Why can’t they sort out our batteries? It’s been decades now, and we’re still suffering from phones with half a day working life, MP3 players which run out mid-song and laptops which explode can’t even play a whole movie on battery. It’s not good enough. Even worse, no-one seems to make accurate battery gauges to indicate how long we’ve got to go before dark time, which makes it all very hit or miss.

Don’t you just hate it when you’re out at a party and you manage to finally obtain the email address of your total soul mate, only to get home and find that it’s a dud? Maybe you wrote it down wrong? Or…oh noes, did you get given a deliberate fake? Well now you can shortcut the anxiety on the spot, with a new free tool.

As if to remind us once again just how versatile these new fangled smartphone thingies are, we’re seeing more and more apps which are pushing the scope of what you can do with permanently connected 3G broadband technology and a decent camera. The latest iteration is to take the humble phone camera and throw yet another super valuable task at it…remote webcam or security camera.

The world is becoming a smaller place. Not only can we traverse the planet in mere hours nowadays, but at the click of a button we can be chatting to someone literally the other side of the globe. It’s incredible how much we take it for granted, so it’s nice to see that some developers are still creating tools to make it easier for us to communicate with each other.

You can’t be too careful nowadays, as the baddies are out to get us. They’re sniffing our pipes, poking our profiles and shuffling through our online underwear, trying to get into our secrets and private stuff. It’s a war peeps, and the price of the tussle is eternal vigilance. Or something.

Everything we do on our computer gets logged. Every file we open, image we edit, video we watch, and no matter how diligent we are these actions can be tracked back by anyone with enough smarts and time. Of course there’s no good reason for becoming overly paranoid about this stuff, but if you live in an insecure, shared environment, you might want to think about keeping some sort of control over your PC to ensure your privacy stays…well private.

Road warriors who travel all the time know the problem. Your hotel room offers free WiFi, but it’s only for a single computer or you have to pay extra. Or you have a 3G dongle delivering broadband to your laptop, but you need to access it from your phone or another device to get some task done. Basically there are times when you need the convenience of logging on to a WiFi network access point, quickly and easily.

BitTorrent is a great tool for downloading large files, and with enough number people to piggy-back off (called seeding) it can slash download times to a fraction of the time it would usually take. But the problem for most people, especially newcomers to the technology, is it can be quite difficult to understand how to make it all work, especially since you typically need to install a BitTorrent client first.