As you're reading a tech blog, I'd say that the chances are that you use more than one computer regularly - perhaps you have a desktop and a laptop. Or if you're me, a desktop, two laptops and access to yet more computers all over the place.

As you probably know, this can be a frustrating experience - if you bookmark something on one computer and you need it on another, do you really want to spend all of the time Googling for it again, or logging into your e-mails on each machine every time? How about having to update all of your saved passwords when you change them? Well the good news is, as luck would have it, there's a few solutions to these irritating problems, and that's what I'm going to be talking about in today's mash-up: how to make your browsers sickeningly consistent.

It's bad enough having to wash your clothes, but when the washing process sucks up vast piles of water and electricity and costs you money it's downright INFURIATING!

Which is why today's tip addresses how to get your washing machine working for you. Make it more efficient, get it running better while saving money AND the environment in the process. It's a complete no-brainer!

Can anyone recommend a good plumber or washing machine repair man? Mine seems to have started leaking recently.

Related posts: E&E #4 | E&E #3

After the joy (and surprising popularity) of Spotify the other day, my palm is firmly back on my face thanks to Lala and their launch of "web songs" - cut price music that's locked up tighter than a... actually I probably shouldn't pursue that simile any further.

Lala is offering music for 10 cents a track. "Great!", you cry. But wait a sec. The only way they've got the record labels to agree is to limit you to only listening to that song in your browser. You're essentially paying 10 cents for something that you can get for free on Spotify, Last.FM, MySpace, or even YouTube, for god's sake. As the unnamed head of a digital music service once said, "you want the world's best on-demand music service? Go to YouTube and close your eyes."

One of the big buzzwords surrounding web 2.0 is that of "the cloud" - the idea that the internet is replacing the hard drive, and we're storing stuff online rather than on our desktop computers. Things like Google Docs, Flickr and Facebook means that it doesn't matter what computer we're sat at, we can always get hold of our spreadsheets, photos and people we haven't seen since school.

But what if you want to do more heavy duty tasks? What if you need to access things stored on your actual home computer? There are some solutions out there, and that's what I'm going to be looking at in this week's mash-up.

The kettle. A massive household energy absorber. Mum wants tea. Dad wants tea. You want tea, often all at different times. And sometimes, if you're busy, you might want a coffee - all require the boiling of a kettle. It is an energy black hole.

So, how can you cut down on kettle use? Is there such a thing as an energy efficient way to generate hot water? Yes! There is! Allow me to demonstrate.

Follow this advice and save pounds.

Related posts: E&E #1 | E&E #2

Speculating about the future is always a silly idea - because the futurologist who is speculating is invariably always wrong. You only have to look at the insane ramblings of the fundamentalist Christians in America who predict the "end times" every new year or the deluded announcer who introduces John McCain as "the next President of the United States" to see this. The technology sector isn't exempt from this either - there's the famous old quotes of IBM executives saying in the 1960s that they think there's demand for maybe four computers in the world, or poor old Sir Clive Sinclair, who genuinely thought that the C5 was a good idea, or poor old Sony, who thought that people might actually want a PS3.

So with this in mind, I'm going to set myself up for a gigantic fall, and go ahead and claim that location-based web services are going to be the next big thing. Feel free to e-mail me a link to this column with a wry note in the future when I have been proven wrong.

This week, I take a look at fires in the house. Not as dangerous as you may initially think, plus burning wood is a superb, environmentally sound and low-cost solution to home heating.

It's also great fun if you draw effigies of your enemies on the logs, then watch them BURN.

CONCLUSION: Everyone should buy fires for the home. Watching wood effigies of people you don't like BURN is far more entertaining than television.

Related posts: E&E Episode 1 | E&E Episode 2

According to some scientist, humans have stopped evolving. This means we're not going to get any better - at least not naturally.

So I propose science steps in to make us better, seeing as Mother Nature can't be bothered any more. Here's how. These are the evolutionary steps scientists need to introduce to our gene pool ASAP.

1. SIDE EYES Seeing as our ears are always in use listening to MP3s of 1980s cover versions, it's hard to hear cars, bicycles and lorries coming toward you. I therefore suggest moving our eyes to the sides of our heads, like horses, so we're less likely to step out in front of buses because we can't hear them coming. You never hear about horses getting run over because they're too busy listening to the new Oasis album to listen out for cars, do you?

2. WIDER EAR CANALS Dunno about you, but my ear holes are never big enough to accommodate all these so-called "in ear" earphones. You know, the ones you're supposed to ram right in. I ram them in so hard it hurts and my brain pops, yet they still fall out after three minutes when the cable snags on my shirt. I therefore suggest scientists develop wider ear holes for better audio clarity and comfort "on the go."

Twitter's great. It's like a secret club where people in the tech sector go to talk about the inanities of their lives... and it's horrendously addictive. It may surprise you to learn though that Twitter can also be used for some genuinely useful things.

...

Okay, that was obviously a lie. But there are many things you can do that will enhance your Twitter feed, and give it the virtual 140-character equivalent of bells and whistles. For this week's mash-up, I'm going to go through some services that you can hook into Twitter.

Today, I'm looking at renewable energy sources, with this video review of a wind-up torch. Is it a good idea? Does it work? Is manual electricity generation a viable alternative to traditional plugs, bulbs and power leads? Let's find out!

I apologise for the poor sound quality.

In summary, wind-up torches work, but require constant winding. There is an additional energy saving to be found thanks to the physical effort of winding keeping you warm and therefore saving money on heating bills, but otherwise I'd have to say wind-up is not a sustainable way to light the home.

Related posts: E&E Episode 1 | RIP, battery videos :(

With rocketing energy prices and the pressure to be "green" in everything you do, I thought it'd be fun - and hopefully educational - to start a series of videos looking at ways we can all be more energy efficient around our homes and offices.

To kick thinks off, I take a look as the massive (white) elephant in the room - the always-on electricity sponge that is the household refrigerator. Do we really need access to cold cheese 24 hours a day? Or is it just a conspiracy by the electricity companies to keep their shareholders happy?

I hereby declare that next week is National Turn Your Fridge Off Overnight week.

Related posts: Battery power tester | Laptops on the beach

This is three stories in one really, so I apologise in advance for the length of this post. The three things I'm about to cover are as follows: Creationists are trying to ban Spore in the USA due to its evolutionary content, video-game fans are slamming EA and refusing to buy the game due to its DRM system, and creators Maxis have released a bunch of early prototypes of different aspects of the game.

Creationists are miffed

UPDATE: The site mentioned in this section is a fake. See this post for details.

Firstly let's talk creationism. A huge part of the early game in Spore concerns evolution - earning DNA points and using them to evolve beaks, flippers and armour plating onto your creature. These then unlock new abilities, or upgrade existing ones on your creature, making them more effective. I called Shiny Media's evolutionary biology correspondent, and here's what he had to say about the depiction of evolution in Spore:

Yesterday - and this is not a joke about how sad my life is, it's the honest-to-Betsy truth - I decided to make the switch and start using Google Chrome as my default browser.

I'd decided the night before, in fact. I was, sadly, really quite excited about the prospect of turning over a new leaf or, to update the phrase, starting a new session. Doing a fresh install of my life and switching from Firefox to Chrome.

I like Chrome. It works, it's already imported all my passwords and bookmarks for me and it's nicely laid out, so I might as well use it as my default browser. It'll be quite painless.

Turned out it was also quite pointless...

It's easy to forget sometimes that the 21st century is now. Information is the currency that the world runs on, and is far more transferrable and globally relevant than actual cash. However, despite its focus on knowledge, the education system is hopelessly out of date. The traditional "exam" involves sitting down with a pen and some dead tree, and trying to remember when the battle of Sevastopol was. A school in Australia is trying to change that.

Students at Sydney Presbyterian Ladies' College are piloting a program which will allow their students to call people, use the internet, listen to podcasts, whatever they like, during exams. They'll be assessed on their ability to find credible and correct information, and cite sources, while writing quality prose.

Lucky Germans - a bunch of law enforcement officials in Germany have declared today that they won't be prosecuting the vast majority of file-sharing lawsuits.

Basically, they've rather sensibly decided that home users aren't worth bothering with and will only go after P2P users that share on a "substantial, commercial" level. What level is that? I'm glad you asked. Being a German, the state prosecutor of Nort-Rhine Westphalia has defined it in very prescise terms:

So after yesterday's rubbish McAfee scare-mongering attempt to get us all to sign up for one of its products, us lot here at Tech Digest thought it might be good to take a look at a sample of genuine spam.

You never know, one of those lottery emails just might be the real deal. And what if, one fortunate evening, you find yourself in the company of a willing lady and could actually really do with some herbal Viagra and a winky that's five times its original size?

Spam could be a life saver. And if nothing else, it's always very entertaining...

Katherine Hannaford writes...

Can we call 2008 the heady days of digital music yet - can we? Can we? Sure, 2007 had its fair share of digital movers and shakers, with Radiohead pioneering the new music release formula, but with today's news that Napster is going DRM-free, surely things can only pick up in speed?

Beginning life as an illegal P2P service in 1999, it was acquired by Roxio in 2003 after numerous legal battles with the RIAA and, err, Metallica. I'm sure there's a generation of kids who only know of Metallica as those baddies who shut down their favourite way of downloading 50 Cent.

Napster's move to go DRM-free, and offer MP3 file formats encoded at 256kbps, has inevitably led a lot of people to draw even more comparisons between them, iTunes and Amazon.

However, there's no ignoring the facts, that iTunes currently has just EMI feeding them DRM-free tracks, and whilst Amazon has support from the four big record labels as well, it doesn't have anywhere near the size of catalogue as Napster, who can also boast all the indie labels in addition to EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and Universal.

MySpace has "won" around £120m from two spammers who used their network to send junk mail to members, but it has little chance of seeing the cash.

It's no surprise that Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines (who apparently are real people) failed to turn up in court -- it's likely no-one even knows where they live.

By nature, spammers, phishers, and the other assortment of scammers who infest the Internet, hide behind false names, email addresses, and locations. They know what they're doing is largely illegal, yet they also know it's notoriously different to track them down.

Because every Apple fan and gadget fashionista will automatically buy it anyway. As long as it's sleek and expensive enough to brag about on the internet.

Even if Mr Jobs pulls a solar-powered calculator (iAddsUP) out of his shirt pocket and announces it goes on sale - tomorrow! - for a mere $699 for the 8-digit screened version and $799 for the 10-digit screened model, it'll be a smash.

Apple fans will now buy anything from Apple. Not only that, but Apple's become some sort of global fashion icon. People just have to have its new stuff, regardless of if it actually fills a gap in their lives or not. It's a far cry from the Apple of the 1980s.

Hello everyone. Don't panic - this isn't another battery review! Instead, this is my entry for the Shiny/Cisco My Video Life competition.

The idea is you make a video about what video means to you, whack it on YouTube, then someone gets the honour of being described as A WINNER. Imagine that. Imagine the feeling of being a winner! Here's my attempt at winning. I doubt I will be feeling the feeling.

You should enter. Any video will do, even just one of you watching telly while eating sausages filmed on a mobile phone. If that's what video really means to you, there's no arguing with it. There's £500 worth of stuff for the winner. And I'm probably not allowed to have any of the prizes, what with being a Shiny Media employee :(

I have sort of wasted everyone's time in doing this, to be honest.

Related posts: WIN BIG! | WIN BIGGER!