The on-demand lifestyle

My children will likely never remember media being on a schedule. That's kind of a crazy thought, but it's true. The baby is still too little to understand watching TV or listening to music, but Amber definitely does and she has never had to be told no to a request. Of course, I have told her no, but only because of other circumstances, never because what she requested was unavailable.

All of our movies are in digital form on a hard drive in a Media Center PC; all of our CDs are ripped into the computer; whatever little videos she wants to watch are on YouTube; even the radio we listen to is choose-your-genre Internet radio. And once she's old enough to watch episodes of TV shows, they'll either be ready on the DVR, or streaming from the web.

Android pro tip: Search with different apps

One of the best parts about using an Android smartphone is that there are so many seriously powerful things that the OS is capable of. An admittedly frustrating part of Android, however, is that not all of the cool features are immediately apparent and average users may not always discover them.

One such feature is app searching. Most Android phones have a dedicated search button right on the front. And even those that don't at least have a Google Search widget with launches the same search app. Pressing it brings up a search bar that lets you search through items on your phone, as well as search the whole Internet. By default, it searches through your apps, contacts, bookmarks, etc.

But that search can be customized to be much, much more powerful. With a few tweaks, you can pick which apps you want to be searchable right from the search button

Google+ first impressions

I was invited to check out Google's new social network, called Google Plus, a few days ago and so far I've been extremely impressed. Everything about Plus feels well thought out and smooth. The engineers behind this project clearly put a massive amount of time into it, thinking through even the smallest details, and it shows.

Google Plus is the culmination of lots of rumors, and it weaves together existing Google products into one cohesive experience that has the real potential to challenge Facebook and Twitter in the coming months and years.