Google giveth and Google taketh away. That's what happened with the company's RSS management and reader service called Google Reader just this week. If you rely on Reader for your RSS needs you aren't dead in the water yet, but it's a good idea to download your feed list and other settings ahead of the July 1 cutoff date.

In this tip, Melissa Holt is going to cover some interesting and handy ways you can manage windows. You can bring back all of a program's minimized windows at once, for example, or you can close every open one within an app. Studies have shown that you'll get a 7.6 percent increase in productivity just from learning these techniques. There's also a 99.4 percent chance that someone writing this likes to lie. A lot.

It's easy to load up your Mac's menu bar with useful add-ons that give you quick access to settings, information, and fast data entry, but it's also easy to quickly fill up and turn into an unmanageable mess. Apple lets you rearrange the items in your menu bar, which is a nice start, but if you need more control over how you see everything you packed in, it's time to turn to third-party apps.

Spotlight is a great tool for sifting through the files on your Mac's drives to find exactly what you need. It isn't so great, however, when its Index file get corrupted and you don't see all of your files -- or your Mac's fans start spinning incessantly.

Siri is often quite helpful in relaying information about your contacts. However, Siri has difficulty recognizing and articulating foreign names. There is a great way to teach Siri proper pronunciation of such names. Sandro Cuccia shows you how.

Apple's MacBook Pro and MacBook Air charger is great because it includes a built-in way to wind up its MagSafe cord. The problem is that it's kind of easy to bend and fray the cord over time where it goes into the power supply, even with the extra reinforcement Apple added. Thanks to a quick winding technique, however, you don't have to worry about frayed cords and potential electrical hazards.

Teachers, trainers, and students deserve all the respect and support they can get and the app Reflector gives them unique help. Unfortunately, the set up instructions for the app are insufficient, so Nancy Carroll Gravley improves on those instructions so the teachers, trainers, and students can use it.

Sometimes I'm surprised when someone asks me a tech question that I just assumed everyone knew the answer to, like recently when I was asked about changing the default Internet search engine on the iPhone. It's an easy switch, and as I was reminded, if you don't ask you won't learn.

There are some great options available right from your iPhone's recent calls list, like adding the number that called to your contacts or your favorites. But there are a couple of things you may not have known that you can do with your recent calls. Things that may make life easier. Things that may save the world! OK, not that. But they're fun and handy to know anyhow.

Control-clicking a document to see the Open With contextual menu is a handy way to choose exactly which app you use to open a PDF, JPG, or any other file. OS X has a problem, however, where duplicate apps can show up and make the list grow longer and longer. You can fix that issue when it crops up as long as you don't mind a quick trip to Terminal.