Digital Home Thoughts: Keeping Connected to Everything at Home

"Streaming recorded TV to your hotel room. Grabbing files off your home computer from work. Checking on the dog walker. Your computer can do amazing things while you're nowhere near it, and these 10 killer remote access apps help you do them."

So not everything can exist in the cloud right now, and a lot of people still have a considerable amount of their digital life tucked away on their home. Just because you are not at home, or not right in from of the computer that stores what you need, does not mean that you cannot get access to it. There are a wide variety of tools that provide services like remote access, VPN and streaming. Of particular interest should be the Wake-on-LAN option that is available for most current generation computers. In the world of saving power and arguably faster boot times, you may not need to have your computer(s) on all the time. However, with Wake-on-LAN, you can rouse them from their slumber to do tasks only when needed. You might be surprised just how much power than can save over the course of a year. Now if only LCD monitors could get there. Yes, I know they're improving, but many still use way too much power for what they need when in stand-by mode.