three decades of personal computing, but when Apple's Time Machine software arrived as part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last fall, we finally had a backup program easy enough for anybody to use. But as I noted at the time, Time Machine requires a second,...

Facebook Adds Chat; Count Me Out (For Now)

At the start of this month, the social-networking site Facebook began adding an instant-messaging application. It's not a separate program, or even a separate Web page that you need to launch to start zipping notes back and forth in real time. Instead, this little Web widget pops in and out...

Faster Forward: April 27, 2008 - May 3, 2008

Returning To Sender: A Cable Conundrum

Status Consciousness

Paring Your Plug-Ins

Bonus Review: Apple's Time Capsule

Facebook Adds Chat; Count Me Out (For Now)