When and How To Clean Your DSLR's Lens and Sensor
Added by Will Greenwald on Sept. 7, 2010
If you want to take consistently sharp photos, you need to make sure your camera's lens and sensor are both clean. If any smudges show up on the glass, or if any particles accumulate on the CMOS, you can expect fuzziness, spots, and other unwanted things to show up in your pictures. To do this, you need to do two things: protect your camera's sensitive parts, and clean your camera's sensitive parts when dirt still manages to get in. 

Protecting your lens from dust is actually extremely simple.
 
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How To Get Great-Sounding Audio for Podcasts and Games
Added by Matt Braga on Sept. 3, 2010
We all know that guy — the one who jumps on team chat spewing more static than an electrical storm. Your friends may be attempting an enjoyable game of Team Fortress 2, but LickitungNorm92's awful mic is making the whole experience a futile one. You could mute him and move on, but there will be more — some with even worse audio than the last. 

Getting decent audio from your headset or mic isn't hard — and not just for gaming, either. Podcasts, annotations, narration and more require good sounding audio too, but there's a few simple ways you can improve the quality of your own recorded audio. Here's how.

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How To Take and Create HDR Photos on Android
Added by Ryan Whitwam on Sept. 3, 2010
HDR photography is all the rage these days, isn't it? A good HDR shot can bring out details in shadows, while not over-exposing lighter elements. This technique has the potential to give your shots a really great hyper-realistic effect. Apple announced in their recent event that the camera software on their i-devices would be getting built-in HDR shooting modes.  

Apple is using auto-bracketing in the app to take three different exposures, then they are combined in-app. On the Android platform, there is no integrated solution for doing this. There are only a few apps that can simulate an HDR effect with density and tone mapping. Continue on to see how well these apps perform. 
 
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How To Spot Scams and Malware Apps on Android
Added by Ryan Whitwam on Sept. 2, 2010
Android offers developers a lot of freedom in using a phone's hardware in their apps. While this leads to some really amazing functionality, it can also be a security concern. Google has chosen to run a more open marketplace for apps, and does not hold content up so they can review it first. There is no gatekeeper for the Android Market. All a developer needs to do is pay the $25 developer fee and upload their app to the Android Market. Naturally, this has invited some riffraff to join the party. By looking at an app with a skeptical eye, and checking the permissions, you can avoid apps that are shady, or just plain scams. 
 
Head past the jump to find out. 
 
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How To Make Sweet Magic Eye Images (Glasses-Free 3D!)
Added by Matt Braga on Aug. 31, 2010
While the Nintendo 3DS may be making waves in the low-cost 3D market, we often forget it's not the only option for cheap 3D. In fact, you can produce a similar effect at home, thanks to random dot autostereograms — or Magic Eye images, as they've become colloquially known. 

We know it's not *quite* the same sort of thing, but that doesn't mean the effect still isn't cool. These images are specially designed to produce the impression of 3D by focusing your eyes on 2D patterns. Given a cursory glance, the images may look insignificant, but a closer look will reveal a simple 3D image beneath.

Sure, it's primitive, but it's also easy to make your own — assuming you can see the image yourself.

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Reference Video Cards vs Third-Party Designs: What's the Difference?
Added by Matt Braga on Aug. 30, 2010
Extravagance is over clocking your CPU to 7GHz and cooling it with liquid helium. Extravagance is configuring a $20,000 Mac Pro with 12-cores and all the optional upgrades. And most recently, extravagance is buying a thousand dollar GPU — one of the fastest on the market — packaged in a P90-themed gun case.
 
What you're looking at below is the XFX HD 5970 Black Edition, a third-party Radeon card with two 5870 GPUs welded directly to the board. There's no questioning this card is fast, but for consumers, this is where confusion sets in. While AMD and NVIDIA will design and manufacture their own GPUs, those reference builds are licensed out to other manufactures too, who then modify them as they see fit. That means buying the latest Radeon or GeForce isn't as simple as walking into the store — you need to know which flavor you want. 
Deciding on a graphics card is hard enough, but knowing the difference between the same model across different brands can be even harder. The question is, are reference cards, designed as ATI and NVIDIA specify, worth the money? Or can third party models perform just as well?

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How To Choose the Right Microfiber Cloths for Cleaning Your Devices
Added by Will Greenwald on Aug. 30, 2010
Microfiber has quickly become one of the most popular materials in cleaning electronics. When your iPhone gets smudged or your monitor gets dusty, you're likely to reach for the soft, synthetic cloth to make the displays pristine again. While it's seen use in various applications over the last few decades, it's become particularly popular among consumers in the last few years. 
 
Technically speaking, microfiber is any stranded material with a strand weight of less than one denier (a denier is a unit of measurement defined as the number of grams 9,000 meters of a strand of material weighs). In terms of consumer use, microfiber is any woven material made of microfibers (smaller than 1 denier), generally made from 80/20 blend of polyester and polyamide. Natural silk is 1 denier, and it's extremely difficult to find any natural fiber suitable for commercial use smaller than that.

But given this loose definition, it's clear that not all microfiber clothes are created equal. Let's take a look at what's best for cleaning your shiny screens and devices. 
 
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Splice Your iPhone's Bundled Earphones for Superior Sound
Added by Matt Braga on Aug. 30, 2010
Anyone who remotely cares about the quality of their audio knows that Apple's standard iPhone or iPod earphones simply aren't that great. And while you could go out and buy a decent third party pair, you lose out on the handy functionality of Apple's built-in microphone and remote. For hands-free junkies and audiophiles alike, the choice is difficult one.

Unless, that is, you don't have to make that choice at all. Flickr user Yutaka Tsutano was faced with the exact same situation, and did what any other enterprising geek would do — he combined his two options into one. By simply splicing the wires of Apple's microphone and remote with a superior style of earphone, Tsutano was able to get the best of both worlds — and we'll show you how to do the same.

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Three Essential Things to Do to Every New USB Key
Added by Will Greenwald on Aug. 27, 2010
If you're using a USB drive, it's probably to shlep files from computer to computer. It's so easy to just rip open the packaging, plug in the drive, and start filling it with data. However, you can do a few neat things with your brand new drive before you load it down to make it more secure, more flexible, and more powerful.  

For starters, you might want to consider whether you want to use FAT32 or NTFS file systems. 
 
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How To Properly Benchmark Your Android Phone's Battery
Added by Ryan Whitwam on Aug. 27, 2010
It's common that whenever a new technology finds its way into mobile phones, a company feeds us a line about how much better it will be for battery life. They know how to get us like that. The Achilles Heel of many smart phones is the battery life.  If a phone can't make it through a day under your unique usage pattern, it is of little use. When AMOLED displays started making their debut on phones, the battery life was supposed to be much improved.  

A new analysis from Laptop Magazine shows that, in fact, many AMOLED Android phones perform worse than their LCD-using cousins. The Droid X with its large LCD display bested the smaller AMOLED handsets. Informative as this is, it was an artificial benchmark. If you really want to know how your battery performs, the best way is to just use the phone, and track your battery usage. Read on as we show you how to do just that. 
 
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