In 2012 you're going to eat better, lose weight and exercise your body, right? Well don't forget about exercising your brain! I took brain-training service Lumosity for a test drive, and enjoyed the experience.

Blockbuster has finally rolled out its games-by-mail program. So does GameFly have anything to worry about? There's only one way to find out. Once more into the breach!

The 22nd annual Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) conference is meeting this week in Miami. While this is my first opportunity to participate in any FIRST activity, these conferences have obviously been ongoing since 1988. With a focus on detecting and responding to security incidents and the convention of moving to a different location each year -- last year in Kyoto, next in Vienna -- the conference in unsurprisingly international.

Yesterday Microsoft pushed out a firmware update that allows the use of USB drives to store game data. As the owner of an original Xbox with a 20 GB hard drive (and almost no free space), I wasted no time in putting the update through its paces.

GIFfun, a MacOS open-source tool, provides quick animation for presentations and more.

Last Friday Sony PS3 owners received their Instant Streaming Discs. Over the weekend I put the service through its paces, spending a grueling amount of time watching TV. I make these sacrifices for you, dear reader.

Ninite is a service that automates the installation of free Windows applications. I put it through its paces during four Windows 7 upgrades.

Microsoft's new free anti-virus program, Microsoft Security Essentials, does the job, but it also snoops into your business and it's s_l_o_w.

Setting up your own Internet domain isn't that hard, and there are a lot of choices, including some that are nearly no cost to host your Web site and email servers.

The problem with virtualized servers is sort of like Lay's potato chips: you can't just have one. Once you get involved in moving your servers to a VM environment, it becomes harder to manage all the VMs. Hytrust's appliance provides a lot more flexibility in managing these environments and adds a strong layer of compliance too.

Microsoft and Lotus are once again squaring off at each other in the collaboration arena with two services that have very complex names starting with "Live." The idea is to provide Web services that require minimal downloads and enable teams of people to work on various projects. The two offerings have somewhat different feature sets.

New features improve an already wonderful web tool.