Technology

There are probably hundreds of resources on the web using writing technology to help writers perfect their craft. We've spent some time sifting through my favorites and wanted to highlight a few sites we find most useful in writing, blogging and researching.

Online word processing

First, there are plenty of online word processors. Zoho Writer and Google Docs are excellent ways of creating and editing documents "in the cloud," meaning your documents are available to you anywhere you have an internet connection. With most online word processors, you also have the option of sharing your documents for feedback and collaboration, which can be highly beneficial in certain types of writing. Check out Writeboard as well, it's not as full featured for editing, but is great for collaboration and reviewing changes made to a document by yourself or others.

Web-based grammar and spell-checking

There are some good tools for grammar and spell-checking, as well. Granted, nothing can really replace a human editor -- at least not yet -- but an automated once-over can help catch embarrassing mistakes before submitting your work. AutoCrit provides some great tools, at about $50 for a year's subscription. Spellchecker is a

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Radio frequency identification (or RFID) is a type of intelligent barcode with an endless array of uses. They use radio waves to communicate with a network system for tracking items to which the RFID "tags" are attached. There are many uses of RFID that are currently implemented but due to the low cost and ease of implementation the technology is expected to explode into nearly ever facet of our everyday lives.

RFID tags can be broken down into two main components. The first is an integrated circuit which is used to store and process information handled by the RFID tag. The second component is an antenna for receiving and transmitting data to and from an RFID reader.

Probably the most common example of RFID that consumers are aware of is the use of mobile payment. This is especially common for transportation systems such as tollroads and public transit. In this example, one merely adhere a sticker to the inside of their windshield. Then through the action of driving passed a tollroad's RFID reader, the account is debited the appropriate amount without any action on the part of the driver.

 

Many credit cards now feature an RFID chip for the purpose of transaction payment. Depending on the sensitivity of the reader, it is possible for the customer to merely tap the reader with

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Looking to buy a new home? Until recently, newspaper classifieds had a near monopoly on the housing market. Classifieds were the bread and butter of newspaper advertising, not to mention the real estate industry, and apart from the occasional news story about mortgages, real estate news was hard to come by.

Then came the Web -- and Craig Newmark's Craigslist. Newmark and Jim Buckmaster launched the bare-bones San Francisco-based community venture in 1995, and it fundamentally changed the way we look for a home, opening the door to for-sale-by-owner sales and a fast paced rental marketplace. Before the decade was out, Craigslist's amazing growth -- more than 50 million users looking at more than 700 local sites in 70 countries -- had inspired a new wave of new real estate sites, including Trulia, Zillow and Move from the National Association of Realtors. Filled with listings, maps, school districts, and other juicy real estate data, this new wave of real estate sites brought reams of information to consumers, surpassing Craigslist -- by 2008 in in customer experience, if not necessarily popularity.

The advent of blogging in the early 2000s brought yet another twist to online real estate. Bloggers brought insight and opinion to every subject, from astrology to zoology and everything in between, including real estate. Single...

Let us just come right out and say it – 'The Jetsons' lied to us. It's nearly 2010, and still, technology doesn't seem to have reached the level that George and the rest of the gang enjoyed in those cartoons. Flying cars? We don't see them. A robot maid? Not in our home. Talking dogs? Well, maybe that is just a pipe dream. But there are still some advances in technology we'd like to see in the future. Are these realistic? Maybe and maybe not. That doesn't stop us from holding out hope though.

1. Flying Cars
 
Go ahead, admit it. What kid didn't grow up dreaming about zipping through the sky in a flying car? The technology might not be too far away. There have been some attempts to create a car that can take flight, but most have been costly and inefficient. We'll keep our fingers crossed and wait.

2. Time Machine
Again, this invention is a child's dream. Realistically, it's probably not a good idea to unleash this kind of technology on the masses. It'd be like letting a 10-year-old fly a space shuttle. But is time travel possible in the future? Probably not in the sense you're thinking (sorry, you'll probably never see the dinosaurs).

3. Unlimited, Free Energy
Energy is a hot-button issue. If somebody could figure out how to...

Rarely does a program come along that is so simple yet so powerful that it changes the way that you use your computer. Dropbox is such an application.

You probably have heard of Dropbox and have read about its many, many, many uses. It's a fantastic automatic sync utility that keeps a copy of whatever you put in the Dropbox on the Internet cloud. You can then log into your account on any number of machines -- Mac, Windows, and Linux are all supported -- and have access to those files, pictures, documents, etc.

I'm not going to give you some magical tip that hasn't been covered somewhere else, but I have found a great use of this home technology and wanted to share it.

My wife and I each have a child from our respective previous marriages. The ex-spouses both live within 10 minutes of our house, so the kids spend a great deal of time at each of their homes. Now, ours is a tech-savvy Mac house while the others are reluctant computer owners with Windows PCs.

Being the Tech Guy of the bunch, I'm charged with keeping the data accessible and usable. We use a small collection of tools to...