Reluctantly or otherwise, Facebook is the place most of us have chosen to share our lives online. In spite of its many useful features, the social media site can be a constant source of annoyance, embarrassment, and trouble if you make a few stupid decisions you might not even realize you're making. Fortunately, with a little effort, you can get Facebook under your control. More »

When you're ready to take your data into your own hands and run your own blog, own your own photos, and host your own apps, it's time to find a good web host that can put it all on the web for you, give you the tools, bandwidth, and storage you need, and support you when you need help. Thankfully, there are dozens of great companies looking for your business, and this week we're going to look at five of the best, based on your nominations. More »

Ever been told that you should fully discharge your battery to prolong its life? Or that jailbreaking your phone is illegal? Or that you should wait for the newest Intel processor because it's going to be "so much faster"? These are tech myths we hear all the time, and likely spread to our friends—but most are just a waste of your time (and in some cases, they can actually harm your gadgets). Here are some of the worst offenders. More »

According to a report by AdAge, location-based check-in service foursquare is starting to get serious about making money. It has hired former Apple iAd exec Steven Rosenblatt as Revenue Chief, the first such role the company has had in its history.

Foursquare has shown that its serious about getting more companies to join its platform by way of claiming their venues with a new simple verification process that will run them $10. The company recently announced that the new feature is available to companies worldwide.

By bringing in Rosenblatt, the company is getting someone who has spent a long career in the mobile space. Before joining Apple, he was a VP of advertising sales for Quattro Wireless. Apple purchased Quattro in 2010, and Rosenblatt went on to help lead the iAd division.

The iAd product was introduced as a highly interactive ad unit only offered to a top tier of advertising partners.

With all of the talk today surrounding Facebook’s IPO, the question of how companies can advertise on mobile platforms effectively continues to gain steam. This appears to be the perfect hire at the exact right moment for foursquare.

Rosenblatt had this to say about the opportunity that foursquare has in helping companies reach all new audiences:

I think what we’re most excited about is helping create new products and building new tools for our merchant partners to be able to reach new customers.

He has a lot of work ahead of him, as does the company, but it looks like the team is on the right track.

Foursquare lost its head of Business Development, Tristan Walker, at the beginning of the month, so today’s announcement will help lighten that blow.

If foursquare is going to make serious money, it must figure out a way to reach its users without forcing them to take a “check-in” action, which it attempted to do with its “Radar” feature. Radar would alert you when you were close to venues and share deals with you, but as is the case with most location-aware apps, it’s an absolute battery drain.

Building a hackintosh—that is, installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware—used to require extremely restricted hardware choices and quite a bit of know-how. Now your options are vast and the installation process is fairly simple. With that in mind, here is our always up-to-date guide to building a hackintosh that will walk you through purchasing compatible parts, building your machine, and installing OS X all on your own. Thanks to a new process, it's even easier than before. More »

I don’t know about you, but I’ve just about had my fill of so-called Instagram alternatives, though I do still occasionally bust out Instagram itself if I’m looking to taint some snaps with a pseudo 1960s feel.

But what about apps that transform snaps into sketches? Well, PowerSketch for iOS has you covered there.

As with retro photo apps, there are already a slew of photo-to-sketch apps out there, such as My Sketch and Sketch Me. But PowerSketch is a worthy addition to the family offering a simple, streamlined way to quickly turn your images into artwork. Oh, and PowerSketch also lets you create arty videos based on the exact same effects available for your photos.

You can either capture an image directly from you iOS device, or import an existing one from your camera roll. You then just hit the ‘edit’ button in the top right-hand corner and you’re presented with a serious of options:

A particularly cool feature, too, is that it lets you combine your ‘sketches’ to create photo collages. There are 16 effects to choose from, before ‘saving’ to your device or opting to share with the social sphere.

The app also has a real-time preview feature built in as you’re capturing your masterpiece.

If you’re on the lookout for a simple app to turn your photos into something that would look more at home on an easel, then the $0.99 PowerSketch will set you back is well worth it. And the video feature is a nice touch too. “We are committed to making PowerSketch to be the number one sketch app,” says Joey Zhang from Wondershare, the developer behind this app.

Meanwhile, you can read all our previous Pick of the Day selections here.

➤ PowerSketch [iOS]

Mozilla’s Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers. According to new data shared by Mozilla today, 8.6% of Firefox desktop users and 19% of mobile users now turn this opt-in feature on. The latest company to announce that it will honor Do Not Track is Twitter.

As Do Not Track isn’t so much a technical solution that just blocks tracking cookies and more like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users, its success completely depends on being supported by publishers and developers.

As for the major browser developers, Microsoft and Apple are already on board (and IE9, it is worth noting, already offers a somewhat more aggressive “tracking protection” tool). Google, too, plans to support Do Not Track later this year and Opera is building it into its upcoming Opera 12 release.

A number of major online companies, including our parent company AOL, as well as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have already pledged support for Do Not Track. For Twitter, which doesn’t rely on tracking and third-party advertising as much as other sites, pledging support for Do Not Track was probably not a very hard decision.

The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.

— Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012

The Weather Channel has rolled out a new version of its iOS app which sees a massive interface overhaul and a number of key new features introduced.

Launched in the UK in July 2001, The Weather Channel constitutes a website and mobile app, and provides pretty comprehensive global weather information. The latest incarnation of its iOS app hit the App Store today, and brings a much cleaner design and layout to the table, as well as a slew of new features and tweaks.

When you first launch the app, it displays a current view of weather conditions outside. If it’s cloudy, this is what will be displayed:

The app also has a nice swipe feature taking you between the various locations saved on your handset, each with real-time imagery of the current conditions.

There’s now an expandable button which offers you more detailed weather data for each location, such as wind, humidity and UV Index, whilst it also gives you sunrise and sunset times too. Oh, and everything has to have a social element to it these days, right? Right.

Similar to Weathermob, the app dedicated to those who like to talk about the weather, The Weather Channel introduces a new social feature for users to explain the impact the current conditions are having on their lives. Accompanying this, it has also introduced a much more simplified photo-sharing function which lets users share directly with iWitness, Twitter, Facebook and email.

A number of other tweaks have been made to the app. The severe weather alerts feature has been made more prominent, and it’s now shown as notifications next to the current conditions as well as on the navigation bar.

“Our new app is more relevant – whether it’s showing a beautiful image that displays your local weather or allowing you to save your own personalized home screen image, it’s more about the weather and content that matters to each consumer,” says Cameron Clayton, executive vice president of digital product at The Weather Channel. “We’ve made changes based on consumer feedback to engage users through a deeper and more emotional weather experience.”

Back in December, we reported that The Weather Channel was rolling out the UK’s first advertising campaign to feature live weather conditions, in a commercial deal with British Gas.

The winter-themed campaign for British Gas HomeCare boiler cover ran on The Weather Channel’s UK site, displaying live temperature and location data in the advert in real-time.

➤ The Weather Channel [iOS]

Your education doesn't have to stop once you get out of school—being free of the classroom just means you have more control over what you learn and when you learn it. We've put together a curriculum of some of the best free online classes available on the web this summer for our second term of Lifehacker U, our regularly-updating guide to improving your life with free, online college-level classes. Let's get started. More »

Raise your hand if you've shared a username and password with someone over IM? Ever share a document with your SSN or other extremely sensitive information without protecting it? How about if you've sent, erm...scandalous pics to your significant other? Thanks to the internet, we share more than ever, and so quickly and easily that we do it without a second thought. That's great, but it may be time you learn a little about how to do that sharing in a more secure fashion. More »