PC Gaming

How many years has it been now that people have been prophesying the doom of PC gaming? The outlook can seem a little bleak, now and then, with major gamemakers and publishers citing astronomical piracy figures and episodes like the Spore DRM fiasco taking attention away from all the legitimately good PC games coming out, but every year we find that gaming on the PC isn’t dead after all, and in fact is still going strong. And for that, we’re very thankful.

Cheap Terabyte Drives

There was a time when PC users had to waste precious brain cells fretting over what data they wanted to keep and what was disposable.  Questions like “Can I manage to do the full install on Baldur’s Gate 2, or will I have to delete some Deus Ex savefiles to make room” ran rampant, wracking poor nerds with anxiety.

Well, the time of the data-misers is over. With today’s dirt cheap storage, anyone with an extra couple of Benjamins can build a RAID big enough that they can just keep every single 1 and 0 that flits its way through their computer.

Google

There's a lot of internet-related items on this (what can we say, the web's given us a lot to be thankful for), but the company that's done the most to make our tech lives easier recently has to be Google. The thing about Google for which we’re most thankful is that even though the company already provides some of our very favorite services (search, Gmail and Google Maps, to name a few) they’re not resting on their laurels. We love to keep an eye on the Official Google Blog (with Google Reader, of course) because the Mountain View search giant just always seems to have something new on the horizon, from the silly to the handy to the very significant.

Wikipedia

How did we live before Wikipedia? The online encyclopedia has put all the information we could ever need right at our fingertips. There was a time when it took more than 5 seconds to find out what the atomic weight of Tungsten is (183 grams per mole), what Johnny Knoxville’s real name is (Philip John Clapp) or what the world record for the densest turducken is(18 freakin’ birds), but we’re glad that’s behind us.

And now that smartphones are becoming commonplace, Wikipedia’s influence is spreading beyond the computer. These days, you can’t so much as murmur “I wonder what the Planck constant is” in a bar without somebody whipping out their iPhone and filling you in.

USB Flash Drives

It’s easy to take the little thumbdrive in your pocket for granted. After all, it’s pretty inconspicuous. It just sort of sits there. It doesn’t, for instance, keep your WoW character safe, or project video onto the wall, like certain similarly sized devices. But what USB flash drives have done is eliminate most of the need for burning CDs (or, perish the thought, floppy disks) and made it so that we can keep backup copies of all sorts of data with us all the time.