Advertisers would have us believe that we need a lot of things that we really only want, and that brand names are always better. This simple purchasing flowchart walks you through your purchasing decision-making process to help you make the smart choice.
Over at personal finance weblog Get Rich Slowly, guest writer April Dykman explains how she curbs unnecessary spending with the flowchart you see here. It's a simple process that hinges on cost ('Can I afford it?'), need ('Is it something I need or lack?'), and quality ('Is there a less expensive/high quality option?'), and if you were to stick to this flowchart for all your purchases, chances are you'd make considerably fewer regrettable impulse buys.
Of course there's certainly something to be said about the occasional splurge—that is, sometimes getting something that you merely want isn't always bad—but this very simple flowchart will at least prompt you to give those spur-of-the-moment purchases a little more thought.
If the flowchart doesn't seem like quite the right fit for you—or you just need that much more help to keep your impulse buy instinct at bay—try supplementing the "Should I buy it?" flowchart with the stranger test or the 30-day list.
If you've been waiting patiently for the Dropbox app [
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As some of you may know for my 
So now when people search a phrase that appears in the title of a post on your blog, your post will appear higher in the search results. This is a much more likely scenario than someone searching for the actual title of your blog.
You registered a domain name and set up the free 
This flavor of Google Apps is only useful to people who own their own domain name (or want to purchase one), and who plan to set up a workgroup behind that domain. For example, if you're Carol Brady and you register thebradybunch.com domain name, you're going to want to set up several users at that domain. With Google Apps, Carol could create a greg@thebradybunch.com account, a marcia@thebradybunch.com account, all the way down to Cindy, Bobby, Alice, and Tiger. When Marcia gets hitched? Carol can add her spouse to the family domain. When Alice moves onto greener pastures? Carol could shut down or suspend her account.
If you own multiple varieties of your domain name—for instance, multiple 
If you've got only a few users to create, you can add them to your domain one by one. However, if you've got a large group, Google Apps offers a bulk upload option. To use it, you make a spreadsheet of user's first and last names, username and password, and upload that to your Google Apps Dashboard. (Visit https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/Users, but replace "yourdomain.com" with your domain.) You can also create user groups or mailing lists with various flavors of permissions—accessible to the outside world, only reachable from people sending from inside your domain, and with custom roles for each user (member or owner). For example, a softball league might have an "Umpires" group, a "Coaches" group, and a "Players" user group.
One of the biggest complaints about Google Apps accounts is that they're usually the last to get new and experimental features like Gmail Labs. (Yes, that took an 
One of the advantages of having your own domain name is that you have control and access to every single word combination @ yourdomain.com email address that you want. If you create a "catch-all address," you can forward any email that comes to your domain and doesn't match a user to a specific address. This means that if you wanted to use custom email addresses on the fly—like amazon@yourdomain.com when you register for an account at Amazon, or lifehacker@yourdomain.com when you register for an account at Lifehacker, you can do so without having to create custom addresses. Instead, set up your domain's catch-all address to forward to your user account. To set up a catch-all address, in your Google Apps Dashboard, from the Service Settings drop-down choose Email. There you can either reject mail that comes to addresses that don't match a user, or set up a catch-all forwarding address as shown above.
Where Google Apps really shines is in its workgroup-level permissions-handling. In Google Docs as well as Google Calendar, you can choose to share docs and calendars with everyone within your domain only. That means if someone leaves your team and you suspend their account, they automatically lose access to sensitive workgroup data in one shot. You don't have to remove them from every doc and calendar you've ever shared with them. Conversely, when you choose the 'Share' option in Docs and Calendar, you have the option to share with everyone in your domain, instead of individuals, as shown here.
I have had my iPhone for a little over 2 years and I’m still amazed at the number of things that it is capable of. Today, more and more people are getting one for themselves. Whether they fully utilize it is a different story altogether. 
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