NESZOR BLOG

How to Mirror Your iPad Display to Your HDTV

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 07:27:00 +0000

The iPad's king-size display is great for watching a movie by yourself, but it's not so great for group screenings. Fortunately, getting it working with the HDTV in your living room for impromptu movie nights, vacation photo slideshows, or YouTube viral video marathons isn't difficult. Depending on your needs and preferred uses, you'll be working either with a wired adapter (HDMI, VGA, or Composite video) or with an Apple TV and AirPlay--we'll walk you through both methods in this article.
Wirelessly Mirror Your iPad With Apple TV and AirPlay
Thanks to Apple's AirPlay technology in the new Apple TV, you can easily mirror your iPad's display to your HDTV wirelessly--assuming, of course, that you have the new Apple TV, which will run you about $100. If you plan on regularly using your HDTV with your iPad at home, this is the most elegant method available, but it's also the most expensive (and you probably aren't eager to park yet another box beneath your HDTV).

Setting up AirPlay with an Apple TV is pretty straightforward. The hardware requirements are an iPad 2 or iPad 3 running iOS 5 or later, and a second- or third-generation Apple TV running software version 5.0 or later. You'll also need a Wi-Fi network to connect the iPad to the Apple TV, since the iPad doesn't have an ethernet port.

Once your iPad and Apple TV are turned on and connected to the same network, double-click the Home button on your iPad to make the Recently Used Apps bar open on the bottom. Swipe from left to right until you see an icon consisting of a rectangle with a triangle in front of it (it's a stylized HDTV). Tap that icon, and you'll see a list of available AirPlay devices on your network; select the one you want to use, and toggle the Mirroring switch to On. At this point your Apple TV should display your iPad's screen on your HDTV.

If you don't see the AirPlay icon on your iPad, confirm that both your Apple TV and your iPad are connected to the right Wi-Fi network and update them both to the latest system software available. Also, double-check that AirPlay is enabled on your Apple TV, by navigating to Settings > AirPlay and switching it on (if necessary). If you still can't successfully mirror your iPad to your HDTV, you might try disabling your router's firewalls to see whether it is accidentally blocking certain ports that you need to use AirPlay. Apple claims that AirPlay uses ports 80 (TCP), 443 (TCP), 554 (TCP/UDP), 3689 (TCP), and 5353 (UDP); but some users have noted that they couldn't get AirPlay to work without also opening 62078 (TCP/UDP), 7000 (TCP/UDP), and 7100 (TCP/UDP). If AirPlay works fine when your firewall is disabled, reenable your firewall and follow your router's instructions for opening those ports. For more information on how to open a port, check out the second half of our guide to forwarding ports on your router.

Wired Mirroring With the Apple Digital AV Adapter
Don't want to spend $100 on yet another Apple gadget? If you're willing to put up with another wire, you can mirror your iPad's display with a $40 HDMI adapter instead. This approach isn't as elegant as the wireless AirPlay method, but it's cheaper--and easier to carry around and configure on the go if you want to mirror your iPad's display to a projector or TV to give presentations during meetings.
All you have to do is pick up an Apple Digital AV Adapter for about $40, plug it into your iPad, and connect the adapter to your HDTV with a standard HDMI cable (sold separately), and you should be good to go. If your TV doesn't have any free HDMI ports, you can use the Composite video or VGA adapter, though neither will look as good (and the VGA adapter will handle video only).
Unfortunately, the Digital AV Adapter has a few compatibility issues in need of sorting out. First, be aware that an older version of the Digital AV Adapter (part number MC953ZM/A) exists that doesn't support the third-generation iPad. Some users have reported that it still works, but it gives you a warning when you plug the adapter in. Make sure that you buy the newer Digital AV Adapter (part number MD098ZM/A)!
Also, be aware that first-generation iPads don't support video mirroring at all. You can still use the Digital AV Adapter to show content from certain apps (Video, Keynote, and Photo, for example), but in order for this feature to work, the app developer must have specifically enabled it.

Finally, the Digital AV Adapter outputs at up to 1080p resolution for everything but video, which is limited to 720p--not great if you're a true cinephile. If you are, you should probably invest in the Apple TV to obtain optimal video quality when mirroring your iPad to your HDTV.
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How to Take Better Photos With Your Phone

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 03:46:00 +0000

Flickr users upload close to 100 million photos to the photo-sharing site each month--and according to Yahoo, the iPhone continues to be the most common "camera" they use to upload all those photos. As more people leave the digital SLR--and even the point-and-shoot--at home, it's worth taking a look at how to get better photos from a smartphone. A few weeks ago I shared my five favorite iPhone apps, so this week I'll run through four handy tips for taking better smartphone photos. (If you have an Android handset, check out top photo apps for Android.) Consider the following to be bonus tips that complement my 11 tips to ensure great smartphone photography.
1. Adjust Exposure With Your Finger
Your phone doesn't have any of the sophisticated exposure mode options that a full-featured digital camera does. But you might not realize that you can tweak the exposure anyway, even without a spot meter or an exposure compensation dial. All you have to do is tap the screen.
You probably already know that you can focus the iPhone's camera (and those of many other smartphones) by tapping the screen--the camera immediately tries to focus on whatever point you tapped. What you might not know is that the camera sets the photo's exposure off that part of the scene as well. Point your phone at a high-contrast scene, such as a dark room with a lamp in one corner. On the phone's screen, tap the lamp, and then tap a dark part of the room--you should see the phone adjust the exposure accordingly. Now you have no excuse for taking photos that are radically misexposed.

2. Turn Off the Flash, Turn On HDR Mode

If your phone has a High Dynamic Range mode, as the iPhone does, you owe it to yourself to disable the flash and use the HDR mode instead. About 90 percent of the time, you'll get better photos with the HDR mode than with the flash. You might be wary of the HDR mode because you know that it usually works by taking several photos with different exposures and then combining them into a single shot. Well, fear not: Most smartphones that offer built-in HDR modes, the iPhone included, cheat by taking only a single photo and tweaking its dynamic range. So you won't have to stand around for 10 seconds trying to hold the phone steady.

3. Illuminate Your Shot
If you insist on using your phone's flash--or if you are shooting in a particularly dark location that requires extra light--you don't have to compose your photo in the dark. Many camera apps let you turn the flash into a flashlight, so it fires continuously. Recently I recommended Top Camera, for example, and it has this feature. Turn on the flash, compose your shot bathed in the luxury of the light it gives off, and then take your shot. The flash turns off automatically after the exposure, helping to save your battery.

4. Add a Lens
Believe it or not, you can attach add-on lenses to your iPhone. Although I think this option is a little geeky even for me, such lenses do give you the ability to turn your lowly smartphone into a camera with a telephoto lens, a wide-angle lens, or even a macro lens. Interested? You can find a wide assortment of lenses that snap or magnetically attach to the iPhone at Amazon.
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How to Make Your Own Network Cables

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 23:46:00 +0000

Although it’s easy to head to the electronics store to buy network cables, making do with cables of predetermined lengths can be a problem. More often than not, premade cables are either too short (and require coupling) or too long (in which case, you have to tie up excess cabling and tuck it away somewhere). The end result is usually a mess of extra network cable, wrapped and bundled up alongside your devices and network switches. It works, but it isn't ideal, and it looks horrible.

You don't have to deal with premade network cables of incorrect lengths, however. Creating your own custom-length network cables is quite easy once you have the know-how and the right tools. Making network cables takes just a little cutting and crimping, plus a bit of wire arranging. Here's how to do it.
Getting Started

Network-wiring toolkits, which include connectors, a crimper, and a tester (among other odds and ends) are available for about $35.To make your own network cables, you need some raw CAT 5, 5e, or 6 cable (a composite cable consisting of four twisted pairs of internal wires), some RJ45 connectors, and a proper crimping/wire-cutting tool. Ideally, you also want a network-cable tester, to easily confirm that your custom cables are correctly wired and working properly. A cable tester isn’t a necessity, but it will save time and prevent headaches down the line should you have a problem with a cable or connection.
All of that stuff may sound expensive, but you can find a full network-wiring toolkit--containing the necessary tools, ends for network and phone cables, a cable tester, and some other assorted parts--for only about $30 to $35. Pay a few more bucks, and the kit should include punch-down tools and other probes as well.
The cost of a network-wiring toolkit may be prohibitive to people who want to make only a few cables. But if you have the need to make many cables, the toolkit will easily pay for itself over time, as bulk cable and RJ45 connectors are significantly cheaper than premade cables. On top of that, you’ll end up with much cleaner wiring, a nice bonus.
Wiring Schemes
You'll find a couple of standard wiring schemes and types of network cables. The Telecommunications Industry Association's T568A and T568B standard wiring schemes define the order of the individual wires and pin-outs for eight-pin modular connectors and jacks, such as those used for network cables. Depending on how you wire the cables, you can make “straight-through” or “crossover” cables; I'll give you more details on what those are in just a moment. First, take a look at the following diagrams to figure out how to arrange the wires to make your cable.

T568A wiring scheme

For most home-networking circumstances, you’ll want to use the T568B wiring scheme and straight-through cables. The network cables currently connecting your broadband modem, router, and PC or media player to your network switch are all straight-through cables. The T568A wiring scheme may be present in some preexisting residential network wiring or other similar projects, but the vast majority of premade network cables available at retail (at least in our experience) use T568B.

T568B wiring scheme

Crossover cables are a different matter. Crossover cables serve only to connect similar devices together, in lieu of a network switch or hub. For example, you can connect two PCs directly to each other to transfer data between them using a crossover cable. Years ago, connecting one network switch to another also required a crossover cable, but most modern switches, hubs, routers, and similar devices are now equipped with Auto-MDIX ports that can detect whether a crossover is required and automatically choose the MDI or MDIX configuration necessary to properly connect to whatever device is at the other end of the cable.

Crossover cable color scheme

I have included the diagrams above to illustrate the different wiring schemes. Inside standard CAT 5, 5e, and 6 cable, you'll find four twisted pairs of wire of varying colors: orange with orange/white, green with green/white, blue with blue/white, and brown with brown/white. You may also see some fibers in the cable that add tensile strength, and that you can cut off when you're crimping on a connector--the fibers don’t carry any electrical signals.
To make a common, straight-through cable, you need to arrange the internal wires and place them into connectors with the same T568B (or T568A) scheme at both ends of the cable. To make a basic crossover cable, use T568A at one end and T568B at the other. Or, to make a 1-gigibit-suitable crossover cable, you must cross all four of the pairs.
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How to Benchmark Your PC for Free

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 20:40:00 +0000

Running benchmarks on a PC enables users to evaluate performance, to identify potential bottlenecks, and to choose effective system upgrades. Unfortunately, many users imagine that system performance is simply a matter of CPU frequency or memory capacity, which leads them to think that dropping in a faster CPU or more memory will automatically and immediately yield noticeable performance improvements. In reality, however, that is not always the case.

Though CPU and memory upgrades help in some situations, it often makes more sense to upgrade the storage subsystem or the graphics board if you're looking for perceptible improvement in system responsiveness or gaming performance, for example. If you ran a series of benchmarks and identified which components were holding your system back, you'd be able to choose the most effective upgrade for your current system--or determine which components make the most sense in a new system suited to your particular needs.
Several different types of benchmarks are available for evaluating a system's performance. Some use synthetic tests that don't necessarily reflect real-world usage, while others employ scripted tests that rely on actual applications and simulated real-world workloads. Some benchmarks assess the performance of a single component, while others measure total system performance. To best gauge the overall performance of a PC, consider running some combination of all of these different types of benchmarks, based on your usage patterns.

Benchmarking Do's and Don'ts
Before running any benchmarks, you need to consider a number of hardware and software factors, in order to avoid potential damage to your system and to ensure consistent, accurate results. We'll look at hardware factors first.

Many benchmarks place significant stress on specific components, so you need to ensure that all such components are in good working order, properly cooled (if necessary), and receiving adequate power. If you have a component that seems unstable or unreliable during normal, day-to-day use, subjecting it to a taxing benchmark could kill it. Also, an inadequately cooled or underpowered device that works most of the time may become unstable under stress. That said, we've run benchmarks for many years, and have had only a handful of components fail due to the demands of a benchmark test--and those components were likely defective to begin with.

On the software front, parameters for the operating system, applications, and drivers must be satisfied to ensure accurate, repeatable benchmark results. Windows (and other) operating systems proactively prefetch data and store numerous temporary files that could interfere with a benchmark, so it's best to clear out any temporary files and prefetch data before running a test. In Windows 7, you can find prefetch data in C:\Windows\Prefetch, and temporary files in C:\Windows\Temp and C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Temp. If you have applications running, it may not be safe (or possible) to delete all temporary files, so restart your system and shut down any applications that may be running in the background before wiping out any temporary files.

You don't want applications or utilities that may be running in the background to interfere with the benchmark, so shut them down. This is especially important in connection with antimalware utilities, remote desktop tools, and downloaders that intermittently consume CPU, memory, and storage resources and steal application focus. Unless you're testing a system as it shipped from an OEM to evaluate the effects of background applications on performance, shut them down before running the tests. In the same vein, most operating systems load multiple services and perform maintenance during the initial boot process. Consequently, after boot-up, it's best to let the system "settle" and reach an idle state, with no drive or CPU activity, before you run a test.

Using the correct (typically the latest) drivers for a component is another important step to take to ensure that it is operating and performing optimally. This is especially true of graphics boards and motherboards/chipsets, where the wrong driver can significantly worsen the system's frame rates or transfer speeds and latency. Finally, confirm that the operating system is fully updated and patched to ensure optimal compatibility and to reflect the current, real-world OS configuration--not the OS as it may have shipped years ago.

Benchmarking Individual Components
Many components in a system contribute to its overall performance, but the CPU/processor, memory, graphics board, and storage configuration generally play the largest roles for most users. Which of these components is the most important in a particular case depends on the individual person's usage patterns, however. A gamer seeking the best possible frame rates, for example, will probably be better served by a faster GPU than by more memory. A casual user seeking a more responsive system may benefit most by upgrading a slow hard drive to a fast solid-state drive. You must decide which aspects of system performance are most important to you, tailor the suite of benchmarks to your specific needs, and then weigh the individual test results accordingly.

CPU/Processor
The most useful CPU benchmarks place a heavy workload on the CPU while minimizes the influence of other system components. SiSoft's SANDRA 2012 incorporates a few CPU-centric synthetic benchmarks that test a chip's performance with various mathematical workloads. The tests are multithreaded and generally scale with higher-clocked speeds and more CPU cores. SANDRA also provides results from other CPUs for easy comparison.

Utilities like SiSoft's SANDRA 2012 incorporate various easy-to-use, synthetic benchmarks for testing the performance of different system components.
Another popular CPU benchmark is Cinebench. Cinebench renders a 3D scene using the animation engine from Maxon's Cinema 4D. Cinebench is free, works with multiple operating systems, and can run in single-threaded mode (to test the performance of a single CPU core) or in multithreaded mode (to tax all of the cores in a CPU). If all is working properly, an Intel Core i7-2700K will score about 1.55 in Cinebench's (R11.5) single-threaded test and about 7.05 in its multithreaded test.

Maxon's Cinebench, based on the company's Cinema 4D animation software, tests single-threaded and multithreaded CPU performance.
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How to Build a PC for Photographers

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 17:08:00 +0000

You love taking photos. You carry your DSLR or mirrorless camera along wherever you go. You’re always checking out new Photoshop filters or interesting editing applications. You have a Flickr Pro or Smugmug account, and you upload hundreds of photos a year. Now you want a PC that can be responsive and fast when you're editing and tweaking your pictures.

Whether you build your own system or buy one off the shelf, several considerations are key to choosing the right mix of components for a photographer's PC. You want robust storage, a balance between CPU and graphics performance, and a great display. But before I dive into speeds and feeds, let’s consider a photographer's requirements.
Meet the Photographer
Every photographer shoots a little differently, has varying workflow needs, and takes a unique attitude toward their photos. In this article, I’m going to talk about a PC as it meets my photo-editing needs and my workflow, which may not be the same as yours. Consider this a rough guide, with rules of thumb that apply to most photographic applications.

Currently I use a Nikon D800 DSLR, and I almost always shoot in raw mode. Raw mode captures the pure sensor data, performing no compression or modification on the data it collects. That translates to large files, and the need to have a photo editor that works well with Nikon’s RAW format. In the past I’ve shot with D7000 and D300 bodies. (I'll discuss software in more detail shortly.)

I shoot a variety of subjects, ranging from flowers to landscape to sports action. I've taken the liberty of sprucing this article up with some of my shots to illustrate what a good production rig allows a user to do.

I prefer shooting with ambient light whenever possible, but I do use flash when necessary. I also own a lighting kit for shooting product photos in my home studio. Here's a quick look at the gear I carry.

No, I don’t usually carry all of them at the same time!

Whatever gear you use, a good PC for editing and archiving digital photographs will have a few common elements. Assuming that you hang on to most of your photos, you’ll need lots of storage. Photo editing, particularly involving effects such as HDR and noise reduction, requires good performance. If you’re editing large RAW images (12 megapixels and beyond), lots of memory helps. You’ll also want to display images as accurately as possible, so a good monitor is a must.

Rather than discuss a lot of hypotheticals, let’s take a look at a real-world system: my own production PC. Bear in mind that I don’t use this computer only for digital photography--I also use it for some light video editing and PC gaming. I’ll break it down by each major component type, and I'll suggest alternatives as appropriate.

After going over the needs for a good desktop PC, I’ll walk through what you should have when you’re on the go. In some ways, choosing a laptop for mobile photo editing is both more complex and simpler.

CPU and Memory
Right now, my production PC carries a Core i7-3930K CPU. The 3930K is a six-core CPU built on Intel’s 32nm manufacturing process, so it isn't using the latest-generation Ivy Bridge architecture. It costs about $560, and requires a motherboard that supports an LGA 2011 socket. Such motherboards can be pricey--particularly if you’re into heavy-duty overclocking--but I’m content to run the 3930K at its default settings, so in my system the CPU lives in a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard, which is available for under $240.

My machine also has 16GB of RAM, in the form of four Kingston HyperX LoVo DDR3-1600 modules. These modules can run at full 1600MHz (effective) speed at 1.5V. All of this helps the system consume less power. And that 16GB of RAM comes in handy when I have multiple raw images open: The D800's 14-bit raw files range from 45MB to 48MB each, but while I'm editing, they consume more memory than the disk space they occupy.

Alternatives
The 3930K CPU contains six cores, and can execute 12 simultaneous threads. That much power may be overkill for many users, so a good alternative is a CPU in the new Ivy Bridge line, such as the Core i7-3770K. Clocking in at 3.5GHz, the 3770K runs four cores and up to eight threads. It’s capable, it costs around $350, and it's quite power efficient. You can buy a Core i7-3770 (note the lack of the “K” suffix) for a little less money. That version of the chip is not overclockable, but most users shouldn’t care.

In addition to supporting Hyper-Threading, the Core i7 CPUs offer large L3 caches, which improve performance in most editing applications. If you’re eyeing a laptop, ideally you’ll want a Core i7 CPU, mostly because i7 processors have larger caches than their Core i5 and i3 siblings.

As for the system's memory, if you edit lots of raw files, I still recommend 16GB of RAM, given that today’s memory-module prices are pretty low.

Storage...and More Storage
If you’re at all like me, you’re shooting a ton of raw images. You may not be using a Nikon D800, but even 12-megapixel raw images consume at least 10MB of disk space each, while 12-bit, 16-megapixel images eat up 14MB to 16MB.

Storage begins with the flash memory cards you use in your camera. Recent developments in flash memory storage technology have afforded us products with very high-speed data rates. The fastest 1000x CompactFlash cards can move data off the card at roughly 120MB per second. The fastest SD Cards are now capable of read speeds up to 95 MBps. Write speeds are slower--closer to 70 MBps for the fastest CompactFlash cards, and only in those cameras with high-speed controllers.

But let’s not get too concerned about the write speeds of flash memory cards for our photographer’s PC. It’s moving data from the card to your PC that can become a bottleneck in the workflow. If you have a 32GB flash memory card packed with 350 45MB RAW images, moving them off the card is an exercise in patience with a USB 2.0 reader. Ideally, you’ll want a USB 3.0 reader connected to a USB 3.0 port. I own a US Robotics USB 3.0 reader that works reasonably well.

Moving data from your flash memory card to your system at USB 3.0 speeds is preferable to doing so over USB 2.0.

PC Storage Guidelines
Where do you put all those photographs? Whatever you do, don’t store them on the boot drive if you can avoid it. At a minimum, you’ll want two drives in your PC. Currently, I have a single, 512GB solid-state drive as my boot drive. A half-terabyte is enough to hold all my applications, as well. My secondary drive is a single 2TB, 7200-rpm Seagate Barracuda XT. If you’re concerned about data integrity, you might want a RAID 1 array for your secondary drive, which holds all the Windows user folders, including photo storage. (RAID mirrors two physical drives. You get only half the space, but each volume is a duplicate of the other, preserving your data if one drive fails. Remember, though, that even RAID 1 is no substitute for a good backup plan.)

I need to hammer home two key points when it comes to desktop PC storage for photographers:
Have more than one physical drive. A good combination consists of an SSD for a boot drive and a large-capacity hard drive or RAID 1 array as secondary storage. Even if you’re using standard rotating storage, having two physical drives will improve performance. By keeping applications on the primary drive and photo storage on the secondary drive, you help to increase data throughput. More-sophisticated users can put scratch files on the secondary drive as well, also improving performance.Develop a good backup strategy.

Even if you’re running a RAID 1 array, you aren't completely safe from disaster, since a catastrophic PC failure can kill the array. Making regularly scheduled backups of your photos is critical.

Be somewhat wary of using external drives as primary storage. I’ve had drives go into sleep mode at awkward times, or lose sync over eSATA. Even with high-performance standards such as eSATA and Thunderbolt, external drive connections aren’t always reliable. External drives can be handy for backups, however. I happen to use a NAS (network-attached storage) system for backups, but locally attached external storage is fine. Just make sure you have enough capacity.

For laptops, try to avoid 5400-rpm or slower hard drives. It’s great to have a lot of capacity, but most photo applications create a large scratch file on the storage device, and waiting for a slow drive to grind through your editing chores is no fun.

What About the Cloud?
People have spilled lot of virtual ink discussing whether to back up data to cloud storage. I don’t use cloud storage for general backups--it’s expensive and time-consuming. If you’re a subscriber to online photo sharing sites, though, you often can use such services as a kind of cloud backup just for your photos. For example, Flickr Pro costs only $20 per year, and allows unlimited uploads of full-resolution images.
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How to Install Ice Cream Sandwich on Your Kindle Fire

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 13:54:00 +0000

With a vibrant 7-inch IPS display and a 1GHz dual-core processor, the $199 Kindle Fire can make for one lovely tablet. With a bit of work--but no hardware modifications--you can set up Android 4.0 on your Kindle Fire and thenceforth use the device as a powerful general-purpose tablet despite its incredibly low price.

Email, games, Web browsing (with Chrome for Android or any other browser)--the Kindle Fire can do it all.

This guide is directly based on the excellent guide written by XDA Developers user Kinfauns. Kinfauns's guide and his Kindle Fire for Beginners guide are highly recommended reading, but they're fairly lengthy. We've simplified the process and then tested it ourselves, so we can walk you through all of steps; but please use caution when tinkering with your gear, and understand that PCWorld accepts no responsibility for the consequences. That said, read on for a quick step-by-step procedure that you can follow to transform your Kindle Fire into an Android 4.0 tablet!

Ingredients
You will need:
A Kindle Fire with a full battery (if it's not full, take time to recharge it fully).A USB cable for connecting the Kindle Fire to your computer.A Windows computer that you have Administrator rights for.fbmode by XDA Developers user Pokey9000.The FIREFIREFIRE bootloader for Kindle Fire.The TeamWin Recovery image, also known as TWRP.The Kindle Fire Utility, a third-party toolkit that simplifies many tasks and includes vital drivers.An ICS (Android 4.0) ROM for the Kindle Fire. You can pick one from this list of ROMs. For this wow-to, we'll be using AOKP, a well-regarded third-party ROM. The latest AOKP version at the time of this writing is build 38, but it's a good idea to check for the most recent version.[Optional] The Google Apps bundle, including Gmail, Google Play, and other essential Android apps. This is packaged separately from the ROM for legal reasons. If you download AOKP, you can find Google Apps for AOKP release 38, under GApps (the last link on the page).A willingness to void your warranty and to use the Windows command line. This how-to does not use graphical tools.Install the Kindle Fire Drivers
For this procedure to work, your computer must correctly recognize the Kindle Fire as an Android device.

Here's how to make that happen:

1. If your Kindle Fire is connected to your computer, unplug it.

2. The KFU zip contains a folder called Kindle Fire Utility. Unzip the contents of this folder into a new folder, c:\kfu.

3. Run the install_drivers.bat file that's in the c:\kfu folder. Windows will pop up a UAC prompt, and then start the Kindle Fire Driver Installer.

4. As you step through the installer, you'll receive a Windows Security alert warning you that the drivers are not signed. Install the drivers anyway.

5. The installer should complete successfully and show a confirmation dialog with the driver name:

Kindle Fire driver installation confirmation.

Verify That the Drivers Were Successfully Installed

Before doing anything risky with your Kindle Fire, make sure that your PC fully recognizes it as an Android device:

1. Connect the Kindle Fire to your computer and wait for a few moments while Windows recognizes it (even if you've plugged it in before).

2. Run Device Manager (Click Start, right-click My Computer, and then select Manage > Device Manager).

3. You should see the Kindle Fire registered as an Android Composite ADB Interface, under Android Phone in the Device Manager tree.

If you see this listing, you're good to go. If this isn't exactly what you see, you'll need to do some troubleshooting; for that, refer to the original guide which has an extended troubleshooting section under the heading "What can I do if the drivers won't load?"
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How to Get Started With CSS

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 09:55:00 +0000

I've already discussed how you can learn to code for free using languages such as Ruby and JavaScript, but this time we'll explore an even more basic language that can help to make your websites pop. Cascading Style Sheets is like HTML's cooler, more artistic sibling: While HTML handles the structure and content of your website, CSS allows you to add cutting-edge design to it. This guide tells you everything you need to know to get started making better-looking websites fast.

Many people just getting to know CSS think of it as a fancy way of handling HTML properties such as text formatting and background images--and for small-scale examples on simple pages, that's largely true. You can manipulate many of the properties that CSS affects through pure HTML instead (though not as well), and if you're just looking to change the font size on your page, CSS is actually more difficult to use than HTML.

What makes CSS worthwhile is the number of design options it opens up for you that are difficult--or impossible--to accomplish with HTML alone. HTML gives you just a handful of text properties to manipulate; CSS gives you properties such as color, direction, letter-spacing, line-height, text-align, text-decoration, text-indent, text-shadow, text-transform, vertical-align, white-space, and word-spacing. And I haven't even gotten to the nontext options.

DocHub is an excellent reference tool for learning new CSS commands.

For a full list of CSS properties, you can check out a handy glossary on Dochub, but for now let's look at just two of the more interesting ones. Since we couldn't actually write HTML and CSS code in a Web page without causing trouble for the PCWorld CMS, we've taken the liberty of providing images of some example code and what it looks like on a live page.

For starters, CSS allows you to add and modify a border for any element on a page. The following code produces a solid, 5-pixel-wide red border around the whole paragraph.

CSS experts will note that there is a much shorter way to write this code (they'll also frown on writing the code inline at all), but it provides a good example of CSS formatting.

You write inline CSS in the tag itself, using the style attribute. Basically you write your HTML tags as usual, and then add CSS in the format "css-property: property-value;" right inside. Any arbitrary CSS can go inside the style attribute. For instance, if we wanted to add a drop shadow to that paragraph in addition to the border, we'd change the code to the following line.

You may have noticed that the box-shadow attribute we added has more than one value. That's because the box-shadow attribute allows for shorthand formatting, another timesaving feature of CSS. In shorthand formatting, instead of specifying each related value of a property individually, you can specify the values in a standardized order to save time and characters. In the example above, we specify the height of the drop shadow, its width, and its color.

The border attribute has a similar shorthand, and we could save a lot of space by writing our code in the following format, which would produce the same results.

These cool visual tricks are really just the window dressing of CSS. The language's true strength comes from its ability to quickly and effectively target style effects to any part of your website thanks to powerful selectors. Learning CSS also allows you to standardize your design across multiple pages on your site using a single, easily modifiable external style sheet. Both of these features take months or years to fully master, but I can quickly demonstrate how and why you'd use CSS with a few simple examples.

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How to Use a Kindle DX as a PC Display

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 06:13:00 +0000

Compared with other Kindle models, Amazon's Kindle DX is gargantuan. Its 9.7-inch E Ink screen provides ample space for reading books and viewing graphs and images. But what if you could use all of those E Ink pixels for something more creative, such as displaying your Windows desktop? As it turns out, with a few simple tricks you can use the Kindle DX as a computer display that can show anything your usual monitor can show. (Granted, E Ink's grayscale display can't perform or refresh as quickly as a color LCD can, so you're best off using this screen for static content such as documents or Web pages.)

In this guide I'll explain how to do it. First, however, some credit where credit is due: People originally showcased this method on TinyApps.org, demonstrating the procedure on a Mac. After working with those folks, I was easily able to apply it to Windows 7 as well. Setting your Kindle DX up as a second monitor is a great trick, but it also can be useful in situations where screen glare on your regular monitor is hurting your eyes.

Ingredients

To get started, you need a Kindle DX, its USB cable, and a PC. You also need a few software components:

Jailbreak Your Kindle DX

Obviously you're about to do something the Kindle DX wasn't meant to do out of the box. To make it smart enough for this trick, you have to jailbreak it. Jailbreaking is a pretty painless procedure. Start by connecting the Kindle DX to your computer and waiting for Windows to mount it as a USB storage device (this should happen automatically after a moment). Next, from Kindle-jailbreak-0.10.N.zip, extract the file called update_jailbreak_0.10.N_dxg_install.bin. Place this file in the root of your Kindle (not in the documents folder).

Next, disconnect the Kindle DX from the computer. Switch it on, and then navigate to the Kindle Settings menu by selecting Menu > Settings. Within the Settings screen, press Menu again, and select the Update Your Kindle option. Press the five-way controller to begin the update process, and the Kindle DX will pop up a confirmation prompt; press OK, and the update will begin.

Important: The update will now fail, and show a warning to that effect. Don't worry, this is normal; the jailbreak software still worked, and everything is fine. At this point, your Kindle should now reboot itself.

Install USB Networking

Once the Kindle DX reboots, connect it to your computer again and mount it as a USB storage device. Next, open Kindle-usbnetwork-0.37.N.zip and extract the file called update_usbnetwork_0.37.N_dxg_install.bin. Place update_usbnetwork_0.37.N_dxg_install.bin into the Kindle's root directory, and then repeat the rooting procedure I outlined above to install the USB Networking file on the Kindle.

Install the Kindle VNC Viewer

With USB Networking installed (but not yet active), connect the Kindle DX to your computer again, mounting it as a USB storage device. Unzip kindlevncviewer.zip, and drag the kindlevncviewer folder into the root folder of the Kindle.

Install and Configure TightVNC Server on the PC

You're done with the Kindle DX, and now it is time to set things up on the PC. First, install TightVNC and run the TightVNC Server application. Next, right-click the TightVNC system tray icon, and open the Configuration menu.

Change the 'Main server port' to 5901, and uncheck the Require VNC authentication option. Click Apply or OK, and then leave TightVNC Server running.

Start Networking on the Kindle DX

You are now ready to start USB networking on the Kindle DX. If the e-reader is still connected to the PC, disconnect it and navigate to its home screen. Next, tap the Del key on the Kindle DX keyboard. A prompt will appear. Type ;debugOn and press Return. Note the semicolon at the beginning of the command; you can produce it by using the Sym key. Next, tap Del again. Type `usbNetwork and press Return. This command starts with a backtick, which you also produce via the Sym key. Make sure that it's a backtick, not a single quotation mark. Once you have that, tap Del one last time. Type ;debugOff and press Return.

Great job! Your Kindle DX is now ready to create a virtual network with your PC, over the USB connection. Use the USB cable to connect the Kindle DX to the PC.

Configure Networking on the PC

When you connect the Kindle DX now, Windows will not mount it as a USB storage device. Instead, Windows will install a new device driver for it. This process takes a moment, but does not require any intervention on your part. Simply wait until you see 'Ready to use' pop up on the screen. When that appears, it is time to configure this new connection on your PC. In Windows 7, navigate to the Network Connections menu by opening Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network Connections, and locate the 'USB Ethernet/RNDIS Gadget' connection. Right-click that connection and select Properties; then, within the properties list, scroll down to 'Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)'. Open the Properties menu, select Use the following IP address, and enter 192.168.2.1 for the address and 255.255.255.0 for the netmask. Click OK, and then click OK again to close the connection properties window.

Establish a Telnet Connection

Now you have to connect to the Kindle DX from the computer, and control it via Telnet. Run the PuTTY application (or your Telnet app of choice) and set up a new connection. Since this will be a Telnet connection, select Telnet under connection type (instead of SSH, which is the default). You want to connect to 192.168.2.2 (which is your Kindle DX), port 23. With those Telnet session settings in place, click Open. You should see a welcome dialog box signaling a successful connection.

Adjust Orientation and Start VNC Viewer on the Kindle DX

To whip your Kindle DX into shape as an auxillary PC display, tap the Kindle's aA button and reorient the screen so that it is horizontal (like your computer monitor). Make sure that TightVNC Server is still running on the computer--you will be connecting to it in a moment.

Using your Telnet client (PuTTY or your app of choice), send the commands highlighted in bold below:

[root@kindle root]# /etc/init.d/netwatchd stop[root@kindle root]# /etc/init.d/powerd stop[root@kindle root]# /mnt/us/kindlevncviewer/kvncviewer.sh 192.168.2.1:1 &The Moment of Truth

If everything proceeds correctly, your Kindle DX should look like this:

Congratulations! Enjoy your extra display.

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How to Maximize Battery-Life While Traveling

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 03:00:00 +0000

Admit it: Your carry-on bag is stuffed full of digital gear you can’t bear to leave at home. Not only will your iPhone, iPad, or MacBook keep you entertained while en route, they’ll make great navigation, research, and photo tools once you’ve reached your destination. But keeping these devices charged up when you’re constantly on-the-go or stuck in the air can be a challenge. But there are a few things you can do to extend battery life and save power.

Battery cases

Mophie Juice Pack for iPhone

A battery case for your iPhone is a great accessory to keep in your carry-on. These cases add extra battery life to your iPhone while also keeping it safe from the occasional drop and bump. Most of these cases sport dock-connector plugs that pair up with the iPhone’s 30-pin port, which is how they deliver the juice to your iPhone. The only downside is that you can't use any dock-cradle accessories without removing the iPhone from the case.

One of our favorite battery charging cases is the Mophie Juice Pack Plus (). It just about doubles your iPhone’s battery life, doesn’t add too much extra weight, and you can still sync your iPhone using the included USB-to-Micro-USB cable. Plus, it has an on/off switch, which lets you control when the case sends juice to your phone.

Sol’s Solar-Powered Charging Case () is another solid option which provides a few different charging options: you can charge your phone using the sun’s rays, bright indoor lighting, or via USB. If you’re lounging on the beach without an outlet in sight, it'll keep your iPhone juiced.

There are also external battery cases for the iPad, which is great if you plan on watching videos while on an airplane. MiPow’s Juice Book is a folio-style leather case with one of MiPow's Power Tubes embedded in the case’s spine. This Power Tube provides 6600mAh to boost the iPad’s battery life when it gets low—just plug it in to your iPad’s dock-connector port when you need more juice, and unplug it when you’re done. The Power Tube can charge your iPhone or iPod, too.

Pack one charger

Bring your iPad's 10-Watt USB power adapter to charge your iPad and iPhoneIt isn't necessary to bring the two chargers that came with your iPhone and iPad; save space by bringing just the one that came with your iPad. Visually, the iPad charger is bigger, with prongs that can be pushed in and pulled out of the square body, similar to that of a MacBook; the iPhone charger is smaller, and the prongs are not retractable.

The iPad and iPhone wall chargers also supply different power levels. Since the iPad has a heftier charging requirement than the iPhone, it has a heftier power adapter—a 10-Watt USB power adapter, compared to the iPhone’s USB power adapter, which has an output of 5 watts. You can use the iPhone’s adapter for your iPad, but it will take significantly longer to reach a full charge, especially if you have a third-generation iPad.

If you’re traveling with your MacBook as well, consider the TwelveSouth PlugBug. It attaches to your MacBook’s power brick and allows you to charge a USB device (like your iPhone or iPad) while charging your laptop at the same time.

Battery saving apps

For your MacBook or MacBook Air, you can use a battery-monitoring app to keep a closer eye on your energy supply. Some of them, such as Low Battery Saver (), let you customize your Mac’s battery warnings. That way, you’ll have more of a heads up on how much battery life remains.

Deep Sleep is another handy app which “hibernates” your MacBook instead of just putting it to sleep when you close the lid while it’s still powered on. (Even in sleep mode, your Mac draws power from the battery.) The utility saves the contents of RAM to your hard drive and stops drawing any power at all from the battery when your MacBook is not in use. It takes a little longer for your Mac to wake up from hibernation, but all of your apps and documents will be restored just as you left them, and your battery will be less taxed.

Check your settings

Saving your battery's charge can be as simple as tweaking some settings on your iPhone, iPad, or MacBook.

For your iPad or iPhone:

· Turn off Wi-Fi and 3G when you’re not using them. Go to Settings -> Wi-Fi, then toggle the switch to Off. Same goes for Bluetooth: turn it off if you’re not using it. Go to Settings -> General -> Bluetooth, and toggle the switch to Off.

· Turn off, or limit, your data push-notifications from your other apps. You’ll have to do this manually for each app. Go to Settings -> Notifications, then tap each app that you’d like to adjust and toggle Notification Center switch to Off.

· Turn off location services completely. This will save a lot of power, not to mention some money if you’re traveling internationally. Go to Settings -> Location Services, and toggle the switch Off.

· Use the Auto-Brightness feature. It's found in Settings -> Brightness & Wallpaper. Auto-Brightness will automatically adjust your screens’ brightness based on ambient light conditions. Manually lowering the screens’ brightness yourself can also extend battery life.

· Don't let it get too hot or too cold. Apple recommends keeping your device between 32 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit. So if you’re traveling anywhere with extreme temperature conditions, consider leaving your iPad or iPhone somewhere that's insulated from the ambient temperature.

(For more battery-saving tips, see Apple's own battery guide.)

Adjust the graphics setting in the Energy Saver preference to save some juice.

If you're using a MacBook—or, more specifically, if you're running OS X Lion on a 15- or 17-inch MacBook Pro—go to the Energy Saver pane in System Preferences. There you'll find a checkbox for Automatic Graphics Switching. Check this box—if it's not checked, the Mac will always use the faster graphics processor, which uses more power.

You should also adjust your brightness by dimming the screen as much as you can. A dim screen will help you maximize battery life, but you need to make sure you can still comfortably see your display. Also, turn off AirPort and Bluetooth when you’re not using them, and make sure you don’t have any programs running in the background: Quit all apps, disconnect peripherals, and eject discs in your disc drive if you’re not using them.

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How to Get Started With Music on Google Play

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 23:05:00 +0000

When Google launched Google Play (originally called Google Music) last year, a lot of hype surrounded the service, since it represented the search giant's entry into the world of music streaming. But now the hype has largely died down, and many Google users remain confused about what the service allows them to do, and how Google’s music locker works. We have the info you need to start uploading and streaming your music with Google Play as efficiently as possible.

Installing Google Play

Google Play’s primary purpose is to let you upload your existing music (up to 20,000 songs as of this writing; sorry, music aficionados) to Google’s servers so that you can store them, stream them, and redownload them to any computer connected to the Web.

You need to install Google’s Music Manager software, which helps you find and upload your music. The application is available from the Google Play store; if you haven’t signed up for the Google Play store yet, the Google Play home page will default to a download page for the program.

After you download the Music Manager app, install it and configure it for your PC. The setup process is straightforward; after you sign in with your Google email address and password, it will ask you to indicate the main music library on your computer.

By default the application will zero in on your iTunes music library; if the bulk of your music is located elsewhere, you can point Google in the right direction by selecting that folder manually. The Music Manager will scan the selected folder and begin preparing all compatible tracks for upload. The application will also add iTunes playlists, music ratings, and play counts to the Google Play library, further easing the transition from iTunes.

Hurry Up, Upload, and Wait

The main drawback to Google Play is that the uploading is slow. In my tests, uploading my library of 7000 or so songs took the better part of two days. Luckily, Google Play makes the process mostly painless by keeping the upload client running in the background and turning it off automatically when you shut down or restart your computer.

This kind of background uploading can hamper your PC's online performance, but in my tests it didn’t consume too much bandwidth; while uploading music, I was still able to watch streaming video or perform other bandwidth-heavy tasks with relative ease. If you do need to throttle the Music Manager's upload speed, use the 'Bandwidth available for uploading' option under the Advanced section of the application's preferences menu.

Google Play can be finicky about file formats, too. Unlike the situation with Spotify, which tries to match unsupported tracks with songs from its library, any DRM-protected tracks you might have bought from the iTunes Music Store or other similar services likely won’t make the jump to Google’s servers.

Google Play Web Player

The music that you do upload to Google Play is available pretty much anywhere, as long as you use Google Play's (admittedly simple and well-designed) music player. The Music Manager tries to assess your favorite tracks intelligently by analyzing their rating and play-count information if those details are available (it counts iTunes ratings, for instance, but it doesn't yet support some less-popular music players), and it uploads those tracks first. The result is that your favorite 10 to 15 albums should be available in the first hour or so after you start uploading, assuming a stable broadband connection.

Log in to your Google account, and point your browser to the Google Play Web Player. Users of Windows Media Player, iTunes, or similar music players should be familiar with the Web Player layout: You can access playlists, albums, or artists using the navigation bar on the left, and you can choose a specific track to play from your music library on the right. Of course, this is a Google product, so the player also has a search bar near the top of the page for finding a particular uploaded album or track.

A few convenient keyboard shortcuts in the Web Player can make your life a little easier. The usual keyboard shortcuts are here--pressing the spacebar pauses or plays the current track, for example, and tapping the arrow keys lets you advance and rewind through tracks. In addition, you'll find some Google-specific keyboard shortcuts: For instance, press the I key for an algorithmically generated playlist based on the current track, or press the / (slash) key to jump to the search box and find your favorite tracks.

Google Music Store

Of course, Google would prefer that you buy tunes from the Google Play music store, so Google Play is designed to work best with those purchased tracks. That said, songs bought from the Google store come as high-quality DRM-free MP3 files, and they cost about as much as songs from the iTunes store.

In fact, the two content stores are similar enough that you have no truly compelling reason to choose one over the other. Google lacks some songs that iTunes has (Google has yet to sign a deal with Warner Music, for example). However, when you purchase music from Google, the tracks appear in your Google Play library automatically, an intriguing feature if you want to make Google your primary music player.

Mobile Player

Android phone and tablet users can get the most out of Google’s music service, thanks to the Google Play Android app. In addition to letting you stream music from your mobile device, the app allows you to store any playlist for playing offline, a handy feature to have when a Wi-Fi or cellular connection isn’t available.

iOS users desperate for a Google Play fix can still access the Web Player through any browser (including Safari); of course, Apple users have no way to use offline mode without a dedicated Google Play app.

Now that I've shown you what Google Play is and how it works, I have to note a few things. If you are a hard-core music fan, Google Play is not an ideal fit for you unless you are deeply tied to the Android ecosystem. In contrast, if you are a casual user of Google’s Web services, you'll find Play useful as a way to back up your favorite tracks so that you can enjoy them from any Internet-connected computer in case you lose access to your home library or suffer a catastrophic data loss that wipes out your music collection.

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How to Turn Your Laptop Into a Typewriter

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 19:05:00 +0000

Writing requires focus: You need to sit down with your thoughts and just plow through your work. Regrettably, a modern computer isn't that great for focusing on something as mundane as text. A word processor surrounds your text with so many flashy buttons and toolbars that you might sometimes feel as if the words you're trying to write belong in the backseat. Then there's the matter of chat pop-ups, email dings, Twitter chirps, and the entire panoply of modern distractions that conspire to steal your focus.

Although full-screen text editors such as WriteMonkey and WriteRoom eliminate most interface distractions, you are still just a single Alt-Tab away from a world of temptations and time-wasting activities (or "research"). So when you really want to get some writing done, sometimes a dedicated typewriter is what you need: You see no notifications, you can't switch to other windows, and nothing comes between you and your text.

In this article, I will show you how to take an old laptop and convert it into a text-only typewriter with zero distractions, but with wireless connectivity to your home network, and seamless Dropbox synchronization for your text. This setup allows you to write on your typewriter, and then edit your work in a full-fledged word processor on your main computer (or on the same computer, booted into Windows).

Download Ubuntu Server

Our typewriter will be based on Ubuntu Server. I know this sounds like overkill: Why take a server-grade operating system that supports enterprise hardware, and use it as a typewriter? I chose Ubuntu Server for three reasons: First, it's strictly a console OS, so it has no X-Windows to disable. Also, it has a polished and well-tested setup routine, as well as robust hardware support. With any luck, you won't have to tinker with drivers for Ubuntu Server to correctly identify and use all of your laptop's hardware, and most important, its Wi-Fi interface.

Obviously, the first step is to get your hands on Ubuntu. Navigate to the Ubuntu Server download page; Ubuntu recommends going with the 64-bit build, but for our purposes, the 32-bit version works better because it supports older hardware. Change the drop-down to say 32-bit, and click the big red Start download button. Once you have the file, use it to make a bootable disk. To do so, on the same page, go to step 2 and select the option to create a bootable CD or USB stick (I chose the latter). Follow the detailed instructions on the page, and you should end up with a CD or USB stick that you can use to install Ubuntu Server on your laptop.

Install Ubuntu Server

Installing Ubuntu Server is pretty simple, but it isn't a mindless process: Although the text-only installer is clear, you still have to read each screen and understand what you're doing. First, insert your media of choice; for the purposes of this guide, put the CD you've burned into the laptop, or plug in the USB drive you prepared in the previous step. Next, configure your laptop to boot from either USB or CD (whichever is more apropos). How you accomplish this step depends on the laptop you own; on my Toshiba laptop, I had to press F2 as the computer was booting, enter the BIOS, and go to the Boot tab. There, I changed the boot sequence so that 'USB Flash Disk' was first. Consult your laptop manual or manufacturer's website for more information.

Time to start the installation process. Once the laptop boots from your CD or USB stick, you will see a text menu with the Ubuntu logo. Pick the second option: Install Ubuntu on a Hard Disk. Move forward through the setup process by selecting your language, your country, and your keyboard layout.

Next, it's time to configure the Wi-Fi adapter. Ubuntu should almost always correctly identify your network adapters and let you choose either the wired or wireless one. The wireless one is usually called 'wlan0'. Select it, and then manually type the name of the network to which you wish to connect, as well as its access password. Both the name and the password are case-sensitive. You will also have to pick a host name for your computer; I went with 'typewriter'.

You will have to make room for Ubuntu, which probably entails resizing your laptop's hard-drive partitions. Choose the first option, Guided - resize. Confirm writing changes to disk, select a maximum size, and let Ubuntu resize the partition. This procedure will take a long time (around 20 minutes, for me). Next, configure your user credentials by entering your full name, a username, and a password.

Important: Ubuntu will now offer to encrypt the home directory. Do not use this option (select No). The reason for this is that we want the computer to automatically log in once it boots, and it won't be able to do that if you encrypt the home directory. This is just a typewriter, so we won't be emphasizing security.

Once that's done, let Ubuntu proceed with updates. It will download packages off the Internet, and eventually it will ask you about what software you wish to install. Leave everything unchecked--you don't want to install anything other than the bare-bones setup. Make sure to install the GRUB boot loader, as this will let you actually boot into Ubuntu.

If everything completes successfully, congratulations! You're done installing Ubuntu. Pull out the USB key, or eject the CD. Once you reboot the computer, you will see the GRUB selection screen. Choose the first option (Ubuntu); this selection will boot the machine into your new operating system.

Set Up Dropbox

Now that you have Ubuntu ready, you're going to set up Dropbox integration. This step is the trickiest part of this how-to, and it involves quite a bit of manual typing. The process is based on the excellent tutorial by Ubuntu Server GUI, with a few minor changes.

1. Log in: Enter your new Ubuntu Server installation by using the username and password you chose during setup. Your laptop should be automatically connected to the Internet (assuming that you are on the same Wi-Fi network you configured during setup).

2. Download Dropbox: Type the following line.

wget -O dropbox.tar.gz "http://www.dropbox.com/download/?plat=lnx.x86"

Note that Dropbox offers 32-bit and 64-bit packages. You're installing the 32-bit one (because you installed the 32-bit Ubuntu Server edition).

3. Unzip Dropbox: Type the following line.

tar -xzvf dropbox.tar.gz

4. Start the Dropbox daemon: This is a tricky part of the process, requiring a second computer and some accurate typing. Enter the following line.

~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

Now comes the tricky part. The daemon will start running, but it will merely tell you that it isn't linked to an account yet. It will repeatedly output a message that looks similar to the lines below:

This client is not linked to any account...
Please visit https://www.dropbox.com/cli_link?host_id=1c1497d78b543178b9349a7c1a8b087a&cl=en_US to link this machine.

Keep it running and outputting this message, and move to the next step.

5. Manually copy the URL: On a separate machine, one with a Web browser, go to the Dropbox website and log in to your account. Next, you will have to manually type the entire URL you see on your laptop into the browser on this other machine. Yes--the whole thing, long argument and all. If you're having trouble copying it accurately, ask a friend to dictate it to you.

Assuming that you got it right, the Dropbox website will request your password again, and then the message on your laptop will change to say:

Client successfully linked, Welcome Erez!

(It would probably not call you Erez, of course.) You may now press Ctrl-C to stop the daemon, and continue to the next step.

6. Get dropbox.py: To make working with Dropbox easier, download Dropbox's helper Python script into the .dropbox folder, and make it executable by typing the following lines.

wget -O ~/.dropbox/dropbox.py "http://www.dropbox.com/download?dl=packages/dropbox.py"
chmod 755 ~/.dropbox/dropbox.py

7. Start the daemon: Start the Dropbox daemon again, this time using the Python script.

~/.dropbox/dropbox.py start

8. Exclude all folders: Since we are using this laptop as a simple typewriter, let's exclude all Dropbox folders so that they don't sync to this laptop and clutter it up.

cd ~/Dropbox
~/.dropbox/dropbox.py exclude add *

You should now see an animated prompt that looks like [...] while Dropbox works to exclude the folders. This process will take a few moments, at the end of which it should say:

Excluded:
documents
pictures
[all of your other folders]

9. Create a new folder: Create a 'typewriter' folder to save your files in.

mkdir ~/Dropbox/typewriter

You should see this folder pop up on your main computer instantly, showing that Dropbox sync is indeed working.

Configure the Boot Process

Ubuntu is installed, and Dropbox is configured--you're almost done. Now it is time to control what happens when you turn the computer on, so that you can simply start writing after turning the computer on. After all, a typewriter never asks you for your password.

First, you need to edit the .bashrc file to make Dropbox and a text editor start on boot. The Dropbox.py script contains an autostart option, but this did not work on my Ubuntu Server installation; if you have the same trouble, try my workaround by editing the .bashrc file as follows.

nano ~/.bashrc

Within the .bashrc file, scroll all the way to the end, and type the following lines.

python ~/.dropbox/dropbox.py start
cd ~/Dropbox/typewriter
nano

The first line starts Dropbox, the second one switches to the 'typewriter' Dropbox folder, and the third starts a text editor. You can also use Vim if you're more comfortable with that, of course.

Now let's test to make sure this setup works. Reboot your computer by typing the following line.

sudo reboot now

Enter your password if prompted, and your computer should reboot. Log in to Ubuntu again, and you should find yourself in a text editor, ready to write. You can test whether Dropbox is working by saving a file and seeing it pop up on your other computer in a moment. Now, let's configure automatic login. Exit Nano by pressing Ctrl-X, and type the following line.

sudo nano /etc/init/tty1.conf

Again, type your password if requested. You are now editing a configuration file, the last line of which starts with an 'exec' command. Replace that line with:

exec /bin/login -f USERNAME < /dev/tty1 > /dev/tty1 2>&1

Where USERNAME is your own username, of course. Be sure to type this line accurately. Then save the file (Ctrl-O) and exit (Ctrl-X).

Now, let's test again to make sure everything is working correctly. Reboot the computer to see if automatic login works:

sudo reboot now

Your computer should now restart, load Ubuntu, log you in, and run your text editor within the Dropbox folder. Once you are done working on your text and want to shut down the computer, exit the text editor and type the following into the command prompt:

sudo shutdown now -h

That's it: You can now work on your text in a truly distraction-free environment, save it, and instantly retrieve it from another computer for further editing. Just don't forget to turn off your smartphone while writing.

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How to Undo RAID: Best Practices

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 15:30:00 +0000

It seemed like a simple, relatively safe task: I needed to undo the RAID array on my PC.

As its primary boot drive, my production system used a RAID 0 array consisting of a pair of Corsair Force GT 240GB drives paired to create a single 480GB volume. All of the valuable data lived on a single 2TB, 7200RPM Western Digital RE drive. The system is based on a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard running a Core i7 3930K CPU. Intel's RapidStore storage software manages the array in Windows.

One day, RapidStore presented me with a "SMART event" notice, indicating that the drive had generated an error from the SMART monitor built into the drive controller. SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) constantly monitors the drive for potential failure conditions, and generates an error when it detects such a condition. Unfortunately, SMART rarely provides specifics about the source of the problem; a single SMART event may turn out to be nothing at all, or it may be a crucial harbinger of imminent drive failure.

One of these Force GT drives generated a SMART error.

The first thing I did was fire up Acronis Backup and Restore and made a full backup image of the array. Then I went online to search for a replacement drive. I found a Crucial 512GB M4 SSD for under $400. I had to double-check the price--$399 for 512GB seemed pretty low--but it turned out to be the real deal; even on Crucial's website you can pick up this model for just $412. The drive sports full SATA 6-gbps support, and reviews show it to be a reasonable (albeit not fabulous) performer. Since my main system's input/output needs aren't especially heavy, it sounded perfect, offering slightly more storage and substantially reduced risk. I figured that, after installing the Crucial SSD, I would no longer need to run RAID.

So I ordered one, and waited nervously for a couple of days until the drive arrived.

Clone Wars

My main system is based around an LGA 2011 system, which uses a fairly recent version of Intel's ICH RAID controller. The Acronis software made backing up an image of the boot array in Windows to a secondary drive easy.

I unpacked the Crucial M4, which looked fairly unassuming.

The Crucial M4, 512GB of SSD for well under $1 per gigabyte.

I attached the SSD as a secondary drive and canceled the Windows message that asked me to create a volume after booting up. Then I fired up Acronis Backup and Restore, and launched the process to clone a drive. I cloned the drive "as is" (meaning that all of its partitions would be the same size), having discovered on an earlier occasion that this is the best way to guarantee proper cloning of a boot drive. I also confirmed that options to make the cloned drive bootable and to copy the NT signature were selected.

The system rebooted, and Acronis launched as a pre-Windows boot process and cloned the drive. I then set up the drive in the system BIOS to be the boot drive. After restarting the system, everything booted without any trouble.

Feeling pretty confident now, I detached the two Corsair Force GT drives, but kept RAID mode enabled. I even went so far as to blow away the RAID array, leaving the backup drive image I'd made earlier as my only security blanket.

'Boot Drive Inaccessible'

The system attempted to boot, but didn't like the boot drive, despite having just booted from the same drive a few minutes earlier.

At this point I went through a systematic process of boot-drive troubleshooting:

I checked the BIOS to make sure that either RAID mode or AHCI was enabled. Neither would boot.For the sake of completeness, I tried booting with the BIOS set to IDE mode. Still no boot.I also tried booting from a Windows 7 Setup disk and selecting the system. The following error popped up: "This version of Windows repair is incompatible with the version of Windows installed on this system."

That last error message made no sense, as I was using a Windows Ultimate x64 setup disk to attempt to repair a Windows 7 Ultimate x64 installation.

Finally, I tried booting from my most recent Acronis Backup and Restore boot disk. When I selected the image backup file, however, Acronis asked me for my "credentials"--and my Windows login and password failed. I was stymied.

It was time for coffee and a little thinking.

I returned to my office, fired up a laptop, and searched the Acronis website. I discovered a much more recent version of Backup and Restore 11. The version number--11--was the same, but the actual software revision code had changed. I downloaded the new version and created a new Acronis boot disk.

Holding my breath, I booted the Acronis restore disk. I wasn't asked for a password this time. I checked to make sure the NT signature wasn't cloned, but created fresh. The restore went flawlessly. When I rebooted, I was greeted with a Windows screen. Life was good once again.

There was one more wrinkle, however. My Adobe apps needed to be reactivated, possibly because I'd changed the NT signature on the drive. Everything else--games, Windows itself--didn't require this extra attention. To reactivate the Adobe apps, I had to call the Adobe help line, but that call went smoothly, with no issues or roadblocks.

Lessons Learned

I learned several lessons from this experience. Admittedly, they weren't new lessons, but stuff I've had to relearn repeatedly:

If you're planning to clone a drive, copying the NT signature as-is doesn't always work. Create a fresh one every time.Don't wipe your old boot drive until you're 100 percent sure that your system is booting properly off the new drive.Make sure that you have the latest version of your backup and restore software--particularly if your system is running newer chipsets and storage controllers.

There's still plenty left for me to learn. Setting up and breaking down RAID arrays may seem like child's play, but there's nothing quite like the terror of realizing that you've accidentally destroyed years of private photos, documents, and data during a botched hard drive migration. So play it safe--back up often, and share your PC storage best practices with other readers in the Comments section.

View the original article here

Declare Independence From iTunes With Spotify Premium

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 11:40:00 +0000

Sick of your current music-management software? Invest in a Spotify membership and declare independence from iTunes, Google Music, or any other music app you're fed up with. iTunes in particular is becoming pretty bloated, especially for Windows users--but I’ve barely seen it over the past few months thanks to Spotify and the new ability to upgrade my iOS software on my iPhone itself.

As long as you’re already paying for Spotify Premium, make Spotify’s mobile app your phone’s default music player. Spotify’s hybrid approach--storing your most-played tunes on disk while letting you stream anything from its massive song library--gives you a much larger musical selection on the go. If you’re buying more than an album or two every month, it’ll also save you money.

Here’s the fastest method to make Spotify your default music manager. Since iTunes is the thorniest music-management app to get rid of, I'll use it as my example, but these methods should be just as easy (or even easier) on Android phones running other music-management apps.

Initial Housecleaning

The first step is to make room for Spotify to start managing your tunes by commanding your current music-management app to stop syncing your smartphone with your music collection. iTunes at least makes this process fairly easy: While your phone is synced to your PC, switch to the Music tab in the device management options, and uncheck Sync Your Music. iTunes will warn you that this action will delete all the music off your phone, but since that’s exactly what you want, click OK. Now you should have plenty of room to start syncing with Spotify.

Next, set up Spotify as an iTunes replacement. This step is simple, since Spotify asks whether you want to automatically import your iTunes library the first time you open it. This procedure will not only bring all your local files into the application (as long as you've linked them with your iTunes library) but also import all your iTunes playlists.

If you declined this option when you first started Spotify but want to import your iTunes library now, or if you merely want to import a library from another music manager, that’s simple enough. Open Spotify, navigate to File > Import Playlists, and then choose iTunes, Windows Media Player, or whatever other supported music application Spotify can find on your PC. Keep in mind that Spotify playlist imports sometimes require a bit of cleaning up; in my case, for example, Spotify attempted to sync the iTunes library of each of my computers separately, which resulted in quite a lot of copies of the same material. However, even with a manual check and some deletions, getting your Spotify application set up with all your iTunes music and playlists shouldn’t take more than 5 to 10 minutes.

Syncing

Once Spotify is set up on your computer, it’s time to start syncing your files onto your phone. Again, Spotify makes this step fairly straightforward, but the process involves quite a few more pitfalls that you need to be ready for. First, the good news: All you have to do is connect your phone to the same wireless network as your computer, open Spotify on your PC, and then select your phone under the Devices tab in Spotify's left navigation pane. Click the big Sync this device with Spotify button, and select the playlists you want to download to your phone.

The bad news is that Spotify syncing suffers from a few irritating hiccups. Since it syncs wirelessly, it’s much slower than iTunes syncing by USB. Syncing 3000 or so songs to the Spotify app on my phone took me almost 10 hours. By itself, that wouldn’t be a huge issue, since I could just leave my phone on overnight, but Spotify also stops syncing when you leave your smartphone inactive for too long. Here's hoping that Spotify will patch this glaring error in a future update. For now, though, this limitation makes it difficult to have Spotify sync your whole library in the background. If you’re thinking of using Spotify as a straight replacement for your music app, and if you have a gigantic music library, syncing everything will be a time-consuming process.

Instead, consider being more selective as to which playlists you listen to. Spotify syncing works much more elegantly if you don’t try to make it emulate iTunes exactly, so I suggest adding local files to Spotify gradually. Find 300 to 500 songs you know you’ll want to listen to regularly, and sync those first. Then, when you’re out and about, you can choose to save the music you find yourself streaming too often as an offline mode playlist. You probably won’t find more than 100 songs or so on any given day that you’ll want to add like this, so syncing them should be a fairly quick affair.

Don’t worry about the syncing process eating up your bandwidth. Unless you explicitly tell it to sync over 3G, the Spotify mobile app will wait until you’re on a wireless network. You can just tell it what you want to have permanently downloaded, and it will add those items to your local library the next time you’re near a stable Internet connection.

A Few More Obstacles

You should keep some other small roadblocks in mind as you declare your phone's independence from iTunes. Many of these obstacles are relatively minor and easily solved; you can't delete the iOS default Music app, for instance, even if you don’t have any music synced with it. I suggest hiding it in a folder and ignoring it. Other issues, however, are slightly more serious.

For the most part Spotify should import all of your music and give you access to Spotify’s library of millions of streaming songs, but if you’ve downloaded a lot of DRM-protected music from iTunes or another music store, things get more complicated. Since Spotify won’t be able to play your DRM-protected files, the service automatically matches those tracks with songs that reside in the global Spotify library. Thus, if you’ve bought, say, a Ratatat album with DRM on iTunes (as I did while writing this article), you should still be able to play it in Spotify by streaming it from Spotify’s library.

On rare occasions, Spotify won't be able to find a match for your DRM-protected music in its online library.

At times, however, Spotify won't find a match for one of your DRM-protected songs, and you’ll be unable to play your music. This occurrence should be fairly uncommon (in my library of 7000 songs, I had a grand total of five unplayable tracks, three of which were free iTunes "Song of the Day" selections I haven’t listened to in years), and you can fairly easily resolve the problem by stripping the DRM off of your iTunes track. You’ll need to go through your library and look for tracks listed in red; these are the songs on which you'll have to remove the DRM.

Also, as much as this method frees you from iTunes for everything but backing up your data, it ties you heavily to Spotify. If you ever stop paying for Spotify Premium, you’ll lose access to offline mode, which means that any music you haven’t synced from your local computer--including Spotify copies of your DRM-protected music--won’t be available on your phone any longer.

Nevertheless, as an iTunes replacement, Spotify Premium is a great choice. Spotify comes with its own set of inconveniences and annoyances, but once you get past the basic setup it’s hard to argue with on-demand access to Spotify’s music library on the go. Happy listening!

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How to Use Groupon to Boost Your Ecommerce Business

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 07:50:00 +0000

Groupon is known for its popular daily local business coupon deals. What many online retailers don't know is that the Chicago-based company goes beyond these types of local deals and provides ecommerce business owners with tools and services to cash in on the Groupon craze.

Giving Local Businesses an Online Presence

Launched in November 2008, Groupon leverages collective buying power to offer huge discounts, which are the result of partnering with small business owners who offer the deals. The featured deal-and the business offering it-can be discovered by more than 36 million active Groupon customers through Groupon.com or the mobile Groupon app. For these deals, customers buy the discount certificate and redeem it on their next visit to the business.

The actual cost of running a Groupon is typically a 50-50 split between Groupon and the merchant. For example, if you offer a deal in which consumers spend $25 to get $50 to spend at your restaurant, $12.50 of the deal purchase price goes to Groupon and $12.50 to your business. The promotional value is the responsibility of the merchant.

News: What a Groupon Deal! $12,500 IT Consulting Discount

Nicholas Halliwell, Groupon's manager of merchant public relations, says the company helps merchant partners structure the best deal and put strategies in place to manage the increase in customers and sales. This includes steps such as setting the right deal price and making sure you have considered what additional staff or stock will be needed.

According to Halliwell, a successful Groupon experience requires planning. "Typically what we see-and what we prepare merchants for&mdasdh;is a lot of customers at the beginning of the redemption phase and a lot toward the end right before the extra value is about to expire," he says.

How Can an Ecommerce Owner Use Groupon?

Without a brick-and-mortar location, an online-only business doesn't fit the bill for a typical Groupon deal, since there's no physical place for customers to visit and redeem the certificate. However, Groupon does offer value for online merchants by going beyond local deals and providing ecommerce business owners with a way to cash in on the Groupon craze.

Study: In-Store Shopping Most Trusted, But Buying Online is Overall Favorite

Groupon Goods, available through the Grouponworks.com site, is a deals program designed for businesses that don't have a local store. This consumer products channel is for buying items such as electronics, beauty, home and garden, toys or even sports items.

In explaining how the marketing promotion works, Halliwell describes Groupon Goods as a "conduit," adding, "You buy the product from the merchant but it goes through Groupon."

Since this is a bit different than the daily deals set-up for local merchants, Groupon will work with an online retailer to determine how many items will be made available. A third-party vendor will retrieve the items from the merchant's warehouse and then pack and ship the items to individual customers on behalf of Groupon, who also handles all returns and customer service for the promotion.

Making Groupon Goods Work for You

So far, Groupon Goods appears to be popular with online merchants. Marlon Wilson, owner of the online retail site Exclusive Phone Skins, has already experienced Groupon Goods and is looking forward to running a second deal.

Exclusive Phone Skins saw gross monthly sales increase from about $3,000 to $40,000 during a Groupon Goods promotion.

Wilson started Exclusive Phone Skins in March 2011 as an outfit for selling iPhone and other smartphone cases and accessories online. As a small part-time business, Wilson says he typically did $3,000 per month in sales.

"I'm a customer of Groupon myself, and, since I love the email deals, I started thinking about&how I could offer a Groupon for my own business," he says.

Knowing he could pick up the extra inventory, Wilson got in touch. After reaching out to Groupon, the company did a background check and verified that the inventory was available. (Wilson had to purchase the inventory after negotiating the maximum units to be made available to Groupon and agree on a deal price.)

The deal Exclusive Phone Skins offered was 60 percent off and free shipping. With Groupon Goods, gross sales increased to $40,000 in one month, Wilson says.

For an online retailer considering a Groupon Goods, Wilson recommends that you prepare for an increase in traffic. Groupon has more than 36 million email subscribers-when the deal runs, you have to be ready to please every customer who purchases a voucher.

Another downside: Since the transaction is handled by Groupon on behalf of its customers, you don't have access to the buyer's data, so there are no email addresses to add to your marketing list. However, after Wilson's promotion ended, he says his Web store benefited from regular increased daily traffic, as well as sales on other products that were not included in the deal.

How to Know If Groupon Is Right for Your Business

There's been a lot of talk about Groupon, both good and bad. Some merchants found they weren't prepared for the influx of customers. Others say Groupon is expensive. There's also the large group of merchants satisfied with the Groupon marketing deal.

Groupon does seem to be listening to its merchant partners. In addition to the Groupon Goods option for online retailers, the company also launched a Merchant Center to give small business partners a snapshot of their featured deals and see customers' demographics information, including age, sex and ZIP codes. There's also Groupon Now, which is designed to let merchants set the time of day for redemption during off-peak hours, and Groupon Rewards, which helps build customer loyalty with consumers who buy your Groupon deal.

There's no doubt that using Groupon is attractive to small businesses, mainly because the company run most aspects of the campaign for you. Ecommerce business owners need to do their research first, though. Look at your bottom line and determine if you will still profit after costs, make sure you can handle the increase in traffic and, finally, decide if offering a huge discount deal will benefit your business in the long run.

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How to Edit Photos With Adobe's Camera Raw

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 04:33:00 +0000

For years, you've heard that shooting in RAW is better than shooting JPEGs. Your camera's RAW mode packs significantly more visual information, so it offers the potential to capture better photos. That comes at a cost, however, since you need to do extra work to coax better photos out of your camera. To help you do that, most photo editors come with some sort of mini photo editor that you can use to tweak RAW images. Photoshop Elements calls it Camera Raw; Corel PaintShop Pro calls it Camera RAW Lab. If you've always ignored such programs, give them a second look.

Why Use a RAW Editor?

In a word, convenience.

This is the same reason that I recommend programs such as Lightroom or AfterShot Pro--they dispense with all the graphical-design baggage packed into a full-featured image editor like Adobe Photoshop, and include only the stuff that's important to photographers editing photos. In the same way, a RAW editor is a photo editor stripped to the bone, sporting just the features you need to correct color and exposure. A lot of the time, you could make a few tweaks in the RAW editor and be done, never needing to mess with the bigger Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or PaintShop Pro.

Checking Out Camera Raw

Accessing Adobe's Camera Raw is pretty simple: It pops up automatically whenever you try to open a RAW-format photo in Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. In fact, you might know Camera Raw as "that program you must click OK on in order to get a RAW photo into Photoshop."

If you're using Photoshop Elements and you open a RAW photo, you see something like this:

But instead of instinctively clicking Open Image--which sends the photo along to Photoshop Elements--take a look around. If all you want to do is tweak the photo, everything you need is right here in a streamlined interface.

Near the top of the right pane, you should see three buttons. The first, Basic, is where you'll find all the color and exposure controls. Since you shot the photo in RAW, you know that the white balance might need to be adjusted. Drag the Temperature slider until the color is properly balanced (if you prefer to use a dropper to set the white balance by clicking on a neutral tone in the image, stand by--I'll get to that in a moment). Tint lets you fix the balance between red and green, as you'd expect. And the list of sliders continues from there, with sliders for adjusting overall exposure, recovering blacks, adding a fill light, altering brightness and contrast, and so on.

For more controls, flip to the Detail tab by clicking the second button at the top. Here you can add some sharpening and noise reduction, if you so desire.

That's not all--if you look at the icons at the upper left of the window, over the photo, you'll see controls for common tasks such as zoom and pan, as well as a white balance dropper (click on a white or gray patch in the photo to adjust the colors automatically). You can even crop and straighten the photo, though you don't have a way to specify a particular aspect ratio, such as 8 by 10.

Lossless Editing

When you're done with the photo, you can click Open Image, which will send the edited photo to Photoshop Elements with all those edits already applied. Or, if you did everything you needed in Camera Raw and don't want to do any additional editing in Photoshop, you can click Done. All of your edits save automatically to an XML file in the same folder as the photo. The cool thing is that you've made lossless edits to the RAW file--the RAW file itself is unchanged, but anytime you open the image in Photoshop Elements, it will read the edits you made in Camera Raw from the XML file and apply them automatically. To undo any of the edits, just open the photo in Camera Raw again.

Other RAW Editors

If you have a different photo editor, its RAW editor should work much the same. The full version of Photoshop (with a "CS" in its title) uses a slightly different version of Camera Raw, packed with a lot of additional features.

If you use Corel PaintShop Pro, its Camera RAW Lab looks like this:

As you can see, it has all the essentials as well--white balance, exposure controls, color adjustments, and so on--though its features are arranged on a single screen. If you're used to Adobe's Camera Raw, however, you'll find a few things missing. Corel's RAW editor has no sharpening, cropping, or straightening tools, for example, so you'll need to open the photo in PaintShop Pro for those features. Camera RAW Lab is focused much more on basic exposure tweaks.

No matter which program you use, though, a RAW mini-editor can be a huge timesaver. If you shoot in RAW, these programs are more than just intermediate clicks to get your photo into a full-fledged editor. Check them out today.

View the original article here

Geek-It-Yourself: How to Learn New Tech Skills and Make Your Own Projects

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 01:17:00 +0000

Every day here at GeekTech, we feature all sorts of inventive projects--everything from cardboard robots to music made by scanning barcodes (and that's just in the last week!). The imagination and ingenuity of the people who make these sorts of creations is incredible... but it's also enough to make you feel a little jealous.

But just because you don't know everything about coding or engineering shouldn't stop you making something cool, because doing your own hacks is a great way to teach yourself a few new skills.

One person who has done this more than a few times is Tom Scott--a self-described "maker of things" with a list of works longer than... well, longcat--who just recently made a Nyan Cat service for fax machines.

Nyan Fax is just one of Tom’s unusual hacks...

With such a big history of hacks, Tom is used to working in unfamiliar territory. He told GeekTech, "Most of the skills I've learned have come from the things I've made: rather than learning for the sake of it, I learn because I need to.

"The best example of this would be some of the projects I helped put together for the TV show Gadget Geeks last year: Suddenly, I needed to do lots of graphical displays, and so I learned Processing. Then I needed to work with a 3D printer--which meant I needed a crash course in Python!"

Any project starts with an idea. But once he's come up with that, how does Tom go from there? He explained: "The idea tends to arrive, fully formed, and then I've got to work out how to build it. Sometimes it just isn't practical--there are half a dozen things on my ideas board that won't work unless I have the budget to hire a helicopter. Most important is how to make it quickly: I have a worrying tendency to lose interest in things after a while...!"

So it's possible--and not unusual--to teach yourself new tricks as you go along with a hack. But how can you actually do it?

In my spare time, I've had a few silly hack projects--normally a joke website making fun of some aspect of British culture (hey, it's what we British people do best). Most of the time, I don't know what I'm doing, but it hasn't stopped me yet.

My first main tip is to break down the idea and figure out what it means from a technical perspective. When you start to figure out what the sort of functions it needs in order to work are, read about your selected topic online and get a bit of an idea for which bits of the puzzle you'll need to put together. Once you know the basics of the technology you're working with, it's easier to know which bits you need to look for specifically.

There's also no harm in working with what's already out there. There are plenty of great guides and tutorials out there, but if you're trying to do something quickly or don't need to reinvent the wheel, use what other people have made available for reuse as a starting point!

One of my projects was pretty much only possible because of this: I wanted to make a version of Twitter that felt like a Teletext service (the text thing you could get on analog TVs, like Electra in the 1980s).

Turning Twitter into the style of old TV text was much easier thanks to code released online.

Unsurprisingly, finding an open source Twitter client for Android that I could understand was a bit too difficult, but I did come across Fork-A-Twitter-Client, a hackable, JavaScript-based Twitter client. Just like that, I had my own working Twitter interface to hack around with.

The freely-available code already out there was much better than what I could come up with, and by working with it, I was able to better understand a bunch of the tricks involved.

Two sites worth keeping an eye on for work you can build on are Github and Instructables. GitHub is particularly useful if you're doing a coding project, while Instructables is great for learning about hardware hacks.

But if there's nothing ready to modify, don't feel too proud that you can't ask for help. If someone's managed to do something that stumped you, send them a message and ask for advice.

Another project of mine involved making a parody version of a popular Twitter snow map that collated people's tweets to build a real-time weather forecast. Who better to ask how to make that... than the maker of it himself? I asked Ben Marsh, the developer of #uksnowmap, if I could use some base code of an older version, and he kindly said, "Go for it!" And so, with my own tweaks and fixes, I got my project going in no time.

If you want to have a go at teaching yourself as you go along with your own hacks, Tom has one final bit of advice for you: "Never stop. If you spent ten pounds on it, it's likely to fail--but if you spend a million pounds, it's still likely to fail! So make lots of things, because each one is a different roll of the dice, and you never know which one will succeed!"

Jonathan Cresswell makes things about stuff on the Internet. When not wasting time on Twitter, he writes about video games and turns jokes into one-off websites.

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How to Eliminate Eyestrain From Your Big, Beautiful PC

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 21:38:00 +0000

Building a desktop computer that's amazing is easy, if a little time-consuming. But even after you’ve stuffed your new system with all the latest hardware, hooked up your cabling, and cleaned off your desk for a giant monitor, you’re not quite done.

Your new desktop masterpiece is going to do you little good if you can use it for only a few hours each day. And you have the failure of your own biology to thank for that: Humans were made to be hunters, gatherers, and thinkers, not desk jockeys.

Spend too much time in front of your screen, and you’re going to wreck your eyes -- and no, we’re not just channeling our worried mothers. Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) is a real condition with real symptoms that you’ve likely already noticed at some point in your tech-centric life: bloodshot peepers staring at you in the mirror after a long day of gaming; the tired, dry feelings that you attempt to relieve by rubbing your eyes; or perhaps a bit of burning, itching, or increased sensitivity to light.

There are plenty of ways to keep your eyes from rioting every time you fire up your favorite Web browser. Most of them are super-easy to set up and require more time than money, although fancier (and pricier) solutions can give you a beautiful desktop setup and happier eyeballs all at once. In any case, your eyes will forever thank you for your investment.

Basic Lighting

While you might think that you’re looking at a crisper, more pleasing picture in a dim or otherwise darker environment, you’re just forcing your eyes to work that much harder to process extreme differences in contrast. And a similar situation happens when you set up your screen in a location that creates a ton of glare: not only does your picture look horrible, but all that light mucks up the quality of your picture and forces your eyes to do a lot more refocusing to achieve better clarity.

So if you’re sitting at a computer under fluorescent lights and you aren’t at work, just stop: This kind of overhead lighting is one of the harshest environments for your eyes to deal with.

The best setup? Plain ol’ natural light, best deployed in the form of a window angled perpendicular to your computer screen. You might be tempted to slap your monitor or laptop in front of a huge window to enjoy some scenery while you work, but the brightness of your exterior view could stress your eyes out. You could always use blinds or curtains to limit the amount of light coming in when it’s especially bothersome, but that kind of defeats the point of the view, doesn’t it?

When placing your screen perpendicular to your natural light source, you want to make sure that you’re balancing ambience with glare reduction: Angle your display so that extra light isn’t bouncing off your screen. And take some time to play around with your PC setup; a few minutes now will save you countless hours of agony later. Again, blinds or curtains can be an eye-saving device if the sun is really giving you trouble during certain hours of the day.

You’ll want to supplement this natural light (or lack thereof, as the day turns to evening) with artificial lighting. And overhead lighting—even incandescent—still isn’t the best option due to its potential for glare. But you shouldn’t go to the other extreme, either. Resist the urge to purchase the classic “spotlight” desk lamp and slap its narrow cone of light somewhere on your desktop. Remember, you’re also trying to avoid sharp differences in contrast.

You don’t need that much light around a monitor or laptop screen, and what you pick needs only to supply indirect light in a general area around your desk and display. A small lamp on a desk that creates a pleasant diffusion of light behind your display and prevents glare is great; a full-sized floor lamp can also work wonders, provided it physically fits into your particular desk setup. As for bulbs, consider those of the natural light (and low wattage) variety: If you need more brightness, switch to higher wattages or add another light source.

Advanced Lighting

If you’re looking for a setup that looks a little bit cooler than a tiny lamp on your desk—or if your particular desktop setup has no room for any bulkier lighting equipment -- you might want to consider trying out some bias lighting.

You’ve probably seen the concept before, likely on a Philips HDTV with ambient lighting (or as Philips brands it, “Ambilight”). The gist is simple: LED lights attached to the rear of your monitor blast the background with colored light (desktop systems only—unless you really want to silly up your laptop), helping to reduce glare in dimly lit environments, to make your picture appear sharper, and to transform your boring ol’ monitor into a glowing beacon of cool.

As Sound and Vision’s Timothy Seppala describes the benefits of bias lighting, in an interview with Ars Technica, “It works because it provides enough ambient light in the viewing area that your pupils don't have to dilate as far. This makes for less eyestrain when a flashbang gets thrown your way or a bolt of lightning streams across the screen.” Tim actually wrote a great guide to getting the most out of your HDTV for PCWorld that includes some tips on lighting your home theater for optimal movie watching, and you should definitely check it out if you're a serious PC enthusiast seeking to optimize your display.

When it comes to PC building, though, the problem with bias lighting is that few devices and software combinations exist that will allow you to achieve the perfect setup: ambient lighting that changes to match the colors appearing on your screen. We’ve had a lot of luck with Mad Catz’s Cyborg Gaming Lights. They’re a bit pricey at $100, but you get two little lighting modules that contain three LEDs (red, green, and blue) for creating any color you’re looking at.

You just need to plug the lights into two of your system’s free USB ports (after plugging the lights’ power adapter into the wall), stash them behind your monitor, angle the lights up toward the wall, and fire up a software utility. You can then pick the color that you want to live behind your screen or set your lights to slowly rotate through a series of colors. You can also have the lights dynamically switch their appearance based on whatever happens to be on your screen—be it a game, a movie, or a picture.

If you’re looking for a more inexpensive way to build bias lighting into your desktop monitor, you can always pick up Antec’s Halo 6 LED Bias Lighting Kit. For a mere $13, you can slap a strip of six white LEDs to the rear of your display. These lights—or a similar style that you can pick up at your local IKEA (Ledberg or Dioder)—aren’t going to modulate to fit whatever’s on your screen. But at least you’ll be able to reap the benefits of bias lighting without breaking your bank account.

A bias lighting strip that you would attach to the rear of your display.

Beyond Lighting

Other tricks you can employ to reduce the harmful effects of extended computer use on your eyeballs include installing little apps to remind yourself to take a much-needed eye break. Chrome users can grab the extension Gimme a Break! and Firefox fans can hit up the simple Auto Timer extension to schedule some rest time for tired eyeballs. For every 20 minutes you spend staring at a screen, you need only to focus your eyes on something else for 20 seconds -- that’s not so hard, is it?

The software fun doesn’t end there. Odds are good that you’re running your display at fairly high brightness and contrast levels, as monitors are sometimes shipped with factory-default settings that use inordinate amounts of brightness to convince you that the picture is awesome. Not good. You’ll want to fire up the Lagom LCD monitor test pages and use their instructions (or our helpful guide) to set your monitor’s settings to their correct levels. Why blast your eyes with excessively bright light if you don’t have to?

Your monitor’s color temperature can also adversely affect your eyes after prolonged periods of staring. An app like F.Lux (click on the Download link at the top of the site) will automatically adjust your monitor’s temperature to match the time: Cooler lighting during the day, mimicking the temperature of common daylight, and warmer lighting in the evening, when “you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun,” says F.Lux.

Finally, you can also opt for a pair of geektastic computer glasses to help you handle your display temperature situation and reduce screen glare—we’re speaking specifically of Gunnar Optiks’ line of Advanced Computer Eyeware (the company's term, not ours).

Gunnar Optiks claims that its glasses also help increase the moisture within your eyes—a function commonly performed by blinking, which one tends to do much less when focusing on a computer screen. We can’t say whether Gunnar’s glasses turn eyeballs into swimming pools, but we did tend to notice less eye fatigue (and didn’t seem to have the same headaches as before) after a few marathon computing sessions when equipped with its glasses. Their yellow tint does take some getting used to, however!

View the original article here

Email Suddenly Not Arriving in Gmail? Here's One Possible Cause

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 18:01:00 +0000

Like many users, I have several e-mail accounts. In fact, I have three with Gmail alone.

A couple days ago, I noticed that one of the accounts hadn't received any new mail for about 24 hours. That seemed very strange, as the flow of messages to that address had always been strong and steady.

I figured it was probably a temporary glitch at Google's end (there was a Gmail outage just a couple months ago), so I waited another day to see if it would clear up on its own.

Needless to say, it didn't. I checked Google's App Status Dashboard for any known issues, but it was green across the board. I also Googled "Gmail outage" (and narrowed the search to the last 24 hours) and came up empty. Clearly, the problem was at my end.

But what was the problem? My two other Gmail accounts were chugging along just fine. But this one inbox sat empty, as though someone had simply turned off the mail spigot.

As it turned out, the flow wasn't turned off, but rather redirected. See, when I checked Gmail's Spam filter, I discovered that junk mail was still arriving. It stood to reason that "good" mail was still arriving as well, just not landing in my inbox.

Filters!

A quick visit to Gmail's Settings, Filters proved my theory: a filter was rerouting all new mail to Gmail's All Mail "folder" (sometimes known as the Archive), effectively bypassing the Inbox.

In fact, there were two identical filters doing this. How did they get there? I have no idea. I certainly didn't create them. But there they were. I quickly deleted both, and presto: problem solved. (I did have to visit All Mail, select my "missing" messages, and move them to my Inbox so I could process them normally.)

If you want to learn more about problems like this and potential resolutions, Google has a help page devoted to incoming Gmail messages that don't arrive.

In the meantime, if you ever encounter a similar inbox interruption, check Gmail's filters. You might just find the mysterious culprit.

View the original article here

How to Replace Your Laptop Keyboard

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 14:43:00 +0000

If your laptop keys are sticky, or some of them are missing, or the keyboard isn't working at all, you can usually replace the entire keyboard yourself for between $20 and $60. The operation isn't as hard as you might think, and performing it has the advantage that you don't have to remove and replace each key individually. Though every laptop is different, removing your laptop's keyboard usually involves simply unsnapping a cover, removing a few screws, and disconnecting a cable.

If you're up to the challenge, you can tackle this project in the comfort of your own home. Take care, though: A working laptop is a terrible thing to waste, and PCWorld accepts no responsibility for any damage to your machine that might occur if you try to take it apart. Furthermore, if duplicating our process requires actually opening your entire laptop--if, say, you have to remove anything more than a handful of screws--you should call a professional. And finally, before you do anything else, check to see whether the laptop is still under warranty. If it is, you may be able to get it replaced for free.

Find a Replacement Keyboard

The first step of the replacement process is to obtain the right keyboard for your laptop. Compare prices by checking eBay, Google, and online stores that specialize in replacement hardware, such as LaptopKeyboard.com, Spare Parts Warehouse, and LaptopsKeyboard.com. Make sure that the keyboard you buy is for your laptop's exact model number, which you may find printed on your screen bezel or on a label attached to the underside of the laptop. You can simplify your search further by specifying the keyboard's part number, which you may be able to find on the laptop manufacturer's website or by calling their support/service department.

Replacing the Keyboard

For more-precise instructions on how to replace your particular laptop keyboard than the general steps provided here, check online. There's a small chance that your laptop is unique and has a very different replacement process from the standard one outlined here. Check with your laptop manufacturer and with the site where you bought the replacement keyboard to see whether they offer specific instructions for DIY repair. Some manufacturers provide service manuals with detailed instructions on a variety of servicing tasks; if not, try searching the Web for "how to replace keyboard" with your laptop's model number.

Now let's get started! Confirm that you purchased the appropriate replacement, by placing the new one on the laptop, and seeing if it appears to be the right shape and size. Next, gather your tools: a small Phillips screwdriver for removing the small screws, and a butter knife or other small, thin, flat tool for prying off any covers.

Make sure that the laptop is powered completely off: Unplug the power cord and take the battery out.

Usually a removable cover or trim piece offers access to the keyboard.

Examine the cover/trim piece that sits between the keyboard and the screen; it usually affords access to the keyboard. Check for and remove any screws that appear to be helping hold the cover piece on. Some pieces also cover the screen hinges, which may have small screws on their backs.

Before removing the cover, be aware that it may have a data cable on the back that's connected to the laptop. This cable is important and usually doesn't have much slack, so be very cautious when removing the trim piece that holds your laptop's keyboard in place. You don't want to rip the cable from the laptop and ruin the connector or the cable.

A data cable attached to the laptop may lie under the cover or trim piece.

When the cover is loose, gently remove the cover/trim piece with your bare hands; if necessary, carefully use a butter knife or other thin flat tool to pry it up. The cover should snap off fairly easily with a small amount of force--don't use extreme force or you may break it. If it doesn't seem to be coming off, recheck for any remaining screws that may be holding it on--even underneath the laptop--and remove them.

Once you've removed the cover/trim piece, set it aside. If it's attached to the laptop via a data cable, carefully try to move it out of the way without damaging the cable. Then find and remove the screws holding the keyboard in place; there are usually two to five such screws, located along the top of the keyboard.

Two screws hold this laptop keyboard in place.

Before pulling the keyboard up, note that the back of the keyboard attaches to a data cable that in turn is connected to the laptop. This cable usually doesn't have much slack either, so be very careful when pulling it up. It is crucial to avoid ripping the cable from the laptop and ruining the connector.

A small flat data cable on the back of the keyboard connects to the laptop.

Carefully pull the keyboard up (without ripping the data cable from the laptop) and unlatch the data cable connector, usually by flipping up the small latch on the connector. Next, remove the data cable and set the old keyboard aside.

Pick up your new keyboard, align it (without setting it down), and attach the data cable to the connector on the laptop, usually by inserting the flat cable as far as it will go and then flipping the small latch on the connector back down to grasp it. With the data cable connected, set the keyboard in place, being careful not to pull at or damage the cable in any way. Reinsert the screws to hold the keyboard down and reattach the cover/trim piece, which usually requires a little force to snap back into place. If you removed any screws from the cover earlier, reinsert those as well.

Once you're done with these steps, you can reinstall your battery and boot up the laptop. If everything went smoothly, you should have a perfectly working keyboard at a fraction of the cost of having a professional repair service do the work!

View the original article here

Enable Image Preview in Craigslist Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 11:15:00 +0000

Like Craigslist? Me, too. I've scored many a great deal on the classified-ad site.

Just one problem: For every single listing that says it has an accompanying "pic," you have to click through to actually see that picture. To me that's the very definition of "hassle."

In the past I've written about browser add-ons for previewing Craiglist images, but recently I discovered something interesting: Craigslist now has its own tool for previewing images.

I'm honestly not sure when it debuted. Could have been last week, could have been six months ago. All I know is, I didn't notice it until now. Maybe you didn't, either.

The feature is hiding in plain sight. When you look at the listings for a particular category or the results of a search, you should see a link just above the listings that says show images:

Click it, and what do you know? A thumbnail image appears alongside each listing (where applicable). And if you mouse over that image, you'll immediately see a larger version:

This isn't perfect. The enlarged images aren't large enough for my liking, and the preview shows only one image, even if the listing has several. But it's still a major time-saver and a very easy way to preview what's "beneath" a Craigslist ad -- no browser extension required.

It probably goes without saying, but if you want to turn off this preview, just click hide images.

View the original article here

How to Maintain Your Android Phone

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 07:39:00 +0000

Your Android phone is a powerful computer. But like any other computer, it won't run at its best without proper care and maintenance. If you've ever owned an Android phone, you probably noticed that it became slower after a few months of use than it was when you first brought it home from the store. There are several reasons for this phenomenon, and in this article I'll explain how to get your Android smartphone back into tip-top shape. You can accomplish a lot of what I'll be recommending here by performing a simple factory reset; but if you take that approach, you'll lose your data and have to reconfigure your phone. So instead, grab your Android phone and follow these steps to get it running like new again.

Clear the Cache

Android phone maintenance: Clearing the cache.Have an app that's always crashing? Rather than force-closing or uninstalling it, try clearing its cache. This simple step will help resolve most of the issues that troublesome apps may be experiencing--and it won't create new problems, as forcing the app to shut down might. To clear an application's cache, open the Settings menu on your phone and click Applications. Then select Manage Applications and tap the app that's been having problems. Don't worry--all of your data and settings will remain intact; you're just getting rid of temporary files that may be causing difficulties.

Uninstall Apps

Check your app drawer for apps you don't use or need.Even though it's my job to love apps (and I do love them), improperly written ones can cause all sorts of trouble for your Android phone. Built-in problems can range from storing critical data as a plain-text file in your memory card to sullying your notification bar with constant updates that can't be disabled.

Consider the official Facebook app: Opening it automatically turns on your GPS, in case you want to upload a photo or create a status update that shares your current location. That's fine and dandy, except that the app periodically forgets to turn off your phone's GPS once it's done using it, wasting precious battery power and leaving you scrambling for the nearest outlet. Even apps you aren't intentionally using may be running processes in the background that waste resources for no good reason.

Unfortunately, task killers are generally ineffective at combating this problem, so your only practical option is to open your app drawer and uninstall apps that you don't regularly use. Doing so will open up space on your phone for more music, videos, and pictures, and it will help reduce the number of apps that are running in the background.

Clean Out Your Memory Card

Cleaning out your SD Card may not boost your phone's performance, but it makes sense to remove any old or unused files that are just taking up space on the card. To identify the biggest hogs on your memory card, I recommend installing DiskUsage. This app shows you which files on your phone are taking up the most room, though you'll have to plug your phone into a computer or use a file browsing app (such as Astro) to delete the unneeded files.

DiskUsage shows you what's on your SD Card.

You should do this whenever you uninstall applications, largely because some apps leave folders of data behind when they're uninstalled. If your phone is rooted, you can download the SD Maid app to automatically clear out old junk files. SD Maid also lets you freeze or remove any bloatware that came preinstalled on your smartphone--so you can finally get rid of the annoying Blockbuster app that continually asks you for updates.

Root Your Phone

If you don't mind voiding your warranty, rooting can breathe new life into an ancient Android phone. We've described how to root your Android phone countless times in the past, so you can refer to one of those guides when you're ready to walk through the actual process. A rooted phone gives you complete control over your Android device: You can remove unwanted bloatware, install root-only applications, and even load custom ROMs that change the look and feel of Android on your phone.

Another benefit of rooting is that you no longer have to depend on your carrier for Android updates. While everyone else is waiting for their phone to receive Android 4.0, you can probably find a ROM for your phone that will give you a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich a few weeks or months before the update officially appears.

Rooting isn't without its hazards, however, and a serious mistake can render your phone unusable. In my opinion, though, the benefits are worth the risks, especially if you have an older Android phone; it's definitely an option you should consider if you aren't satisfied with your current Android situation.

View the original article here

Top Ten Factors for Choosing a Gaming PC

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 04:36:00 +0000

Diablo III PC gaming is big again. According to market research firm NPD, the release of Diablo III drove PC game sales up 230 percent in May. That was in a month where overall sales of games dropped by 28 percent. The Gods and Kings expansion to Sid Meier’s Civilization V did well in its recent release, too. Even smaller companies, such as Ironclad Games, with its Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, are shipping PC games that garner great reviews and attract new players.

Building or buying a gaming PC can be a complex and mystifying process, with manufacturers tossing around terms like Shader Model 5, DirectX, SLI, liquid cooling, and GDDR5. Looking at gaming systems at a purely technological level is generally a mistake, however. It’s better to fall back on the tried-and-true method for making any PC purchase: considering your budget and your needs.

1. Budget

How much can you spend? You probably don’t have an unlimited budget, so it’s a good idea to settle on a maximum dollar outlay for your new PC. If you're concerned about the cost, remember that other considerations somewhat mitigate that, since you can use a PC for tasks other than gaming. Then again, you’re not buying a $500 GPU just to run Quicken.

Your budget will determine the types of components you can afford. You may love the idea of running two graphics cards in SLI or CrossFire mode, but if your total system budget is $900, dual graphics cards won’t be part of the mix.

Once you iron out your budget, you can start thinking about how to divide it up. You have one more consideration before you dive into product choices.

2. What Do You Play?

What are your tastes in PC games?

If you love playing modern first-person shooters, graphics hardware becomes a higher priority than CPU performance. If turn-based war games scratch your gaming itch, a fast CPU to process the AI more quickly may be more important than a high-end GPU. Real-time strategy games often require a balance between graphics and CPU.

Civilization V The other issue that’s shaping games today is the blurring of genres. Multiplayer first-person shooters often have a strong strategic element, particularly in commander mode. Some real-time strategy games, particularly tower-defense games, are adding a first-person element. So don’t completely discount the value of a good GPU. Civilization V, for instance, looks much better in DirectX 11 mode than in DirectX 9, but also requires more graphics muscle in the newer mode.

3. Graphics: Consider Your Display

I know, you’re itching to drop hundreds on a spanking-new, high-end graphics card. Your games will look so much better on your 20-inch display, with its 1680-by-1050-pixel resolution.

Wait, what?

Once you understand which types of games you’ll be playing, you should think about the GPU. Even in CPU-heavy titles, graphics remain an important aspect of gaming, so you want to buy the best possible graphics card within your budget. On the other hand, you don’t want to spend too much. It always amazes me when I see someone drop a cool grand on two high-end graphics cards to drive one 1080p monitor, and then run most games at default settings.

You might prefer a high-end card for several reasons. For example, you may want to enable antialiasing in most titles. Perhaps you’re interested in stereoscopic 3D, which requires nearly double the graphics horsepower. But in those cases, you need to know what you’re doing. Buying a pricey graphics setup, and then never adjusting your game settings, is an utter waste of money.

As a rule of thumb, I allocate one-third of the cost of a gaming rig for graphics. So if your system budget is $1000, for instance, don’t spend more than about $330 on the graphics hardware. Note that the prices of cards using the same graphics chip can fluctuate. In general, I avoid most overclocked graphics cards--you don’t get much additional performance, and you may run into stability issues in the long term.

You should consider getting the most recent generation of GPU you can afford. Unlike CPUs, newer-generation GPUs often perform significantly better than previous generations do. As an example, today’s Radeon HD 7850 outperforms the high-end, $500 cards from two years ago, and it's under $300.

As for displays, while image quality is important, so is frame rate. The great thing about modern LCD panels is that low-latency monitors are common and inexpensive. If you appreciate higher color fidelity, you may want a monitor using some form of IPS LCD technology, but that’s more of a “nice to have” rather than a requirement.

4. CPU and Cooling

I’ll say this once: You do not need six cores to play your games.

You’ll find that many high-end gaming PCs are packed with Intel six-core processors. Now, I love my hexacore desktop system. I play games on that machine, too. But I also do photo and video editing, plus other tasks that can take advantage of six cores and twelve threads. If the main purpose of your system will be to play games, it’s better to dial back a little on the CPU cost and up the ante on the graphics (or on an SSD, discussed on the next page.)

If you really want a high-end platform, Intel makes the Core i7-3820, a quad-core processor that plugs into the LGA 2011 socket. It’s relatively affordable, at roughly $300. The LGA 2011 platform offers tremendous memory bandwidth, given its four-channel memory architecture.

On the budget end, Intel recently shipped the Core i5-3450, which you can find for under $200; it can run in lower-cost motherboards based on Intel’s LGA 1155 socket.

If low noise levels appeal to you, consider a system with one of those newfangled sealed liquid CPU coolers. They’re quiet, plus they help your system run a little cooler.

5. Memory

New motherboard core logic now supports high-speed memory--that is, DDR3 at 1600MHz or faster. Most modern motherboards are dual-channel, with a few higher-end, socket 2011 boards supporting quad memory channels. It’s worth noting that even dual-channel systems running Ivy Bridge CPUs can pump out nearly 30GB per second of peak memory bandwidth, which is plenty for most games.

DDR3 memory also happens to be fairly cheap currently. It’s worthwhile to go with at least 8GB of memory, if you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows. Windows 7 Home Premium currently supports a maximum memory configuration of 16GB, though, so keep that in mind as you load up on RAM.

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One Windows 8 Hassle Solved: Media Center Will be Free (if You Upgrade)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 00:50:00 +0000

Two months ago I advised all fans of Windows Media Center to avoid upgrading to Windows 8, for the simple reason that Microsoft would not be bundling the beloved software with the new OS -- and instead charging extra for it after the fact.

Judging by the number of comments and recommendations that post received, readers shared my outrage.

I'm happy to report that Microsoft has apparently shifted gears, giving the people what they want (kind of) and dialing back the greed.

According to Windows blogger Brandon LeBlanc, users can now buy a Windows 8 upgrade for $40 -- and get Windows Media Center free as part of the deal. Wrote LeBlanc earlier today:

"Starting at general availability, if your PC is running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 you will qualify to download an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for just $39.99 in 131 markets. And if you want, you can add Windows Media Center for free through the "add features" option within Windows 8 Pro after your upgrade."

That's two big steps in the right direction: making Windows 8 affordable, and continuing to offer WMC free of charge. Of course, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft will stick with plans to charge for the latter when people buy new PCs that come with Windows 8 -- and what that charge might be.

This upgrade option is available to users of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, and it runs through January 31, 2013. You'll need to make your purchase through Windows.com.

Starting when? Microsoft still hasn't finalized a "general availability" date, but chances are good it'll be sometime in September or October -- same as Windows 7 three years ago.

My question for you: Does this surprisingly low upgrade price and the restoration of Windows Media Center make you more likely to upgrade?

View the original article here

My Email Account Has Been Hijacked!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 21:18:00 +0000

Coastie65 is nowhere near Malaysia, but friends are getting email claiming that he's stranded in Kuala Lumpur. He asked the Web Browsing and Email forum for help.

This happens far too often. Someone gained access to your email password and sent spam in hopes of tricking friends and family.

To stop this plague, try to log on and change your password. And make that new password a strong password.

If you succeed in changing your password, you've successfully stopped the hijacking.

If you can't change your password, then the criminal has already changed it. Contact your email service provider to find out how to reclaim your account. If you use one of the big three web-based email providers, follow the appropriate link below for directions:

Then take these additional precautions:

Your provider probably has a way to verify that you're who you say you are--usually involving security questions such as "What's your childhood pet's name." If you haven't set this service up properly, do so now. If you have set it up, redo it.Scan for malware. Use something other than your regular program. See Remove Hard-to-Kill Malware for suggestions.Never include your password in an email. If your provider asks for your password in an email, assume that email is a fake.If you access mail on a public computer (such as in a library), sign out when done.

But how did they get your password in the first place? I hate to say this, but it was probably your fault. Maybe a phishing scheme tricked you into emailing your password to a criminal. Or your password wasn't sufficiently strong and someone guessed it. Or your PC is infected with malware that's been reporting back to someone.

On the other hand, service providers have also been known to make mistakes. For instance, in 2009, a Hotmail security breach put thousands of passwords at risk.

In other words, this stuff happens.

View the original article here

Should I Update My BIOS?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:56:00 +0000

Rohkai asked the Answer Line forum if a PC's BIOS, like an operating system or an antivirus, should be kept up to date.

You should update several programs on your hard drive regularly, usually for security reasons. Many of them, including your antivirus and Windows itself, probably update automatically. (For questions about automatically updating Windows, see Should I Turn Off Automatic Updates?)

But the BIOS is different. It's not even on the hard drive. And you should only update it with good reason.
Unlike other programs, the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) sits on a chip on the motherboard, and is the first code to run when you boot your PC. It tells the processor where to look for the operating system. It continues working after the bootup, facilitating communication between the OS and the hardware.

Although you can update today's BIOSes, doing so is more dangerous than updating drive-based software. If something goes wrong, it could render the PC completely unbootable; you won't even be able to boot a live Linux flash drive or reinstall Windows. There's probably a way to bring the PC back to life, but it won't be easy.

So when should you update your BIOS? Only if there's a problem--especially a hardware-related one--and your research suggests that the BIOS may be the cause.

Research is the key to a safe BIOS update. First, find the current version of your BIOS:

Select Start (Start > Run in XP), type regedit, and press ENTER.Navigate the Registry Editor's left pane, as if it were Windows Explorer, to Computer/LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DESCRIPTION\System.In the larger, right pane, note the data fields for SystemBiosDate and SystemBiosVersion.

Armed with that information, go to your PC or motherboard manufacturer's Web site to see if there's a new version available. If there is, double and triple-check to make sure it’s actually for your particular hardware.

Read the description to see if it might fix your problem.

The Web site may offer two versions of the BIOS-updating tool--a Windows program and a special, bootable version you put on a CD or flash drive. If both are available, go with the bootable one.
And follow the instructions to the letter.
View the original article here