How is it that Apple, time and again, manages to find things that we really want that no one else seems to know about? Even when the thing in question is right before us? For instance, take the old idea of the Ultrabook – if you think about it, it seems pretty easy to know that the computer-buying public would want a very light, powerful and beautiful laptop, right? And yet, every computer company out there that stares at their laptop range day in and day out, just couldn’t see it. They just couldn’t see what Apple saw in the MacBook Air idea. Of course, Windows computer manufacturers have come back since then with all kind of ultrabook options. If you’re a Windows fan, these are the best lightweight laptops on the market.

Dell has a good reputation for customer service. When you make a product complaint, they come in and they completely take care of it. The XPS 13 is Dell’s 13.3 inch entry in the ultrabook races. Typically, you wouldn’t really think of Dell for the best-looking computers around. Well, they’ve change that somewhat with this product.

It feels the weighty thisa book – weighing in at 3 pounds; but everywhere else, it’s quite spectacular. It’s only 1 foot wide, the keyboard is a pleasure to use, ideo playback is spectacular, and it starts up in a shade over 15 seconds. And oh, the battery will take you through more than three back to back viewings of Titanic.

The HP Envy14 Spectre is even heavier – 4 pounds. But they don’t let all that weight go to waste. They give you an adapter to wirelessly connect to your HDTV, you can use nearfield communications and communicate with your smartphone, and nearly the entire laptop was made out of Gorilla glass. The audio is very good, and the battery again goes nine hours. But at $1400, it’s $400 more expensive than the Dell.

These two really are the best lightweight laptops. There are other top brands in the game though – if you don’t really mind seven hour battery life.

The Samsung Series 5 ULTRA is a 14 inch ultra book that offers something you will see in no other product’s a DVD burner. And it uses a regular hard drive – not the solid-state kind that of other offer books use. And they managed to keep the price down to nine dollars. If you don’t mind how the DVD drive drains your battery will that, this should be one of the best lightweight laptops ever.

Battery reconditioning is a great way to get better battery life too. It can make a huge difference not only to laptops and notebooks, but also to cell phones as well. Come to think of it, it’s anything that’s got a reasonably accessible battery, so cars and other vehicles can benefit too.

When the EeePC took the world by storm a decade ago, the industry seemed to be genuinely surprised. Who would want a laptop that was so puny, and had such a small screen? Rewind things back a couple of years from there, and circa 2005, you were really proud to walk about with a hefty laptop that weighed maybe 5 pounds, and set you back $1800. You showed off the 10-inch screen that it came with, the Pentium 4 Mobile processor, the WiFi built in, and the beefy battery that would get you through a whole hour and a half; that was just about enough to send up all those oohs and aahs. If you think about it, didn’t those features just describe an EeePC – perhaps an early generation one that had fewer features? Today, for all of this and the best laptop battery life ever at 10 hours, you don’t pay more than $400 for.

As much as the world has taken to the ever-present netbook as a way to easily reach the Internet on the go, manufacturers are already on the verge of finding a newer sleeker avatar of the idea to carry the torch forward. The EeePC replacement appears in the form of the Ultrathin. These new mobile devices go for about $100 more than your typical netbook, but have 13-inch screens, more powerful processors, and the second-best laptop battery life quotes in the industry – five hours.

No one has passed the netbook over yet, but the major computer manufacturers are really trying. Check out any computer retailer, and you’re likely to see a slew of netbooks on display, as well as the new ultrathins on the counter next over. Let’s look at a couple of the new ultrathin computers, and see how they stack up against a traditional netbook.

The HP DM3 is a top-of-the-line ultrathin. It’s still an inch thick and weighs four pounds, but it gives you a great 13-inch screen, and premium performance features – with enough horsepower for some 3-D gaming. And get this, the expected runtime on a single charge – seven full hours.

The HP is a handsome little piece of computing gadgetry with its brushed aluminum exterior; but the Toshiba mini NV 305 ultrathin gives HP quite a run for its money. It’s nearly the size of any hardcover book at the bookstore; and as tiny as it is, it somehow stuffs a properly-equipped keyboard into the mix, and gives you a really wide touchpad. Does that cost it in battery life? Not even a little bit; in the contest for the best laptop battery life, it crosses the line at six hours.

The EeePC was the revolutionary product that started it all three years ago and hasn’t ever stopped plying on new models from time to time; and its latest, the 1005 PE ultrathin at about $350 is one of the best out there. It has a ten-inch screen, the same Atom processor, and the battery life is claimed to be nearly 10 hours.

It seems pretty clear that in the race for the best laptop battery life, the EeePC still wins – in the category it helped invent.

In the beginning of Apple’s iDevice revolution with their first classic iPod, it came as a nasty surprise to many people that the soldered-on built-in battery didn’t last as long as they wanted. It didn’t last enough hours on a charge and its ability to retain a charge rapidly fell once it been in use for a few months. Things haven’t been much different with their popular iPhone either. An iPhone 3GS with a new battery can just drain itself completely through a day just staying on. IPhone enthusiasts try all kinds of tricks to make that mobile phone battery last. They try turning the brightness of the screen down and all other kinds of experience-degrading tricks and find that there is practically nothing that works. They then try sending it in because they suspect a defective battery. But one needs to realize at some point that when it comes to smart phones with their myriad functions, batteries just can’t last without some special know-how (unless we’re talking about a 5000mAH aftermarket battery).

When they design features for smartphones, they must completely overlook the fact that phones are meant to be use without being tethered to a charger all day. Consider all the power-sucking features they design into smartphones these days – GPS checks, background apps, Push e-mail and so much more that constantly use up the battery even when you’re not doing anything yourself.

If you have two or three e-mail accounts on your smartphone, your mobile phone battery might as well be half its size for all the use you’ll get out of it. Since your phone would like to show you all your current e-mail, it just keeps going and checking all your e-mail accounts four times every hour. Make sure that you don’t burden your battery with looking for e-mail that might not even be there; you could just turn the Push feature off and set your email program to manual mode instead. This one move on its own could save you hours of battery life every day.

There are lots of apps on smartphones these days that like to keep checking for your GPS location. Sometimes they use GPS, sometimes they use Wi-Fi or cell tower triangulation. If you’re like most people, you’re going to have at least 10 apps on your smartphone that have location sensitivity. Turn those off and you could get a 10% increase in battery life.

People tend to use their smartphones as if they were computers. You can easily keep a dozen background apps open and leave them there if you’re not careful. All those programs use up power.

You’re probably wondering about how background apps can use anything since in that state, you’ve always been told that they are kind of on standby. Nevertheless, turning background apps off does work. You’ll find your battery last much longer this way.

There’s more options too, even though the battery may not instantly appear to be able to be accessed straight away to be swapped out. One great example is Tom Ericson’s EZ battery reconditioning technique that you can buy online.

The popularity of the skull and crossbones in the last few years is really amazing. There are always new trends, but Pirates have lasted longer than most of them. The skulls and crossbones are pretty interesting symbols in themselves, But it is strange how much of a fascination they hold among youth subculture. As a tattoo artist, I know about the interest they have for people first hands. I have made more skull and crossbones tattoos then I care to think about. When I first started, I thought it was pretty cool. I liked pirates as much as the next guy, having grown up on old Errol Flynn movies. To me, the skull and crossbones signified adventure and excitement. Nowadays, however, I am sick to death of the skull and crossbones. I can’t figure out why anyone would want to wear them.

When you look at skull T shirts and skull flags, you might first think punk rock, however the skull and crossbones are actually even more broadly used by the military today. This is why the counterculture fascination really baffles me. If they had been only used by the pirates, I would understand it. After all, swashbuckling evokes a freer, more lawless time – something that many of us would like to get back to. But the fact is that many of the most authoritarian organizations in the world today use the skull and crossbones as their own flag. From Naval aviators to Los Angeles police anti-gang units, the skull and crossbones is officially or unofficially part of some very un-pirate-like organizations.

So before you get a skull cross bones tattoo, I would recommend thinking twice about it. Like the naval star before it, the skull and cross bones might seem like a good idea if you are a hipster, but I am sure that you will get sick of it within a couple years. It won’t be long before you wonder what you could have possibly been thinking with that skull and crossbones. Tattoos last for a lifetime, so maybe you should start with a skull and crossbones flag instead. There are many different kinds of pirate flags to choose from, and many of them might look quite interesting to you for a year or two. After that, you can always get rid of them easily. They are much easier to deal with than a permanent tattoo on your body.