Browser cookies are useful in some instances; unpleasant in others. While they can save you from having to go through a complicated authentication process whenever you're trying to access your favourite sites, they can also store data on what you've done on a particular website -- which can then be used to serve you more "relevant" advertising at a future point.

All the cool services are getting data dumps - that little link you click somewhere in a settings menu that triggers the service to send you all the data it collects from you (and everything you've used it to do, theoretically).

Suppose you're trying to troubleshoot a family member's computer, you want to show a friend some issue you're having with your system, or you want to make a quick recording of some crazy thing you're about to do in a game. With the Chrome extension Loom, it's incredibly easy to capture and share a quick recording of your screen right from of your browser.

Google's latest update to Chrome came with big changes about how the browser treats autoplaying videos, but it's now causing a lot of audio issues with various web apps and games.

If you want to find some jams that were popular in Canada in the 1950s to kick off your weekend - or just want a random assortment of trending songs by era and location - the website Radiooooo is a great interactive trip.

Big fans of the cloud as we are, there's no doubt relying solely on keeping your stuff stored remotely is a risky strategy. Accounts get hacked. Companies fold. And if you don't have backups of your most precious Snapchats and Gmails, then they can disappear in a puff of data center smoke. Here's how to make sure you've got local copies of everything.

These are troubled times for SoundCloud, with staff lay offs, changing CEOs, and talk of emergency investment securing its future for the time being. As with any service that's looking shaky, users will be (and should be) worried about getting their stuff out -- you may have years of playlists, uploads, and podcasts collected on the service. Here's how to get all that audio and data into safer locales.

If your efforts to track down long-lost relatives and obscure musicians (or anyone else you're looking for on the web) stop at Googling their name, you've come to the right place. Here's how to seriously go about searching for people online, including some advice from the professionals who do it for a living. Oh, and if you'd rather not be found yourself, than read on to understand exactly how the pros go about finding those who'd prefer to stay hidden.

You may attempt to obfuscate your browsing by creating random noise. Sadly, that isn't going to do much.

Google Photos is getting a tweak that will automatically adjust the white balance on your photos. While this seems small, it can significantly improve your yellowish indoor shots.

Web/iOS: Travel planning typically includes a lot of research. When you're planning a trip with stops in different cities, the research can be even more time-consuming. Eightydays can help.

Google's Chrome browser has a neat history erase tool that lets you blitz your browsing logs from the last hour, day, week or month -- or from the beginning of time. However, that history can be useful to search back through, and if you only want to exorcise one site from Chrome's memory, here's how to do it.

Google Photos is pretty killer for managing all your photos, but it sure would be nice if you could share entire albums, right? Now you can. Better yet, you can even choose to let other people submit their own pictures to a shared album.

Running a home web server and need to lock it up? Want to set up standard hosting for multiple sub-domains? Don't worry about tinkering with Apache server's arcane .htaccess file, just tell the .htaccess Editor webapp what you're looking for. The site's interface is a good deal better than many of its ilk, meaning you can usually guess what it's asking for and why. For budding web tinkerers and those with their own storage space, .htaccess Editor is a time-saving tool worth checking out.

HubSpot's Website Grader is a web-based tool which analyses and scores your website against a number of criteria, and provides you with a report card flagging areas you may wish to improve. By filling out a web form which asks for your URL, keywords related to your blog and optionally any websites you compete against, it generates a report on your site. You need to supply an email address as it mails the link to you.The score it generates grades your website against a number of things including website traffic, search engine optimisation, social
popularity (via social bookmarking and sites like Digg) and a wide range of other factors. It also provides some very basic
advice on how you can improve your website's  performance.One thing which tickled me is that it rated Lifehacker's readability as "advanced/doctoral" level. I had no idea we were so rarified! I'd better duck back to uni and get that PhD. :)What's Your Website Score?

Mac OS X only: Manage your FTP connections for free with Cyberduck. If you hate the idea of paying $30 for Transmit, give Cyberduck a whirl. Although not quite as advanced as Transmit, Cyberduck is nothing to scoff at. In addition to having an easy to use interface, Cyberduck also integrates with Growl and has a dashboard widget for easy drag-and-drop uploading. I've been using Cyberduck to manage my websites for about six months without any trouble. Cyberduck is a free download for Mac OS X only. Thanks, sgodun!

Cyberduck

The web makes it possible to search for documents written in every conceivable language, but what if you don't actually know the language you find that special somethin' written in? No worries—there are plenty of online translation services that can give you anything from just a good idea to a complete translation of what you're looking at.