New Year's Tech Resolution: Day Five:

5. Be More Secure

We all hate passwords. But we need them, at least for now. So use a good password manager—1Password is the gold standard, and the also-excellent LastPass has a free tier that should be all you need.

Not strong enough.

If you really don’t want to use a password manager, then at the very least resolve to use the password-reset feature on every website you visit in January to replace your old-standby password with something a little more secure. And be sure to secure your smartphone too, lest it ever falls into the wrong hands.

New Year's Tech Resolution: Day Four:

4. Digitize Old Taxes and Paperwork

Going paperless and scanning all your paperwork could be a multi-day task, but you can make it more achievable by focusing on just one type of paperwork, such as old tax returns or invoices.

If you still have paper tax returns, take 45 minutes to an hour to sort and scan to PDFs the last few years' worth, in reverse-chronological order. Should you ever need to refer to them, you'll likely need the most recent ones, rather than the older ones.

Pirate Bay's censor-thwarting browser snags 100,000 users

The Pirate Bay's new anticensor browser has proven even more popular than the site expected.

Launched on Saturday, PirateBrowser has sailed into the hands of more than 100,000 users via Pirate Bay's direct download link, says blog site TorrentFreak. The official torrent file itself has been shared by more than 5,000 people.

The browser has reached over 1,000 downloads per hour, TorrentFreak added, a volume that prompted The Pirate Bay to upgrade the connection for its downlink link.

PirateBrowser's quick appeal seems to have surprised even the folks at The Pirate Bay.

"I didn't think it would catch on so fast," The Pirate Bay's "Winston Brahma" told TorrentFreak. "I guess people want to see the websites their governments and courts are trying to hide from them."

PirateBrowser is a collection of components -- FireFox's Portable browser with the foxyproxy addon, the Tor open network software, and some custom settings -- all designed to circumvent the censorship imposed on Internet users by certain governments. As such, the browser allows users to access Web sites that would ordinarily be blocked.

The Pirate Bay singles out such countries as Iran, North Korea, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy, and Ireland.

People looking to surf the Web anonymously won't find that capability in PirateBrowser. The Pirate Bay specifically states that its browser is not intended for anonymous Web use and is meant only to circumvent censorship.

"It's not providing anonymity and it's not secure to hide your identity," Winston Brahma told TorrentFreak. "PirateBrowser is only supposed to circumvent censoring and website blocking. If we made the browser fully anonymous it would only slow down browsing."

The new browser currently supports only Windows, but versions for the Mac and Linux are slated for the near future. The debut of PirateBrowser marked the 10th anniversary of the launch of The Pirate Bay.

New Year's Tech Resolution: Day Three:

3. Consolidate Digital Photos

Perhaps you're dreaming of doing a total photo organization makeover. You'll want to consolidate your photos to one service (e.g., download all your Facebook photos or Instagram images and add them to, say, Flickr or Dropbox or an external hard drive) as well as add appropriate tags and captions to make your pictures easier to find and share later.

More importantly, be sure to put in a place a new workflow for the future. Set rules for how you'll add photos to the central location in a timely fashion every time you shoot new pictures, and do some editing (cropping, deleting bad shots, adding tags and captions) during the same uploading process.

New Year's Tech Resolution: Day Two:

2. Unsubscribe From Email Lists

If you've tamed your email inbox, you'll want to keep it that way.

Hit that "unsubscribe" button, set up filters for newsletter and marketing emails, and learn how to back out of email threads from co-workers (it's the "ignore" button in Outlook, and be sure to read up on what it does and learn to use it wisely).

However you cut down on unwanted email, remember that the work you do now will last well into the future.

If you set up your own rules for filtering messages, you'll maintain complete control, but it could also take a long time to do, unless you use an email service with very helpful built-in tools for filtering Outlook.com and Hotmail have remarkably helpful features.

If you'd rather get some help, RemoveMe for webmail works by putting an "unsubscribe" button right into the preview view of your messages, so you don't have to open them to get off the mailing list.

A more automated option for cutting back on subscription mail is to use Unroll.me, a service that helps you either unsubscribe from or consolidate marketing mail into one digest.

New Year's Tech Resolutions - Ten Days of Tech Resolutions

New Year's Resolutions have traditionally been about breaking bad habits or starting new, positive habits, but I believe New Year's Day is an ideal time to tackle organizational projects. In some cultures, New Year's Day is the time to do a full "spring cleaning," purge the junk, yank the couch away from the wall to vacuum, wipe down the baseboards. You might not break as much of a sweat cleaning up your digital life, but it can be equally rewarding.

Day One:

1. Reach Inbox Zero

If you've dreamed of doing an all-day email clean-up sprint, January 1 could be your lucky day.

Depending on how many hundreds or thousands of emails you need to process, I recommend a few different tactics.

One is to do a "sweep." It's the easiest and most efficient way to process the clutter in bulk and find a happy starting place for actually dealing with your mail. Follow my directions for how to sweep your inbox here. (And if "zero inbox" sounds like an unattainable number, shoot for just a single page of messages. It's a more sane goal.)

Another option that I recommend for anyone who receives a lot of unsolicited mail they simply don't need to see is to use SaneBox, which costs about $6 per month. When you run the 14-day free trial of SaneBox (no credit card required—woo hoo!), you'll see how quickly it parses the non-essential email out of your inbox to help you focus on what's important. SaneBox is not a good solution for people who expect to receive a lot of unsolicited mail from, say, potential new clients or job applicants.