A few points to note up front:I’m referring to standalone dedicated applications that are used in desktop OSes and not smartphones. Whether you call it a gadget or a widget, it’s the same thing. This is not OS-specific. Microsoft Windows has ‘em, Apple Mac OS X has ‘em and Linux (specifically KDE) has ‘em. For the Windows that...

I’ll start this one off by answering the question: Hot enough to melt plastic. I know this from personal experience. (And by the way, if you have your own sob story or stories about how you had an item melt in the car, feel free to post it as a comment.) The first time I had something melt in a car from Summer sun was when I was still living in New England...

Recently I’ve been writing about customizable home pages such as my.msn.com, my.yahoo.com and so on. This one specifically concerns iGoogle at www.google.com/ig. Information Week reported that iGoogle received a few updates (for USA users anyway) so I checked it out. Of the updates that are of significance to people who would use this, you can now read...