From left, Apple MacBook Air, Lenovo IdeaPad U310, and Samsung Series 5 14.0” Ultra.

Laptops today are undergoing a dramatic makeover. These slimmer, sleeker, portable PCs promise longer battery life, faster performance, and (yes!) less back and shoulder strain.

Any discussion of ultra-thins must start with Apple’s MacBook Air (apple.com/macbookair), the iconic, razor-thin portable that famously slides inside a manila envelope. The Air is both durable and light; and since it uses flash memory to store files rather than a spinning hard disk, it’s a lot quieter, too. The Air exemplifies Apple’s attention to detail. Its backlit keyboard, for instance, automatically illuminates in low-light conditions. The 11- and 13-inch models start at $1,000 and $1,200, respectively.

The MacBook Air’s popularity spurred Windows PC makers to create Air-like laptops called “Ultrabooks,” a term coined by chip-maker giant Intel. An Ultrabook shares many of the Air’s most desirable attributes: less than an inch thick; 3- to 4-pound weight; the ability to turn on instantly like a smartphone or tablet; and battery life of 5 to 9 hours. Top-tier laptop makers, including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba, sell Ultrabooks today, and many more models are coming soon.

Most Ultrabooks lack a DVD drive, which isn’t a problem for most users. With the advent of streaming audio and video, as well as cloud services that back up your files online, discs are rapidly going the way of floppies.

“I think eventually all notebooks will become slim,” says Bob O’Donnell, computer analyst for IDC, a technology research firm. He predicts the average selling price for Ultrabooks will be around $800 by the end of 2012.

In fact, many Ultrabooks are already there. Lenovo’s stylish IdeaPad U310 ($800; lenovo.com) has a 13.3-inch display, weighs 3.75 pounds, and is available in a trio of fashion-forward colors, including Cherry Blossom, Aqua Blue, and Graphite Gray. The battery lasts up to 7 hours.

The Samsung Series 5 14.0” Ultra ($800; samsung.com) weighs less than 4 pounds and features a 14-inch display. This sleek notebook somehow manages to squeeze in a DVD drive, too.

The VIZIO Thin + Light ($900 to $1,250; vizio.com) has an aluminum frame and a clean, minimalist look that rivals (some might say copies) the MacBook Air’s sleek aesthetic. Available with a 14- or 15.6-inch screen, the Thin + Light weighs 3.4 or 4 pounds and runs 5.5 to 7 hours between charges, depending on the model.

The newest Ultrabooks add something most laptops don’t have: a touchscreen. Why? Because Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, which debuts this fall, is built to run on both PCs and touchscreen tablets. New laptops such as the Acer Aspire S7 let you navigate the screen in two ways: using traditional touchpad and keyboard commands or by tapping the screen as you would with a smartphone or tablet. It remains to be seen, however, if touch commands on a laptop make sense, particularly if it means holding your arm in an elevated position for hours on end.

Meet the Ultrabooks The Saturday Evening Post

With today’s dependence on electronics for work, play, and just about anything to do with productivity, you may often find yourself staring at screens for more than 10 hours a day. With this in mind, it’s important to protect your eyes by minimizing harsh whites and enlarging text size in common programs, regardless of how old you are or how good your eyesight might be.

To lessen the long-term damage computer screens could cause to your eyes, or if your vision isn’t strong enough to read tiny text on your screen, try these tips for PC or Mac computers to make things easier on your oculars. Most of these tricks are simple enough that you won’t have to reinvent (or buy) the wheel. Running Windows 8? These tips apply as well.

1. Attack the problem at its source—drop your monitor brightness. Your screen is the culprit, so why not adjust it to fit your ergonomic needs? Your monitor should come with a how-to guide that will show you how to adjust brightness, contrast, color, and other features, allowing you to tweak these levels and reduce eyestrain. If you can’t find a guide, a brief search on Google for the screen’s manufacturer manual should prove fruitful. If you’re still unable to find any documentation for your monitor or television, all models come with buttons that allow the user to explore menu options that are often hidden. Experiment with these, and you should be able to reduce your monitor’s brightness levels in no time.

2. Invest in a pair of computer readers. Computer readers are glasses that have protective coatings on their lenses designed to lessen the harsh whites that screens can emit. Most readers have a magnifying effect, so you’re practically getting a two-for-one deal. Some companies such as Foster Grant produce readers as cheap as $30. If you’re looking for something a little more high-end and you’re willing to drop the cash, Gunnar Optiks makes a line of sturdy readers that are not only protective but stylish as well. Gunnar’s prescription program lets you combine vision correction with protection. Be wary, however, as the cheaper models can bite holes in your wallet; non-prescription Gunnar models range from $60 to $100.

3. Use the magnifiers. Microsoft is aware that sometimes computer text isn’t the easiest to read. Found with almost all versions of Windows, Magnifier is a versatile program that can enlarge certain parts of the screen wherever your mouse or keyboard cursor is located. If you have a Mac, use the included Zoom software to make reading text a little easier on the eyes.

4. Increase your browser display size. Most screens nowadays come in wide-screen format, and that doesn’t adapt well for documents. Browsers often display websites in a column fashion as well, leaving wide, empty margins. Remove the margins and zoom in on your page by holding down Control and scrolling up with your mouse until the page fits your monitor nicely. On the Mac side, you can increase most browser window sizes by pressing Command and + a few times.

5. Lower the desktop resolution. Your resolution is what makes up your screen in vertical and horizontal “lines.” The more lines the screen has, the smaller images and text will appear. By right-clicking on your desktop in Windows, you can adjust your screen resolution to a lower setting and make those images and text blocks pop. On a Mac, you can find a list of supported resolutions under the Apple logo, System Preferences, and then Display.

6. Increase the Windows text size. Windows 7 has an option to change the text and other items on-screen under the Display option under the Personalize menu, found by right-clicking on the desktop. This option is just limited to three settings: smaller, medium, and larger. Fortunately, an adjustment here should bode well for anyone trying to save their eyesight.

7. Give your eyes a break. Staring at a screen for too long certainly isn’t healthy and can give you computer vision syndrome, or CVS (not the pharmacy). If you find yourself locked onto a screen for too long, look away from the screen, focus on an item in the distance for approximately 10 to 20 seconds, and then focus on an item closer to you. Repeating this a few times should keep your eyes from getting tired.

8. Go outside! Being inside all day not only messes with your sleeping rhythms, it can also have an effect on your eyes. Expose your eyes to different levels of light. This can also kill the monotony of a day’s work at the office!

Whether you have poor or eagle-eyed eyesight, these steps can certainly help you keep the effects of long-term screen exposure at bay. They won’t prevent eyestrain completely, but combining all these steps will significantly save your eyes so you can keep staring at screens for several years to come.

8 Vision-Saving Tricks for Computer-Related Eyestrain The Saturday Evening Post

Landscaper’s Companion

With 15,000-plus pictures and information on more than 25,000 plants, this app is a virtual encyclopedia of gardening. Want the specifics on a plant’s sun exposure, water usage, growth rate, and bloom times? Comprehensive search tools make these facts easy to find. The app currently lacks information on tropicals and orchids, but we expect this to be remedied soon, as the developer periodically adds additional plants and images for free.
Price: $2.99 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch and $4.99 for Android devices.

Grow Your Own

How do I know when my blueberries are going to be ripe? How can I keep aphids away from my roses? This handy app from the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) provides essential advice for part-time farmers. Grow Your Own steps you through the growing process month-by-month, recommending the best times to plant, prune, weed, mulch, and harvest, depending on the crop. And if you need to buy seeds and supplies, the app’s “Buy Now” button links directly to the RHS Online Plant Shop. Hey, the app is free, and they’ve got to earn a living somehow.
Price: Free for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Bugs in the Garden

Blast those infernal bugs! If you need help ID’ing the creepy crawlies devouring your daffodils, Bugs in the Garden can help. With more than 40 photos and illustrations of beetles, moths, aphids, caterpillars, grubs, and other common bugs, this app helps you spot troublesome and beneficial insects alike. It also includes tips on how to attract helpful bugs (like ladybugs) and send the bad ones packing.
Price: Free for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch and Android devices.

FlowerPedia

If you’re a flower person, this app’s for you. There are three versions of FlowerPedia. The free “lite” version has 100 high-resolution flower photos and limited information on flowering plant families from around the globe. The iPhone edition is far more comprehensive: 2,800 flower images; a search tool for finding flowers by common name, Latin name, and country and state/province; and the ability to identify flowers by their anatomy. The $9.99 iPad version is the most beautiful of the trio, with larger, dazzling photos that turn your tablet into a coffee-table flower book.
Price: Free “lite” version; $4.99 for iPhone; $9.99 for iPad.

Moon Gardening

This visually appealing app is useful if you want our nearest celestial neighbor (i.e., the Moon) to guide your gardening practices. Lifeware Solutions’ Moon Gardening brings this ancient practice to modern times by offering time-tested growing tips, such as the best times to plant, prune, weed, and harvest crops based on the current Moon phase in your area. It’s a bit scant on details, though. For instance, Moon Gardening has too many links to outside sources on the topic, rather than providing the information itself. It’s fun to use, however, particularly if you’re curious about the Moon’s phases.
Price: $1.99 for iPad.

Garden Plan Pro

As gardening apps go, Growing Interactive’s Garden Plan Pro is a tad pricey, but its planting toolkit is much more comprehensive than most garden-variety guides. The app’s extensive design tools let you create a simple garden with single plants—or far more sophisticated projects with fruits and vegetables planted in multiple rows and/or squares. Garden Plan Pro has detailed growing information for more than 140 plants, and offers sage advice on how to rotate crops. The app takes a bit of practice to master, however, so be sure to watch the tutorial video before getting your hands dirty.
Price: $19.99 for iPad.

Grow 2.0 The Saturday Evening Post

Photo by Tyler Olson via Shutterstock.

Due to rapid advances in technology over the last few years, maintaining a broadband connection has become essential for many of us in our daily lives. Streaming more HD movies, downloading music, and using data-heavy video chat services like Skype and FaceTime can make basic broadband speeds seem a bit sluggish.

Luckily, you do have some options to choose from. We’ve taken a look at three of the larger broadband providers in the country—Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon—to show you some options if you would like to dramatically increase your internet speeds.

How fast is my broadband now?

The average speed that Americans get from their home internet service is 5.8 megabits per second (Mbps). Those numbers may seem decent, but those speeds place the United States in 13th place worldwide, behind countries like Latvia, the Czech Republic, and Romania. Even the city with the fastest internet service in America, Boston, Massachusetts, only averages 8.4Mbps—a speed that wouldn’t place it in the top 50 cities worldwide.

America’s slow broadband speeds aren’t due to lack of availability but a lack of knowledge among cable companies’ customers. Cable companies push low-end broadband packages, because they are usually cheaper—and much slower. For instance, most Verizon customers don’t have a clue that Verizon offers broadband with speeds of 300Mbps on June 17—the fastest broadband connection in the country, fast enough to download a two-hour HD movie in under two minutes.

What are my high-speed options?

Photo by Tyler Olson via Shutterstock.

Aside from Verizon’s world-class offering (which costs $204 a month), there are other extremely fast options from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon.

Coming in right behind Verizon’s highest broadband package is a 150Mbps offering that costs $94 a month. Another option is an $84-a-month plan that will get you speeds of 75Mbps. Be aware of the hidden costs with Verizon; all of these prices are contingent upon a two-year contract (if you don’t sign, the price goes up $5 a month, plus you have to pay a $100 equipment fee) as well as Verizon’s home phone service (another $5-a-month surcharge if you don’t have it).

Time Warner Cable also has faster options for you, but they are nowhere near what Verizon is offering. Time Warner’s highest offering is $79 a month, which gets you speeds of 50Mbps for your home internet needs. For $49 and $39 a month, you can get speeds of 30Mbps and 20Mbps, respectively. All of these prices are promotional and will rise after the first year.

Comcast does offer higher speeds than Time Warner Cable, but it comes at a premium. At 105Mbps, Comcast’s fastest option comes in at $199 a month, $5 cheaper than Verizon’s highest option, which offers speeds nearly three times as fast. For $115 a month with Comcast, you will get speeds of 50Mbps, while $72 a month will bring you speeds of 30Mbps.

Is it worth it?

If you live by yourself and are not an avid internet user, you may not need this kind of speed. But if you live with techies or have teenagers who are constantly on the internet, it will definitely come in handy.

Even with all of the advances in technology, your broadband connection shares a trait with your water heater—if everyone uses the hot water at the same time, the water will lose heat more quickly than it would otherwise. The same is true with broadband. If you are streaming Netflix and surfing the web on your iPad, your 5Mbps internet connection will take much longer to download that large file than it usually does.

If you are experiencing slow speeds or just want a faster connection, a super-fast internet connection is definitely worth paying for. If you do choose to upgrade, you will miss out on all the fun of buffering Netflix shows, slow-loading YouTube clips, and long waits for file downloads—but we’re sure you’ll find something to do with all that free time.

Is It Worth Paying For Super-Fast Internet In Your Home? The Saturday Evening Post

So what is “the cloud,” exactly? And can you trust online storage providers with gigabytes (GB) of your personal contacts, health and financial records, and maybe even your collection of unfinished Elizabethan love sonnets?

To answer that question a little background is required. First, the cloud isn’t literally up in the sky. Instead, it consists of a massive farm of “servers,” or computers. The name derives from the fact that data and software are all delivered as a service over the Internet rather than as a product that sits in your hard drive. Cloud technology isn’t new. Businesses and governments have warehoused information on Internet-connected servers for years. The big shift taking place now is that consumers—you and me—are getting our heads in the clouds as well.

This change is possible because of the exponential increase in Internet speed. Thanks to high-speed broadband to the home via cable, DSL, and fiber optic services—as well as speedy 3G and 4G cellular for mobile phones and tablets—you no longer need files to be near you to access them.

The beauty of this technological advance is that you can get stuff down from the cloud from anywhere. Want to hear a song that’s not in your phone’s meager storage? Punch in your password and there it is. Same with your tax information, email, and those Elizabethan-style poems. Another benefit—your files are easy to recover, even if your phone, tablet, or laptop is lost or stolen. And some cloud services automatically transfer, or sync, files between your various digital devices including phones and PCs.

Take iCloud, for instance. Not only does it back up your files to Apple’s massive farm of servers, the service also directs digital media to other Apple devices you own, provided they’re running either OS X Lion (on a Mac) or iOS 5 (iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch) software. For example, let’s say you own an iPhone and an iPad. When you buy an ebook from Apple, iCloud automatically sends a copy of the book to each device.

As you would imagine, there’s a price tag for such benefits. Apple users start with five GB of free storage. That could fill up quickly. Extra capacity costs $20 for 10 GB, $40 for 20 GB, or $100 for 50 GB per year. Other cloud providers offer free storage, too. Online retailer Amazon provides 5 GB, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive offers a more generous 25 GB. Dropbox, a popular cloud service that automatically syncs files between digital devices—including Mac and Windows PCs as well as many smartphones and tablets—offers 2 GB. Box, a Dropbox competitor, gives you 5 GB. Of course, you can always buy more storage if you need it. And Carbonite, an online backup service, warehouses an unlimited amount of your data for a flat fee of $59 per year.

But can cloud providers prevent data-stealing hackers and other ne’er-do-wells from accessing your files?

All of these services use strong, industry-standard encryption to encode your data, a security measure that makes your files incomprehensible to any snoops trying to access them. Of course, your account is password-protected, too.

Cloud company workers can’t access your data. As you might expect (and hope), cloud vendors take privacy very seriously. If they suffer a major security breach, their customers will flee. The bottom line: Yes, cloud storage is safe, provided you warehouse your sensitive information with a reputable firm.

The future is indeed cloudy—and that’s good news.

Life in the Cloud The Saturday Evening Post